For Blood or Justice Read online

  FOR BLOOD OR JUSTICE

  Stormkind: Book 1

  By Chuck Regan

  ‘For Blood or Justice’, and ‘Stormkind' are ©2019 Chuck Regan

  First Printing June 2019

  Amazon KDP / Rayguns & Mayhem

  www.chuckregan.com/stormkind

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  DEMENTED AND SAD, BUT SOCIAL

  WHEN THE WALLS GO UP

  KATARAKT

  BLACKOUT

  MINI WRACK

  PART TWO

  DAN’S APARTMENT

  TO THE ROOF

  THE FREE ZONE

  SWAMP MONSTERS

  I’M SWAMPED

  NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES

  COMMUNICATION 101

  THE NOOB WALK OF SHAME

  A WARNING FROM SPACE

  REALITY CHECK

  FIELD TRIP FOR NOOBS

  SO, AM I A SIDEKICK NOW?

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  PART THREE

  BLOODSTOCK DOING HIS THING

  THE RED WEB

  THE HERO’S CALL TO ADVENTURE

  KATARAKT, ACT TWO

  HOW DO YOU SPELL…?

  LEARNING TO DANCE

  REPERCUSSIONS

  PART FOUR

  A REAL TOUGH GUY

  THE DARK TUNNEL INTO THE FUTURE

  THADDEUS ORMOND

  THE CAPE SHOP

  ORB

  THE TEST

  THE FINAL TEST

  YOUR IMAGE CONSULTANT WILL SEE YOU NOW

  PART FIVE

  BLOODSTOCK’S STAKEOUT

  BLOODSTOCK AT HOME

  four color gold comics & GAMES

  AUTOBUS 124

  PART SIX

  A VISITATION

  THE NEW COSTUME

  OLD FRIENDS

  THE INCIDENT

  PART SEVEN

  BLOODSTOCK DOES HIS THING AGAIN

  WE HAVE A FEW QUESTIONS

  THE PAINFUL TRUTH

  CAMDEN SUBSTRATE

  THE REWRACK FACTORY

  MERCY BITES

  PROLOGUE

  1890

  The Ghosa meteor (Ghosa : Sanskrit - ’the roaring of a storm’) crashes in the Indian Ocean, washing the planet with an unknown form of radiation.

  1912

  Pubescent children across the globe are afflicted with crippling headaches and convulsions, then collapse into comas. Many die. Those who survive, most return to normal function and live out normal lives. A small percentage of survivors are monstrously deformed. Even fewer emerge transformed into godlike beings with extraordinary abilities.

  The disease is called The Wrack. The super beings which emerge are given the designation of Sturmkinder (German for ‘Storm Children’) later truncated to Stormkind. The monsters are described by many words. Most of these unfortunates are euthanized. The world adapts to this new world of gods and monsters. Scientists with superhuman intelligence rapidly propel the sciences forward.

  1943

  Extraterrestrial invaders called The Gryn attack Earth and attempt to collect all remaining traces of the Ghosa meteor. World governments work together to repel the aggressive aliens. The hero Ultus leads an international group called The Pact. Working in tandem with world governments, they defeat The Gryn.

  1982

  Governments struggle to remain relevant in a world where one percent of the population has the power to single-handedly destroy cities. Retro-engineered Gryn technologies have filtered into the black market. Stormkind criminal organizations maneuver to take over the government.

  Dan Haeckel, a newly registered hero, stands in his basement apartment, covered in blood.

  PART ONE

  DEMENTED AND SAD, BUT SOCIAL

  July, 1981

  Fifteen Months Ago

  5:37 pm

  Dan Haeckel snorted cola out his nose onto his computer screen. Brown drops dribbled down the image of a potbellied man posing in blue sweatpants with a yellow cape, gold boots and gloves. His mask was made of craft foam and duct tape spray painted gold.

  “No way,” Dan coughed, wiping the screen with the bottom of his shirt.

  “What?” Scott said from his room.

  “You gotta see this guy. Calls himself The Blue Gull,” Dan coughed. “Jerry said he saw him last night. His costume . . . man, it’s so bad . . . I can’t tell if he’s being ironic or just stupid.”

