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#18
MAR 08 |
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The Church of Supergirl, Part Three:
“No Answers”
Linda Danvers was seeing spots. Orange spots that danced around before her in a mesmerizing display of fluidity. What made these spots unique (aside from the color) from all the other spots she’d experienced during her relatively short super heroine career was that they kept hitting her. In addition to hitting her, they were hitting her hard and it was really starting to annoy her.
“ENOUGH!” Supergirl cried, lashing out with her telekinesis in a rage, a bubble of pressure erupting from her and forcing the spots away from her and across the large main room of the Downtown Phoenix Catholic Church, buying herself a little breathing room from her twisted mirror image, the orange and black clad Bizarro Supergirl, who halted her flight across the room with her own ability to fly, coming to a rest five feet above the ground, smiling at her like a retard.
“Supergirl play easy,” the albino woman said, smiling. “Bizarro hate to play easy!”
“Why the hell can’t you talk normal and fight backwards?” Supergirl said, raising herself into the air. “Why are you here, helping Dominique?”
“Bizarro hate you!” Bizarro said suddenly, spittle flying from her mouth. Her eyes, which were normally the blackest of depths, suddenly glowed with blue energy and Supergirl responded, her own eyes flaring to life with red, and they both released at the same time, the heat vision of Supergirl meeting the cold vision of Bizarro in the center of the room, the twin beams canceling each other out with an almost concussive force, knocking them both back a step.
“But why?!” Supergirl cried over the sound of their twin energies crackling together, each bearing down, intensifying their energy discharges. “Ever since Sunnydale you’ve been bugging my ass! You were a Slayer, a hero, in your world! Don’t you remember that? You were a champion!”
“NO!” Bizarro screamed, cutting off her beam and ducking to the side of Supergirl’s heat vision, which sizzled by her head so closely it shriveled her hair on the left side nearly to the scalp. She leapt into the air and plowed into Supergirl, who cut off her heat vision to prevent causing serious damage to Bizarro, driving them both across the room. “You didn’t make him leave Bizarro! Buzz hated you more than Bizarro!”
“Oh, that’s it, then,” Supergirl said, her confidence rising even as she let her right side go slack, overbalancing Bizarro and allowing Supergirl to get her hands firmly on her twisted image’s shoulders and drive her face-first into the floor of the church. The impact of the blow was sufficient to send Bizarro plowing directly through the floor of the Cathedral and into the room below, planting her face into the hard-wood floor of the basement with a sickening crack.
Supergirl lowered herself quickly, not allowing Bizarro time to recover and grabbed the back of her white, greasy hair and pulled her to her feet and drove her other fist into Bizarro’s stomach, following it up with a super-speed combination of dozens of blows to the stomach, chest and head, keeping her nearly-invulnerable foe on the ropes as she tried to reason with her.
“Buzz doesn’t love me more than you, Bizarro,” she said as she head butted Bizarro, driving her onto her knees and grabbing the front of her costume. “He doesn’t love anyone but himself. Your Buzz and mine both used us, abused who we were until all the good in us was twisted and wrong and evil! They didn’t do it because they loved us, Bizarro, they did it because they despised us!”
Supergirl, her face flushed and her voice loud, jerked Bizarro to her feet and pulled them both into the air, dragging her enemy with her to the front of the main cathedral and kicked open the front doors of the church, forcing Bizarro to look at the mass of Church of Supergirl fanatics outside, now either secured behind obstructions by Superboy or, surprisingly, the local Green Lantern, or fighting with the police, dozens of dead bodies lying in the streets.
“This is what the love of Buzz is worth, Bizarro! Death!” She turned and threw Bizarro back into the church, following the skidding form of the pitiful creature until she came to a rest at the bottom of the stained glass image of Supergirl erected by the Church of Supergirl. “Buzz hated us for what we were…innocent, happy girls who didn’t need them in our lives, lives that until then we had only ever desired to help others, you more so than even me. So they made us over into their image, corrupted us to evil and sin, to lust and addiction, and finally to death.”
