It started out the same as every other day that had come before it. The sun rose in the East, as always. It was a Sunday, the day that God took a vacation and gave Christians the excuse to be lazy. The Packers were hosting St. Louis in Green Bay, where the temperature had fallen below freezing.
Simultaneously, at four points across the globe…everything changed.
Phoenix, Arizona was obliterated by a nuclear blast that produced all the destruction with none of the radioactive fallout.
Moscow, Russia was annihilated by a laser shot from the stars, striking with the force of a dozen Hiroshimas.
Rome, Italy was cut off from the world when the dead rose from their graves, hungry for human flesh.
Belfast, Ireland was quarantined by the United Kingdom when time stood still and began to play in reverse, converging hundreds of conflicting timelines into one physical space.
The World Storm had begun...
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OMEGA
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“The Calm”
“I saw this in an old comic book,” the 16 year old girl said, her voice muffled by the cigarette clinched between her lips, “but I’ve got no bloody fucking idea if it’ll actually work. Cheers, mates...”
Her name was Jennifer Quantum, the Spirit of the 21st Century, and the year was 2016. Eight years since the first fires of the World Storm, and Earth had only gone downhill since. Squatting on the floor of the dusty, broken room that had once been the command center of a team of monster hunters called Wetworks, Jenny scrawled a protective circle with a piece of pink chalk.
“It’s not magic, not really,” she stated to her companions, who circled around her like warrior angels, “I’m not the Doctor or anything. But I am the Spirit of this fucked up century, so theoretically I should be able to move through any point of time between 2000 and 2099.”
“But will it actually change anything,” the woman with the wings asked, “or will it just branch into another glitter on the snowflake?” Shen-Li Min had been a member of the Authority, before they were all murdered by the Horsemen. Now Swift was the only family member that Jenny had left.
“That’s just stupid,” Jenny answered. “Our actions don’t determine how realities diverge, that’s shit on a purely cosmic scale. If that were the case, there’d be an alternate dimension every time I or anyone else said ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’ to every bloody question ever asked. No, if we do this right, we won’t even remember the last horrid decade or so because it won’t have happened.”
The third member of their party remained silent, his emotions hidden behind his smooth silver facemask while he field checked his M-16 assault rifle. Jaeger Weiss was the only surviving member of Stormwatch’s elite Team Achilles unit, the lone human member of Jennifer Quantum’s crew of survivors. Whereas before Weiss had worn his face shield to protect his beautiful features, it now hid a scarred visage destroyed by the horrors of the war in which they had long been embroiled.
“What if we make things worse?” the fourth hero spoke up, crossing her arms worriedly beneath her large bust. Caitlin Fairchild, former leader of the young hero group Gen 13, felt the pain of survivor’s guilt as much as the others, if not more so. Once she had been confident in her abilities, but now she was nothing but a shattered emotional wreck of a young woman, constantly second-guessing everything. An optimist turned pessimistic by the deaths she had witnessed.
Jenny shot her a smirk and a wink. “Honestly, Kate,” she answered while lighting a cigarette with her fingertip, “tell me how things could be worse than they are right now?”
“We can’t stay here long,” Jaeger finally spoke up, the handheld motion detector in the palm of his left hand beginning to beep in a slow rhythm. “Get on with it already.”
“You got the date and locations memorized, right?” Swift asked as she embraced Jenny in a hug.
“Trust me, that’s info I’ll never forget,” Quantum replied, returning her ‘aunt’s’ embrace, “You just make sure my arse stays safe until I make it back.”
Stepping into the center of the circle, Jenny flicked her cigarette out into the darkness. “Vaya con dios, mates.”
And then she collapsed into a heap, her limbs falling just inside the circle. Fairchild and Swift stepped closer to their friend, wondering if their desperate plan would work at all. “Astral Projection,” Caitlin explained, “all we’ve got left here is an empty husk until she gets back.”
“What I’m wondering,” Swift replied, “is if she’s gone back, shouldn’t things already be different? Would a change be instantaneous?”
“Fuck!” Jaeger shouted as he dropped the motion detector to the floor, his free hand ratcheting the safety of his assault rifle. “We have incoming, ladies…four hostiles bearing down in about thirty seconds!”
“This is it, then?” Caitlin asked, taking Shen’s hand in hers as the sound of their impending deaths was heard echoing through the abandoned Wetworks headquarters.
“We keep Jenny alive,” Swift ordered, “that’s all that’s important now.”
The southern wall dissolved before their eyes, liquefied by a power that was immeasurable. The three heroes took defensive positions in front of their leader’s empty body, each of them hoping that Quantum would return quickly.
The Four Horsemen had arrived, eager to inflict horror upon their victims.