  Scott leaned over Dan’s Garamond computer and looked at the screen. The reek of cologne curled off him like ripples of heat distortion.

  “Dude. You trying to poison me?” Dan winced, swatting the vapors.

  “No. That guy’s serious . . . ” Scott said. “Seriously demented.”

  “Dude.” Dan pushed Scott away to a safe distance. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Why you always on that netsite?” Scott said. “You goin’ full color, or what?”

  “Yeah, right.” Dan laughed. “I’m researching costumes to come out as a hero. You caught me.”

  Scott waited for Dan to say more. “Oh, so you’re joking,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me.” Then, added, “So, you comin’ out with us, or what?”

  Dan leaned back, making the trash-picked office chair squeal like a rat pinched under a car tire. “Nah, I gotta open tomorrow.”

  “Heck, you work in a comic shop!”

  Scott always called Dan Heck when he wanted something out of him. He wanted a ride, Dan figured. Scott had burned through the last of his friends who owned cars.

  Scott had put together a music demo last month, and it was getting, as Scott put it, ‘some hardcore rotation.’ Dan figured it was something Scott just liked to say in hopes it would become a self-fulfilling prophesy, but his friends kept dropping to the side, sacrificed in Scott’s quest for legitimacy.

  Scott had been pimping that demo to every DJ in every club in Philadelphia, and had been going out clubbing every night trying to make himself relevant. It was that desperation that drove him to ditch his friends so he could connect to real business people as Scott called them.

  “Where you going tonight?” Dan said, trying to sound disinterested.

  “Katarakt.”

  It was one of the clubs Dan could tolerate. Decent music. Good looking people. Mild dysfunctions, little drama. Only a few criminals. Dan recognized at least half of the songs they played there, but the club would probably be filled with stokers, groupies, and soul-sucking vampires vying for attention.

  Scott did his best to try to look the part—hoodie with the sleeves ripped off, bleach-distressed jeans, fingerless gloves, scuffed high top sneakers. Dan had long ago fully embraced his own geek nature and stopped trying to stay trendy. It took too much effort.

  “Nah,” Dan said.

  Dan leaned in to look at the Blue Gull’s stats and scrolled down, ignoring his roommate’s fixed glare. “Says he can fly. That’s legit.”

  Scott puffed out a frustrated breath. Stepping away from the desk, he tripped over a pile of comic books stacked high enough to defy physics. They splayed out like a Vegas dealer’s spread of cards across the floor. Scott shook his head and muttered a half-hearted apology.

  “I’ll get ’em later,” Dan said, fluttering his hand.

  “They’ll never stay mint like that,” Scott said, half teasing.

  Then, as if remembering how he wanted the conversation to go, he added, “Anyway, you know your customers don’t crawl out of their parents’ basements until way after noon anyway. Nobody will notice if you open late.” In the mirror, he picked at his moussed-up bedhead, and tried hard to hide a smirk. He looked like he had some other leverage he was waiting to use on Dan.

  “I take my responsibilities seriously,” Da
n said, imitating the bravado voice of Major Fist from the popular superhero sitcom Flying Colors.

  Scott sniffed out a thin chuckle, trying his hardest for it to sound genuine. Dan didn’t buy it.

  “Huh . . . Savant-Two Durability . . . ” Dan said. “Not lame.”

  Scott folded his arms over the top of the monitor and waited for Dan’s attention.

  “What do you want, Scott?” Dan sighed, still scrolling through stats, waiting for Scott to pull the card he obviously had up his sleeve.

  “Cassy said she wanted you to come.”

  Dan checked Scott’s expression. Scott just smiled, knowing he had just played a winning hand.

  “But you can’t go dressed like that.” Scott waggled his never-lifted-weights-in-his-life finger at Dan’s grungy Zerotrooper1 shirt, a spot of it stained with cola.

  “You look like a comic book geek.”

  “You’re fucking with me. You just need someone to drive you.”

  “I am not fucking with you. She did ask for you. And is that a yes? I gotta know.”

  “No, that’s a my roommate is a selfish prick maybe,” said Dan.

