CIX
The Hand That Is Dealt
Bruce stood at the foot of colossal Trigon… completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of power standing before him. A newborn could not feel as helpless as he did now. Without even realizing it, his thumb had moved over the button on his cufflink, to take perhaps the only chance he had… a tachyon cannon in space that shot backwards in time…
But he turned to look at Raven. His wife was alive… but silent. Her eyes were downcast to the unforgiving sands below, the breaking dawn unable to hide the tears in her eyes. Bruce could feel the powerful sadness, the despair that overwhelmed Raven from twenty feet away… What had Trigon done to her?!
Two hundred feet above him, the first rays of the morning lit the tips of the demon's antlers, cast from primordial bone, to remind him of the true horror that was the dawn! The weight of the world Bruce Wayne folded in upon him. In his insane lust for vengeance, he had created the tool which had allowed Ra's al Ghul to obtain his final victory…
In that exact second, Bruce knew he had sanctioned the murder of every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth. All livestock, every wild animal, the entire kingdom of fauna…
Destroyed.
Sinking to his knees, there could now be no other plea. Guilty. Nor could there be a better judge and executioner for his crimes than the merciless god who faced him now… Trigon the Terrible.
In his confessional heart, he begged forgiveness from his mother and father, from Richard, from Alfred, from Barbara, and from his wife – it was Raven he had betrayed the most. To the end, she had remained by his side, never knowing his terrible secret until it was too late… The voice of Trigon came down on him like a pronouncement, but it was a question…
"Can you guess what I hold in my hand, mortal?"
Far above, Bruce could only view the backside of the giant's crimson hand, not what he held on the other side. Bruce only knew that Trigon held his death sentence, of that there was no doubt.
The man suddenly felt himself being raised into the air… floating. As the sun creased the Eastern horizon, Bruce was levitated high above the sands of Kahndaq - to be raised level with the object suspended above the demon's large hand.
The sun on his back cast Bruce's shadow across a solid black sphere, perhaps ten feet in diameter, slick with liquid. There was something evil about it, almost as if it were alive…
A foul smile crossed Trigon's yellowed maw as Bruce realized what floated before him… Every single nanite that Wayne Industries had put into the atmosphere had been gathered and compressed into this one, single black orb. The exhibit of his guilt for an unnecessary trial… but if his nanites were here?!
Clear liquid Sarin - enough to kill every breathing organism on Earth - squeezed through particles smaller than dust… oozing suspended within a glimmering poison sphere. And if the poison was here, Trigon had saved everyone, had saved him… but why?
"Would you like to see a magic trick, Bruce? You like magic…"
In the flourishing gesture of a stage magician, Trigon's free hand passed quickly in front of the sickly sphere, so that Bruce lost sight of it for only a split second. But this was no mere sleight of hand, his engine of destruction was now… gone!
"Where?..."
"That all depends on you, and the choice you make…"
It was the first sound he had heard from his wife since his arrival, a scream of 'NOOOO!' one-hundred-and-fifty feet below… only to end as abruptly as it began. Silence… With every beat of his heart, the fear in him grew.
"So many interruptions, so little time… She is not allowed to interfere in the deal we shall make, Bruce Wayne. She cares for you far too much. In her heartfelt love, she has declared that she will follow me if I absolve this world of your deadly device of poison. And now I have..."
"Thank you." Alfred had ingrained manners far too deeply into Bruce.
"But where does it go, Bruce? Into cold, empty space? Into the sun? A barren rock in space? Or perhaps on one of the hundred worlds I know of which are similar to your own, populated by fellow air-breathers… It waits upon your choice.
But there is one more condition, mortal… My daughter only wishes for your happiness… It is within me to grant all that you desire. I can change the cruel workings of Fate to give you a life that was denied you. The finest world of what might have been… will be yours if you but desire it. Nothing is beyond the realm of possibility…"
Trigon looked gravely into the purple sky… a grim expression narrowed all four of his eyes. The smile had left him.
"… One moment."
Bruce suddenly found himself encased in a translucent, crimson bubble descending to the ground. Raven and Barbara suddenly appeared beside him - also encased in this thick bubble of scarlet force field. From above, Trigon looked down at them briefly, before turning his attention back to new day's skies above.
The massive demon raised his right hand - as if to hold it over the noon sun.
And then what happened next… happened in a nanosecond.
The entire sky lit up. Bruce's vision went white as spots burned across his retinas from the white-hot sky. It was when he heard the high-pitched whining scream of an object that had crossed the atmosphere at 65,000,000 miles an hour - and the incredible fusion boom of its impact two hundred feet above him that he knew… all Hell had broken loose.
Four miles to the west, Captain Thomas Bradley rolled along the sands of Kahndaq. All seventy tanks of the First Armoured Division traveled with him, a rolling cavalry of thunder bearing towards their target - leaving a wide dust storm in their wake.
They had fought long and hard to get into firing range of Big Red. A firestorm of 120mm Depleted Uranium smoothbore rounds that could cut through bank vaults awaited Trigon. General Johnson had given him the all-clear… the President was over 200 miles from the action, tucked safely away.
