Emergence Read online

  Emergence

  Humanity 2.0, Vol. 1

  Erdelac, Knapp, Diamond, Carter, Marquitz, Martin, Braun, and Hayes.

  © 2016

  Edited by J.M. Martin

  Assisted by Gwendolyn Nix

  Cover design by Shawn T. King

  Cover art by Patrick Brown

  Interior art by Oksana Dimitrienko

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Worldwide Rights

  Created in the United States of America

  Published by Ragnarok Publications | www.ragnarokpub.com

  Publisher: Tim Marquitz | Creative Director: J.M. Martin

  Thank you for purchasing this Ragnarok Publications eBook.

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  This is an Early Reader Copy (ARC) of Humanity 2.0 - Emergence. It may well contain errors or lack aspects of the final retail version.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  From the Barrel of a Gun – Jeff C. Carter

  Never go Half-Supervillain – C.T. Phipps

  We Could Be Heroes – Eloise J. Knapp

  Whiplash – Tim Marquitz

  The Other – Rob J. Hayes

  Perennial – Edward M. Erdelac

  Avenger – G.N. Braun

  Bring it On, Hero – J.M. Martin

  (They Call Me) Epilogue – Steve Diamond

  Introduction

  I’ve always loved superheroes. My mom would take me to the library religiously when I was young and I would stock up on superhero novels (not that there were a lot) and read every one of them, wishing I had powers like those guys and gals. That never happened, sadly.

  But maybe it was a good thing.

  Because I couldn’t be super, I decided I wanted to write about them instead. That’s where Humanity 2.0* comes about. I was thinking about creating a superhero novel when the idea struck me that I didn’t just want to create a story, but a whole world. I wanted my own universe, something in the vein of Marvel or DC. A world full of heroes and villains and the people caught in the middle. And while I most certainly could have done it on my own, I felt it would lack the resonance of its inspirations as it would only be imagining it. As such, I decided instead to turn H2.0 into a group project, one where I invited authors to step into the world and create their own characters and adventures.

  From there, one thing led to another and my partner in crime, Joe Martin, decided this would be a perfect fit for Ragnarok Publications and I agreed. So we sat down and started hashing out ideas and concepts and invited authors to join us, and they started in and helped build the world. What started out as a fanciful child’s dream has grown and expanded and become a real thing. That idea is the book you hold in your hand.

  Written by a diverse set of authors who bring their talent and excitement to the series, and capped off by the fabulous art by Patrick Brown (who just so happens to do some work for Marvel) Emergence is the first salvo in the Humanity 2.0 assault, but it most certainly will not be the last.

  Tim Marquitz

  El Paso, TX

  8-14-16

  * Special credit and thanks to Kenny Soward for the brainstorming session that resulted in the title of Humanity 2.0.

  Emergence

  Humanity 2.0

  From the Barrel of a Gun

  Jeff C. Carter

  Throngs of people waited outside the courthouse to see Hathcock. Reporters lined the steps while chimerics and protesters filled the street. The sky was clear and Lars Wilson, the superhero known as The Red Wraith, could feel the light breeze through his body. It was a perfect day to make his return. He hadn’t been solid out in public once since Hathcock’s reign of terror began, and Lars couldn’t wait to see the look on the old man’s face.

  A huddle of police officers surrounded Hathcock and led him down the wide white steps. Hathcock almost looked like a super villain with the black bulletproof vest wrapped around his orange prison jumpsuit.

  Lars thickened into a red fog inside the formation of police. The panicked officers jumped back, exposing their prisoner. Hathcock stood his ground.

  “Greetings citizens! The Red Wraith is back! You don’t have to be afraid anymore. Evil will never go unpunished as long as I am here.”

  Lars plunged his hand effortlessly through the bulletproof vest and closed it around Hathcock’s heart.

  #

  12 hours earlier…

  Everyone stood when the judge entered the crowded courtroom, everyone but Lars. He hovered among the eager crowd, unseen and immaterial. Tonight the photographers will scour their pictures for his faint image. By then it will be too late.

  Lars looked down at Timothy Hathcock. The accused man’s close-cropped silver hair faded into a bald spot and heavy bags drooped beneath his eyes. Lars couldn’t believe how old he was. The old man’s eyes flicked upward, grey and hard as flint. A stab of panic shot through Lars. Could the old man see him?

  Lars tucked himself into the concrete floor to hide. Even with Hathcock in cuffs and his own body intangible, Lars felt exposed. He clenched his fists and cursed. Today he would finally stop cowering like a kicked dog. He emerged from the ground and approached the counsel tables.

  The slick prosecutor, Alec Glabrous, stood and buttoned the jacket of his pinstriped suit. He was wide and doughy, but his tailored suit made him look robust. He delivered his opening statement with a slow confident metronome, letting each fact sink into a well-placed pause.

  “The defense will tell you that Timothy Hathcock is not a ‘supervillain’. He never donned a costume, nor used an alias. He was just a man with a gun. Do not be fooled.”

  He stretched an arm out to the jury and closed one eye.

