New Mutants Unlimited 25

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New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by Alexander "Cadmus" Baptiste on Dec 15, 2006, 1:47pm

New Mutants Unlimited #25
A Little Carnage in New York

Cover Description: Osmosis Lass is standing on a torn up street in the form of some type of metal. She is facing the "camera" with her fists up as if she were boxing. A few blood red blades are protruding from her body. Somebody's shadow is extending towards her but the owner of said shadow is standing in front of the "camera."

Writer's Note: This story takes place sometime after New Mutants 110 - Handbasket Express

***

It was a little dive of a diner. Every city has its fair share of them. Or every city had its fair share of them. Before the world itself shuddered before the power that was Calamity. But that's neither here nor there. This was one of the ones that had survived. More often then not you know what to expect when you walk in. Cozy atmosphere. Not as clean as it could be, but not dirty enough to deter you from entering. A few booths, a few tables. Middle aged waitress, possibly one that possesses a southern accent and says "Sugah". Guy taking orders at the counter, yelling them out to the cook in the back. You know. Standard fare.

But as the small unassuming figure of Jonathon Norton walked into "Craig's Diner" he quickly learned that today would be filled with anything but standard fare.

The first thing that he noticed was the smell. It hit him like a truck. The place reeked of rotten meat. If only he hadn't seen the splash of red on the wall next to him he could have backed out to go find a nice place to vomit. But he wasn't so lucky. His curious nature caused him to examine the diner further. And then he got to see. See the bodies, most of them still in their booths. A couple of them looked like they tried to get up but it appeared that they didn't manage to get far. All dead. Blades of red were protruding from most of their bodies. Blood was everywhere. The head of a middle aged waitress, who may have had a southern accent and liked to say "Sugah", was on the floor.

Everybody was dead. Everyone but a tall, somewhat scrawny, redheaded man in a white tank top and beige cargo pants. He was eating a sandwich.

Johnny wanted to scream. To run. Hell, he would have settled for being able to wet his pants. But he couldn't move at all. Like a…

"Deer caught in headlights, eh?"

The redheaded man acknowledged he was there. Johnny still couldn't make his feet move.

"My work tends to have that affect on people. Now I know what you may be thinking and I want to clear it up right now. I'm not crazy. You'd think so, but no. Let me just explain and you'll see. I didn't come here to kill a bunch of people. I came because I was hungry. If things went down smoothly nobody would have had to be hurt, I swear. Well… maybe the old guy in the corner. But that's it. I was just eating my turkey sandwich when the waitress, sexy southern accent by the way, asks if I wanted anything else. So I say give me a slice of apple pie. No not that kind of pie you naughty boy, it wasn't a double entendre. Just some hot apple pie. So, get this, she asks me if I wanted a free scoop of ice cream with my pie. There was a special apparently. Can you believe that woman? Hell yes I want the free ice cream! What kind of question was that? Clearly she had to be removed from the gene pool. So I cut I her fucking head off.."

The man sat there grinning as he thought about his deed.

"But at that point I was too worked up to stop. Taking lives is like eating Lays. Not being able to take just one and all that. So everyone else had to die. I hope you see now. Why I did what I did. Why I'm clearly not the insane one. And why you have to die now too."

As the redheaded man got up from his table Johnny screamed inside his head, telling his legs to work, but to no avail. On the upside though he did finally manage to wet himself. The man cut his shoulder with a nearby butter knife. It wasn't a particularly deep cut or a wide cut and he had to saw at it for a little while to make it. It was a butter knife after all. But it bled profusely. But it couldn't be blood could it? Blood didn't warp and move on its own and cover the entire body like that. It didn't have swirls of black. Nor did it form a maw with rows upon rows of teeth.

"Ladies and gentlemen… children of all ages. CARNAGE is in the building."

Johnny realized that the smell of rotten meat from earlier was the creature that enveloped the man with red hair. Finally able to move, Johnny fell to the ground and retched. As Carnage stepped towards Johnny he considered how pathetic it was that vomiting would be his final act. Carnage's hand morphed into an axe as he raised it into the air. Before he brought it down the two of them heard a sound… whimpering…

"Eh?"

