The End of the Future
Apologies for my absence from the board. Here’s something I forced myself to write tonight in an attempt to get over my current aversion to writing. I’ll try and catch up with others’ work and respond properly in due course.
***
The Carnifex walked down his trophy gallery carrying his newest addition. Beside each mounted head was a name and a date but he didn’t need to read the little brass plaques to remember each hunt, each kill. The Lair Legion had been memorable game.
He decided on a spot right between CrazySugarFreakBoy and the Sorceress. That seemed right to display Jay Boaz’ head, between his best friend and his first love. The Carnifex took the trouble to nail Hatman’s head to the backboard personally, as a tribute to his fallen foe. He positioned Hatman’s default cap in place and admired the effect. He was half ready for Hatman to somehow reanimate even now as the plain baseball cap with the yellow H on it touched Boaz’ cranium; but Hatman was dead, the Serious Matter gone from his brain to some other place and time.
“Mark, my love,” called Zdenka Zarazoza in her soft Candian accent. The goddess of the north stood silhouetted in the doorway to the Carnifex’s personal study, her slim form delineated by the firelight that shone through her thin cotton dress. “She’s here.”
“Of course she is,” the Carnifex smiled. “Such a finely honed sense of revenge, she has. She’d never allow Boaz’ death to go unanswered.”
“Be careful,” Rabid Wolf warned.
Her lover shrugged. “I’m the Carnifex,” he pointed out.
“Still be careful,” Zdenka insisted.
The Carnifex turned away from Hatman, passed Rabid Wolf, and slipped into his study. He closed the door so he was alone with his guest.
“So it’s come to a final confrontation,” he remarked.
Samantha Featherstone nodded. “It’s the final countdown,” she agreed. “The last hunt.”
“And who is hunting who?” The Carnifex was amused. The lithe young woman in the black leather jacket was dangerous in her own way, but he knew her plans. “Or perhaps I should ask how long you need to distract me for?”
Samantha’s face didn’t change. Her heartbeat didn’t waver. Her biorhythms never changed. “Distract you?”
The Carnifex poured himself a drink. Samantha shook her head as he held out the decanter to offer her a glass. “To prevent me from noticing your team-mates entering my Esqualine Tower,” he said. “Denial and the Probability Arsonist and Shiro and Ham-Man, breaking in from the roof. Ebony, Fleabot, Artemis, Anvil Man and Glitch tunnelling in below. The ragged last of your Lair Legion.”
Samantha still didn’t flinch. “You’ve killed enough,” she answered. “You’ve divided and conquered, ravaged the Parodyverse, slaughtered empires. You’ve murdered too many good people who trusted you too blindly. Today that ends.”
The Carnifex sipped his whisky. “Samantha my sweet, I’ve slaughtered gods – a few of them personal friends of yours. I’ve depopulated whole dimensions. I’ve evaporated the Triumvirate. Do you really think you and the rag-tag survivors of a decimated Earth are going to stop me at the last?”
Samantha nodded. “We’ve the Lair Legion. It’s what we do.”
The Carnifex gestured to his trophy gallery. “I’ve got two dozen heads down there to disagree with you. And I’ve got Mr Flay and Mr Skinner.”
“Your thugs?” Samantha wasn’t impressed. “Powerful and cruel but not unstoppable. Ask Miss Peel. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. Hallie and Gaz tore her head off.”
“Hallie and Gaz are in my gallery now.”
Samantha frowned very slightly. “And you’re going to pay for all of that. You let me through your defences believing me helpless. That was your mistake.”
The Carnifex cocked his head to one side. “Hear that? But of course, you can’t. You’ll just have to take my word for it that Artemis and Glitch just died. Oh, and there goes Ham-Man.”
The Esqualine Tower shuddered. It hadn’t rocked when it had been ground zero for a nuclear blast.
“And there goes Kerry,” Samantha shot back. “She always wondered what kind of damage she could do if she maxxed her powers while Danny denied your tower’s defences.”
The Carnifex’s smile faded. “Impressive,” he admitted. “It’s going to take quite some time to stitch Mr Skinner together again.”
