A little something from the vault that I've had floating around for a while now.

Some notes, to preface this:
1.) This is too hot for QQ. They'd Rule 8 me just for posting it, citing it as 'too political.' It's not exactly politically correct, either.
2.) This was storyboarded in 2014 and I finally got around to writing it in 2016, around the time people started pulling down statues, but before wide-spread rioting, because it's actually part of a connected series of stories that I never got around to writing much for.
3.) The setting for this particular story is only on Earth for the first half of the first chapter, so everything else that takes place after is in a fantasy world. The Earth part is there to set up where in that particular timeframe this story would fall (after a story with a placeholder title of 'Hero' which would follow the building of a hero team after people started developing powers).
4.) Believe it or not, I made this before reading Worm.
5.) This story is dead and not ever likely to see any sort of work ever put into it again, but I figured I'd share it here and see what you guys think.

So, without further ado...

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01

“Tragedy struck today as three of the Free Western People’s Republic’s top first string defenders, Black Friday, Pride Parade, and Santa Muetre, were brutally murdered by Valiant Rex, a member of the National Socialist Militia of Supers. In the studio with us this morning is Professor Paul Steinberg of Berkley University, an expert in the field of supers and their impact on today's society. Professor, what can you tell us about this tragedy and its potential impact?”

“Well, Carol, this is what happens when you give violent, literal Nazi bigots like the NSMS power of any sort. Guns were bad enough, but that day thirty years ago when the first reports started coming in of people developing paranormal abilities... I couldn't stop shaking—literally shaking—at the thought of these sorts of 'people' with even more power to oppress others with their horrible, fascist ideology. That is why we must push forward, progressing ever onwards, past this sort of racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant barbarism—”

“God Marsh, why the fuck do you watch that trash?” the voice of Robert 'Marsh' Marshal's coworker spoke over the talking head on the video stream he had been watching. “I mean, do you hear this shit? It's a complete hatchet job.”

“I do,” Marsh agreed, sitting back in his chair and spinning it around to look at his coworker. “And two reasons. Firstly: personal amusement. Listen to the wording and the tone used—this is all scripted and rehearsed beforehand, and they're being fed cues over their ear pieces. It's the same thing on every 'major news outlet.' They always keep coming back to the same talking points, trying to hammer the same appeals to emotion disguised as facts in, like they think that if they repeat it enough it will make people believe. To be fair, that tactic used to work, before the internet. Before a single meme could destroy the official narrative and cause a major media organization to lose face. Back before you could cut and paste this kind of thing side by side with all the other idiots saying the exact same thing, in the exact same tone, like a bunch of mindless automatons.”

“Okay,” Jim agreed, nodding his oversized bobble-head. Given its faintly red coloration and the fact that Jim kept it shaved out of preference, rather than show off his bald spot, he'd earned more than one 'dickhead' comment in the past. That was before he became the sort of person you simply didn't make those kinds of comments about.

Jim was what Marshal figured happened when powers didn't match the person. Jim had been a fat I.T. nerd for decades and had had the body to show for it, right up until his powers kicked in. Now, Jim was built like a brick shit house. All that fat had evaporated over the course of a few days, leaving behind a slab of what the girls in the office liked to covertly call 'beefcake,' in between their twittering and barely disguised looks of lustful longing.

Not that Jim minded the looks, these days. The man got more play than any three guys Marsh knew. 'The fat man's revenge,' Jim liked to call it.

A physical enhancement package didn't necessarily make one pretty, though—so Jim's oversized head, which had looked pretty normal on his supersized body, now made the balding man look like the sort of bobblehead toy Marsh remembered being popular back when he was a kid.

Jim's next words brought Marsh back to the present and out of his staring at the man's unfortunately sized head. “So, what's the second reason for watching that trash?”

“Oh, that's easy.” A grin spread across Marsh's bearded face. “If you want to truly understand the way your enemy thinks, observe him. Listen to the lies he tells himself, his followers, and his enemies. Watch what he shows you, both the message as a whole and the subtext. Take note of who he has proselytizing for him and how they do it. Once you know all of this, the enemy becomes easily recognizable—familiar to the point that you can spot him in any crowd. And familiarity breeds contempt.”

Jim gestured back to the stream playing on Marsh's monitor. “Looks like they're about to show footage. Bets on it being edited?”

“Considering they've had a good two hours to play with it? No bet,” Marsh shook his head.

On screen, a view of the news room—currently showing a black woman in a pantsuit and a tweed-wearing man with pasty skin, curly hair, and a big nose that only stood out more under his needlessly oversized ‘retro’ glasses—was replaced by what looked like a cell phone video.

It was, of course, taken with the phone standing up—because apparently no one knew how to turn the phone sideways to get wide-screen video. The scene the video opened up to was what 'official' news agencies were calling a “peaceful protest,” which was anything but.

The protesters—rioters, really—stormed down a street in black masks, hoodies, and balaclavas. Some of them carried flags—most of which Marsh didn't recognize beyond the same clenched fist pattern repeated over and over in different color schemes with different letting around them, though he did note more than one hammer and sickle flag being flown. Smoke rolled across the area with no discernible origin, but Marsh's research had shown it to be the result of a police car set on fire by Molotovs thrown by the aforementioned peaceful protesters.

