WELCOME TO THE CLAMBAKE!

Part I

By D. Golightly

Los Angeles

The soft treading of Adler Bruhn went unnoticed by the dozens of people he shuffled by, himself just another warm body moving through the ocean-like currents of downtown Los Angeles. He was non-descript by most standards; a brown overcoat, gray hair, thick glasses. Barely anyone paid him any attention at all, and his mutterings, while poignant, also went largely unnoticed.

“Nearly the right time,” he said to himself. “Almost. The time is nearly upon us, master.”

Adler slowly made his way to a sidewalk café, seating himself and awaiting the waitress. He ordered tea, even though he wasn’t planning on drinking it. He sat and watched the people that disgusted him, the general populace that made his stomach turn.

He smiled as the waitress brought him his hot beverage, nodding politely. She engaged him in small talk and he responded just enough to shut her up and move her on her way, but without raising her suspicions. He had become very adept at avoiding such attention. Decades of practice as a sleeper agent had served him well.

He glanced at the digital billboards, the people staring into their smartphones, and the general apathy  of society. So engrossed had they become in their online virtual lives that they failed to notice what was directly in front of them. He fantasized about how easy it would be to simply push a man in front of an oncoming bus while he perused his social media, or how little effort it would take to launch digital propaganda that would change the lives of the uninformed and bend them to a cause fueled by hate.

“Yes. It is finally time.”

He withdrew the relatively small canopic jar from within the folds of his overcoat, placing the delicate clay container onto the café table beside his steaming tea cup. Such an ordinary object that contained a power beyond his younger self’s ambitions.

This was the moment he had been waiting for, the moment when culture had culminated into a pathetic shadow of its former glory. He allowed his fingertips to brush the faded glyphs on the jar, imaging what it would feel like when the power consumed him. Did it matter? Wasn’t this the fruition of his mission, gifted to him by that once glorious leader that many of these spineless whelps probably had forgotten?

He stood and raised the jar over his head feeling justification fill his being. A few passersby looked at him briefly before diving back into their obnoxious ignorance.

Just before he smashed the jar onto the ground, he shouted in perfect German, “Hail the New Reich!”

A vortex of energy erupted from the shattered pieces, bathing him in glory as his purpose in this life was finally realized. This now towering torrent of white and blue consumed him, eating away hungrily at his flesh and bone, a sacrifice that was necessary to enact his life’s dedication.

For year upon year he had sat and waited for the day to come when his master was needed the most. With that day now upon him he felt the gratification of a lifetime endeavor coming to an end.

And just before the maelstrom of power shriveled his eyes he bore witness to the return of a legendary figure, a man that would once more alter the face of the world. As Adler Bruhn died, spurned by the storm he willingly unleashed, another stepped back into this plane of existence to take his place.
Adler would have been happy to know that people were certainly paying attention now.

“Ketchup?”

The pink creature sitting across the table from Craig Hollis shook her head, which was anything but casual given her skull structure. “For the third time, Craig,” she replied, “I do not need cats-up on my protein.”

She delicately raised the burger to his mouth, grease and red drippings falling beyond what the thick sesame seed bun could contain, and took a satisfying chomp. Despite the other patrons in the fast food restaurant giving them obvious space, only venturing to stare peripherally, none of it bothered Craig, also known as the incredible Mr. Immortal.

He was used to that kind of attention, after all. Dating a pink dinosaur/human hybrid tended to have that affect, along with his red and blue uniform. He rarely took it off, declaring that evil was always afoot and he needed to be at the ready just in case some supervillain arose.

He took superheroing seriously, even if other heroes didn’t offer him the same level of respect. That didn’t bother him, either. The job mattered. The respect would come all on its own. Besides, hadn’t Spider-Man started out as a sideshow wrestler or something? And look at him now! On the front page of virtually every edition of the Daily Bugle since he donned the webs.

But he would give it all up for her.

Just watching her masticate those fries really made his stomach flip, but it a totally romantic way. The way she gobbled down that burger. The way she wiped her mouth with her talon.

