Crossover Earth '98

by Christopher Shea, Mike Cocker, and Michael Kelly

Canal Street at the height of Mardi Gras, jammed from sidewalk to sidewalk with drunken college students, immense parade floats, whirling mobs of maskers, and wide-eyed tourists, was not a good place to be if you were barely four feet tall. Milo Tagelohn's steel-hard pilema shirt protected him from the worst of the elbows and jostlings that came his way, but his feet had been repeatedly stepped on, someone had spilled a Hurricane on him several blocks back, and on no fewer than three occasions, a hefty woman had stopped him and blinded him with a camera flash, screaming, "Oh, isn't he the cutest little thing?" to her companions. And getting anywhere was a tortuous process, especially for Milo.

Even after all these years of city living, in Germany and America, he was still not quite comfortable in crowds, and especially uncomfortable about shoving his way through them. His lips moved constantly as he forced himself through people jammed hip to hip. The sound of his voice was lost among the shriek and din of the crowd.

"Excuse me...pardon me...make way, please...may I come through?..."

The task was made no easier by the man and woman who followed in his wake. The man, one Chester Penman, was the bigger burden, because he carried a video camera on his shoulder -- the sight of which ignited the I'm-gonna-be-on-TV circuit in the revelers' sodden brains and drew them in flocks to wave, caper, shout, "Hi, everyone!" and similarly inspired slogans, and flash various body parts. Chester recorded it all with a fine journalistic impassivity, but the target of his camera was Milo, which meant that Milo was constantly battling through a wall of people who crowded around him, seeking their fabled fifteen minutes. He wondered what they would think if they knew he was hunting a pair of murderous supervillains. Probably they'd find it exciting, he thought sourly.

The woman, Lynette Evans-Tagelohn, followed just behind Chester, her blonde head swiveling as she took in the crowd happily. She, at least, was enjoying herself, but having her around only worried Milo more. He stopped often to look back at her. Milo would rather have left both Lynette and the cameraman back home in San Francisco, but the Goblin King's brazen challenge was News, and so were the superheroes who had turned up to fight him. Combine that with the pageantry of Mardi Gras, and you had an opportunity that any television producer in particular would trade his soul, assuming he had one, for. An opportunity that one television producer in particular had persuaded her husband into letting her in on. Lynette, at least, seemed to be enjoying Mardi Gras. From somewhere, she'd accumulated several strands of beads she wore around her neck. Milo had seen for himself how such necklaces were usually earned, which only increased his determination not to take his eyes off her.

Milo rubbed a thumb over the Miller Medallion he held, grimacing. The gold was sticky with Hurricane residue. On the street, the high and elaborate floats of Endymion Krewe rolled by, each one laden with figures as bizarrely costumed as any villain Milo had ever fought. The medallion gave a little flicker as one of the older floats rolled past. Milo traced a finger along the mazework of lines engraved on its face, and the flicker died. If the task weren't difficult enough, there was magic around -- too much of it. New Orleans' reputation as an occult nexus was well-deserved, it seemed. At any other time, Milo would have been curious to discover more, but now it was just another annoyance. What he was doing was the equivalent of hunting for a diamond in a snowstorm.

Suddenly, the Miller Medallion went from warm and sticky to bitterly cold. A weird black light boiled from within the metal, sending lines of itself wriggling snakelike across the golden tracery. Milo stopped dead, all his attention focused on the medallion, watching the patterns that formed and reformed before his eyes.

"Whoa," said a man in a dress and a long black wig, leaning closer to peer at the medallion. "Cool."

Lynette shoved him aside impatiently. "Do you have it?" she asked Milo, shifting from tourist to sharp and businesslike in a way that would have disturbed him if he hadn't seen it so many times before.

He nodded slowly. "I think so. It feels right. Eastward...no, southeast."

She already had the map of New Orleans out of her back pocket and was unfolding it. "Could be Lafayette Number Two. That's the biggest one that way."

"We should investigate. Contact the others." Milo dropped the Medallion back in the case at his belt while Lynette punched numbers into her cell phone, calling Old Glory, who was patrolling elsewhere in the city. There was no need to call the third member of their group. Milo knew he would be listening.