At the front of the pack, things looked a little different than the rank and file useful idiots. A group of thirty men—and Marsh used the term only loosely—all identical marched, danced, twerked, undulated, and dry humped their way up the street. All of them were actually a single super: Pride Parade—an individual out of San Francisco, gifted with the ability to duplicate itself seemingly without limit.

Its costume consisted of what Marsh would tentatively call hooker boots, if they weren't bring worn by a man, assless chaps, an oversized flashing rainbow LED cod-piece, and a domino mask—leaving its upper body bare and exposing its many painful looking piercings and bad ink across its scrawny form. “It” because Pride Parade was extremely vocal to anyone who would listen that it was some sort of trans something-or-other and changed pronouns every other week.

The two ahead of Pride Parade were a morbidly obese black female in a white spandex leotard dripping with sweat even in the poor quality footage, calling herself Black Friday—one of the “healthy at every size” crowd—and a small, shirtless Mexican man covered in Day of the Dead themed tattoos, save for a large one across his back labeling him as a member of La Raza. Marsh had no idea who these two clowns were or what they could do and he didn't care enough to look into it—he only knew as much as he did about the living rainbow brigade because it was a media favorite.

Opposing the marching rioters were several groups of both supers and normies arranged in a protective formation around what looked to be a statue of a man on a horse. The normal people there were dressed fairly conservatively—jeans and tee-shirts or slacks and button-downs—with nothing obstructing their faces. Some of them carried flagpoles bearing the American flag, the Confederate Battle Flag, the state flag, or the NSMS party flag: a black sun on a red background. While most of them were unarmed, a number of them bore rifles, shotguns, pistols, and other weapons clearly visible.

At the forefront of the opposition were a trio of men.

Valiant Rex: a man who stood just under six feet tall, dressed as a roman warrior clad in red and gold—complete with shield, lance, and a gladius strapped to his side. From what Marsh remembered, Rex was a physical enhancement package with a dash of extras that he refused to disclose.

The Asguardian: a seven foot hulking slab of Nord, with a braided blond beard and long hair to match—a hammer and axe strapped to either side of his hips. This one Marshal had remembered thinking of as a cheap Thor clone without the fancy hammer, who could throw around some sort of elemental arctic wind. Despite his size, he wasn't a physical enhancement package—it was just freakishly good genes and hard work.

SpecFor: standing at 5'6”, he was the shortest of the three, but arguably the most dangerous—and definitely the most well armed. He wore a mixture of military style clothing, body armor, and carried at least six different guns at all times. SpecFor—or Special Forces—had a pretty specialized power that allowed him to use any weapon he laid hands on as though he were a grand master of it, and then turned it up to eleven.

If the world's greatest sniper could hit a target in the head from three miles away, SpecFor could shoot the bullet that sniper shot out of the air before it reached its target from twice that range and kill the enemy sniper with the ricochet. His power didn't just apply to guns, but they were SpecFor's weapon of choice—probably because his power didn't provide any physical enhancements to strength, speed, or anything else. On the other hand, speculation on the internet said some of SpecFor's abilities bent the laws of physics in improbable ways, especially where firearms were concerned.

While all of the supers on the opposing side of this riot in progress were low-tier power-wise, the man standing off to the side—opposite the police and apart from both the protesters and counter-protesters—was anything but.

Null: the one super everyone in the world knew on sight. His outfit didn't exactly stand out—being all black and gray fatigues, body armor, and long coat. Even his mask, while memorable, was nothing to write home about. Normally a curved, blank white face outlined by a glowing red LED border, he occasionally used the mask to display a simple animated mouth and eyes to convey emotions when he was speaking—or for intimidation.

No, unfortunately for Null, it wasn't so much fame as it was infamy that had made him a household name the world over. The current Second (American, for those outside the good old U.S. of A.) Civil War as it was being called had been a long time coming and had actually been going on covertly for decades, but it had finally escalated to armed and superpowered violence as a direct consequence of Null's involvement.

A certain vocally left-leaning American hero known the world over calling himself American Sam had, to put it bluntly, gone nuts and attempted to raze the city of Baton Rouge to the ground after conflicts between protesters attempting to remove Confederate statues and armed citizens willing to fight to preserve their history had ended in the deaths of six of those so called peaceful protesters. Baton Rouge was part of the patrol zone Null's team had covered at the time—before the team fractured following the incident.

Three of Null's team had shown up and attempted to talk American Sam down, but Sam wasn't having any of it. Sam had, in turn, convinced one of Null's own—Shield, a former football player who had had a short-lived pro career for the Saints before a knee injury put him permanently on the bench—to turn against his team, citing issues of racial solidarity with those killed.

While Oni—the Japanese demon themed, fear aura and sword wielding female third member of their team—had stalled Shield, Null had drawn American Sam's ire to himself and taken a beating in doing so. American Sam used Null like a human wrecking ball, smashing through downtown Baton Rouge and knocking over more than one building before Null had finally put him down—by popping Sam's head like an overripe watermelon.