Jenny Quantum was a ghost, walking through four parts of the globe simultaneously yet unable to touch or affect the physical world around her. The jump had been successful; she had safely emerged eight years in the past.
It was the day the World Storm would begin, and she had no idea how to stop it.
In Phoenix she walked through the mid-morning traffic and hustle-bustle typical of an American city before the world changed. In Rome and Belfast, she crept along empty alleyways in the middle of the night. In Moscow it was late evening, locked in a vicious snow-storm. No one looked twice at her; no human could perceive her existence.
None but the four people she had come back in time to find…
Moscow, Russia.
Jennifer would have looked out of place in her tank top and light jacket in the middle of a blizzard that had all but crippled the city, had anyone been able to perceive her. It was in Moscow’s fabled Red Square that the event would happen, and she’d made it there with just minutes to spare. It would have been so much easier if she could simply kill her targets before they activated, but most of Jenny’s immense power was locked in her body eight years in the future. All she could do was warn them and bear witness.
She walked through the crowd until she spotted them. The young couple was dancing in the center of the Square, laughing as they played in the falling snow that had sent most to find shelter. Angliana Knox and her fiancé, the boy whose name fell into obscurity after the World Storm, had nary a care in the world, living life as it passed day by day.
“Angliana!” Jenny shouted, but her voice was drowned out by the crack of thunder in the heavens above them. Everyone in the Square, save Quantum, looked skyward to see the clouds parting in a swirl pattern, opening up the stars in a moment that could only be called beautiful.
“No, please,” Jennifer whispered as she drew closer. She had been too late after all.
The laser, the full stellar power of a planetary alignment, shot through the Earth from the stars…Angliana Knox being the epicenter of the blast. The cosmic energy struck the young Russian girl and exploded outward in a circular radius, obliterating the great city in an expanding wave of destruction.
It was over in a matter of moments, and only two people stood alive in the decimated heart of Moscow. Angliana Knox looked at Jennifer Quantum, her body still radiating the stuff of stars, and then promptly collapsed.
Caitlin Fairchild could smell her nigh-invulnerable skin cooking as her hand reached for the Horseman called Syzygy. Flesh blistered and melted as she grabbed the woman by the throat, Fairchild having grit her teeth to help ignore the pain. Syzygy laughed an evil cackle.
“As much as I enjoyed murdering your teammates, girl,” the Horseman hissed through Caitlin’s clenched fist, slowly breaking her neck, “I’ve always thought your death would be something special.”
Syzygy amplified the cosmic field of energy that surrounded her body, blowing it outward to free her from the Gen-Active girl’s grip. Caitlin was thrown backward, her clothes and flesh vaporizing under the onslaught of the Horseman’s power. “I was born in the light of a thousand supernovas,” the woman that had previously gone by the name Angliana Knox boasted as she approached the fallen Fairchild.
Bleeding internally, her consciousness trying to fade on her, Caitlin refused to lie down and die. She slammed her fist against the ground, her incredible strength rocking the floor of the complex down to its foundation. Syzygy hovered into the air, avoiding the tremor, and casually knocked aside the follow up chunk of concrete that Fairchild had heaved toward her.
“Say hello to the sun for me, bitch,” the Horseman insulted as she looked to the ceiling. Fairchild struggled to get to her feet, to rush her enemy with all of her remaining strength. She wasn’t going to die this day, not after all she’d lived through.
Caitlin Fairchild died instantly as the star-blast blew through the building’s roof, engulfing her in stellar fire that left nothing but a charred skeleton of the heroic young woman. Angliana Knox dusted the palms of her hand. “You are now the stuff of stars, Ms. Fairchild.”
Rome, Italy.
Jennifer entered the church with trepidation, the empty hall illuminated by the flickering flames of hundreds of candles. The cemetery squatted behind the church, only mere blocks away from the Vatican itself, and she knew she would find the object of her search inside the discarded house of God.
Alexis Giovanni sat in the first pew, rosary gripped in her shaking hands as she recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over in a voice barely above a whisper. Jennifer approached from the left side, cautious yet hurried by her diminishing timeline. This had been the most unexplained of the World Storm events, the exact time of the plague only guessed upon in correlation with the other three.
There was blood on the Giovanni girl’s hands and clothes, but it was unclear if it belonged to her or to someone else.
“Alexis?” Quantum asked as she knelt down in front of the girl. “You have to listen to me, I know this will sound bloody crazed, but you’re about to do something horrible. You have to think about what’s happening, about what you can do to stop it.”
“How can I stop it?” she asked, revealing the large puncture wound in her abdomen. “How can I still live when I should be dead?”
“Oh bloody hell,” Jenny whispered as she stood and took a step backward, “it’s already started, hasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Alexis replied before she broke into tears.