"On his way," Lynette reported a moment later, folding up the cell phone.

"Good. Let us be on our way as well."

"It's a couple miles away," Lynette warned. "We ought to go to one of the other streets, find a cab."

"Not necessary. I mean to travel more swiftly." Milo held the flap of his belt case open so he could peer within, then extracted a small object.

"Come closer; you too, Mr. Penman. If the rest of you could just back away a little?"

Lynette smiled. "Okay, which toy do you want to show off this time?"

"My creations are not toys," Milo said mildly. "Particularly not this: the Amber Road." He held up his palm, displaying a little golden-brown marble of amber, then turned his hand over and let the amber bead fall. When it hit the ground, there was a sizzle and a muted boom that sent the ring of onlookers stumbling back. A bolt of lightning struck up at the sky from the ground, arcing over the rooftops. When the crowd blinked their dazzled vision back to normal, there was no sign of the three, only a smell of ozone and a scorch mark where they had stood.

"Very cool," the man in the black wig commented, staring skyward.

The eerie, ambient sounds of Ry Cooder's guitar would have been a fitting accompaniment to oilslick rainbows writhing in the reflection of the moonlight on rain-slicked asphalt. Instead, the faraway shouts of "Laissez les bons temps rouler!" desperately fought through the thick walls of run-down tenement buildings, Bourbon Street's joviality seemingly all too distant to ever reach. The overall effect, therefore, was much the same.

In a darkened alley off of St. Peter, the dregs of the Creole and Cajun denizens fled at Old Glory's approach, his star-spangled cape cutting through the night. The patriotic hero made his way along the decay and squalor, taking the quickest route to one of New Orleans more renowned graveyards.

Old Glory didn't consider himself superstitious yet he nevertheless felt apprehensive knowing that the Goblin King was in the Crescent City. He shuddered at the thought of what horrific scheme the master of terror had planned for the hundreds of thousands of costumed krewe members and tourists. And the fact that it was to involve a cemetery only served to heighten his concerns.

He approached the back of a blues bar called Spooky Luc's. Housed in one of the French Quarter's oldest buildings, Spooky's was an in-spot for off-duty hookers, dirty cops, and gamblers while its laneway catered to a smattering of prostitutes and drug-users.

A place like Spooky's existed in every major city, seedy, smoke-filled, capturing its essence as Spooky Luc's captured the essence of New Orleans' seamy underbelly. For the most part, the cops kept out the violent maniacs, employing a peculiar selection process, and somehow establishing a truce. The cops didn't bother the hookers, and vice versa. Old Glory was appalled with this brand of justice, but clearly knew this wasn't the time or place to question such ethics.

Old Glory stopped as he moved by some toppled crates of produce alongside the blues bar. Even in the dark of night, he could clearly see a man lying amidst the crates. He kneeled down beside the sprawled body, removed a glove, and confirmed that the man was dead. The body was still warm, in fact.

Old Glory cursed silently.

"If it helps matters, he got what he deserved," an ominous voice said from the shadows. "He was a criminal."

The patriot started. He blinked as a long silhouette stirred, detaching itself from the shadows of the alley.

"Mortician...," Old Glory whispered. He heard the figure's walking stick tap on the street, caught a glipse of his wide-brimmed hat, but mostly he blended into the darkness. Only the white of his shirt seemed to reflect light.

Old Glory had been to New Orleans many times before, but never had he met the Mortician. He saw photos in the paper every once and a while and swore he saw a familiar silhouette standing on the cornice of an old theater, but it disappeared before he could make it out. New Orleanians take a sort of pride in being identified with the Mortician, but no one got to actually see him. It had been so long since Old Glory even read about him, that he sort of forgot he was real.

He was real enough now.

"I could use your help," Old Glory said. "I'm on my way to Lafayette Number Two to stop a sociopath named the Goblin King and his crazed partner." He hesitated then continued, "I believe magic is involved."

"Black magic," the Mortician added. It was strange. All these years, Old Glory imagined the Mortician with a southern or Cajun accent. He had neither, his voice numb of dialect and emotion. "Only black magicians called bokor disturb the dead. Bokor are known to raise the dead."

