Chapter 6

“Enough!” I loudly decided, more than an hour later, when I could start to see the sun setting in the horizon, outside the glass penthouse walls and the angry voices had at least for now subsided enough that I could begin to hear myself think again.

Mostly, I was thinking about getting some food! I was starving, having had nothing but those cookie snacks a few hours ago to eat in several days.

“Alright ... enough already!” I repeated, standing up from my chair to project my voice ... and a bit of my focused will to improve the chances of them actually listening to me. “Time for the girls to just shut the fuck up and let the adults in the room, if there are any, speak. First of all, the chances are that if you decide to work with me, the odds of us together figuring out this problem with the alien virus, or whatever you call it, will distinctly improve. Second of all, damn it! I want my fucking pants! Now the sooner you can settle those two minor issues, the sooner we can all get out of here and get something to eat!”

Now that finally got their attention! The big brains at the front end of the table, the Professor Rachael and Doctor Wilma Reeds, along with Pat Wilder, put their heads together in whispered conference and began to less violently debate the scientific issues of the matter. Blackwing, with a slight exaggerated sigh, stood up from the table and walked around to hand me some items she pulled from one of her belt pouches. The Revenant stood too and came around to join me from the other side.

“I’ve got your pants contents,” the dark grim enforcer of the night muttered to me, handing me the small handful of coins, my set of keys to the van and my wallet. “No pants, however. They, along with everything you survivors were wearing were put into hazmat bags at Mercy hospital and then burned, as being possibly infectious. This should be everything you had.”

It was. Everything, pretty much that I owned in the world. A wallet, otherwise empty except for my driver’s license, the van keys and $ .35 cents in loose change ... along with that old, well-worn ancient silver coin the strange lady had given me. I just felt relief, happier and safer somehow, once it was again in my hands, but it did not glow or even feel the least bit warm to my touch as I took it back again.

“That coin you have,” the Revenant solemnly stated, “is indeed most unusual ... and briefly, when I first examined it with Blackwing, it clearly held traces of some very powerful prior magic upon it.”

“It’s a Roman-era silver denarius from 49 b.c.,” Blackwing told then told me, in something of a conspiratorial whisper. “From the start of the civil war, the very first coined minted for Julius Caesar after he marched on Rome. Marked ‘Caesar’ with crossed olive branches on one side and the goddess Fortuna on the obverse. Incredibly rare ... possibly nearly unique as it’s only been described in a couple of very old rare coin books, and there’s none on display in any coin collection or museum that I know of. It must have been some incredibly lucky find ... or a very rare gift indeed.”

“It was,” I admitted, gratefully accepting the coin and then clinching it tightly in my hand for a long moment. “It’s my good luck charm.”

I couldn’t see much of the black-clad lady’s face under her dark leather cowl, but I could feel that she was looking upon me with some genuine feeling of astonishment. She knew coins, even extremely rare and legendary ones ... the chances were a certainty, that she understood what had been given to me. The mystical Revenant knew more about it too, I was certain of it ... but she turned away quietly and returned to her seat when I tried to ask her about its magical qualities.

“Well, three days ago,” I laughed softly, I only owned three things in this world ... a hat and a coat, and my self-respect. Now ... most of those things are gone, along with my dignity while I’m wearing this stupid gown. I’m certain that I’ve been extremely fortunate just to have survived this mess in the first place, but my ass is still hanging out in back of this stupid gown ... and unfortunately, sometimes also my entire front!”

The grim crusader might have actually been grinning, as she turned to walk back to her chair.

It took a while ... but about twenty minutes later an orderly or one of the lab assistants appeared knocking at the door with a pair of white hospital surgeon pants that would fit me. With my dignity now partially restored I was a bit happier and a few minutes later the big brains at the end of the table had come to some sort of medical consensus, concerning the nature of Doctor Fate’s original golden liquid sphere, and then the damaged corrupted form it had then taken.

Well as they say ... garbage in, garbage out. The jargon was mostly way too technical for me to understand, but when I made them repeat things a few times down to my level of ignorance, I could at least now begin to grasp the basic concepts of what we were facing with some level of calculated confidence. It was like throwing darts blindfolded at the wall to see in the end which shafts came closest to hitting the target. From there, it became a simpler matter of slowly refining the odds.

When the brains at the head of the table started to lose patience with me, it was Blackwing, the Green Canary and the Revenant that took up my side and each urged gentle persistence. I think they each at least, were starting to understand on some basic level how my luck seemed to really work. That if I could calculate the odds on something, precisely, that I could then accurately understand the situation and what the facts likely were, but they each mercifully resisted any urge to blurt out the details ... that I was apparently quite as special in my own manner as those heroines were.

