Often the things I write are predicated on a single idea. In this case, the idea was "What would it be like if there was a Supervillain... in a world without Superheroes?" Further, what if the villain were not the "intellectual" kind, but rather the brawny kind - the uber strong, uber powerful, invincible, violent, completely unstoppable sort of villain? The kind that would normally wind up being defeated in an epic final act battle with Superman! What if that kind of villain was around and there was no Superman?
It would be a nightmare, yes? The following is my take on what the nightmare would be like.
Needless to say, this is a story which contains graphic sex and graphic violence. Don't read it if you are under age for that kind of thing, and don't read it if you don't like it!
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They drove for the rest of the evening and into the night, leaving Garret's Corner far behind. Had things been that simple, they might well have just driven away from the multiple murders Eris had committed that day. However, as is often the case, life proved a little messier. Sherriff Burke's budget was not great by any means, but he had spent the money to equip his SUV with a high resolution dashboard camera, which he nicknamed Cyclops. He had flipped it on about five minutes before pulling up to the gas station and it had dutifully recorded Eris's horribly slow murder of Burke in glorious full colour 1920x1080 detail. As the angles worked out, it also had a perfectly clear shot of Cole and his truck in the background. His license plate was displayed in absolutely readable detail.
The Sheriff's wife waited for five minutes after his final radio call, as instructed. On another day, on another call, she might have given him an additional five minutes. But she had a bad feeling about this one, and the instant the fifth minute clicked over, she lifted the phone.
It took ninety minutes for the Sheriff of Pine Fields and four of his deputies to drive to the gas station. They approached with maximum caution, two men hanging back whilst the rest closed in on foot, weapons drawn and at the ready.
Had Eris still been there, none of these precautions would have done them the least little bit of good. But she wasn't, and so the five men lived through the day.
Within seconds it was clear that something horrific had happened at the gas station. Within minutes the deputies had checked out the camera footage. A radio call went back to Garret's Corner with the license plate seconds after that. And minutes after that, just around the time Cole and Eris arrived on a paved road, they became the object of a large and rapidly expanding degree of police attention.
About the time the Sherriff and his deputies were examining the dashcam footage, another camera was being focused on the scene. Oddly enough this one was composed of ordinary 5 Megapixel cell phone camera CCDs. It was, however, made of three hundred and sixty eight of them networked together and attached to some extremely high end image processing hardware and a data transfer system whose capacity would have genuinely astonished most of the world, had it not been very highly classified. Which was all a long winded way of saying that it was one of the most powerful, and expensive, cameras in the world.
It needed to be, since it was mounted on an MQ-1 Predator drone some two miles above the station. The drone had been diverted from a routine training mission; it had spent some minutes taking beautifully high resolution images of woodlands and open ground, all of which was completely lacking any sign of either a crater or a Chinese satellite. After half an hour the operator had set out to methodically scan the area around the estimated point of impact, and it was at about that time that a signal intercept had picked up the radio chatter from Sheriff Coburn and his deputies as they approached the filling station. The chatter had referenced multiple murders at a location which was around five miles from the alleged crater. It hardly rang alarm bells, since there seemed to be no direct connection, but due to the proximity a note was dutifully made and placed in the growing file regarding the incident. One couldn't be too careful about these things, after all.
Cole stood in the shower, wishing that somehow the water would wash away his sin. It didn't.
They had found a roadside motel as night fell, and he had rented a double room on his credit card. She hadn't let him go out anywhere, but he had some food in the car so he ate in the room and they watched TV, of all things. Eris had been fascinated, and bombarded him with endless questions. And so Cole had found himself explaining the finer details of The Muppet Show to a murderous creature who was on a mission to destroy the world. At first, she had seriously thought the Muppets were an intelligent species that shared the Earth with humanity.
Eventually, she had tired of it and turned the TV off. After that...
Cole blushed. He hadn't had any idea he was able to orgasm so many times. The beast on his back had been rampant. She had made him... no, she had allowed him... to worship every single inch of her body with his lips. Occasionally, she would roll him over onto his back, mount him, and ride him to another orgasm. Then the worship would resume. It seemed to go on and on, without end. Cole had never been a sexual athlete by any standard, but he seemed to have acquired a permanent erection.
