Tom Black #11: Last Man Standing
In which lots of very powerful people butt heads in the cause of random property damage
and things get excessively green.
 Previously:
Tom Black #9: Badripoor Scheming
Tom Black #10: Eggs In One Basket
Tom Black, new possessor of the evil Kaos energies that allow him to control things electronic, mechanical, and arcane, has travelled to the corrupt Pacific-rim city state of Badripoor to learn more about his predecessor Count Armageddon. His arrival has attracted a lot of unwelcome attention from those seeking to steal his power, to manipulate him for their own ends, or to end his life.
While attempting to question various major crimelords on the neutral territory of the Charity Club Black was attacked by occult adversaries set on by Vlastimock Bogoff, the Necromancer General. This has broken an ancient truce and has brought many factions into conflict. Baroness von Zemo, the Fokker Twins who rule HERPES, MODEM, chief scientist of BALD, Justus Screwdriver, the Lycanthropes Guild, the Cult of the Apostate, worshippers of the Fairly Great Old Ones, Anvil Man, Dreamripper, Genetwist, and Baroness Morbo are all involved in the battle.
Matters have been complicated by the arrival of Mark Hopkins, aka spiffy, aka Badripoor’s President for Life, the only former Lair Legionnaire in the tangle, and by the Carnifex, the Parodyverse’s mightiest hero, a man not known for his softly softly approach to battle.
Now things go boom.
***
The people of Badripoor were used to the skies turning a strange colour and the city trembling. When the clouds above the Pacific-rim city state shifted to a lurid green and began to roil they simply went on with business as usual.
“I wonder where we’ll teleport to this time?” wondered a street vendor offering I went to Skree Lump and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and a case of intergalactic herpes t-shirts.
“Just as long as it’s not Switzerland again,” answered a potential customer. “Those guys are just too clean and polite.”
The city shook again. An old part of the sea wall crumbled down, crushing the shellfish stalls beneath. Up on the ridge where the elite played and power-brokered the façade of the colonial Charity Club exploded outwards.
“Uh oh,” breathed one of the guys down on the docks selling doses of illegal superpower-granting Shazam. “That’s supposed to be neutral territory. That’s gonna make the kid gloves come off.”
“Ia! Ia!” shrieked a purple-robed cultist excitedly as giant tendrils of a Dark Shoot of Shrub-Noggeroth wrapped itself around the ancient building. “Now my master shall arise and consume all! All!” He looked around worriedly and patted his pockets. “Hey, where’s my silver amulet of power? I could have sworn it was right here in my pocket?”
The cultist next to him looked suddenly worried. “Your silver amulet? You mean our silver control amulet? And you left it in your pocket in this marketplace?”
The first cultist looked stricken. “But I…”
He didn’t get any further because the ground beneath him erupted with thousands of flailing multi-angled branches and dragged him down into eternal screaming.
Nearby locals managed to get the whole thing on phone-cam to put on u-tube.
In the wicked city’s alien quarter brash alarms rang out warning that sensors had picked up one particular intruder. “Are you certain?” screeched Erg-Yee, representative of the Shee-Yar Imperium in exile. “The bioweb might be faulty?”
“It’s no mistake,” the shimmering hologram-creature of the Joad Majanu promised, looking up from its control console in Earth’s only intergalactic post office. “The Carnifex is in Badripoor. Those readings are unmistakable.”
“The Carnifex who previously wiped out every being present in the Shee-Yar Imperium, extinguished billions of souls out in a single night?” cried out Anselephon Gastavard of the Dramaatis. “Oh woe, woe and thrice woe!”
“You think he’s found out there’s still some dudes surviving here from his massacre and he’s, like, come to finish the job?” wondered Lugus, hippy space monk of the J’minti. “That’s heavy.”
“He’s the Carnifex. He’s the greatest hunter in the Parodyverse,” pointed out a Shankarian pirate monkey to the stricken Erg-Yee. “If he wants to find you Shee-Yar dudes and snuff you all out then he can. End of story. Don’t stand so close to me.”
“No! I’ll complain!” objected Erg-Yee, shaking his feathered head and looking round as the other aliens backed away from him. “I’ll claim asylum. We’re an endangered species.”
“Dude, it’s the Carnifex,” pointed out Lugus. “He took out your whole empire in, like, three hours? Who are you gonna call to save you?”
“Death comes like a gravid Broob-queen!” declaimed Anselephon. “His fatal tread swift, sure and final. To be or not to be…”
“Maybe if we shoot him first then the Carnifex won’t come here?” speculated the pirate monkey. “Or maybe we just shoot the Dramaatis guy?”
“Everyone’s a critic,” sulked Anselephon.
The city shook again. The Joad Majanu backed away as its communications console began to glow green like the clouds above.
