AndyC

Absolute Comics: Rebirth

WHO KNOWS...

PROLOGUE

---

The car is on fire,
and there is no driver at the wheel.
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides,
and a dark wind blows.

The government is corrupt,
and we are all on so many drugs,
with the radio on and the curtains drawn.

We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine.
And the machine is bleeding to death.
-Efrim Menuck, "Dead Flag Blues"

---

Queens, Manhattan
12:44am

"Nnnnghyeeeeahhhh," grunted Officer Troy Vincent as he stretched, arching his back far enough that he felt a couple of satisfying pops and cracks. "I could kill for a smoke right now."

He had worked a long, uneventful shift that evening, handing out traffic tickets and shooing off loitering kids. Most of his evenings were like this now, long hours of patrolling the neighborhood, people giving him a wide berth as he passed, maybe a stink-eye or a sneer when they thought he wasn't looking. Even people who hadn't done anything wrong tend to get a little nervous in the presence of a cop.....maybe it was a power thing, or a race thing depending on who was on the street that day. Maybe being around someone who represented law and order made people think about the hundred little crimes they committed every day, the misdeeds they told themselves were necessary to get by....

Troy shook his head and picked up his pace. That line of thinking was what got him kicked off of Vice. Besides, his shift was over. He was off the clock and out of uniform; no point in painting everyone as a potential perp right now.

After several blocks, he pulled out his phone and sent a text to his old partner, Donnie Skaggs.

Heading to the Thirsty Turtle, he typed. If you're coming, I still owe you a shot.

Skaggs was one of the few people from Vice who would still talk to Troy after the big falling-out that saw him busted back down to working the streets. They'd been working a case involving a human trafficking ring, kids going missing and turning up on sites in the dark corners of the internet. When evidence began to point to someone in the unit being involved, Vincent had gone straight to the Captain and began raising hell. Words were exchanged, followed by fists being thrown. If Skaggs hadn't been there to calm the Captain down, Troy probably would have been canned and maybe cuffed.

Hahahahaha.........

Troy's head jerked up from his phone at the sound of laughter, the kind of cold sinister laugh you only ever heard in old movies from his grandpa's day.

Looking around, he saw the criss-crossed steel of the old Queensboro Bridge not far off, lit up like Christmas. His grandpa used to tell him about how someone saved his life on that bridge. He'd lost everything when the Stock Market crashed, and was going to jump from the bridge and end it all. But someone stepped in at the last second, gave old Henry Vincent a new lease on life, a new purpose.

Troy's phone buzzed.

39th and 11th Ave. Now.

"...the hell?" Troy wondered to himself. Who knows what Skaggs had gotten himself into?

Haaahahahahahahahahaha........

That sinister, horror-movie laughter was closer now; Troy could feel a tingle run down his spine when he heard it. Tucking the phone away, he turned towards 39th Street and broke into a dead sprint.

For what felt like hours, the only sounds Troy Vincent heard were the ruffling of his jacket, the ragged huffs and puffs of his breath, and the sharp crack of his shoes smacking wet pavement.

His eyes stung with sweat, and his muscles burned. He'd always been in good shape, but now it felt like he'd been running obstacle courses all night. His vision began to blur, and he could swear that even though there hadn't been a cloud in the sky that evening, a thick fog was now rolling out from the alleyways.

HAAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-HAAAAAAAAAA......

Troy felt keenly aware of the weight jostling around on the left side of his chest: the pistol he kept in a shoulder holster underneath his jacket. He vaguely wondered if his senses would be sharp enough to get off a good shot if--

"Shit!"

Troy Vincent skidded to a stop on the unusually wet pavement, nearly slipping and falling as he approached the corner of 39th and 11th.

Hanging between two street lights, one tied with a long chain to each arm so he hung in a crucifix position, was Donnie Skaggs.

"Oh shit, oh shit," Vincent cursed as fog rolled in around him. Reaching into his jacket, he went for his pistol....

.....only to find it was gone.