It was coming from one of the side booths. Both of them turned their heads. It was a little girl. Couldn't have been older than five - maybe six, tops. An older woman, possibly her grandmother, had lunged on top of her earlier when all hell had broken loose. A blade of red protruded from the old lady's back. She was on the floor now. Not being in the most balanced position when she died, it was only a matter of time before she rolled off the booth seat. But in doing so, she revealed the little survivor's body. The realization of what that meant probably accounts for the whimpers.

"Well now. One still alive? That's not like me. Not like me at all." He held up one hand limply and slapped the back of it with the other. "Bad Carnage. Bad. I gotta say, I'm disappointed in myself. But you know what they say. If at first you don't succeed. True, I didn't get in the first wave like I should have…" He looked down at the crumpled form that was Johnny. "But that can stay between us, right old boy?"

Carnage raised a hand to face the little girl, who had not moved so much as an inch and was still whimpering. Yet another blade slowly grew out of the palm of his hand. Considering how fast he had shifted the same hand into an axe and back again earlier, Johnny concluded that it was taking so long now purely for the sake of dramatic effect. The ear to ear smile on his blood red face seemed to confirm the suspicion. Good. Johnny thought. Gives me just enough time to update what my last act is going to be.

Making more movement than he had since he first stepped in and saw the bodies littering the diner, Jonathan leapt to his feet and put himself between the girl and Carnage. He stretched out his arms in a "You shall not pass" sort of fashion, but said nothing at all. It's entirely possible that he couldn't have spoken if he had wanted to - he was once more feeling very "deer caught in headlights" as opposed to feeling like Gandalf. Though you would doubt that it was possible, Carnage smiled even wider.

"Wow. Just… wow. This is priceless. No, really man. Between the wet spot in your crotch and the chunks on the floor over there, I just didn't think that you had anything even resembling this in you. You've got some cojones on you after all. Or, at the very least, a cojone. I almost respect that. Almost. In fact, I almost respect it just enough -"

Jonathan never saw it coming. Few would have. The speed at which the two tendrils had emerged from Carnage's chest and entered Jonathan’s eyes and emerged through the back of his head was blinding.

"that I'm not going to make you watch when I do that to her."

***

The city was still a complete and utter mess. To be fair, that could be expected. It was only a couple weeks after The Calamity Event - as Nadia liked to refer to it in her mind - after all. No amount of construction crews could have set things right in such a short span of time. Even Damage Control, who seemed to be on every street that Nadia walked past, were clearly in far over their heads. Looking around at the mayhem that engulfed New York, Nadia wondered if it was like this everywhere else in the country. Was it like this everywhere else in the world? It would make sense that The Calamity Event would have been most powerful at its epicenter and places farther away would have taken less damage. But just how powerful were the quakes that spread through the world? Powerful enough that even at diminished levels it could have done the same thing to, say, London, or Rome that it did to New York? At the thought of Italy, Nadia chuckled at thought of whether or not the Leaning Tower of Pisa was still standing. She immediately felt bad about it. Nothing about The Calamity should have been funny.

Nadia had been terrified of ever setting foot back in New York City again. The last time she was here, she had been completely out of control. Her body had remade it self as some sort of cyborg and she couldn't exert any control whatsoever over her actions. Oh, she was able to watch alright. She was aware of every little thing that she was doing. But it was as if some body else was in the driver's seat. She had torn a swath through downtown and caused all sorts of property damage. To this day she considers it a miracle that she didn't kill anybody. Until Phantazia anyway… but she didn't like to think about that. There was no telling how far she would have gone if Greg had not shown up and stopped her. She didn't like thinking about him these days either - mostly because there was no way to know if he was still alive. She didn't think that she could bare to face the city again, partially because of guilt and partially because she didn't know if the police had ever managed to identify her and she really didn't want to find out what the law did to out of control teen mutants. All of that, however, was then. This is now. After The Calamity, Nadia figured that it was safe to say that she just plain didn't rank too high on anybody's Wanted list. She had kept her eyes on the news when she first arrived at the X-Mansion (which was now an Ex-Mansion) and Damage Control had cleaned up the majority of her mess inside of a week. This though? Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Nobody had any sort of estimate on how long it would take to rebuild New York… and the rest of the world. Frankly, in light of The Calamity, nobody gave a damn that a random superhuman tore up downtown for the six millionth time.

