The Scourge of the Underworld and the Great Lakes Avengers in…

JUSTICE IS SERVED

By Clayton Tooley

Consciousness returned slowly, almost lazily, seeping through her head like marinade through a roast. There was no pain in her head, only a sense of depth as if she were lying on the floor of the ocean. Her thoughts echoed in her head, or at least the facsimile of a head she had created for herself, and she opened her ‘eyes’ slowly. It took longer than usual for her to focus on creating the cornea, iris, cones, rods and other sundry items needed to see the world beyond her body, but eventually she was able to make out where she was and she knew her blood would have chilled if she’d had any.

Standing before her was her tormentor, or so she assumed since he wasn’t wearing his long jacket or hat. He was tall, even for a black man, and very well muscled as evidenced from the bulging arms extended from his sleeveless shirt. He was drinking a bottle of water and wiping the copious amounts of sweat from his forehead when some instinct made him turn and look toward her. He stared into her still coalescing eyeballs and then smiled, beginning to chuckle a little. It was more chilling to her than the first three words he had spoken to her…

Michigan
Some Time Ago

Beating the Christ out of losers is hilarious!

That was the thought going through Quicksand’s head as she sandblasted the skin and muscle off of the supposedly Mr. Immortal. Craig Hollis’s skeleton and internal organs splashed onto the pavement outside of the bank Quicksand had just devastated, stealing more than $300,000 in cash before the Great Lakes Avengers had arrived to take her in. Quicksand had laughed, which had angered the heroes, who made loud proclamations about her imminent defeat and their own prowess in the hero game.

Unfortunately for the GLA, they had never faced a human sandstorm before, and it turned out they didn’t have a very good plan of stopping her rampage. After slaughtering their leader, Quicksand had turned to the next closest ‘hero’ and stabbed at him with her mind, forming a rock-hard sand spear from her left breast, which pierced the glowing black man’s body…and passed straight through! The spear lodged within the voluminous fat rolls of the charging rhinoceros of a woman known as Big Bertha as she ran straight through Doorman and slammed into Quicksand’s body, which ruptured like a soap bubbled and scattered across the pavement.

This minor victory, no matter how unexpected, did not last long as the sand particulates suddenly leapt into the air and swirled around the smallish-head of Ashley Crawford, who suddenly found herself breathing solid, grainy air that was devastating her throat and lungs. She panicked and leapt upward, using her powerful leg muscles to propel her impossibly large frame clear of the suffocating attack but it cost her the energy she had left and she slammed into the ground face-first, unconscious and shrinking back into her normal size of the Midwest’s most beautiful super-model.

Quicksand reformed her body and laughed, amused by this ignorance. She had just turned to pick up the money that had been burst loose from her body by Big Bertha when the sound waves slammed into her back, splitting her sand form down the middle and sending agony ripping through her extremities. The cohesion her consciousness exerted over the sand-like molecules making up her body was disrupted and she felt her cohesion loosen until she seemed to be melting like that witch doused in water by a bratty kid and her dog. She felt as if her life was about to end…

Then it was over and her pain receded. She formed two eyes on the back of her head and saw a pink dinosaur-looking shape flash by, the terrible sound wave following in her wake. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who had caused her pain and Quicksand felt she had been lucky that the creature had been forced to continue her flight instead of hovering and continuing its assault. Quicksand let her body totally flatten out, making the biggest, most obvious target she could as two tendrils snaked out lightning fast and wrapped around two nearby trash cans, getting a firm grip on both. She saw the creature angling back toward her and she gritted her figurative teeth for the pain.

It came on just as suddenly, yet her diffused form allowed the waves to pass more easily through her mass and not be so devastating. She held her position until the last minute then with a strength that had paused even the God of Thunder, she slammed the two trashcans into the flying banshee, smashing it from the sky and into a nearby office window, the demon disappearing in a hail of glass shards and a low whistle of pain.

Her amusement gone, Quicksand reformed her body in a large and very dense form and turned toward the two remaining ‘heroes’, the all-black intangible thing and an impossibly thin man who was stretching in a manner similar to Mr. Fantastic, only with less agility and style. Quicksand was not interested in the taffy man and turned her attention on the other guy, who seemed unsure of how to approach her in the fight. She assumed another attack would be as successful as her previous one, but even as she thought that she realized the one clue she had almost missed…the black man was standing firmly on the ground.

With a satisfied smile, Quicksand plunged her steel-hard hands into the pavement before her, forcing her particles to squeeze through the concrete and under the man’s feet. With a shrug powerful enough to stun the Hulk, she jerked upwards and lifted a circular section of pavement clear of the street and slammed it into the side of the bank with such speed and force the man was unable to use his phasing ability, however it worked, and a satisfying cry of pain came from him even as he collapsed into unconsciousness beneath the four hundred pound disk of concrete, his breathing shallow.

