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Black helicopters swarmed the Atlantic Ocean, and the southern tip of Florida shrank into the horizon.
They were gone.
Perhaps They were lost in the shimmering, violent waves that roared for thousands of miles. Perhaps They disappeared of their own free will. Perhaps not.
Too many questions. It was Valerie and Shawn Cooper’s job to find the answers, to discover the whereabouts of the United States government’s clandestine cadre of mutant-hunting mercenaries.
“I’ve got my task force on the case, Val,” Major Edmond Atkinson assured, “but if five unhappy government agents are determined enough, and want to vanish into thin air, there’s not much to stop them.”
The two government employees stood amidst the bustle of dozens of armed soldiers, just north of the Florida coastline, as all present searched the vicinity for clues as to the fate of the five mercs.
“What makes you think they’re unhappy?” Val Cooper asked her former husband.
“They’re government--they can’t be happy,” Atkinson replied dryly.
“And how do you explain Captain America?” Val chided. She flashed him a smile of genuine appreciation--it seemed Ed had done more for her in the name of devotion after their marriage had crumbled years before. In much the same way, she’d come to appreciate him more, post-nuptials. Before, he’d been an unseen husband, too concerned with the good of the world to tend to his duties as her lover. Now, without the burden of family, he was the picture of perfection--the tall, dark, and handsome hero, his thick lips and square jaw ever thrust outward. She wondered if it would be considered strange that she cared about no one in the world more than her ex-husband.
With the awkward reply his brown eyes offered, he seemed to say, “Stop staring at me, girl, before people start to talk...”
He left her to meet with some of his men, and Val started to hit the redial command on her cell phone before her younger brother, Shawn, aggressively ended her woolgathering.
“It’s our job not to lose one of the mercs, and we’ve lost five of them, Val! So why are you standing here chit-chatting and laughing with Ed?”
Was he yelling because he was angry, or because the helicopters that buzzed in the distance nullified their stealth with their rumbling, overwhelming numbers. It wasn’t like Shawn to get upset over anything. Then again...
“This is our lives here, Sis! If we can’t recover the agents, then one of our loved ones dies--and we don’t even know who!”
“I think I’ve got an idea whose life is on the line,” Val replied, her eye on her departing ex-lover, “at least in my case.” The thought of Ed snubbed out by a government assassin’s bullet met ill with her--her creamy tone flushed, and she ran her fingers through her blonde mane in a contained frenzy.
“Could you get a hold of Representative Primrose’s office?” Shawn continued.
“No. His assistant said she would page him, but he hasn’t called me back.”
“Strange. We’ve been able to contact him any time we needed to before now.”
“It’s probably for the best,” she said. “The longer Primrose is in the dark about the situation, the better our chances of recovering the mercs before we lose someone we know.” They both nodded, solemnly.
“As long as we’re spittin’ bad news.... While the trucker’s got a name--Chris Diamond--he couldn’t tell me anything else about what went on earlier today, even though it was his truck that the mercs were last seen in--or on, anyway,” Shawn reported, pointing to the dark mustached, beer-bellied man left stranded in the commotion, his arms crossed. When he saw that he had finally earned the attention of the Agents Cooper, he anxiously started toward them.
“You all find my friends?” he asked, referring to the mercenaries’ mission objective, Nate Grey, and his female companion, the name of whom the truck driver had revealed as Tiffany Wenrich.
“No luck,” Val answered. “No trace of your truck, either, Mr. Diamond.”
“Ah, forget the truck. It’s stolen anyway...”
“That figures,” Shawn sighed. “Not that we’ll prosecute. Finding our agents is our top priority right now.”
Diamond shook his head in wonder. “Where on God’s creation could they be?”
"Oh, What A Knight"
by Sam Everett
AUGUST, YEAR FOUR
I found the tether quite naturally and cried “No!” to The Light, and I was back. Now I’m awake, and I would open my eyes...but they’re already open...?
“Betty-Sue?” I instinctively call out.
I hear her pained gasp. What does it mean? “I’m here Eduard,” she replies, ever so gently. What does it mean?
“Why can’t I move?”
“Because...because you’ve...you’ve passed on, sweetie,” the grandmother replies empathetically, with the experience born of more than maternal wisdom, I’ll soon learn.
“Damn,” is the only reaction that comes to mind. It isn’t as great a disappointment as you might think. Not after the things I’ve Seen. “How come I can talk to you?”
“I can communicate with the people who...aren’t here anymore,” she says, trying to evade any implications that I am, indeed, dead. “They’re drawn to me, for twenty-four hours after they start their blessed journey to the Good Place. It’s my...thing.”
