SECOND COMING

Part II

By Wesley Overhults

The Cathedral, An Unknown Earth

The whir and click of machinery permeated the room, the humming and droning a soothing noise to the technicians while they continued their work. They moved with precision like the fine, well-oiled parts of a machine. There was order to their movements as there was order to everything else in their world. Order was a virtue, a shield used to defend themselves from the chaos of life. The Reverend told them that order was the most important thing in life. As long as your life moved in a pattern, you were safe and clean from the chaos of the rest of the world.

“What’s the status of our project?” inquired the Reverend as he made his way into the room.

“We sent one of the inquisitors in to get him, sir,” explained one of the scientists. “He should be returning any moment. I must confess that things would be much easier if we had Dr. Ohn to oversee this operation.”

“You know that our former brother Jonathan is no longer with us,” said the Reverend. “I must admit that I have languished in my duties to this section of our operations. I have let this flock wander too long without the firm hand of a shepherd to guide them. Brother Jonathan’s experience in interdimensional technology was vital to our cause. I see the same potential for greatness in this one so it’s imperative that we retrieve him and get him functioning again.”

“You needn’t worry, Reverend,” assured a man as he stepped from seemingly thin air. “I believe I have just what you requested.”

The blond man in the strange body armor adorned with giant crosses held up a container with a silver liquid inside it. The Reverend studied the liquid intently, trying to discern if he could spot any movement from it. He noted the faintest flicker of life in the liquid and it was enough to give him hope. He knew the technicians would have to move quickly, though, if they were going to succeed in their task.

“Brother Samuel, you do us a great service once more,” commended the Reverend. “You are well on your way to becoming our greatest inquisitor.”

“All praise to The Order, Reverend,” said Samuel Guthrie, the young man who in other worlds was known as Cannonball. “I serve our cause as best I can.”

“And you serve it faithfully,” noted the Reverend. “Return to your post for now. I must adjourn to my chambers to deliberate on other matters. Technicians, I want him up and running as soon as possible. This is a commodity we can’t afford to lose.”

The scientists all nodded and moved to begin their work. One of them took the container from Samuel and began hooking it to a machine. The Reverend left the workshop, knowing that his scientists would do their best. He continued on through the halls of the grand building that was the headquarters for his Order. Long ago he had built this organization from the ground up, molding it into the force it was today. He didn’t do it alone though. After all, every great creator was nothing without their muse, their divine inspiration.

“I take it the mission was successful,” said the blond woman as the Reverend entered his private chambers.

“We’ll have our new Minister of Science in no time,” he assured her. “Once again I am in awe of your abilities, my dear Eterna. None of this would have been possible without you.”

“A dutiful wife would do nothing less for her husband,” said Eterna, crossing the room and planting a kiss on the Reverend’s lips. “You’re the one with the vision, William. All I did was put a little power behind it.”

The New York Hilton, Earth-32

“There’s something I think I should say.”

The Exiles were waiting until the cover of dark before they moved out for the HYDRA facility. Songbird had contacted SHIELD and had gotten the location of the facility. It seemed that the Avengers didn’t think it necessary to check out the facility, knowing that it would probably incur HYDRA’s wrath and draw them into an unnecessary conflict. The Exiles didn’t have that much of a problem with it though. They made their careers off of unnecessary conflicts.

“You’d like to do that now?” asked Goblin in reference to Wasp’s statement.

“In the air, not here,” she explained. “Fly with me?”

Goblin wordlessly nodded and opened the window of his hotel room. He floated off the ground and flew through the open window, hovering in the air until Wasp joined him. They rocketed upward into the sky, far above the hustle and bustle of the city below. Being in the air helped Wasp clear her head. Both she and Goblin had grown up in this city, had been born into the fast pace of its lifestyle. Getting into the sky helped escape that and it gave both of them, especially her, a sense of clarity. In the sky, they could look down on the city that was their home without being entrenched in it.

“You had something you wanted to say,” prompted Goblin.

“I didn’t want to say it back at the Axis because there was too much going on and I didn’t expect you to come back anyway,” admitted Wasp, closing the empty air between them. “If you’re here then that means that Liz . . .”

