Daredevil and Scourge in…

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE THE DEVIL SCOURGED

By Erik Fromme and Clayton Tooley

Hell’s Kitchen
New York, New York

Daredevil was careful to observe the blaze from a safe distance, perched high above on the ledge of an apartment’s rooftop and across the street from the burning delicatessen, though he found it still wasn’t far enough away for his comfort. Having skin sensitive enough to feel the miniscule heat thrown off of an incandescent light bulb meant that getting near the intense heat of a raging inferno was one of Matt’s least favorite things to do. He recalled that the last burning building he had charged into had left him with a severe heat rash that had taken over a week to heal, even with his skin shielded under his insulated suit. It was bad enough that right now he couldn’t get rid of the sour taste of charred wood that lingered in the back of his throat no matter how many times he swallowed.

Fortunately for him he wouldn’t be diving haphazardly in to the flames tonight. His radar sense couldn’t find any people trapped inside the deli and the FDNY, who were even now racing down the street in their fire trucks, would soon have the situation under control after taking an extra three minutes more than normal to arrive. However, this being the fourth fire in the Kitchen tonight, set less than an hour after the first, meant that the FDNY in the area was stretched to its limit and were relying on their brothers from other zones to pick up the slack.

To Daredevil’s dismay, as three of the fires continued to rage within blocks of each other, the entire neighborhood was going to be overwhelmed with the stench burnt wood, plastic and synthetic fibers for two straight weeks. Between the already destroyed property and his own personal discomfort, Daredevil felt the pressure to stop whoever was responsible for the arsons and prevent them from doing more damage before they claimed an innocent life.

From the random nature of these arsons and the few reports of defacement he’d heard about, Daredevil suspected that a pair of street-dwellers known as the Wildboys were to blame for all of this trouble. He had thought that after a couple months of silence the thugs had left New York City entirely, but he guessed he was proven wrong as the Wildboys were making their presence felt big time with a wild night of fun, booze and vandalism. He had to get those two punks off the streets quickly.

Taking short, shallow breaths, Daredevil stretched his enhanced senses outward in an attempt to find a trail to track them. Even through the billowing black pillar of smoke that stretched endlessly into the sky he could smell faint traces of the spray paint the duo had used to tag graffiti on several buildings down the block. Matt couldn’t read any of it, but from what he was able to gleam from various bystander conversations down below it was the Wildboys’ typical nonsensical stuff like ‘Monkey House’, ‘Mighty Horse Rocks the Fat Ass’, the backwards swastika, and just the words ‘The Who’.

Satisfied that his involvement wasn’t necessary for the fire, Daredevil took off along his special elevated highway, using the trail of paint like breadcrumbs. The heavier the scent got the fresher he knew the tags were. He was intimately familiar with the Wildboys life signs; they had almost beaten him to death before, after all, and compared them from memory to the community around him. The real pain of only being able to identify people by their body odor, heartbeat or other non-visible tells was that he lived in the most densely populated city in the country, forcing him to constantly sort and concentrate on things when he was out in public. It was originally an almost insurmountable problem, but by this point in his training and career as a vigilante it all came as second nature to him and he barely needing to dedicate any thought to it, though finding two people in a city of millions was never an easy proposition.

It was a moot point in this case, however, as Daredevil had never known the Wildboys to be restrained or silent. Knowing the hooligans as he did, it would only be a matter of time before they did something that would act like a flare to his amazing senses and once he locked onto a target it was nearly impossible to lose focus on them. Then, when they inevitably caught his attention, he would descend upon them like an angry hawk on an unsuspecting rabbit.

Daredevil, however, was unaware that he wasn’t the only one on the hunt tonight…

The Wildboys, Jet and Spit, tore their way down the streets of Hells Kitchen with the subtlety of a tornado, blocks ahead of the determined vigilante. The unruly pair had a frenzied look that forced single traveling adults, and even those in groups, to flatten themselves against buildings and trees, lowering their eyes to the ground to avoid being noticed. Parents with children rushed to the other side of the street, warning their kids to not make eye contact with the untamed ruffians.