Supergirl stepped over Bizarro, whose black eyes were riveted on her, and lightly touched the image of Supergirl represented by the stained glass. “I was saved by an angel, whereas your Buzz perverted that angel into a demon. I found the light while you were smothered by the dark.” She turned her blue eyes onto Bizarro, smiling warmly at Bizarro. “But it doesn’t have to be that way, Bizarro. I can help you…I want to help you. I know people, people who can help, like Dr. Fate, or Wally-God, or maybe even Twilight now that she’s become an Earth Angel. Let me help you, Bizarro. You don’t have to be alone and unloved any longer.”
Bizarro was quiet, looking from the image of Supergirl in the glass, her body swathed in white robes as her "gold"en hair spilled down over her shoulders majestically, to the Supergirl standing before her in person, her blue and red costume resplendent in the light of the church, her blond hair billowing around her just as gorgeously. She wanted to believe this woman, this representation of everything Bizarro believed about herself, and the words the woman had said tugged at something inside of her that had been lost long ago. A Champion, she thought. A Slayer!
Supergirl knew then that she had gotten through to Bizarro when the smile crossed her albino face, and she relaxed a little, pleased that finally their fight was at an end…
It was as she was moving her head from Supergirl to the image of Supergirl in the stained glass that it happened. Bizarro caught a glimpse of refracted light from her right side and she looked over and down, her eye caught on a piece of broken glass lying on the floor that was reflecting a ghostly image of the two Supergirl’s standing over it. Bizarro saw this reflection and her heart stopped.
She saw everything she ever desired to be represented in that image…standing in judgment over everything she was. She saw herself, in her tattered black and orange costume, her white and dirty skin and hair, kneeling like a bowed child before the domineering mother and she knew hatred. Her face fell, the hope and enthusiasm that had only moments broken out upon it as she had briefly deluded herself into thinking she would ever just be Supergirl disappearing with the realization that she was not Superigrl at all…she was Bizarro. She was no one’s angel, no one’s dream. Even Buzz had forsaken her love. He had found someone he loved better, someone he loved more and had arrived at the church with tonight.
He had found his Supergirl…and it wasn’t Bizarro. And as long as Supergirl lived, it would NEVER be Bizarro!
With a cry of hatred so powerful the stained glass image of Supergirl shattered like a crystal goblet at the opera, Bizarro hurled herself at Supergirl and began hitting her as hard as she could. She drove them both onto the floor of the cathedral and then through it, beating on Linda Danvers as savagely as anyone had ever been beaten before in the history of the world. Down they went, through the first basement floor and into the stone caverns below the church, all the while the blows came too quickly and too forcefully for Supergirl to respond. She could not move, could barely breathe, and if she didn’t stop Bizarro soon, she knew she would never see the sunlight again.
“So, what, decided on a little vacation did we? Decide to spend a little time as a teenage idiot, hanging around the farm or some drunken sorority scoring with a wanna-be Amazon?” Dominique asked, her mandibles clicking together with a sound that was clearly mocking and full of hilarity at the same time. She appeared to find the situation amusing to the highest degree.
“Hardly,” Beelzebub said, his voice changing even as the false form of Superboy faded away into the shifting, humming mass of darkness that spread along the rooftop like a cancer given sentience. “I was…investigating…something else, but was drawn back to this realm by the recent shift in the balance of power with these so-called ‘Earth Angels’ and this wonderfully perverse Church of Supergirl you’ve got going here.”
“Thank yo--”
“That was not a compliment,” Beelzebub said with a mocking chuckling of his own. “I would have thought your father would have taught you a little more about the family business than this amateur hour.”
“My father has nothing to do with this!” Dominique shot back, her mandibles clicking together with great force.
“I hardly think that is the case,” Beelzebub responded. “You’ve gotten involved in the life of the woman he loves, kidnapped her mother and friends, and are apparently planning to sacrifice the Earth Angels. Plus, you have recently been wearing the form of your father and Supergirl, and somehow drew her own bizarre twin into your game. Saying this is not revenge upon your father and the woman he loves more than you is nothing but a lie, my dear.”
Dominique was simmering and her large eyes squinted at the powerful demon before her. “And here I thought you were a fan of the act, o’ Lord of Lies.”