“She broke up with me,” confirmed Goblin. He knew exactly what she was going to say and he didn’t want to hear it, maybe because part of him had wanted her to say it all along and he didn’t know how to deal with it.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized to him. “I know the timing on this is going to suck but I have to do this. I’ve been through a lot in my life but I’ve never met anyone like you. I love you, Harry. I don’t care if you love me back or not but you should know how I feel because if what we just went through with Jules tells me anything, it’s that I can’t wait around to say something like that to someone I care for. I want us to be together, Harry.”

“You don’t know me like you think you do,” he countered, trying to tell himself that he didn’t want the same thing that she did. “I’m moody, I’m paranoid, and I’m barely even classified as a human being anymore.”

“And I’m a former drug addict with wings sticking out of her back who can shrink herself,” she reminded him. “It’s okay if you don’t want the same thing, Harry. I understand, and I’d definitely rather us not be together than me be some sort of rebound girl for you. I have too much self-esteem to put myself in that situation. I just wanted you to know how I feel because I think maybe you feel the same way too.”

Harry looked at her, at this girl who was honestly one of the strongest women he had known in his life. How many times had they saved each other’s lives? How many times had they been there for one another without any expectation of returned affection? When he was lost in the darkness with the evil energies of that demonic spell coursing through his body and mind, she was the one who helped bring him back into the light. Now there were no restrictions, no reasons to continue denying himself what his feelings were trying to tell him.

“Kate, if we’re going to do this then we have to move slowly,” he warned her, the doubt and hesitation still haunting him as it always did. “You have to admit we both have a lot of baggage.”

“You don’t have to make excuses anymore,” she said tenderly, her fingers grazing against his cheek. “You’re a good man, Harry, and I’d like to think I’m a good woman. Shouldn’t two good people finally have something beautiful in their lives?”

“Slow, Kate,” he reminded her, his own hand resting on top of hers. “We have to move slow.”

“Of course,” she agreed.

“Will wants us inside,” cut in Songbird as she hovered in the air with the two Exiles, her hard-sound wings shimmering with pink energy and faintly giving off some music. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“Duty calls,” said Goblin, lightly kissing Wasp’s hand before she removed it from his cheek. “C’mon.”

He dove back towards the hotel and Wasp could swear she actually saw him smiling a little bit. She didn’t think she’d seen him smile after what happened in Husk’s world with his demonic corruption. Granted, none of them had that much to smile about lately but maybe things were starting to look up.

“I take it you and he are together now?” asked Songbird.

“As much as we can be,” answered Wasp with a grin.

“I know that look,” said Songbird, managing a smile of her own. “He’s got some rough edges but I don’t think I’m one to criticize given my taste in men. Take care of him, Kate. Just don’t forget to take care of yourself too.”

“Yeah, I know,” assured Wasp. “We better get back to the hotel. The sun’s starting to go down so I assume that’s why Will wanted us down there.”

“Yeah, we’re going to be raiding that HYDRA facility tonight,” confirmed Songbird. “He said that you and Harry have been with him the longest. What’s he like, Kate?”

“You mean Will?” asked Wasp. “He’s been our leader for a long time, pretty much since the beginning, though he didn’t officially have the job at first. He’s kinda like our team dad I guess. I mean he looks out for everyone and always tries to protect them when we’re in trouble.”

“He and I are trying to work out an understanding on being co-leaders of this team,” explained Songbird. “He seems really stubborn.”

“He’s not used to someone else having ideas about what to do,” admitted Wasp. “I don’t think he minds it when someone stands up to him though. I mean I did it once when we were starting to get into some heavy crap. I think he respects people who speak their mind and are honest.”

“I just don’t like stepping on toes,” said Songbird. “He was your leader long before I came into the picture. I don’t wanna screw that up just because I’m used to always being the leader where I come from.”

“You and him are gonna get along just fine,” assured Wasp. “You guys are actually a lot alike I think. Just be yourself. We’ve seen enough crazy stuff that I doubt there’s anything you do that’s going to make us flip out.”

Melissa Gold nodded even as Wasp swooped towards the open hotel window. All her life, she had battled with insecurities. In the eyes of her abusive, alcoholic father, Melissa was never good enough. It gave the girl a huge inferiority complex that she carried with her even to this day when she was one of the senior leaders of her world’s Avengers. She was inadequate in pretty much all walks of life, or at least that’s what she had been lead to believe for a number of years. It took a long time to reverse that thinking and even now some of the old insecurities still haunted her. Songbird pushed those thoughts away and returned to the ornate confines of the hotel for the mission briefing. She wasn’t that scared little girl huddling and crying in the corner of her room. She was a grown woman who had proved her worth on more than one occasion and she would do so again. She was at least sure of that if nothing else.