“Dinah,” Mr. Immortal said. “There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

“Please do not offer me cats-up,” Dinah Soar replied.

Craig opened his mouth to reply, but a flash of light coming from outside choked the words back down into his throat. A swirling vortex was quickly arising in the middle of the street, sending pedestrians running in all directions. He couldn’t quite make out what was in the center, but it was dark and it was moving, which meant that this probably wasn’t some freaky weather anomaly.

When Craig turned his attention back to Dinah, she was already up and halfway to the exit. “Hold up!” he called after her.

She pushed through the glass doors, bent her legs slightly, and glanced back over her shoulder at Mr. Immortal. “Hurry yourself!” she said. “We must engage the conflict before innocents are put in danger.”

“But we could—”

“The world needs us!”

She pushed off of the ground and the thin membrane that comprised her pink wings spread out wide, slamming downward with enough force to propel her high into the air. Dinah Soar took to the skies like she had been born there, leaving Craig Hollis to chase after her, ready to lay his life down for whatever cause they were fighting for today.

Several times if necessary.

“You can’t pay me with this!”

The thickly-muscled man wiped beer foam from his beard and looked bewildered at the bartender. “Why?” he asked. “I would say this coin is worth more than what you have in your cash box there. You should feel honored to sate the thirst of a living legend such as myself. So says Hercules!”

Raising his glass to no one in particular, Hercules downed the last of his beer and slammed it on the bar with a satisfying thud.

The bartender turned the golden drachma over in his hands, trying to figure out what nationality the currency belonged to, and what his accountant was going to say to him. Normally, a single beer wouldn’t be a big deal to write off if it meant sending this weirdo on his way, but said weirdo had just polished off an entire keg of black and tan.

Hercules took the bartender’s silence as acceptance and made for the door. As he stepped out into the late morning light, all thoughts of the mortal vanished from his mind. He breathed in deeply, hoping to enjoy a refreshing gust of air, but his senses detected the infernal smog that this coastline was riddled with.

“Perhaps it is time for Hercules to return to his homeland,” the lumbering hero said to himself. “Even Hephaestus’ forge has a better scent than this city. Would that a ferry take me there, I would—”

A plume of spiraling energy spun upward above the rooftops across the busy street, catching Hercules’ eye. He could see chips of stucco, brick, mortar, and more being pulled from the buildings and swallowed up by the vortex, and seconds later car horns were blaring, mixed with the started screams of innocent onlookers.

The bartender opened the door behind Hercules, nearly bumping into the hero. He started to say something about money again, but Hercules was focused entirely on the adventure unfolding before him, and an instant later he was off, running headfirst into what would hopefully be a glorious battle.

THWIP!

With pinpoint accuracy, the Scarlet Spider’s webline adhered to the corner of a five-story building in downtown L.A., anchoring the apex of his swing. Pumping his legs forward, he rounded the corner of the building, a tenement he thought, and used the momentum to catapult himself halfway down the block.

Somersaulting through the air, Scarlet was at his happiest. The freedom of movement always cleared his head, and there was a lot that needed clearing at the moment. Leaving Peter Parker behind had been a difficult thing to do, but ultimately a good idea. He needed a fresh start and L.A. was as far away as he could get.

He wasn’t sure about the climate, though, and finding adequate buildings to webswing from was problematic. Case in point, he had to target a ledge that was about thirty feet further away than he normally preferred out of sheer necessity, lest he go splat in some Californian’s latte.

If he was going to stay in Los Angeles and really try to make a life for himself here, he might have to think about an alternate mode of transportation.

Scarlet was about to turn the corner and swing uptown, but people running away in droves caused him to change his trajectory. Instead of releasing his webline he held on, turning in midair and allowing his momentum to bring him back toward the ensuing chaos.

One additional webline later, he flipped through the air and landed expertly in the middle of the street, standing before a growing tumult of spinning blue and white energy. In the eye of the storm was the outline of a person, although the shape was too amorphous for him to see if it was a man or a woman. Either way, reason coupled with his enraged spidey-sense told him that this was the person causing havoc in L.A. at the moment.