“Touche,” Beelzebub said, his red eyes blinking slowly at her. “Let me ask you another question: have you considered the consequences of sacrificing the Earth Angels in this manner?”
“A source informed me this ritual would allow me to make contact with a higher power, a demon I could pay tribute to for a boon,” Dominique responded. “I had hoped it would be you.”
“It may well have been,” Beelzebub said, nodding his head imperceptibly. “However, you are two months too late for this spell to be effective. Had you actually slain the Earth Angels in this manner, you would simply have turned Phoenix into a pit of the Seventh Level of Hell and given Supergirl and the rest of the heroes of this world a bad week.”
“Oh, well,” Dominique said, her cheeks flushing green with embarrassment. “What’s the harm in that?”
“The release of energy would have killed you…painfully,” Beelzebub said, laughing like mad. “That’s rather amusing…wouldn’t you agree, Marcus?”
Dominique tensed suddenly and realized what she had missed. She turned toward the shadows cast by the chimney closest to the Earth Angels and saw the trail of cigarette smoke curling lazily toward the sky and then watched as her father stepped from the shadows, clapping at her mockingly. “My baby girl,” Buzz said around his cigarette. “I’m sooooo proud.”
“I’m going to enjoy sucking your intestines out through your eyeballs, Father!” Dominique said, stepping toward Buzz, who did not look concerned by her approach. “Oh, acting the brave hero, are we?”
“No, but I figure if Beelzy here ain’t in the mood to kill me, I doubt he’d let a wanker like you do it,” Buzz said, flicking his cigarette at Dominique, who looked toward Beelzebub, suddenly concerned with overstepping her bounds. Demonic politics between the haves and the have-nots was a skill of her Father’s she had not inherited and had yet to learn.
Buzz, for his part, walked right up to and past her, his rumpled suit jacket flapping against her abdomen as he passed close enough for the stench of his cigarette smoke aura to fill her head. “I figured you weren’t dead, but I have t’ admit I didn’t spot you as Super-Retred. My question, then is why’n the hell’re you playing hide an’ bloody seek?”
“My reasons, as always Marcus, are my own,” Beelzebub said, another mocking cackle emitting from inside his amorphous body, the incessant buzzing of flies and other insects from within his darkness was growing louder by the moment. “But you may rest assured that this day I am not interested in either settling old scores with you, or teaching the amateur attempting to sneak up behind me and strike me with some abysmal jade construct a lesson in how to die.”
As Beelzebub had been speaking to Buzz, Green Lantern Anthony Drake, who had been slowly inching toward Beelzebub’s back on his side, blood streaming down his body from the twin puncture wounds inflicted by Dominique, his ring hand held up and pointed at the demon’s back. When Beelzebub spoke, Drake froze, stunned not only by Beelzebub’s words but also the way the demon’s back suddenly formed into a demonic face with red eyes that leered at him until he lowered his hand, deciding against an attack.
Buzz performed a short teleport and appeared next to Drake, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Not yer day, kid,” he said as the two of them disappeared, reappearing in front of the church, safely behind one of Drake’s previously constructed barriers. “Get some rest and take care of this crowd. I’ll handle those sods.”
“How…?” Drake asked, pain still lancing through his body with every breath, despite his ring’s efforts to patch him up. “It’s…magic…” he stuttered in disbelief, having never been face to face with the supernatural in this manner.
“So am I, boyo,” Buzz said with a wink, disappearing from the street to reappear on the roof, separated from Beelzebub by the Earth Angels, who were still unconscious and bound on the roof, anchoring the pentagram of virgin blood. Ignoring the arguing Beelzebub and Dominique, Buzz stepped into the pentagram, feeling his skin begin to crawl at the sensation, and quickly checked the pulse on the three Angels. He was just verifying that Twilight was alive when he realized what his senses were telling him…senses he had spent centuries honing as a demon that he’d thought he’d lost when he’d been turned human.
“Something is…different,” he said, looking up at Beelzebub accusingly. “What did you do to them?”
“I am merely an observer this time, Marcus,” Beelzebub said, his madding cackling and buzzing beginning to irritate Buzz. “I came to observe this momentous event for my own reasons, but I am not the ‘higher power’ at play here.”