Speculation ran rampant about his powers, but the one thing everyone could agree on was that it was some variant of telekinesis—and they only had that much because of evidence left over from the fight with American Sam. Null never used his powers in the sort of displays most supers did, so finding video of him doing anything with them was nearly impossible. However, given the fact that Sam had been ranked in the top ten strongest supers in the world, opinion said that Null should be ranked somewhere in that list above Sam.

The fact that Null had taken time out of his usual patrol schedule to show up two states away told Marshal that he was likely looking to avoid a repeat of the Battle for Baton Rouge, as it had been called. When the fighting did break out, this was proved accurate as the masked hero stepped in between the groups and began forcibly separating those fighting—everyone he hit going down and not getting up again. When Rex began screaming incoherently and stabbing people, Null was already cut off by the protesters around him—and many of the black-wearing bunch looked to be doing everything they could to put themselves between him and Rex, some of them even throwing themselves at him bodily and latching on to try and hold him in place.

The footage of Rex impaling Black Friday to a tree on his spear, stomping Santa Muerta's head in, and beheading the original Pride Parade Al Quaida style was of course censored but not so much that anyone watching couldn't tell what was going on. It was only after those three were down that the black-clad mob had rapidly dispersed, the person with the cell phone camera joining the rest of the rabble in retreat. The video stopped after that, switching back to the same two talking heads that had been on before.

“He was clearly not operating under his own control.”

“Obviously,” Marsh answered under his breath.

The word was still enough to draw a raised eyebrow from Jim, whose bobble-head split horizontally with a wide grin. “Talking to your ghost girlfriend again?”

“I will remove his intestines through his nose and feed them to him.”

“She says 'hi,'” Marsh deadpanned, closing the video stream.

Only about thirty percent of the world's population even had the potential to manifest super powers. Marshal was one of the lucky few that tested positive for a genetically heritable power. Sadly, Marshal's power wasn't anything as strong as telekinesis, as cool as weapon mastery or elemental manipulation, as iconic as super strength and flight, or even as useful as duplication.

Ever since he was six, Marshal had had the voice of a woman stuck in his head. For the first year or so she didn't even speak English, but she picked it up quickly. It probably helped that Marsh was in elementary school, learning the basics of the English language himself at the time.

The woman in question would never give him a straight answer as to whether she was living or dead, or even where she was. The only answer he'd gotten out of her had been a name: Eva. It wasn't exactly helpful in narrowing things down, much to his frustration—and her vocal amusement. What she would tell him though was that her voice being in his head wasn't actually his super power—only a convenient byproduct. And while Marsh had tried to test himself for some other manifestation of his power, whatever it was had too high an activation cost—that is, it required more power than his body produced naturally to use it, making it useless.

Keeping Eva a secret in a world where people had super powers turned out to be pretty pointless, so Marsh hadn't bothered. When people who found out inevitably tried to ask her questions, they quickly stopped asking when she proved intentionally irritating and abrasive at best. Eva did not like fielding questions from peons and simpletons and had no qualms about voicing her opinions on the matter to Marshal. Thus, Marsh wound up acting as her brain-to-mouth filter more often than not if she ever did bother trying to communicate with anyone aside from himself.

Jim turned a knowing look on his coworker but brushed it off. “You know they're going to turn these jokers into martyrs.”

“No doubt,” Marshal agreed. “It was probably the entire point. Everyone with sense is going to see that someone puppeted Rex into doing that, but the left isn't going to care. The million dollar question now is, who's their new super with the MC powers?”

“I'd worry more about it if the Empress wasn't immune,” Jim shrugged. “It's not like they can take over the country.”

The Empress was exactly as her name stated: the Empress of the Free United States of America—or at least the parts that recognized her rule. Beautiful, blonde, elegant, and extremely powerful—within the top three supers worldwide. She was the sort of woman girls aspired to be: strong and confident without sacrificing her looks or femininity, or coming off as abrasive.

She had popped up out of nowhere a decade ago as a teenager, making her way onto the political scene and swiftly inserting herself into politics in a way that should have been impossible—but for her was an every day occurrence. No one knew what her power was exactly, mostly because the few instances there were of her actually using any sort of power tended to white out every camera filming it and eye witness statements were sometimes confused. The results, however, spoke for themselves.

Such as the Russian Incident the previous year.

During a visit to Russia to speak at a conference, the Empress had been attacked at range with either a missile launcher or an RPG. When the smoke from the blast cleared, cameras watching the event showed that not even a hair on her pretty head was out of place. She had lifted a hand towards the shooter's position and every camera watching whited out. Audio recordings picked up something that sounded like thunder, followed by a rumbling. In the wake of her return fire, the abandoned building the attacker had used was taken out, leaving behind only a pile of smoking rubble.

Immediately following that incident, as in the minute of, the Empress had made a single post to her public social media account.

No one had taken her up on the blatant challenge to just try dropping a nuke on her head if they wanted to kill her.