Jenny heard the sirens coming from outside the church, followed by the screams. “You should run now,” Giovanni advised as she stood from the pew and walked toward the exit at the front of the church. Jenny followed Alexis outside, into the horror.
The dead had arisen in Rome, and they were taking their bloody vengeance out upon the city that had neglected to mourn them.
The dead things, the creatures animated by a plague of Biblical proportions, poured into the compound, wave after wave falling into bullet riddled piles as Jaeger Weiss stood his ground in the corner of the room. He narrowed his eyes beneath his face shield, cursing to himself in his native German tongue.
They were not zombies, he told himself, because that would be just plain ridiculous.
Suddenly, the army of undead stopped their advancement, pausing to part the way for their mistress. The woman, the second Horseman of Armageddon, called herself Nether after discarding her human name of Alexis Giovanni. Her flesh, rotted and diseased, glowed with an unearthly luminescence of pale blue, while her smile revealed rows of blackened teeth. “Come to me, Jaeger Weiss,” she beckoned with outstretched arms, “and experience the sweet kiss of oblivion.”
Jaeger replied with a pull of his trigger, his empty rifle exchanged for the Desert Eagle handgun in his hip holster. The slug struck the Horseman directly between the eyes, rocking her backward into the shambling horde that she controlled. It couldn’t be that easy, he wondered to himself.
His question was answered when Nether shuffled back onto her feet, her razored fingers digging the bullet out of her skull. Jaeger knelt down and continued firing, though none of his shots stopped her forward advancement. It was then that Jaeger recognized the creatures heading toward him at their commander’s side. Ben Santini, Victoria Ngengi, Khalid Tefibi…all of his teammates in Team Achilles, slain and revived as part of Nether’s vast army of the dead.
“All it takes is a touch,” Nether explained as she reached forward, now within arm’s length of the soldier, “and you will rejoin your brethren once more.”
“Eat shit, monster,” Jaeger ordered as he removed the grenade from his flak vest. His thumb pressed down on the detonator, enveloping the surrounding zombie horde in an explosion that rocked the large chamber that had proven to be the heroes’ Alamo.
When the dust settled, the desiccated Alexis Giovanni was the only one left standing, unable to die once again.
Belfast, Ireland.
Walking into The Lion’s Mouth pub, Jenny spoke a soft “thank you” that she wasn’t able to smell the air. The patrons of the pub were of a swarthy sort, unkempt and unwashed, not the kind of lot one would bring home to their mothers. It was here that she would find the man she was looking for, blind stinking drunk as he was.
Chester Fagan, 29 year old Kinsmen, jumped onto the bar-top table and began to croon along with the jukebox as loud as he could, an ear-splitting rendition of that song from The Commitments. It was obvious from the crowd that while Fagan was having a grand ol’ time, the rest of the patrons weren’t in as jovial a mood as he.
“Oi, Chester!” Jenny shouted from the floor in front of the warbling drunkard. Chester looked down, then immediately fell down, cracking his head against the floor with a sharp thud.
“Listen to me,” Quantum pleaded as Chester made his way groggily to his feet, “something awful is going to happen here and you’re the cause. Just my luck you wouldn’t be fucking sober, huh?”
“I don’t feel so good,” Fagan mumbled before doubling over at the waist. Jenny assumed he was throwing up, but instead the Irishman began to convulse and spasm. Each spasm sent forth a wave of energy that hit most of the people around him like a physical force, toppling and changing them with each irradiating pulse.
“Oh shit,” Jenny complained as the people and objects around her began to flow and ripple, change and distort. It wasn’t reality that was being messed with by Fagan’s power, it was more like…time?
Her theory was proven correct when the Scot with the 16th century claymore broadsword stabbed the 29th century IRA elitist through the chest, causing blood and sparks to fly out the cyborg’s back. Time had skipped a beat, playing the past and future like a broken record in Belfast.
And the quickly sobering Chester Fagan was the cause.
Swift had little room to maneuver in the large room, massive though it may have been. Her wingspan was great for open aerial combat, but not so much in doors. Regardless, she soared over head, ripping apart the undead monstrosities with the talons on her feet. She’d seen Caitlin and Jaeger meet their demise, so it was up to her to keep the helpless Jenny alive.
“Nowhere to run, lassie,” a voice with a thick Irish brogue said from above her, “nowhere to hide.”
Shen flew higher in the great chamber, met by the floating Horseman named Stutter. His long blonde hair and braided goatee accented the traditional Irish uniform wrapped around him, kilt and all. “Ever had yer ass kicked in by a man in a skirt?” he asked with a wicked grin.