"You mean create zombies?" Old Glory's bafflement was punctuated with worry.

"Yes." It was then that Old Glory realized the Mortician's voice lacked all the essence of life. His voice sounded dead.

Old Glory paused, nearly lost for words. Everything seemed too surreal for him as if he was detached from the actual world. It was a phenomenon brought to those that visited New Orleans, a bewitching quality that those of the Crescent City seemed accustomed to.

"Will you help me?" Old Glory asked.

"No. I cannot."

The Mortician stepped back and melded with the shadows, like dark ink vanishing on black velvet. A tap-tap-tapping of a walking stick echoed through the night. Then a dead voice spoke up.

"Cut the tie that binds the dead and you will stop the zombies..."

Lightning struck out of a clear sky, sending jagged arcs of electricity dancing along the ancient iron gates of Lafayette Cemetery Number Two. When the flash and the boom had faded away, three people were left where the bolt had hit. Milo Tagelohn strode into the dark cemetery, Lynette and Chester following him -- not wanting to be too close to whatever might come after him, but also wanting to be close enough for him to protect them.

It had not taken a great deal of brainwork to realize that a villain who called himself the Zombie Master would be likely to seek out a cemetery. The question was, which one.

Ideally, the city should have mounted a police guard at each cemetery, but with the festivities in full swing, the NOPD had its hands more than full. Certainly they could never have spared enough men to completely watch a cemetery the size of Lafayette Number Two. It was a virtual city of the dead, a maze of tangled paths snaking among looming, solemn crypts. Many of the structures dated back to just after the Revolutionary War, and they showed their age-crumbling plaster, verdigrissed bronze, panoplies of stain overlaid on stain. Crooked trees, bare except for the occasional drape of Spanish moss, and a sullen half moon only served to perfect the eeriness of the setting.

Chester swung his camera this way and that, flashing its attached light around the area, and they could see that many of the crypt doors were hanging open. In front of one, an old chain and padlock lay in pieces on the ground.

"Milo, look!" Lynette grabbed his shoulder and pointed ahead to one of the broken-open crypts.

A near-fleshless hand had grabbed hold of the door jamb, and as they watched, a walking corpse hauled itself into the moonlight. It had neither eyes nor eyelids in its skeletal face, but even so it gave the impression of blinking in the unaccustomed radiance as its head swung this way and that, chunks of hair and clods of dirt sliding off the smooth surface of its skull. Its half-rotted clothes were dark from decay and the wet soil, so that there was no way to tell whether it had been a man or a woman, or when it had been laid to the rest so rudely interrupted.

The zombie finally seemed to notice that it was being watched. Turning in their direction, it began to make its way down the path toward the three observers, moving slowly as if it were struggling to remember how to walk.

"This is the right place, then." Milo, his feet planted and his chin tucked into his chest, thrust a hand at the oncoming zombie.

Instantly, its papery skin and moldering clothes were soaking wet. It lumbered on obliviously as Lynette and Chester backed away in haste, but Milo held his ground. A faint hissing sound made itself audible and grew louder as, before their eyes, the zombie began to dissolve. Holes appeared in its skin and grew rapidly, and its clothes decayed and sloughed off it, followed rapidly by the remnants of the skin. The bones bubbled and sizzled, pits appearing all along their length. A yard from Milo, the thing's legs rotted through entirely and it fell in a tangle of bones, like a bundle of old sticks. Even this quickly dissolved, leaving only a dark stain on the stones of the path.

"Holy water?" Chester asked shakily.

Milo smiled. "I am hardly a priest, Mr. Penman. It was merely hydrochloric acid. When dealing with the undead, one must take extreme measures. But come -- I think I hear more of them ahead." He plunged deeper into the cemetery, the other two following with a certain reluctance, but not before putting out a call for help.

As they proceeded through the vast graveyard, a wintery chill began to waft in the air. Mist grew out of the night, gray and flecked with blue, yet pale and translucent, carrying the hollow sounds of an old man's voice. A paranormal power roiled over the cemetery.