Buzz realized whom Beelzebub really meant and was already teleporting back into the main cathedral before he said the name…
“Wally.”
Supergirl’s head was ringing and she was bleeding from her mouth, nose and at least one ear, her vision being obscured by her slowly swelling eyes. She didn’t think any bones were broken but she felt like some of her teeth were loose and she’d bitten the end of her tongue off a while ago. She’d stopped falling but had yet to get ahead of the blows being rained down upon her by Bizarro, but she was blocking most of them now as she tried in vain to regain the focus necessary to use her telekinesis. A year ago she could have bounced Bizarro all over the room without breaking a sweat, but since having the power returned to her she’d lost her fine control of it.
While she was fending off the attack, she caught glimpses of the room around her and she saw she was at the end of a hallway leading to an open area that had three bound acolytes of the Church of Supergirl lying on the ground, with Lt. Lisa Hunter standing over them, looking back and forth between Supergirl’s battle and a doorway in the far wall. It was the tear streaks down her face that got Supergirl’s attention, and ignoring Bizarro for a second, she managed to use her telescopic vision to get a look through that doorway.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
The pure fury of Supergirl’s scream stunned Bizarro and she paused for a moment, her face as shocked as if she’d been slapped in the face with a frozen fish. She started to open her mouth and say something but Supergirl was already moving. She hit Bizarro with nothing resembling finesse or skill, just pure adrenalin fueled rage, the full-force of her newly acquired Kryptonian strength pulverizing Bizarro, driving her off of Supergirl and into the wall.
Supergirl was on her feet and swinging like a jackhammer, tears pouring down her face even as they evaporated as she loosed a rapid fire succession of heat vision blasts, keeping Bizarro off balance and gasping for breath in the suddenly baked air. Supergirl continued to punch Bizarro until she was sunken totally in the wall the depth of Supergirl’s forearms. All the while Supergirl had been screaming the word NO over and over. She finally stopped, satisfied that for at least the moment Bizarro was not a problem, and she turned her back on Bizarro and flew down the hallway like a shot, careening around Lisa Hunter with millimeters to spare.
She slid to a halt next to her father, reverting without a second thought into Linda Danvers and threw her arms around her mother, who was lying propped against the cold stone wall. Sylvia Danvers did not react to her daughter’s affection…nor would she ever again.
Sylvia Danvers was dead, lying in a puddle of her own blood that had spread from her waist to encompass her sobbing husband, Fred Danvers, who knelt there between her splayed legs holding the two still bodies of his children…twin girls who had been stillborn, the trauma surrounding their birth costing not only their lives but that of their mother as well.
Next to Fred knelt Linda Danvers’ best friend Mattie Sharp and her husband, Cutter, who was holding his blood-soaked wife as she wailed in his arms. Mattie was a doctor, one of the finest Chief Residents of any Emergency Room in America, but with no tools, supplies or assistance she had been unable to save either of her three patients, one of them a woman who had been a part of her life since she’d met Linda Danvers in kindergarten. Cutter had not known Sylvia well at all, but had been close friends to both Linda and Supergirl for years, and had gotten to know just how strong and special a woman Sylvia had been over their brief time of captivity, and he wept for her loss.
Linda could barely see through her tears and was mumbling nonsensical things but she heard her Father whisper her name hoarsely and she turned toward him and noticed the twins for the first time and she reached for him, pulling him and the two babies into her left arm as she hugged her Mother with her right. She barely registered it when Buzz arrived, sliding to a stop just past the threshold and screaming a string of curse words as his own tears began, but one word he said got her attention.
“What did you say?” she asked, raising her head and looking at him over her still moaning Father.