“Not as long as it’ll take you to patch your other thug,” Samantha warned. “You think the Librarian died for nothing breaking into your archives? You think he didn’t pass on Mr Flay’s creation codes to Fleabot before you got him?”
The Carnifex almost snarled as he felt his other minion go down. “Wait there,” he instructed his guest.
He was back in less than a second, spilling a pile of trophy-heads at Samantha’s feet. “I was specially impressed with Yuki,” he admitted. “She’d clearly put a lot of analysis into my combat styles. She actually got a punch in.”
“All dead,” Samantha noted, still showing no emotion. She’d not wept since the night long ago when Paradopolis had become a wasteland, the night Visionary’s lighthouse burned.
“Yep,” agreed the Carnifex. “How’s the plan going so far?”
“Pretty well,” Samantha replied. “The Legion died doing what they set out to do. They got you out of your study for one second.”
“And that’s a long time for the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity,” recognised the Carnifex. “Long enough for you to set up what you came here to do.”
“Quite long enough,” agreed Samantha. “Glitch had already done most of the set-up work before I came in here.”
The Carnifex smiled again, and took one deliberate step to the left. “Where did you get a trans-nuclear weapon from anyhow?” he demanded. “I thought I’d neutralised the last of the Harper arsenals.”
“Old von Zemo cache,” his adversary explained. “But you knew we had one?”
“It might even have worked,” the Carnifex admitted. “You shift the bomb forward in time while I’m gone from the room, then arrange for me to be stood exactly where it reappears and explodes. An internal trans-nuclear explosion would hurt even me.”
“Kill you if it was near the right vital organs,” Samantha corrected him. “Salieri Meng did the bio-calculations and he was usually pretty good on the mathematical stuff.”
The Carnifex smirked and took another step to the left. “And you’re good at the psychology,” he admitted. “You expected me to shift and you positioned the bomb anticipating it. But outside my body it won’t do more than sting. Well, to me anyhow, You’re going to be sub-atomic particles.”
Samantha sat down in an old leather armchair. “I’ll take that drink now,” she said. “To celebrate.”
“Defeat with style is no shame,” the Carnifex told her. “You’ve been a very worthy adversary.”
“And not defeated,” Samantha told him. “The Lair Legion just won. Now you’re going to be beaten.”
“Your Chronometer can’t affect me,” the Carnifex boasted. “Your grandfather found that out.”
“It can’t affect you directly,” agreed the last Legionnaire. “Nothing our last roster could do could affect you directly. But we don’t need to. That wasn’t the mission.”
The Carnifex realised that he was missing something. His victim wasn’t scared, wasn’t desperate; wasn’t even despairing.
“The mission,” lectured Samantha, “was to save the Parodyverse, save Paradopolis, stop you dead from achieving your objective of destroying everything for your mysterious distant masters. Job done.”
“Your trans-nuclear weapon cannot harm me,” insisted the Carnifex.
Samantha snorted. “As if Glitch was going to engineer a huge bomb. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the élan? We dumped the bomb somewhere in New Jersey. It was a red herring.”
The Carnifex looked disbelieving “You sacrificed your team-mates to play… some kind of joke on me? No… I can sense your chronal manipulations. You have attempted a time-assault.”
Samantha leaned forward, and her eyes bored into the Carnifex’s. “I know time-assaults don’t work on you, Carnifex. We’re not fools. And Glitch was a communications specialist.”
The Carnifex looked closer at the temporal streams twisting through his study; the streams open to the outside world through the damage Kerry had caused, unchecked because his minions has been taken down. His brow furrowed. “No…” he hissed.
“We didn’t like this future,” Samantha told him. “So we decided to go for a different one. One where the Legion was warned.”
“No!” snarled the Carnifex, shedding the temporal imaging signal cobbled from Ebony’s magics and Yuki’s technology and fragments salvaged from a dozen places around the world. But it was too late.
***
Vespiir the Caphan exile awoke with a scream. Her tent-sister Koodi was there for her.
“All is well,” Koodi assured the hysterical seeress. “We are in our tents in Far Lemuria, and we are safe.”
Vespiir shook her head. “Not safe. Not here. Not anywhere.” She looked around urgently. “I must speak what I have seen.”
Continued at an appropriate point…
***
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Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2008 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2008 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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