Chapter 1: The Papers Say It's Doomsday.
Chapter Text
The taxi cab came to a halt and Ben Grimm stepped and breathed in the New York city air for the first time in almost five years. It was the summer, so the air smelled like burning garbage. Not the sort of thing you’d think you’d miss, but he did. Seated on 42nd street and Madison was his target. The Baxter Building. An old friend had extended to him an invitation, and being without a job for the last few months, he made him an offer that he’d be a fool not to take. He could hear the car’s radio as it pulled away.
“Dream Boy, dream Boy...You’re my only dreaaam boyyyy. Dreams faaade into the night, But rather than die awaaaayy. Why won't you staaaay? ” sang a melodious trio of girls over tinny speakers.
The Baxter was thirty-five or so stories tall and seemed to have a space-age gleam to it like something out of a pulp novel. Inside was a whole other story. The air was fouled by the pungent aroma of coffee and electrical fire, while every single table was practically overflowing with bits of odd technology, each was more awe-inspiring than the last. Then he saw a face that he recognized, or at least he thought he did.
Reed was a lot slimmer than the last time the two had seen one another, but it was him. Was his hair starting grey already? Had it really been that long? Reed was a skinny, kind of string bean of a man and had dark circles under his eyes. Oddly, despite his older appearance, it reminded him of their college days, just before Korea. Reed turned to focus his attention on Ben and it was like someone had flipped a switch. His eyes, widened with excitement like a kid all hopped up on sugar and he sprinted up to him, his leather shoes making an audible, machine gun ‘tak’ against the floor.
“Ben, good god. You have no idea how good it is to see you.”
“It’s good to see you too, pal. Are you okay? You need a sandwich or something?” said Ben as the two men shook hands. Ben watched as the thought crossed Reed’s mind. It was as though he hadn’t even considered that thought until Ben brought it up.
He made a dismissive breath sound and waved his hands about in an excited manner, “Nothing to worry about, how are you? Look at me, just look at this place. What do you think?”
Ben laughed, “I don’t know what to think, Reed. This seems a little out of my element.”
“Nonsense, I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I didn’t think you were up to the challenges ahead of us.” Reed yawned as the two men weaved through the maze of half-constructed devices, “I wouldn’t want anyone to accuse me of nepotism.”
“So, care to clue me into what your secret project is egghead?”
“In due time, in due time. We have so many things to work on, right now. It’s just,” Reed was practically bouncing on his heels as he flapped his hands, “We’re building the future.
“Impressive, is all of this you?”
“Only half. I speculate that by the decade’s end we’ll have an entire force of scientists operating here. Right now, all of our energy needs to be focused on the big project. But, I won’t get into that at the moment, make yourself at home in one of the rooms upstairs, Johnny should be up there if he isn’t out and about.”
An hour after getting set up in his apartment, Ben made his way back down to the lab space. He could hear one voice, a man, Reed while the other was the familiar But unplaced voice of a woman. As he stepped out he could see that Reed was leaning against the table talking about something with a shorter woman with a crown of curly brown hair.
“Is now not the best time?”
As soon as he spoke the pair turned to face him. Reed was already beaming, but as soon as the woman with him placed her eyes on Ben, he watched her face light up, “Ben, it’s good to see you again.”
Suddenly the dots connected in his head. It was Sue. Ben walked over and picked her up in a great bear hug before placing her back, safely on the ground. “It’s good to see you too, Susie. I should have figured you were working with Reed on this.”
Sue gesticulated by twirling a distended finger, “Working with a bit of a simplification. Johnny and I are kind of bankrolling this whole mess, but I’m not going to bore you with it, I’m sure Reed has told you all about it already.”
Ben could see Reed smiling slyly behind her, “Actually, our Reed’s been weirdly stingy with the details, what’s going on?”
“Ben, how familiar are you with the Baxter Building?” she said out of the blue.
“Not super, mind giving me the key points?”
“A couple of years ago, right after the Manhattan project, my dad sold a few invention ideas. Some ended up with the government, real hush-hush wetwork projects and the like. Some went elsewhere...but that isn’t important. The man delivered on the money before being locked up. The Baxter was originally a condominium in the 20s filled with all sorts of uppity socialities and the like. When dad bought it he intended to use it to house a rocket so we could beat the Russians into space.”
“So, that’s why you need me? You guys need a pilot for a rocket?”
“Oh far from it,” spoke Reed, “A rocket just doesn’t quite cover what this project is capable of. A rocket is a big cumbersome mass that doesn’t quite cover our intentions. After the war, Sue and I met up at a physics summit. We got to talking about a new possibility. Something that can transport a lot of people a great distance in seconds. I’m talking about teleportation, Ben.”
Ben took a moment to process the great set of statements that the pair had just dropped on his lap and he couldn’t help but laugh, “You guys are fucking nuts.”
“Ben, trust me on this. Reed and I have spent many nights awake talking about this. I think we can do it. I have the capital, Reed and I have the know-how. We just need an engineer to help us piece the thing together. We have Johnny, but he’s only a student.”
