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He still hadn’t found Rancor, but he did learn his fair share of information on the streets and skyways. Earlier today, a strung-out gun runner unleashed every piece of hearsay he gathered for the last year. And one of the most recent brought him here.

He sat atop one of the area’s taller structures, a sixty-four story tenement that served as the lowest of the low rent apartments in the city. He left the wall-runner parked a safe distance away and now peered through a pair of auto-binoculars at a building across the streets. The gun runner’s tip had been spot on. He watched as a half dozen men moved in and out of his view finder. All wore the orange and red jumpsuits of EMPIRE. No one quite knew the origins of the vast criminal and terrorist organization. No one even knew for what the acronym EMPIRE stood.

It didn’t matter. If the story he heard was true, he had to stop them. He hadn’t heard the term dirty bomb before today, but a quick call on his com-link to Amy cleared up any questions about the device. He needed to stop it, and he needed to do it before they finished readying the device.

He yanked the retractable magnetic grappling hook from its secluded holster in his cape. He aimed the device and with a soft whoosh of air, the pneumatic tube fired a thin line of titanium wire across the expanse. Vengeance wasted no time as he swung across the divide between the two skyscrapers.

He tapped the trigger several times on the g-hook in mid-swing. The cable reeled in which each press. Vengeance aimed his entire body directly towards the window in to EMPIRE’s offices.

A few feet from the window, he triggered a device built in to his belt bucket. A wave of sonic force rushed out from the buckle and shattered the window just before he flew through it. He landed in a crouch a top the shattered glass.

The EMPIRE agents didn’t know what to make of his sudden arrival. He used their immediate confusion to stand upright, pull a pair of V-blades from his belt, and hurl them towards the two nearest men. One man caught a blade in the leg with an explosion of blood. The other blade caught the nearest man in the right hand. The poor, hopeless agent staggered and clutched at his hand as Vengeance leaned in and delivered a skull-rattling punch. The EMPIRE goon dropped like a bag of bones to the floor.

The other soldiers of EMPIRE now turned their attention his way. Guns shifted out of holsters. Rifles came off shoulders. He counted five in all. Vengeance resisted the urge to crack a smile as he leapt in to action.

The nearest two terrorists fell beneath a flurry of lefts and rights. A third man brought his weapon up to fire. Vengeance grabbed one of his dazed foes by the collar, pivoted, and hurled the man straight at the would-be gunman. Both men fell to the ground with a sick thud.

Automatic weapons fire flew towards him now. Vengeance dived to the floor. He yanked a small metal canister from his cape pouch, depressed the trigger on its top, and hurled it between the two standing gunmen. The lenses of his cowl instantly darkened to block the blinding light of the flash grenade. But even through the lenses he could still see the blistering white light that filled the room. It didn’t stop him from closing in to make short work of both men.

He hadn’t even broken a sweat. But his skull ached as he felt another memory flood over him….

****

July 1940. Rancor only recently had started to work as my second, but our partnership was already taking the news on the street by storm. Now there wasn’t one but two mystery men to fear. The good we were doing eased the pain I felt at the loss of my loved ones ever so slightly. At least enough to allow me to once again feel like a functional human being again.

That summer was hot in New Salem, which always resulted in far less robbery attempts than normal. No one wanted to exert too much effort on those days, least of all the criminal element. After a week of nearly pointless patrols, even I was tiring of the grinding conditions.

After the eighth slow night on patrol, I was surprised when Rancor rushed to my side with the morning paper. It showed photographs of a brutal crime scene under the massive headline: “Brutal Slaying, Is Animal Loose in City?”

I jumped from my seat as I quickly read over the article. It seemed a jewelry store was robbed just before closing, and the victims were torn to bits. Police blamed the attacks on a trained bear or possibly wildcats, but experts were already saying no. It didn’t matter that it was morning. I needed to find the villain behind the attack.

After all, I knew exactly the culprit behind the crimes. Phineas Moulton was a mad genius. His expertise in genetic engineering was sixty years ahead of his time. If not for his depraved morals and willingness to commit the most heinous of crimes, I’m sure he would be marked down with names like Tesla and Einstein. Instead he would barely be remembered out of true crime circles.

I already encountered Moulton and his fiendish humutants once in my career. The former humans he transformed in to massive, savage beasts were nearly enough to end me. I shuttered to think the animalistic monsters had returned.

“I’m helping you whether you like it or not.” Rancor didn’t like it when I tried to cut him out of the action. I couldn’t blame him, but it did little to assuage the wariness I felt when it came to the humutants. They were little more than ravenous beasts, twice his size, five times his weight. But I knew I could never dissuade him.

We spent the next two days searching every warehouse, tenement, and shanty we could. We found nothing. I was at wit’s end. I knew they couldn’t be hiding anywhere mainstream. Both the transformation machinery and the humutants themselves would be impossible for Moulton to confine.

It was Rancor who finally worked it out. I should have seen it from the fact that the jewelry stores they struck at were all ground floor establishments. We needed to stop looking around the high-rises. We needed to look under them.

The sewers were only dimly lit by occasional work lights. We didn’t have nightvision back then, so we were left to make our way slowly through the bog. We did have flashlights, but a moving light in the distance would be a dead giveaway that even the humutants would recognize. It made things dangerous, but we lived our lives on the edge of danger.

Our struggles with the dark proved less demanding then we hoped, as we heard the tell-tale moan of a humutant from several yards away. I signaled to Rancor to keep quiet. We trailed the beast from several yards back.

It took nearly an hour to reach its destination, but the creature never saw us. We were at Phineas Moulton’s lair. Now all we had to do was get inside to stop him. This time I came prepared.