The mist opened to reveal a serried group of men. In the center of the group stood a slender yet commanding figure. His face was a ghastly sight, a mockery of anything human, with pointed ears and skin jaundiced in color. The haunting man immediately acknowledged Milo and his party. He raised his arm, letting the folds of his tattered saffron robe fall back, and welcomed the newcomers.

"Ah, perfect!" the robed man laughed. "We have ghouls, a goblin, and now the Gnome."

Milo pursed his lips, squinting his eyes as if studying the group. "It seems we have found the source of this necromancy," said Milo softly.

"Chester," Lynette whispered with a gulp. "That's the Goblin King. Get a close up of him."

Chester panned his camera towards the group in the mist and zoomed in. "I've got him. Man, this is getting freaky."

A man beside the Goblin King stood with his arms outstreched, and it was his voice that was clinging to the tenuous vapors about the grounds. He was a black man, clearly old, with white wiry hair and bushy eyebrows. He was thin and resembled a scarecrow from a distance.

Never ceasing, the black man continued to speak, his words clearly comprehensible yet seemingly lacking any syntax. His words summoned a quickening, commanded a quickening, forced a quickening.

"What's he doing?" Lynette asked.

"Performing an incantation," answered Milo. "That is the Zombie Master."

High above, unseen by the masses below, an ebony figure was silently performing a high-tech search. The man inside the opaque energy-absorbing shell was scouring the cemeteries for unusual gravitic signatures, his man-machine symbiosis combining computer precision with human intuition and reason.

Unfortunately there were few differences between a zombie's gravitic signature and a live human's, and many a lead was false. Matters were complicated by the odd costumes worn by many. His frustration only grew as he realized his sensory equipment was completely useless in the present situation when the Tagelohn party put out a hail for Old Glory to meet them at the Lafayette Cemetery.

Consulting the city map loaded into the computer, Anchorman plotted a vector towards the cemetery, augmented the gravitational pull of a distant star along the same vector, and rapidly accelerated towards the site. Though betrayed earlier by his unconventional senses, now they revealed to him the exact location of the source of the zombie hoard. Moving with speed rivaling that of Blur, Anchorman moved to poise himself above the awakening zombies and their supernatural leaders.

The damp earth broke open and parted, a hand reached out from the soily crevice to resurface, a hand weathered and gnarled, its bony fingers like claws, with skin spotted in mold and decay. In another area the ground split, and deformed hands punched up and out. Then another, and another. A moaning drummed its way up from the graves, relentlessly drawn by the Zombie Master's chant. Misshapen, slavering creatures dug their way out from the depths of their tombs, their lipless maws emitting a cacophonous howl of lament.

The zombies were clawing their way out of their graves by the dozens, many of them already on their way to perform god-only-knows-what kind of evil. In the midst of the resurrection, the cavorting figure of the Goblin King and the eerily unmoving Zombie Master seemed to taunt the party of heroes.

As the media watched, a new haze seemed to merge with ghostly tendrils of mist. The Goblin King howled with anger as those within the haze were seized in the impartial hand of gravity. The henchmen were only human and were affected the most, reduced to wriggling worms upon the graves they helped desecrate. The zombies, not much stronger but far more enduring, made slightly better progress. Those already out of their graves made slow headway, but those buried under the earth would stay.

The Goblin King sought the source of the haze. Hoping to topple the shadowy figure with a supernatural blast of fear, he sought to locate his mind. Yet there was something odd about the static figure. Where there should have been one mind, there were many. The Goblin King sensed that most of the mental signatures were fake, a cybernetic reverberation of several subconsciousness minds, but nonetheless a most impressive psychic barrier. There were two remaining minds that were somehow intertwined. One seemed to be a standard human's psyche, replete with emotion, conviction, and creativity; the other psyche was of pure logic and scientific reason.

But what the Goblin King found most disturbing about Anchorman was that his form was an opaque void. He was featureless, and thus had no eyes to make contact with.

The Goblin King merely smiled, the ends of his mouth curling upward to unnatural proportions. He looked at the Zombie Master and nodded. A diabolical laugh finally pealed from him.