The clouded mind cannot see, came a dark, sneering voice that seemed to drip with malevolence. You have nothing to fear from me, Troy Vincent....unless you interfere with my work.

"Hey, fuck you!" Troy spat, mustering every bit of courage he could. "You just killed a goddamn cop, you think I'm going to let you go?"

Donald Skaggs claimed to serve the Law, the voice said. But the Law is a poor master. I serve Justice. Tell me, Troy Vincent.....what do you serve?

"Who....who the hell are you?!" Troy called out, his fists balled up in a fighting stance.

You once were a vice officer, yes? the voice asked. You thought you had seen the foulest reaches of the human soul, and that you could fight against it. But who can say they have seen the full depths of depravity, so that they may judge it? Who knows the face of absolute sin, so that they can destroy it? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The fog that surrounded Troy began to dissipate, the chill in the air giving way to a warmer breeze. Troy's eyes darted back and forth in every direction, trying to find the man who had killed his old partner, but saw nothing.

Taking a few tentative steps towards Skaggs' body, he reached for his phone to call it in. When he did, however, he found something else in his pocket, something small and plastic.

Pulling it out, he saw it was a black thumb drive, with a dark red smear across it.

That same dark red smear, he saw, glistened on the pavement below the hanging body of Donnie Skaggs. Written in red across the pavement of New York, were three words that hadn't been seen in decades.....

THE SHADOW KNOWS

Marvel: Knights of New York

IC is live, folks! Let's get this party started!

Marvel: Knights of New York

Gianino's Imports
Corner of Court and Bryant St, Red Hook District, Brooklyn
02:34 AM

She's falling.

The night air was hot, stuffy, not even so much as a breeze to stir up the humidity that sat heavy like a damp blanket over the district. Any stars that would be out were drowned out from the dull orange of street lights, the sky a flat black washed in a dim brown haze. In the distance, a red-eye commuter train rumbled past, likely carrying no one other than a dead-eyed conductor and a few drunks and transients. A dog, woken from its sleep by the train, barked in protest.

It was the closest thing one could get to silence in the City.

"Christ, I'm sweatin' my balls off here," griped Tony Campaea, wiping at the glossy sheen that had settled on his brow. "How much of this shit is there?"

"Enough that you should keep your mind on moving it instead of whining," growled Ronnie Tataglia, grunting as he and Frankie Zambrano hoisted another large crate from the loading dock into the trailer of a nondescript semi. "About a dozen more of the big ones left in the basement, and six or seven cases of--hey!"

Louie Laguna stopped in his tracks, partway through slinging a small metallic case into the semi trailer.

"What'd I tell you?" Ronnie snapped at him. "Big crates and money bags go in the truck. The smaller cases go in the van."

"Right, right," Louie nodded, trudging towards an unmarked windowless gray van.

"I don't get it," Tony said as they headed back into the warehouse. "Why're we splittin' this up anyway? Ain't it all going to the boss?"

Ronnie shook his head.

"The stuff in the crates and the money all goes to the boss," he said. "Hammerhead wants the smaller cases going to some outfit he's got going on upstate."

"What's in 'em?"

"I don't know, and I don't want to know," Ronnie said as they boarded a cramped service elevator and descended into the basement of Gianino's Imports. "All I know is I wanna get this shit moved out. I just wanna go back to makin' money, not cleanin' up after psychos in Halloween masks."

Years ago, this place was a front for Silvio Manfredi's smuggling operations, bringing in or shipping out whatever goods the Maggia Crime Syndicate needed at the moment-- guns, drugs, people, anything the market demanded. The Maggia took a pounding and lost half of Brooklyn, though, when a couple of new players moved in: a pair of masked freaks who went by Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. Spider-Man was one of the hero-type freaks, crippling Manfredi's operations and running them out of town to the point that Silvio himself had to leave the country. Meanwhile, the Goblin simply moved in everywhere the Maggia moved out, turning their old fronts and safehouses into caches where he would store weapons and gizmos and whatever other crazy things he was saving for later.

