BLUE COLLAR — Superheroes for the People

TITLE: THE NIGHTMARE

EPISODE: 1 — SLAYER

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SLAYER

Ellis Island, 1890

The steamer pulled into Ellis Island and a pair of glittering eyes stared down from the stern, hiding among the bags of trash waiting to be taken off. Most of it would have gone over the side days ago, but the crew ran light due to the various outbreaks.

The Cat watched the rats rummaging through the refuse. They were not what it sought. A juicy rat would normally be exactly what a cat needs, but today it had other prey in mind. It followed the shadows thrown on the wall as Death skipped from place to place, hidden in the scuttling, in the ghosts, in the miasmas that men believed were the cause of so much dying.

The Cat, whose name is unimportant because cats don't answer when called, knew it was getting close.

Seventeen of the crew had fallen deathly ill and their bodies were prayed over before being thrown over the side. The crew had learned the hard way. Keeping the bodies only seemed to spread the sickness.

The Cat stopped to groom. Fastidiousness mustn't fall away simply for stalking prey.

A child wandered the long corridors as the ship came into port. The rat ran past him, and as it did, the specter leapt from the rat to the boy. It was hardly a struggle. The child was already dead, held up by sheer will, ravaged with a fever different from this new affliction. His cough, wet with blood, said he would not live much longer. A race between the old thing killing him and the new one.

As the boy passed an open portal, candlelight spilled into the hall and his shadow was consumed by the mythic beast of the Old World.

The Cat wanted to feel something. It had happened so many times in its life that there was nothing left but the work. Stop this creature before it spread again.

The boy stumbled in the dark, trying to get back to what was left of his family. A father, more dead than alive. Two siblings in stages of recovery — older, stronger, stinking of the remnants of the dark miasma, skin covered in boils that healed poorly, but healed. They would make it to the New World.

Their brother and their father would die soon after arriving.

The Cat continued its stalk as the rat made its way toward the anchor lines, as eager to arrive as any other passenger. It was the last of the bearers. If the Cat worked quickly, this ship would not deliver another one to these pestilence-ridden shores.

The rat could sense its own death was near. It was a gift of being a rat — resilient, durable, preternaturally aware. A rat knows when Death is upon it and is always prepared to fight to the last. Never corner a rat, or some such expression men use to describe a rat's most lethal state, which is the moment before it dies.

It ran along the wall, avoiding the lines of people blocking its exit. Most were hot, tired, and so hungry they didn't see it with the proper disgust. More than one of these unfortunates considered how much meat there seemed to be on this particular rat, and whether they had the wherewithal to do something about it.

At the bowline, the rat turned and faced the eyes glittering in the darkness.

I see you. And I don't feel my death. My deliverance is at hand.

It leapt onto the rope and dug its feet into the coarse braid, confident of its footing, sensing triumph in its grasp, and bolted for the edge of the ship and the shore beyond.

The Cat had hunted hundreds of them here and knew every inch of the space. It closed its eyes and raced along the wall, certain it could arrive faster than anything navigating a rope.

A howl welled up in its throat. Deep, guttural, primal.

The sound froze the rat. It had heard that howl once before, the night it stumbled into its nest and found every rat there ripped to ribbons with tooth and claw. A madness it had not believed could exist. And off in the darkness now, the same horrifying thing that had consumed its family all those years ago.

Not a cat. The Slayer.

The rat felt the Rage of the Small come over it. It had heard of the Rage but had never seen it. Its mother said he would know it when it came. He reared back on his hind legs and felt himself fill with a new power. His claws grew long and sharp in the dim light. His teeth, capable of chewing through almost anything, shone like knives.

He stood his ground.

The Cat had seen the Rage before. It was unimpressed.

They met in a blur. The Cat moved without thought — every spin, every slash, murder in motion. The Rat struck with equal ferocity and found only muscle and coat, its enhanced claws catching in fur that fell away and bled the force out of every blow until they landed like the nips a mother gives her children to remind them of their place.

The Rat understood. It came cold, a rippling down his spine to the tips of his whiskers.

He gave himself entirely to the Rage.

And the specter rose.

The Gentle Bite caught the Rat behind the head, across the spine, and the Cat felt the body go slack in its jaws — and felt, in the same instant, the thing leave. Not fleeing. Not fighting. Simply stepping off, the way a passenger steps off a ship, unhurried, having arrived.

It passed close enough that the Cat could taste it.

Then it was gone down the bowline into the dark, and there was nothing in the Cat's mouth but a dead rat and the salt of the harbor.

The Rat was dead.

The Cat noted five or six serious bites as it cleaned its wounds. A worthy foe.

But the thing was gone. All this work, and the specter got away.

It stared down the bowline into the darkness, into the Understory of this new, stinking place, full of scents it did not know. A dozen different dinners. Sounds of hospitality and fear on the wind.

The Cat descended.

And as its paws touched the ground of the New World, it felt the world shudder — not the shudder of a ship settling, but of something enormous turning over in its sleep and opening one eye. Something that had no order to keep and no place to know. Something emergent, that did not care what the Old World had agreed to, and had begun, already, to draw up terms of its own.

A new player in a nascent game aborning.

The Cat stopped to groom.

It satisfied itself that its effort had saved lives, and that its part of the Compact had been met.

A new world. New Compacts await.