HYDRA Facility, That Night

“They are scrubbing facility now,” informed Whiplash. “We must move.”

Sandman nodded quietly and turned into his sand form, slithering along the ground like a snake. Wasp shrunk down to microscopic size and then followed him. The plan they had laid out prior to the strike was that Sandman and Wasp would infiltrate the facility first, clearing a path to get the rest of the Exiles through the front door. Once everyone was inside, they would find out why the Scorpion came there in the first place and then try to corner the Scientist Supreme and make her tell them what was in that canister that Scorpion consumed. However, things had to be modified now that there was twice as much personnel as normal.

“Whiplash’s right,” agreed Songbird. “There’re too many goons around for them to really clear us a path. We’re going to have to make our own. Molly? Can you do that?”

“Oh yeah,” assured Bruiser with a grin plastered across her face. “I can definitely do that.”

“Good,” said Songbird. “Let’s get in there and get what we came for.”

Bruiser was the first one out of their concealment, her invulnerability making her the perfect person to take point. She didn’t waste any time either, decking the first HYDRA soldier she saw. She broke his jaw with one punch, barely restraining herself from killing the man. She had to remember what John said. Pulling punches wasn’t her style but she knew she would be in real trouble if she actually cut loose on someone, especially if they didn’t have the invulnerability to take one of her real punches.

“Watch your back, little one,” warned Whiplash, the air coming alive with the pop and crackle of his whips energizing themselves. “Leave dangerous work to me.”

The former Soviet super soldier entered the fray, whips singing through the air with frightening speed and precision. He cracked one of them towards a HYDRA soldier and removed the gun from the man’s hand before cracking his other whip in a slash across the man’s throat. Whiplash cracked the whip on his right hand in a horizontal sweep that brushed aside more HYDRA goons. Goblin got into the air and used his hellfire bolts to lay down some cover and keep the other terrorist soldiers from firing on his teammates. It was Songbird though who planned on doing the real damage. The air was alive with the sound of her scream as she soared through the battlefield on her sonic wings. A blast of sound flew from her mouth and formed into the shape of a battering ram before plowing through the remaining HYDRA soldiers.

“Give me one of them,” she ordered to the others.

Whiplash nodded and coiled one of his whips around the unconscious body of a HYDRA goon, retracting it and reeling the man in like a fish caught on a hook. He didn’t know what Songbird had planned but he knew she probably had a good idea. Songbird nodded to show her satisfaction and then landed next to the prone body. She rifled through the man’s outfit until she found what she was looking for. She knew all the HYDRA goons had to have radio transmitters somewhere on them so they could stay in touch with one another and with their superiors. All the transmitters were linked by the same frequency so that meant she could probably drop all the HYDRA operatives at once with one well-timed scream.

“You were planning on calling the others?” inquired Goblin.

“We’ll see them soon enough,” promised Songbird before putting the radio close to her mouth. “Here’s a little tune you guys might know. Feel free to sing along if you can.”

Songbird sent a low-level sonic scream into the radio and watched as it dropped everyone who was listening to it. She assumed that it got some of the other HYDRA goons inside the base as well. With most of the ones outside already down, Melissa thought it safe to head into the facility and see what Will and Kate had accomplished.

“We could hear that over the radios,” reminded Sandman as the other Exiles entered the facility.

“I tried to be as quiet as I could,” replied Songbird. “What’re we looking at in here?”

“We managed to get into the security room and get a look at the footage from the cameras,” said Wasp. “Scorpion broke in here to look at some files on their computer network. I think their computer network might still be up and running but I don’t think any of us know what to look for.”

“Give me terminal and I will find out,” promised Whiplash.

“You were worried about me, weren’t you?” asked Wasp playfully, grinning at Goblin.

“Maybe,” he admitted with a grin of his own.

“Get a room or cut it out,” ordered Sandman. “What have we got, Whiplash?”

“Pitiful security,” stated Whiplash. “Little assassin girl wanted to find father. She hacked into very classified files to find information. This is what she found.”

Sandman looked at the image of Scorpion’s biological father that Whiplash pulled from HYDRA’s mainframe. He cursed under his breath and realized it was going to be a very long night if they didn’t put an end to this quickly. The problem was finding the father when he was running loose in a city this size. It seemed though that the Exiles were about to have even more problems to deal with.