Rancor and I pulled the canisters from our cape pouches and hurled them in to the room. Seconds later, tear gas filled the sewers. Even the humutants needed their eyes. They struggled to see and flailed wildly. We donned our gas masks and made our way through the mess.

I found Moulton coughing himself in front of a half-transformed humutant. The poor woman was naked, her arm and head horrifically expanded in to gross measurements while the rest of her body remained that of a normal woman. She whimpered in pain as she struggled against the straps that held her in place.

“Monster!” I ran towards the gagging Moulton. He never even saw the blow land against the side of his head. He dropped like a heap to the floor. I watched blood trickle from where I boxed his ear.

“Moulton’s down,” I yelled. “Switch to the knockout bombs.”

Rancor nodded from across the room. A moment later I heard the first explosion take a humutant off his feet. I freed the woman’s arms and legs and helped her off the table.

“Kill me,” she said. “Please kill me.”

I knew it would be the merciful thing to do to her. No one would ask to be trapped in the half-mutated form she was in now. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill, especially not an innocent.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I turned to help Rancor subdue the remainder of the humutants before we returned to the surface.

*****

Vengeance made sure the terrorists were unconscious and secure before he checked on the status of the dirty bomb. The weapon was still secured in a crate, inactivated. He breathed a sigh of relief and thanked God for small favors. Another crisis was averted.

Blinding pain struck him on the back of the head, just beneath the armor of his cowl. A second later, a stream of electricity coursed through his body. Vengeance could feel his body skip and shutter before he collapsed to the floor.

His body betrayed him as he felt himself rolled over. He looked up in to the dark eyes of Rancor. Up close, Vengeance realized this wasn’t the boy he remembered. His skin was lighter colored. His eyes were nearly black instead of brown. But the way he carried himself, the way he moved in combat, it was all reminiscent of the boy I helped raise decades ago.

“He never saw me coming,” Rancor said to no one visible. “What you want me to do with him?”

He paused for several seconds. “Are you sure? It could be a trap.” The boy sighed, apparently in response to the voice only he could hear. “Fine. I’ll bring him.”

Vengeance could feel his muscles returning to his control, but it was already too late. Rancor leaned down, popped open some kind of capsule, and waved it in front of Vengeance’s nose. The fumes burned his nostrils, but he could only feel it for a few seconds before his consciousness faded away.

He opened his eyes on a high-ceilinged bunker of some kind. He coughed up a layer of bile as he pulled himself in to a sitting position. He realized his mask was gone, but otherwise his gear seemed to all be in place. He quickly studied his surroundings.

A pair of wall-runners lined the far wall, along with the hover-cycle he saw the boy use a few days earlier. Several cars of various makes and models sat silently in random positions around the rest of the garage. Several yards away from the wall-runners sat a blank door.

As he climbed to his feet and started across the room, he realized his cowl was gone. The cowl was supposed to be attached to his skin with a special polymer that held it to his face until he used an otherwise harmless gas to neutralize it. It seemed whoever this new Rancor and his associate were, they knew all his secrets.

Maybe they can share a few with me.

He walked in to the next room and found himself surrounded by a computer set-up that put even the Citadel he destroyed to shame.

“Look who’s awake.” Rancor dropped to the floor only inches in front of him. The boy smirked as he pushed the tip of a bo staff in to Vengeance’s chin.

Vengeance pushed the staff aside. “Enough games. Who are you? Why are you here? And why are you wearing that costume?”

The computer panels on the far end of the room shifted and opened in to another room, also filled with screens and keyboards. An electric wheelchair, a design far superior to any Vengeance had seen in his few weeks in the twenty-first century, backed out of the chamber and in to the computer room proper.

The chair spun on its access. Vengeance couldn’t contain the gasp that rose from deep in his throat.

The man before him was nearly ninety. His heavily weathered skin was darkened nearly to black. It stood in sharp contrast to the shock white hair that remained just above his cragged temples. But despite his advance age and his beat-up body, Vengeance would recognize the man before him anywhere.

Terry Lincoln, the first Rancor.

Terry smiled. “Hello, old friend.”

*****

He pounded in to her with the ferocity of a man-possessed. She writhed beneath him and struggled. She knew they liked it when she fought.

He was well over three hundred pounds, somewhere in his mid-forties, with dark, shaggy hair and multiple chins. He wasn’t much a catch, and his need to use the Redzone on a regular basis made him a prime target.

Breathtaker opened her eyes as she felt the man spend himself inside her. Her pupils glowed red as she reached up and grabbed him by the throat. The man panicked as she rolled him over with ease. But she was deceptively strong, far stronger than anyone with her slight frame should ever be.

She held him down. He struggled, tried to get away, but it was no use as she rode him hard. Despite his fear and pain, her pheromones kept him hard. She felt his release deep inside her. She felt it again a moment later. And again a few seconds after that.

By his fifteenth release, he was little more than an emaciated husk. Breathtaker rose off of him and went to retrieve her clothes.

She never even saw the man in black riot gear step out of the shadows. As she picked up her halter top, the taser connectors struck her back and sent a wave of electricity through her body.

She toppled forward to her knees. But the power stolen from the john still coursed through her veins. It made her stronger, faster, tougher than any of these mere mortals. She sprung back to her feet.

The shot caught her directly below the heart. She gasped as she looked down at the blood swelling from the wound. She shrieked in pain and fury. The soldier didn’t move as she lunged towards him.

She only made it three steps before the poisoned bullet took its toll. She fell to her knees, then to her face. Consciousness started to fade.

“Target 184 secure.”

Everything went blank.