Longbow's Big Adventure
                         By Tom Gordon

It was the distant clank of bars and chains rattling that roused Longbow
from his supine slumber upon the dirty wooden bench.  Disoriented, he
sat up, unenthusiastically studying the distantly familiar, dimly-lit
brown-tiled and concrete-lined tunnels, abandoned and devoid of humanity
in the apparent early morning hours.  Then he remembered.  He had
boarded the C-Train some time ago, and in his exhausted previous state,
must have fallen asleep, leaving himself vulnerable to the erratic whims
of some of New York City's more sadistic subway patrons, or else the
grim-faced discipline of the Transit Police, determined to keep the
metropolis' subterranean veins and arteries clear of any cloggy,
dangerous fatty deposits.  Remnants of the suddenly dispersed dream came
back to him at once, a boomerang of memory.  He had seen Solomon
Hellborne's face, laughing at him like some horrible clown from Hades,
the pleasurable effort of his own hands grasping the fiend's neck,
Hellborne's ominous countenance suddenly contorted with a satisfying
grimace of agony, and the ensuing death rattle, sounding remarkably like
the clack-clack of the subway car bouncing off a decrepit rail.  Solomon
Hellborne's head exploded in a chalky white flash of an atomic-bomb
blast.  Longbow had watched his own flesh nauseatingly vaporize away in
an instant, leaving only blackened bones to fall to the ground, the
clattering of the unsupported skeleton inexplicably metallic, like
chains rattling.

Then he had woken up, uncomfortably positioned on one of the subway
platform's benches.

Longbow lurched into a vertical position, and looked around at the
station.  It looked much like any other New York subway stop; steel
pillars, rivers of indescribable filth flowing freely through submerged
trenches of rails, uniformly mediocre lighting.  To Longbow's
experience, it closely resembled Broadway-Nassau, one of Manhattan's
busiest locations.  But there were subtle differences.  There were no
name postings on the dull gray pillars or quaintly spelled out in mosaic
upon the tiles.  All stations, he had known, had at least these
constants, along with other less pleasant ones noted earlier.  The
station was also more unkempt than others Longbow had encountered;  the
tiles were not white at all, but a sickening yellow-brown, as if the
interior of the station had been doused with urine.  Sniffing the air,
Longbow felt this could be actually be possible.  Finally, there was the
most shocking discovery of all.  He had buttressed himself against a
pillar to look into the subway trench, and he felt a strange feathery
sensation on his hands.  He pried it away from the pillar, peeling back
a thick skin of spiderwebs from its surface!  Through the exposed
hand-shaped section, Longbow saw a partially obscured set of symbols
upon the pillar, looking much like a name posting.  He unwrapped the
shroud of webbing from the pillar, revealing at last the station's name.

"231 South?"  he remarked in incredulity.

He had never heard of it.

Suddenly there was a heinous screech of grinding metal, the signature
music of an approaching train.  No matter, Longbow thought.  He would
take this arriving train out of here and find his bearings.  The last
time he had been to New York City was some time ago, and doubtless the
city had made some sizable additions to their public transportation
system, however poorly maintained they may have been.  He stood at the
platform's edge; an old habit of his; letting the car rush by just
inches from his face.  From the ebon orifice in the distance spouted...

There was almost no time for Longbow to react.  He had been expecting to
wait for the car to noisily lumber towards him, light blazing, grinding
to a halt after whooshing past him.  Instead, with only a high-pitched
whine to mark its passing, the train had instantly materialized in front
of him.  It had come out of the tunnel, passed him and stopped, in
little under one second.  Longbow first looked down at his shoes.  Both
tips of the leather boots had been sheared, burned away just millimeters
shy of his toes.  Then, he slowly turned his gaze upward.

"What the hell..."

The train was covered with murals and symbols.

It was not graffiti art, although that was what Longbow had initially
thought, that the car was some holdover from the seventies, prior to the
city's cleanup.  Graffiti art seemed feeble in comparison to this
machine. The entire train was painstakingly painted, completely covered
with inexplicable scenes of oversized rats and spiders engaged in combat
with turbaned and fezzed heroic male and female figures, all
pale-skinned and spectral looking.  Other cars had the same figures
perched inside miniature replicas of this particular train, careening
along a tunnel, adjacent to a black train with mysterious cowled figures
with shining blades.  Lengthy paragraphs of handwritten text in some
obscure language ran down the machine's lengths. It was a rolling
Sistine Chapel and Bible combined, a document of inestimable worth.