“Primal cyclones of unchecked energy are a moving violation, pal!” Scarlet shouted. “Unless you want me to go all Walter Peck on you, shut it down. Now!”

The person within the storm seemingly turned, perhaps to face him, but the vortex only continued to grow. It was rippling above the buildings now, pulling chunks of them off as if gravity was selectively denser higher up. Scarlet was glad he hadn’t tried to swing over the thing.

Falling into a crouch, Scarlet stretched out his arms and fired twin weblines at the central figure. The vortex ate up the webbing, spinning it upward until it simply burned out.

“Okay,” Scarlet muttered. “For my next trick—”

Spidey-sense blazing, Scarlet narrowly avoided being put into a stranglehold by someone in a black uniform behind him. So fixed was he on the dark figure in the vortex that he had ignored the warnings and allowed someone to get close. He pivoted on one foot, but then his peripheral vision caught another black-clad assailant just to the left of him.

Bending in normally impossible ways, the Scarlet Spider ducked under another set of arms grabbing for him and then leapt backward over the newcomer. He watched in horror as the uniformed person turned to face him, although person was a loose term with this creature.

Gray skin flecked with decay, bloodshot eyes, and mashing yellow teeth were all of the Hollywood trademarks of a very specific kind of undead bad guy. As the thing turned to face Scarlet, it staggered toward him, arms outstretched, and teeth grinding away in hopes of somehow finding something to bite down on.

“Oh, hell no,” Scarlet said as he flipped backward, adhering to the front of a building twenty feet up by the soles of his feet. “Nope. Uh-uh. Not happening. I don’t do zombies.”

He webbed up the pair of clumsy zombies, pasting them to the pavement as well as lashing their arms to their sides. He laid on an extra thick layer over their mouths to keep their teeth to themselves.

With a gasp, he saw that there were easily a dozen more of the creatures stalking toward him on both sides of the street, all of them wearing the same black uniforms. Most of them were locked onto his position, except for two, which were cornering a family of three in front of a bodega.

“Please let there be a Romero festival in town,” he said as he raced along the building’s face toward the family.

He hopped the gap between buildings, anchored a webline on a balcony overhead, and dropped between the mother with her two started kids and the encroaching zombies.

His fist slammed into the first’s jaw, ripping the mandible off completely. He allowed a moment of shock, exclaiming, “Gross!” before squarely placing an uppercut under the second’s chin, sending it flying back about ten feet.

He ushered the family away, pointing toward a path of relative safety where no zombies were in sight. As he did, however, three more stumbled out of the alley he had just hopped over, coming up behind him. The zombies were comparatively slow, but as he faced the new arrivals down the previous two had recovered and were stalking toward him.

Fists and feet flew, connecting with the rotting flesh of the zombies. The force of his strikes was only deadened by the thick black uniforms they wore, which looked to be bulky leather overcoats. Somehow, more were coming for him. As he put one down, another appeared. It was like the street was infested with them and he couldn’t figure out where they were all coming from.

Launching himself up and over one of the creatures, he spied the answer he was looking for. A bubble formed along the base of the vortex and when it burst another of the uniformed zombies was birthed out.

“Alien zombies?” he wondered aloud. “Inter-dimensional zombies? Weird Science zombies? Shame on Anthony Michael Hall!”

The uniforms bothered him. It alluded to someone controlling them, or at the very least, outfitting them. He could still make out the dark figure in the center of the maelstrom, but he wasn’t about to throw himself into that mess. He needed a plan, something better than rushing head-first into an unknown energy field.

The horde was growing and fast. Before he knew it Scarlet was surrounded completely, forcing him to give up the fight and retreat to a perch out of harm’s way. Planting himself on top of a flower shop’s awning, Scarlet watched as the zombies quickly filled the sidewalk under him, their count now way up into double-digits.

SCREECH!

A wave of compacted sound washed over the sidewalk full of zombies, causing Scarlet to instinctively cover his ears. He watched in amazement as the zombie horde began to lose its coherence, with splits forming in their ranks. The sound continued on, knocking several over as flakes of the already ruptured skin broke away.

