Paragon

High above the ground a dragon flapped its tremendous wings that turned the ocean into flame. Zeke reached towards the dragon but he was so far down and the dragon was so very high up in the air. A cry echoed off the cliffs and surrounded him; the scream rang in his ears for several eternities. He looked up and saw the source of the sound: it was Kira, standing in front of Mary, with her hands outstretched. She used the flaming sea as a weapon against the dragon, but the fire merely rippled away from the dragon’s scales and had no effect on the beast. The dragon turned towards her slowly and smiled; no it wasn’t smiling, it was opening its mouth.

“NO!” Zeke shouted and summoned all his power and took off into the air towards her. He flew as fast as he could, pouring all his power beneath him as he soared with his right arm reaching towards her.

“KIRA!” He shouted. She heard him; her head turned towards him and her hands fell to her side. She smiled with tears in her eyes. Zeke flew but no matter how fast he went he seemed to be drawing no nearer to her.

“MARY!” He bellowed as tears formed in his own eyes. Mary looked and saw Zeke, she waved excitedly, not seeming to register the danger she was in.

Fire; it came and engulfed the cliffs and turned them to blackened stone that steamed. The rocks dissolved, the trees became cinders. There were no remains. He’d been too slow. He lost everything to the fire. He’d been too slow.

“NO!” Zeke sat straight up and popped his eyes wide open. He was in a room filled with computer monitors and electrical panels, a room that was completely unfamiliar to him. He looked down and saw that he was lying on a black-steel cot which explained the twinging, uncomfortable back pain that he was suddenly aware of. He pressed his palm to his head and discovered that he was covered in beads of frozen sweat that stuck to his skin as little, icy opals.

He looked around the room.

It reminded him of some of the control centers in the facilities he’d recently been visiting. A single, black leather chair sat in front of the monitors in front of him that was placed in such a way that whoever sat in it could easily reach every panel or command key on the console.

A door opened audibly to his left and Zeke leapt off of the bed and turned, ready to strike. He let his guard down when he saw Jon and Phalanx entering through a set of double doors that swung behind them gently. Jon looked at him with a mixture of remorse and anger while Phalanx’s helmet concealed all facial expressions, yet Zeke somehow felt like the Paragon was glaring at him.

“Where are we?” Zeke asked as his hands fell to his side. He realized then that his cloak and mask had also been removed, though his torso was still bare.

“You’re in my sanctum,” Phalanx grimaced, “and you’ve made quite the mess of things.” Jon’s face suddenly turned to confusion and he looked up at Phalanx with a tilt in his head.

“Are we here to help or hinder, Phalanx?” Jon mused.

“At the moment, neither,” Phalanx growled and walked towards Zeke with his shoulders forward. “I anticipated a great deal but this is something else entirely. You gave the Dragon everything he needs to turn us into public enemy number one.”

“We knew he was going to fight Vladimir, why are you angry about this now?” Jon barked and then leapt in front of the approaching Paragon and placed a hand on the metal chest of Phalanx’s armor.

“Because he went to the Dragon’s home! You saw the news, Wolfspider, don’t pretend like this doesn’t make things more difficult and now…” Phalanx paused and turned away, walking towards his command console. “Now for us to even show our faces in public will be considered an act of terrorism. How do we bring the people to our side when we can’t even show our faces?”

“What do you mean you knew I was going to fight Vladimir?” Zeke asked and turned his attention to Jon. His red eyebrow was cocked up as high as it could have been.

“No one’s that stupid, Z,” Jon said, “you took down all his operations the only logical next step was to attack the Dragon himself. We just figured you would go to the Tower and do it or catch him on his way home. Not sure why we thought that, an isolated mansion in the woods seems like a much better place for two Paragons to duke it out, now that I think of it.”

“What’s happened?” Zeke inquired; he knew something must be different judging by their reaction. The last thing he remembered was trying to fly away from the house in the middle of the woods on the outskirts of the city. “How long have I been out?”