That was over, though. The Green Goblin was dead, and Spider-Man probably dead with him. Over the last year, Manfredi had returned to New York, and was hell-bent on taking back his old territory. His right-hand man Hammerhead had been put in charge of clearing out all of the Goblin's hideouts so the Maggia could return to business as usual.

"So why's Hammerhead not bringing everything to Silvermane, huh?" Tony asked, squatting down to lift another crate. "Think he's tryin' to pull a fast one on the boss? Would that make us--"

"Tony, enough with the questions already!" Ronnie barked, his patience running thin. "We ain't got all night, and I ain't in the mood to--"

"AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!"

Tony and Ronnie stopped dead in their tracks and looked up, towards the ground floor of the warehouse. Down in the basement, the scream had been muffled, but they'd heard it all the same.

"What's--"

"I said enough with the questions," Ronnie cut him off, dropping the crate and pulling a pistol from the waistband of his pants. Following his lead, Tony did the same, producing a chrome-plated revolver. Ronnie nodded his head towards the stairwell, and the two made their way back to the ground floor as quietly as possible.

As they headed up the stairs, there was another scream, followed by several loud POPs and a chatter of automatic fire. An intruder was bad enough; those gunshots would bring in cops, or worse, capes. A year ago, the worst you had to worry about when the super-types came around was a bloody nose, maybe a couple of teeth knocked loose. You took your licks and stayed down until the cops came to round everyone up, then the boss would post bail and you'd be back to work in a couple of weeks. After Spider-Man went down, though, they started getting mean. Started snapping limbs, breaking backs, leaving people twisted up like pretzels or with their brains beaten to jelly.

Opening the door with as little noise as he could manage, Ronnie poked his head out, sweeping the warehouse with his pistol. He heard a pained groan from the other side of a shipping container, and gestured for Tony to check it out.

Tony nodded and crept alongside the shipping container, the chrome hand-cannon trembling in his grip. Rounding the corner, he saw a figure trembling on the floor.

"Aww, Jesus," he muttered. "Louie, you all right?"

It was a stupid question, but it was all he could think to say. Louie Laguna lay on the concrete in a pool of blood, wide-eyed and pale, his arm snapped backwards. Through dark red shreds of mangled flesh, Tony could see white shards of bone sticking out. His legs were bent in unnatural ways too, probably broken in several places. What could have--

"No, nonono, NOOOO!!!!!"

A figure blurred through the air, and letting out a startled yelp, Tony squeezed the trigger of his revolver. The shock of the hand-cannon going off shot a wave of pain up his arm, the kick nearly breaking his wrist. The BANG was so loud his ears began to ring, the noise of the chaos surrounding him muffled and drowned as if he were underwater.

His heart pounding and his senses reeling, Tony frantically spun from one side to the other, pointing the gun at nothing each time, until he finally saw the figure that had flown at him crumpled in a heap ten paces behind him.....

It was Sal Minelli, a pool of red the size of a basketball spreading from his head. Sal was enormously fat, nearly 400 pounds, and whoever had broken Louie's arms and legs had thrown him like a football. In his panic, Tony had blown a baseball-sized hole in Sal's thigh, and as crimson gushed out from the wound, the big man had gone too far into shock to scream.

"Jesus Christ, Tony, you stupid fu--" Ronnie began before being cut off by another deafening chatter of automatic fire. Frankie Zambrano, shrieking like a man possessed, emptied the clip of his Uzi into thin air. As the gunfire gave way to the click of an empty magazine, Tony saw something, what looked like a long black whip of some kind, lash out from the rafters and snare itself around Frankie's arm. It pulled up, yanking the fear-crazed Frankie upwards into the shadows, where a loud crunch cut his screams short.

"Hell with this," Ronnie muttered, "I'm gettin' the hell outta here!"

Ronnie sprinted for the loading dock, and realizing he was about to be left alone, Tony broke out into a run behind him. They were maybe five paces from the door when a figure dropped down from the ceiling, putting itself between the two hoods and their exit.