Even if they had cared enough to want to (try) to arrest her, they probably would have put it off for another time. They had more pressing concerns. It was weeks later and they were still pulling bodies out of the wreckage. Unfortunately everybody involved had embraced the reality that at this point it was highly unlikely that they would still be able to find survivors. There was always hope - hope has a way of persisting regardless of the odds - but for the most part rescue workers were consigned to finding nothing but mere bodies… the people that once inhabited them having ceased to exist. This realization had hit the rescue workers some time ago. For some reason - perhaps it was hope… Nadia seemed to have more of it than most people - this realization didn't dawn upon Nadia until she had already arrived here. It was the main reason that she had come to the city. She wanted to feel a little bit useful on her day off. With as much destruction as there had been, there simply wasn't enough man power to check out all the wrecks at once. She figured she could look for the living in the places where rescue forces hadn't yet. When you're made of the wind, searching through a crumpled wreck was simple - there was no crack she couldn't push herself through. She had hoped to find survivors down there and point rescue forces in their direction. To be helpful. As you can imagine, she wasn't very lucky. She checked collapsed wreck after collapsed wreck. No luck. The only people she could find were of the dead variety. No, not people. Bodies. That was all that she could find. She didn't bother to try to get any of them out. They weren't going anywhere… and she had severe issues with doing anything that involved corpses. As far as issues go, that's not a bad subject to be freaked out by.

She decided to call it a day after a little over an hour. Seeing everything that Calamity had done from up close had left Nadia sorely depressed. The crushed Ex-Mansion and what she had seen on the news had definitely been bad, but there was something about being there to see the mayhem in person that made everything hit so much harder. All that hope that she possessed was quickly diminishing in this setting. Westchester wasn't exactly sunshine and lollipops either, but at the very least she could crawl into her bed, sit up with the covers over her head and rock back and forth as she hoped for a better tomorrow. Assuming Marisol wasn't in there, or worse, in there with Zephyr. It was impossible to hope that tomorrow would be a better day when you had to look at the crapshoot that today was. She had decided to try to pick up some comfort food for later but another unfortunate effect of The Calamity that should have been obvious made itself clear to her: few grocers, convenience stores and other proprietors of ice cream had survived. The ones that she could find that were still in good shape had yet to reopen. Clearly this just was not meant to be a good day.

"You win this one, God."

No survivors and no ice cream. It was time to pack it in and head home. Perhaps she should have done it immediately - becoming one with the winds and flying back to the Ex-Mansion that is. Or perhaps it was a good thing that she didn't; that she walked that extra half a block first. At the end of the day it all depends on your perspective. Either way, because she had walked that extra half a block, Nadia was close enough to hear a scream. Actually it sounded like a few screams. They were faint, but they still managed to convey… terror. Police cars were headed in the direction of the screaming. Nadia hadn't thought anything of it before. After all, police cars were all over the place, headed in every direction. Along with ambulances, fire trucks and vehicles with "Damage Control" slapped on them, they littered the street. But it was clear now that there was some method to their madness - they were converging on one spot. She didn't even have to think about it, really. She ducked down and touched the concrete of the sidewalk and then she was off.

Her body had become fully concrete long before she arrived at the scene. And what a scene it was. At the epicenter of it all was what Nadia could only assume was a man, though he was covered in a flowing red and black suit. The term "suit" is used loosely. It was thick and liquid… like blood. But even thicker than blood. And it could clearly get harder too. Pieces of it fashioned into blades littered the street. The police that got here ahead of her were opening fire, but it didn't really seem to be having any real effect. It would clearly take some heavier artillery than what the beat cops were packing. He was picking them off like flies with those blades of his. Which leads what really made it a scene that Nadia would never forget so long as she lived: the bodies. They were everywhere. Some stabbed half a dozen times, others missing appendages and a few being pinned to buildings with those blood red blades. Nadia knew that if she was in her human form right now that she would be vomiting. Even in her current form the sight was dizzying. And with every cop the monster (she had been wrong before - there was no way it was a man) cut down, the death toll climbed. Once more, she didn't even have to think about it.