There was something else about the train as well.  The sides slanted
inward slightly from the platform, and in this void were protruding
vertical cylindrical outcroppings, like the towers of a castle. 
Touching the protruding section, Longbow could see through the artwork
that it was covered with heavy armor plate, and then he noticed the
horizontal slits with blackness beyond.  Using his electronic eye, he
enhanced the visual input.  From these slits were a pair of eyes staring
right back at him.  He pulled out his iron plasma bow, and before he had
time to level the weapon at the unseen observer, a short staccato burst
of high-powered machine gun fire spewed forth from the slit.  The plasma
bow remained in his steel-steady grip, but the unexpected force of the
flak striking the weapon threw him into a frenzied pirouette, falling to
the ground after a trio of spins.

"What is your name, surfacer?"  The voice was harsh and too quickly
close to him.

Longbow lifted his head, still dazed from the ricochet.  A young woman
had some large, pipe-tangled apparatus pointed at him.  She looked about
twenty-five or so, garbed in some exotic multicolored cloak interspersed
with pearl-like domes at regular intervals.  Although the obscure fabric
added some bulk to her figure, her short size and rather normal-sized
head already indicated a stocky build.  The most distressing feature,
however, was her face;  Her skin was completely devoid of pigmentation;
unrelentingly white.  Even the thick lips were reduced to only a
sculptural feature, thin and indistinguishable.  The pupils of her eyes
were bright red against pink eyeball, while a few stray locks of
similarly bright red hair trickled down from a low white fez.  It was
clear to Longbow that she was most probably an albino, but that
revelation was of no use while she held the hefty baroque weapon to his
head.

"Your name, surfacer.  To ask you again will mean your death."

"Yeah, yeah, just take it easy there."  he said, waving his hand in a
gesture of compliance.  "Say, could you put that thing away for a sec? 
No offense, but conversation isn't exactly my strong point when there's
firearms involved."  The weapon was not lowered.  She looked at him
inquisitively, the red eyes conveying simultaneous fascination and
contempt.

"Past the Watchers did you get?   How?  Of this you will tell me."

"Look, Miss, I fell asleep on the C and someone dropped me off here.  I
don't know about any watchers.  Now if you don't mind, I'd like some
answers.  Where exactly am I, and what," he pointed to the train, "is
the deal with that?" 

There was short pause, before the white-skinned woman coldly remarked,
"This," her eyes fluttered from left to right, "is deadisland. 
Strategic control is unneeded, and it has no name, from we of the Unseen
Riders and from the Brood of the Tunnel.  As for the Snake-"

"Hold it, hold it."  Longbow interrupted.  "You make no sense to me at
all.  What's this 'Unseen Rider' and 'Brood' stuff?  Are you some sort
of gang member or something?"

The woman stared at him, uncomprehending.

"Okay, look, let's start again.  I'm Erik North.  Who are you?"

"The clan name given to me is Trudeau.  My full name is not to be
spoken.  On your feet,  Erik of the North.  We must make haste, as the
cargo my Snake," she pointed to the ornate train, "carries within its
belly is of utmost importance, and the Brood of the Tunnel will not be
delayed long."  Trudeau put her hand inside her cloak, and there was a
distinct clicking sound from within its technicolored casing.

For a moment, Longbow thought he was hallucinating.  With a soft chorus
of rustling sounds, like the crumpling of silk, he watched the bright
colors of the cloak blend and merge to a muddled soup, becoming
increasingly resolved in a blurred geometric pattern of yellow-browns
and wispy grays.  The only unchanging features on the cloak were the
evenly-spaced pearl-domes, the white spheres unaffected by the
metamorphosing colors.  The patterns tightened and became more focused,
and the rustling sounds stopped.  It took Longbow a few seconds to
comprehend the end product.  Trudeau's entire lower torso had vanished,
with only the consistent domes and her white-fezzed white face hovering
eerily above the platform.