“I’m claiming asylum!” shouted Erg-Yee. “For me and my people. Get me the Earth ambassador!”
“Um…” the Joad Majanu answered uncertainly.
“Dude, nobody’s gonna stand in the way if the Carnifex wants to finish off the rest of you ex-pat Shee-Yar,” Lugus warned.
Erg-Yee pointed to the lurid green console. “Get me the Earth ambassador! Get me Visionary! Get me the Lair Legion!”
***
In ancient charnel tunnels beneath Badripoor the Abyssal Crucius hurried to report to the Necromancer General who had bound him. The detonations above echoed even down here, dislodging long-dead insects from the matted webbing that roofed the circular chambers.
“Well you’ve gone and done it now,” Crucius told Vlastimock Bogoff. “Master.”
“It’s working then?” the Necromancer General asked. “The cultists and beastwalkers and their ilk are doing their jobs?”
“For a given definition of working,” answered the crabbed brain-eater. “If you define working as ‘attacked blindly and got in the way of each other as they broke one of Badripoor’s oldest truces and got into a huge fight with supervillains and the Carnifex’. Master.”
“What?” The Necromancer General had worked hard to broker opportunities for the various occult power bases to seize Tom Black and his power before the neophyte had time to learn its uses. He hadn’t expected complications of this sort.
“Amazing isn’t it?” snorted Crucius. “Who’d have thought that one of your plans would go so horribly wrong? I know I’m shocked. Who’d have thought that it would crash straight into a major gathering of the world’s major crimelords and interfere with a supervillain hit squad having a go at this Black character? Who’d have thought that the whole thing would descend into one massive snafu of things exploding through several extra dimensions? Master.”
The ancient tunnels shivered at an upheaval above.
“Oh, did I mention that spiffy’s involved as well now? The Badripoor President-for-Life? The guy with that weird Unhappy Place fern? And I know I already mentioned the Carnifex but I think it’s also worth mentioning him again anyhow, seeing as he could wipe us all off the face of the planet before we even knew about it. Carnifex. Carnifex. Carnifex. Master.”
The Necromancer General dismissed his minion’s vaporings. “None of that matters. Tell me whether we captured Black’s kaos energies when he was forced to unleash them against this overwhelming array of enemies.”
The Abyssal Crucius sighed. “Shall I go get a dictionary so you can look up the definition of ‘obsessive’? Master. Yes, the containment sphere you conjured managed to sample the kaos energies. I’ve got a trio of zombies on their way down here now to deliver it.”
“Good,” conceded Bogoff. “Anyone I know?”
“Only locals. It’s not exactly hard to get good material to zombify in Badripoor. Just go fishing in the bay. Master.”
The charnel chambers trembled again. Some of the old piled bones rattled down across the floor.
“You know that breaking the Charity Club pact is considered to bring really bad luck, don’t you?” Crucius warned the Necromancer. “Master.”
***
Bethany Shellett occupied a familiar place in Badripoorean politics. She liked to think of herself as spiffy’s PA, as his aide-de-camp, as the city’s comptroller and as a reformer in local politics and welfare provision. The people of the city-state were far happier to rank her as President Hopkins’ mistress. It didn’t mean they didn’t like her. She was Ava Peron.
Beth had been against spiffy heading off to personally track down Tom Black. She’d urged him to take the information provided by that international detective woman and call in some heavy help. She’d argued that he was too important now to go risk his skin in some senseless supervillain brawl.
She’d known even as she spoke that he wasn’t going to pass off protecting his city to anybody else.
Then the explosions started.
“Hey, that was a bigger-then-average mid-morning detonation,” observed Lindy Wilson, sauntering into the presidential suite from her early morning swim. The former teen superheroine Falconne was residing in the palace for legal reasons until her guardian’s claims on her custody could be revoked. Lindy had no problem living in decadent luxury for the next nineteen years or so; but being a friend of kerry Shepherdson she was a connoisseur of things blowing up. “Did Mark find what that Black character was up to then?”
“He’s out there now,” Beth worried. “There’s smoke rising from the colonial terrace and I’ve lost radio contact with him.”
Champagne Cacciatore was also present in the palace. She’d made her report and got spiffy out of the way long enough to already remove the Badripoorean crown jewels. It wasn’t like Badripoor needed them now. It was ninety years since they’d had a royal family.
“Has anybody noticed the skies?” Champagne asked the others curiously.
Beth looked out of the armour-plated windows of the Presidential palace. “Oh dear,” she worried. “I hope that’s not another teleport effect. We only just got the legal stuff settled after that Swiss junket.”
“I’m not going to no bug-ugly alien world again,” Lindy insisted. “Unless they have those cute Caphan guys there with their olde-worlde jewel-giving customs,” she amended after some reflection.