The figure was maybe five-and-a-half feet tall, thin but with chiseled muscles under a skin that looked like it was made of tar or oil. Light seemed to just fall into it, like a moving shadow, the only parts not flat black were a gleaming white emblem of a spider on its chest, and a pair of flashing white eyes--the only features visible on its face.

"I.....I heard about you," Ronnie sputtered, raising his pistol. "New guy, they're callin' Venom, right? Tryin' to replace Spider-Man or somethin'?"

The thing he called 'Venom' didn't answer. It cocked its head to one side, like a curious dog, but otherwise made no move as Ronnie pulled back the hammer of his gun.

"Well he's dead, asshole," he said, taking aim "an' so are you!"

With that, Ronnie squeezed the trigger, and again Tony's ears rang from the noise. He saw a splatter of black goo spray from the front of Venom's head, a perfect shot right between its eyes....and the thing didn't even flinch.

"What....what the--"

Suddenly springing to life, Venom lashed out an arm, which shot forth one of those whips of black goo and pulled Ronnie towards him. With its free arm, the black figure slammed a fist into Ronnie's face, bone and cartilage giving way with a sickening crunch. Ronnie Tataglia didn't make so much as a whimper as he crumpled to the ground.

Tony Campaea turned to flee back into the warehouse, but he felt something snag his feet, and a second later, his world burst into stars as his face hit the concrete. Scrambling onto his back, he saw Venom turning away from him, its attention now turned towards the crates they had been loading onto the semi.

The black figure ripped off the top of a crate, wood and nails that might as well have been tissue paper, and reached inside. Tony saw the creature produce a small, metallic orange sphere about the size of a softball. It regarded the orange ball with the same curiosity that it had looked at Frankie before smashing his face, then its hands began to tremble. Whatever was in those crates, it made that Venom thing very upset.

"Please," Tony begged, "whatever you're doin', just.....just let us go. We're not hurtin' nobody, we're just--"

Venom's head snapped back towards Tony, white eyes flashing, and Tony froze, too terrified to finish his thought.

Still carrying the orange ball in its quaking hand, Venom stalked back towards the stairwell to the basement.

The creature pressed a button on the side of the orange ball, and Tony saw it light up. Across one side, sickly green lights made the shape of a ghoulish smiling face.....and Tony's eyes went wide with horror.

This place was an old Goblin hideout. Which meant those crates were full of the Goblin's favorite weapon....

"Your friend is right," it said, a garbled, gurgling voice bubbling up from its pitch-black skin before tossing the Pumpkin Bomb down the stairs towards the dozen more crates filled with high explosives. "Spider-Man is dead."

Moments later, the night sky lit up as Gianino's Imports erupted into flames. The night air began to wail with the sound of police sirens, the staccato chopping of SHIELD helicopters....and the screams of men burning.

Marvel: Knights of New York

---

"New York City,
Center of the Universe.
Times are shitty,
But I'm pretty sure they can't get worse."

'Superheroes.' Vigilantes and mutants and alien gods, jumping across rooftops and cracking skulls in the name of the greater good. Sure, it was dangerous, but it was all in good fun, right? They were our friendly neighborhood watchmen, pulling cats out of trees and keeping the bad guys in check. You might get some broken windows, maybe lose a building here or there, but unless it was a full-blown alien invasion or cosmic demigod or something along those lines, your Iron Men and Thors and Spideys always made sure nobody really got hurt. That's how we saw it-- cops and robbers on a bigger scale. It was all just a game to us.

Until last year, anyway.

It looked like your average showdown between Spider-Man and his arch-rival, the Green Goblin, on the George Washington Bridge. People were recording it on their phones, streaming it on YouTube and sharing the fight on Facebook. Millions watched and reacted when the Goblin was unmasked and revealed to be OsCorp CEO Norman Osborn. Social media lit up as a crowd-favorite hero grabbed his nemesis and impaled them both upon the Goblin's glider. The whole world saw the age of the harmless, fun-and-games heroes come to an end with the murder of an innocent 19-year-old girl named Gwen Stacy.