  “When Timothy Hathcock looks through the scope of a high-powered rifle he can see you from a mile away. He can kill you with the twitch of a single finger. He used this extraordinary power to take twenty-three lives. He struck fear into the hearts of everyone in this city, chimeric and citizen alike.”

  The jury didn’t blink. They knew what Hathcock had done. This trial was empty ceremony, performed by a prosecutor hoping to further his career. Still, it was good for the people to be reminded of Hathcock’s sins.

  The public defender, Jean Ryu, was the D.A.’s opposite; skinny and fidgety. The only thing holding her together was the tightly wound bun in her hair. Her opening statement was feeble, a desperate attempt to obscure Hathcock’s sins with a geyser of words. Lars was sickened she could defend him at all. Not a single friend sat behind the mass murderer, not even his son.

  The prosecution started strong, using the medical examiner’s testimony and gory posters of the victims to shock the jury. An enlarged photograph showed a pile of shattered black rock in a puddle of congealed blood.

  Jean Ryu continued to grill the medical examiner, picking through each report for inconsistencies.

  “You said earlier that your medical training did not cover chimeric biology. Would you agree that some of these so-called ‘victims’ were not even human?”

  The medical examiner, a short Filipino woman with thick glasses, squirmed in her seat.

  “Objection!” The prosecutor interrupted. “Chimerics are afforded all the rights and protections of the legal system. The charges of homicide still apply.”

  The judge nodded. “Sustained.”

  Ms. Ryu flicked op
en a folder on her desk. “How did you determine the cause of death for the rock creature known as Obsidian?”

  The nightmare that haunted Lars’ mind resumed its endless loop. It was dumb luck that he’d been intangible when the first bullet came his way. He was taking a short cut through a brick wall when an angry lance of air pierced his body.

  The bricks behind his head exploded in a cloud of red shrapnel. He flailed backwards in shock. A salvo of bullets tore through the wall, tracing the path of his head. He saw and heard nothing but shattering bricks. He dove through the wall and escaped.

  He returned three sleepless days later to look for clues, with his teammate Obsidian. The stone-skinned giant laughed, “You can hide behind me, sissy.”

  Lars was still intangible, a nervous red silhouette looking over his shoulder. He had seen Obsidian catch a live grenade and punch his way out of a burning high-rise. He took solace in the mountainous man’s gruff humor and felt safer in his large shadow.

  Obsidian’s head erupted into a scarlet waterfall. His body toppled backwards onto Lars, who was frozen with shock. His friend’s corpse passed through him and shattered on the sidewalk. Lars stood hip-deep in blood-drenched stone.

  The medical examiner scanned a copy of the report. “The victim, Benjamin Grimes, sustained a wound to his left eye with a corresponding larger exit wound in the base of the skull. Metallic fragments were lodged inside the skull, which forensics matched with a type of armor-piercing SLAP round. This evidence is consistent with a gunshot wound.”

  Ms. Ryu held up her own copy of the medical report as if to show the jury. “On page six you stated that its skin was completely covered in stone. You write that it is unknown how it could move, avoid hyperthermia, or function like a real human body. How can you say for certain how it died…if you do not even understand how it was alive?”

  The prosecutor tried to shout her down.

  Lars shook his head, the bitter tang of disgust souring his face. Ben had died a hero. She was arguing like he wasn’t even human. It? He scanned the jurors. Were they swayed by her ignorance? Were they truly Hathcock’s peers, hating and fearing what they did not understand?

  Rage flared through his body and his concentration wavered. He flickered into a semi-tangible form. His friends all died in front of him and he could do nothing but watch. He abandoned his team and avoided his friends. He became a prisoner inside his own house. He was unable to sleep, terrified that a bullet would smash through a window at any instant. He desperately clung to the safety of his intangible form. He was grief-stricken and powerless as an actual wraith.

  Lars swooped around the courtroom and perched behind the judge to stare down upon Hathcock. The old man was now at his mercy.

  Glabrous pulled the medical examiner out and brought up a ballistics expert to hit Ms. Ryu with cold hard numbers she wouldn’t be able to refute. It didn’t stop her from trying. They were finally going to debate the issue of Magnetar.

  In his absence, Lars’ arch-nemesis Magnetar wreaked unchecked havoc upon the Anchor City. He uprooted bridges and held the commuter trains hostage until the Red Wraith showed himself. When that failed, he peeled the roof off the local TCA branch and jeered the fallen heroes. Mere recruits in training, nothing more.

  Lars watched it all play out on the news from his home. This was the miracle he had waited for. He cackled with glee, waiting for the sniper to seal his own fate. He fantasized about the moment that Magnetar swatted a bullet aside, rooted out the sniper, and skewered him on his own smoking rifle.

  “Mister Machowicz, you testified earlier that the criminal known as Magnetar was shot, yet the self-proclaimed ‘Master of Magnetism’ was infamous for deflecting bullets, even stopping them in mid-air. How, then, could my client have killed him with a single bullet?”

  Lars had screamed that same question at his television and then curled up on the floor in tears. He didn’t mourn his old foe, but his death had been surprising on many levels. He shook off the memory and gave his full attention to the witness.