“Three days.” Jon said. Zeke looked back at him in surprise and Jon simply nodded, “we followed you but we couldn’t interfere with the fight. If we had taken Vladimir out then and there, we figured the press would have simply turned it into a ‘supers gang up on a nice guy’ story and things would get worse. We didn’t anticipate the Exodus Act.”

“What is the Exodus Act?”

“It is something that has colossally fucked over a century of work,” Phalanx interjected, “and something I did not see coming somehow…” Phalanx took a moment to himself and then plopped down into his chair, which Zeke assumed had to be reinforced with something durable to hold up Phalanx’s metal suit, and went on. “The Exodus Act has called for all Supers to turn themselves in for immediate incarceration. They claim the Supers are going to be deported but anyone who can see straight knows that’s not actually happening.”

“Then where are they- the Tower.” Zeke’s mind clicked again and he hung his head in shame; all the facts fell into a funnel together and were spat into a perfectly clear image. Vladimir had used Zeke’s attack to fuel a motion he had likely been holding up his sleeve for some time. He was likely connected, or intimidating, enough that he had pulls in Congress. Vladimir would be able to pass such an Act that would now supply him with an entire country of hosts for his experiments. But to what end? “I can tell you something else you didn’t count on.”

“Oh lovely, more good news,” Jon quipped and sat on the bed that Zeke had been lying on previously. “Do tell, my frosty friend, do tell.” Jon placed his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling.

“You told me that Vladimir was a telepath, right? Probably the strongest one there ever has been?” Zeke asked and Jon nodded. Phalanx was still staring at his computer monitors. “Well he did something to himself; there’s this… metal thing in his chest that his skin seems to have grown over now. Not sure what it does, but he’s not just a telepath.” Zeke then went on to explain how Vladimir had demonstrated a plethora of powers ranging from Zeke’s own lightning to super strength, geomancy, telekinetics, pyromancy and several others. When he was done Jon groaned, planting his face in his palms and shaking his head. He rubbed his eyes and just stared at Zeke.

“Ya hear that, Phalanx? Your fucking son found a way to give himself more powers.” Jon barked after clicking his tongue.

“I’m sorry, his what?” Zeke exclaimed and then glared over at Phalanx’s back.

“Yep; the Dragon is actually Phalanx’s baby boy, ain’t that somethin’?” Jon’s face turned sour as he hopped off the bed and marched over to Phalanx, who sat silent, staring up at the screens.

“I’d say you might owe me a bit of an explanation then.” Zeke hissed; his body suddenly came alive with power. He wasn’t sure why he had so much energy right now, he remembered dumping it all in an epic uppercut to the Dragon’s jaw and then escaping while he still had consciousness.

“What kind of explanation would you like?” Phalanx said softly and swiveled his chair so that he could face Zeke. “That my son is the literal source of every nightmare history has ever known? That my offspring is responsible for the evil atrocities committed to your family? Would you like me to explain how he thinks he is a god and thus above the rest of us, or shall I save it and simply prattle on in gibberish? It’s likely you’ll hear what you want to hear either way.”

“You bastard, your fucking son murdered everyone I loved!”

“And he’s going to murder so many more if we don’t try to fix this.”

“We?! What we? You’ve been sitting on the sidelines while I’ve been running around actually doing something about this! I’ve shut him down entirely.”

“No, you gave him ammunition,” Phalanx stood and crossed his arms, “propaganda is, sometimes, an even more effective weapon than a bullet. A bullet kills a man, propaganda kills an idea. You remember what I told you about ideas, about symbols. Propaganda destroys all of that and can turn friend and family to foe at the drop of a hat. You gave him ammunition for that gun by recklessly assaulting these facilities in such quick succession. Yet, what did you learn from them?”

“I learned some of his plans. I saw innocent people suffering at his hands and nothing being done about it!” Zeke’s eyes lit up and his body started to crack and hiss with static power.

“Then, you not only learned nothing, you’ve done nothing.” Phalanx whispered and shook his head.

“Nothing? Nothing?! I saved people’s lives! I ended their suffering, I brought down places that harvested super powers and experimented on Supers and Enns alike with genetic mutations! They were in agony and Vladimir was just getting away with this, and you say I did nothing?!” Zeke’s voice became thunderous booms that sounded even louder thanks to the small size of the room and the metal walls. The acoustics reverberated the sound and made it that much louder, causing Jon to plug his ears.