Either being up close and extremely personal with a body drawn literally from his deepest fantasies was having a rather profound effect on him, or... was she doing something to him? Maybe.
By the time she allowed it to finish, he was utterly exhausted. She had spooned him, her big soft breasts pressed against his back as her thickly muscled arms snaked around him and held him close.
The feel of those gigantic muscles enfolding him, imprisoning him, the warmth of her iron-hard body pressed against his back... it was the most relaxing thing he had ever experienced. For all the strangeness and horror of the day, he felt protected and at peace. He had fallen asleep instantly.
In the middle of the night, he had woken needing to go to the toilet. As soon as he moved, her voice had murmured "what is it, lover?" He'd explained, only to then have to explain what a toilet was, and why humans needed them. The idea had amused her so much that she'd followed in and watched him go. He half thought that she hadn't believed him.
Afterwards, she had decided that since he was up, they could spend a little more time in worship.
In the morning, he'd woken up facing her, nose to nose. Those big thick arms were wrapped around him, and one leg was casually hooked around his. Her eyes were open, staring into his.
"Don't you ever sleep?" He asked grumpily. Cole was not a morning person.
"Good Lord, no!" She laughed. "Such a silly way to spend time. But it's delightful to watch, I have to admit. Now, let's put that mouth of yours to good use..."
Later, he'd eaten again and hit the shower.
The woman he was travelling with was a multiple murderess. She'd killed five people yesterday, every one of them right in front of him. She'd made a vague threat against his own wife. If human psychological terms could even be applied to her then in his layman's opinion she was an unrepentant psychopath, probably a sociopath, and a positively gleeful sadist. And he despised those things, truly he did.
She was, however, also a fantasy figure from the depths of his subconscious, who could make him hard just by flexing an arm and pumping her bicep up. When she did it, suddenly the murders somehow didn't matter, the brutality didn't matter. Or worse, he thought, they actually make it sexier. It was like his conscious mind was lost in the thick bulging curves of muscle, as if she could turn him into a lust-crazed beast at her whim.
All of the above was bad enough, but when you then factored in that she wasn't human at all... that she was some sort of...
What? He hadn't considered the question before, which was nuts in and of itself. His conscious mind had shied away from it, somehow. Refused to contemplate it whilst it girded itself for the stress and shattering of worldview that would surely accompany any answer.
Now, like a man walking into enemy fire, he faced it. What was Eris?
A demon? Perhaps. Cole was no believer in Gods or demons, but he was one of those rare people who paid more than lip service to the idea that he might be wrong on important matters.
An angel? The same provisos applied. He was well enough versed in angels to understand that they were not, at least as depicted in the bible, necessarily benign beings. One need only hop into a time machine and go ask Sennacherib's 185,000 man army about that. Or the firstborn of Egypt.
Could she be an alien? Cole had not been a great believer in those, either, though at least humanity knew with certainty that life could exist on Earth. Logically, then, it at least could exist elsewhere. But was being an alien enough to explain the bizarre abilities he had witnessed?
Of course, he could have gone quietly insane. He could be sitting in a padded room even now, imagining the shower. Could a hallucination possibly be this realistic, this sustained? For that matter, was it this realistic and sustained, or did it just feel that way as part of the illusion?
Maybe, maybe, maybe. The fact was that he was facing something he had no frame of reference for. An outside context problem, he thought with a bitter humour. What was the line? 'An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.'
I'm going to destroy your planet.
Twenty minutes later he was dried off, dressed and ready to go. Eris hadn't bothered to shower; she didn't seem to sweat, and whilst she did get dirty, any dirt on her just seemed to vanish somehow along the way. Her clothes were looking rather the worse for wear, though.
They stepped out into the morning sunshine.
"HALT! POLICE! YOU ARE UNDER ARREST!"
Perhaps thirty cars and trucks were arrayed across the parking lot in a rough semicircle, centred on the front door of their room. Maybe fifty police officers stood behind them. Most every one of them had a weapon aimed in his direction. Above, he could hear the clatter of helicopter blades. Several of the machines, from the sound of it.
