Chapter 3

The contest was now nearly over and Drake was still standing, but it had been tough competition for him and our local boy looked more than a bit the worse for wear. At least it wasn’t one of his ears that was now decorating the moll’s jacket. He and another survivor from this sand ring made it to the center arena and climbed upwards just as a meager selection of small weapons appeared out of seemingly nowhere and scattered themselves widely across the final upraised combat stage.

“Hah!” Leo, laughed, “I knew it! Just like the boss said happened, back in Chicago. Now the finalists get to really hurry and fight to see who gets a weapon and who gets to become the stuck pig! Not enough toys to go around ... so the kiddies are going to have to share!” He giggled ... perhaps not altogether sanely.

The loud sudden cry of alarm from the skirt clued me in at last just whom she had been rooting for all this time. Her bruno had come out on the short end of the race for the limited supply of sharp hardware and Drake was now providing the dame a short and violent tutorial on what happens when you’re on the receiving end of a cold meat pie, being sliced, diced and carved up with six inches of sharp steel. After thoroughly disemboweling the poor sap, our guy Drake wasted no time in plunging his knife into the back of the next nearest competitor, repeatedly a half-dozen times, as the hysterical dame screamed and cried and lunged into the arena and threw herself upon the fallen form of her man, frantically trying to stuff his bleeding guts back into his abdominal cavity.

She never noticed the guy behind her with the short sword turn, and with an easy swing of his blade, take the skirt’s head clean off. Her heart’s blood pumped out in violent spurts from her headless neck, splattering the crowd just off to the left of us, as she slowly toppled over on top of her man, joined together once again, but this time in death. It ought to have been sentimentally touching, the irony of it all, but I was good and ready to puke myself by now. Pils was already doubled over and trying, mostly in vain, to barf up anything remaining left in his guts.

The violent drama before us was reaching its climax and Drake now had his own bit of comeuppance a few moments later. Thrilled to have his favorite weapon again in hand, our boy enjoyed a brief but vicious pair of fast victories before he became over ambitious, and directly challenged a pair of other finalists, each armed with bully clubs. Fully engaged now in a real fight for his life, he was taken from behind by surprise by that bruno with the short sword,

Hubris ... I thought as I grimaced, watching that blade slam right through his back and right out through the side of his chest, narrowly missing his heart. Antonio always thought too highly of himself and his street fighting skills, and tonight near the end of this competition, he had let his ego dictate his tempo, by trying to fight everyone at once to show off that he was the biggest badass there. The guy with the sword had the right sort of game plan for this kind of donnybrook ... let the other guys fight it out and weaken each other, while he clung to edges of the general combat and conserved his strength, so he was prepared to take advantage of other’s mistakes.

Karma, as my prison cell neighbor upstate would have said, is a bitch and she always gets her due. Fate and Lady Lucky, however, weren’t quite done with Drake just yet.

Drake slumped face down on the sand of the central arena, blood already pooling around him and I sadly thought he was already a stiff, but looking closely I could see that his eyes and fingers were still moving. The sociopathic bastard was still alive, moving and even trying to get back up upon his feet, but he was now almost out of time. The two thugs with clubs had beaten down the last couple of remaining challengers and now, along with the guy with the short sword, they were the last trio standing. By the rules of the engagement, Doctor Fate should have pronounced the tournament over and done with, and rewarded these three finalists accordingly ... but I had the sense that the crazy evil fucker was waiting for something to happen, right at the last moment. I could just feel his anticipation and eagerness, and soon so could the rest of the audience.

After a moment or two of waiting, even the three remaining candidates could sense that some wildcard had yet to be played. Like his luck in playing cribbage, that last card was apparently Pilsner’s.

“Help me!” Pilsner muttered, pushing past me into the ring, “Drake’s trying to stand up but his legs aren’t working good. I gotta help him to his feet ... he can do this!”

This was madness ... and it was way out of the ordinary for Pilsner to interfere in anyone else’s fight ... anytime – anywhere – or for any reason! He’d seen ... and heard, what Fate had done to the last bystander that had interfered – and now like a sap, he wanted us to do the same damned stupid-ass thing!

“Bad idea, Pils ... Really, really bad!” I yelled to him as Pilsner grabbed my hand and now set foot inside the outer arena sand rings, pulling me towards the central arena.

“Fate t0ld me to do it! I heard his voice command me inside my head, just now!” Pilsner whined, tugging me along behind him even harder.

“HELP HIM TO HIS FEET!“ I then heard Fate bellow similar orders inside my own head, but not through either of my ears. It was Fate’s mental command then, so perhaps we weren’t totally and completely screwed... yet.

Everyone cheered us as we hastily stepped over the piles of the dead, unconscious and wounded, right up to the edge of the central stage. Then the audience grew quiet but anxious, undoubtedly waiting for us to become another pair of obscene snacks, but Doctor Fate remained silent and unmoving, and we could tell that his eyes and the force of his will were upon us.