People had died in the action before, but never that deliberately, never in front of so many eyes and cameras. The shock of it all turned the City against the costumed heroes, and the Feds began to crack down.

SHIELD stepped up its surveillance, and now you can't walk a block without hearing one of their drones buzzing overhead. After anti-cape protests broke out into full-blown riots in front of the Avengers Mansion, the team closed up shop and moved to a secluded compound far away from the city. Reed Richards and his team have started finding more and more excuses to be on other planets, other dimensions, anywhere but the often-vandalized Baxter Building. Charles Xavier's kids can't set foot in the Big Apple without setting off a fight, either with SHIELD operatives or just your average disaffected New Yorkers. No one even knows what happened to Spider-Man-- given how badly he was injured that night on the Bridge, most people assume he died later that night, but others claim he's still out there. Either way, he hasn't been seen in over a year.

Even if the major players are gone for one reason or another, though, that doesn't mean there's nobody left in the game. Spider-Man had been New York's most active defender, and without him, other men and women have started braving the SHIELD crackdown to fill the void he left. Norman Osborn had left a major power vacuum behind-- both in the corporate world and the criminal underworld-- and there's no shortage of stuffed-suits and crime bosses looking to grab their share of the Goblin's empire. Neighborhoods are being carved up into territories, Hell's Kitchen and Harlem and Soho being claimed as the domain of one hero or villain or another, like the knights of feudal Europe.

And New Yorkers, like the serfs and peasants of olden times, are feeling more and more powerless, keeping our heads down and quietly wondering when the rules stopped applying to everyone. A knight might protect you and your family, but they might also chop your head off if they're in a bad mood. No one ever had to worry about Captain America doing something like that, but who can say the same about the Punisher, or the Ghost Rider, or any of the so-called 'Defenders' now?

Things are dangerous now, sure. Everything's up in the air. The city feels like a pressure cooker, ready to blow. Walking around the city, it doesn't take long before you get the feeling that we're all holding our breaths, waiting for the spark that sets it all off. When that happens, if these new capes really are the new knights of New York, it won't be long before we see if they're worthy of it.

-Ned Leeds, Daily Bugle

---

Central Arc:

A BROKEN WEB

Norman Osborn, CEO of the multi-billion-dollar science firm OsCorp, is dead. In a scandal that rocked the corporate sector, Osborn's death came moments after he was revealed to have been the criminal mastermind and terrorist lunatic known as the Green Goblin. His killer, the controversial vigilante known as Spider-Man, has not been seen in over a year, and is presumed dead from the wounds he sustained during the battle.

In the wake of Osborn's death, companies like Stark Industries, Rand International, Fisk Financial, Alchemax, and the Roxxon Corporation have been vying for OsCorp's assets, while the deceased madman's son Harry tries to keep the proverbial vultures at bay and salvage what is left of his father's empire.

The fall of the Green Goblin has also left a tremendous power vacuum in the criminal underworld. The Maggia Crime Syndicate, who had lost much territory to the Goblin, is on the rise again, as are prominent crime lords like Tombstone and Hammerhead, while smaller gangs like the Kitchen Irish and outsiders like the Yakuza and Triads mean to carve out territories of their own. As syndicates and street thugs begin to clash, assassins and hitmen are finding no shortage of dirty work, and the police find themselves overwhelmed, leaning harder and harder on the new SHIELD authorities to keep the city from breaking out into all-out chaos.

While full-scale war has thus far been avoided, New York has become a powder keg, and a new player threatens to spark things off. A mysterious and brutal new vigilante has been spotted in recent nights, ripping his way through criminal lairs and SHIELD checkpoints alike. Wearing all black and seemingly indestructible, this new player looks at first glance like the long-lost Spider-Man, but fights like a vicious animal, and thus has been given the code-name "Venom."