"You should give up," Cole said to Eris. "There's too many of them." Perhaps it's over, he thought. The thought was a relieved one, he told himself. There was no disappointment in it. None. Not a bit. He was almost completely sure of it.
Eris laughed softly. "Stay here," she said. She walked forward, out into the semicircle of officers. Cole saw her look into the face of handguns, bolt action rifles, AR-15s, even a few of what looked like those giant fifty calibre sniper rifles. It was an awful lot of firepower... and she walked into the middle of it without a care in the world, a sunny smile on her face.
For an instant, he was hit with the strong impression that her clothes - Eric's clothes - were shrinking. The hem of the jeans slowly rose up her legs, exposing the thick calves. Calves which thickened even as he watched. Then it hit him. Her clothes weren't shrinking, she was growing. Her height, already in the upper range for any woman, slowly increased, inch by inch. Her muscles, already huge by male standards, let alone female, swelled in proportion... and more than proportion. The check shirt which had taken such abuse over the last twenty four hours, drenched in blood and gore and torn by shotgun pellets, finally gave up the ghost and burst at the seams as unstoppably powerful muscles burst through it. The jeans followed suit a second later, shredded by thighs that must have been thirty eight inches in circumference.
"DOWN ON THR FLOOR..." The voice bellowed through the megaphone. It sounded rather more uncertain about it now, Cole thought. He felt a swell of pity for the man, for all of them. After a day of death, terror and astonishingly good sex, he had reached a kind of Zen-like acceptance of it all. Not that he thought for one second that he had processed the events and put the stress behind him in a manner conducive to good mental health. Rather, he had reached a point where each new insanity just kind of added itself to the pile without worrying his conscious mind too much.
Now a new horror was about to unfold. He suspected it was going to be the worst so far. And these poor bastards were facing it cold, completely clueless as to what was about to happen. He wished there was some way he could explain what was truly happening to them, make them understand what they were facing. Make them run. And yet, he found his eyes locked on the now eight-foot muscle Goddess who was the centre of attention and wondered just what it was that she was going to do. And deep down, in a place beyond shame, the thought of what she might do excited him.
"HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD, RIGHT NOW!"
Eris bent down next to a car and casually pulled the hub cap off a wheel. She straightened, holding the plastic disc between two hands, staring at it thoughtfully. "I SAID DOWN ON THE FLOOR, NOW!" The same agent screamed.
Most people believed that a lightweight lump of plastic wasn't a terribly dangerous thing, Cole thought. He knew better. Even a marshmallow was dangerous... if it had a high enough velocity.
In one blindingly fast motion, Eris flung the hub cap. It flashed through the air so fast that it was just a single long streak between her outstretched hand and the agent who had issued the order, covering the seventy foot distance in perhaps a fiftieth of a second. In that instant his chest burst open, exploding in a spray of blood and gore that spewed out behind him for forty feet.
For a long moment the man remained upright, swaying slightly, still clutching his megaphone. There was a vaguely surprised expression on his face as he looked down at the ruin of his chest. Then he toppled over backwards and hit the ground.
Cole's irrational calm gave him one priceless advantage; he did not spend that moment paralysed with shock. Instead, he spent it diving down onto the floor and trying to make himself as flat as possible.
The sound of the corpse's impact broke the spell. One of the cops was suddenly firing, the cracks of his pistol surprisingly quiet in the dead silence. Perhaps a second later, the other officers seemed to catch on and every one of them opened up. A hail of gunfire poured at Eris. Cole could see the bullets plucking at the remains of her clothing, ripping holes in the already ripped shirt. The skin beneath was a different matter, however. Every round simply bounced off her, leaving not so much as a single mark.
Cole heard a phhhhht sound and something plucked at the collar of his shirt. At the time, it barely even registered. He wouldn't realise until later that he'd just come within less than an inch of taking a bullet in the spine.
After about fifteen seconds, the firing tailed off; everyone had run out of bullets. Eris stood smiling, waiting to see what would happen next. About half of the officers began reloading their weapons.