And so ... I let Pilsner drag me out there, one footstep across the bloody sands at a time, until we were right up against the edge of the raised central arena. By leaning way over on tiptoes I could just reach Drake’s right foot to grab him and pull him back towards us, so that after a moment of tugging, Pils could then reach his left.

Somehow, the magnificent psycho bastard was still alive, but he was bleeding out and there was quite a blood trail flowing in his wake as we tried to lift him up.

“Quick, let’s at least get him up on his knees so he can still fight!” I muttered to Pils. We really didn’t have any time to spare; the finalist holding the short bladed sword that had run Drake through a minute ago, was just now wising up to our game, and was looking in our direction with more than a bit of malice. The other two finalists with the pair of billy clubs were just watching us with a wink and a smirk. Very clearly, they didn’t consider us their problem and they seemed entirely content to stand in the center of the circle and await their just rewards. They’d already won, in their opinion, so they weren’t about to risk their certain reward for anything.

Hauling salvage about can be heavy and exhausting work and we had the muscles to prove it. We lifted Drake up into a kneeling position and somehow he managed to stay there, albeit he was a bit wobbly. His blade was still in his tightly clinched grip and he was still eager to use it. Then, with a snarl on his lips, he shuffled his right foot forward and with a loud cry tried to lunge himself forward on his feet, to meet the incoming attack of the cheated swordsman. Drake didn’t quite make to both feet again, and that probably saved his life. His rival had lost his cool composure and went for the flashy final kill, swinging his short sword around hard, going for another certain decapitation. But when his would-be victim stumbled and fell forward instead of standing, his blow swung wide and high, clear over Drake’s head, leaving his groin and belly wide open for certain retaliation. Drake’s dagger, still fixed in his right hand, rip-sawed upwards into his rival’s groin, then ripped into his belly upwards nearly the entire length of the swordsman’s body right up to the chest bone.

Coils of bright red and purple intestines, guts and likely also a severed penis and testicle or two fell outwards on Drake, covering our champion as the two mortally wounded men fell and collapsed on each other. With what must have been his last bit of effort, the swordsman tried to raise up his longer weapon again, to strike one last time and finish this duel, but our friend twisted his dagger inside up through his remaining guts into his chest cavity, thrusting his blade slowly upwards into the heart for the kill.

That one final stab was enough, and Drake remained there motionless, the dagger embedded still inside his foes chest, as the now dead swordsman slowly toppled over, cheated at the end from his near certain reward. I thought for sure now, that Drake had at last bled himself dry from his dreadful wound, but his eyes kept blinking as he remained hunched down on his knees, too weary to try and stand once more.

Fate laughed. It was a long and nasty laugh that no entirely human voice could have replicated. There was just something reptilian and other about it, an entirely too evil sort of cry for any mortal possessing an untainted soul to utter. It chilled me to the bone and caused me to stagger about three steps backwards, making me trip over one of the stiffs and fall backwards on my ass, right on the blood-soaked sand. Stunned, I just lay there on my backside ... and that quite probably saved my life, if not my soul as well.

“I am pleased,” Fate murmured to his three winning contestants, “and I find the three of you each acceptable. Now for your rewards!”

With just a mild gesture of his left hand, Fate caused a bright golden vortex of yellow plasma to appear before him, down at the center stage. The energy field grew for a moment and then stabilized, appearing much like a round doorway to something or somewhere else. It seemed made of some sort of liquid, but even as close to it as I was, I could tell that it felt unnatural and certainly wasn’t of this world. Whether it was summoned by Fate’s arcane magic or constructed from unnatural energies from outside of our world, I couldn’t hazard any guess ... but no manner of prize or reward would ever have enticed me into entering that eldritch sphere of abnormal energy!

The two champions with the billy clubs did so, immediately and without pause or reservation. What emerged a moment or so afterwards ... wasn’t entirely human anymore and I shuddered a little bit with fright!

“Golden men! Now that’s some serious liquid water enhancement!” I heard Leo cry out, just behind me as he moved forward on the bloody corpse strewed sands to offer me a hand up. They were ... exactly that! I’ve seen ancient Greek and Roman statues of their gods at the museum, and well ... these golden men now looked just like them. Tall, muscular and seemingly the perfect representation of the human form, except well ... they definitely weren’t human anymore and possibly, like Fate, weren’t even made of mortal flesh, either!

Very definitely enhanced ... probably in every way possible. As for liquid water enhancement ... well, that’s what my father called just plain Scotch.

It was then ... just as Leo’s hand reached out to help pull me back up on my feet, while Drake stretched out with his hands to touch the welcoming glow of the golden liquid, which would heal him and make him seemingly also perfect, that the skies all fell in around us and the entire world around me turned to chaos and death.

It was the beginning of the end of my old life and from this moment onwards nothing would ever again be entirely the same.