With a running leap, she cleared the police's perimeter with ease and dashed towards the monster in red. The sound of her crashing down on the pavement caused him to turn away from the officers on the other end of the street that he was firing blades at. It didn't matter too much though as she was already on him before he could react. A swift blow to the creature's stomach lifted it off the ground and threw it a good fifteen feet. Rolling a few times it got back up depressingly fast and looked at Osmosis Lass quizzically. Nadia returned the flesh to her mouth leading down to her vocal cords. She felt the need to say something but her shocked, slightly crazed and emotional state kept it from being particularly insightful.

"Who the hell are you? What's your damage? These are people's lives? Haven't they had enough damn it?"

The monster stood upright and grinned.

"Carnage. That would be my name. And this-" He didn't so much as move but a blade fired out of his shoulder and flew through the head of a police officer behind Osmosis Lass. "would be my game. Any more retarded questions, hmm? Or can we skip straight to the evisceration?"

Nadia knew that she would be fighting back tears if she had any tear ducts right now. "Fine. No more retarded qu-" she wasn't able to voice the rest of it as she had once more become fully concrete. Carnage had probably been ably to catch her meaning, however, judging by her speedy advance on him. She leaped at him when she got about five feet away but she was clearly not going to get any more freebies. Carnage was more prepared for her this time. A thick tendril emerged from his chest and cracked at her like a whip. The force of blow negated her forward momentum and then some, sending her flying backwards into the side of a bus. Bouncing off of it and on to the ground Osmosis Lass quickly managed to right herself, only to see that Carnage clearly wasn't one to wait around. A barrage of blood red knives tore through the air at her. Running off to the side, she evaded most of them - though one got caught in her shoulder. The rest were embedded in the side of the bus. Taking on a new tactic, Carnage abandoned the knives in favor of a more hands on approach. He leapt towards her, with his claws looking a lot longer and sharper than they had a moment earlier.

But Osmosis Lass wasn't giving out freebies either. In one swift movement, she ripped a street lamp out of the ground and swung it at Carnage, giving him a taste of his own medicine. Catching him in mid-leap much like he had done to her, Osmosis Lass sent the razor toothed bastard careening into the side of a building. Like her off of the bus, Carnage dropped down towards the ground - only he had to fall about thirty feet. She almost smiled. Almost. But she never really got the chance. It was disheartening, how quick he was able to stagger back to his feet. And that massive smile had yet to go anywhere.

"Looks like we got a live one on our hands here. Feisty. I like it when they put up a fight. But that's only during the courting process. Frankly, after a long day's massacre, I've always preferred my women lay deathly still."

As if he hadn't just been smashed into a building at all, Carnage was closing the distance between himself and Osmosis Lass with blinding speed. She tried to swing the street lamp at him again but being ground bound this time, he was in a position to dodge. Simply hopping over the street lamp when it approached him, Carnage planted a foot square in her jaw. The force of the blow knocked her back half a dozen feet away, into the wall she was standing before, and separated her from her baseball bat/street lamp. She ran her hand over her chin. It was cracked and starting to come apart. The fault lines were spreading.

"Gotta say, Mistress Concrete, you must have been on the crapper when they were handing out powers. You got a seriously bum deal."

Nadia badly wanted to say "I wouldn't be so sure." She reached into her pocket. It took her just a moment to find it. Nadia had taken to putting her destiny a bit more into her own hands by carrying a few "samples." Squeezing the ball bearing, Osmosis Lass took on a steel form and once more earned a quizzical look from Carnage. The cracks mended somewhat but wouldn't heal entirely until she became human again. Wasting no more time than necessary, Osmosis Lass ripped out the blade she had been caught by earlier and threw it towards Carnage. Catching it easily, he said something about admiring a little bit of bloodlust in heroes as she charged towards him, but she wasn't really listening to him. Distracted with the catching the blade and launching off his quip, he wasn't back in the game by the time Osmosis Lass had tackled him to the ground. She looked down at his monstrous face for the briefest moment before she started pounding. Over and over again she rained blows down upon his face while thinking of the people that he had killed today and likely killed before this. She kept at it for a good thirty seconds before it dawned on her that she was striking red mush.