With a laugh of enjoyment, Quicksand turned and found the flat man standing before her with his arms loaded up with all of the cash she had stolen from the bank, his two-dimensional arms and chest having expanded to accommodate the load. “Drop the cash, Tapeworm, or you’re dead,” Quicksand said, taking one step forward.

To his credit, Dr. Val Ventura didn’t flinch much from her approach, but he did move backwards, turning his thin head from side to side, wondering where the hell the cops were and how he was going to protect this money without getting himself and his teammates killed. He looked over toward the slowly healing skeleton of Mr. Immortal and gulped, knowing his amazing body would never have survived such an attack. Then he remembered Quicksand was still coming toward him and he turned back toward her. As he did so, however, a figure standing in an alleyway behind Quicksand caught his attention and, when the man gestured toward him eagerly, Flatman felt as if he were saved.

Taking the stranger at face value, he leapt forward with all of the quickness of a snapped rubber band and shot his body across the street in a clean, perfect arc that caught the villain completely off guard and allowed Flatman a few extra seconds to sprint down the alleyway and toward the first of two metal doors in the back, one of which was open with a sign on it saying, “Go here!” Not having a better idea, he dove into the doorway and felt his foot catch on a wire stretched across the doorway, which resulted in the door slamming shut behind him and sealing him into a very dark, very lonely room. He gulped audibly when he heard the first super-strong fist hit the door and Quicksand’s voice faintly coming through the door, ordering him to come out or die.

Outside the door, Quicksand was furiously pounding on the heavy door, leaving deep dents and scratches in the metal, her rage at the delay these idiots had caused her limiting her thought process to using brute strength as opposed to her other fantastic abilities. Just like he’d planned.

The words didn’t register on her mind at first, but as she felt the splash of liquid on her back that quickly and impossibly seeped into the minute gaps in her body and paralyzed her, she realized someone had spoken behind her. As she fell backward she got an image of her attacker and her subconscious caught up to her active mind even as she slipped into a deep darkness and she heard…

“Justice Is Served!”

“Skurge!” she mumbled, her mouth still partially paralyzed from whatever substance he had used to capture her, but her meaning was clear to the man smiling at her and he mockingly shook his head.

“No, ‘fraid he was a badass Asgardian God. I’m just a regular ol’ human badass. It’s Scourge, Quicksand, and I assume from your reaction you’ve heard of me.”

“You…you can’t be the same guy…that was years ago…” Her control of her mouth was improving, but she was unable to feel anything below her neck or even change the features on her face.

“True, the previous Scourge and his organization were destroyed, but nature abhors a vacuum, and no good idea should be wasted, ya know. Justice still needs a champion.”

“Champion my ass. You’re a murder!”

“Says the murderer,” the man shot back, finishing off his water and crushing the plastic bottle in his hand. “Near as I can tell you’ve got a double-digit body count yourself. At least I only kill murderers.”

“WHY?!” she screamed, her loud voice echoing back to her, giving her a sense of wherever they were. It was a large metallic structure and from the sweat on Scourge’s face it was quite hot. “What’d I ever do to you?!”

“Nothing,” the man said, turning away from her and picking up a pole-shaped object and walking it over to a nearby railing and turning back toward her. “But then again, I’m not stupid enough to let you get your hands on me.” Laughing, he held up her right arm, twirling it around like a band majorette before holding it out by the middle finger over the railing and in the way of a rising column of steam. “Hands off now,” he said as he let the arm drop.

A horrible sizzling splashing sound erupted beneath their feet, and Quicksand struggled with all her might to increase the diameter of her eyes until she could get a better look at the room they were in. She observed that everything was made out of metal, including the catwalk Scourge was standing upon and the metal table she was lying atop of. She saw tiny windows in the upper reaches of the walls, and dozens of different machines and large vats scattered around the warehouse-sized room. It was the view of the vat beneath them that chilled her soul…a vat of bubbling, oozing liquid super-heated steel. And sinking into it, being evaporated down to its base elements, was her right hand. It slipped fully under as she began to scream.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

“Oh, stop that,” Scourge said, walking over to her and grabbing her hair. He jerked up suddenly and she felt an incredibly powerful sense of vertigo as she was lifted off of the table and dangled in the air before him. She tried to make her left arm or her legs lash out at him, or form a sand weapon from her body to impale him, but nothing worked and he began laughing at her again. “You don’t get it, do you?” he asked, turning toward the reflective plastic covering of a nearby grinding machine and forcing her to look at herself, which only caused Quicksand to scream louder.

She had no body. She was a head being held aloft by the powerful hand of the Scourge. She had been dismembered!

