CHAPTER TWO

Standards and definitions changed, over time. For instance, the term "crime spree" had once been limited to, say, some kid robbing three or four convenience stores in the course of a month. Now, it could refer to superhuman thieves that stole hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of property over a span of ten years, rarely being caught, and always escaping from prison. "Gang warfare" had gone from quaint drive-bys to high-tech assassins that blew up entire blocks for fun. "Regular" serial killers paled in comparison to their costumed brethren, who routinely racked up bodycounts in the triple-digits. "Terrorism" was now an arena for world-dominating organizations and genetically-superior maniacs. Something as down-to-earth as "fights" was now used to describe godlike beings clashing in the skies--with the average person never getting the whole story behind it.

And what was the response to this? Logically, you'd think the press would be portraying it as a meltdown of the highest order…anarchy both at home and abroad. There were foreign countries where US troops were attacked dozens of times a day, and American cities where dark vigilantes unearthed conspiracies engineered by organized crime. But this rarely made the national news. In fact, when the media did try to talk about it, they'd be accused of sensationalism and bias. Yes, there's a man in a cape tearing up Keystone City, but please don't try to boost your ratings or influence politics by making a big deal out of it. For something to get a lot of attention, it had to be really major. The people casually lived in what basically amounted to war zones--damage from superhuman battles was just something that would slow down your commute. The public's faith in its strange protectors certainly factored in, but still…they were simply used to the chaos. And nobody was sure if that was a good or bad thing.

The only time they truly panicked was when the danger was obvious and immediate. Unfortunately, for the residents of San Francisco, that was now the case.

It wasn't smoke, but it looked like it: a dozen-block-wide plume of concrete powder and radically-unsettled dust was rising from the ground, vaguely resembling a gnarled tree trunk covered in grey moss. Skyscrapers were dwarfed by this--it could be seen from many miles away. People were having trouble breathing with all of that in the air. The decimated area was surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high rim of wreckage…which unlucky individuals were still digging and climbing their way out of. If not for the antigrav and the way the grid turned most of the buildings and their contents into a fine powder, they'd all have died from the fall and/or the high-speed impact with walls and desks. The evening sun was unusually faint. Citizens were running everywhere, screaming and pointing. Though the destruction had been relatively limited, there were other things going on, and they were even more dangerous…

The unusual EMP had made elevators speed up and pacemakers slow down. Construction equipment had gone haywire and taken out chunks of buildings that they weren't supposed to be working on. The computer-controlled transmissions of vehicles froze up. Lights shot sparks, or went out entirely. Cell phone towers and landline switchboards were scrambled to the point of being inoperable. Traffic lights overloaded and caused hundreds of accidents in a matter of seconds. The noise from security system alarms was deafening. And for the just-arriving military and SHIELD personnel, in their plain-looking semis and the big-wheeled armored carriers that had emerged from submarines, all of this caused two major problems: first, their equipment and high-tech weaponry was screwed up, and second, they now had even more terrified civilians and victims to deal with.

So, when they saw the Air Force choppers' control-systems going insane--they were either crashing or unnecessarily firing batches of missiles that echoed from Castro to Golden Gate--they knew that things were much worse than they'd originally thought.

The assumption was that the EMP had been created by the clay-monster thing (some of them had seen it flying around) that had taken out that neighborhood full of well-to-do small businesses…but that wasn't the case. In an SUV parked in a surprisingly low-tech underground garage, three plainclothes AIM agents were remote-controlling an antennae they'd planted. Their objective was simple: they needed to capture Banner, as they were convinced that he was an endless source of (gamma) energy, and if they could control something like that, they could control the world. But by the time they'd located him, combat divisions had already been deployed to the city. They'd never be able to fight both the Hulk and that many troops at the same time. Ergo, they needed a distraction--and they had more planned, if necessary.

