Punisher's War Journal

A man's work is never done. Some days, it seems like I can hardly bust up a Maggia wedding or clean up a human trafficking operation before some other piece of human filth catches my attention.

I was cleaning up in the restroom of an old-school diner that served good chili and whose owner didn't ask too many questions about why the De Luca brothers weren't hassling him for 'fire insurance payments' anymore... Let's just say that they found out why running their racket out of an abandoned sausage factory was a mistake.

As I finished washing up, I noticed a man walk out of a stall and leave without washing his hands. Now, normally that woulnd't be enough to get my attention... Except, he looked a little familiar.

Not too long ago, I made a... Mistake. HYDRA had dug up some copy-cat who could do a flawless imitation of Captain America, enough to fool even the man's close friends. And like half of the country, I was convinced to sign on with HYDRA because 'Steve Rogers' said so. I left as soon as I realized that the whole thing was full of shit, but that's a black stain on my record that I don't think is going away anytime soon.

And the guy who'd just left looked an awful lot like a guy who'd gotten a little... Too into it. A Robert Robertson. Was excited to be "Bob, Agent of HYDRA" until he'd been told that that title had been taken by one Deadpool's sidekick. Poor moron was still neck-deep in bullshit when "HYDRA's America" was falling down around them.

And I had to wonder... Was he still in neck-deep?

I complain, but sometimes it's nice when opportunity falls into your lap.

—

It had taken a week of staking out Robert's apartment before I got a lead. The man left his apartment at the stroke of midnight, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora over his HYDRA uniform. In any other city that would just make him stand out more, but in New York...

The man had no situational awareness. After an hour of stalking him, I got the impression that I could stand right behind him and he'd never realize he was being followed.

I was able to track him to a cemetery in Queens, and then I had to start ducking behind tombstones and monuments becuase it wasn't just the two of us anymore: There were at least a dozen HYDRA grunts all over the place, all converging in one place.

Right in the middle of a newer part of the cemetery, with half the plots empty, was a grave with a wooden cross instead of a normal headstone, no name, paired with a proper headstoned grave on one side.

"Does anyone know the story here?" my guy asked out loud. "I mean, it's a good landmark, but..."

Another grunt stomped on his foot. "Shut up, the boss is here."

"The boss" was a man with a shaved head and a green skull tattoo covering his face wearing an outfit that I was almost certain he'd stolen from Baron von Strucker's closet. HYDRA must be scraping the bottom of the barrel. While I made sure my guns were loaded, "the boss" began what I'm sure was a well-rehearsed speech.

"My friends," he said in an obviously affected German accent, "like many people, I believed that the so-called 'Captain America' defeating our Hydra Supreme, the true will of America, meant the End of HYDRA. But my friends, HYDRA is not so easily slain. As I fled the facility in which I was stationed I found a treasure trove: Pages and pages of printed notes, transcripts of the research done for the Infinitas Agenda!"

Apparently, that meant something to these freaks, becuase they all shouted "Hail HYDRA!"

"For millennia, HYDRA and our countless predecessors studied the bodies of so-called gods and allegedly invincible warriors—Immortal Gilgamesh, Invincible Achilles and his rival, Godlike Hector, Perfect Balder—and fountains of youth and immortality Elixirs in pursuit of immortality. Dissected vampires, zombies, ghouls, ghosts, and mummies and studied the dark sorceries behind them in hopes of achieving mastery over death, all in the pursuit of creating Gods to shape this flawed world into HYDRA's image of perfection."

"Hail—!"

"Don't cheer!" 'The boss' shouted. "This quest cost HYDRA one of the greatest minds to ever pursue our cause, Dr. Nikolaus Geist, when his ultimate creation, The Great God Hydra, turned on him. He'd created a perfect God, but was arrogant enough to think he could control it. But, from his folly we learn a valuable lesson: Never create something you can't control. And always be aware of your mental and emotional shortcomings, less you make a dreadful mistake." The man raised a hand, and his followers cheered.

"Hail HYDRA!"

The man held out both arms. "And while the ultimate goal of the Infinitas Agenda was a failure, that does not mean that we cannot repurpose its successes for other goals. Dr. Geist may have died for his arrogance, but his creations... I must take the time to compliment the late Doctor. Who else could have thought to use Captain America's stolen blood as a medium to imbue a human with the biological traits of Thor? But, we are not here about that, we are here, because..."

The man pulled something from his belt. A glass flask full of some acid-green liquid.

"This. His first success, during his time with the Thule Society. The Lazarus Formula."

"Hail HYDRA!"

"A Super-Soldier Serum retro-engineered from the remains and residues of gods and immortals using the occult knowledge of every nation controlled by the Axis powers, the Lazarus formula revives the dead and rebuilds them as perfect, unaging, undying, needless super-soldiers... Usually. There was the slight hiccup, where if the corpse wasn't... Fresh enough, the subject would become a zombie, but by studying Dr. Geist's research on other avenues of resurrection and immortality... And the many bodies of gods, dragons, elves, giants, demons, angels, and trolls so carelessly left behind by Roxxon and their allies in the Ten Realms after their failed invasion, I have not only recreated the Lazarus formula, I have improved it, perfected it!"

