Chapter 56

Initial Results

Tribune Quadrangle

Considered the heart of Midtown Hillwood, the 2x7 block area was surrounded by most of Hillwood's media, print, television, radio, and online (the area was named for the city's most prestigious newspaper, the Hillwood Tribune), not to mention a number of entertainment and retail locations. But on a typical day, the bulk of the area's population consisted of tourists, drawn by chain stores, destination restaurants, and hard-to-get-tickets-for theater. Indeed, most of the establishments here were designed to exploit the vast disposable income of these visitors, including the dozens of, let's be polite and call them "performers" dressed in knockoff costumes of popular media characters. At any moment, there would be at least five Abdicators and seven Wally the Alligators mugging for passersby's spare change. Mugging in the hamming it up sense, not the assault sense (though that could happen too if you weren't careful).

On any given Saturday, thousands upon thousands of people passed through, so one could easily be forgiven for not noticing one particular denizen. After all, he wouldn't have been the only shabby, unsteady, possibly drunk person in Hillwood on a typical day.

But today was not a typical day, and this derelict was not a typical derelict.

At roughly 2:04 PM, the individual in question, who had been wandering around aimlessly and unnoticed, began to suddenly convulse in pain. Even in a busy crowd such as this, this kind of behavior would stand out to those nearby. These included one of the Abdicators, trying to pull off the hero's mystique despite being bearded, balding, and possessing a distinct Czech accent. "Excuse me," he asked, "are you okay? Do you need help?" This particular person was not exactly known for his sense of altruism, but perhaps today, he was unconsciously inspired by the exploits of the hero he was aping, or by the influence of a certain football-headed boy taking hold at long last, prompting him to offer what aid he could.

The derelict responded with a gurgling grown. By now "The Abdicator" could see that the individual was, beneath his battered raincoat and hat, completely hairless, with a pale, nearly grey complexion, mottled with uneven purple blotches. Wondering if he was suffering from some horrible unknown, potentially contagious disease, he stepped back; this instinct would save his life as the derelict suddenly puked up a stream of yellow-green bile that began to dissolve the pavement on contact.

"IT'S A ZOMBIE!" declared the performer, his sudden burst of heroism evaporating and replaced by the instincts of self-preservation. "Run away!" By now, the supposed tramp's hat had fallen off, exposing his true nature. The onlookers were frozen with curiosity and confusion; a few took the opportunity to snap pictures of the unfortunate soul with their phones. The "zombie" looked around, whatever reason he had once possessed eroded by fear, disorientation, and the pain of becoming… something.

The thing howled unnaturally as his body began to swell, tearing apart what clothing he wore. The expansion was uneven; his right arm merely grew in length, while his left grotesquely expanded in both length and girth, fingers receding into the flesh of his hamlike hand until the limb was reduced to nothing more than a huge bludgeoning instrument. His legs became massive, swollen, tree-trunk-like appendages, the torso becoming a huge, grossly-misshapen thing. His head was now nothing more than a massive, deformed cyst with facial features arranged unevenly, one eye set far too low, one ear far too high and the other two large, the gaping maw filled with large teeth that were more like stunted elephant tusks than human dentata.

This bizarre metamorphosis finally triggered the self-preservation of even the stupidest of tourists. There was a mad rush to evacuate, with a few unfortunates suffering minor injuries in the panic; otherwise, there were no serious casualties. The creature himself seemed to not be particularly belligerent on his own, merely stumbling around in mindless pain and confusion and not making any aggressive actions at any stragglers.

Still, as passive as the creature seemed to be, the city could not exactly tolerate the presence of a monster in the most profitable tourist location in the city. A TAC team was sent in to attempt to subdue the beast, but fared poorly; the creature seemed to barely even register beanbags and rubber bullets, and tasers seemed to only provoke him. In his anger, he lashed out at the team, causing serious injury to two of them.

At the same time that the TAC team had been summoned, anther call had been made. Years ago, after the Budnick's incident and the defeat of Wheezin' Ed, a system had been put in place to get in contact with the city's resident superheroes in the case of more… unusual threats. The system had not been used often, but it was good to have in the event that it was needed. Now was such a time.

