This is a new one called BULLET HARD. Story and art by me. Enjoy!
BULLET HARD, Issue #1
Last night, the lab room…
Kane woke up calmly, as if the sleep poisons in his body wanted to keep him in a state of slumber. He’d never woken up that lazily before in his life. Kane was an alert man, a light sleeper, always ready for action, even when he wasn’t in the field. This meant he must have been drugged. Kane was also a paranoid man. But it wasn’t his memory that was playing tricks on him. Not only was his body sluggish, but his mind was as well. He didn’t remember where he was or what was happening to him. But then it started coming to him. The idea of being drugged sparked a train of thought. He had been drugged, but he’d agreed to it; something about being offered obscene amounts of money. But money wasn’t the whole story. There was something else, something more important, something about getting even. Yes, getting even with the people that had done… what… what had they done to him?
“What… what the hell’s happening… to me?” he asked. He looked around, but his vision was fuzzy. The room he was in was dark, but he could make out what looked like medical machinery. The sorts of thing you might find in a hospital… or laboratory. He was hooked up by tubes and wires to some of these machines. There were vats filled with liquids. There was buzzing and whirring, and strange smells, antiseptic and chemical smells. There was also movement in the room. His vision started to clear.
A stern voice answered his query.
“Relax, Captain Kane. The process is over. You’ve had a few hours to rest and it seems like you did very well; very well, indeed. But you need to rest longer. Give your body enough time to adjust to the changes.”
Then another voice chimed in, a gravelly voice, but a friendlier one.
“Aaron, it’s alright. You made it. You’re going to be alright.”
Kane snapped to attention and tried to make out the source of the second voice.
“Colonel? Colonel?! Benny… is that you?”
An older man came close to him and Kane could make out the craggy face and grayed hair of Colonel Benjamin Walker. Perhaps the only friend he had left in the world. Definitely the only man he could trust.
“Aaron, the tech boys said you’d be groggy. It’ll all come back to you. Just give it a little time. You been under for days, but they said they were done with you. It’s over, and I’m not gonna let them do anymore. I got my Nelly with me and I can still kick some ass when the ole Glock is loaded” chuckled Col. Walker.
Kane, smiled. Memories flooded back about Nelly, Col. Walker, Iran and Afghanistan, memories of war, memories of killing, memories of blood and pain. At first he’d liked it. Not the killing, Kane was never a truly violent man, never into blood and gore. But the action, the adrenaline, the danger, and being the best there was at avoiding being killed. Jumping off mountains, skydiving, para-sailing, race car driving, none of these would have the same effect for him anymore. He’d been shot at hundreds of times. Had grenades blown up in his perimeter dozens of times. He’d even climbed out of blown up tanks and downed helicopters. He was one of those supremely lucky few who had survived whatever the war and thrown at him, even road side car bombings. He’d survived two of those. He always attributed it to being alert, being limber, and being the baddest marine there ever was. Some of the other soldiers had begun to resent him, that is, the ones who weren’t trying to get him to rub off some of his mojo on them, so they’d survive outrageous circumstances too. He’d lost lots of friends, and after a while he stopped making them so he wouldn’t have any more losses. But that was then, and this was now.
He looked down past the Colonels face and saw Nelly, the Colonels sidearm, strapped in its holster at the Colonels side. Kane smiled. His memory was quickly returning.
“They’re done? They did it?”
The Colonel smiled and took a step back. “Take a look.”
Kane was lying on a hospital style bed in that dark room. He lifted his head and shoulders. His eyes were wide with anticipation. He thought he was sure what to expect when he looked down at the rest of his body. Even though the Colonel had just told him there had been success, he was sure that he wouldn’t be surprised.
Surprise was the mildest word that he would ever use to describe what he felt upon laying eyes on the rest of his body. He raised his arms and bent his knees. That alone was reason enough to shout, to cry, to scream, to exhale a glorious war cry. But all he could do was shiver as a stream of tears rolled down from his eyes over his face.
“They did it.”
“They really did it, Aaron. You could kick ass before, but now, you can really kick ass” said the Colonel.
Kane’s body was naked… except for the metal arms and legs. They moved fluidly as he shifted them, putting them through their paces slowly. They even flexed and bulged like muscle. He wiggled his fingers and toes. It was incredible. He also noticed that the rest of his body was powerfully muscled. Except for the last two years he’d always been in good shape. Being a soldier, an adrenaline junkie, and an extreme sports fanatic, did that to you. But this was different. He felt as if he could bench press a car.