Less than twenty blocks away, National Guard soldiers emptied out of an overturned, canvas-covered truck. Its steering had freaked out when the EMP hit. They'd been told that the heavy-armor SHIELD and regular-military forces had been delayed, so their job was to "occupy" the being that their commanding officer had nicknamed Clayface, until more firepower arrived. A man named Peter Shaugn was among them--he was an administrator that worked for a human resources company. Peter had been handed a kind of assault rifle he wasn't familiar with, and told that he'd be going up against a "class-nine superhuman", whatever that meant. Once out of the vehicle, the first thing he saw was a wave of people that were either injured or covered with blood. (They'd been told not to help them; EMTs were on the way.)

Clayface was currently robbing Cord Enterprises, a technology firm whose owner had been involved in any number of scandals. Most of their operations were in the midwest, but they had a few big-city offices like this one--it was surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire, just like a movie studio. There were several three-story buildings sitting on the asphalt, all very modern-looking. The titanium gates had been crumpled and tossed into the street. As Peter and his comrades neared it, they saw smashed cop cars and craters in nearby buildings. Police officers were carrying out wounded friends. A steady stream of gunshots could be heard from somewhere within one of the complexes. Right before they entered it, the remains of a human-sized robot came smashing through a wall, flying right past them.

CE security guards--armed with energy-rifles that weren't exactly legal, civilians had been banned from purchasing them by new "exotic weaponry" legislation--were firing away at the thing, whatever it was. Peter had to agree that it looked like clay. White clay, to be specific. Very tall, featureless except for black eyes, black and dark grey lines occasionally pulsing over its "skin". It didn't seem to be aware that it was under attack. Both bullets and energy-blasts ricocheted off, sometimes injuring the shooter. They were in some kind of lab where robots (like the one that had nearly crashed into them) were under construction. Clayface was doing something with a computer. After realizing that shooting it wasn't going to do any good, Peter ran up behind it and tried to hit it with his rifle, snapping the gun in half and spraining his arm in the process. An eye-like organ suddenly opened on Clayface's back, and a stream of force sent Peter soaring through the door he'd just entered.

Eric Del Rio, whose life and times had been completely forgotten by Clayface several minutes ago, had gotten his wish: though he hadn't yet escaped from humanity, it felt very, very far away. His senses were now capable of appreciating the more impressive phenomena of the universe, and humanity was to him as micro-organisms were to humanity. They were so low on the spectrum that he just didn't notice them. Oh, he knew they existed, but they were pests that weren't worth his attention; his body was dealing with them without his mind even realizing it. He was too focused on getting to a sterile dimension, where he wouldn't even have those kinds of tiny worries. Clayface continued to look for an ion-chamber--his senses had detected one in this place. Half of the components for his portal were nearby, the other half, he'd create himself.

His eyes lit up with recognition. The metal-tiled floor suddenly melted, and Clayface floated down through the hole he'd just created. (They were still shooting at him, not that it mattered.) As expected, the ion-chamber was right there waiting for him; the room had just been designed to mask the chamber from scanners and enhanced senses. But his were on another level entirely. It was a plexiglass dome that had a high-tech skeleton both inside and outside, with robotic arms attached to its interior. About twenty people would have been able to cram into it--it was just under fifteen feet tall. The purpose of the chamber was to provide a secure environment for working on volatile energy-sources or devices. If an explosion went off inside it, the ion energy would muffle it and cancel it out. Its inventors claimed that such chambers could even contain the blast of a nuclear warhead. But Clayface was going to modify it, as he needed it for a different purpose.

The CE security people and the National Guard came fleeing out of the complex; they'd been told to disengage the enemy and evacuate--the big guns had arrived. An orange-black blast, which was directed straight up, blew the roof off of the lab. Clayface flew out of it. He was trailing the chamber, which was hovering and contained in a giant silver energy-sphere. As soon as he came into sight, a multitude of missiles rained down from fighter jets and helicopters. His skinlike clay was molecularly-dense to a very high degree, so they didn't even make a dent…still, it gave him a chance to make more improvements in himself. He'd been perfecting this new body ever since he'd had it. His muscle structure, his invulnerability, his ability to fly, his senses, organs that he was just coming up with, biochemical properties of substances that he was developing within himself. Now exposed to this new, fiery stimuli, he bettered his DNA and found a way to absorb the impact and heat and store it away for later. It couldn't hurt to have it around.

