Talyesin's Tales

Previously on Squirrelman - Sins of the Past:

Investigating the ruined Boost lab in Downtown, Squirrelman, Ace, Ragdoll, Physique and Doc Sterling discovered the complex was in fact, sentient, having mingled its A.I. with the mind of the metahuman criminal Junkernaut.

Questioning the Living Complex, they discovered a secret lab beneath the ruined drug lab.

The contents of that secret lab proved to be a stasis tube, with a lone occupant: a creature of nightmares.


Starring!

Matt Mattheson ......... as Squirrelman
Kimmy Sinclair ................ as Ragdoll
Rick Duncan ........................... as Ace
Lisa Dumont ................... as Physique
Mike Washington ............. as Dragon
Trevor Andrews ............... as Phenom

Guest starring

Reed Sterling ........................ as Doc
Molly O'Malley ............. as Glory Gal





In the fall of 1990, my predecessor was in high school. Technically, so was I, but that's not the point. We were both spending a lot of time trying to score with the only girl on our Mathletes team, and we were both ignorant of what was happening in Daviston, a little town just east of El Paso, Texas. Me, because I wasn't in this alternity; him because he was trying to figure out how to work Mary Ellen's bra hooks with one hand.

In the fall of 1990, the town of Daviston was killed.

The entire town. In one night. Six hundred forty two people, dead. In fact, every last man, woman, child, dog, cat, budgie, goldfish. Everything that could have been classified as an animal of some sort. Sucked dry.

Blood turned to dust. Skin to papery ash. Bones as brittle as old wood.

No alarm had been raised. No calls to 911. Nothing.

The Texas Rangers were called in, of course. The Daviston sheriff was decidedly dead, so he couldn't investigate the murders. The investigation turned up different times of death, over the space of a few hours, but no one had seen or heard anything, and no one had reported the murders taking place. And Daviston was a small enough town that there weren't any security cameras anywhere, so no luck there.

Three days later, when the first Federal Psychic showed up to help, word reached the investigators that a ranch 140 kilometres northwest, in New Mexico, had been slaughtered the same way. Every last cow in the herd, all the cowboys, all the ranchers, all the horses. Sucked dry.

Unfortunately it was outside the Texas Rangers' jurisdiction, and the bureaucratic red tape involved in a multi-state manhunt - because by then they had come to the conclusion that someone was behind the murders, that it wasn't a freak of nature or a fluke of science or a magical spell - took two more days to clear up, and by then the New Mexican State Police had been back and forth all over the crime scene. Which isn't to say they mishandled the case, just that they weren't yet aware of what they had on their hands.

The first costumed crimefighter to run into whatever it was that was causing these strangely calm deaths was an New Mexican local by the name of Cowgirl. She ran into whatever it was at the White Sands National Monument, about three weeks after the Daviston massacre. Her body was found sucked dry, just like the others. And she had been classified as nearly invulnerable, a Class Six, and a Class Five on the strength tests, able to throw cars, so whatever it was that was killing everything in its path, was stronger than that. Cowgirl's death made national news.

Over the next few months, more deaths in the area. The death toll was rising, and people in the area were rightfully scared. A number of deaths occurred as a result of fear and paranoia, as the heavily armed inhabitants of the area exercised their Constitutional right to protect themselves at all costs, winding up with dead neighbours more often than not.

When the winter came, and there were no new leads, the deaths suddenly stopped. The story that spread was that whatever it was - and at the time, the media had all kinds of names for it : Death Storm, the Reaper, Silent Killer, Night Hunter, the Wendigo - had gone into some kind of hibernation.

Bounties started being offered for the death or capture of whatever it was. By then, of course, the first three psychic investigators had gone insane and killed themselves - one by shoving a pair of scissors up her nose - so the authorities knew not to call in any more psychics.

So they called in a magician. Not just any magician, either - they got Pentacle to help out. The man himself. He was as big then as he is today, only then he was still calling himself Doctor Pentacle.

Well, the good Doctor showed up in the area, set about some ritual of some kind, to try and find out the true nature of this killing machine. He consulted with local shamans about the nature spirits of the area, the local mythology, the mystical flora and fauna. He called in experts from around the globe, setting up a multi-tradition covenical ritual to discover the path of the beast. Thirteen mages, witches, shamans and sorcerors entered a magical circle at Full Moon.

Only Doctor Pentacle survived.

When he came out of his astral coma a month later, all he would say was, "This thing... what it is doing is not killing. It is harvesting."