He sat up from the bed and to his surprise he found that the arms and legs were light, they were even pliant to a certain degree. There he was, standing in the middle of a laboratory, with his only friend and metal arms and legs.
He had metal arms and legs.
One week ago, the warehouse…
Kane found himself in the middle of an empty warehouse. During the drive there his senses and his know how told him that he was somewhere on the Jersey side across from New York City, but other than that he couldn’t know. He’d agreed to be taken to this place blindfolded only because his only friend Colonel Walker had asked for his trust.
“We’re here Aaron.” said the Colonel as he removed Aarons blindfold.
Kane turned toward him and realized they weren’t alone. A small group of people were gathered before him.
“Aaron, this is Doctor Alan Yu. He runs the show here.”
The doctor stepped forward after the Colonel introduced him. He only glanced at Kane’s face with the briefest of smiles before turning his attention elsewhere. He seemed to be most interested in looking at Kane’s body.
“We’re glad you to came to see us, Captain Kane. I’m Doctor Alan Yu. I’m what you might call the top “egghead” of this group, but that’s only because I also have most of the money that makes our organization work. The others you see here aren’t quite as brilliant as I am but they hold their own.” They all laughed.
Apparently Dr. Yu had seen enough of Kane and he started pointing the others out.
“This is Doctor Mortimer Lane. His specialty is high end post future prosthetics.”
“High end post future?” asked Kane.
Dr. Lane, a small thin man with long gray hair, looked like a hippy. He smiled at Kane’s curiosity and took a step closer to one of Kane’s arms. His smile and that wide eyed quality of his eyes gave the impression of him being a hippy who was very much still high on something from his younger days.
“What that means is that my science is so far ahead of anyone else’s that no one can afford it. Only private organizations like this one even try.”
Kane’s eyebrow went up.
“So that means you’ve made prosthetics for other… organizations?”
Lane smiled again.
“Don’t worry, Captain. You can be assured of having the very best. I always top myself.”
Doctor Yu introduced another man, a younger, somewhat more slovenly man than the rest.
“This is Doctor Terry Payne. He specializes in man-machine interface. It’s a budding science and technology of which he is at the forefront. No one can afford him either.”
Dr. Payne merely said hello with a smile and a clumsy thumbs up and then stepped aside.
“And last but not least” said Dr. Yu, “This is Doctor Elise Weir. Her specialty, along with mine, is in biochemistry. She’ll be taking care of any future medical needs of yours.”
Dr. Weir did not smile or move forward. She simply sat and stared at Kane, keeping her arms crossed and holding a pen close to her mouth. Kane thought she was a good looking woman, though he had never been attracted to the lab coat scientist type. He could not place her age, but something about her olive complexion made her mysterious to him. He shook the thought off, looking down at his own body.
Kane measured up the people in the room with him. They weren’t threatening, but they were strange.
“So you’re an egghead and you have a lot of money.” He asked Dr. Yu.
“Yes, private money. Actually we’ve all pulled together our resources to make this… to make you… come to reality. We’ve planned for a long time, selling our inventions, working for the highest bidder even if we found them to be less than worthy. We’ve worked very hard and we’ve amassed quite a lot of resources.”
Lane chimed in. “Yes, so you better be worth it.”
The Colonel retorted. “Oh, he will be.”
“Why are you doing all this?”
“We’ve all suffered at the hands of the same people you’ve suffered from, Captain Kane.” said Dr. Yu with a very grave expression on his face.
Col. Walker turned away and began speaking. He was now just as grave as Dr. Yu.
“Aaron, there are things I know about that I never told you. I never knew how to tell you. I could never find the right way or the right time. But before we move on, you need to know.”
“The story I’m going to tell you starts a long time ago, before you and I were even born, and I’m an old man. During World War Two the United States military spent a considerable amount of time, resources and money on creating what has been referred to as a “super soldier”; A soldier whose physical abilities would be that of ten men, who would be indestructible, and who would inspire the ordinary soldier to believe that the American male was greater than any Nazi master Aryan wacko or any Jap kamikaze nut job. They had their Super Soldiers too. We had success in the form of the man history remembers as Commando Triumph. He was a good old boy from the Midwest who’d been corn fed and brainwashed with the bible and mamas apple pie; Some blue eyed, yella haired, side o’ beef who never bothered to ask “How high?” when the president shouted “Jump!” Still, the boy was effective, and even though he didn’t singlehandedly win the war he definitely turned the tide in our favor, and boy did he inspire. Recruiting numbers went through the roof when word of him got around. But there never was more than one Commando Triumph. The process by which he transformed into a super soldier was never duplicated, and the story is that the egg heads that created the process were all killed by Nazi saboteurs and their information destroyed. No more super soldiers could ever be created.”