“I don't think we want to see what happens if some idiot tries it,” Marsh shook his head, standing up from his desk and stretching. A twinge in his right shoulder caused him to wince and bite down on a curse.

“Dude, you should just get a healer to look at that,” Jim opined.

Marshal rolled his eyes. “Don't have the money. Anyway, I forgot to bring my lunch in this morning so I'm going to head back to the house and grab it. You mind covering a while?”

“Sure, no problem,” Jim nodded, dropping into the seat behind his own desk and kicking back.

Seeing the man clearly intended to take a nap while he was out, Marshal refrained from comment. If the phone rang, Jim would get it... or send it to voicemail. Not like it mattered much either way. Snagging his long brown insulated duster off the back of his chair, Marsh tossed it on and made his way to the parking lot. Digging into his pockets, he came up with his keys and thumbed the remote unlock button for his truck. Dropping into the driver's seat, he started the truck and moved out onto the highway.

“There, I'm going. Are you happy?”

“No.”

“You've been giving me the cold shoulder for the last six months and you finally decided to talk to me again today? What are you up to?”

“Me? Nothing. I have only your best interests in mind.”

“Uh huh,” the man muttered, green eyes rolling at the woman's words.

***

“I told you so.”

A wet flesh-on-flesh slapping sound filled Marsh's bedroom as two bodies writhed and moaned in what he supposed was ecstasy. One of those two enjoying themselves on the bed was Janet—Marshal's fiancee.

The other was not Marshal.

Marsh stood in the bedroom door, just out of line of sight of the two lovers, his right eye beginning to tick in time with the sounds accompanying the other man's thrusts into his fiancee.

“She's faking it, so there's that at least.”

Marshal ignored Eva's commentary for the moment. Instead, his hand slipped inside his jacket, unbuttoning the top two buttons of his shirt and finding the comfortable weight hanging under his left armpit. There was a quiet hiss of metal on cloth as he drew the pistol out of its holster and leveled it on the bed. The green and red dots of his sights lined up on the unknown man's back, center mass. The sound the safety made as he clicked it to the 'off' position was buried beneath the other sounds of the room.

“Neighbor. If she hears the shot, she'll call the police. Even odds as to whether cops or supers show if that happens.”

Marshal paused, his finger halfway into squeezing the trigger before he was reminded of the elderly neighbor across the street. Mrs. Smith had made a nuisance of herself for years, with her habit of nosing into others' business. Switching the matte black Colt 1911 to his left hand, he reached back under his shoulder and pulled open the extra pocket he had sewn onto the concealed carry holster. The two magazine pouches under his right arm hadn't been quite large enough to fit the suppressor, so he'd had to improvise there. Drawing out the short tube, he spun it onto the threads extending from the end of the barrel.

“Thank you.”

The words were enough to bring the activities on the bed to a halt as both its occupants seemed to realize there was someone else in the house with them. Janet's eyes widened in panic upon seeing him. “Marshal?!”

“Oh, shit!” the other man's exclamation came as he caught sight of the pistol being leveled at them again.

“You're welcome.”

Three squeezes of the trigger and three muffled shots turned the man mounted on his former fiancee into a bloody sack of meat. Two holes sat clustered one atop the other in the middle of the unknown man's back, the third in the back of his neck as Marshal allowed the recoil to walk the sights up.

While the first two shots had not punched through, the third had—and had left bright red blood and white bone painted all over Janet's face. A shift to the right and a fourth and fifth shot put two into the traitorous blonde whore's filthy mouth before she could scream—the same mouth that had kissed him goodbye and told him she loved him just that morning, before he'd gone off to work.

“We need to talk,” he finally said, safetying the weapon. Unscrewing the suppressor, he slipped it and the gun back under his jacket and buttoned his shirt again. His stomach turned and his lip curled in disgust at the sight left on the bed—the smell of voided bowels had quickly filled the room.

Also filling the room was a pale white mist rising off the fresh corpses. It drifted lazily like smoke for a moment before abruptly being sucked towards Marshal, where it disappeared and Eva made a quiet sound of satisfaction.

“Oh, now we need to talk?” Eva's voice dripped with sarcasm, on top of its usual honey-and-smoke tone, no sign of whatever satisfaction she had gotten out of the kills, or whatever that mist was, in her voice.

Moving out of the bedroom, Marshal made his way to his rec-room—or rather, his 'man cave' as Janet had had a habit of calling it, and always in a tone suggesting that she didn't approve. He didn't give a shit if she approved or not. It was his house, left to him by his father before he'd passed on.

In hindsight, it was probably part of what had convinced her to cheat. She had spent the better part of two years slowly transforming the clean, rustic wood and stone interior of the home into something he barely recognized—tacky rugs in bright colors all over his smooth hardwood floors, mounted trophies that had belonged to his great grandfather removed and relegated to the attic, pea soup colored wallpaper fouling his bedroom walls after she had demanded he put up drywall since wallpaper wouldn’t go over the log walls.

He taken all of these small losses with a smile, because they made her happy. The rec-room was the the only place left stubbornly untouched—the last pocket of resistance to her war on all things masculine in the house.