“We’re stranded in God-Knows-Where, and she’s talking to dead people?!” I recognize that hostile tone. Black Marvel.
Doesn’t the superhero realize how fortunate he is? He wasn’t born blind to the beauties that the world offers. I was. But I’ve seen more than the eternal darkness of blindness. I was cursed with visions some ten years ago. Cursed With Visions. Visions of a Place So Terrible, I would eventually come to prefer the eternal darkness to The Eternal Darkness.
Yeah. It sometimes confuses me, too. My life has become an enigma. I tried different things to cope. Humor. Weed. Girls. Nothing worked, until the Knights Templar. When I encountered this secret association devoted to seeking out the truths of the world, they only needed to tell me where to sign up--perhaps they could help me discover the origin of The Visions, I thought at the time. I’ll never find out, now.
“Don’t be so cynical, Marvel. Betty-Sue’s the real thing.” George Cain. I’ve worked several missions with the Sol System War Soldier. Good man. I’ll miss him.
“Assuming she can talk to dead folks: his body is on this side of that rock, and his head’s sitting over there.” Didn’t need to hear that.
“That’s his head?” Mystique says.
“Some respect, y’all!” Betty-Sue demands. Sweet old lady. She doesn’t know I’ve grown a thick skin the last ten years. I can thank The Visions for that.
“Bee-Em’s right,” Mystique announces. She sounds cute, but I would never have been able to get in her pants. It would have been fun to try, though! “We need real answers. If Betty-Sue is talking to Ramos, then we know we’ve been...here...for less than twenty-four hours. We know that, whatever planet we’re on, we’ve got oxygen to breath, and gravity to keep us on the ground.”
George takes over. “Those are thunderheads in the sky, ladies and gents, and the ground is soft, which means we’ve got to find some cover soon. Survival comes first. Answers can wait.”
“There’s one answer I won’t wait for.” Polaris, right? “Where’s Guido? And Grey, and that girl, for that matter? Why did we end up here and they didn’t?”
“Because we were all together on the truck’s trailer before we ended up here.” Domino. There’s a lot of pain in her voice. She’s got more stress than this situation allows. “Guido was stuck on the cab with the girl, and Nate was floating out in the air somewhere else when they disappeared.”
Before we ended up here.... Could it be?
“You still there, Betty-Sue?”
“Still here, dear.”
“Here she goes again!” I’ll haunt you later, Marvel. Just like the other government goons--he doesn’t believe. If they’d just believe, maybe they wouldn’t get so screwed in the future.
“I might know where we are.”
“Go ahead dear.”
“They said there are dark clouds in the sky?”
“Yes.”
“That’s dissolving atmosphere.”
“What do you mean?”
“And soft ground? It’s soft with blood. Nothing around, right? Completely barren?”
“Well...y-yes. Absolutely nothing.”
Heh. I’ve got to laugh. A person just never knows what can happen. Toss a blind seer--a prophet, by God!--into the Bermuda Triangle, and see what you get. Who would have thought? I know exactly where they are.
And now they’re stuck in my Vision.
Something turned me off. Betty-Sue can’t hear me anymore. This is it. No turning away from The Light anymore, not that I’d want to stay in the world they’re in. I get to die. They’ll wish they were so fortunate.
In recent weeks, Guido Carosella, the superpowered mutant also known as Strong Guy, had come to comprehend the cruelty of the mirage. Glimmering hope turned to grinning misfortune. Number-one rated Japanese television shows that fired their stars. Bi-sexuals disguised as girlfriends. A government devoted to the people--devoted to pulling the wool over the people’s eyes.
And now, as he struggled through the barren wasteland found on no map, cradling the sparse weight of the woman with whom he’d been stranded, and shaking with withdrawals all the while, he hardly acknowledged the gleaming object teasing him in the distance.
He needed his heart medication, but he had not brought the pills on this mission. He never imagined he’d be gone longer than a day. Now he wished he had asked the tailor for pockets when he’d had his new costume sewed. His heart was fine. No problems with it for some time, in fact. He didn’t take the pills for his heart anymore. He took them for their curious, glorious side effect. He took them because they made him feel normal.
The shakes were getting bad, now. If he left the girl, continued on his own, maybe he’d find civilization sooner. Assuming there was any civilization to find. Desert for miles and miles. Gloom like sunset, but no sun in sight. Flora and fauna forgotten and gone. And it was hard to imagine how a person could survive for long. It was hard to imagine how he could survive for long.
There would be no leaving the girl. He was desperate and disillusioned, but he was still a hero--for now, anyway.
“Wh-who are you?” the girl moaned.