One man ran forward. He skidded to a stop about five feet from Eris, brandishing something that looked for all the world like a little yellow toy gun. Cole stared at it, wondering what it was, when with a soft pop the end blew open and two little darts flew out, trailing wires.
Oh shit, it's a Taser, Cole thought. He actually emitted a bark of laughter at the sheer absurdity of it. It could not have been more ridiculous if the man had fired a water pistol at her.
The darts hit Eris in the abdomen and plonked to the ground. For a moment, she stared at the cop in bemusement as his Taser crackled uselessly. Then she stepped forward and in one smooth motion, lifted her right leg and slammed her foot into his midsection. His body noticeably crumbled at the point of impact as he flew in a straight, perfectly flat trajectory right over the heads of everyone and vanished off into the distance. If he came down again, Cole didn't see it.
There was another of those frozen moments of shock. Then another sound broke the silence.
"Get her!" Somebody shouted; and one of the cops ran forward, arms spread. The words shook everyone out of their shock and a dozen or so of his comrades joined him, rushing the giantess.
As the first man reached her she stepped to one side, reaching out a single hand and sweeping it up under his neck. His forward momentum stopped as if he'd run into a brick wall, his body rotating around her hand as his feet went out from under him. Eris lifted smoothly, raising his body up in the air as he spun, and then slammed him down on the concrete with such sickening force that he actually bounced back into the air before collapsing, a rag doll with the strings cut.
Even as he hit she spun again, her other hand flashing out, fist crashing into the next cop's chest. His entire chest sagged, ribs shattering, as his body flew backwards.
Another cop reached her. He was huge man, maybe six feet five or more and very heavily built, although he looked rather small and skinny when compared to the giantess he now faced; rather than try to tackle her he threw an uppercut that slammed straight into her chin. It was a good punch, Cole thought, a lot of swing and power behind it. Mike Tyson in his prime would have been proud of a punch like that.
Her head didn't move so much as a millimetre; the man stumbled back, cursing violently as he stared at his fist. Eris stepped forward, smiling widely as she bent down, her arms flashing out to encircle the man's chest.
She straightened, lifting him effortlessly. His feet kicked uselessly, a good foot and a half above the ground. "Gimme a hug, honey," she said with a chuckle. Her immense arms constricted, and the man let out a strangled scream that wheezed into nothing as his chest visibly compressed, ribs bending and then snapping like twigs under the tremendous force of Eris's muscles.
The other cops attacked her, nightsticks slamming against her body ineffectually. She simply ignored them. The man she was holding tried to scream again as the pain exploded to overwhelming levels, but he couldn't draw a breath. Eris squeezed, and squeezed, her arms constricting inexorably. He let out a strangled gasp ??? and then coughed a huge quantity of blood up. Cole could swear he saw chunks of something mixed in with the blood, something that just might have been pieces of lungs. She smiled and continued crushing his chest to a pulp before letting him drop to the floor.
She casually ripped the rags of the shirt, now drenched with blood, from her body and tossed them aside. She smiled brightly at the array of law enforcement officers before her, immense breasts naked to them as she reached out and took two of her attackers by the neck. She lifted them off the floor, the muscles of her arms and shoulders flexing beautifully. Cole shivered in lust as she turned and gave him a wink, then shivered in terror as she smashed the two men's heads together. The sound of the crunch could be heard throughout the parking lot.
Most men would have run from this giantess of death, which would have been the sane choice since it might just possibly have saved a few of their lives. Cops, though, were used to being the ones running into trouble. The events they were witnessing were just too strange, too completely insane for any one of them to really get a good handle on it all in the few moments they had. So instead they reacted by pure instinct, following the dictates of their training - and thus did exactly the wrong thing. They rushed in to join the fight. Cole watched, terrified, as a mob of almost fifty law enforcement officers threw themselves against Eris.
And she laughed and slaughtered them, one after another.
One woman swung her M-16 around, holding it by the barrel and using the stock like a club. Eris reached up and caught the end of the weapon in her hand, still smiling as she yanked it from the agent's hands ??? and then rammed the barrel into her face with such force that it smashed straight through her skull, erupting from the back of her head in a torrent of shattered bone and chunks of brain matter. Eris laughed delightedly as the woman's body slumped, still twitching as it hung from the weapon.