Jet, an Asian with long spiky hair like a lion’s mane and a long dirty brown trench coat, played with his butterfly knife as he talked. “…’What’s yer problem?’ so he’s tryin’ to act all tough in front o’ his bitch all like ‘What’s my problem? You’re in my fucking house!’” Jet was amusingly reminisced about a home invasion he did three weeks ago in Long Island. He continued his story in between fits of laughter. “So, I just fuckin’ threw my switch blade right between that tattooed faggot’s eyes. You shoulda seen the fuckin’ face on that god damned rich cunt’s face when her sugga’ daddy hit the flo’, right befo’ I fucked her real good.”

“That’s fuckin’ classic, bro!” Spit joined his friend in the laughter. He was a black man that stood four inches taller than Jet and built slightly more impressively. A pair of sunglasses rested atop of his greasy hair as he rolled a cigar between his yellow teeth and tucked it in the corner of his chapped lips.

Jet pulled a bottle of rum from the oversized pocket of his trench coat and took a long pull, chugging four bubbles before the liquor ran out. Angry over the sudden lack of booze, he chucked the bottle through an apartment window, gaining a measure of pleasure from the sound of shattered glass. “Shit like dis makes me wish we still had the ol’ ‘68 convertible.” His tongue snaked out and hungrily licked the alcohol off his lips.

“True dat,” Spit responded as he kicked over a metal garbage can, scattering dented soda cans, chewed pizza crust and other discarded debris over the street. “Let’s go gank us some mo’ booze and find us some pussy to cap this night off right.”

“Then let’s do it, cuz!”

Spit absent-mindedly tossed the wet, used cigar against a brownstone, abandoning it in favor of a fresh one he pulled from the inside of his worn out leather coat.

The pair eventually walked out of the block, restoring the serene quiet and sense of security that was momentarily robbed from the residents. Unnoticed to those that quickly made their way inside their buildings a white boot stepped out from a narrow alley and crushed the smoldering stub of Spit’s discarded cigar. A pair of blank white eyes stared daggers into the retreating backs of his prey, the white skull-like mask hid the seething anger that radiated off the man who shrunk back into the shadows, the white trench fluttered slightly before disappearing entirely into the dark of the alley.

The first moment Jet knew something was wrong was when Spit stopped walking. His friend was the farthest thing from shy and, with his impressive build and extensive street cred, he had no need to ever not walk proudly. They were the baddest motherfuckers not wearing faggoty red leotards or tiny nipples on their foreheads. Who would dare fuck with them?

“Wha’ da fuck?” Jet said, turning to see Spit’s mouth opening and closing silently, his fresh cigar spinning as if in slow motion to the pavement. His arms were locked out away from his body and slightly shaking, and his eyes were buggin’ out like he’d smoked a pound of hash after doing rails off some skank’s hardwood floor. “Spit! What the hell’re you doing?”

Finally Spit made a noise somewhere between a whinny and vomiting through his nose, which he did a second later, blood and snot blasting out of his nostrils like it was Ol’ Faithful’s time of the month. The bloody mess splattered all over Jet’s face and torso and he screamed like a tiny girl as he leapt backwards, trying to avoid another bath, his fury and disgust quickly replaced by unadulterated fear when he saw what was behind Spit.

Holding a cattle prod of shiny steel that was sank into the back of Spit’s throat down to his spine, a tall and broad figure wearing head-to-toe white with wide brimmed hat over a white-skull face with black accents over a full-figure white trench coat, pants and boots, with heavy rubber gloves, one of which was holding the cattle prod and pumping god-only-knew how much electricity into Spit as he continued do dance like a drunken monkey. The other hand held a semi-automatic snub-nosed machine gun that was pointed directly at Jet.

“Justice is served!” the man said as he squeezed the trigger.

The sound of the first shot was so loud for a moment Daredevil thought a cannon had gone off. From more than two blocks away it hit him so hard it disrupted his swing, nearly causing him to slam into an inconveniently placed gargoyle on his target building. Recovering at the last second, Daredevil turned his upward momentum into a quick gravity-defying sprint across the face of the building and leapt clear at the corner, snapping his billy club around to latch onto a new mount and propel himself as quickly as possible to the source of the first shot.

He was still a block away when he heard a second shot, half that distance for the third, and it was then that he heard the first scream. As he cleared the top of the last building and dove for the flagpole he knew was there, he realized it was Jet screaming in an agony as raw as any Matt Murdock had ever felt.