Champagne pointed to the phone and reading lamp on spiffy’s desk. “I only drew it to your attention because all the electrical equipment in the palace is glowing the same way,” she observed. “In a hue that seems reminiscent of the glow attributed to kaos energy.”
Beth frowned. “Are you saying this is all Tom Black’s doing?”
“I’m saying that there’s a reason it’s called kaos energy,” noted the international jewel thief. “Rumour is that Black is able to suffuse objects with his energies, and if they’re electronic or arcane he can take control of them.”
The city shook as the diamond district detonated. A part of the stock exchange roof bounced off the side of the palace.
“That does it,” Beth decided. She rummaged in spiffy’s desk drawer. “Mark said if things ever got bad I was to call in support.” She thumbed the Lair Legion comm-card.
The comm-card self-destructed.
***
Hallie, the Lair Legion’s resident artificial intelligence, winked her holgram form into existence in the team leader’s office. “Jay,” she called over to Hatman, “We may have a problem.”
Jay Boaz looked up from the accounts he was studying with the administrators of the Benedicta Boaz Foundation. “Anything that doesn’t involve market projections and cost benefit analysis would be welcome,” he admitted. “I’d take the Yurt over explaining CSFB!’s expense claims any day. And don’t get me started on how Al B. can bill me for time travel experiments he claims were deleted from the timeline by subsequent events.”
“I’ve had several calls from Badripoor in the last ten minutes,” Hallie explained. “One of them came from spiffy’s comm-card. The defence protocols automatically destructed the card.”
“Deliberately?” Hatman checked. It wasn’t unknown for the thin communications devices to spontaneously detonate; especially spiffy’s card.
“Deliberately. Firstly the card wasn’t being used by Mark Hopkins. Secondly the device was contaminated by kaos energies.”
The leader of the Lair Legion frowned. “Kaos energies and Badripoor are not a happy combination,” he noted. “What about the other calls?”
“Satellite phone contacts plus one over that intergalactic communications hub the refugee aliens set up there now Starcross is gone,” Hallie reported. “All the attempted calls were likewise kaos-tainted. The mansion defences blocked them, but Marie’s had to go lie down with a migraine.”
“Satellite surveillance of Badripoor?” Hatty wondered with little hope of success.
“Still blocked by the Idiom’s countermeasures,” the AI replied. “Al says he thinks he punched his way through before that timeline got retconned by the Moderator but now it never happened. I am getting heavy cloud activity over the city. Green clouds.”
Hatman looked at the accountants. “I’m sorry, we’ll have to do this another time,” he told them politely, trying to hide his relief. “We have a Lair Emergency to handle.” He slammed his hand down on the big red button on his desk. “Hatman to the team. We’ve got big trouble in Badripoor. Head for Lairjet One stat. Looks like Tom Black is finally making his move. And if you’re Nats, Lair Legion Line Up!”
There was the sound of the world’s greatest superheroes scrambling in the corridor outside. For example:
“Yaaaayyyyyy!!!” called CrazySugarFreakBoy! “It’s clobberin’ time!”
***
“Ah, there you are!” called the Abyssal Crucius as his three newest zombies shuffled through the sewers to the locus with the ancient charnel pits. “I was starting to get worried. You never call, you never write.”
The three mindless animated corpses shuffled forward carrying the enchanted globe that had captured some of Tom Black’s kaos essence.
“Yes, that’s the stuff,” agreed Crucius. “Poisonous and dangerous and likely to bring the Necromancer General to a bad end. What a shame. Let’s hurry and take it to him.”
He opened the shadow portal so the zombies could pass through. “You know you’re pretty cute,” he told the third of the walking dead. “You come see me when all of this is over, baby. I’ll take you out for a meal.”
There was a retching sound from the gloom of the sewer tunnel. “Eew,” objected Squibb, intergalactic mercenary bounty hunter for hire. “That’s pretty disgusting. And I'm from a species where your date is likely to eat you if she catches you fertilising her eggs. And not eat you in a good way.”
“Who’s there?” demanded the leader of the Ghouls Under Badripoor. “Come on out where I can eviscerate you.”
“Hey, I have a no-eviscerate clause in my contract,” objected Squibb. “And also a pair of Mark IX Shankaru Atomripper 9000s with the sexy lady reptile engraved on the hilts. They’re aimed at you and almost certainly charged.”
“Well excuse me while I go change my underwear,” retorted Crucius. “So who are you and what do you want? Let’s have the exposition portion of this pointless dialogue.”
“I’m Squibb, mightiest warrior of the, um, Squibbians, master of many deaths.”
“You mean you die a lot?” checked the ghoul.
“Um, no. I mean I… look, just stand back and hand over the zombies, mister.”
“I thought you didn’t fancy her?” said Crucius. “I don’t know why though, look at the mould on those…”
“Shutup!” the alien mercenary insisted. “Shutupshutupshutup! Although if you want to give me her number later for… No, shut up. I’m here to shoot your zombies, not to date them.”