Several agonizing moments later, the sound finally stopped. While the horde hadn’t been laid out completely, it was certainly thinned.

Once the ringing in his ears lessened, Scarlet could make out the noise of what sounded like tiny jet engines from overhead. Given the intensity of the situation and that telltale noise of someone flying using mechanical means, he half expected to see a certain armored Avenger arriving to save the day. However, he was still pleasantly surprised to see—

“Machine Man!”

The purple android lowered himself to Scarlet’s level on the awning, nodding in mimicry of a human acknowledgement. As he descended the sonic weapon protruding from his left forearms broke down and slid back under his purple covering. The heavily armored and dense with internal weaponry robotic hero was suspended in midair by his boot jets combined with repulsor technology.

“Scarlet Spider, correct?” the self-aware machine designated as X-51 responded. “I would be happy to lend assistance in this emergency. I assume you require help?”

“Does the pope wear a big hat? What are you doing here?”

X-51 surveyed the scene below them, saying, “I was attending a seminar on Phineas Horton, the modern grandfather of robotics, when I was alerted to a crisis in the downtown area.” He turned back to face Scarlet. “However, information on the police band was limited and I was not aware that the zombie presence had ties to the National Socialist party.”

“Huh?” Scarlet shot back, but he turned his attention to the recovering horde and squinted, focusing on previously unnoticed red armbands. “Swastikas. Oh, c’mon! Seriously? Zombies aren’t bad enough? They have to be Nazi zombies?”

“I can access several databases that monitor current Neo-Nazi or other similar groups, but none are currently involved with anything as comprehensive as corpse reanimation. We face an unknown enemy.” Machine Man paused, looking further up the street. “It would seem we do not face it alone, however.”

Scarlet followed Machine Man’s gaze and was astonished to see a crowd of zombies that was being blasted apart by some unseen force. Every other second a uniformed zombie would fly up and over the group, rising twenty or thirty feet in the air before landing ungracefully on the pavement again, as if being struck by a speeding vehicle. Left and right, one after another, the zombie collective was split down the middle by another very recognizable figure.

Hercules grinned from ear to ear as he pummeled the zombies, bashing them back and forth, not wasting more than a single strike per enemy. He didn’t even seem to notice when the ones behind him bit down on his biceps, unable to break the skin thanks to his godly strength.

“Ho there, friends!” he shouted once he spotted both Machine Man and the Scarlet Spider. “Have you come to lend Hercules a hand? I will be sure to leave enough for all of us!”

Hercules’ fists crunched into the zombies like pile drivers, splintering the group within moments. The way he was slicing through the horde made it look like he wouldn’t be able to keep his promise.

“Incoming!” a new voice shouted from above.

Scarlet and X-51 both looked skyward to see the source of the declaration: a costumed man hanging onto the legs of a pink dinosaur girl. It was something straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon, and a bad one at that. The girl’s arms were laced with thin wings, allowing her to glide downward toward the street.

The man released his grip on her legs, letting her soar faster toward her intended targets. He rolled to his feet and kept the momentum up, running headlong into a contingent of zombies. His red and blue costume was slightly gaudy, but Scarlet swore that he had seen it somewhere before.

“Do you know who—” Scarlet began to say.

“Mr. Immortal and his paramour, Dinah Soar,” Machine Man stated. “Pseudo-Avengers, unless my memory is out of sync. We should lend aid.”

Mr. Immortal plunged into the zombie pile, kicking and punching to very little effect. Scarlet couldn’t be sure, because it was so insane, but he thought he heard the blonde man yell, “Hey! Look at me! Over here, over here!” as he tussled with the undead. But that couldn’t be right…could it?

When he saw the zombies begin to feast on Mr. Immortal, Scarlet sprang back into action. He leapt over the creatures beneath him, his spider-strength propelling him into the middle of the street, where he ran flat out toward the downed hero. He latched a webline onto Mr. Immortal’s ankle, quickly yanking him out of the horrid display.