“Yes,” Marshal pushed open the door, making his way to the safe in the back and inputting the key code. The safe was yet another thing Janet had demanded. She claimed guns in the home made her feel unsafe and had argued him damn near into the ground to try and get rid of them, before he'd finally gotten a safe and locked them away, save for the one he carried every day. Out of sight, out of mind—and out of reach from her trying to pawn them, as he'd heard a buddy had gone through with his own wife. “I thought you weren't speaking to me.”

There was a soft, indelicate snort of laughter so close to his ear he almost felt her breath. “Only because you refused to listen, Marshal.” The words paused before asking, “How many of those are you planning to run away with?”

“Not all of them,” Marshal answered as he began checking the weapons secured in the gun safe. Four of them were AR patterned rifles, each fitted with different accessories, in two different calibers. The fifth weapon was a shotgun in a bullpup pattern—a 12 gauge semi-automatic that had cost him a pretty penny a few years back.

“And where do you plan to run from this? There are supers capable of tracking you.”

Hefting the shotgun out of the safe, Marshal moved over to a nearby table and set it into a waiting soft case. Making sure the weapon was securely strapped in, he went after his second and third choices—a pair of ARs. One chambered in 7.62mm with a medium barrel, currently fitted with a red dot with a booster scope on top, a set of flip up sights in case the red dot failed, a foregrip, and a flashlight. The other in .308, with a long barrel, scope, bipod, and suppressor attached. The bag already contained any other attachments and tools he might need to swap out on the rifles for an extended trip at the range or a hunting trip—scope, laser sight, suppressor for the 7.62, cleaning and maintenance kit, spare batteries, and so forth.

“Uncle Jim's cabin,” he answered distractedly. His uncle Jim—not his coworker by the same name—kept a hunting cabin up in Montana, in the mountains. The cabin was off the grid and the nearest neighbor was a mountain east of it. Marshal had updated it a few years back, adding solar panels and a marine battery array to avoid using the generator as much as possible to avoid repeat trips into town to get fuel for it—that, and he just didn't like the noise of having to run the jenny full time just to power the freezer, radio, and television.

The trip getting there may be a problem, however, if the bodies were discovered any time soon. Montana was a long trip up from south Arkansas and as Eva had said, there were supers capable of tracking him down if one of them took an interest.

The voice was quiet for a long moment before giving a soft hum. “It's not a terrible plan. Staying would be suicide. I could do better, though.”

Securing the other guns, Marshal zipped up the case and moved across the room to open up a locked metal cabinet. Inside, the upper shelves of which were covered in neat stacks of 30 round magazines—all loaded with either brass 7.62mm or .308 rounds for his rifles or hand-loaded 12 gauge rounds for his shotgun.

Sadly, he only had four spare magazines for the 1911, two of which were already secured in his shoulder holster while the other two were in his truck's glove compartment. Well, it's a sidearm. I'm not going to be using it to hunt, so I won't be blowing through magazines that fast. And if I run across a super or cops, I don't intend to get into a firefight. If they catch me, they catch me. I won't be the asshole who kills somebody just doing their job.

“If you've got a better plan, I'm all ears,” he countered, picking up the first stack and transferring it to pockets in the brown gun bag. The gun bag wouldn't hold all the magazines he had, but that was what the duffel bag in the bottom of the cabinet sitting on top of his ammo boxes was for.

“Go where they can't find you.”

Marshal rolled his eyes. “Thank you for that oh so helpful advice,” he muttered, sarcasm dripping off the words as he closed up the gun bag and set about transferring magazines to the duffel bag. “You wouldn't happen to know of somewhere harder to find someone than the middle of nowhere, would you?”

There was a faintly amused tone to her voice as she answered, “Only if you're willing to give yourself to me, body and soul.”

Chuckling darkly, Marshal shook his head. “My name isn't Faust, woman.”

“And I am no Mephistopheles,” Eva countered hotly, amusement shifting to something close to offense.

“So you say,” Marshal hummed.

It was an old argument between the two—familiar ground. As a child, she had been the invisible friend whispering in his ear. As he grew older and came to realize her nature, he began to suspect something of more malevolent origin—which she had denied. The fact that she refused to tell him much about herself beyond superficial details had not done much to help assuage his doubts.

He finished packing away loaded magazines and moved on to boxes of ammunition—metal containers with water tight seals. They fell into silence while he worked, loading the duffel bag and moving it outside to the back seat of his pickup, followed by the bag with the rifles and shotgun. Then, just in case he needed it, he took out the shotgun and leaned it against the passenger seat pointed into the floorboard. His reloading equipment went into the back next, along with the sealed containers of powder, primers, and everything else he would need to make new ammunition.

A few changes of clothes went into a trash bag, tossed negligently on top of everything else in the back seat of the big, black pickup's extended cab before he snagged his 'go bag' from the rec-room and tossed it in as well. Finally, he changed out of his work clothes and into a more comfortable set of jeans and a long-sleeved dark green flannel button down shirt, throwing the shoulder rig on over it and his long, brown jacket on over that. He made one last trip to the rec-room to top off the magazine in his pistol before heading to the front door.