"What-"

"This cloak I wear is made of camocloth.  It is manufactured upon the
looms of the Unseen home island of Sub-Central. The fabric's strands are
made up of four primary additive colors, much like the light phosphurs
of a television set, and the strands are able to be shifted about
without losing the material's cohesiveness.  These 'eyes'," she touched
one of the pearl-domes near where her left breast would have been,
"observe and manipulate the fabric on the opposite side," she
momentarily turned counter-clockwise and tapped a nonexistent right
shoulder blade, "into an approximation of what it 'sees', thus rendering
it wearer almost completely invisible.  This is the standard uniform of
the Unseen, and we utilize it within the depths of these tunnels, when
we must contend with crawlers and hissers, and on islands such as this
one, which we try to remove from the Brood's evil possession."  

She waved the ugly tubed contraption towards the train.   "You are
trying my patience.  I am in no position to further explain to you
things you already know about.  Into the Snake.  Now."  

Suddenly, as abruptly and quickly as Trudeau's 'Snake' had arrived, on
the other end of the platform materialized a single, untied
black-painted subway car, as similarly turreted as Trudeau's machine.

"The Brood!"  Trudeau's torso-less head and hands glided past Longbow,
and, pointing her hefty machine-gun at the dark vehicle, opened fire. 
Mushrooming flowers of flame polkadotted and ricocheted off the Brood
machine's armored hide, failing to penetrate.  A single earth-shaking
concussion blast resounded from the Brood, and milliseconds of
high-pitched squealing later, a nearby chunk of concrete platform
blasted high into the air, propelled by a geyser of fire and dust. 
Trudeau was thrown violently against a pillar, and fell to the ground. 
From the Brood car, a quartet of black-wrapped figures were disgorged,
all carrying cruder versions of Trudeau's weapon.

Longbow cursed under his breath, his eye discerning amongst the
jet-black features upon the train a large cylindrical cannon, presumably
some customized mortar.  He lunged for his plasma bow.

"Wait-"  Trudeau shouted, too late.

Longbow fired four precisely calculated bolts of blue destruction at the
approaching group.  But instead of the energy blasts tearing through
their way through the Brood anatomies, as he had been expecting, the
bolts congealed and faded away, the Brood not affected in the slightest.

"Okay..." Longbow muttered in dejection.

The quartet let loose their own volleys of red-hot steel at him. 
Longbow rolled, the path of his motion closely followed by a convoy of
pulverized concrete shrapnel and smoke.  Trudeau awkwardly leveled her
weapon and sent a wad of flak into the featureless face of the nearest
attacker.  This Brood lolled back, a fountain of bloody obliterated meat
now atop its shoulders, and fell in front of Trudeau's Snake.  Its body
struck the third rail and shower of sparks momentarily illuminated the
station.  The Brood, distracted by the fireworks show, ceased their
assault on Longbow, who took advantage of their unguarded preoccupation
to rush them headlong.  He jumped into the air, winding back his
synthetic arm in one great parabola, before bringing its weight, and the
weight of his body, down upon the hapless trio.  Like dominoes, each
crashed down upon the other.  Longbow quickly wrenched away one of their
heavy machine guns and, breathlessly atanding over the group, opened
fire.

Ugly red craters instantaneously popped over the Brood's bodies while
the enormously unpredicted recoil of the gun sent Longbow's tilted upper
body sharply back and upward, He swayed and lolled like a drunkard as
the powerful weapon dictated its own course for him to follow before he
managed to release his grip.  The gun continued to fire away, eating
away at the brown tiles of the Brood's tunnel.  "Jesus Christ!"  Longbow
yelled, and that was all that he was able to say before the mortar atop
the Brood car fired again., rocking the entire platform a shrill whistle
later with a thunderous explosion.  Obscured in the clouds of flame and
flying debris, the Brood car vanished into the mouth of the tunnel. 
Trudeau ran to Longbow, her body still indistinct in the camocloth
cloak.  "Are you intact, Erik the North?"  

"Well, more or less," he gasped.  "That thing sure packs a wallop,
though."  He pointed to the machine gun.

Trudeau smirked derisively.  "I know children who could have held onto
that weapon longer than you.  You did not distribute your weight in the
proper manner."

"Yeah, well, I got the job done, didn't I?"

"Hardly.  You have, by killing the Brood elite in such a cold-blooded
manner, given them the incentive to send reinforcements.  That carrier
that just departed is even now sending an alert signal to the other
forces in this realm.  Within minutes this deadisland's ports will be
stocked with the most trained and experienced of the Brood, and they
will not be as discriminating as this group."