Eventually, it all started to make some sort of organic sense in my head and I could then offer up some fairly likely conclusions and suggestions. Having another assistant providing me with a brace of thick warm corned beef sandwiches and a large bowl of soup, helped to get my gears shifting into gear a bit faster, as well.

“Ok, the odds are very prevalent that Doctor Fate is in fact a much more dangerous sort of bizarre nutjob than you all think. Whatever experiment altered him, sent him to another dimension of reality ... and I think replaced him entirely there, or enough of the mortal human parts that it probably doesn’t matter anymore.”

Now that was a jaw-dropper for a few of the ladies, and up at her top seat Doc Rachael turned so pale that I thought she was about to have another of her dizzy spells.

“That,” I continued, “is why he’s not interested in typical super-villainy sorts of things, like wealth or ruling the world ... his goal is much higher. Very likely, he/they ... the consciousness that now occupies his form, want to absorb this dimension into their own, but it’s difficult. It’s likely too different from theirs and they have to work in tiny pieces at a time, carefully and with lots of planning and prior preparation for every single step. That original golden vortex we all saw, summoned by Fate, is likely a portal to that very same alien dimension ... where other bits of that reality can then enter into other human hosts, at first willingly, but then to utterly replaced, altered into the golden man form so that they can exist in our reality. This was Fate’s intention for what happened at the warehouse, to merge parts of that alien consciousness into the physically best and most evil human host specimens ... the worst of the stone cold killers, those that displayed exception force of will, fighting to be chosen by him.”

“The hosts, of course, had no knowledge that their intellects and likely also their souls were going to be entirely displaced ... did they?” Doctor Wilma wondered.

“None. Like Drake, they were just expecting to rewarded with power and position within Fate’s massive and secretive organization. Instead, the hosts would lose all their higher mental faculties for reasoning, but the lower ... more basic, animal portions of the brain would still be present for the new entities to absorb and utilize, on behalf of Fate’s plans.

Yep, Doc Rachael was just about turning pale blue with shock and Pat Wilder was now bent over inches from her face hissing something to the elder scientist that I couldn’t hear, while Doc Wilma was again tending to her. The short conversation did not sound friendly.

“So, what went wrong? Why was the third final merger with the flesh incomplete and defective?” The Roboteer chirped in with her toneless mechanical voice. Tabloid rumor had it that somewhere, there was an actual living person who built this and dozens of other robots, of different sizes and for different tasks, but she mentally controlled them all remotely ... like by radio or two-way TV, or something nifty.

“Pat Wilder suggested earlier that it was the confluent merge of those three or more different energy fields coming all together in the combat, and I think now that she was correct. Most likely when the alien energy was impacted forcibly by Atomic Girl and Starlite-Starbrite’s different energy beams that disrupted ... and yes, even mortally wounded the summoned alien host structure. Internally, it was much like a virus, but a more complicated and living sort of entity, and when its life force was disrupted, its structure broke down nearly at once and started collapsing.”

“Yes,” Doc Wilma agreed, “from the degraded dead samples of it that I took, along with what I’ve observed from the partially infected hosts, this happened as the result of something that acted very much like alien virus. The alien host entity was hurt and its structure significantly damaged and unable to perform the alteration that had been intended with any of the human hosts, so it could function properly in this reality. Instead, loose and dying, for those few moments here in this dimension in which it was incapable of living, it was forced to merge in small fragmentary pieces ... and had only mere seconds to attempt to rewrite the human DNA code hastily ... and inaccurately upon it’s final accidental subjects.”

“Like Antonio ... Drake, who caught the most effect of it, first and most immediately after the alien energies had been first damaged.” I agreed. “They, the Other forces, were partially able to merge with him ... but to a much lesser extent, or so you’ve told me, with the other unlucky thirteen surviving patients.”

“Most of those appear to just be partially crippled or perhaps less or more randomly altered but in limited ways.” Wilma added, “Some with perhaps very minor powers or special abilities, we can’t be entirely sure.”

“Because now they’re all now loose, out on the street.” Blackwing growled, “They’ve all escaped either from Mercy hospital or from other secure hospital wards downstairs. Drake took them all with him when he forced his escape. We did notice that he didn’t seem to want you or your crippled friend.”

“Oh ... about Drake,” I replied, “his partial merger has given him some very serious powers. For a flaming skeleton, I think the chances are that he’s very close to being invulnerable and he can use fire in some really nasty and violent ways. By the way, he now wishes to be called Fire Drake, and since I think he’s officially a real super-villain now, it fits.”