Looking around at the living room, he sighed quietly. I'm going to miss this place.

Unfortunately, there was more of a risk of getting caught if he tried to dispose of the bodies and stick around than if he simply disappeared. His last stop in the house was the small closet beside the front door, where he lifted an old black Stetson cowboy hat off of one of the pegs there. The hat was older than he was, but was well cared for and waterproof—and one of the few things of sentimental value he didn't want to leave behind, as it had belonged to his grandfather.

Heading back outside, making sure to lock up behind himself, he started the pickup and backed out onto the road. He sent the old lady next door a friendly wave as the truck roared away and settled in for a drive. “Town first. Fill up the tank and the reserve and get some basic necessities while I'm at it, pull some money out of my bank account, then head north. Should be able to make it into Kansas before I need to stop for the night. Buy dry goods and supplies there then move on.”

Fifteen minutes and a stop at a gas station to top off his tanks and pick up some odds and ends—food, water, soap, and toilet paper—later, the voice in his ear spoke up again. “Turn off here.”

Marshal raised an eyebrow at that, considering it for a moment. The last time he hadn't listened to Eva had been six months ago, when she had warned him that Janet was cheating. He had told her to fuck off and the next words she'd uttered had been today, to convince him to return home—specifically so she could remind him that she had been right.

The woman had a vindictive streak a mile wide.

“Fine,” he grumbled, following her directions and leaving the highway. Over the next several minutes, those directions lead him over poorly maintained county roads, finally ending up on a dirt road leading to a church and cemetery that seemed to have been forgotten for the last fifty years. “Why are we here?”

Instead of answering, Eva asked, “Did you bring your bolt cutters?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” he retorted, clicking his seatbelt off and hopping out of the cab of the truck to move around to open the toolbox mounted on the truck bed. Digging out a set of bolt cutters, he made his way to the gate and clipped the chain holding it shut. Pushing the gate open, he replaced the bolt cutters and closed up his tool box before driving through the gate and onto the narrow service road through the cemetery. “So, why am I here and not—oh, I don't know—halfway to the county line by now?”

“You never answered my question.”

Marshal frowned at that before pointing out the obvious. “You never asked one.”

He very carefully did not smirk as he heard a feminine growl and what could only have been the gnashing of teeth. “You are an ass.”

“You know me so well.”

Eva sighed, took a breath, and asked, “Will you give yourself to me, body and soul?”

Marsh hummed in thought, fingers drumming on the steering wheel as the Ford idled. “What exactly does that entail, and to what purpose?”

“To answer your second question first: revenge.”

Nodding, he glanced at the clock and saw he'd wasted five minutes here already. Going to need to yank the battery on my cell phone, before I start moving again, he thought as his mind wandered. “Okay. And the first?”

“Is a bit more difficult to put into words. You would become mine. By that same note, I would be yours.”

Marshal rolled his eyes. “Helpfully vague. I'm not committing to anything until I know more.”

The voice in his ear growled quietly, annoyance slipping through for a moment. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

A world full of super powered people and he wouldn't believe her? It'd have to be pretty far out there, then. In that case, “Probably not,” Marsh agreed, nodding. “I'm more of a 'seeing is believing' kind of guy.”

“Fine. I didn't want to do this until after you had agreed, but I can work with that.”

Frowning, he asked, “Do what, exactly?”

Eva provided no answer and Marsh was quickly growing impatient—he had a limited window to get out of the state before someone found the bodies and this was cutting into it. The longer they sat here in this foggy cemetery, the less time he had to put distance between himself and the scene of the crime. Wait. Fog?

His eyes narrowed as he swept them across the ground around him, where a thick fog was beginning to rise up—of the same kind that had risen off the fresh corpses of Janet and her fuckboy. The radio, which had been quietly pouring out the sound of the local rock station broadcasting Hell's Bells, spat static. “What the—”

The world went black and for just a moment, Marsh felt a sense of weightlessness—at the same time, his whole body hurt like an all-over muscle cramp. Then his stomach rose as he fell. A second later, the truck's suspension protested as it came to a stop, as though he'd just dropped several feet.

“—fuck!” The cramp relaxed, but more than that there was a feeling of a weight being released—like he'd finally had a chance to set down something he had been carrying for years without realizing it. The feeling left him lightheaded but feeling suddenly energized.

Light had not returned, save for that of his clock and radio. A dull, constant, quiet sound like rushing water echoed all around him through the rolled down truck window, while the sound of static filled the cab from the speakers.

Reaching over, he hit the power button for the radio before turning on his headlights. He blinked as his lights illuminated what looked like a cave of some sort. Hitting the high beams, he flipped the toggle switch he'd mounted on the dash that controlled the flood lights on the top of the vehicle, in addition to the brush guard in front. Six extra lights flooded the surrounding area and he whistled, noting that the sound echoed faintly off the far walls.

What the lights showed was definitely the interior of a cave—complete with stalactites and stalagmites, along with the sound of bats protesting the sudden noise of his entrance and the rumble of the truck's idling engine. Reaching down, he found a small knob mounted under the toggle switch for the lights and tilted it left. There was a faint mechanical hum as two of the lights mounted above the truck responded, panning at his direction.