  “C’mo-o-o-on. Cassy’s been asking about you since the party.”

  “You’re a professional asshole, Scott.”

  “No. For real. Yeah, you of all people. You really made an impression on her.”

  Dan looked again at the ridiculous costume on his screen, and had a flash of himself at 40 years old, alone and pathetic, wearing something equally as demented.

  “Alright, but we gotta leave the club by midnight.”

  “Awesome!” Scott clapped his hands. “Go get changed. I’ll wait downstairs.”

  1 - Commander Zero was the leader of a United States jetpack squadron during the Great War of 1912. Mortally wounded from a struggle against the German Stormkind soldier Volkvox, Commander Zero miraculously recovered, gaining super human strength and durability. Renaming himself The Zerotrooper, he joined other heroes in helping fight the enemies of democracy. The Zerotrooper died fighting the Gryn in 1944, but remains one of the most popular comic book and movie characters of today.

  WHEN THE WALLS GO UP

  Fifteen Months Ago

  Dan’s Ford Deuso2 squealed to a halt. Even with the Eco-stimulus program offering rebates off the purchase price of a cheap electric car, on his salary, he was stuck with what he had. The Deuso was good for another year or two, unless all the fueling stations in the city switched over to electric-only.

  The Deuso had survived two road trips to Atlanta CapeCon, and one trip to Chicago to see the ruins3. That mandatory capegeek pilgrimage had been the last road trip he and Scott made together. The Deuso was the one reliable thing left in his life.

  With President Kirkpatrick tightening up the laws against vigilantism (and greenhouse gases), and with growing tensions against Russia, the news reported a daily upswing in crime. All of this seemed to stimulate a rise in comic book sales. People needed their escapes. For now, Dan had a stable job and a somewhat stable mode of transportation. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.

  Traffic was really slow. “Isn’t there a march tonight?”

  “What?” said Scott, startled back from staring out the passenger side window.

  “About the Slug Bill. 313? A march about it tonight?”

  “Shit. Should’ve taken Nixon Boulevard,” Scott said. “I was supposed to meet them at the doors at seven. Fucking political bullshit. I think people should just mind their own business and focus on getting jobs. Or work on their hobbies. Or—”

  “Engage internal soundproofing!” Dan poked at an empty section of his peeling dash padding.

  “God,” Scott sniffed. “Maybe you should just drop me off. I’ll find a ride home.”

  “I really need to get that quantum actuator fixed.” Dan said.

  It was an old joke between them. In a roleplaying game campaign, their characters had to disarm a Gryn battleship by disabling a piece of equipment called the quantum actuator. That in-game technobabble had become a running joke between them.

  Dan searched Scott for any acknowledgement of their shared nerd roots, but Scott was staring at Dan’s hands. They were trembling on the wheel.

  Dan tightened his fingers around the grip and waited for the traffic light to change.

  “You still having side effects?” Scott asked gently.

  “No,” Dan said, gripping tighter.

  “You had your Wrack, what . . . ten years ago?” Scott nodded to Dan’s quaking fingers. “That shouldn’t still be going on.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The light turned green. Traffic didn’t move.

  “I’m just saying, Jimmy Barnes got that levitating thing he can do, like five years after his Wrack.”

  “Yeah, well, Jimmy is an idiot. I didn’t jump off a bridge to try to get powers.”

  “Sometimes that just happens whether you almost kill yourself or not,” Scott said. “You sure you got no powers?”

  “I’m a zero . . . just like you-u,” Dan whisper-sang last summer’s hit song.4

  “You’d tell me if you did, though . . . right?” Scott sounded serious—more serious than he had sounded in the last few months.

  The traffic still didn’t move.

  “Heck! You’d tell me if you got powers, wouldn’t you?” Scott continued. “I mean, we’d still be friends and all. You can trust I wouldn’t tell anyone. Remember, we made that blood oath.”

  Dan huffed a laugh. “We picked scabs off our knuckles when we were twelve. I don’t think that counts as a blood oath.”