"Not as discriminating?  Lady, what else are they going to do?  Kill us
twice?"

"I will tolerate your insolence no longer, surfacer.  Were I not more
knowledgeable, I would leave you here for the Brood to exact their
twisted whims."  Trudeau touched a hidden protrusion on her Snake-train,
and a door slid silently away on the intricately painted shell,
revealing an interior aflame with a Christmas tree of blinking control
panel lights and indicators upon its inner walls.

"Just a sec."  Longbow exclaimed, as he rushed over to the slain Brood
to retrieve his plasma bow.  He looked at the horrendously
bullet-riddled bodies, and out of curiosity fired another energy bolt
upon the corpses.  The bolt faded away just short of the carcass.    He
fired another bolt at a nearby pillar and it was instantly converted
into an knarled abstract sculpture.  It shocked and puzzled him yet
again to see his weapon have absolutely no effect against an opponent,
not even against its dead body. Boarding Trudeau's Snake, he made an
inquiry to her.

"Trudeau, how come my own weapon had no effect on them?  You said 'no'
or something when I tried; I thought you might have known the reason."  

The door closed, silently. He felt the floor shift momentarily, beneath
his feet, as Trudeau turned away from some instrument panel she had been
tinkering with to look at him.  There was the same odd expression of
fascination and contempt upon her softly chiseled face, though much more
the latter than before.

"What?  Are those of the surface so pampered that they do not even know
that which is common knowledge?  It only takes minimal observation to
notice that this," she touched the plasma bow, "is an energy weapon."

"Yeah,"  Longbow admitted, suddenly humbled by her knowledge of
technology, rather sophisticated technology at that.  "So what?"

"For years," Trudeau droned in the tone of a collegiate professor, "the
absorption gene has worked its way into the public mainstream, to the
point where the majority of the population has become essentially immune
to that weapon of yours.  The Brood always kill off those of their ranks
that lack any genetic enhancement, and absorption is the most com-" 

"Absorption?!"

"Yes.  The absorption gene draws on the caloric heat and energy derived
from the output of such antiquated instruments of destruction as that
plasma-base discharger you insist on relying upon, converting that same
energy to practical usage throughout the various subsystems of the
mutate's physiology, although the mind-men of the Unseen have determined
the net gain to be negligable.  Most curious how a surfacer such as
yourself has not been made aware of such widely distributed facts.  Are
you mentally debilitated in any way-"

"Yeah, ma'am. I'm a blithering retard. Never mind that!"  Longbow
snapped.  "Are you saying that all the.. the Brood are energy-absorbing
mutants?"

"As I was saying, yes.  The absorption gene is very common.  I, myself
have it." 

"You have it..."

"As do almost all of the Unseen.  And those that do not have it are
telepaths or body-forms, so they are most handsomely compensated."

"Excuse me...  Empirical research, you understand."  Within a second,
Longbow leapt backward, aimed his plasma bow at Trudeau, who backed from
the controls in stunned horror, and, before she could reach for her
machine gun, fired.

The bolt faded away inches from her hovering, torsoless face.

Trudeau lunged at Longbow, bringing a clenched fist into manifestation,
the path of it described in three straight white lines; from near the
floor of the train to below Longbow's protruding jaw, and the quick
parallel horizontal thrusts from behind her body to his groin and solar
plexus.  He gave a short cry of pain, abbreviated by the shock of the
startling swiftness of her attack and genuine inability to release the
air from his agonized lungs into a dignified groan, as he too quickly
fell to his knees.  Indifferent to the consequences of her punishing
retaliation, Trudeau gripped his shoulders, slowly helping him to an
adjacent chair.

"You should not have done that, Eric of the North." she remarked,
softly.

"Owww...Jesus... " Longbow spluttered after almost a minute of wheezing,
his head lowered, drops of blood occasionally falling from his lips.
"Where the hell did you learn to fight like that?"