On the sidewalk below, right out in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen as if that meant nothing, a figure in white was shooting explosive bullets into Jet of the Wildboys. From what his radar sense told him both of Jet’s legs had been blown off at the knees and his right arm was missing from the shoulder down. Blood loss was already catastrophic and even as he landed twenty feet away from the man in white he heard Jet’s heart stop as his last gasp escaped his lips in a dry rattle.

Rage burned through Daredevil as he tensed to leap, but he restrained himself when his radar cleared from Jet’s agony only to realize that Spit was laying on the ground making a mess all over himself from a literal lightning rod being jammed into his soul. The figure turned, slipping his rifle into his jacket and gripping the cattle prod with both hands, his masked face giving Daredevil nothing to work off of, and his heart beat…his heart beat gave off three distinct readings. What the hell? Daredevil thought.

“Stop,” the figure in white said, splaying his fingers out on top of the cattle prod, “or I’ll kill him.” Growling low in his throat, unable to tell if the figure was lying or not, Daredevil hesitated. As if reading his confusion, the figure in the blazing costume chuckled and said, “S’what I thought.”

Then he jammed the cattle prod completely through Spit’s throat, severing his head in an incredible display of strength and undeniable cruelty. “Justice is served!” he gloated.

“Monster!” Daredevil said, diving at who he now realized was either an imposter or the real Scourge of the Underworld, though he was supposed to have been dead. Despite his speed, Daredevil was unable to grab the man but he was able to kick the cattle prod from his hand as he shot past. It wasn’t until he spun to try again that he realized what he was standing in.

“Careful there,” Scourge said, his hands disappearing into his jacket. “You’ve gone and gotten a little bit of Spit on your shoes.”

The billy club was out of his hand before he even registered he was going to throw it and this time Scourge was unable to dodge. The club struck him directly in the face, dead center between his eyes, and his head rocked back powerfully and a strangled curse escaped his lips. Daredevil was on him in under a second, his hands and feet lashing out with a fury he rarely allowed to escape but, as he felt the powerful muscles in the man’s stomach and face, Daredevil realized his rage would not win this fight on its own.

“Tough suit, huh?” the Scourge said, taking another shot across the jaw from Daredevil’s billy club, which he’d somehow retrieved while on the offense, and the larger man tripped backwards, rolling over his shoulder and came up into a crouch and tossing a spherical object into the air between them that detonated just as Scourge pulled his hat down over his eyes. Daredevil was unable to cover his face before it exploded but, other than a wash of brief heat and a scent like burnt dust, no ill effect hit him as he leapt into a knee-drop at the Scourge, who managed to block it and roll to the side out of the way.

So it’s true, Scourge said to himself as he crouched and then leapt straight up as hard as he was able, clearing 25 feet easily and grasping the bars of the fire escape attached to the building behind him and climbing rapidly for the roof. This Devil IS blind.

Daredevil, surprised again by the unassuming speed of his opponent if not his powerful muscles, be they his own or simply components of his suit’s exoskeleton, did not pause in his pursuit, leaping to the top of a nearby newsstand and then propelling himself up the fire escape with finesse and acrobatic skill that surpassed his opponent, but the brute strength and above-average movements of the Scourge only underscored what a dangerous, not to mention murderous, foe he would face on the rooftops, where even one timely punch from such a strong foe would spell a quick and unpleasant fall that would end Daredevil’s fight permanently.

The Scourge wasn’t happy taking this route, but he rapidly realized that if he were going to string this skirmish out then he needed to change the playground. He honestly hadn’t expected Daredevil to be as quick or as precise or, especially, as punishing as he was, which was largely due to those reinforced steel batons that he expertly handled. It was also worth mentally noting to later add some sort of a nasal numbing agent to his flash bombs, because if other targets were as vision impaired as his current combatant then other parts of their senses were bound to be amplified to counter the lack of the other. Hell, if it were true for normal blind men, then it had to hold true for super human blind men too.

Everything was a blur to his peripheral vision. Scourge wasn’t sure where he was headed; he only knew that he had to keep moving and doing so quickly. He glided across the rooftops, his legs effortlessly crossing them in five long strides and clearing the gulfs that separated them without breaking his pace. While he wasn’t entirely comfortable up here, unlike his friend chasing him, his considerable experience with urban guerilla warfare was making up for the lack of confidence and not being a stranger to this city that he carved through didn’t hurt either.