The media ran with the quote and began calling it the Harvester, which rapidly became the Harvest. But by then there hadn't been any deaths in nearly three months, so it barely made even the local news.

Then Spring came. And the deaths began again.

People were demanding something be done. The federal government had to step in, call in the army, send in STAR Force, whatever it took, but the Harvest had to be stopped.

The problem was the Harvest was impossible to track. It left no trace, caused mages to die and psychics to go insane, had no scent for dogs to pick up, no footprints, no camera images - and, by then, the Harvest had been spotted on camera, a fuzzy vaguely humanoid nothing on the screen, lifting its entranced prey off the ground and sucking them dry - nothing for the pursuers to try and track. Just a path of death and a rising body count. Heading slowly, vaguely, northwards.

Then it came to the Albuquerque Maximum Security Metahuman Correctional Compound. Over two hundred enhanced, powered, and metahuman criminals from all over the southwest.

All dead in one night.

The death toll was nearly five thousand by this point. National news on a daily basis. Everyone was talking about what it was, what it could be, what it could want. Pentacle was still recovering from his coma and wouldn't - or couldn't - talk about it. My predecessor didn't know it at the time, but found out later - there was a lot of talk among costumed crimefighters that the Harvest was a government program to control the metahuman population.

Understand, it was a different time then. Most normal folks didn't trust masks at all, despite the nearly decade-old Claremont Registration Act. And the masks knew it, suspected the government of anything to keep the masks in line. Conspiracy theories ran rampant, and the Harvest was more grist for the rumour mill.

After the Albuquerque massacre, the death toll began to mount to such a point that people were actually leaving the area, moving out of New Mexico completely rather than risk getting harvested. But the deaths continued, and finally the federal government called in its last resort - they asked the Defenders of Justice to help.

Of course, they weren't the first masks to try and help. Cowgirl, of course. Texas Star. Yellow Rose. Alamo. High Roller and Showgirl. Sandstorm. Burro and the Puma. Rita Grande. Silver Scorpion. Kokopelli. Sagebrush and Mesa. The Carlsbad Caveman. All of them tried to find Harvest. All of them did.

And all of them died.

The U.S. government and the Defenders of Justice had never really gotten along, not since the DoJ declared themselves emancipated crimefighters, severing their ties to any government and involving themselves on an international level, in any crisis they, from their satellite headquarters, deemed required their presence. Arrogant, sure, but they got the job done, enforcing human rights and justice across the globe.

So the government calling them in was sort of a big deal, and to their credit, the DoJ didn't try to milk it for more than it was worth. People were dying, and Harvest had to be stopped.

Psi-Fi had a precog dream that they would fight it in Denver, Colorado. So the Defenders of Justice took up shop in Denver, and waited.

Days passed, then weeks. More deaths, heading steadily north through New Mexico. Into Colorado. People outright criticizing the DoJ for doing nothing. Angry people, scared people. Mobs. Riots. The US Army called in. More deaths. Denver was evacuated, except for some diehards who wouldn't go.

A year after the massacre at Daviston, Harvest came to Denver.

The battle caused almost $3 billion in damages. Eight hundred dead, times ten injured.

Harvest was some kind of psychic energy vampire, sucking the life force right out of its victims. It was some sort of living anti-life battery, needed life energy to survive, the anti-life energy was what had caused the psychics to go insane and the mages to die. It had a psychic mindlock that kept its prey entranced and alive while they were harvested, which explained why there were never any screams or 911 calls. Later, it was explained that the more energy it sucked from its victims, the stronger it became, and when the victim was a metahuman, its strength multiplied exponentially.

By the time Harvest came to Denver, it was very, very strong.

The Defenders of Justice were decimated. Hydrowoman. Herakles. Johnny Swift. Miniature and Thumbellina. Fahrenheit. The second Midnight Avenger, and Amazon. Denver's own Mini-Mom and Maxi-Mom. Bolt. Crimson. And, as it turns out, Wonderman. Nearly two-thirds of their active membership, killed. And Denver, gutted.

Public reaction was outrage. If the Defenders of Justice hadn't just waited, things could have been different. If they had done this, if they had done that. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and everyone needed someone to blame.

The public decided to blame masks, because, after all, if Harvest hadn't fed on over 300 metas then it couldn't have been so powerful that it took the entire Defenders of Justice and the destruction of Denver to stop it, so then Harvest wouldn't have killed so many people. Sure.

In fact, public reaction was so bad that it took the Reality Warp of '99 to set things back to a place where masks weren't hunted by cops and chased by mobs.

So Lisa's announcement hits us pretty hard.