---

Roster:

Elektra
Queentze

Flint
Hound55

Hawkeye
Eddie Brock

Luke Cage
Byrd Man

Nightcrawler
HenryJonesJr

Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu
DC The Dragon

The Shocker
The Bork Lazer

Venom
AndyC

Absolute Comics: Rebirth

The Death of the Supermen

Part One

"Everyone, stay back!" I call out to the panicking crowd. You'd think that in an emergency situation, moving to safety would be the last thing you would need to remind people to do, but when things start happening quickly and the people around you start to panic, it's easy to get confused, to freeze up, or to gawk at what's going on. Normally I try to personally ensure the stragglers and gawkers and deer-in-the-headlights get to a safe place.....

...but unfortunately, my hands are a little tied at the moment.

My vision explodes into stars and blotches of color as I tumble head over heels across the pavement, finally coming to a stop when something smacks me hard against the back. I'm quick to pull myself up to a vertical base, shaking the dizziness out of my head long enough to see that I'd slammed into a courier van, knocking it onto its side with the impact. After a quick scan to make sure there's no one inside of the van, I rub my jaw, still smarting from the impact.

It's not very often these days that I have to deal with someone who can hit hard enough to leave a mark on me. But damned if today didn't end up being one of those days.

I burned breakfast this morning while putting out a wildfire in Oregon, so Lois and Jon had to make do with cold cereal.

I got an earful from Perry about how my story on Lex Luthor's parole hearing is behind schedule, and how he's giving the story to Ron if I don't have it done by Friday.

The United Nations was attacked while I was preventing a suicide bombing in Pokolistan.

A hurricane is bearing down on Madripoor, and while I'm sure Kara can take care of it herself, I'd hoped to lend a hand....

"Stay down, Superman. I don't want to have to take all day killing you."

....but that's when the Atomic Skull came out to pick a fight.

Joseph Martin, the unfortunate victim of exposure to exotic radiation from one of STAR Labs' many unconventional experiments with alien or cosmic technology. The incident melted the flesh off of his bones, but somehow his consciousness remained intact, becoming a walking nuclear warhead, strong enough to go blow-for-blow with me and capable of letting out blasts of irradiated plasma that can burn an ordinary human to dust in an instant. While he has regained most of his sanity over the years, it's done nothing to alleviate his agony, or his hatred of the world around him.

"You want to fight me, Martin? Fine, we'll fight," I say, cracking my knuckles as I hover over him, "but not here. We do it outside of the city, where we can go twelve rounds without putting these people in danger."

"Why bother?" he answers, letting out a pulse of radiation that pushes me back, sending a wave of stinging pain and nausea through my body. "They're next once I'm done with you. Everyone burns today, Superman. Everyone burns!"

Atomic Skull lashes out with his right arm, hurling a radioactive plasma bolt at a group of terrified civilians. I've seen what happens to people who get caught by one of Martin's blasts: the dust that used to be their bodies leaves an imprint on the buildings behind them, burning a silhouette of the person in their final moment. 'Hiroshima shadows,' they call it.

That's not happening today, as I throw myself between the Skull and the bystanders, letting the blast hit me square in the chest. Every nerve in my body is screaming, my senses reeling with agony and sickness. It's not as bad as Kryptonite poisoning, but it's damned close.

"Nngh!" I grunt, digging my fingers into the asphalt to prevent myself from tumbling away. Gritting my teeth, I glare back at the Skull and ball up my fists. "Have it...*rgh!*....have it your way."

Atomic Skull isn't as cunning as Luthor, as advanced as Brainiac, as ruthless as Zod, or as unstoppable as Doomsday. But he's still tough as nails and incredibly volatile. His radioactive aura soaks up most of my Heat Vision, and weakens me when I get too close, so the longer this fight goes, the more trouble I'm in. First things first, then: disperse that aura as much as possible, then take him down fast and hard.

I take in a deep breath, and as Martin charges forward, I let him have it.