“I said Wally did this,” Buzz said, not bothering to wipe his eyes. “Something’s happened to the Earth Angels, but neither Dom or Beelzebub had anything to do with it. Think about it, Linda: this all started when Twilight took your place as an Earth Angel, then they came to visit you and you blew the house up. Then you regain your powers and more while Dom kidnaps the Angels and yer Mom, and now they’re powerless and Sylvia…”
He stopped them, unable to continue over the lump in his throat. He slumped to his knees and put his head in his hands. “Dear God, why did it have to be Sylvia and those kids?” Tears pooled in his palms and seeped out between his fingers, trickling onto the stone floor. “She was an angel on Earth and I’m still here and this isn’t fair…”
“Calm yourself, Buzz,” a familiar yet ethereal voice said from above them. “This is a joyous day.”
“MOM!” Linda said, leaping to her feet and staring at the ceiling, where a form of pure white was now forming…forming into the form of a younger, beautiful Sylvia Danvers, her face positively beaming with joy and peace as she slowly lowered to the ground, her form still maintaining it’s cloudlike, immaterial construction. “You’re alive!”
Fred Danvers looked up from where he knelt in the very real blood of his soul mate of nearly twenty-five years, taking one look at the image before him before breaking into heart-wrenching sobs again, squeezing the dead babies in his arms closer to his chest. “No, Linda, she’s not.”
“Oh Fred, my darling,” Sylvia said, her peaceful and happy face creasing with true and plain heartache and sorrow as she knelt next to her husband, her billowing feet never touching the ground. “I know you can barely grasp the miraculous series of changes that have graced our daughter, and I can only imagine what this must be doing to you. But you have to believe me when I tell you that I never, ever wished to leave you, my love. But this is for the best…for all of us and the very Earth itself.”
“To hell with the world and me, Syl,” Fred said, looking at his wife with such pain-filled eyes that no one could stand to stare at him for long. “I can’t loose you. I-I’ll die…I think I’m dying right now, right here. Let me come with you, s-so neither of us will be alone. Please.”
“I’m sorry, Fred, but it doesn’t work like that, much as my heart wishes it did,” Sylvia said, her lips ghosting down and across Fred’s forehead. “But you are not alone, and if you were to come with me then who would care for Linda?”
“Mom, this isn’t right! You can’t b-be dead!” Linda screamed, unable to keep quiet any longer, pushing Buzz off of her and shifting her form into Supergirl, her eyes blazing as her barely-restrained telekinesis flipped her hair and cape around angrily. “WALLY! Get your half-pint ass down here NOW! You owe me a Goddamned explanation!”
“Calm yourself, Linda, I have always been here,” a new voice said as from the shadows of a corner stepped a young boy, maybe eleven years old, dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a sweater, a bowler cap on his head resting on his big round glasses, a baseball bat and mitt slung over one shoulder, a ball bouncing up and down in his other hand. “Trust in me that I have not only your own, but also your mother and sisters’ best interests at heart as well.”
“Bullshit!” Supergirl said, lifting Wall off of the ground and into her face. “This has nothing to do with my interests and everything to do with your own and your damned Earth Angels! You will tell me what is going on here or I swear to God I’ll make you pay for it.”
“Swearing to me, or at me, will do you little good, Linda,” Wall said, smiling sadly. “This is what must be.”
“B-but why?” Supergirl asked, lowering Wally to the ground and shrinking back into Linda, crumpling to the floor in a heap. “Just tell me why.”
“Let me show you, Linda,” Sylvia said, opening her arms to her sides. “Meet your sisters…Kara and Matrix.”
“W-what?” Linda asked, looking up into the light illuminating from her mother as it coalesced into two young girls, maybe five years old, standing next to her mother framed in the joyous light. One was blond and exuded confidence and strength, a symbol of her one-time status as the preeminent heroine on Earth. The other had white hair just on the crown of her head and large black eyes, meekly smiling at Linda, a symbol of how her natural form had always been more uncomfortable to her than other forms she took.
“Kara? Matrix?” Linda asked, stunned at seeing the two parts of herself she had just lost standing before her, smiling at her in contentment.
“They cannot speak to you, Linda, but they have been given another chance to do what they have always done…represent the forces of Light,” Sylvia said, smiling over Linda’s shoulder. “And here is our third Earth Angel now.”
Everyone in the room turned and gasped as one as they took in the girl standing in the doorway. Her skin was albino white, as was her hair, but the orange and black costume of Bizarro Supergirl had faded away, leaving torn black jeans and a gray flannel shirt adorning the body of Bizarro Linda Danvers, who stood there with tears in her eyes as she looked at Sylvia.