A small blinking device on her forehead mocked her as she screamed, and the Scourge playfully tossed her head back and forth in his hands as he turned away from the reflection. “It’s a force field projector of a sort, designed to keep you contained and locked into one form, which is why you were able to regain consciousness and make eyeballs and everything, but nothing else. I was worried it wouldn’t work, or that your consciousness would have been split equally throughout your body, which is why I put a separate projector on each of your limbs after I sliced them off, then the three pieces I cut your torso into.”

“You’re killing me!”

“I’ve already killed you, you grainy bitch,” he said, shaking her head again. “You’re head is the only remaining piece.”

His bluntness was devastating and stunned her into a terrified silence. “I have to say, you were a fascinating challenge. Dealing with the concept of a silica-based superhuman wasn’t new to me, but killing one was. I searched for a way to trap you, which turned out to be relatively easy given the state of chemistry in our world today. It was actually a substance created during World War II called Adhesive X that I hit you with up in Michigan, the shock of which knocked you out for a considerable amount of time. I hadn’t expected you to actually fall unconscious, but it made things easier to transport you here.”

“Capturing you and holding you are two vastly different things, however, as you and several law enforcement agencies have learned over the years. Even as powerful as Adhesive X is, your consciousness would have eventually found a way to overcome or metabolize the substance into your system, or pull in enough fresh material to start again. So making you a statue wasn’t a good long-term solution. I mean, really, how many times have the Avengers been turned to stone and back over the years by the Grey Gargoyle?”

“I considered busting you up and mixing you into the foundation of a new building, but the Juggernaut was once buried in a similar fashion by Spider-Man and he survived, so I figured you’d eventually pull the sand in the concrete foundation out and reform yourself, or some other Absorbing Man rip-off move that would ensure your freedom again. Similarly, I considered cutting you into pieces, sealing them into concrete or even metal blocks, and dropping them into the deepest parts of the ocean hundreds of miles apart.” He held her up in front of his face and shrugged. “That probably would have worked, but I didn’t want to waste that much time.”

He chuckled at her blank, shocked expression at the entire situation, and then began coolly discussing her planned demise. “I considered freezing you, burning you, irradiating you and even locking you into a capsule and launching you into space, but each either was too costly, too difficult or just plain stupid. Then, oddly enough, I found the solution on TV.”

He hefted her head and extended it over the churning metal death below and smiled again. “Terminator 2, baby, the best of the three. Only you won’t be back. The superheated metal below will almost instantly vaporize your atoms on a subatomic level, and with you consciousness trapped in your head, death will likely be instantaneous as well. I’m not merciful, but I’m also not cruel.”

“You’re a psychopath!” Quicksand said; her unavoidable death sentence had cut through the horror and revulsion she felt and calmed her nerves. “I won’t beg for my life, not from the likes of you. But if you think you can kill us without someone getting you, you’re dead wrong. Your days are numbered, Scourge of the Underworld. I’ll see you in hell.”

“I have no doubt,” Scourge said and this time there was no humor or jocularity in his tone, only a cold stare between them that lasted several seconds before his hand opened suddenly and she was falling.

In the seemingly endless time that she fell, images of her past overtook her conscious mind and she relived her childhood as the daughter of a fisherman and his subservient wife in Vietnam in the decades after the war with the Americans had petered out. Her mother had named her Kim-Ly, which stood for Golden Lion, which suited her fierce attitude towards conditions of women in her village and country, and Ly had longed to strike out into the world and learn more than any man had ever learned, to be smarter and stronger and never again feel inferior because of her sex.

She had done so, achieved her goals and had become a scientist, the top in her field in nuclear physics, and had earned a distinguished position at a prominent nuclear facility. An accident caused by the ignorance of her male superior had resulted in her being fused with the very sand beneath the basement lab that had exploded in her face, turning her into Quicksand. Lashing out in rage at her unfair transformation, she had eventually come to love her new lease on life and the fact that she would never again be abused or humiliated by a man. Her golden, powerful form suited her birth name, and she took the name Quicksand to strike fear into those who would dare get into her way.

It was either ironic or horribly unfair that the last thing she saw as the back of her head splashed into the superheated metal was the grim face of the Scourge of the Underworld as he lifted his white mask to his dark face, pulling it down and watching her die through the blank white eyepieces sewn in. The metal filled her mouth and nostrils and eyes as the back of her head vanished into the swirling morass of the metal, and she was already dead as Scourge buttoned his jacket and placed his hat onto his masked head as he used a small scanner strapped to his forearm to take some final readings on her death.

Satisfied that his latest mission had been concluded successfully, Scourge turned and picked up the few tools he’d brought into the facility and headed for the door, already planning his next target.

For more of the NEW Scourge of the Underworld, check out future issues of USAgent!