“To shoot them? You are aware that they’re already dead? It’s a prerequisite really. An entrance-level qualification to zombiehood.”
“I know that. But the guy what hired me paid me to shoot them so that’s what I’m going to do.”
A suspicion flickered across the Abyssal Crucius’ mind. “This man who hired you… he didn’t infuse your guns with livid green energies at all, did he? Raw kaos as some might term it?”
“Well maybe,” conceded Squibb. “So what?”
“So he intends to infect my zombies with his kaos energies, control them, then have them lead him back to my master, who in turn plots to use the stolen energies in this crystal sphere in a plan to destroy some American gangster. It gets quite Byzantine.”
“So?” Squibb frowned. “I’m not a Byzantine. I don’t go to church at all these days. Okay, I bought one of those pamphlets from those people giving out flowers at the spaceport, the one about the coming Apostate, but only because the girl was cute and that Sister Bartok is a good-looking woman for someone without scales.”
The Abyssal Crucius sighed. “And another staggering intellect joins the cast of thousands.” He stepped aside. “You want to shoot these zombies. Shoot them. Go ahead.”
“You won’t stop me?”
“I won’t stop you. Why should I care if your boss beats up the guy who bound me to his indentured service? Go for it. Don’t miss.”
Squibb took his chance while he could and punched a zap-ray through each of the undead. They each glowed greenly for a second then went back to standing motionless and uncomprehending.
“Right,” Crucius told him. “You’ve done your job. You’ve also used up the kaos energies in your ray guns. So now you can run.”
“Run?” puzzled Squibb. “Why?”
“Because I’m taking these three zombies as instructed to see the Necromancer General and you’ve got to face down all my other zombies that have been creeping in around you while we talked,” explained the Abyssal Crucius. “I think you’ll find they don’t care at all about Mark IX Shankaru Atomripper 9000s with the sexy lady reptile engraved on the hilts.”
“Ah,” said Squibb. He ran.
Crucius patted zombie number three on the bottom and shepherded them down to see Vlastimock Bogoff.
***
“By the Hairy Hosts of Hoggin!” shouted Baroness Morbo, rising above the maelstrom around the Charity Club, “By the Slithering Spoors of Saggeroth! By the Violent Voidings of the Valenti! Let this elderspawn be bound!”
Arcane energies wrapped around the Dark Shoot of Shrub-Noggeroth. The Dark Shoot wrapped itself around spiffy’s energy-manipulating fern. spiffy wrapped himself round the mind-shredding Dreamripper. Dreamripper hammered her dark visions into the incoming werewolf cult. The Guild of Shapeshifters, Skinwalkers and Allied Metamorphs fell upon the agents of HERPES.
And so on.
“Ouch,” said spiffy.
“Stop!” boomed the Carnifex. “Anybody who wants to object is welcome to be the first to die.”
“You can’t just…” Hansel Fokker began to object before his sister stunned him with an ashtray.
“We surrender,” Greta Fokker called. “Do whatever you want with us.”
The unstoppable Anvil Man startd to charge the Carnifex but stopped as the hunter turned to look at him. “Um…” Anvil Man said.
“Die, blasphemer!” one particularly fanatical Apostate follower screamed, raising his machine pistol. Then the cultist screamed louder and fell to the floor. Nobody even saw the Carnifex move.
“Well done, Mark!” applauded the Baroness. “Next kill all those tedious B.A.L.D scientists!”
“Oh, everybody here dies,” the Carnifex promised Elizabeth von Zemo. He strode into the ruins of the Charity Club. “You, Hopkins, these villains, every miserable life in this crime-infested stinkhole.”
“Me?” worried Elizabeth von Zemo. “But Markie…”
“Everybody dies,” announced the Carnifex. “Everybody in this city except those I have a reason to spare.”
“We can give you reasons,” Justus Screwdriver agreed quickly. “Lots of reasons. Millions of dollars of reasons…”
“There’s only one reason I will spare any of you,” declared the Carnifex. He pointed to the ruins where Tom Black was limping towards them. “If he asks me to.”
Above the city the green clouds released green lighting into the city below. Suddenly every electronic circuit, every mechanical device, came under the complete control of the master of the Kaos energies. No vehicle would move, no technology would operate, no door would open without his permission.
Badripoor ground to a halt, helpless, held by Kaos, for the Carnifex’s judgement.
Tom Black smiled at the assembled throng. “Well,” he told them, “this is going to be interesting.”
***
Concluded in Tom Black #12: The Judgement of Badripoor
***
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Where's Where in the Parodyverse
All previous chapters of Tom Black:
#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10
Carnifex image provided by Dancer.
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2009 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2009 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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