Chapter One
MORNING IN AMERICA
The dream was the same.
Was it prophecy? Anxiety surfacing from the chaotic, straining mind of the mount? Feedback from the collective unconscious? It didn’t matter.
Legion didn’t need to sleep, but the fragile body and simple brain of the mount did. Legion’s essence interfaced oddly with the churning images of the mount’s sleeping mind and was cut off from the external sensory input of the mount’s body. Legion could no longer feel the soft, cotton sheets and the down pillows--the bedding of a king. Legion felt slightly vulnerable like this, but it knew that was ridiculous.
This mount was one of the best-protected human beings on the planet.
Ah, this mount! This wonderful mount! Its will was strong; oh, how it fought Legion every moment since it had been taken. Not that it made any difference. In the end, Legion was supreme.
At night, however, Legion’s complete control slackened and, for these few hours, Legion sat back and watched the same pictures unfold against the closed eyelids of the mount’s mind. Images from the mount’s past as a soldier, presumably, its experiences in the wreckage of Europe during the 1940s. Old images seen in new ways, adapted to new paradigms. Twisted. Distorted.
Legion saw the Statue of Liberty snapped at the base, the statue sinking into black, stinking water filled with ash and excrement. The capital dome shattered and cracked like a crushed eggshell. Once proud cities, smashed to oblivion, bombed to extinction and still burning. People in rags, little better than animals, fighting and scrabbling, tearing at each other with teeth and sharpened claws over scraps of rotting food. Brother against brother. Children screaming as they ran from their own violently insane parents. The dead piled in unburied heaps. No trees, no grass, no birds, or even insects. Nothing else alive, just gray, cracked rocks and silence punctuated by screams. It was always the same. Every night.
It was so beautiful.
An American dream.
**********
Warden Braffert had finally found a home.
The Justice League had taken him in, no questions asked. For the first time since he had become alone, Warden was somewhere where he was not sneered at with contempt and hissed about in whispers just loud enough for him to hear: Ignorant, red neck, white trash, hick.
Freak.
Such words had no place within the great hall of the Justice League. Everything that made Warden an outsider elsewhere was precisely what allowed him to finally belong here. Indeed, soon after he met the Justice League, Warden learned he was hardly even unique.
Warden was introduced to a small boy, fair skinned with freckles and reddish-blond hair. By all appearances they were quite dissimilar. The boy was younger than Warden by five years. Even their voices suggested vastly different childhoods, vastly different worlds. While Warden had a slight southern twang in his soft voice, the other boy’s cadence was thick with the sounds of eastern skyscrapers and city streets. On the outside, they had precious little in common.
But it was what was inside them both--very literally--that mattered.
The other boy’s name was Jimmy Reese. He, too, was shy and quiet. He, too, had grown up mostly on his own and much too fast. He, too, had seen the newsreels depicting the heroic exploits of the JLA and felt something deep within him stir in response. He, too, could become something.... other.
Warden had never seen a Mighty Mouse cartoon, and Jimmy hadn’t seen the movie Mentalon the Misfit. Thus, each of their alternate forms looked to the other like the most miraculous, amazing thing they had ever seen.
Mighty Mouse was very different from Jimmy. He was brash and happy; a chirpy, high-pitched voice always singing that he would save the day. And yet Mentalon couldn’t help but feel Jimmy’s loneliness; the longing for a mother who’d never loved him and a father whom he’d never known. As Mighty Mouse, this was buried deep under bright ribbons of Technicolor joy--the tingling euphoria of flight in a cloudless blue sky--but it was still there: A dull ache that gnawed at the periphery of the innocent freedom that being Mighty Mouse provided.
To Mentalon, it was a vivid pain. And familiar.
The JLA had encountered Jimmy only a short while before they had first met Warden and some of the JLA wondered what encountering two such similar children could mean. The android NoMan saw them as nothing less than harbingers of the next generation of America’s metahumans: Vastly powerful beings whose awesome abilities fueled fantasy escapes from painful childhoods. NoMan wondered how many more such children there were out there; young boys and girls living lives of quiet despair punctuated by moments of half-glimpsed omnipotence.
And he wondered what they would eventually grow into.
Chapter Two: “Truths Self Evident”
To him, it was a
house of ghosts.