Eris tossed the body aside and turned to slam her foot up in a kick that flashed up between an agent's legs to land square on his crotch, lifting his entire body feet off the ground. As he fell again her arm lashed out, palm flat, pistoning into his chest; the body flew back in a trajectory that was virtually flat, finally crumpling into the ground a good fifty feet away.
And still it went on. Eris simply stood there as they came at her, lashing out with hands or feet, and with every single blow an agent died. A man whose neck was snapped with a flick of her wrist. A woman whose skull was caved in with a punch. A man who took a roundhouse kick to the head with such force that everything from the neck up simply disintegrated into a red mist.
Eventually, with perhaps thirty-five of their colleagues lying dead around them, the rest of the agents began to stumble back as common sense slowly asserted itself. One man paused to try and reload his pistol. Eris stalked forward, seizing the weapon and crushing it into twisted wreckage ??? along with his hand, still holding it. He fell to his knees, screaming as he stared at the mangled mess of twisted metal, flesh and shards of bone that had been a hand five seconds earlier.
Eris turned, whipping her hands over her head in an arc. The man's body arced through the air in a blur, smashing into the ground. She turned back, whipping him over her head again, smashing him into the ground on the other side. She chuckled as she repeated the move over and over, smashing the man's body against the concrete again and again until it was an unrecognisable lump, only vaguely person-shaped.
She dropped the remains and casually chased down her next victim, moving with a swiftness nobody that large should be able to manage. The man looked back as she loomed behind him and screamed in terror. He ran into a car, a big red Chevrolet Silverado, and bounced off it. He turned, struggling to reload hi AR-15. To his credit, he got the weapon reloaded and managed to get it up in time to a long burst, emptying the entire magazine into the approaching woman. Eris grinned as the rounds bounced off her naked breasts, not so much as denting the skin.
The man started reaching for another magazine. In an impossibly fast and graceful movement Eris stepped to one side, reached down, and gripped the sides of the car. Metal crumpled and split under her fingers as the body collapsed under her immense strength. She got a good grip of the engine and straightened up, lifting the entire two ton vehicle straight up into the air. As the surprised cop gaped up at her she brought the mass of metal down on top of him. It hit the ground so hard that the suspension practically exploded. All four wheels popped off with a screech of metal as the massive impact turned the man into a smear on the ground.
Eris lifted the car again, effortlessly, and Cole winced to see the strings of gore hanging off the underside. She held it there for a moment, glancing back at Cole and winking, and he realised that she was actually posing for him. He stared, open-mouthed at the display of pure strength and power before him. And to his own utter humiliation, he began to get hard.
Eris arched her back, tensed... then flung the car. It smashed into a group of cops fifty feet away, scattering them like ninepins.
Another cop brandished a big .50 calibre rifle. Cole had seen YouTube videos of people shooting through steel plate with them. The man fired, and the slug hit Eris directly in the eye. The flattened slug plopped to the ground with a soft plink.
"Guns don't kill people," she called out merrily. She darted forward, reaching out to take the man's jaw in her hand. She lifted him until his face was level with hers. "I kill people!"
Then she squeezed. His jaw shattered like the most delicate glass and she tore it from his head, leaving the entire bottom half of his face a bloody ruin as she turned to the next man, and the next, and the next.
One man ran around a car and came up behind her, a heavy bolt-action rifle raised. He aimed directly at the back of her head and started firing. "Die!" He screamed as he pumped round after round into her. "Die, dammit! Why won't you die!"
Eris turned, smiling, as he fired a good fifteen rounds directly into her face from less than six inches away. He ran dry and slowly lowered the weapon, emitting something that sounded like a sob.
"I won't die because I can't die, Human," she said to him. "Death is something I do to you."
She brought her hands up in a blur, palms out flat as she clapped them together on his head. His skull was flattened in an instant and his lifeless body dropped.
It took a couple more minutes for her to slaughter the remaining fifteen or so officers. Cole watched in horror and disgust as she worked her way through them methodically. Fists that punched through heads and torsos. Limbs ripped off like a child might pull the legs off an ant.