“You’re awake!” Guido beamed.
“Who are you?” she asked again, more alarmed now.
“They call me Strong Guy. Don’t worry, I’m a good guy.”
Increasingly alert, she began to struggle in his hold until he set her on her feet. “No! No! The last thing I remember, I was flying an eighteen-wheeler, and you were trying to stop me!”*
He approached her, and she took cautious steps away from him. “And now...the rest of the story,” he recited in his best Paul Harvey voice. “I woke up face-first in the dirt in this God-awful place, and you were laying next to me. I picked you up and started walking--”
“Toward that thing out there?” she finished, pointing to the object in the distance that had earlier teased him.
“No. Wait, you see it too?”
“I suppose we should go together,” she ceded, defiantly. “But don’t think that I trust you, because I don’t.”
“I could have abandoned you, lady! You should trust me!”
“But you’re a...mutant.”
“Oh, and we can thank Gamma rays for your aerial magic back on Earth?” he said sardonically. It seemed as though his genetic status was the real reason for her apprehensive behavior toward him. He was used to that reaction, but it was still insulting. Which made the news he delivered that much sweeter. “You’re a mutant too, babe.”
Her head fell. So disappointed by what she must have already known. She continued wordlessly toward the mirage-turned-oasis, and Guido endured his withdrawals and followed.
“Eduard is gone,” Betty-Sue Langford reported gravely. “I can’t hear him anymore.”
“Even in his death he’s helping us,” George Cain said, approaching the consecrated remains of Eduard Ramos. Inexplicably, the extra-dimensional journey met Ramos with more intensity than with the others who had passed through to this mysterious world. That, or the dark curse with which Ramos had struggled for ten years had finally escaped, and left little of its vessel. “We know now that we have been on this world for exactly twenty-four hours.”
“That won’t get us home any sooner,” Black Marvel groaned.
“No, but any information is vital at this point,” Cain shot back. He knelt down over the body and rubbed the index and middle fingers of his right hand over Ramos’ battered torso. It was a simple motion, but sincere in its sanctity. “The Good Place, indeed. You served well the Knights Templar. You served well humanity. You served well The War.”
Out of Cain’s view, Black Marvel rolled his eyes, while his fellow mercenaries waited without words. Cain was an interesting man, with interesting customs that they had never seen, but he was also strong, and provided them perhaps their best chance for returning home.
“Things are out of hand now, people,” Black Marvel continued.
The helplessness of being lost swelled through Polaris like a wave of magnetic energy, and expelled itself in the form of anger. “I don’t know what’s worse! That you haven’t said word one since we were all forced together a few weeks ago, or that now you’re Chatty Kathy with a stick up your--”
“People!” Cain bellowed. “We’ve got to find shelter! This isn’t help--”
“You think cuz you’re a woman, I won’t backhand you back to Earth?” Black Marvel threatened, ignoring Cain’s warning.
“Not before I magnetically bond your titanium asp to the metal plate that makes you so hardheaded.”
A round of laser fire separated the two combatants, and Mystique warned, “We’ve got bigger, blacker problems!”
Everybody turned their heads to where the blue-skinned mutant’s wide, golden eyes gazed, and soon their colored pupils drowned in blackness.
An oil black wave roared over the horizon, and approached with furious speed, growing higher, higher, reaching for the heavy clouds above. As black as the sky was with the sun smothered behind the clouds, the wave was blacker. On ground and in pupils drowned in blackness.
An oil black wave roared over the horizon, and approached with furious speed, growing higher, higher, reaching for the heavy clouds above. As black as the sky was with the sun smothered behind the clouds, the wave was blacker. On ground and in the air, it shifted and surged, like an angry ocean of darkness.
“It’s almost pretty,” Betty-Sue gasped.
“No,” Cain affirmed. “It’s...bad.”
“And it’s coming fast! Run!” Domino said.
Mystique led the frantic retreat, as the wave closed in on the four mercenaries and two Knights Templar. It spanned barren miles in seconds, like a force of nature, though deliberate in its intent for its human quarry.
“We’ll never be able to run fast enough!” Betty-Sue said, her old legs already weakening. Cain put an arm around her to hasten her along.
“There must be something around here to keep us safe!” Polaris cried. “I refuse to believe this planet is completely desolate!”
“If there’s no life on this planet, we know why,” Domino noted. “That wave is huge!”
Their flight continued, but the wave’s presence was very real, now. Very threatening. Very close.
In her flurry, Domino stumbled over a stone, and fell to her knees, into the soft ground. Her hands sunk into the ground, her knees followed a moment later. She pulled up, but the soil’s thick consistency secured her. One forceful thrust, and she pulled a handful of dirt up with her. And something else.