...Great. Nazis planning o take over the world with an army of Zombie Super Soldiers. If Spider-Man was here, he'd probably crack a joke about a lack of originality, but this was my operation, not his, and I did things differently. I reached for my side-arm.

"I've assembled you here because within this cemetery are buried twelve Agents of HYDRA, murdered by so-called heroes like Deadpool, or Black Widow, or the Punisher!" skull-face spat when he mentioned me. "With my perfected formula, we shall resurrect them, and by studying its effects on their bodies I will create the means to make us all into perfect immortals. We shall be the übermenschen, and when we reunite with HYDRA's other heads and share what we have with them, HYDRA shall rule this world as its new Gods!"

"Hail, HYDRA! Immortal HYDRA! We shall never be destroyed! Cut off one head, two more shall take its place!"

At that, I stood up from behind the gravestone I'd been spying behind and emptied my sidearm. Five bullets impacted the necks of Robert Robertson and four of his friends with enough force to take their heads from their shoulders. The sixth shattered the flask of the Lazarus formula.

Skull-Face had been pacing a bit, during his speech, and startled when I started shooting. Every drop of his serum ended up spilling onto the grave next to the wooden marker.

"You know, it's not true," I deadpanned. "I've cut the heads off of plenty of HYDRAS. You just get dead HYDRAS."

Skull-Face looked down while I holstered the pistol and went for my main gun, starring at the fluid as it disappeared into the soil. "That was enough formula for a dozen subjects, and you just spilled it all into a single grave. Do you have any idea what you've done?"

"No." I was about to continue that I didn't particularly care when the man smiled.

A nasty, almost too-wide smile. The kind of smile that you only saw on the truly insane. "Neither do I, but it's going to be fun finding out."

I was about to turn my gun on him and the remaining HYDRA grunts when I heard footsteps. A lot of them, as if multiple heavy-set people were running at full tilt in the same direction.

I turned around and saw six or seven men and women, dressed in combat boots, black slacks, and white tank tops. I could just barely make out the edges of a giant HYDRA tattoo on each of them, from the parts of their chests that were exposed.

They were each over six feet tall, each broad in the shoulder, and each built like a Mr. Universe winner. And they were charging at me.

I turned my rifle on them, emptying the belt in a spray as they got in range, only for my bullets to be shrugged off with little more than superficial damage.

I had one more gun, a military-grade shotgun with a bit more stopping power than my automatic rifle, but in the time it took me to aim they were already upon me.

...It wasn't the worst beating I'd ever taken, or the most humiliating, but it was up there.

When I could see straight again and had finished coughing up blood, I was being held up by my shoulders while my knees dragged the ground.

The skulled-faced asshole got in my face. "Do you like Das Auferstehungs Corps? Oh, sorry, 'The Resurrection Corps' for your uneducated ears. The successful test subjects of the original Lazarus Formula, soldiers of the German Army revived as Super Soldiers near the tail end of the Second World War. A pain in the ass to find, but oh so willing to help me when I did find them and told them what I was planning. Their generous donations of blood were quite useful in my study of the Lazarus Formula."

I spat blood in the man's face. He was not amused.

"Oh, don't be like that. If Captain America and Bucky couldn't take the entire Corps at once when they were fresh, what makes you think you could stand a chance after they've had decades to get used to their immortal bodies?"

I spat on him again. As his eyes narrowed, he drew a pistol from his belt and fired into my side, prompting the undead nazis holding me up to drop me.

"Leave him to die. It will take time for the Lazarus Formula to works through the soil into... Yuri Fujimoto's body, we can retrieve her when she revives." I heard rustling. "No, leave the others as well. It'll look like Castle died in a mutual kill, and with Wilson Fisk as mayor no one will investigate the Punisher's death if there's an obvious answer, and I know a man in the Medical Examiner's office..."

As the HYDRAs walked away, all I could think about was how pissed I'd be if I died there and woke up as a Frankenstein. Again.

—

I hadn't been shot in anything... Too vital, and I managed to get up and stop the bleeding. I wouldn't have been able to get back to my base of operations, but as luck would have it there was a FEAST shelter... I felt a little bad taking from the homeless, but if I lived I'd be able to pay them back. One sewn-up bullet wound later and...

The next thing I knew I was in a back ally in the middle of the morning with Spider-Man poking me with a stick. He was very interested in why I'd broken into the FEAST shelter, so I told him the story. He got panicky when I told him which cemetery it was and described the graves that HYDRA had met in front of.

I blacked out again, woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed. Huh. Not the first time I've been arrested. Plead guilty, escape at the earliest convenience, and kill any guaranteed repeat offenders I ran into on my way out. It was almost clockwork by now.

There was a note on the table next to me.

Frank, you might want to serve your sentence in full this go around. For your own safety. There's a very powerful kid with some serious anger issues who is very upset about her mother's grave being desecrated.

~Sincerely, Spider-Man.