(Once upon a time, it would have been unthinkable for US forces to fire missiles on American soil, let alone in a densely-populated urban area that was already on the brink of panic-induced rioting--but when going up against beings with that kind of power, they had no choice. Just another thing to get used to.)

A second round of missiles followed. A third. He kept gliding forward at a rapid clip, and they weren't hurting the chamber, either, due to the forcefield around it. The National Guard was now trying to clear the remaining civilians out of the area. After a full two minutes of bombardment, Clayface's "immune system" took one second to strike back--a crimson halo of light appeared around his head, and similarly-colored lightning bolts leapt out from it. They made contact with the jets and choppers, slagging their metal hulls and sending them crashing down…some pilots managed to escape, some didn't. Though most of the pilots aimed towards the Pacific, one empty F-16 slammed down on the freeway and skidded for a mile before it stopped. (The occupied/operating vehicles swerved; the empty vehicles, which had been trashed by the EMP and therefore abandoned, scattered like bowling pins.)

And then SHIELD's quick-response force arrived. They had secret bases located throughout the country, in order to be close in the event of just such an attack. Aside from a few San Francisco warehouses, they also kept storage submarines at the bottom of the bay--they housed the armored vehicles that were now showing up. These weren't the kind you might see on CNN. No, they were the truly top-secret prototypes, which were usually reserved for situations where the only people who would see them would end up dead. But they were making an exception, this time. Some were slate grey and multisegmented--two oversized wheels for the cab, four really oversized wheels for the larger, rear section--and some looked like steroid-pumped humvees and all-terrain vehicles, with tons of guns sticking out. The shadows of hovercopters raced up and down hills.

Without any hesitation, they circled Clayface at a surprising speed and began taking shots at him with energy weaponry and more advanced explosives. It was somewhat hard for the ground forces to maneuver, as there were civilians zipping around everywhere, whether on foot or in vehicles. (Evacuating them was proving to be less easy than the National Guard had hoped.) Also, the smallish streets had been built for cars and trucks, not military-issue transportation. Buildings were being damaged, empty Volvos were being crunched by giant, bulletproof tires, computer-targeted missiles from hovercopters would occasionally miss and wipe out a plaza, and Clayface didn't even give his opponents the courtesy of simple eye-contact. He just continued his unstoppable aerial march towards the completely-destroyed portion of San Francisco.

High above the city, a cloud-camouflaged mini-hovercarrier monitored the battle. It wasn't as huge as SHIELD's main flying headquarters, but, it functioned as a command center and a hangar for aerial craft. Though it was equipped with an arsenal of weaponry, they were holding back…unleashing that, with that many people around, was too dangerous to seriously consider. For the moment. In one room, four dozen SHIELD agents sat in six rows, they were all wearing headsets and glued to computer monitors. The EMP had destroyed 911's ability to take incoming calls, so they'd rerouted them to their own switchboard. They'd then pass the info on to the police or National Guard. Other agents were coordinating their attacks on Clayface (the nickname had spread up there), and trying to keep an eye on Banner via long-range cameras. The man overseeing all this had temporarily turned away from the screens on the wall, opting to just listen.

"--Landing Bay B, this is Central. Eagle-4 is out of ammo, it's returning to base to reload. Get prepped for it."

"SFFD Engine #32? I'm hearing about an EMP-caused fire at a chemical plant. You're thirty blocks away, it's--"

"--listen, just hold on and keep talking, we have people on their way now. Is your son bleeding, ma'am? Okay. Can you see any light at all, or--"

"Just keep moving everybody out of Clayface's path. Yeah, I know you haven't been trained for this, but we need you to find a place to put 'em! Is there a mall around, anything like that?"

"--yet another elevator is stuck in the Jeffries building, guys. Hey, blame the EMP, not me."