A cone of hurricane-force wind, super-cooled by compression to near Absolute Zero, knocks the Atomic Skull off of his feet, and more importantly, slows the decay of the atoms in his radioactive cloud, rendering it all but inert for a precious few fractions of a second. Which, hopefully, should be all I need.

I take a three-point stance, like a linebacker about to pounce, and rush forward, ramming my shoulder into the disoriented Skull's gut and grabbing him around the waist. Martin's tough enough that one punch, even from me, won't be enough to put him down, so I'm going to need to do something a little more drastic if I want to end this before someone gets hurt.

Before the Skull can react, I take to the air, wrenching him upwards as we go above the rooftops of New Bohemia, above the monolithic LexCorp Tower downtown, above the clouds. The air ignites in our wake, the friction from the sheer speed of our flight leaving a fiery streak as we go higher and higher.......

By the time the Atomic Skull regains his bearings and realizes where he is, the blue skies over Metropolis have given away to the endless starry expanse of space. The jaws of his death's-head visage hang open as he shouts and screams in protest, but up here there's no air for the sound to carry.

I'd tell him he brought this on himself, but since he can't hear it, I give him a look that says it for me. I then grab hold of his arm, whirl him twice around me, and on the third spin, I send him back down towards the planet.

I sure hope my aim was good, I think to myself as a bright flash of orange light signals that Atomic Skull has hit the atmosphere. Given the distance from the target area, the curvature of the Earth, the change in trajectory from hitting air resistance, and several dozen other minute variables, I only had a few fractions of a second to do the calculations in my head once and didn't have the time to double-check. If I was off by even a fraction of a degree, he could impact miles away from where I want, possibly in a populated area.

Taking a few precious seconds to soak some unfiltered rays of rejuvenating sunlight, I pour on the speed and begin following the Skull down, getting in a few jabs here and there to correct course as he arcs downward. A few hundred yards up, I put on the brakes and let loose with a blast of Heat Vision, not at the Skull himself, but at the ground he's barreling towards at Mach seven. Hitting solid ground at that speed would devastate the surrounding area and kick up a massive dust cloud like a meteor impact. As the ground liquefies into magma, however, he passes through it like a hot knife through butter before landing where I want....

....at the bottom of a massive concrete cask at the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Storage Facility. It's not Stryker's Island, to be sure, but a few hundred feet of concrete should contain him long enough for SHIELD to extract him safely.

"I told you I'd go twelve rounds with you once we were out of the city," I say, indulging in a little bit of swagger as I fly down the molten tunnel his landing had bored into the ground. "Should I start the ten-count now, or do you--.....wait...."

As the Atomic Skull lies in a heap at the bottom of the concrete cask, he begins to twitch, sparks and electrical arcs popping and crackling from different joints in his body. I focus my eyes to the X-Ray spectrum, scanning him for some sort of internal injuries....

....and all I find are circuitry and wires.

"A robot?" I say out loud, to no one in particular. "Who'd make a robot duplicate of--"

Wait. Something's wrong.

I can hear it, something very clearly off. When you can sense things on the other side of the planet, hear and feel and smell far beyond the range most would consider physically possible, it's important to have a few constants, standards that you can use to find your center in a sea of sensations generated by billions of people. For the longest time, I kept my hearing focused to a single rhythm, a pulse that I could always find no matter where I was. Eventually, it would be two rhythms, two steady drumbeats that let me know things were okay.

The heartbeats of my wife and my son. And right now, both of them are pounding like machine guns.

I smash the robot copy of the Atomic Skull with an appropriately large slab of concrete and take to the skies with a speed that would catch even Wally off-guard. Whatever's going on with the robot, it can wait. Lois and Jon are in trouble.

Normally, I take a long and winding route back to the farmhouse in Hamilton County, about twenty miles west of Metropolis. I don't want people following me back to my family, even if that house is home to a ten-year-old that can already lift a tractor and protected by a dog that chews on titanium like a rawhide bone. Now, though, I'm leaving a fiery comet-trail in the air across the Continental United States, and if someone wants to follow that trail, they won't like who they find at the end of it.