Beneath his crimson mask, Scarlet was stricken to see that he was too late. Mr. Immortal had succumbed to the bites of the undead. Even without checking for a pulse Scarlet could tell that he was no longer alive.

Then Scarlet blinked, and somehow, amazingly, Mr. Immortal was standing upright and dusting himself off. He looked down at this ankle and tried to unsuccessfully kick off the webbing, and then got an annoyed look on his face. He glanced around until he saw the Scarlet Spider standing with the other end of the webline in hand.

“Do you mind getting this stuff off of me?” Mr. Immortal asked.

“…I…what? How did you—”

Mr. Immortal raised his hands, palms toward Scarlet, saying, “I get this a lot. I’ll explain later. In cases like this we find that I’m best used as a distraction.”

“Distraction?” Scarlet replied. “For what?”

Mr. Immortal smiled and pointed to the sky. “For her.”

The hungry zombies dining on chunks of Mr. Immortal’s flesh, which had since regenerated on his actual person, never heard or saw Dinah Soar swooping down from overhead, her wings stretched wide. She leveled off her flight path with the tops of their heads, slicing them off in a flash thanks to the razor-tipped edges of her wings. When she pulled upward and flapped higher into the air, all that was left in her wake were half a dozen decapitated zombies.

“Wow,” muttered Scarlet.

Bashfully, Mr. Immortal said, “That’s my girlfriend.”

Another screech filled their ears as Machine Man blasted another group of the Nazi zombies with his sonic weapon. Instead of relenting, however, he seemed to be corralling them, funneling them toward one end of the street.

And at that end awaited Hercules, his knuckles dripping with the torn decayed flesh of dozens of zombies. Tearing them in half with his brute force, punching completely through their faces, shattering their legs with vicious kicks…whatever tactic he took it was effective. The horde was being decimated by him alone, with fresh combatants put in front of him my X-51.

But there were still dozens more, and more coming by the second as the vortex continued to belch them out. All of them were clad in the heavy black leathers and each one bore a blistering red armband. To make matters worse, not all of them were homing in on the heroes; some were shuffled outward into the downtown area, seeking warm bodies that couldn’t defend themselves.

Scarlet webbed as many as he could into place, leaving them for Dinah Soar to finish off in much the same way she had before. Mr. Immortal did his best to keep the strays turned around, leading them back to where one of the other heroes could destroy, but even with their collective abilities they were stretched too thin.

“This isn’t working,” Scarlet called out. “We need to shut that…portal thing down!”

Machine Man, having switched off his boot jets, stomped up beside the Scarlet Spider as he laid down suppression fire from wrist-mounted dischargers. “The vortex does not seem to be so much a doorway to another place,” X-51 stated, “so much as it appears to be a doorway to another time. I am registering an alarming amount of tachyons disseminating from the center.”

A series of bone-crunching stomps captured the groups attention. From within the vortex they bore witness to the final emergence of the dark figure at the center, the one who would seemingly be the cause of this unghastly disorder and rampant carnage. The outline had grown bulky and cumbersome, its appendages thick and heavy. As it stepped out of the swirling energy it stood revealed, powerful and unforgiving in its appearance.

The gunmetal gray armor of the massive suit was rounded in most places, composited in a style from long ago, during a time of war. A blood-red swastika was painted on the chest plate, at least three feet across. Standing twelve feet tall, the armor looked outdated by comparison to modern versions, but still intimidating. This hulking mass of a past generation’s technology had once been cutting edge. Aside from its smooth and beveled surfaces were twin Gatling guns, one mounted on each massive arm.

Laughter emitted from behind the opaque helmet, which slowly slid back to reveal not a face, but a grotesque facsimile of the bone structure of the human skull.

A Red Skull.

The laughter continued as the shocked heroes gaped at this reborn nightmare of a man. Distracted by his appearance, they almost didn’t notice that his laughter had become mixed with something else: the whirring of the Gatling guns.

Scarlet’s extra-sensory ability kicked in, warning him of the immediate threat all the more. He shouted, “Scatter!” and two of the heroes obeyed, with Machine Man and Dinah Soar both taking to the air as he leapt straight up in the air, anchoring a webline and pulling himself to safety.