“So,” Pat Wilder wondered, pondering the options yet some more, “they’re all likely inhabited by isolated and discoordinate bits of that alien consciousness now, but it is likely that they could be weakened or defeated, perhaps even destroyed, by a similarly created energy field or beam, similar perhaps to that created by the merged energy forces that occurred in the battle? With a few of the escaped infected patients recaptured, that optimal energy frequency against Fate and his dimension of origin could be tested and likely determined.”

“I’d figure those odds would work ... to at least the 89^th percentile,” I quickly calculated. “It’s also a near certainty that the already infected patients ... those other unlucky folks other than Drake to make significant skin contact with bits of the disrupted alien field before it collapsed a few seconds later, cannot further infect other people. Drake, or rather Fire Drake, is a more significant problem. Otherwise, that’s relatively decent odds ... that we now shouldn’t end up with an entire infected city!”

That was happy news ... but being my usual pessimistic self, I couldn’t let it rest. I made of mistake of wondering just what lessons Doctor Fate might learn from this episode himself, and the odds of something really nasty occurring grew, the longer I even considered them!

“Fuck...” I loudly muttered, “unless Doctor Fate makes his own mental calculations about what went wrong and he then might find some opportunity from serendipity. He can summon access to that alien dimension at will ... I’m absolutely certain of it. What if he decides, in the interest of creating disruption or confusion, or just to accelerate his own plans, to replicate that precise sort of ‘corruption’ again, as a weapon? He could willingly modify that kind of infection or virus to use to deliberately alter both human and alien DNA’s together, perhaps the next time in a more desirable form. It’s a coin flip ... I think, regarding those odds ... but I doubt they’re going to improve over time. He, Doctor Fate, is a brilliant genius, right?”

“He is...” the still pale Professor Rachael admitted, and Pat Wilder nodded her head in immediate agreement and added, “He was not only was the smartest scientific genius on this planet before and after his dimensional accident, but he has also learned to master metaphysical magic, as well as science ... both of this world, and that alien dimension. He’s a creature of pure energy now, but possessing an alien and malevolent will. Until now, he’s been unstoppable ... by all of us, together or apart.”

“But by studying the energy pattern from the corrupted alien energy source, you can then determine the appropriate energy frequency or pattern for Fate’s alien dimension.” The Revenant suggested, “Where to find it, perhaps, or shield it from our world ... or better still, disrupt Fate’s persistent alien connection to it! Drive that connection from his physical form, or what’s left of it, in this reality and at worst you’d just make him mortal again, as before. Something like an exorcism!”

Yes ... the chances were damned near certain that this sort of disruption would work ... once the corrupted patients had been located, captured and studied ... much more securely. That ... mercifully to say, was going to be the #1 task of the assembled heroes here, and the dozens more of the minor heroines that hadn’t been present for this senior council meeting.

“Not my problem anymore!” I repeated told anyone and everyone who asked, after the meeting was declared over.

Except ... I needed to do something about Fire Drake ... and I admitted as much in private to Blackwing.

“He’s going to go to ground, like a wounded animal ... at least for a while,” I admitted, “but he was a smart and very nasty bastard even before the accident and now he’ll be also hurt and extremely angry too. He’s got boltholes all over the Westside, especially in the Abattoir, his home turf. Chances are near certain that he’ll hide in a deep hole there for a week or even a month while he starts gathering up his local street forces from his ward. He’ll purge anyone from his mostly Italian street gang that won’t be 1000% loyal before making any bid to take over the rest of South Hell next. He’ll likely target Connor O’Neil’s turf first, and then from there stream roll north, then going public when he then tries to take the entire Westside outfit as well.”

“So, there’ll be a full gang war soon embroiling the entire island then, every faction breaking the Concordance and battling for complete and utter control.” Blackwing surmised, and I didn’t disagree.

“Yep, the entire city; not just the Westside but eventually the entirety of Empire Island ... and then the whole Five Boroughs. He won’t stop until he takes down the entire Syndicate and various other family Consortiums, too ... all of the family outfits that control the Italian, Irish, Jewish gangs and organizations. He’s going to want to start a total war ... with everyone at each other’s throats, mobs killing other mobs, until he’s strong enough to come in and pull it all in together in his crazy flaming arms. Don’t worry about Fate, he’s already long out of town! We’ve got a new evil supervillain right here now actively trying to rule and control the entire city ... and perhaps get all of the other supervillains too, under his command.”

“You don’t sound happy about those chances.” Blackwing said, and I agreed.

“Nope. These are crappy odds ... and I can’t even calculate just how lousy they are yet until we find him, and discover something about his immediate plans. Chances are, that won’t be for weeks, so at best we’re all going to be reacting to his first planned moves ... so tell your buddies to keep their bright costumes clean and ready to go, because it will get ugly ... fast! And probably at the worst possible time for everyone involved, myself included.”