She thought she killed him for a second there. She could feel the breakdown coming on during that brief moment. But Carnage's decision to strike right when Osmosis Lass let up didn't give her time to do it. A mass of tendrils seemed to emerge from every spot on Carnage's chest and wrapped around her body. In a quick flicking motion they threw her off of him and down the street. He stood up. Rebounding quickly, Osmosis Lass faced him. His smile was somehow wider - wide enough to see the man inside who was smiling also. He was smaller than the monster he wore… notably so. He had probably ducked his "real" head into the suit's chest or something when she began the beating. This was getting increasingly disconcerting. The suit defended the man - and she wasn't seeing a way to get to him. She started another thought but never got to finish it. Once again proving to be disturbingly quick, Carnage had grabbed hold of the very same bus he had flicked Osmosis Lass into earlier and threw it towards her. In a moment of profound idiocy that she instantly regretted, she tried to catch it instead of dodging it. Maybe she could lift a bus - it wasn't as if she had tried before. But with the momentum behind it, it didn't matter if she could press the weight or not. Long side first, the bus slammed into her and pinned her to the ground. She was feeling groggy. Due to the thankfully non-living metal she was made up of, she didn't really feel the impact, but the continued to use of her powers in this high stress situation was getting to her. That wasn't all that she was realizing though. Pretty much every window on the bus shattered on impact. Most of her body was pinned under the metal of the bus' side but her head was under where a (now broken) window was. The bus had been full of people. Had being the operative word. Now it was full of bodies. They must have taken refuge in there when Carnage began his massacre. Clearly this wasn't meant to be a good day, as he had gotten them anyway. Nadia wanted desperately to cry.

She didn't make the slightest move to lift the bus off of herself. She simply stared at the bodies of the Ex-People that had been flung around the bus as it was in flight. Things stayed like that for a good couple minutes before it was suddenly yanked off of her. A few of the bodies fell out of the windows as Carnage let it down a couple feet away.

"Come on, now. You haven't given up on me have you? I was enjoying myself. And considering that it's been literally minutes since I've killed anybody - not counting those people in the bus of course because no self respecting human uses public transit - that's saying something."

Nadia got up. A voice in the back of her head screamed "Hit him damn you!" but she felt sapped of the will to fight. The odd thought passed through her head that she wished that she had a security blanket.

"Fine then. It was good while it lasted."

With a quick motion Carnage raked his claws against Nadia's face, rending the metal and warping her simulated features. The will to fight was re-emerging but so was a sense of panic. She was blind. His claw had torn apart her simulated eyes and suddenly she couldn't see. She lashed out a couple times but hit nothing but air. A kick to the back put her on the floor.

This is inane. Those eyes aren't even real. I should see just as well without them as I do with them. This shit makes no blasted sense!

She hated what she felt she had to do next, but there just was no fighting Carnage blind. Her sense of strength left her as steel reverted to flesh blood and bone. She never really understood the intricacies of her powers but one of the first things she learned was that her body puts itself back as it should be whenever she becomes human again. That was what happened now. She could feel her face putting itself back together as it reverted back to normal. Then a horrid smell washed over her… rotting meat? She turned. Carnage was behind her. Had he smelled like that all the time? She only intended to stay human long enough to get her sight back. She now realized that it was far too hopeful to have expected Carnage to have given her enough of a reprieve. His hand was raised above his head in the shape of an axe. This was it. Or it could have been. But then a glint shined is his monstrous eye as it looked like an idea passed through what passed for his mind. It was a swift motion. A kick to the face. It was far weaker than any other blow either of them had launched that day, but it was meant to be. It was the last thing Nadia saw before passing out.