  The summer before they headed to high school, Scott had dared him to go to the Free Zone, where mutant slugs lived in the ruins of the old city. They never even got close to the fence surrounding the zone. Three older kids had cornered them. They had scraped their knuckles in the struggle to get away. It was a month later that Dan had begun convulsing during civics class and was hospitalized for symptoms of a Wrack onset.

  Still nothing but brake lights.

  “I mean . . . ” Scott pulled away and lowered his voice. “You’re always on that Capes and Hoods netsite, like you’re researching costumes or something . . . You did get powers, didn’t you?”

  Dan pulled his hands off the wheel and sighed.

  “Dan?” said Scott warily.

  Dan lowered his head.

  “Dude, I knew it! You’ve been holding out on me! What ya get?”

  Dan pushed his palm at Scott’s face.

  Scott flinched away.

  “BEHOLD!” Dan bellowed. “The TREMOR!”

  His fingers trembled.

  Scott’s eyes bounced between Dan’s hand and face, then relaxed and shook his head. “You’re such a dick.”

  Dan chuckled and put his hands back on the wheel.

  “Not funny, dude,” muttered Scott.

  “This isn’t from the march. That’s all the way down on South Street.” Dan craned his neck to look at the intersection ahead.

  Scott muttered, “Shoulda took Nixon.”

  The car engine shut off with an electronic ping.

  “Aw, come on!” Scott snapped.

  The car’s dashboard speaker buzzed an alert sound and the intersection ahead lit up with orange, pulsing, holographic warning bars. A fuzzy, electronic woman’s voice rasped through the car’s old speakers.

  “A skirmish is in effect. Stay in your vehicle for your own safety. Emergency shielding has been activated in your area,” the voice said.

  “Can you see anything?” Dan rolled down his window and scanned the sky. Orange stripes crawled between rooftops, shielding the street from any debris.

  The transparent shimmering force wall blocked the intersection ahead, flashing the word WARNING. Animated banner ads for Metronome Insurance and Valence Construction played on either side of the holographic shielding. Passengers stumbled out of their vehicles, getting their camcorders and phones ready, hoping to get a closer look at whatever was going on.5

&nbs
p; “Stay in the caaar,” Scott groaned.

  “I want to see who it is!” Dan opened the door.

  A boom resonated through the street, and a blur of brown and blue streaked across the intersection.

  “Holy shit! That was Detrode6!” Dan said.

  “How could you tell?”

  “But he was supposed to be teamed up with CyGar7 in Atlanta!” Dan said, grinning full-toothed. “Wait’ll I tell Jerry.”

  “You are such a geek.”

  2 - The Ford Deuso was a hydrogen-fuel cell compact car introduced in the early 1950s. It became popular with fans of the 1972 sci-fi comedy TV show, Chipper, about a yellow early-model Deuso with a robotic brain.

  3 - In what has come to be known as The Chicago Incident, an unregistered Stormkind emerged from his or her Wrack with powers which could not be contained. The Unnamed Stormkind destroyed most of the city of Chicago, causing an estimated 2.3 million deaths.

  4 - ‘Just a Zero’ by Anklesaurus held the #1 spot for three weeks in the August 1980 Billboard Chart. It was their only hit song.

  5 - The Emergency Domestic Protection Protocols made it mandatory to equip electronic kill switches on all vehicles except for emergency response, police, military, and government vehicles. The law went into effect during President Nixon’s first term. The kill switches work in tandem with the EDPP’s force walls which are installed on all urban structures.

  6 - Detrode rates as a high strength and durability (a type of hero known as a ‘tank’) member of the Ultimates, a high-profile team which is contracted with the US Government to respond to attacks by unknown or unlicensed Stormkinds on domestic soil.

  7 - CyGar is an android with the ability to transform into a swarming cloud of microbots, used most commonly against high-tech criminals. His origins remain a mystery, but speculations point to him traveling from an alternate-Earth dimension where Nikola Tesla survived well into the 1970s and created CyGar to host Tesla’s digitized mind.

  KATARAKT

  Fifteen Months Ago

  9:46 pm

  Dusk was crawling across the sky as Dan looked for an empty spot in the full parking lot. Scott was focused on the cars, not on spaces between them.