"For God's--you are not, I repeat, not cleared to use kamikaze tactics on the superhuman. Listen, Steve, don't even--"

"Deep Manta? Central, here. We're gonna need your guys, too. Yeah. No, the other drivers are fine, we just need more numbers. We're stretched super-thin."

"--still unable to re-establish visual contact with Banner. I haven't seen him since the EMP. No, I don't--"

For their commanding officer, the picture was clear…they were losing. Trying to take on a class-nine superhuman and deal with a city-wide chain of emergencies at the same time was just impossible. They were waiting to hear back from H1--since Banner was involved, they hoped that H1 would lend them a hand. They were specifically geared towards taking on a very powerful monster, so maybe they'd have some more effective strategies or technology. He was sure that they'd help out. So, it was just a matter of buying time, until they could get there.

One of the agents got his attention. "Sir? 'Clayface' is only a half-mile from his technology cache, do you want to change our approach?"

"Tell the drivers and pilots to pull back--then, tell the knights that they have a green light."

Thousands of feet below, seven men in blue-and-black exoskeletons (their helmets had white eye-lenses) crashed through a storefront window near Clayface. Their armor was bulky and not as powerful as the Mandroid models that SHIELD usually used, but these combatants had been nearby when the situation had emerged, whereas the Mandroid division was, unfortunately, at least two hours away. The blue parts were smooth metal, while the black parts were ribbed and more flexible. These particular suits had a twenty-ton capability, in addition to jumpjets (they couldn't fly) and gauntlets that were packed with offensive devices. Immediately, photon-cannons popped out of their forearms, and they started firing.

Clayface actually slowed down a little. The men inside the armor were all highly-trained in the martial arts, so they weren't afraid of a little hand-to-hand. They leapt into the air towards him, punching and kicking, their attacks causing Clayface to almost budge. But he was lost inside himself, mentally creating a schematic for the portal and continuing to be fascinated by his new biology. Once again, his subconscious took care of them--his mind developed a telekinetic ability, pushing one of them through a freeway pillar, and he unknowingly punched one of them in the stomach, shattering a good portion of his armor and sending him flying through the air for miles. He absorbed one of their energy beams, amplifying and redirecting it back at the one who'd shot it. A metal-eating chemical coated his skin…two of them watched in horror as their armors dissolved after they'd tried to grab him. The final pair made the mistake of trying to get to the ion-chamber; the energy-field surrounding it shocked them into unconsciousness on the spot.

With that, he entered the dust-choked area he'd been created in, unopposed.

This was seen on a number of viewscreens, back on the hovercarrier. "Okay, time for a new plan," the senior officer was telling his agents. "We just surround him and do our best to keep him from leaving the place that he flattened. It's better if he's there, anyway, there won't be any civilians or obstacles in the way when we attack. So we just wait for reinforcements and help from H1. I don't know why we haven't heard back from them--maybe they can't contact us. Could the EMP still be screwing up wireless communications?"

A number of techies shook their head "no".

"Sir, Bradley from the Pentagon for you, on channel seventeen."

He sat down at one of the computer consoles, putting on a headset. Throwing protocol to the wind, he said, "Please tell me H1 is on the way, Bradley."

"McGregory had the same thought you did--he started mobilizing his people, but the President wants to keep them in reserve."

"What?!"

"Just in case there's another EMP. He doesn't want all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak. If there's another one, he wants to be able to send in H1 after the fact, instead of losing them in it."

"I'd usually say the same thing, but this time, we need--"

The word "explosion" suddenly bubbled up into the one-sided conversations of the people in the room. As in, "multiple explosions", "simultaneous explosions", "unidentified explosions". The wall-mounted viewscreens (which were showing real-time scanner maps of San Francisco) registered flashes of heat. They were happening everywhere. The dots representing SHIELD personnel, which had been grouping near Clayface's location, were once again spread out, as they responded to the explosions.

The senior officer slowly stood up, gaping. The assumption was that Clayface was doing it, but he wasn't so sure…it was almost like somebody was trying to distract them and stretch them thin. But who? There wasn't much time to consider it--they had to react, or else innocent lives would be lost. Even if it was a trap, they had to walk into it.