“There are people all over the world who suffer. Some starve, some drown, some die; some get raped or murdered or tortured. Each one a travesty that reflects the horror of what men and women are capable of, yet no one cries out to help them except through tear-jerking infomercials. Tell me, what will you do about them? What do you do when you must kill a man to save a thousand? How do you know that saving one person won’t then damn another?”

“So that’s it, then? You just do nothing because for every one you save another hundred die? Is that it? It’s just not worth the trouble?” Zeke howled. Jon took several steps back and hopped up onto the wall. He knew he wasn’t going to be safe as long as he stayed in the same room with the two of them. For some reason he felt himself somewhat entertained watching a centuries-old Paragon argue with a Paragon in his twenties.

“No,” Phalanx said, “you act delicately. There is a time for brute force and a time for precision. I thought you might understand that.” Zeke responded in action as opposed to words. He flung his hands out and sent his will soaring out of his hands towards Phalanx; electrical arcs screeched from his fingers and crashed into Phalanx’s body. The old Paragon locked up and twitched, falling down to one knee and balancing himself with his fist on the ground. He could hear Phalanx’s heavy breathing through the voice modulator. Zeke was charging up for another blast when the Paragon stood and he noticed that the generator at the center of the chest piece seemed to be glowing that much brighter.

“That… That was over a hundred thousand volts…” Zeke whispered.

“Yes, you fired a hundred thousand volts into the body of a man who can absorb electrical energy and turn it into a steroid, proof that you’re not thinking as clearly and as precisely as you normally do.”

For a moment Zeke felt insulted, but he realized the Paragon was right. He should’ve known what would happen. He basically just super charged Phalanx and gave him the strength to liquefy Zeke’s head with a single punch if he chose to.

You’re better than this, he thought as he turned away, shaking his head. You know better, you’re good at exploiting weaknesses yet you just FED the person you were trying to beat. What’s wrong with me?

“You’re wrathful,” Phalanx said and Zeke suddenly noticed that the Paragon was right next to him, placing his colossal, metal fist on Zeke’s shoulder. “You’ve suffered loss and now you’re heart is full of wrath and ruin.”

“Zeke,” Jon said as he slowly crept down the wall.

“That’s not his name,” Phalanx said and waved Jon away with his other hand.

“Don’t start with that shit right now, the man is hurting!” Jon yelled. Phalanx turned and looked down at Zeke again.

“That’s not your name is it, storm-caller?”

“Stop it, damn you.” Jon barked again.

“Tell us your name, Paragon.” Phalanx whispered. Zeke’s shoulders heaved. His chest was tight. His eyes welled up as images of his life with Kira raced through his mind again. He saw her dead face, Mary’s charred body. For a brief moment he saw Kira in a white dress standing in a church; a flower-designed veil over her head. Then, he saw her with a swollen belly while holding another pair of tiny children that laughed and smiled and yelled for their father. He saw a thousand images all at once that depicted his life with Kira, and at the end, he saw himself. He stared at his own image and it stared back.

Zeke closed his eyes and tried to erase the images, yet they were still there, freshly imprinted in his mind. He saw himself staring back; the perfect image of who he was, who he had been with Kira and who he would have been. He did not wear a cloak or a mask on his face, and the Mohawk that had been his ‘gimmick’ in the ring for years, had become a full head of hair now that he had children.

“What is your name?” He heard the modulated voice say again, but his eyes stayed closed. He saw himself standing in front of him still. The man before him would someday be a father; a husband; a grandfather; possibly even an uncle. This man fought underground and played by the rules; this man was calculating, he was in love and only sometimes did he actually put himself in danger. This man stayed inside, away from the storm.

“Who. Are. You?!” The voice shouted.

This man, the one who stood in front of him without a cloak or mask or Mohawk, was dead. He had died with the woman he loved and with the rest of his family. The memories became wisps of smoke and wrapped around him.