"Standard Unseen indoctrination.  The mind is given access and control
to all of the body's biochemical functions.  When I want more
endorphins, oxygen, or in your case, adrenaline, I say so, and behold
the consequences. The hard part is learning how to strictly discipline
and ration the usage, and how to come down without going into a state of
shock.  The brain wasn't originally meant for that depth of control;
those naturally occuring chemicals residing in your body are thousands
of times more powerful, and addictive, than any drug."  Trudeau frowned
slightly as she handed Longbow a gauze cloth from the unoccupied air
beneath her floating head.  "Even for one that has not been
indoctrinated, having a dangerous weapon fired at them produces a
surprisingly similar reaction.  The Unseen prefer purposeful, valiant
deaths.  And while your bow is harmless to me, I could not accept your
intention."

"...You're right.  I'm sorry."  His regret, however, was completely
overwhelmed by an almost religious terror at all the cumulative
discoveries, from both his actions and hers.  Trudeau, and the Brood,
and the Unseen, (whoever they happened to be!) were genetically, cousins
of Kane!  Trudeau's words had already described two distinctly foriegn
civilizations, technologically superior ones at that (camocloth, the
Snake, Trudeau's knowledge of energy and genetics,) in New York City's
subway system, no less!  For a moment, Longbow began to suspect that
either he was beginning to go insane, or else he was hallucinating or
dreaming.  But the tangibility of everything around him, the Snake's
depth of artistic detail, the weight of the Brood machine gun in his
hands,  that dry heat rushing over his face as the mortar had detonated,
and the profound pain in his chest and crotch told him otherwise.  From
the moment he had awoken at the 231 South station, it was as if he had
been thrust into a whole other world.

231 South...  To him, that name had remained as unfamiliar as everything
else.  The cobwebs had indicated that it had been there for quite a long
period of time.  Longbow was no mechanical engineer, but he had some
general knowledge of New York City's history, specifically, that
regarding the construction of her subways.  Undoubtedly there were
several miles of unused tunnels that had been abandoned for a myriad of
reasons; structural problems, erroneous surveying, water damage, bad
odors, et cetera.  231 South could have been a station years ago, he
speculated, and thus, had fallen into the obscurity of that same
obsolence.  What other explanation could there be?

His train of thought, (and another train, surely!) was shattered by a
dull, thunderous thud reverberating through the Snake.  These damn
rails!  But Trudeau  abruptly looked from the instrument panel she had
been operating.  Her face was shaken and grim.

"That was a concussion blast. It is the foul workings of the Brood.  The
alert signal has been recieved."

"Well, then let's get out of here!  Trudeau, move this thing!"

"Erik the North, we have been moving since you entered this Snake.  The
Brood are in pursuit, right now, on an adjacent vein or directly behind
us.  I must assume the latter, judging by the wave variance of the
vibration."  Another loud clank, distant, jarred the two occupants. 
Trudeau fell silent, for a moment in deep contemplation, then nodded. 
"Yes.  They are behind us."

"We're moving?  But I don't feel anything!  Other than those bumps."

Trudeau reached over to touch a button.  "I assure you we are."  A soft
whirring sound revealed a retracting metal iris on the curved ceiling of
the vehicle.  She picked up her machine gun and pointed to the black
void above.  "Since you are the reason the alert signal was sent, and
because I have been ordained as rider of this Snake, you must go up
there and slow their progress.  My Snake must reach Sub-Central intact. 
It is carrying... food and medicinal substances... leased from the
surfacers.  They have been stored in the same latter segments now being
fired upon. The Unseen cannot survive without them."  Longbow looked up
into the black portal with bewilderment as Trudeau tinkered with the
tangled knot of tubes, valves and switches strangling the cannon and
pulled off several protruding fixtures, forcing the modified weapon into
Longbow's hands.  "You did not handle this well, in our last encounter
with the Brood. I do not know if my alterations will make this weapon
any more manageable than before, but there is insufficent time to
instruct you in proper technique.  Stop them."  Longbow shook his head,
taking the machine gun.  "Look, I'm telling you, this thing is not
moving, Trudeau-"  She glared at him.  "Okay, okay. Geez."  He reached
up and lifted himself up, into the darkness, contemplating an
appropriately snide remark to make to her once he proved her ridiculous
notions erroneous.