But the incredible demonstration of violence and gore was not the worst of it. Worse was the way she so clearly enjoyed it all. She was gleeful, like a small child playing with wonderful new toys. She smiled. She laughed. Now and again she would make little jokes as she killed some poor helpless victim. She was clearly having the time of her life.
Even that, however, was not the worst of it. No, the worst of it was the fact that Cole couldn't keep his eyes off her body. Couldn't stop watching the way her muscles flexed and swelled as she dished out death. They were ants before her, completely powerless against her strength, and Cole was tremendously turned on throughout the entire bloody massacre. The shame was a living thing inside him, and somehow that only served to amplify his lust.
At the end, the last few survivors finally broke and just flat-out ran for it, tossing their weapons aside as they tried to escape. Two of them headed straight out towards the highway. Two others ran for a car and and roared away, tires screaming in clouds of rubber.
Eris watched it for a long moment. Then she launched herself into the air and flew after it.
And why not? Cole thought giddily. Of course she can fly. Why wouldn't she be able to? Flying is easy. You just have to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
She caught the car in less than a second. Her hands gripped the roof, the metal crumpling under her grip as she lifted it off the road. She soared up into the air, perhaps two hundred feet, looping gracefully.
Then she came down so fast she was practically a blur, with an honest-to-god sonic boom cutting through the air, and two tons of car slammed down on top of the running officers like the hammer of God.
A crater more than twenty feet across was smashed into the asphalt; bits and pieces of the black material rained down hundreds of yards away. The car seemed to simply explode; the engine cartwheeled fifty feet back up into the air, and all four tires went spinning off across the lot. One slammed into another car, ripping the roof off, before careening out of the lot and into the nearby trees. Cole thought he glimpsed a red something flying away amongst the debris. He didn't want to speculate about what it might be.
And then it was over. She walked over to Cole, an eight foot giant made of hundreds of pounds of muscle, stark naked, covered almost from head to toe in blood and gore. Bits of brain and bone clung to her body like lovers. She struck a double bicep pose before him, smiling knowingly as he gazed up at her.
"Tell me you didn't enjoy that," she said in the sultriest voice he had ever heard.
Cole whimpered.
Captain Eskavich turned to look at Lieutenant Shives, shock in his face. The screen was a 70 inch model, and the immense resolution of the Predator's camera had given them an excellent view.
It was pure luck that they'd even been watching. The note regarding the previous day's murders had prompted a flag to go up when the police reported having tracked the perpetrator's vehicle to a motel. The Predator had still been in the air from yesterday - the things could stay up for twenty four hours without difficulty. On a whim, Eskavich had decided to watch the arrest. If he was honest, he thought it might be exciting to see something like that going down. Maybe the perps would even get shot, he'd mused. Nothing like a little mayhem in the morning! Then he'd laughed at how that sounded, like something out of a cheap detective novel. Eskavich liked to imagine himself a writer after he left the Air Force, writing tawdry thrillers. He filed the phrase away in his memory.
Well, it had been exciting alright. And he had certainly gotten to see some mayhem. Rather more than he had expected, in fact.
By the end of it, both men were paralysed with shock. "That's impossible," Shives said finally.
"Did she... grow?" Eskavich asked.
"She seemed to," Shives said noncommittally. "And then at the end, she... maybe I'm seeing things here, but I thought she was flying."
"Run it back."
They watched again, slowing it down as Eris began to swell. The angle was quite good, the resolution truly excellent. It was obvious that she was indeed growing. "Look, you can even see the shadow lengthening," Shives said. "What is this?"
"Didn't look like anything human," Eskavich said, voicing the unvoiced conclusion. He felt an odd sensation on his face, and touched his cheek. He was startled to find that he was crying.
"What do we do?" Shives asked in a whisper.
Eskavich pulled a phone book out of a desk drawer. A real, old-fashioned paper book. It took him five minutes to find the number, and then he dialled it wrong twice in a row. His hands were shaking quite badly and his eyes wouldn't quite focus.
The third time he got through. It rang... rang... and a voice answered.
"Langley," it said.
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