And so it was that a few minutes after the TAC squad, having failed to subdue the creature, pulled back to instead keep the area secure, Joule arrived on the scene. Rather than de-escalating the situation, however, the sight of the half-alien girl seemed to drive the creature into an uncontrollable rage. Joule's superior agility helped her dodge the creature's clumsy lunges, but her own blows seemed to have little effect on his thick hide. It felt as though she was punching a giant slab of beef, and the monster seemed to react to the punches about as much as the beef would have. Joule's electrical blasts, though more powerful than the TAC team's tasers, didn't seem to have much more effect. Any attempts to talk to the creature were just as useless; its mind at this point was essentially gone. Only rage and instinct drove it.

Tired of the impasse, Joule looked for some kind of edge she could give herself. Seeking a weapon, she seized upon one of the concrete barriers that were set up to regulate pedestrian traffic. She hefted the slab and swung it with all her might at the monster's midsection, hoping to at least knock the wind out of it. She succeeded in landing a solid hit, but unfortunately, this had the added effect of unsettling the creature's stomach. It vomited forth a fresh sample of corrosive puke all over the teen heroine, dissolving sections of her costume and even leaving some mild chemical burns on her mostly-invulnerable violet skin.

Now, the burns, painful as they were, would heal within a couple of hours, but those who knew Joule in her every day life knew that three things could drive her berserk: 1) assuming she was stupid, 2) antagonizing her girlfriend, or, 3) ruining her clothing.

Her visor, also damaged by the corrosive vomit, was tossed aside, revealing that her three eyes now glowed red with rage. "I hate when that happens," she growled, her four fists clenched tightly. Fueled now by righteous fury born of an assault on fashion, Joule once again joined battle, now focused not on containing but on putting a decisive end to the threat. Fists struck harder, were targeted more strategically, and in general a new efficiency could be seen in her movements.

And still, her hits seemed to not register against the creature, for a reason completely unknown to her; I truth, her blows did inflict pain, but that pain was nothing compared to the pain it endured constantly simply by existing. Pain that would have eventually taken its toll on the creature's innards even without outside intervention, because in truth its distorted internal organs could not survive the strain that mutation had inflicted on him. In the end, its heart simply burst, and the creature keeled over and died, leaving nothing behind but a confused teen hero, who would be pondering just what had happened and why for quite some time after that.

What she didn't know is that she knew who the creature was, or his face, anyway; Joule, or Rhonda Lloyd as she was known when presenting a more human face, often volunteered at a downtown homeless shelter, during which she had encountered the creature in its former life. Back then, he was simply another patron of the shelter, one of dozens upon dozens she had served in her time there. The shelter never asked questions when questions weren't welcomed, and he was one of those who did not welcome them. He didn't seem to have any family or friends and never volunteered any information about himself, though his battered army jacket suggested that he was a veteran, probably of of the Afghan War, who had snapped, deserted his post, and fled back to the States to live out the rest of his days in anonymity. Either that or he got it cheap from an army surplus store. There was no way of knowing, and anyway his past was none of their business if he didn't want to talk about it.

So, while she could not tell you the man's name, she would have known the face, up until the man just stopped coming. Rhonda had registered the man's absence and questioned some of the other patrons if any of them knew where he was, but none did; it wasn't exactly uncommon for street people to simply disappear one day, unnoticed and forgotten. After the second week Rhonda assumed that the same had happened to "Army Jacket" as she'd mentally dubbed him; it wouldn't be the first time a regular had simply vanished. For some reason the disappearance had nagged at her but she assumed it was merely guilt over being unable to form a connection with him.

None of this was on her mind now as the monster's corpse was secured by what appeared to be government agents. She just wanted to go home, slather some aloe on her burns, take a long soothing soak in the tub, and try to put the fact that she had just fought yet another monster that had died on her behind her. This kind of thing, she reasoned, could not be good for her long-term mental health.

The government men were not, in fact, government men. At least not on paper. The credentials they had displayed were quite fake, though they certainly passed for real.

In reality, these men answered to the Imperative, and to Major Gustav Caudell in particular. Their mission was to find a way to counter the alien presence on Earth (personified by the Sisters) by any means necessary.