Ben dug his fingers into his hair and brushed them away from his sweaty brow, “Fine, you two have twisted my arm. Where do we begin?”
Reed walked over and clapped him on the shoulder, “See, I told you he was good for it. No faith I say, she has no faith in the inherent goodness of mankind.”
“Spoken like someone who’s never been kicked out of a bar for his skin colour, Richards.” She said with a smile, but a hint of a bite on Reed’s surname.
Reed’s expression dropped, “My apologies, Susan. I forget myself at times.”
“You’re fine, darling,” She smiled a more genuine smile at Reed. They both shared nearly the same sickly sweet smile. Ben would have found it heartwarming if he didn’t have to spend most of his teens watching the puppy love build-up to it. I mean, my god you spend like six years watching two people beat around the bush with their awkward feelings, then the next thing you know you’re serving in Korea.
She turned her attention back to Ben, “Have you by any chance met Johnny yet, I wasn’t sure if he’s upstairs or not.”
“I didn’t see anybody...Do you mean your brother Johnny?”
“Well I don’t really associate with very many other ‘Johnnies’ I can’t imagine it would be super nice.”
Ben remembered Johnny well enough from his youth, a very willful, energetic kid… but that was years ago, “He’d be about sixteen now, what’s he doing messing about on a project like what you two are suggesting?”
“Well...I...He does have some natural talent with engineering, but he’s very inexperienced so we were thinking maybe you could show him the ropes.”
When they found Johnny he was lying asleep in a deck chair. In his room. His room from which he had removed the bed and covered the floor in red coloured sand and porcelain seashells. As though that were not enough, Johnny was dressed as either Salieri or King Louis XIV while on his chest he balanced a martini glass that was loaded with what appeared to be Atomic Fireballs and Certs.
“So...this is your great engineering prodigy. I must say, not what I expected. I’m excited. Really, Reed, I’m thrilled to be working with some kind of dandy.”
Sue looked as though she were ready to throttle her younger brother. Then, as if on instinct he opened his eyes and looked first at the bright light above him and then to his sister. “Could you please keep it down Sue, your violent thoughts are interrupting my dreams. And she was such a gorgeous brunette too...”
Johnny Storm sat up and brushed the sand off of his clothes and proceeded to eat a Cert and a Fireball. Ben couldn’t imagine the cinnamon, mint hell that was his mouth, but he seemed unaffected by it.
“Huh, you’re Ben. You seem to have aged beautifully. What are you now, fifty? You look good for fifty.”
It crossed Ben’s mind that he could probably punch Johnny in the face and flee before Sue could retaliate, but he did not. Sue instead spoke, “Johnny, what are you wearing and why is your room full of sand?”
“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it. I wanted to imagine for a second that I wanted to have an idea about what it would be like to be Oscar Wilde, stranded on some martian beach, beautifully and totally drunk with an empty bottle of Jack Daniels and a martini glass of sugary treats.”
There was a moment of silence, and to be quite honest the experience kind of made Ben want to laugh. It made Sue want to slap him and Reed was too tired to focus on anything really. It was taking most of his energy to not immediately fall asleep on a pile of old t-shirt and liquor bottles.
Sue pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes in annoyance, “Go clean up and get a cup of coffee, we can talk about this. I need to see you some kind of sober before we begin things.”
Johnny mumbled a mixture of words that didn’t add up to much, it was mostly just a bunch of noise to mock his older sister. She stripped off his elegant jacket and his powdered wig and tossed them to the side. As he vanished down the hall, Sue, Reed and Ben exited the bedroom.
“I am so, so sorry about that Ben; this isn’t an everyday thing, I don’t know what’s going on with him.”
“Eh, it’s fine. Not the weirdest thing I’ve seen. What Johnny needs is some guidance. And to not drink right before helping to build a teleporter.”
Ben would watch Johnny polish off an entire pot of black coffee by himself. It was as impressive as it was disgusting. He just looked on with mute horror as this kid just finished off cup after cup of bitter, black coffee. It wasn’t just the fact that he was just drinking it like it was going out of style. It was also the crude viscosity of it. It seemed to be thicker than it should be. Like he was nursing himself on crude oil. Don’t get him wrong, Johnny was a good engineer and he and Ben worked quietly beside each other on the great machine on one of the lower levels. Just occasionally, Ben would see him do something grotesque and it would be all he could think about.
It was fine at first. The two would work on the teleporter while Sue and Reed ran diagnostics. Then he found out a new and frightening thing about Johnny. Johnny liked to perform pranks. Not, the typical sort of slapstick gags he was accustomed to, though. At the end of one workday, Ben decided to retire to his room and immediately go to sleep. Only, there was one issue. Johnny had at some point taken eight mannequins and set them up in Ben’s bedroom. Eight mannequins all immaculately decked out in two-tone mod dresses and bowler hats with their right arms aimed directly at the bed. Ben stood there for an alarmingly long time, trying to work through exactly what he was looking at. As though there was something that would be revealed if he could just find it. Ben discovered rage instead of answers. He threw a few of them over his shoulders and tossed them into a dumpster one after another. There was a little old woman and a little old dog that sat just outside the Baxter Building and looked at him like he was mad.