“I…” Zeke whispered; a single tear, still in its liquid form, fell from his eye and struck the floor as ice. “I am a ghost.” He said. In a flash, he saw distant memories of his father and pictures of his mother smiling at him and then, they too turned to smoke and vanished from his thoughts. The man before him, Ezekiel Jeremiah Blackwell, was dead.

“Zeke,” Jon whispered next to him.

“That’s not my name anymore, Jon. Zeke is dead.”

“What is your name?” Phalanx growled into Zeke’s ear.

***

Janice sat at her desk with her hands interlocked while resting her chin atop her fingers. Her elbows dug into the mahogany desk on which rested all her paperwork for the department’s current cases, her computer, and a small, black thumb drive given to her by the Winter Wraith. She still looked back on that night with quite a bit of confusion.

They had talked, just like he said he wanted, but unlike many of the Nulls in her department that had crossed paths with him, she was left alive. Janice had spent the past couple days watching the news very carefully and was even surprised when congress passed the Exodus Act. She closed her eyes and looked back on the night she had been visited.

“This,” he had said, placing the thumb drive on her kitchen table while she had still been trapped in the ice, “is a set of pictures, videos and documents involving highly illegal activity that I think you’ll be very interested in.”

“You broke into my apartment just to rat someone out?” She chuckled and spat on the ice.

“Oh, not just anyone, Chief: the CEO of Draco Industries. He’s been a very bad boy and I think you’ll be interested in seeing where all that lovely bribe money is coming from.” The Winter Wraith said, plopping down on her couch and kicking his feet up onto the coffee table.

“How did you…”

“Don’t worry about that, you have more pressing concerns right now. If you’re half the woman I think you are you’ll look at what’s on that flash-drive, and when you do, you’ll call the number hidden in one of the folders.”

“What makes you think I won’t just come after you?”

“Two reasons; one, your curiosity will eventually get the best of you and once you see what’s in those files you’ll no longer have plausible deniability. Two, because, despite the bribes, you seem to have some sense of integrity. You take care of your own men and, despite being very firm handed, your crew has little to nothing bad to say about you.”

“You fucking Supers are all about being so damned dramatic. You might as well just kill me; because I’m not gonna play your damn game.” She spat again defiantly.

“It’s not a game, Janice. People’s lives are at stake.” Suddenly her bonds melted against her wrists and she was able to move. She scrambled up and dove towards one of the ground-level cabinets for a Glock .45 she kept hidden there, but when she turned the sights in the direction the Winter Wraith had been she saw only a thin layer of fog. She could still see, however, and she saw that he was gone.

Janice popped her eyes open and stared down at the flash drive again.

“People’s lives are at stake.” She heard the words echo in her head like a haunting dream. If there was even the slightest chance that he wasn’t lying then it was her obligation to look at the information. Then again it could be some kind of trap. She shook her head and picked up the thumb drive, staring at it more intently and turning it between her fingers.

“It’s just another case, Janice, think of it like that.” She whispered to herself. Remarkably that seemed to help when she thought of the Winter Wraith as a source instead of a suspicious character. He was a source providing possible leads into criminal activity by Draco Industries and it was her duty as the Chief of Police to look into it, or at least pass it on to one of her detectives. “No,” she decided, “don’t bother them with anything until you know for sure.”

She powered on her computer and pressed the thumb drive into the USB port at the front of her computer-tower. Immediately a file popped up on her monitor that held over a hundred folders each with unusual titles.

FACILITY MANTICORE

FACILITY WYVERN

FACILITY DRAKE

FACILITY BASILISK

EXPERIMENTS 001A – 100B

EXPERIMENTS 101B – 200C

The amount of data stored would have taken her well over a month to go over on her own so she decided to double-click a random folder and open it; it was one of the experiments folders and it was filled with images, videos and text documents. She clicked on a random image and it pulled up something that immediately filled her with horror and the urge to vomit. It was an abomination that had clearly once been human and was titled “Marionette Alpha.” It had no face but a large mouth that opened left to right instead of up and down; its skin looked sinewy and rough and it had several extra, gangly limbs. The next image displayed a similar creature labeled “Marionette Beta.”