He moved fast, his trench coat fluttering behind him like a cape as his boots forcibly dug into the tiny stones that blanketed the tarpaper roof, splashing them into the air behind him in waves and striking various objects like bullets. Scourge could see the next gulf and the rooftop that dropped roughly twelve feet down from the one he was currently on, and imperceptibly adjusted his pace to make the jump seamless. He leapt high into the air as his foot pushed off the ledge to propel him into a long, arcing fall down to the lower roof that caused his coat to float up over his shoulders.

“Gaah! Fuck!” Scourge cried out in mild shock as something hard slammed unexpectedly against the back of his knee, forcing his landing to falter. He crashed hard on to the roof and slid for about seven feet before his hands dug into the roof and push himself up to a stop on one knee. Scourge raised his head to see Daredevil land silently 12 feet away from him to effortlessly retrieve the billy club he had used to exploit a momentary flaw in the protection his trench coat offered to strike the least guarded part of Scourge’s leg. Who the fuck knew that two little sticks could be so devastatingly efficient?

“You’re not getting away from me that easily. No way. Not now. It’s repulsive how you’ve twisted the word ‘justice’ so callously. Who do you think you are, some sort of Punisher knock-off? Bullshit. I don’t need another him in my town,” Daredevil spat with disgust. His hands tightened around both batons, the tendons in his knuckles tenses to the point they almost hurt.

Scourge chuckled in amusement as he composed himself, straightening to stand at a full 6 foot 6 inches in height, a full head taller than the hero in red and, he figured, a good 95 pounds heavier. “You’ve battled the Wildboys easily a dozen times, Mr. Morals. They murder, rape and plunder without conscious and, if I remember correctly, didn’t they almost kill you once?” he taunted, then teased with, “Oh and, by the way, the name’s Scourge. Or did the all-white outfit and skull mask fail to clue you in?”

Daredevil scowled as they sized each other up. Scourge’s heartbeat seemed to echo, as if there were three distinct and steady heartbeats layered over each other. Just the fact that one of them wasn’t racing after the exertion the Scourge endured was amazing enough to Daredevil. The other oddity, that must’ve been clearly intended, was that the Scourge had no scent. He wasn’t sure if that was a standard countermeasure or designed specifically for him, much as he had realized that sneaky flash bomb before had given away his blindness. Combined, all of those tricks made him very uneasy to think his vulnerabilities were that well known.

“You live up to your reputation, at least in your research,” Daredevil said as he shifted to his side, skittering the rocks on the rooftop to allow him a clearer picture of the roof as they clicked and clanked together, his radar sense looking for every edge he could find. His opponent was bigger, stronger, tougher and well-informed…a potentially deadly combination for anyone who knew fear. Fortunately, the Scourge did not face such a foe tonight. “How do you feel about killing heroes?”

“Not my first choice,” Scourge said, his hands disappearing into the folds of his coat’s sleeves and pockets. “I didn’t come here to kill you, Devil-man. You’re not my enemy.”

“Then what am I?” Daredevil said, lowering himself onto the balls of his feet as he settled on his plan of attack.

“Practice!” Scourge said as he pulled his hands free of his coat and flung a veritable cornucopia of small objects into the air, easily two dozens worth that exploded upon impact with the roof into a variety of harmless and distracting things, from small flash-bangs, to pepper gases, small blots of slick oil, powered glass and many other things. None of it was of real concern to Daredevil, even though his ears and nose rang from the cacophony, and he dodged up an over the storm and ricocheted off of a chimney just past Scourge’s shoulder and brought both of his feet down like jackhammers, crushing the lower back of Scourge, who grunted and stumbled forward, unprepared for the attack.

Daredevil was unprepared for the shock of impact racing up his legs and into his hips, but he managed to catch himself on his hands and pinwheeled around, sweeping his heel around and managed to swipe the feet from beneath the unsteady Scourge and drop him heavily onto the roof.

Flipping himself back to his feet, Daredevil took a split-second to steady himself against the throbbing in his legs and it cost him as a spray of gravel from the roof pelted him, fanning out form the Scourge’s hand as he rolled up onto his shoulders and flipped forward back to his feet and launched a series of boxing-inspired punches at the recovering hero, who reacted instantly to the familiar assault but was still caught off-guard by the Scourge’s speed and swiftness of attack.