Everything seemed to slow down around me as if time itself began to crawl. My mind could still think, as if the world was quite entirely normal, but oddly everything around me seemed to be moving much slower. Too startled to move even a muscle, there were a series of loud crashes all around me and I tried to turn my head around to see what was happening. In front, to the sides and even behind me, as walls and doors blew open as the entire warehouse filled with sound and fury.

The so-called costumed super-heroines had arrived!

Now, I’d never seen a super-heroine before in the flesh, but I’ve seen their pictures published in the Gazette and read about them all the time. The Gazette might be a tabloid scandal rag, but it has the best crime reporting of any of the other local papers. They also avidly report all of the adventures and appearances of the lady crime fighters with a friendly but yet balanced editorial attitude, neither outright fawning nor disparaging in tone. I’d never seen a villain either, before now ... so it was quite a night of firsts.

Present here and now was just about every heroine I’d ever heard of, and probably a few that I hadn’t. Dealing with Doctor Fate was apparently a Class-A emergency for everyone, along with their friends and any acquaintances available with a clean, ready-to-wear cape and leotard.

Oddly, there don’t seem to be any costumed hero crime fighters, anywhere; fighting evil and saving the world seems to be a strictly female-only occupation, from what I’ve read. Even the Gazette reports this as a cardinal fact that only women had ever been granted super-powers. The Times, I read once, even lauded this fact as the highest singular achievement of decades of increased women’s independence and post-war modern ‘liberation’ from old repressive cultural traditions.

A bright yellow costumed streak raced right past me, the heroine blasting away with lightning bolts at Doctor Fate and his two new golden minions. That must have been Lightning Lass sprinting by me, running so fast that she was nearly invisible to everyone but me, as time still slowed around me ... up until she was struck by one of Fate’s own nebulous purple-black energy bolts and was blasted backwards on her pert hypersonic butt, somewhere way beyond my sight.

At almost the same moment, a chunk of concrete masonry about the size and weight of a small car was hurled by the Mighty-Maid right at ... and harmlessly right through Fate’s immaterial form, leaving him untouched. It’s flight path unobstructed, it then flew inches over my still reclining head and violently impacted poor Leo full on in the upper chest and head. Undoubtedly quite fatally, with that much mass and the speed of its impact ... not to mention the squishy pulping sound the flying concrete made as it turned poor Leo’s entire body into mushed jelly. No attempted good deed goes unchurned, I sadly thought with a smile.

What was left of him impacted somewhere far behind me ... probably right into the Haarlem River.

I could next see Pilsner, turning around from the central arena to try and make a run for it ... far too late for safety’s sake. He didn’t complete even his second step before a bright red energy bolt of pure power struck him in his lower back, blasting him forward out of the sandy ring, to within maybe ten or twelve feet of me. It might as well have been a mile away.

At first, blinking my eyes twice to clear them from the glare of the energy blast, I thought Skulda, the Valkyrie War-Maiden had been the one responsible ... firing energy from her magical spear, but the true culprit was just to her side. It was Lady Firefly, blasting away without respite at Doctor Fate with both energy-glowing hands flaming brightly as she laughed with maniacal glee.

Was Pilsner alive or dead? I couldn’t see his face or even tell if he was still breathing. I started to crawl on my belly over towards him, but at my snail’s pace it seemed like it would take forever. Time, seemingly, was a luxury now that no one but me appeared to have!

The bystanders all around me now tried to make their own escape, but like Pilsner they had delayed for several moments too long, or else they were just doomed right from the start. Doctor Fate could not be harmed by thrown bits of masonry or steel beams, or even the energy blasts hurled by the heroines, but the crowd of merely mortal bystanders could be, and were. Some managed to start running for the exit, but I don’t think any of them made it.

I could see the two golden men go down under a hail of hurled rocks, iron beams and a rainbow of assorted energy blasts cast by the heroines. Those bastards were tough though, and I thought I could see them constantly regenerating themselves right up until the moment when The Lumpette and Commander Grimm appeared to do combat with them at center stage. Each of these absurdly powerful women, the first a mountain of raw near formless muscle and the other a military heroine, perhaps America’s greatest super-soldier, each wielding long chunks of steel I-beams, swinging them upon the heads of the golden men as if they weighed no more than a tennis racket. In a moment, no more than two blinks of my eye, the golden men were naught but quivering golden mush. So ... it appears that they were still mortal after all!

Finally, the combined cosmic efforts and energies of Atomic Girl and her daughter, Starlite-Starbrite, found a meaningful weapon to use at last against the seemingly impervious Doctor Fate. Together they concentrated their combined beams upon his floating golden energy sphere and this appeared to distract the villain’s attention. As the women blasted away, aided in minor ways by Lady Firefly and the other heroines, the central energy globe pulsed erratically and violently changed color to a bright angry purple-red color.