“That story, of course, is a lie.”
“During Vietnam the bigwigs in Washington and in the military knew the war was going bad, so they turned to the super soldier again. Well, by this time good old Commando Triumph had passed away, under “mysterious circumstances”. So they needed new men. This time they had several departments separately trying to create new super soldiers. One department went the route of creating serums that would re-write human DNA to make men better than they were. This one they called the Weapon Program. Super Soldier sounded too corny I guess. Their departments’ mission statement was to find men who already had unique abilities and to amplify those abilities using god knows what process. They found a man, and he became their secret assassin. They code named him Wolf Claw. And he took out a lot of high ranked enemy soldiers that were too well protected for anyone else to get to. Word was you could unload a machine gun clip into the man and he wouldn’t go down. But again, at the end of ‘Nam he disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and again the process that he went through was lost.”
“That story, of course, is also a lie”
“During the Gulf War the whole sordid super soldier mess reared its ugly head again. They called it the Gamma Program. But this time it really bit the military and the corporate big wigs in the @$$. One of their own scientists was caught in an explosion that did… something to him. For weeks after that the gulf was flooded with secret reports about a mountain of a man running around in an uncontrollable rage, throwing tanks in the air, ripping apart entire platoons of men with his bare hands. Can’t confirm those stories are true because, you guessed it, at the end of that war the man disappeared and the process that he underwent couldn’t be replicated.”
“And of course, that story too is a lie.”
“The truth is that in World War Two there hundreds of super soldiers and the process that created them was never lost. But they could never turn all of America’s recruits into super soldiers. It would cost billions! So, they came up with the story that it only worked for the one guy, Commando Triumph. The others super soldiers were spread throughout the war effort, and that’s the real reason we won the big one. By the end of the war half of them had died in conflict and the other half became part of the lost generation that stayed in Europe when the fighting was all over. Rumor is a good number of those men are still alive.”
“It’s the same story in Vietnam. Patriot Arrow did go home and he’s made a life for himself, but the Wolf Claw didn’t just disappear quietly in the breeze. And he sure wasn’t the only man they turned into a bullet eating assassin. Again, there were hundreds, but the problem this time was that the version of the super soldier process they went through had the unexpected side effect of turning them into stark raving mad lunatics. Rambo had nothing on these guys. It got to the point that they actually sent our own soldiers to wipe them out. Of course a whole mess of the freaks escaped. Some are still living in the jungles. Every once in a while one of them pops up as an assassin for hire and then goes back into hiding.”
“And that whole mess during the Gulf War? What no one ever says is that the scientist who became a monster did die, but his fellow scientists were so impressed with what happened to him that they kept working on the process until they perfected it. Again, there were hundreds of huge soldiers who could flip over tanks with a flick of a wrist. These men were kept out of the public eye and sent on secret missions throughout the conflict. Rumor is one of them shows up from time to time and goes hog wild.”
“And that brings us up to now, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Word is one of the current super soldier departments is working on something new. It doesn’t sound good.”
“Your mission is to take out any and all surviving super soldiers; the ones from World War Two, the ones from Vietnam, the ones from the Gulf War, and the new ones being made now. Fighting and killing attracts them. They’re going to be found causing a ruckus wherever there’s conflict going on anywhere around the world. Bring them down, all of them. And amongst one of them you’ll find the ones that did this to you.”
Now, the recovery room…
The next morning Kane felt much better. Colonel Walker and the Doctors walked into his room and found him standing in front of a full length mirror. Kane was marveling at his metallic arms and legs, marveling at his new physique, marveling at his new lease on life. He was also beginning to wonder what the “string attached” was going to be. He looked at the others.
“People used to ask what happened to me. I’d lie. I’d tell them that I was in the Iran war and they’d respect that and stop asking questions. I was in the war. That parts not the lie. But what happened wasn’t because of a land mine, or a grenade, or enemy fire. It was men that did this to me, son of bitches so hopped on serum that they didn’t know who to kill or even when to stop killing. It was Super Soldiers that ripped off my arms and legs and tossed me aside like garbage. And the only thing that kept me alive was my will, my will to kill those damn pieces of filth and the people that created them.”
Then Kane turned inward and thought, that in order to get his revenge, he’d just let them do the same thing… to him.
End Issue #1
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