Lynette and Chester backed away from a zombie, capturing its lifeless expression as it slowly lumbered towards them. The living corpse was too slow for the two, and a confidence momentarily veiled their fears. But Lynette and the cameraman were unaware of a second zombie moving up from behind. There were too many of them to keep track and their misplaced confidence was about to exact a desperate cost. As the lifeless horror was about to seize its hapless victim from behind, a sheen enveloped it and it shot up into the air headed towards the gravitational anomaly surrounding the Goblin King and Zombie Master.

Chester whirled at the sound to find nothing. Suddenly, his original undead assailant was enveloped by a similar shimmering aura and hurled across the perforated ground of the boneyard. Then a third, and a fourth joined it. As the cameraman spun to attempt to capture what was going on, more and more followed.

The source of all this action was the dimly seen black statue nailed to the night sky.

"Anchorman," a bold voice cried. "Get these civilians out of here!"

It was Old Glory, who now hurdled a tombstone to thrust himself into a lurching mass of zombies. The darkness continued to stir with gangly man-shapes. There came the snaps of sinew, the rips of aged clothing, the grates of rotten leather. Old Glory finally tumbled out of the haunting fray.

Though the patriot's call was unheard, Anchorman's ears enveloped in shell permeable only to radio waves, it seemed to be heeded, as various energy constructions seemed to spring up here and there, sometimes protecting, sometimes herding, and somethimes hurtling zombies, but always helping a civilian in trouble. The inert figure hovering in the air bought much needed time for the others.

"We've got to press the source of the horror," the patriot said, as gnarled hands reached for him.

A heartbeat later, the hands fell away, along with their owners, as the wet earth of New Orleans opened under their feet, a fresh grave to swallow them up. The hole vanished as quickly as it had appeared, sealing the zombies below the ground once more. A second pit opened under a troop of shambling things in rotted gowns bearing down on Lynette and Chester, and the zombies tumbled out of sight silently. Milo was kneeling, his gauntleted hand pressed to the ground, connecting him with the earth.

"Take him, if you will," he called to Old Glory. "I want to ensure that no more of these things leave the cemetery."

"The only ones not leaving the cemetery will be you!" the Goblin King spat. "Porcupain, make yourself useful!"

A scrawny thug in a trench coat stepped forward, snickering -- and then flinched as a brilliant light washed over the grim scene. For a moment, it seemed as if the sun had suddenly risen at midnight, but then the dazzled eyes of those gathered in the cemetery could make out an opalescent form at the heart of the light.

When he saw the figure, Old Glory first assumed it was Spectrum. The prismatic glow definitely reminded him of the metahuman outlaw. But upon closer scrutiny he realized that it wasn't the associate of Mockery Brigade, but rather a member of the Guardians.

"Photon!" Old Glory shouted.

"You maniac!" Photon roared at the Goblin King. "You won't get away with these terror tactics any longer!"

"Ooo," Porcupain teased. He removed his trenchcoat, dropped it to the ground, and revealed a sleeveless t-shirt. For a teenager, he seemed to suffer from a serious case of body hair. "I'm so scared, my hairs are standing on end. See."

The hairs on Porcupain's arms and shoulders stirred and rose. Suddenly, a cluster of hair propelled from his body and sped towards the glowing hero. The hair appeared unusually thick and rigid, and lethal, like quills. Almost all of them rebounded from or shattered on the cocoon of hard light that Photon summoned, but one punched through and lodged into the hero's shoulder.

"Uhn...," winced Phonton.

Porcupain's "Yessss!" broke off into a yell of terror as an answering laser blast tore a blackened swath across the ground just in front of his feet. He clumsily dodged to the shelter of a crypt and hurled another spread of quills at Photon, who vaporized them in mid-flight with a short burst of energy.

Chester, his back to another crypt, moved his lens slowly from one opponent to the other, hoping that Photon's light wouldn't wash out the image. At his side, Lynette jerked on his arm.

"Get a shot of Milo!" she yelled to him.

"But he's just kneeling there," Chester objected. "Boring."

"Then shoot the zombies falling down! We're not here for Photon!"

As they argued, Old Glory's keen eyes swept the scene, his mind formulating a plan. The zombie army's ranks were thinning rapidly as their spindly forms were crushed under increased gravity, cast into pits that sealed over their heads, or dissolved in pools of acid. He saw his chance, and to think was to act. He stiff-armed a zombie lurching toward him, sending its skull flying in eggshell fragments, ducked under the swinging arms of another and rolled through its legs, snatching away its tibia as he passed, and came up on one knee, drawing a stun pistol from under his cape.