There was little time to react once his upper body had left the
decievingly secure confines of the car, especially when he was still
operating on the premise that Trudeau was mistaken about the Snake's
rate of movement.  Longbow was completely unprepared for the force of
acceleration that hit him square in the face! "Aaagh!"  Longbow yelped. 
He was thrust backwards, and his pelvis and legs were rudely pulled from
the portal like the cork of a champagne bottle.  The white, lighted oval
of the iris shot off into the darkness, while indistinct white and red
lines and flickering dark gray pulse of interspaced girders blurred
past, and it took Longbow some time to realize that he was sliding along
the painted metal roof of the Snake, unhindered.  He groped frantically
around the all-encompassing darkness with his robotic arm, and locked
onto some hidden outthrusting of metal, ceasing his horizontal descent
at last.  Longbow quickly discovered, after some effort, that the
forward momentum that had thrown him backward was not as bad as he had
originally thought; he could even manage to stand.  But he had been
unprepared, misled by the apparent insulation of motion provided by the
Snake's interior, and, he reluctantly admitted, by his own stubborn
skepticism.  "Sorry, Trudeau!"  he called to the opened iris.  "You were
right!"  A white, wristless hand hovered over the doorway, and gave him
a thumbs-up.  Longbow thought about responding her declaration of
superiority in kind with his own particular hand signal, but then
slapped himself, remembering his objective. He looked toward the rear of
the train, saw nothing but the intermittent, hyperkinetic streaks of
signal bulbs flashing by.  Then he heard a loud crack, and the warm glow
of an explosion lit up the tunnel.. Longbow felt nauseous, confronted
with the momentary image of a still, hypnotically colored corridor of
tattooed train flanked by an indistinguishably blurred, unrecognizable
hash of girder and stone, going by so fast as to alternate between
receding and approaching, like the spokes of a bicycle.  He was almost
overwhelmed with vertigo and motion sickness at once, but he quickly
noticed that the flash had come from a rail parallel to the one
Trudeau's snake was riding upon, across a line of girders, yet still far
behind.  Then a great cloud of flame and black debris exploded at the
rear of the Snake, and the orange ball of mottled flak quickly faded
away to the darkness, inconsistent with its expansion.  The caboose of
the Snake had been blown away, so badly damaged it had been shaken loose
from its 'mother,' leaving whatever cargo it held within its belly to
any passerby.  "Son of a bitch!"  Longbow wished the Brood had been
behind them, as Trudeau had (mistakenly!) determined, then they would
have crashed into that same departed car, but then he heard the
tremendously loud marriage of knashing metal in the distance, and
quickly revised his opinion of her positioning abilities.  Okay, he
admitted,  so she was right about that, too. It was hard to shake away
prejudice brought into existance by an aching groin.  Another flash lit
up the tunnel,  the blue flicker of the third rail, and through the
visible, sickening oscillations of girders Longbow could discern a
black-plated single car, neatly topped with an ornate cylinder, a
familiar incendiary device manned by two shadowy figures.  Undoubtedly
the Brood.

Bracing himself into the gap between the Snake's segments, Longbow
levelled Trudeaus hyped machine-gun toward the Brood machine, which was
rapidly becoming lost in the diminishing shower of erratic electricity,
and, with a slight wince, fired.

Hasty preparations and Trudeau's customizing job came to naught; though
he had made sure he could not be forcibly thrown from the train like
before, the gun was impossible to aim properly, its turbulent, violent
recoil would have shaken it out of his hands were it not for his steady,
electronically enhanced grip, and even maintaining that stranglehold on
the gun was infuriatingly difficult.  Worse still, the bullets
ricocheted and bounced off that semi-transparent 'wall' of girders, a
shield that would surely deflect at least half of Longbow's gunplay,
even when assuming he could figure out in time how to wield the thing
without throwing epileptic fits.  His options were limited.  He could
tell Trudeau to reduce the Snake's acceleration, allowing him a better
chance to disable the Brood's machine, but possibly the high rate of
speed was needed just to stay ahead of the pursuers; there could be
other cars, perhaps still on the same track.  The Brood fired again,
their location having shifted to nearly directly opposite Trudeau's car,
and a great heaving chunk of dimly illuminated tunnel came down around
Longbow, one jagged splinter grazing his back.  Apparently the Brood
gunners were masters at meticulously timing their shots through the
indiscernable gaps between the flying girders, well, either that or
sheer coincidence, a concept Longbow had made a regular habit not to
believe in some time ago.  Darkness surrounded him once again,  and so
he tried to let loose another volley at the spot of fire still
resonating on his retina.  The heavy machine gun seemed more compliant
this time around, but the accuracy of his shots continued to be erratic,
and their progress soon ceased as dense clusters of sparks off that
accursed 'wall.'  