There were a dozen of these creatures and each looked like gangly nightmares with different aberrations. One even had six legs and was nicknamed “The Arachnid” which sent chills up her spine just thinking about it. She shook her head and closed her mouth which had been hanging open for a decent amount of time, and closed the images. She backed out of the folder and went to another.

There were no images in this folder, only several videos and documents. Each document contained a blueprint or schematic involving replacing limbs with cybernetic attachments. The first few seemed innocent enough; replaced arms with robotic arms to give amputees their hands, legs, toes or whatever back. It even gave detailed instructions on how to wire the devices into the body’s nervous system. Then the plans became slightly more sinister and war-based.

She was down to the seventeenth image when they started to depict arms being replaced by mechanical attachments that could easily become weapons. The schematics indicated a human-looking hand becoming a long, scythe-like blade or something labeled “fusion cannon.”

Again, Janice Slayt shook her head and backed out of the folder so she could look into another one. This time she clicked on the folder labeled “FACILITY MANTICORE” which held videos, images and documents. The documents showed detailed instructions and records of the creation of the Marionette creatures using genetic mutations in order to replicate the process nature used in order to give people powers. The results were continual failures and patients became comatose and brain dead while their bodies became mutated in bizarre and horrific fashions. Despite the continued failures the attempts continued with no change in the results despite the various methods used, all of which conducted by a Dr. V.

Janice clicked on the first video in the folder which opened with an empty surgical room. The doors popped open and a man wearing a set of goggles, with numerous attachments on the sides, and a lab coat stained with blood walked in. The doctor was quickly followed by a pair of Nulls, their weapons slung over their shoulders, carrying a young woman in a hospital gown by her arms. She was screaming and kicking and making every attempt possible to get herself free and out of that room. The doctor turned around and touched his hand to her head. Immediately the woman went silent and limp.

“Place her on the table,” the doctor said and the Nulls obeyed, “now get out.” The two Nulls nodded and left the room, slamming the doors shut as they exited. The doctor opened his coat, revealing a belt with pouches filled with surgical tools, which he placed one by one onto a small silver tray next to the table. He was very meticulous and methodical in his placements. Janice looked closer and saw that the surgical tools he was setting into the tray were all dirty and covered in blood.

“What the fuck…” She whispered.

“Subject number… eh…” The doctor paused and walked over to a clipboard that hung on the wall, “number three-hundred-four-foxtrot. Female,” he walked back to the operating table and removed the hospital gown from her body, staring down at her naked form as he talked. “Brown hair, blue eyes, athletic by her appearance; formerly married with three children, hence her wide hips. Subject is not a Super.”

They’re experimenting on normal people… Janice thought as the doctor walked over to a cabinet and retrieved a bottle of neon-blue liquid that was being chilled. He brought it over to his small table and drew some of the liquid out with a syringe.

“Subject is being administered serum number six.” The doctor jabbed the needle into her arm, entirely uncaring about what such a thing might do to her veins, and pressed down on the tab to inject the serum. When he was finished, he tossed the needle into a small trash barrel. He pressed his hands on her wrist and his stethoscope on her chest.

“Such lovely breasts…” He said, which drew a snarl out of Janice. “Subject’s heart is racing… blood pressure is elevating… skin is turning cold, very cold in fact. Serum six contained genetics we had hoped would imbue cryomancy, the ability to manipulate cold temperatures and ice; it may be working…”

The woman’s skin was indeed getting colder, to the point where her skin was becoming pale and her lips were turning purple. All her veins suddenly became visible.

“Subject’s temperature is forty-five degrees and dropping. Her body temperature is falling rapidly…”

The woman started to shake and convulse.

“Damnit, damnit!” The doctor shouted. He pressed his hand on her forehead again and closed his eyes; he seemed to be concentrating. Was he a Super? A Super conducting experiments on Enns? On Draco Industries’ payroll?