It didn’t register at first. But soon, there was no question that it was a skull. A human skull. Tattered, with what appeared to be a bullet hole through the brow. And her trembling hands had more to offer, as the chain of a set of dog tags shifted restlessly along her palm. Automatically, she reached for the end of the chain, and, through the rust and dirt encased on the surface, read the etchings in the small, metal plates.
She read it again, and again after that. This could not be right. This could not be possible.
Then it all came together. A revelation most startling.
“Oh God,” she gasped. “Oh God!” She dropped the skull in its shallow hole, and the surrounding dirt blanketed it nearly to its original state. The dog tags, she kept.
“Come on!” a voice commanded, pulling her back to reality.
She looked up at Black Marvel. “You?”
He took her by the arm and led her to the others ahead. “If it ever got out that I left you to die...” he replied light-heartedly. He assumed she had been surprised by his rescue due to his hostile nature. He didn’t know that, in his black cowl and square jaw, she saw a living ghost.
“I can’t go on.” Betty-Sue fell into Cain’s arms. “Go on without me. I mean it.”
Cain picked her up and tried to start her on her feet again. “There’s no retreat in The War, old girl. Besides, you’ve only got fifteen years on me. You can make it.”
“George, please.”
“You can make it. We will make it!” He spiritedly squeezed her shoulders, and smiled like an old friend. All present knew what it meant to look at death through a friend’s eyes. It was scary. But it also bred a force armed with humanity. Armed with hope.
At that moment, hope came fully loaded.
Barely seen past his speed, Nate Grey swooped down over the looming wave and toward the six relieved specks below. Their relief was short-lived, as the wave rushed toward them with more speed, as if to match the soaring mutant’s. As if it was alive.
“You better appreciate this!” Grey grunted before he let his telekinetic abilities take over, and envelope the others in a bubble of levitating, white light, before the wave could swallow them in darkness.
And still it wasn’t over.
The six passengers of Grey’s TK bubble rose into the air on the mutant’s mind-power alone, slowly, for he had rarely carried this many people at once. The wave did not splash down, as it should have. No, it reversed its flow, stretched toward its prey.
“What is that thing?!” Domino wondered aloud.
She would get no answer. Only a warning.
“Hold on,” Grey said. It didn’t take his passengers long to realize that there was nothing to hold onto inside the TK bubble. It took them even less time to realize that there was, indeed, reason to hold something.
Grey abruptly twisted himself and the bubble to his right, and the wave followed. He twisted again, upward, and over the crest of the wave, and its hungry fingers stretched accordingly. Once the wave was sufficiently “tangled” in itself, Grey headed out over the flowing body of the wave as it rippled and undulated below. At his velocity, the miles spanned seemed like yards, and the end of the liquid-like body appeared over the horizon quite unexpectedly.
The end of the body shifted and rolled until it formed a wave similar to that which continued to chase them from behind.
“Now we’ve got two of them after us!” Mystique said.
“I know,” Grey replied simply, self-assured.
Once the second wave reached its peak, Grey turned once again, and flew across the body, as the waves from both sides closed in on the center. On them.
“You’ve got to fly faster, Grey!” Cain urged.
“Faster!” everyone exclaimed upon seeing the double threat surrounding them.
Empty land appeared ahead once again, as they reached the end of the body, dragging itself along the ground. No longer like a body of water. Now, more like an amoeba, with no real structure. Dangerous, nonetheless, for still both waves roared closer. They climbed higher, over the soaring group, and if Grey could not carry them back over the ground, everyone would be swallowed in the waves’ black fury.
With a terrible clap, the waves collided, and the conjoined mass rained down toward them. But Grey sped out of their virulent path, and over land. He kept flying, until the mass was out of view. And finally, he lowered the TK bubble to the ground, then allowed himself to fall out of the air.
Cain rushed to the mutant’s limp form. “Grey! Are you okay?”
“Just...a little tired...is all,” the young mutant mumbled. His left eye pulsed with a golden glow. His brow gleamed and his brown and white-streaked hair was frazzled with sweat.
“Fancy flyin’, kid,” Black Marvel said.
“Th-thanks.”
“How did you find us?” Polaris asked.
“I sensed your minds. Telepathically.”
“Does anybody have any idea what the hell that was back there?” Mystique asked, frustrated. “Does anybody have any idea where the hell we are?!”
“I do,” Domino replied, and held up the dog tags that had belonged to the skull she’d found earlier, letting the others confound themselves with the enigmatic engraving.
Her voice was haunted with alarm. “This is Earth.”