His arm was straight and hard as an iron rod, and one eye narrowed slightly as he put two bolts of energy into the Zombie Master. The villain crumpled silently.

The invisible strings that were tied to the zombies were finally severed, the unconscious puppeteer no longer had control over his undead legion of marionettes.

"Someone take out the Goblin King!" Old Glory ordered.

Photon turned his attention from a now unconscious Porcupain to the thug's smiling master, their eyes challenging one another. The hero rose into the air. His body glowering with swirls of fluorescence as he flew towards his opponent. Stark shadows fell over the Goblin King's face as Photon's radiance grew, exaggerating the planes and contours of his ghastly features. The villain's insane smile increased in grotesqueness as Phonton advanced. Things seemed to dance within the shadows and one could almost hear the call of madness as it met the diving Photon.

But what the others could see was obviously nothing compared to what Photon was envisioning as he twisted madly in mid air, seemingly desperate toavoid some unseen menace. Writhing, the hero fell like a glowing comet, colliding with a large tombstone. Photon laid unconscious at the base of the headstone, the inscription above ironically stating "He was the guiding light of many."

Old Glory swivelled, his weapon coming to cover the Goblin King -- or where the Goblin King should have been. But there was nothing there, only darkness and the lingering traces of mad, maniacal laughter.

"Anchorman, Gnome," he called to his allies, remembering this time to speak into his radio. "Where's the Goblin King?"

At first, there was no direct response, merely an airy pause of uncertainty. Then Anchorman's rigid form canted as if acknowledging the question. The anomalous man-shadow replied, "I don't see him." His voice was a scratchy rendition of Rod Sterling's.

"He got away?" Old Glory pressed.

"It appears so." Milo sighed. "Perhaps one of us has a way to track him?" His fingers tapped on the top of his belt case, his brow furrowed in thought.

"There's no time," Anchorman said from above. "According to the police bands, unearthed corpses have been reported at several other cemeteries in the city. Some of them have gotten out into the streets before the Zombie Master was stopped. It sounds like the police need some help, now. I'll clean up here while you straighten up the mess in the city."

The whole fight seemed to only last a few minutes. But the real work lasted long into the night and the following day. While Old Glory, the Tagelohn party, and a rapidly recovering Photon scoured the streets for more zombies, Anchorman helped rebury the dead and supervised the transportation of the two captured villains. The tireless automaton barely "spoke" for two days as he redug graves and transported corpses.

Milo emerged from an alley the next afternoon, scowling and rubbing his hands, to find Old Glory waiting for him at curbside.

"Another one?" the patriot asked.

"The last, I hope. It was trying to consume a stray cat."

Old Glory pursed his lips. "It might have been the last. I haven't heard any more zombie reports over the police bands for a while."

"I hope so." Milo touched the silver amulet he wore around his neck. "One may elude the need for rest for a certain length of time, but not forever."

"Where are your escorts?"

"Lynette and Mr. Penman? Back at the hotel. They do need sleep... and in any case, Mr. Penman already has more footage than they could ever possibly use."

Milo paused for a moment, then spoke again. "I think constantly: we have been through this once already with Apocalypse Now. We hurt them, but did not destroy them -- and they struck back catastrophically. We barely know anything of this Goblin King, what he wants -- we would not even be here had he not been so kind as to warn us beforehand. I do not think I could endure hearing of another New York disaster."

"There won't be one," Old Glory said firmly. "Sending those challenges was a mark of overconfidence. People with that sort of ego always slip up sooner or later, and when he does, we'll be there to knock him down."

"I wish to believe that." Milo rubbed his forehead. "I believe I will return to the hotel and see if my wife has awakened yet. Call me there if any further zombies are reported."

"Of course. It's been good working with you again, Dr. Tagelohn."

"And with you. Give my regards to Anchorman and Photon if we do not meet again." The little man walked off down the street, and after a moment, Old Glory turned in the opposite direction.

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