After decontamination and quarantine, Gorgon headed over to Roddenberry, where Stealth had claimed the entirety of the executive fourth floor for herself. A lot of people had grumbled when she had, thinking it was some kind of status thing, but Gorgon knew better. It was central, with the best sight lines, and already wired for mass communication. ( Read more... )

"Whaddaya think the odds are that anyone's still alive in there?" Luke Reid asked, nodding to an old, blocky synagogue across the street. On one wall, words were painted in what looked like old whitewash or something:

Alive inside. Running out of food. Please help!

( Read more... )

That was Kathy.Gorgon hunched a little further in his duster, adjusting the collar once more so that it covered his ears from the wind. December in Los Angeles had nothing on December in Baltimore for miserable weather, but this morning had dawned cold and drizzly and the tall, empty buildings were acting like the world's most ex-infested wind ( Read more... )

June

It had been almost six weeks since Banzai had died. She was the first of the heroes to have fallen, but she was not the last. Not after Regenerator got bit and fell into a coma. Once their healer was gone, the heroes started dropping like flies.

( Who lives, who dies, who tells your story. )

The days blended together, as they always did. Hell had no sense of keeping time, beyond the coming and going of demons. In this little isolated corner of it, there was even less to go by. The jailer demon was there, and not-there, sometimes terrorizing her, sometimes content to leave her to stew in the sheer emptiness and despair of this place ( Read more... )

Before coming to Fandom, Kathy had lived her entire life surrounded by rules: who she could interact with, how she could spend her free time, what she could wear, how she should speak to her parents. It wouldn't be kind to say that what little living Kathy had done in LA had been in the few brief moments when she could forget the rules and be ( Read more... )

It had been a month to the day since Kathy died and the heroes of Los Angeles were fighting a losing battle. By Stealth's calculations, the surviving population had likely dropped to below fifty thousand people. To those few heroes she trusted most, she said that her most accurate estimations put the population to around half of that. A little over ( Read more... )

( The shade drifted. And where it drifted, one pair of eyes watched. )

Los Angeles burned while The Mighty Dragon flew overhead. He could still see pockets of fighting, holdouts where armed civilians or members of the National Guard tried to fight off the exes with whatever came to hand. Some, he saw, had viable exit strategies and were making a fighting retreat to find somewhere safer to hole up. Most did not. ( Read more... )

Hours had passed and there was still no sign of Regenerator. One of the National Guardswomen said that she thought she'd heard that he's been transported somewhere else, another said that there had been an outbreak on one of the upper floors and that the hero was dealing with that. Hearing that bit of rumor, Kathy'd tried to get out of bed and go ( Read more... )