Since the President had left, it hadn't been an easy road. They had originally fought the ugliest things he had ever seen with their Browning M2 and M240 machine guns - which had worked well - but they had soon realized that the best strategy was to simply put the petal to the metal - and drive over the amalgamations of horrid flesh-lumps. There were thousands of them that constantly attacked them! But the demons did leave a nice smudge in the sand when you managed to catch one of them under your treads…
Seconds ago, their wi-screens had gone out, but luckily the tanks were retro-fitted. Switching over to older hardware, Captain Bradley could easily make out the giant red unfriendly silhouetted by the sunrise in front of them. They were about to hit him hard…
As he witnessed the sudden flash of light across the eastern sky, and then saw the sphere of white radiance begin to form, he screamed "NUKE! NUKE!" to everyone across all channels. Why hadn't the damned Pentagon warned them about this?! Stealth nukes?
Each tank was plated with steel-encased, depleted Uranium Chobham composite – which gave them an excellent chance of survival from a nuclear strike at four miles. They jammed on the brakes, battened down all hatches, and prepared for the shockwave – breaking out the Nuke-suits…
Covered by the black gore of countless dead atrocities, Princess Diana of Themyscira sliced through yet another deadly appendage of the demons that swarmed the Amazons. A trail of demon entrails stretched behind them for miles to the shoreline where they had landed… but still these things came for more!
The Oracle of Themyscira had prophesized of the coming of The Great Evil, piecing together signs for the past twenty-two years. And now Diana caught glimpses of these demons' crimson master, a giant demon – foretold to have the power to wipe out the world of man and Amazon alike. A number of her sisters had fallen… what was left of them would be retrieved and honoured, but for now the battle raged on.
The power of the gods lit the sky above her like the midday sun… had her father himself taken a hand in their battle to strike from above?! Had the cries of merciful Hera swayed mighty Zeus to action?
The straight lightning sliced apart the sky itself to strike the King of demons… and then grew!… A column of continual lightning raised to the clouds, threatening to create a hole through Gaea herself! Something in Diana told her to get down - she screamed at her sisters, transfixed by the spectacle of destruction before them, to do the same. Diana dug her immortal shield of stars into the rock below as scores of demons stopped and stared…
The land… the land itself was forming a tidal wave… a wave lost in the yellow-brown shockwave of sand that was rapidly becoming the air. Merciful Hera brought other Amazon warriors to the ground to join Diana as it hit… a crushing wave of sound, air, heat and dust that flayed skin from demons - tossing them away in its awesome wrath.
The remaining warriors had suffered the worst of the wind when the land itself rippled, like a wave on the ocean, tossing them as an autumn wind tosses dry leaves. The air was hard to breath now… choked with fine dust, like particulate fog, the oxygen burned away.
Blinded, Diana landed some distance back, now feeling the shifting earth below. It was as though Gaea herself trembled. By the Gods, what a strike! The warrior princess did not know how many of her sisters had survived the terrible vengeance of Zeus, but no Devil could have survived that!
Boulders that had been tossed into the sky to kiss the invisible clouds above, now fell back to Earth with tremendous whomps, some landing far too close for her liking but impossible to avoid because dust fog. Princess Diana of Themyscira still held her sword and shield. She still drew breath. She did what any surviving Amazon was expected to do…
She continued forward.
For Bruce, it was like being a spectator at the heart of a nuclear explosion… a witness to what Richard must have experienced. The pain of that loss magnified countless times as he saw the true destructive might of the Universe at work. For the first split second, he had thought he saw creation itself through the red opulent force field until lightning flashed a million times around them.
Shielding his eyes, looking down, he witnessed the earth disappearing below him, as though he were being raised hundreds of feet without momentum into the air… But they weren't moving. The earth itself had disintegrated below them - a crater had eventually formed at least 300 feet deep, perhaps half-a-mile across.
At its base, a lake of lava awaited, the heat from the impact had melted rock which now flowed to its bottom. That same heat had turned the sands on the edges of the crater to a brown glass... The Gates of Hell had been knocked loose and Bruce, Raven and Barbara now hung precariously above them. And yet… the bubble still held.
It was this realization that reignited the terrors in his heart… his logical mind had spoken without any thought of the consequences… for if the bubble had held, then Trigon… Trigon must be… slowly, he cast his eyes towards where the crimson giant had beenbefore… no, no, no… to spot the same enormous foot, connected to the same mammoth leg… no, no, no… willing his damnable eyes not to follow upwards, they still did.
His gaze drifted past the same torso and followed along the outstretched arm… to finally look upon the extended red hand, the hand that had performed the magic trick only a moment ago, to catch sight of a falling star. But this was a star shaped like a man that glowed like the sun…
In this nightmare of vision, only two words from this god threatened to dislodge Bruce from his own sanity. None of this could be real. For surely, holding onto what must have been Clark, who had used himself as a projectile of astronomical proportions to cause untold devastation, Trigon remained.
The demon spoke two simple words that became an epiphany to Bruce – that reached into Pandora's Box to squeeze the fragile life out of its last remaining occupant, destroying any hope humanity ever may have had…
"That… hurt."