"By any means necessary" including snatching the homeless off the street and subjecting them to torturous genetic experimentation in order to create superhumans of their own.

The remains of the creature that Rhonda had fought now lay in a freezer in Lab 2. The body had been starting to slowly liquify due to the corrosive nature of its bodily fluids ad had been rushed to the freezer to arrest the process before there would be nothing left. That is, with the exception of the creature's left eyeball. A tiny camera and microphone had been implanted in the organ before the creature had been released for its test run. The footage from the camera was now being uploaded onto the Imperative's secured server for analysis.

Caudell watched the footage play out in his office; the project's head geneticist Dr. Dalton Bedovian next to him. With his messy black hair, bushy mustache, ensemble of high-collared white lab coat, long purple gloves and dark goggles, and ever-present expression of manic glee, Bedovian was every bit the classic mad scientist, an image he gladly cultivated at every opportunity.

"Well," he said, "for a test run, this wasn't bad at all," he said in his deep, gravelly, British-accented voice. "Quite smashing, in fact…"

Caudell glared at Bedovian incredulously. "You call this a success? It barely lasted ten minutes! It would literally be a puddle right now if we hadn't gotten that thing on ice!"

"Patience, Major," the scientist chuckled. "We're in uncharted territory here. You can't expect miracles. Isn't it more than enough that we – oh let's be honest, I – created something that could go toe-to-toe with a Sister on our first try? Okay, technically the eighth try since the first seven exploded…. Oh well, can't make an omelet and all that!" he concluded cheerily. "Back to the grindstone, eh?"

"Listen, Bedovian, I may have authorized the creation of that… thing… but releasing it into the public was a risk that I'm not all that comfortable with. It was too mindless, too unpredictable. There could have been more serious injuries, or deaths. And that leads to people asking questions. Questions are bad for the operation, you understand? Next time we run a test, it better be something we can more easily control."

"My dear Major, you can't control everything. Life is chaos, and you have to take that into account. Besides, how can we learn from our mistakes if we don't make them? We know the subconscious conditioning works; you saw how it reacted to the Sister's appearance. Now it's just a matter of being able to control its actions better. Perhaps some sort of rudimentary programming language for the brain…"

Caudell shook his head. Bedovian was brilliant; that's why he was here instead of rotting in a prison somewhere. But he was also entirely lacking in any sort of scientific ethics. Again, that was a big part of why he was here; he would go to lengths reputable scientists would never even consider. But his vision was too twisted for the Major's taste. Caudell envisioned a corps of super-powered patriots, dedicated to American values (as his outdated mind saw them) but essentially human despite their powers. Bedovian seemed to have something far more… Frankensteinian in mind. He felt now was time to lay down the law and make it clear that things needed to change.

"Let me make something clear, Bedovian," he stated. "This project is for creating supermen. Not monsters. That's what we're fighting. We don't need more of them."

"For the leader of a subversive organization, you're astoundingly naïve," Bedovian said. "This is an arms race… and our targets are starting with four each." He chuckled at his own joke. "Oh, what I wouldn't give to study one of them… the things I could learn. The things I could make, oh my…" He turned back to Caudell. "You need me more than I need you, Major. None of this is happening without me. So you'd best keep your eyes off my research. Sorry, eye," he added, that creepy laugh of his punctuating the dig.

"No. More. Monsters." Caudell repeated for emphasis. "Or you'll wind up in a hole so deep you'll never see the sun again. I'll be watching you."

Bedovian ignored the Major's warning, his mind already racing. Altering existing subjects was proving to be less than ideal, but perhaps he could create something from scratch…

Or from the right donor…

Oh, if only he could get his hands on one of them…

A.N.: Bedovian is partly based on Anton Sevarius from Gargoyles and partly on Dabney Donovan from the Superman comics. His dialogue should be read in Tim Curry's voice. In fact, you should go back right now and do that. It will make the chapter much better. For the record, Caudell's played by Clancy Brown in my head.

Jose: I think they'd still be reluctant, especially once… oh, but that would spoil "True Colors".

Speaking of… I did a thing for Amphibia, so go check that out if you want. I might be doing more in the near future…

See you next time!