The woman continued to shake and twitch despite whatever the doctor had been trying to do. He cursed again and jumped back. The woman’s skin was starting to crack and break off of her leaving only bits of muscle and bone. Her entire body started to crack audibly like the sound of a pick chipping into a glacier. The skin split and fell off her body like broken glass until she was skinless with purple muscle tissue. Her arms stretched out and, Janice would not have believed it if she hadn’t seen it for herself, became longer. The arms now reached past her feet, which had also grown into talon-like ligaments.

“Aborting subject,” the doctor yelled, pulled out a sidearm and squeezed off six shots into the woman’s chest, and then one final shot to the head. Janice jumped in surprise and covered her mouth with her hands. “Serum six unsuccessful, results did not differ from serums one through five.”

The video ended leaving her screen black and Janice in a stunned silence. She hurriedly clicked on another video but this one didn’t even start with a subject name or anything that even remotely indicated any kind of professional atmosphere. The video was simply six minutes of the same doctor from the previous video making pointless incisions on a man who was strapped down to the table and screaming through a cloth gag. At the fifth minute the doctor dragged his scalpel from the man’s chest down to his groin and used his hands to pry open the incision, forcing more screams from the victim. At five minutes and forty-seven seconds the doctor reached into the man’s chest and forcibly ripped out one of the man’s lungs, and then the video ended.

The rest of the videos in the folder were just like that one. Senseless violence on helpless victims who seemed to be both Supers and Norms alike; some videos showed the victims being dragged into the operating room by Nulls who were careless in their treatment, while others simply cut straight to the doctor’s evisceration. Some victims were put to sleep when the doctor placed his hand on their foreheads; others were kept awake and gagged. Janice was horrified.

She didn’t bother looking through the rest of the images or videos, she didn’t want to. Instead, she hunted through the documents for the phone number the Winter Wraith said she would find hidden somewhere in the folders. When she found it she immediately got up, shut her door, locked it and called the number.

***

BZZT! BZZT!

“Hello?”

“Is this line secure?”

“Chief Slayt, I’ve been expecting your call.”

Jon looked up at his friend with a very serious and worried expression.

“What the fuck?” Jon mouthed silently at his friend who quickly waved him off and pressed a button on his phone. Chief Janice Slayt was put on speaker-phone.

“I watched the videos… Some of them at least…”

“And?”

“And you were right. I don’t know what you have planned but I’m in.” She said.

“Excellent. Is there anyone at your department that you can trust?”

“With this? No.”

“You’ll need to find someone then, we need more than just one cop. Anyone who’s on Vladimir’s payroll like you were is out; any Nulls are out; anyone with a family to lose is out.”

“That’s more than half the force.”

“Time to search the other half then, I would say. I’ll call you again in two days. Best get to work, Chief. There’s a storm coming and you’ll want to be in the eye for it.”

“Wait, what am I calling you?”

“You may call me Wraith.” He said.

“Sticking with the tabloid moniker, are ya?” Janice jested.

“It is what I am, Janice. I am this city’s ghost. I am here to haunt it in the fog.” Wraith said.

“I won’t lie to you then, Wraith; this is insane and we could get ourselves killed.”

“Do your part, Chief Slayt, and we shall do ours.”

“We?”

“Two days.” Wraith pressed the red button on his phone and set it back into his pocket. He turned to Jon and Phalanx who seemed highly perplexed at him. “The Chief of Police is now on our side, and I know how we can turn the public back as well.”

“This ought to be good, how’d you manage that one?” Jon asked with crossed arms.

“With information, Jon,” Wraith smiled, “I showed her what Vladimir was really doing with the Supers being abducted by Draco Industries and her Nullifiers. Including some of Doctor Vivisector’s surgery tapes.”

“Now that’s just cruel, guy. What did the poor bitch do to deserve seeing that?”

“A bitch she may be, but there is at least enough integrity in her to not turn a blind eye to such cruelty. She needed to see where her bribes were coming from.”

“Makes sense she was under Vlad’s heel, but now she’s on our side?” Jon scratched his head and started to pace while Phalanx silently stared at Wraith through his helmet.

“Indeed.”

“How do you plan to turn the public to our side, Wraith?” Phalanx asked.

“The same way they do, Phalanx; information.”