The lights revealed that the cave was in the neighborhood of a hundred yards long and perhaps half that wide, with a ceiling around ten yards above his head. Not exactly huge, but not small either. I'd love to explore, but I'm not getting lost in this place.

Panning the lights around to the right, several somethings caught his eye. Something shone, refracting the light that hit it while around it were other, dimmer reflections off of what he believed to be metal. Several yards behind that, several pairs of yellow circles also shone in the light, causing the hair on the back of his neck to raise. “What is that?”

“Something important to me,” Eva answered quietly—tiredly.

Several of the round circles winked out in pairs and Marsh realized why they unnerved him—they hadn't winked out, they had blinked. “What are those?”

“Kobolds. Annoying little shits. I'm sorry, I should have mentioned the infestation earlier. They won't let you leave here alive.”

Marsh frowned. “Anything like the kobolds I'm familiar with from fantasy?”

“Three and a half to four feet tall, rat-faced burrowers? Yes, pretty much.”

“And they can't be reasoned with?” the man asked, reaching back into the back seat and pulling his vest from the top of the pile, before shrugging out of his coat and slipping it on.

“Can you reason with a rat?”

Shaking his head, Marsh watched as the glowing eyes approached, the creatures becoming visible as they moved into the light. They were hairless, ugly little abominations that looked to be part man, part rat—complete with long, naked tails. Some of them wore crude furs from other animals, looking for all the world like they should have rotted and fallen off by now, but the majority of them were nude—to Marshal's disgust. Many of them carried sharpened sticks, while most had short clubs.

 As they neared, he shifted his foot onto the accelerator and revved the engine, turning the truck's low idling rumble into a roar in the closed-in confines of the cave as it shifted slightly on its struts, giving the impression of some great, angry beast. It apparently did an admirable job of spooking the kobolds as they chittered, shrieked, and backed off again.

Reaching over to the passenger seat, Marshal grabbed the shotgun. Digging through one of the magazine bags, he pulled one out and slammed it into the gun before loading several more into the slots provided by the vest. Turning back around, he saw the kobolds had drawn close again. Revving the engine again, he pressed the horn and sent them scurrying back.

As soon as he felt they were as far back as they were going to get Marshal killed the engine and stepped out of the truck, wrinkling his nose at the stink of shit, piss, and spoiled meat that filled the cave. Flipping on the light affixed to the front rail of the shotgun, Marsh stalked out in front of the truck into the path of the headlights. The kobolds went wild at the sight of him, shrieking and charging in a mad rush to be the first to get to him. As they neared, he brought the shotgun up and tucked it into his shoulder, centering the red dot on the first target.

A single shot cracked in the cave, thundering against the cave walls and bringing the shrieking horde of rat-faced half-men to a standstill. The kobold he'd aimed for dropped to the ground, its face, neck, and upper chest nothing more than ruined meat. The light on the end of Marshal's weapon swung left to the next target and several kobold heads turned to track it. The weapon sounded off again and the second kobold dropped in the span of only a few seconds.

Shrieking began again in earnest as several of them resumed the charge, trying to get in close enough to stab Marsh with their makeshift spears. None of them made it as they fell to the thunder of his gun. The rest, seeing their brethren slain so easily, turned and fled. For a moment, Marshal considered letting them go. Eva's voice disabused him of that notion.

“Kobolds breed like rats and prey on humans—especially children. If you don't eliminate the little vermin to the last, they'll just breed more of themselves and go right back to attacking travelers and settlements.”

Marshal nodded, his boots thumping against the stone cave floor as he strode off after them, firing into their retreating backs as quickly as he could to prevent them from getting into some little hole somewhere he couldn't follow. “I find myself at a loss.”

“Oh?” Eva asked. “Three o'clock,” she added, pointing out a fleeing form off to Marsh's right which had nearly reached a tunnel. Marsh leveled the light on the target the woman had pointed out and fired before moving on to the next.

“Found out my fiancee was cheating on me.” The shotgun sounded off and he switched targets again.

“Committed double homicide.” The Kel-Tec punctuated his statement by ending another kobold.

“Fled to somewhere obviously not Earth with the help of my imaginary friend, who it turns out is not imaginary.” Boom, headshot.

“Did you have a point in all of that whining?”

Marshal growled, kicking a kobold corpse as he put a load of shot into the last kobold running away. “I am not whining, you bitch.”

“Sounds a lot like whining to me,” Eva countered before adopting a high falsetto. “'Oh woe is me, I didn't listen to the wise and intelligent woman who has known me the longest and the dumb blonde cunt I've been shacking up with decided to get a little strange on the side. Poor me, I grew a pair of balls and killed the cheating whore and the bastard she was fucking behind my back and now the weight of them feels funny dangling there between my legs after all the time I spent without them while putting up with her. As if my life couldn't get any worse, now I have a fresh start and all I can think about is what I left behind. Boo hoo.' Try being dead and isolated in a fucking cave for a few hundred years, then get back to me.”