“Congratulations, you’ve solved the mystery,” noted the Scientist Supreme as she leveled her gun at Sandman while her personal guard trained their weapons on the rest of the Exiles. “I’m sure everyone in the afterlife will be pleased to hear who did it.”

“Guess my scream didn’t do as much damage as I would’ve thought,” realized Songbird.

“This girl is your daughter, correct?” asked Whiplash. “Why would you allow daughter to ingest something as dangerous as this?”

Whiplash gestured to the file on the computer that he found regarding what the substance was that Scorpion had consumed. Monica allowed a semblance of a smile to grace her lips. She had outdone herself with that particular specimen. It was so lethal that even her beloved daughter was feeling under the weather after exposure to it. If it could possibly kill Scorpion then a normal human being or even a superhuman being didn’t really have a chance of standing up to it.

“I had planned on exposing her to it when I felt it was ready,” she confessed to the Exiles. “I suppose it was a happy accident that things turned out this way.”

“Told you adults were like that,” said Bruiser snidely, moving to put herself between Sandman and the barrel of Monica’s gun.

The Scientist Supreme squeezed off a blast of energy that struck Molly’s hand and had no effect on her. Whiplash took this as an opening to strike. His coils slithered across the floor and wrapped themselves around the legs of two HYDRA soldiers, whipping their legs out from under them and putting them on their backs in an instant. The rest of the HYDRA guard began to open fire but the air was alive with music and a hard-sound shield surrounded the Exiles courtesy of Songbird. Goblin and Wasp got up above the shield and blasted the HYDRA guard, causing them to fall back and give the Exiles more room to maneuver.

“We’ve got what we need to know,” decided Sandman. “I think it’s time we pull out. Melissa, keep that shield up as long as you can so we have some cover.”

“I can do you one better,” she promised before turning the shield into something resembling a snow plow. Songbird used the plow to clear the Exiles a path to the exit.

Unfortunately, it seemed that HYDRA had other ideas. One of the goons pointed an exotic-looking weapon at Songbird and pulled the trigger. As near as Melissa could tell, it was some kind of sonic-distortion gun. Whatever frequency it generated was canceling out her own and her construct dissipated before her eyes. She switched up the frequencies of her next scream but the gun instantly calibrated itself to match the pitch. Worse yet, it seemed to send her own scream right back at her, sending her sprawling to the floor. Whiplash saw one of his leaders go down and cracked his whip at the man with the sonic gun. It only took one precision stroke from the energized whip to slice the gun into pieces.

“We’re not getting out through the front door,” realized Sandman, using some sandstone shields to give the Exiles cover. “Osborn, you and Kate make us a hole.”

Goblin looked up at the roof of the complex and realized what Sandman wanted. He aimed his hellfire blasts at the ceiling above the HYDRA guard, blowing a hole in it and raining debris on them. The soldiers moved backwards, giving the Exiles time to use the debris as cover and get themselves out of the complex through the hole in the roof. Goblin and Kate flew through the hole while Songbird picked herself up and unfurled her sonic wings to do the same. Once the three airborne Exiles were out of the building, Melissa created a scoop to pick up Whiplash and Bruiser.

“This train is about to leave,” she reminded Sandman. “You coming along?”

Sandman nodded and elongated his hand to grab the edge of the platform Songbird had created for Whiplash and Bruiser. Will was about to haul himself up to join them when a beam of energy lanced through the air and struck the column of sand that was his arm. He felt it slowly break apart and it sent him plummeting back to the floor. The Scientist Supreme pointed the glowing barrel of her gun straight at him and prepared to fire another shot. Apparently though, Sandman recovered faster than she expected him to. He came towards her and warped his body to weave around her shots.

“That first shot should’ve done more damage to your molecular cohesion,” she said as she tagged Sandman with another blast before he grabbed her by the throat and pinned her against a wall. “I calibrated it specifically for your body’s composition.”

“Newsflash, lady,” said Sandman, “I’m not made out of regular sand anymore.”

The contact Sandman’s body made with Monica’s began to cause an unexpected reaction in the Scientist Supreme. She began to rapidly age right in front of his eyes. Sandman recoiled, relinquishing his hold on her to spare her from aging any further. It was then that he remembered what Jules had said during their battle. Something was different about him, something that he had tried to ignore but now it was blatantly apparent. When he reformed his body using sand from the Axis, something changed inside William Baker and now he wasn’t sure if he could control it.