For a moment, Longbow thought about retrieving his plasma bow; he had
noted back at 231 South how well it had managed against New York City's
structural underpinnings, the control in his previous absorption
experiment, later cancelled altogether by Trudeau's amusing crotch-grab.
 He tucked the machine gun into his carryall and pried away the bow from
his back, jammed against the walls of the Snake.  He noted it was
slippery with his blood, but that would have to wait.  With one pass,
Longbow shot a high spread of energy bolts along the racing girders, and
watched their dramatic, fiery devolution to shredded slag.  His
calibrated eye, locked onto the multiple impact points, precisely
followed that blurred, red-edged void, and he leveled another shot into
the indistinct orifice before it flittered to nothingness.  A soft
explosion issued forth, and a cloud of plasma, fringed with coils of
burning shrapnel, poured between the sharply silhouetted ribs of the
Brood track.  Longbow whooped with triumph as the cloud dwindled to an
almost stationary comet of spouting fire, relative to the racing Snake,
indicating a damaging hit on the pursuing car.  He had hoped the comet
would soon slow down and vanish, irreparably impaired, but that vigil
was quickly  interrupted by three bursts of flak, rapid succession, from
the smoldering Brood tank, landing square on three cars, including the
segment Trudeau was operating the Snake from!

"Man, you guys just don't give up!"  Longbow shouted in frustration,
between hoarse patches of coughing; smoke poured from the Snake's
newly-created chimneys and freely flowed into his face, the trio of
flames were rapidly changing colors as they forever consumed the
outlaying pigments of painstakingly placed paint, adding into the smoke
chemical substances that wracked Longbow's lungs with pain; undoubtedly
carcinogenic.  But the flames were a double-edged sword, providing
enough illumination for him to better access the situation, and then the
opportunity came; the strobe of the shield had abruptly ceased, 
completely exposing the dark-plated attacker at last!  

"Hai-yaaah!" Longbow's body acted before his mind could protest, he
leapt from the Snake, flung across the twenty-foot clearance, and landed
cacophonously on the roof of the Brood's machine.  Two sets of
bewildered, black-draped hands greeted him.  It took one emphasized
caress of his artifical arm to send the first Brood gunner flying into
the path of the instantly resumed haze of iron beams; there was a
momentary squish and a blossoming flower of blood before the unfortunate
flicked away.  The other Brood, his lower body immersed in a turret's
hatch, required less expenditure of energy; Longbow lifted him in a
simple arc, up over his head.  "Sayonara, asshole!"  He tossed the
gunner over the receding edge of the car, onto the third rail.  The
retina-piercing splash of icy electricity, with its wriggling victim and
his accompaniment of squealing wails, dopplered off seconds later. 
Gasping with exhaustion, Longbow crouched down, and crawled over the
roof, grasping for any sharp depression or indentations on its plated
hide, found nothing.  He glanced over at the damaged Snake racing across
the tracks, and remembered his Unseen companion.  With a sharp intake of
air, he shouted as loudly as he could across the expanse.  "Trudeau!" 
His cry barely broke through the clamor of the trains, and Longbow
nevertheless prayed that was the reason why she did not respond, and not
something else. "TRUDEAU!" To his immense relief, Trudeau's detached
head cautiously rose from the pools of incandescent craters surrounding
the scorched doorway, fezless, the tangles of her bright red hair
closely echoing the nearby tongues of flame.  Her scarlet eyes were
narrow with perplexed wonder, then immediately widened in horror.  She
made a frantic, pointing gesture to him, and Longbow only had time to
rotate his head, before a blunt instrument struck him on the temple,
cracking rather loudly.  He wordlessly slumped against the barrel of the
cannon, and his last diffuse, multiple-imaged sight was of Trudeau's
aghast, artistically flamelit face, mouth open in shock, disconnected
extremities gripping her forehead.  Longbow dazedly smiled, winked at
her, resolved to be a bit more thorough in searching the vehicles of
mysterious, black-costumed cultists next time around, and blacked out.