"Lois! Jon!" I call out as I land outside the farmhouse, the loud crack of a sonic boom announcing my arrival.

"Clark!" Lo calls back from the front porch, cradling a figure in her arms. "Oh, thank God, I wasn't sure what--"

"Dad!" I hear Jon from inside. "Mom won't let me come out. I can't see what's--

"Go back inside, Jon."

"But Mom, I--"

"Jonathan Samuel Kent, you go back inside right now." Lois says with the kind of protective fury that only a mother has.

"Listen to your mother, Jon," I say as I approach the front step, seeing exactly what it is she's holding. "This isn't something you should see."

Jonathan hesitates for a moment before I give him a stern look, and then he looks away and heads inside. I know that his own X-Ray vision is starting to develop at this point, but he knows better than to use it when both Lois and I tell him he shouldn't be looking at something.

Lois lays the figure back down, standing up as she wipes nervous tears from her eyes.

"I was working on a story in the office, and I.....I heard this loud thump, and Krypto started going crazy and I just...."

"It's okay, Lo," I say, putting my arms around her and holding her close. "I'll get the League on the line and we'll figure this out. In the meantime, I'll take it to the barn so Jon won't see it."

"God, I sound like such a mess," Lois laughs at herself. "Lois Lane-Kent, fearless reporter, the woman who's stared down terrorists and alien demigods, and now I'm shaking and crying like I've never seen this sort of thing before. I just....I thought it was.......oh God, I thought it was--"

"It's not," I reassure her, running my fingers through her hair. "I'm right here."

As I hold my wife and tell her it's going to be all right, I look down at the figure lying on our porch. One quick look, and I know. Lois was right to be afraid, even if I can't make heads or tails of it.

Someone has left the body of a dead man at our doorstep. Not just a dead man......

.....a dead Superman.

---

ELSEWHERE

"I've just received signal of another incursion. I think our next target has just been singled out."

"Any sign of infection yet?"

"Not yet. We're actually ahead of the ball this time, so we may be able to intervene before it's too late."

"What sort of secondary targets are we looking at on this world?"

"Pulling it up right now. It looks like-- oh, wow. Nearly a complete legacy on this world. A Supergirl and two Superboys, possibly a Power Girl as well, though that's not confirmed. I'm also seeing several derivations here: a Thor, a Captain Marvel, a Sentry, even a Blue Marvel! This may be the most well-defended world we've encountered so far!"

"I think you mean it's the most target-rich environment. All of those different angles of attack..."

"You're being awfully pessimistic, friend."

"One of us has to be."

"We need to establish contact with the primary target as soon as possible. If we can bring him in before he's infected, then all the better. If not, we can extract him and put him in null-space before it has the chance to spread. I think we have a chance of stopping it here, though."

"Agreed. We haven't been able to bring in an uninfected target before. If we can get to him before the enemy arrives, we can lure it out and take it down."

"Or we could die like the last team who was on this case."

"None of that. This is our best chance of identifying and capturing our enemy and avenging our comrades."

"If things go South, though, the Omega Sanction--"

"--is not to be used under any circumstances, am I clear?"

"You say that now, but you weren't there when--"

"Am. I. Clear?"

"......you're clear."

"That's what I thought. No matter how bad it gets here, we are never resorting to that again."

"On that, you have my oath."

"If you say so."

"Good. Now, we don't have much time. So, gentlemen.....let's get to work."

Absolute Comics: Rebirth

Hey y'all, sorry for the lack of activity-- holiday and family stuff. I'mma try and get Superman and Shadow up and running some time this weekend.

Marvel: Knights of New York

Monday- gives everyone time to enjoy the big holiday weekend.

Marvel: Knights of New York

Digging it. Elektra and Nightcrawler are both APPROVED.

Marvel: Knights of New York

Of the two, I'd say Elektra probably is a better fit for the setting.

Marvel: Knights of New York

Yup; door's open!