"Lisa," I say, "Are you sure?"

"Look at that face and tell me you'll ever forget it," she snaps, pointing at it, her fear turning to anger. "Imagine you saw that face suck Rags dry as a twig, and tell me you'd forget it then."

"Lisa," Doc says. "It's not possible. I personally have seen Harvest's corpse in the DMA holding facility in Washington. The battle in Denver caused so much damage to the corpse that it is virtually unrecognizable as this creature."

"What if it's a clone?" Dragon asks.

Nobody likes thinking about that.

"Holy socks..." Reed says, heading for a computer. "Living Complex?"

"Yes, Doctor?"

"Do you have access to the Project Solstice mainframe?"

"No, Doctor."

"Why not?"

"The mainframe requires biometric clearance."

"Retinal, vocal, or fingerprint?"

"All of the above, Doctor."

"Whose?"

"Doctor Hi-Q's, of course."

"Swell," I say.

"We need to find Hi-Q, as soon as possible," Reed says. "Living Complex, may I ask that you contact me if there is any change in the situation here in Project Solstice?"

"Of course, Doctor."

"We have to go," Reed says, heading for the door. "Squirrelman, contact Phenom, tell him to expect us?"

"Sure thing, Doc," I say, following. I activate the nanobead on my finger and say, "Squirrelman, Phenom. You there?"

Nothing but static.

"Maybe we're too deep," Ace says as we start climbing stairs.

"Unlikely," Reed says over his shoulder. "They're made to penetrate a kilometre of solid bedrock." He starts to run.

"Doc, what's the rush?" I say.

"Do you know how far along its gestational period the Harvest clone is? How soon it will awaken, and need to feed?"

"No."

"Nor do I. The only person who can get the information is Dr. Hi-Q, and he's somewhere in Action City."

"So that's our priority?"

"Yes, it has to be."

"What about the UnSeelie?"

He's in pretty good shape for a nearly sixty year old, he's barely breathing hard as we run up the stairs, booted feet clanging hard on metal steps.

"They'll have to wait. The threat of Harvest awakening is too huge."

"Doc," Ace says. "The Boost-"

"I know," he says. "Harvest injected with Boost is too horrible to contemplate."

"Yeah, but you contemplated it," Dragon rumbles.

"It's what I do."

"Any luck with Phenom?" Ace asks me.

"Phenom, you there?"

More static, then something that sounds like "Little busy" - which makes me more worried.

"Doc, I don't like this at all," I say. "Things are getting out of hand. There's too many people we need to find."

We're at the rubble portion of the secret complex now, climbing over chunks of masonry. A little slower going.

"How do you mean?"

"Okay, look. We have to find Hi-Q to stop the Harvest clone from awakening, right?"

"Yes."

"And we have to find Lord Hades, because all this suspicious activity Downtown, we assume, involves him in some way."

"Correct."

"But to find Hades we have to find Doc Steele. And no one knows where he is."

"That's true."

"And then there's this sorceress we need to find," I continue. We're nearly to Downtown street level, where the rubble is the thickest.

"What sorceress?" Reed asks.

"The one that killed Annie O'Day," I explain.

Reed stops so sudden I nearly walk right into him. He pauses. Turns around. Stares me right in the eyes and says, "What?"

"This case Darklight and I are working on," I say. "Nothing to do with this, it's just one other person I need to find."

"Annie O'Day, girl pilot? That Annie O'Day?"

"That's her."

"She was killed by a sorceress."

"Yeah. Some ritual to find something."

"A longtime colleague of Doc Steele's - a man we're planning on travelling halfway around the world to find - was killed in a 'ritual to find something', and this is the first time you've thought to mention it?"

"First of all I didn't know she was a longtime colleague, and second, yeah, so?"

Doc just raises an eyebrow and shakes his head.

"You didn't think the two might be connected?"

"The two what? Our search for Steele and this sorceress' search for something? We don't even know what she's looking for."

"Alright, fair enough," Reed says, taking a deep breath. "I tend to see connections other people don't, and sometimes it's a little frustrating."

"So you think they're connected."

"I think they're connected."

"Listen, this is great and all," Dragon says, "But shouldn't we be getting a move on?"

"Quite right," Doc says, and jogs off down the street, back the way we came.

As we get closer to the Sterling Spire's entrance, there's definite sounds of a fight from up ahead. We pour on the speed, leave Reed behind.

Round the corner.

Phenom and Molly are taking on a gang of Downtown goons. With dogs.

"I hate it when they have dogs," Ace says beside me, pulling out his pack of cards.