“Mom?” Bizarro said.
“After a fashion,” Sylvia said, opening her arms to Bizarro. “Come, child, it is time your pain and loneliness was taken off your shoulders. Let me show you your true path; the path of the Earth Angel…of a Champion.”
Bizarro Linda Danvers took a step towards the light and then slowed, looking into the face of the true Linda Danvers, noticing the tears still streaming down her face and the splotches of blood on her clothes from having hugged Sylvia’s corpse. Bizarro looked at Linda then back to Sylvia, and bowed her head. “Bizarro is not who you want. Bizarro is bad…Linda is good.”
Despite herself, Linda felt her heart, pounding as it was, begin to tighten again. She stepped forward and drew Bizarro into an embrace, squeezing her tightly and whispered, “You finally said something right, Bizarro…so don’t turn your back on your salvation now.” Linda stepped back, new tears trickling down her face, and watched as Bizarro, tears on her own face, stepped forward and reached for the ghostly form of Sylvia. As their fingers touched, the light extended down Bizarro’s arm and drew her into the flow with a flash bright enough to cause them all to turn away.
When they looked back a third young girl stood between Kara and Matrix, holding their hands in her own, her shoulder length brown hair framing her beautiful face…the same face Fred Danvers had seen twenty years ago in his baby girl’s face. Sylvia put her arms around the three of them and, for just a moment, Fred felt his pain pushed aside and the love from the four angelic forms hovering before him forced its way into him and he knew that his wife had accepted this as her fate, but that she loved him and would miss him.
“I’ll miss you too, my love,” Fred said, staring at the light until it faded from view, then he sat down beside his wife, cradling the bodies of his twins, and just held all three of them.
Wally approached Linda, who was being supported by Buzz, who looked at Wally with pure hatred in his eyes. “Linda,” Wally said, speaking softly. “I know you don’t understand, but a terrible danger is coming that will affect not only your world but the universe itself, and the Earth Angels as they were could not have stood before this threat. With your Mother’s guidance and your faith, the Earth Angels now stand a chance of saving everyone on this planet.”
“That’s bleed’n great,” Buzz said, snorting at Wally’s statements. “Get the hell out of here. You’ve taken enough for today.”
“I—“ Wally began, but Linda cut him off.
“You heard him, get the hell out of here!” she screamed, turning her head to the side to speak to him. “You took my mother and my sisters, my father’s soul, my faith and put Mattie in an unimaginably cruel situation she had no hope of winning. Instead of letting my mother pass away in a hospital where her pain could have been minimized, you allowed her to be kidnapped and terrorized by Dominique, tortured Comet and the other Angels instead of simply removing their powers, and allowed an unknown amount of deaths in Leesburg and around the country due to this damned Church of Supergirl. I guess what they say is true…you are a spiteful, self-interested God.”
“You do not understand,” Wally said, defensively. “There were extenuating circum…”
“I DON’T CARE!” Linda screamed, swiping her hand through the air in front of Wally. “I’m done with you, done believing in you. When the end of the world comes, leave me out of it. If I ever see you again, you’ll have to kill me, because I’m sure as hell going to try to kill you.”
With that, Linda drug Buzz over to her mother and reached out and took Cutter’s hand. “Take us to Leesburg, to the hospital, Buzz. It’s time to mourn our dead…and pray ‘God’ is more merciful to them in death than he ever was in life.”
A moment later they were gone, leaving Wally to stand there and hang his head. He had his reasons for his actions…and inactions…here this day, and one day Supergirl would come to understand and even accept them.
But not today…or tomorrow…or the next day…
On the rooftop, Beelzebub turned from the shimmering portal he had created to watch the action and stared at the three Earth Angels as they shimmered and disappeared, removed from this place by Wally and deposited back in their old lives, safe from further harm. Beelzebub nodded, satisfied that the action was over, and turned back to Dominique.
“Come, Dominique,” he said, holding a hand out to her. “There is much to do.”
End of Volume One...
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