Issue 0: The Sun's Conquest

Prologue

Undeath Toll: 0

It was a bright and sunny day. About a week before, it had been a dark and, actually, clear night. The day is when this tale begins, but the night is when this story begins.

The weather forecast for the day immediately following the night, as of 2 A.M., was non-stop rain, a darkening drizzle, depressive and dreary to the eyes of most. To the eyes of the man who begins this story, everything was depressive and dreary. He was a scientist. A mad scientist, of course.

This man was mad in a fairly unusual, though not particularly unique, way. Not in that he hated everyone and everything that exists; that’s an exceedingly common way to be mad. And he wasn’t mad in that he felt the world had slighted him; the world had been very kind to him, and had easily paid his way through college and given him very comfortable living arrangements. Nor was he mad in that he was megalomaniacal; he had no desire to rule such a chaotic world as this. He was mad in that he believed the world should be operated purely by order, that everything should be unchanging and linear[1], and that he worked towards this end every moment.

A week before our tale begins, our story begins with this mad scientist standing rather maniacally in a secret lab that was built, for some irrelevant and likely now indeterminable reason, deep beneath a suburb of Denver. He was delivering a monologue to his four laboratory assistants (for he was a government sanctioned mad scientist) on the success of his life’s work, which seems to him to have occurred just moments before.

“Finally,” went the end of his monologue, his tinny voice tinted with maniacality (for “mania” is too kind a word to describe it), his hand holding a sickly looking vial of obvious importance, “I have completed the virus, Anthrax Leprosy Omega, which will cure death!” One of his more observant, sardonic, and all around post-modern assistants used a small and simple device of her own invention to create a flash of sharp and quite nearly angular light and the sound of her metal trashcans falling down. The mad scientist was far too involved in his speech to give her a Look. “And with it, so shall we cure Life, and Chaos itself!”

“Yeah,” said the mandatory “dumb” assistant, educated in the ways of science but damned to be a trusting crony for his whole life who had a voice something like Ringo Starr’s, “but the government’s just goin’ to use it as a weapon, right?” The mad scientist looked at him and blinked., and spoke slowly.

“Ye-e-es… About that.” He dropped the vial, and before it had hit the ground he had pulled out of his labcoat a nasty looking switchblade and a simple revolver. In one motion he stabbed the nearest lab assistant in the stomach and shot the farthest lab assistant in the same. The sardonic lab assistant and the dumb one stood in shock for a moment, staring at the madman between them, who without hesitating shot the dumb one twice through the chest and tossed the gun to the opposite end of the room from the last one. He grinned dispassionately at her, for that is what mad scientists are supposed to do, and advanced on her with the knife.

“I must, you see,” he began without her asking, she being too busy trembling and backing away to ask, “make sure that the virus works before I begin full deployment. Don’t worry, you’ll be joining your comrades in a moment. I’ll be joining you soon as well—the virus should take ten minutes to fully activate, after first-death. Don’t bother begging—even if I spared your life now, you’d be caught within a year. And don’t bother screaming, either, the walls are soundproofed. Which you know, of course, but still, I feel I should remind you. Now, please, bare that pretty little neck[2] for me…” He lunged at her, but she had regained herself enough to throw herself to the side, causing his knife to collide with the metal wall, creating a particularly nasty sound. She stood and began to run towards the gun, ignoring her faintly gurgling co-workers as best she could, but the mad scientist had turned and grabbed her, holding her from behind in the classic knife-against-the-throat pose.

“And you’ll never be able to open the door; I altered it today to only unlock to my handprint. Do you see where hope, courage, and all those daft human things get you?” If he were the type to laugh, the mad scientist would have cackled then. His hypothetical glee was interrupted by a sudden flash of light and crash of sound—the sardonic assistant had managed to surreptitiously pull her device out of her pocket and get her hand up high enough to activate it directly in the mad scientist’s face. He shut his eyes, and dropped the knife and his grip on her as he clutched at his ears. He did not scream out in pain, which rather disturbed the young woman, but she still drove forward to reach the gun. She spun around and pointed it at the mad scientist and pulled the trigger violently, an expression of sorrowful triumph crossing her face.

One which faded quickly as his dispassionate grin, hovering some distance above the glint of a metal and bloody knife, approached her. “Hope! Do you see where it gets you?” he repeated. “I only half-loaded the gun, just so you could feel it, you foolish young woman. Don’t bother with terror, either,” he added suddenly. And, as she finally screamed the shrill scream of terror that comes from anyone dying in this situation, he lunged forward and slit her throat. She gurgled terribly as she slumped to the ground, blood spilling from her throat, her eyes rolling backwards. He watched as she died quickly, and then turned to survey the room.

The two he had shot were already dead, and the one he had stabbed was bleeding far faster than he should have been, and was breathing only barely. He nodded to himself, satisfied, and waited until all four were dead. Then he moved to the control panel for the facility’s doors and ventilation systems. He opened all the vents, and activated the fan that drew air out of his personal laboratory and distributed it throughout the rest of the facility. He turned to watch the corpses of the two he had shot.

As he waited, he went through a mental checklist; he had actually completed the virus the previous night, and had that morning sent nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine vials of it—its reproductive rate was astounding—around the world. His most guarded estimations assumed that one hundred of them would be shattered or opened by accident, and three would be shattered or opened on purpose, before any notable effect was felt. It was his hope, though that word is not quite accurate for this man, that the rest would be broken in the ensuing tumult. He listed, to pass the time, every place that he had sent them. It would be a waste to copy his list here, so it shall suffice to say that it was a very comprehensive list of the most centrally populated areas on the planet.

Finally, one of the first of the dead began to stir, and then the second, and then the young woman’s. As all three stood and looked around, quickly catching him in their sights and beginning to advance with a minimum of thought and speed, he smiled almost passionately, and there was a definite air of his eyes very nearly tearing up. He had predicted the possibility of not all the corpses rising, but He took the knife in his right hand and slit the wrist of his left, and as his last act as himself, Dr. Sunny Mabus (for that was the mad scientist’s name) fell forward onto the button that opened all the doors in the facility.

Ten minutes later, the body that had once belonged to the mad scientist stood and followed the other three out the door. A few hours later, it was a stormy, and Sunny’s, day.

Undeath Toll: 27

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[1] Relatively linear, really. Very few things in the universe would work properly if they were truly linear; by linear, the mad scientist really means “describable by equations that I can write down in less than a 70 page notebook”

[2] This may seem a very emotional thing for a life-hating mad scientist to say, but he had always found the phrase “pretty little neck” the most mathematically brilliant phrase in the English language, which just goes to show that there’s no accounting for taste or a faulty ability to calculate.