The Titans rested, a brief moment stolen from the chaos. "What in the ever-lovin' name of Elvis is going on here?" asked Cyborg.
"Mass hysteria?" mused Robin aloud.
"The illness of angry bovine?" suggested Starfire.
"Zombies?" yelped Beast Boy.
Cyborg shook his head with his eyes closed, thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of his nose. "Really, Beast Boy, now isn't the time for jokes."
"No dudes, I mean LOOK!" a shaky finger pointed outwards, away from the makeshift cordon that had corralled the youngsters. It was the paleness of his face that actually caused the rest of the team to turn and look.
The four heroes were confronted with a scene from one of Beast Boy's collection of cheaply produced horror movies. Behind them, where they had left EMTs tending those injured from the initial rush, the fallen forms were rising and attacking their erstwhile benefactors.
Silence surrounded them for a breath as the teens gaped at the scene before them. "Titans, GO!" shouted Robin as he crouched, preparing to leap into action. "No, wait!" shouted Beast Boy, snatching Robin's cape and yanking him back to Earth with predator speed and strength. "We can't just go wading in there like we usually do," the young metamorph explained rushedly. "These are zombies! Living dead! They consume the flesh of the living to power their unnatural animation!"
"I know what it looks like, Beast Boy," Robin said impatiently, "but they're probably just possessed or being controlled somehow."
"Naw, Robbie, I think the grass stain is onto something here," Cyborg said in a low voice as he gazed at the battling crowd. "Thermal vision is showing that the attackers are cooler than the defenders. They're approaching ambient temperature." He turned ponderously towards his leader and asked rhetorically, "What does it generally mean when a human body stops radiating heat and takes on the temperature of its surroundings?"
"False Death," Starfire said softly, feet planted solidly on the ground. "'Although they move as if alive / Still bound from flight they be, / Driven by unholiest / Immortality. / The flesh of living Tamarans / Briefly sates their need, / Yet ever shall they roam the ground / Until True Death's release."
As the group shook the effects of Starfire's impromptu poetry session, ("Part of the Dirge of V'lha," she would explain later. "Such unnatural activity is not unknown on Tamaran.") Beast Boy directed Robin's gaze to a child attacking the bars of their barrier. He was bent sideways at the waist, spine obviously broken. The injury that should have paralyzed him, however, did nothing to impede his locomotion. "Even I know that possession and mind control can't overcome paralysis like that!" Beast Boy said.
"Well then how do we defeat them?" a frustrated Robin asked.
A pencil thin beam of emerald fury drilled the snarling child between the eyes, felling it instantly. Shocked eyes swung about to stare at Starfire, her eyes still aglow with righteous fury. "We must deliver them the True Death."
"Destroy the brain," Beast Boy said solidly. "Don't let them bite you, or you become one of them."
"Whatever you decide, Robin, you better make it quick," Cyborg said as his arm clanked through the transformation to his sonic cannon. "I'm convinced, and we have a few hundred bogies headed our way. Besides," he continued as he shot a sweeping beam to push the encroaching hoard back, "some of the victims were already put in ambulances and transferred to Jump City General."
"Damn. We'll fall ba-"
"Rob!"
Beast Boy's shout transformed into the roar of a silver-back as he transformed and caught a leaping kindergartener in mid-air. A breach in the cordon allowed the smaller children to begin trickling through. Uttering Tamaran curses, Starfire's eyes and fists blazed a brilliant emerald. Cyborg continued to try to hold off the approaching EMTs-, police-, and parents-turned-zombies. Robin whipped out a fan of birderangs and linked them into a sword, yelling, "Titans, fall back! Lethal force is authorized!"
An orgy of blood and gristle ensued as the four teens fought off an army of former citizens. Eventually, Starfire and Beast Boy managed to grab their teammates and fly back to Titans' Tower.
They didn't notice the thumping rotors of a helicopter overhead as they battled.
The alley was cast into twilight by the hulking buildings that formed it. Rats and roaches, parasitic creatures that thrived on humanity's refuse, feasted from a dumpster whose rusted corner allowed easy access. As a mass they stilled, orienting themselves towards a swirling vortex that formed in the air. Raven stepped out, took a deep breath, and held it briefly before releasing it slowly.
She had been gone for so long that she had nearly forgotten the sickly-sweet stench of rotting garbage, laced with exhaust and the urinal smell that told of drunken revelers or homeless using the brick walls as toilets. The smells of the city, of her city... of Home.
Raven cast her scarlet gaze about the alley, and chittered softly. The swarm of creatures that fed from the dumpsters ringed around her with military precision, forming ranks and files. She spoke to them, and when she was done they dove into sewers and through cracks in the sidewalk, through broken mortar and up drain pipes.
Then she turned and walked through the alley's opening, reentering the city and the fight.
She willed it, and her uniform shifted and flowed into a new shape. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt, hands shoved deep into pockets and hood pulled up to hide her features. Her face changed, elongating slightly. Her eyes closed and reopened as two round orbs of green, a slight difference from the almond, indigo eyes of her birth.
With this new anonymity, she walked the streets and thought of how she could bring an end to Zarach while saving Jon. It wasn't until she passed an electronics shop with its display of televisions that she knew just how FUBARed the whole situation had become.
"For those of you just tuning in, this is footage shot less than an hour ago by our news chopper," said the perfectly coiffed man behind the news desk. The image switched to show a junkyard piled high with tires and broken appliances. Raven's form could be seen standing amid the false mountains, and it was with a vague sense of foreboding that Raven realized Jon's form was nowhere to be seen, blocked by one of the hills. The image was washed out briefly as a pile ignited into a blazing tempest, and the image swirled as the helicopter battled the new convection currents and thermals created by the firestorm. The image steadied enough to capture the bird-form of Raven's soul-self as she teleported away, the spectral scream faintly audible under the steady thwumping of the rotors.
"We have confirmed that the figure that apparently caused this conflagration is, in fact, Raven of the Teen Titans, whose motives remain unclear. Casting further doubt onto the benevolence of the hero who has assisted in apprehending several meta-human criminals is this footage caught by our Five-Alive Traffic chopper, which was near Jump City General Hospital when this stunning event occurred."
The hospital's doors opened, and streams of fearful people spilled from them into the streets. A spectral scream lingered in the air, a carrion cry of primal fury. A multi-tonal voice echoed through the air, damning in every syllable. "I am Raven, daughter of Trigon, Crown Princess to the Lord of Hell and High Priestess to the Cult of Azar. I am Raven, Teen Titan of Jump City, and Rachel Roth, Friend of the Chronicler known as Jon. I am Human, and I am Demon, and on my blood I vow thus: You shall not end this day alive."
The hospital cracked, windows shattering and pulling into the building, a dust storm of razors. The structure groaned, and steel ripped free from concrete. It bulletted towards some dimly seen figure in the dust cloud as the building sagged under its own, now unsupported, weight. Gurneys and wheeled beds, pushed by people in scrubs and labcoats and hospital gowns continued to pour from the rear of the hospital as the whole edifice began to sway drunkenly.
A pause, and then another roar, then blessed stillness as unearthly powers ceased their tug and pull upon the ill-used structure.
"Five minutes," Raven thought to herself. "That happened just five minutes ago here... I had nearly forgotten, it's been so long..."
When the news began showing the hordes of undead schoolchildren being slaughtered by the rest of the Titans, Raven took off running.