“Let’s go!” ordered Songbird.

“Right,” agreed Sandman, pushing aside his questions for the moment and hoisting himself up onto the hard-sound platform Melissa had constructed earlier, thankful that none of his teammates had seen what had occurred.

How long could he expect to keep this to himself though? How long could he even keep this new power in check? He hadn’t done anything like that when he had used his power on the guards earlier. He reasoned that perhaps it had to do with his emotions. The angrier or more excited he became, the harder it was to hold his new power in check. If that was the case then he was going to have to keep a level head. The last thing that the team needed was for its leader to fall apart.

“Everything okay?” asked Wasp, noticing that Sandman didn’t seem his usual self.

“She just got a lucky shot,” stated Sandman. “C’mon, I think we’ve caused enough damage for one night and we still have to find Scorpion. Whiplash, what can you tell us about that virus she ate?”

“It is biological weapon designed by that woman herself,” explained Whiplash. “It was built to withstand even superhuman healing factors such as Scorpion’s. That girl is lucky being alive after eating it. It is getting worse though.”

“Worse?” asked Sandman.

“Da,” replied Whiplash. “When infected person dies from virus, virus seeps out of their body and goes airborne to infect others in area. That is how virus is spread.”

“So if Scorpion gets killed then we’re looking at a worldwide pandemic,” realized Sandman. “Knowing who her real father is, I think it’s safe to assume that there’s a good chance of her getting killed while trying to find him. We need to contact the Avengers and notify them about this immediately.”

“Notify us about what?” asked Iron Man as he swooped in. “I see you kids have been having fun tonight. I’m surprised nobody thought to invite me. I always love a good party.”

“You had the same idea as us about searching the HYDRA base?” guessed Songbird.

“Yep but you know how the rest of those guys can be sometimes,” said Iron Man. “Good thing I’m the brains of the outfit. Now, what’s this about Scorpion?”

“We have to contain her as soon as possible,” explained Sandman. “If she dies then that virus inside her will go airborne and it will probably wipe out the entire human race.”

“If we could get her contained and I could get a DNA sample then Reed and I could probably come up with an antidote,” said Iron Man. “Trust me, with the think-tank we have at the mansion we’ll come up with something for her. Did you find out who her father was?”

“Yeah and you’re not going to like it,” said Sandman.

Something was really, really wrong with her. It didn’t matter though. She had spent the whole day tracking him down and she had waited years for this moment. Finally, she was going to meet her father. Carmilla Black couldn’t tell if the butterflies in her stomach were because of nervousness or because of nausea. She was here now, though, and there was no turning back. This was the moment of truth that she had been waiting so long for. It was strange in a way because she had already met her father once without really knowing he was her father. Maybe he knew and that was why he had sought her out to become part of his group. Whatever the case, now she knew the truth and she could look at him with new eyes.

“Never could stand to look at your face,” muttered a voice from inside the warehouse. “Always so annoying the way you would dictate terms to me as if you were better than me. I’m better than you, better than everyone. I always have been.”

“Dad?”

The figure turned away from his work and noted the young girl standing in front of him. He knew the Scorpion well enough but had she just said what he thought she said? That wasn’t possible. He never had any children and at this point in his life he knew there was probably no chance of him ever having children. So why was the Scorpion of all people standing in front of him and calling him Dad?

“I think you have the wrong arachnid,” said Scarlet Spider, intent on returning to his work defacing the image of J. Jonah Jameson that was plastered all over the wall of the former Daily Bugle shipping warehouse he was using as a base of operations. “Either that or MJ has some very interesting explanations for me. I do hope I meet her again though. I’d love to snap her neck.”

“The files said you’re my father,” said Scorpion, almost collapsing into his arms from exhaustion. “Help me.”

Carmilla Black was dying. Her wonderful body had somehow betrayed her and it was trying to kill her from the inside out. Her enhanced lymphatic system could only compensate for so much of the biological weapon coursing through her veins. She was a walking time bomb because that virus would kill her if something else didn’t do the job first. Once that happened, the world would have a plague of biblical proportions on its hands because if the virus could kill her then it could kill almost anyone.

“Only because you’re my kind of kid,” decided Scarlet Spider. “Really though, you could’ve just gone on Maury. It would’ve been a hell of a lot faster.”

Next Issue: Scarlet Spider has big plans for his daughter Scorpion but not if the Exiles have anything to say about it.