"...THE PERFECT CRIME, NORTH!"

Solomon Hellborne had returned, his component atoms had reunited and he
was laughing at him once again, but now Longbow's straining, eager hands
were unable to reach the vein-lined, chicken-neck, the sepulchral
villain seemed to be spatially displaced, always too close and too
distant simultaneously, while the emanciated, crescent-shaped head
expanded, soon encompassing all of Longbow's limited vision with a
black, snapping slash of yellow-canined, rancid-smelling mouth.  
Hellborne's cackling voice was like a blaring whistle, each syllable a
red-hot spike into his ear as the declaration was made.

"MY SEEDS HAVE BEEN PLANTED, NORTH!"   Longbow's tried to respond, but
couldn't, his jaw, his entire body was an intangibly numb mass of
paralyzed, helpless meat.  The abyss of Hellborne's orifice closed
tightly, and bolted open again, the renewed stench of death gusting
forth with the nauseatingly sweet pungency of a thousand decomposing
corpses.

"THE CHILDREN ARE NOW... MIIIIIINNNNE!!"

And the unrelenting fires of Armageddon rose from the gargantuan maw,
their roaring hunger joining the symphony of his agonized screams.  

When Longbow somewhat forcibly came to, an indeterminate length of
relative years later, he quickly regretted it.  His nightmarish visions
were gone, but their reign had been replaced by an angrily aching head,
certainly not helped by the jarring glare of spots high above, his eye,
still accustomed to the pitch-dark of the subway tunnel, were pierced by
the rays of white light.  He lifted his head, and tightly squinted,
surveying his horizontally splayed body. He was on some stone slab or
table, his arms and legs were wrapped by several woundings of low-gauge
chain; amusingly inadequate, if his apparent captors had intended to
keep him down for any length of time over three seconds;  with hardly a
gesture from his artifical arm he could make quick work of that.  But he
had decided not to break free just yet; he wanted to get some answers
before playing his cards.  The thick snowfall of fine dust in the air
caught the light and extended its radiance, and would have made it
somewhat difficult to discern the outlying environment except for the
second miscalculation on the capturer's part.  Longbow's eye filtered
out the noise and presented him with a very low-ceilinged, tiled
expanse, a veritable forest of chrome-silver pillars evenly spaced, the
shining lines of prespective fanning out in all directions.  He could
discern no other features along the visible horizon, only the continual
repetition of mirrored cylinders from floor to ceiling.  Longbow shifted
his weight, listened, heard nothing around him or in the distance, so he
ventured a word.

"Hello?"  An echo responded.  "Is anybody here?"  More hollow
reverberations followed, unanswered, and  Longbow was about to wrench
away the chains to take the next step, but the metallic croak breaking
directly behind, matched by the sudden materialization of four
black-garbed Brood to hold him down gave him quite a start.  

"Yes somebody is here welcome to the Hearth of the Brood surfacer"  The
voice was not even remotely human, it sounded more like an early
electronic synthesization, with equilaterally robotic pauses between the
words giving it a zombie-like quality.  The Brood tugged at each bound
limb, spinning him completely around to face the voice's owner.

Longbow paled, felt the hot rise of bile in his throat.

It was a twelve-foot high monstrosity of jumbled, makeshift parts and
gears, in the loose semblance of a human body, indeed a robot, if the
dignified term of 'robot' could be applied to what seemed to have been
constructed by the alliance of an emotionally disturbed child and a
unscrupulous junk-yard dealer, and supervised by some technologically
literate criminal. A vast assemblage of disparate components gathered
from otherwise incompatable sources, a bulldozer's yellow-painted
shuttlecock here, an automobile dull gray axle there, varying colors,
compositions, and purposes forced together with little rhyme or reason,
but apparently functional nevertheless.  Longbow had seen machines
before, even mix-and-match Rube Goldberg deals comparable to what now
hovered over him.  But he was unprepared for what sat upon this mountain
of iron, steel, plastic and God knows what else as a head.  A large,
greasy glass jar, sealed, bubbling and churning green fluid, submerged
within the putrid pink mass of a human cerebellum and upper fringes of
spine, with a pair of red, irritated eyes, still attached by optic
nerve, sickeningly bobbing and rolling in the liquid like two fat, dead
fish hopelessly entangled in red seaweed.