“You done?” Marsh asked, rolling his eyes.

“For now,” she agreed. “You missed one, by the way.”

“No I didn't. I just wanted to see how close it thought it could get, throwing its shadow on the ground like it is,” Marsh denied, spinning in place and leveling the shotgun on the kobold that had been sneaking up on him—at an angle between him and the truck, its high intensity lights still flooding the cave—with a knife in hand. He shot from the hip since it was close enough to use the beam of his flashlight to aim.

The kobold was blown backwards, its chest cavity sporting a multitude of new holes. Surveying his handiwork, he grinned and flipped the safety on the weapon. “Fuck I needed that.”

“That's more like it,” the woman purred in his ear. “This is the man I helped shape over all these years. Not some sad sack pushover, kowtowing to the first woman to come along and spread her legs. Remember that, Marshal. You're a man—not one of those sorry excuses too afraid to even call themselves men. Act like it.”

Marsh rolled his eyes. “You say that like you have some sort of personal investment there,” he muttered, examining the corpses and finding nothing of any real interest. Even the knife that had been used against him was inferior to any of the many knives in his own gear, let alone the Ka-Bar he carried on his person.

Eva snorted softly. “You say that like I don't.”

Shrugging, Marsh made his way over to the crystal that had caught his eye earlier. It was surrounded by a small pile of little metal rectangles—mostly copper, but a few in silver and two that looked to be gold. Picking one up, he found it to be stamped with characters he couldn't read and a seal of some sort that looked like a dragon's head. Dropping what he'd loosely call a coin, he gestured towards the crystal. “So, what is this thing?”

Eva hesitated for several long moments before finally saying, “In a word: me. What's left, anyway. It's my phylactery.”

Marsh raised an eyebrow at that. “Your soul jar? Like a lich?”

“Exactly like a lich,” Eva agreed. “As in, I am one. I was a mage who studied necromancy and soul magic. Can story time wait? Let's just take my crystal and the loot and go. I need to see the state my lands have fallen into since I’ve been otherwise incapacitated.”

Marsh sighed, turning and making his way back to the truck. Killing the engine, he rooted around in the back seat and pulled an empty garbage bag from the roll—one of the kind meant to stretch under weight, because he didn’t want anything he used them for rupturing in his truck. Stowing the shotgun, he made his way back over to the pile of money and began tossing the bar-shaped coins in. Once those were stashed he looked at the crystal resting on its pedestal. Roughly five inches long and an inch or so in diameter, it looked to his untrained eye like a piece of quartz or perhaps diamond. “This isn't going to be like that one Indiana Jones movie, is it?”

“No. I didn't set up pit traps or a boulder. Sorry to disappoint you,” Eva snarked.

“Ha ha,” Marsh grunted, picking up the crystal and pocketing it before heading back to his truck.

“You're going to want to take a seat for this next part.”

Marsh blinked, tossing the bag of loot into the back seat. “What next part?”

 Eva sighed quietly. “I don't want to leave something so valuable as my soul just sitting out where anyone can steal or break it. I want to put it somewhere relatively safe.”

“You stuck it in a cave for how many years?” Marsh lead. “What’s wrong with just burying it somewhere?

“No. Absolutely not,” Eva denied, clearly not too keen on the idea given her tone.

Sighing, Marsh nodded. “Fine. Where, then?”

“In your rib cage, with those fancy guns safely between me and anyone or anything looking to destroy me.”

Laughing quietly, Marsh dropped into the driver's seat and shook his head, fishing the crystal out of his pocket to inspect it again. “I am pretty sure humans don't work like that. We don't exactly have a lot of extra space in our chest cavities. Besides, something tells me that what you have in mind is going to hurt like a bitch.”

“Oh, I assure you, it will hurt like nothing you’ve ever experienced. I’ll reshape the crystal to burrow through your chest and wrap around your ribs themselves.”

“Yeah, no. Not happening. Sorry, looks like we’ll be finding a rock to hide you under,” Marshal shook his head.

Eva sighed. “It’s not like there aren’t benefits for you.” Taking his silence as a sign to continue, she added, “You would gain access to magic, through me.”

Magic.

Magic was something no one on Earth had. Oh, sure, there were power sets that could manipulate probability and do all sorts of things that looked like magic, but none of it actually was. Besides, it’s magic. It’d be worth it just to see what it can do.

With that thought in mind, Marsh asked, “If I agree to this, can you knock me out first?”

He could almost feel the lich roll her eyes. “Fine, you big baby. Is that a yes?”

“Yes, it’s a—,” Marsh agreed, only to be cut off as the crystal in his hand pulsed and he passed out, slumping over the steering wheel.

“Well, at least this means I don’t have to go the brute force route. I’ll try to be gentle,” the lich promised.

In Marshal’s hand, the crystal brightened as tiny filaments protruded from it, piercing the flesh of his hand and going straight for bone. Eva had not lied—merely not given Marshal the entire truth. While the majority of the crystal would find a new home around his ribs, the rest would stretch out fine pieces of itself across the rest of his body to create what would eventually look like a secondary nervous system.