***


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by Alexander "Cadmus" Baptiste on Dec 15, 2006, 1:47pm

Her head hurt. Bad. Like a bus had hit her, she thought. Later on she would laugh at that. She tried moving but couldn't. Realizing that, she raised her head to see what was going on. She still felt groggy. She wondered how long she had been unconscious. The place was dark. She could make out cement floors with spatters of red here and there. She thought she saw a severed hand at the edge of the darkness. She tried to move again. Useless. She was bound to a wooden chair. She tried to use powers. Become the wood, the rope, the air, anything. It didn't work. She couldn't change. She realized that she wasn't alone when a voice called through the dark.

"Finally up, sleepy head? Good stuff. I'll be along in a minute. I've got a game to show you - the old Skin Game. You'll love it. Or I'll love it. Same difference really."

She said nothing but began pulling harder at her bonds. Nothing. His voice called out through dark again. He was… singing?

"On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair…
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air…"

Scratch that. He was singing, poorly. She realized she was crying. All those tears that couldn't manifest when she was transformed seemed to be making their presence known now. Nadia could hear a shuffling through the darkness and soon he had come into the limited light. He wasn't the same. Thin man. Red hair. White tank top. Beige cargo pants. Oh. And the eleven-inch knife. Can't forget the eleven-inch knife. He meandered towards her slowly.

Welcome to the Hotel California…
Such a lovely place…

To Be Continued.


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by Alexander "Cadmus" Baptiste on Dec 15, 2006, 2:02pm

Fun fact: I wrote most of the first sequence (the scene with Carnage in the diner) over a year ago, back when Chickenlover's RPG was still running. For the life of me, I can't remember where I was going to go from there. The whole thing sort of died by the time I wrote it so I never bothered to post it. As you can imagine, I wrote in bit here and there to fit into New Mutants continuity (the bits referring to the quakes).

Anyway, I was rummagging through old files a couple weeks back and got the inspiration for Nadia's first solo adventure. Though, uh, I doubt it's going the way she would like it to.

I may or may not be overpowering Carnage. Not too sure. I just wanted round one to go really badly so I may have tilted things in his favor.


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by The Sacred Digits on Dec 15, 2006, 2:04pm

Definitely interested in where this goes, but there may be a minor cosmetic error to a few details by the time Handbasket Express ends. Nothing horrible, though.


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by Blight on Dec 15, 2006, 2:07pm

Neat stuff. I think sometimes I'm the only fan of Carnage on earth


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by Roxanne "Madrock" Madison on Dec 15, 2006, 2:08pm

I'm a happy Lasty!

Not only do I finally get the first Nadia solo, but it includes Carnage, one of my favorite villains who are always done wrong, actually done right! Excellent work, and an awesome cliffhanger. The fight scene was also superb; cool to see Nadia against someone she can more or less fight evenly.


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by Alexander "Cadmus" Baptiste on Dec 15, 2006, 2:20pm

Heh, thanks guys. Another fact (though not as fun) that I wanted to mention but forgot was that I got my first exposure to Carnage through the Spider-Man novels "Carnage in New York" and "Goblin's Revenge" (Perhaps I saw him in the cartoon first… but the books were more fun). That's (clearly) where I got the name for the fic from but it's also where I picked up the "Carnage smelling like rotting meat" and "the old Skin Game" which you're likely to hear more about next issue.


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by K'lar on Dec 15, 2006, 2:21pm

My sister is a big Carnage fan too. I do like the character somewhat, but not as much as I used to.


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by The Sacred Digits on Dec 15, 2006, 3:07pm

The only comics I ever read with Carnage in them are the New Avengers issues. So I only know the character through games and other secondary sources.

I forgot to mention that I really enjoyed it. Also, I wasted no time getting Cletus into Cerebro. Who loves you, baby?


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by Alexander "Cadmus" Baptiste on Dec 15, 2006, 3:37pm

Clearly, you love me. And while I appreciate it, I'd prefer that we stay friends.


Re: New Mutants Unlimited #25
Post by The Sacred Digits on Dec 15, 2006, 3:49pm

Dude, I've been "can't we just be friends"'D on the internet. I think that's a higher form of rejection than break-up via text message.


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