Hercules scoffed and stepped forward, welcoming the barrage of bullets. They bounced off of his chest and he was eager for more violence. The lust of battle was upon him and he would seek satisfaction with this mechanized man…and he would have, except that someone tapped on his shoulder.

“Excuse me,” Mr. Immortal said from just behind Hercules. “I couldn’t help but notice that those bullets are ricocheting off of you in a not very good way.”

“What manner of—” Hercules began to reply, but he looked around and saw that the projectiles were bouncing off of his durable skin and shattering windows of the nearby storefronts, or pilfering the pavements.

Most of the pedestrians had cleared the street, but he couldn’t risk anyone else coming to harm. Hercules flexed his mighty legs and sent himself hurling over the armored Red Skull, avoiding the stream of hot metal erupting from the twin Gatling guns.

…which were now focused on Mr. Immortal. His body became like a ragdoll as the rapid fire of the arm cannons sliced through him. Within seconds several dozen bullets had punched through his internal organs, shattered bones, and punctured muscle tissue. He flopped wildly in place for a moment before falling in a heap to the ground.

But in the blink of an eye later he was upright again, fully reformed and on the move. He said, “Now that’s how you act like a human shield!”

The Scarlet Spider found a perch atop a lamppost and took a moment to check his web fluid levels. Choosing to switch out a nearly empty cartridge, Scarlet’s mind raced as his hands deftly worked the equipment.

“Zombies, Nazis, an Avengers-level megalomaniac,” he muttered. “Yeah, L.A. is looking like a pretty awesome place to raise a family.”

“Heroes!” the Red Skull said, his voice augmented by a microphone at the base of his retracted helmet. His words were thick with a German accent. “Hear me! Your fight against my übermen is admirable, but I will prevail. It is inevitable! This plan was put into motion generations ago by your standards.”

As the legendary tyrant spoke the vortex continued to birth more and more of the zombies into the city. In fact, their numbers were increasing at an alarming rate. They needed to shut this thing down before there were too many to round up.

“I, the true and original Red Skull, was destined to rule! If I fail in my time, I will succeed in yours!”

The Red Skull began to chuckle, which slowly grew into maniacal laughter once more. It was clear that his insanity had gripped him completely, but Scarlet wasn’t sure if that made him any less of a threat. It likely made him even more dangerous. In his experience he had discovered that the less sane a bad guy, the more unpredictable they would become.

Scarlet was ready to dive back in the fray. He wasn’t sure what he would do, and he had absolutely no plan to work from, but he couldn’t just sit still. He took a deep breath and tensed his muscles for the fight of his life.

VISH!

Metal struck metal as something white crashed into the Red Skull’s chest plate, causing him to stumble back. The lumbering legs of the mechanized armor kept the villain upright, however, and Scarlet was just as surprised as the Red Skull to see a blazing white sword half embedded in the front of his armor, thrown by someone high above.

The pommel stuck out like a flag, announcing the arrival of something that this Red Skull was very familiar with.

Tracing the trajectory back upward, the Red Skull leered at yet another new arrival to the fracas. It led to a hovering craft, large enough for just a single passenger, and was barely six feet across. It was something between a jet-powered drone and a glider, and was mostly just two wings that came to a point, almost like a V.

Upon it stood a man wearing thick purple body armor, a stylized white mask, and a cape that draped over his left shoulder that bore the stars and stripes of the American people.

As it lowered closer to the Red Skull and the other heroes, the man shouted, “As long as I’m standing the future is safe from your tyranny!”

Scarlet heard someone beneath him and looked down to see Mr. Immortal standing at the base of the lamppost, his hand cupped around his mouth. “What?” Scarlet asked.

“Who’s the dude in the cape?”

Scarlet shrugged. “I haven’t got a clue. These cameos are getting a little ridiculous.”

NEXT ISSUE: All the players are in place for a big downtown throw down! Can these gathered heroes stop this newly returned Red Skull before his zombie übermen infest the entire city? Plus, none of these guys are technically Avengers, so where are they?