  The tall ballistics expert leaned back and rubbed his bald head. “The only videos we have of Magnetar were from police encounters. They always announced themselves, never shot first, and used small caliber weapons. The sniper, on the other hand, did not announce himself. He did shoot first. He used a Barrett M82A1 .50 caliber rifle, which is bigger than you are.”

  The defense attorney flailed her hands as she spoke. “So you believe Magnetar heard the rifle and chose not to block a single bullet?”

  Mr. Machowicz stifled a quick laugh. “He never heard the shot. It came from over a mile away at three times the speed of sound, Ms. Ryu. And that single round was one of these.” He held up a round of ammunition that was nearly half a foot long. The gleaming rocket didn’t need a rifle to be intimidating. “A Raufoss MK 211. A combination armor-piercing, explosive, and incendiary round designed to take out armored vehicles.” Machowicz leaned forward and arched an eyebrow. “Even if Magnetar somehow sensed it instinctively, with his ‘magnetic field’ or whatever, it was too late. Deflection is still impact; impact detonated the high explosive payload and projected a cone of incendiary fuel at five-thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The guy was Rice Krispies.”

  Poor bastard, Lars thought. He remembered the looping news reel of Magnetar gloating one moment and plummeting like a shooting star the next. He looked at Hathcock, expecting a cruel or gloating smile, but the old man merely nodded with dry, academic satisfaction.

  Mr. Machowicz cleared his throat and sat straighter. “Finally, a tungsten carbide penetrator was launched from the round at 4,000 feet per second. As tungsten carbide is a non-ferrous metal blend, it was immune to magnetic fields. Any or all of these effects would have been lethal.”

  Ms. Ryu stooped to read a question scrawled onto a legal pad by her wet-behind-the ears assistant. She stood and faced the jury. “How could my client possibly get military-grade ammunition, which you state is designed for destroying armored vehicles?”

  He shrugged. “You can get it online, Ms. Ryu.”

  A burly sheriff led the next witness to the stand, a sullen-looking girl with choppy black hair and drooping shoulders. Her hands were bound in cuffs and her delicate neck was encircled with a thick shock collar. She looked familiar, but Lars couldn’t place her. Her orange prison jumpsuit made it hard to remember what her original costume might have been.

  The prosecutor jumped into his examination as soon as she hit the chair.

  “Will you please state your name?”

  “Crystal Waters.”

  Someone in the jury chuckled softly. Her frown deepened.

  “Before your present incarceration, you worked for Steven Ashler, the criminal who called himself Ocular, is that correct?”

  “Yeah. Like an accomplice I guess, yeah.”

  “And what was your alias?”

  “You can call me Neptuna.”

  The photographers quickly raised their cameras. She allowed herself a smile.

  “You were with Ocular on May 27th of last year?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you remember Mister Ashler’s last words?”

  “Sure, I mean…how could I forget? We were pulling a job uptown. Captain Mercury had found us, he was beating the crap out of Inferno. Steven and I were about to jet when he noticed something. He was always getting distracted because he could see for miles, right? So anyway, he tugged my arm and said, ‘Hey ‘Tuna, see that flash? There's an old fart on the Holtz Tower with a gun!’”

  Her face fell. “Yeah, those were his last words.”

  Lars clenched his jaw. Even in his spectral state he could feel his heart racing again. Each murder was carved into his senses and preserved like scar tissue. The angry wet slap. The crimson spray. The roar of thunder that rolled across the skin. Then came the portraits in scarlet, those final glimpses of his friends as their faces were warped into monsoons of ruptured tissue.

  “Th
ank you, Ms. Waters. That will be all.” The sheriff escorted Neptuna away. Her dark eyes lingered on Hathcock. Lars toyed with the idea of snapping her shock collar to see what she would do to the old man. The thought was obliterated by a delicious thrill of anticipation. Vengeance belonged to The Red Wraith alone.

  Alec Glabrous plucked a phrase out of the air and held it between his hands to focus the jury’s attention. “Holtz Tower.”

  He peered at the jurors. “One of several high-rise office buildings in the downtown area, all managed by Madison Properties.” He pointed dramatically at the defendant. “All supervised by Facilities Manager Timothy Hathcock.”

  He called the detective in charge of the sniper investigation to the stand. Detective Khan’s black suit and tie were as somber as his clean-shaven face. Lars glared at the monolithic figure with contempt.

  Khan was the poster boy for the metro police. Civilians and chimerics had unleashed a blistering storm of outrage and criticism against the department. The frothing media poured gasoline onto the firestorm of hysteria. The DCD swamped the investigation in red tape. The crimes themselves had been unpredictable and unstoppable. In the end, Detective Khan accomplished what Lars could not.

  The prosecutor pounded the facts home like coffin nails. “Since March 8th, twenty-three chimerics have been murdered, all of them killed by a high-powered rifle, correct?”

  Detective Khan leaned forward into the microphone. “That is correct.”

  “When did the police realize there was a sniper at work?”

  “The first regular human fatality was the caped vigilante Desmodus. It was easily identifiable as the work of a high-powered rifle. We went back and searched former murder scenes, namely those of Arrow, The Cocoonist, and Human Tornado, for more evidence. We recovered .50 caliber slugs or shrapnel at each location.”