Daredevil dodged two punches effortlessly, but the blows he blocked with his forearms felt like he was deflecting blows from a concrete block hammer. Daredevil was certain his arms would be one massive bruise in the morning even as he retaliated, his hands striking like cobras, his fingers jamming into multiple pressure points across the Scourge’s chest and arms. He pulled them back with a grimace, feeling as if he had just tried to poke a Sherman tank; regardless of how good Scourge’s Kevlar padding actually was, he suspected that the killer was naturally tougher than a normal human, perhaps even the normal super-human. DD had faced enough opponents, such as Bullet, to be able to tell the difference between armor and skin.

Scourge was also a varied fighter, as he used Aikido to flip Daredevil away from him and toward a nearby brick wall, turning a rare moment of exposure in his technique to hurl the smaller man away. Daredevil recovered, flipping inhumanly and landing in a crouch against the face of the wall and launching himself back at Scourge in a sharply-executed kick.

He knew it was a setup a split second before the Scourge side-stepped him and slammed both fists down into his stomach, driving him agonizingly into the rough rooftop, all the air in his lungs escaping in a rush, exploding the nerves along the base of his spine up into his brain and totally stunning the hero, leaving him lying before his foe completely exposed. Daredevil’s gasping brain worked the last seconds of the fight over in his head and realized the only reason Scourge would wish to separate them with the throw, given his apparent edge in strength and stamina, was to find a way to make the fight conclude much quicker and less painfully for himself.

“Stay down,” Scourge said, picking up his hat that had fallen off during the scuffle, rotating his arms and stretching his back, trying to regain feeling in his arms and neck from the debilitating effects of Daredevil’s precision strikes. The skinny bastard had damned near immobilized both of his arms, and he was quite sure he would be a big bruise in the morning across his chest, but his suit had protected him from the worst of the affects. “I’ve had enough of you.”

Scourge picked up the dropped billy clubs and walked over to Daredevil, dropping them casually next to the gasping hero, whose red-lensed eyes were staring blankly at him. “Listen, Daredevil, I didn’t want it to go this far, understand. I realize that as my activities become more out in the open, as opposed to the 13 prior missions I’ve successfully completed, its inevitable that I’m going to run into heroes who don’t see things my way. I decided to test my skills and equipment against one of you and, frankly, you scared me less than Captain America or Spider-Man.”

“Give up…yet…?” Daredevil asked, trying to sit up against the numbness in his abdomen, his left hand reaching for one of his clubs.

“Even in as good of shape as you are, you aren’t getting up for another couple of minutes, and you don’t want to be picking on a guy like me for a couple days at least,” Scourge said, standing and kicking the billy club away from Daredevil. “You compared me to the Punisher and I can see how you would, but this is nothing like that penny-ante mob shit Castle’s consumed with. Sure they’re a disease on this world, but they’re also one it’s used to and can handle.”

“Super-villains, however, are a cancer and one radiation only empowers,” Scourge said as he began to back away from Daredevil. “You can beat them back but you’re as beneficial as chemotherapy for most cases, and you make the organism you seek to protect…society…sicker by destroying lives and property in an endless cycle of worthless effort. Common sense says you don’t battle cancer…you exterminate it! But since you can’t bring yourself to do it, I will.”

“I am the Scourge of the Underworld…and Justice will be served!”

He dropped off the side of the building and dropped the four stories to the street, landing easily and taking off silently into the dark, following one of his previously laid-out escape routes from Hell’s Kitchen.

Though Daredevil pulled himself to his knees mere seconds after the Scourge left, it took him a full minute before he could get his clubs and onto his feet with protest, and though he tried valiantly to follow the quickly moving Scourge he soon lost him. The triple-heartbeats stopped after a moment and the sounds of the city, even at this time of night, obscured any sounds or scents of the Scourge from his senses within another few moments.

Slouching on a windowsill on a building a block from where they had fought, Daredevil lay his forehead against the cold glass and gritted his teeth against the pain and aggravation of the night. Scourge’s last words rang through his mind and he clenched his fist and pounded it into the stone next to the window. “Not if I can help it.”

The End…?