Swift narrowed her eyes and dove forward, her clawed fingers itching to rip into the murderer’s flesh. But, as he had proven multiple times before, it was impossible to strike a man that could step between seconds; disappearing as Shen flew through the open air where he had hovered only to reappear instantaneously across the room. “Let’s have a change of scenery, shall we?”
With a snap of his fingers, the room changed for he and Swift. Instead of the Wetworks compound in the 21st century, they were now in a near pitch-black cave some-when approximate to the dawn of civilization. Shen collided hard with a descending spire of stone from the cave’s ceiling, disorientation and concussion causing her to crash down upon the cold wet floor.
Chester Fagan was atop her before she could reorient herself, and with a touch of his fingers upon her chest – time flowed and rippled once more, changing not the setting but instead changing her. Replacing the fierce woman with the wings of death sat a scared and timid girl of 11 years; Shen-Li Min regressed back to a point before her power had been activated.
“Enjoy yer stay,” Stutter remarked before disappearing, returning himself to the present time, “you won’t be leaving”.
Phoenix, Arizona.
Jenny stepped into the fast-food restaurant, walking through closed doors like an apparition. The young black man behind the register smiled through the black eye and swollen jaw, results of the fight he’d lost the night before. “Welcome to McDonald’s,” he said to the girl approaching the counter, “may I take your order?”
“Jason Rusch,” Quantum addressed, “are you Jason Rusch?”
Tapping on the nametag affixed to his shirt, the young man nodded and smiled. “Do I know you?”
“We don’t have time for a sodding meet and greet,” Jenny answered with a caustic tone, “because you’re about to become one of the biggest mass murderers in human history.”
Jason took a step backward, stunned into silence by the young girl’s accusation.
Before either could speak again, another intruder entered the restaurant; an unshaven and unkempt man, bearded and grizzled with a trenchcoat covering his tattered clothes. The shotgun was produced from the coat’s lining, and a raving psychotic list of demands began to spew forth from his voice-box. He wanted money, food, anything to make his life less of a daily hell than it most assuredly was. When nothing was handed to him in the crucial seconds after his entrance, he aimed his shotgun at the first person he saw and pulled the trigger.
“No!” Jason screamed as he saw the flash of the muzzle right before the buckshot ripped into his chest, blowing the hole the size of a basketball through his back. When that happened, Jenny closed her eyes and cursed.
The maniac had just detonated the world’s most destructive nuclear bomb.
Jennifer Quantum’s helpless body laid still in the middle of the protective circle scrawled onto the floor, unaware of the carnage that had taken place around her. Her three protectors were dead or gone, murdered by three of the four Horsemen of Armageddon. It was then that the fourth Anti-Angel descended to the floor, the billowing flame cascading from the top of his head illuminating the darkness that threatened to swallow them whole.
He had once been named Jason Rusch, but that changed the day of the World Storm. He was he Horseman of Nuclear War…he was the Fire Storm.
“How lovely to see you again, Ms. Quantum,” he mocked as he cautiously touched the air around her, stopping when the sparks threatened to burn his fingertips. There was a protective bubble around her, a shield-field created by a bastard mingling of science and magic.
The Fire Storm extended his hand with an open palm and closed his eyes. “Change.”
A flash of light exampled the power of the chosen of his infernal majesty, the atomic manipulation of reality’s building blocks the gift bestowed upon him by a genetic aberration. The air surrounding Jennifer’s bubble burst into flames, the ground surrounding it bubbling into quick sand. Nothing could harm her, he realized, and thought quickly on what the girl’s plan could possibly be.
Simultaneously, in the year 2009, Jennifer Quantum did the only thing she could think of to the four people fate had chosen to destroy the world. She touched each of them, making physical contact despite her wraith-like existence in the past. The Spirit of the 21st Century furrowed her brow and tapped into the near-unlimited potential of her power. “If I can’t stop you,” she said sternly before she was enveloped in a burst of pure, white light, “then maybe I can guide you.”
The burst of pure, white light was echoed in 2016, exploding from Jenny’s body and shocking her back to life, blinding and disorienting the Four Horsemen that surrounded her. The Fire Storm was the first to recover, his visual perception much different than that of a normal human’s, and as such was the first to see Jenny Quantum – potentially the most powerful creature in existence – step out of her protective field.
“What have you done?” Rusch asked the smiling girl, who paused to light a cigarette before answering.
“Simple, you tosser,” she replied with a puff of smoke blown in the murderer’s face, “I changed the fucking past.”
The Fire Storm’s eyes widened in realization.
“It should be catching up to me any second now,” Jenny explained. “Cheers.”
And then the world died, consumed by reality re-writing itself. History had been altered, but had the World Storm been averted? Had the sacrifice of Jenny and her allies been worth the pain and strife, or were they doomed to live out a reality much, much worse?
No one knew….
Yet…
To Be Continued...
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