On the day of the first test, there was a buzz in the air. A sort of intense, perfect energy. The four of them were gathered in a secluded station that overlooked the teleporter and it’s subject. A single apple on the field before them, surrounded on all possible fronts by cameras.
“Is everybody prepared to make history?” asked Reed, his fingers resting on the key.
They all nodded and he pressed the key.
Chapter 2: Empty Town
Summary:
In which our four adventurers find themselves forever altered and dumped outside of a sundown town in the rural south.
Notes:
The E.C comic described in the first paragraph is a real comic, look it up.
Chapter Text
For a moment Susan Marian Storm felt frozen. A second that passed like hours, completely still while her eyes stared out at the vastness. First, there was a sort of redness, but to describe it as such would be a disservice. Then stars. A vast sea of stars, more stars than she had ever seen up to that point. For a moment, a thought crossed her mind. If you were to ask her what it was she’d feel embarrassed. She was reminded of a comic book. A silly pulp thing published by E.C or somebody. But, the story stuck with her. The story was about an astronaut on a planet inhabited by robots. Robots that were completely indistinguishable, save for their paint job. One orange and the other blue. One group of robots has more rights and privileges than the other, and due to this, the astronaut concluded that their prejudice made them ineligible for membership in a galactic republic. What really punctuated the story for her was the very ending when the astronaut removes his helmet. He removes his helmet and the caption box above him talks of how the perspiration on his dark skin twinkled like the light of distant stars. The stars around her were like the sweat on her own dark skin. Then there was nothing, total darkness.
Then Johnny started to scream.
She was on solid ground then, the feeling of being suspended and completely weightless suddenly gone, but there was still darkness. When Johnny was twelve, she remembered him riding on his bike. He had a pretty nasty wreck, ploughed right into a Cadillac that someone had parked down the street. Broke his leg in two places, right above the ankle. Sue was the first there. She heard his scream. His scream now was akin to that, but magnified by a thousand. Then there was a smell in the air, like...sulpher? A sort of firework smell.
“Johnny!” She cried out first, “Reed! BEN!”
As her mind began to focus on thoughts of them was when everything slowly took focus. Simple shapes at first. Edges and corners and soon after...trees? How the hell were there trees? There was a masculine figure running around, his entire body surrounded by incredible blue-white fire. In an instant, she knew that was Johnny.
“Johnny! Stop, stop it right now, goddamn it. I need you to remember safety protocols and stop and roll!”
The flaming figure of Johnny ceased screaming and turned and looked around, as though he couldn’t find the source of her voice, the flames dying down to be localized on his lower body, “Sue? Where are you?”
“This is hardly the time to be playing around.”
Johnny slowly moved around in a serpentine manner, like a blind man without his cane.
“Johnny, for god’s sake, you’re still on fire.”
She very nearly slapped him when he put his hand on her face but stopped when she watched his expression freeze in a look of horror, “Sue...I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re invisible. I can feel you right in front of me, but I’m just seeing more woods.”
Sue looked down at her hands, or at least where she reckoned her hands should be. She could feel the warmth of them as she held them against her face, but she saw nothing.
“Johnny...where are Ben and Reed?”
Elsewhere, the siblings heard a great cry and felt the ground itself shake before them. Instead of quickly fleeing like a normal person, Johnny took off towards it. Sprinting through the grass and causing small fires along the way.
“Wait, Johnny, where…?” she began, but her brother was soon out of earshot. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”
She sprinted after him. It wasn’t challenging to follow him, what with the fire and all. But as she ran she noticed something odd. These strange rubbery bends were hanging from and tangled up in the branches of the trees above her. Then she came to a stop when she discovered at the end of one of the bends was a human head. It looked like Reed’s neck had somehow elongated, while his head bobbed around, gently swinging around.
As if that wasn’t awful enough, Reed’s head began to make noise, a kind of slow awful kind of noise like he was relearning how to speak, “Suuu...ssssuuuu.”
The head turned and blinked it’s eyes and his features looked close to melting off of his skull like candle wax, forming a fleshy puddle in the soil at her feet. Sue’s mouth felt dry, but she found it exceptionally difficult to swallow her spit at the same time. It took just about every ounce of her will to not break into a sobbing fit at the grotesque sight.
“Reed?” She whispered as she crouched down and began to paw at the skin puddle in some sort of mad frenzy to try to piece together her mister potato head of a fiance.
“Reed, Reed darling, just I...pull yourself together.”
Four years later Sue would recognize this same emotion in another when she watched on television as Jacqueline Kennedy attempted to gather her husband’s skull fragments off of the trunk of a still-moving car. But, at this moment, it felt like the most alien thing imaginable. She made a faint laugh to herself as she tried to paste Reed’s silly putty face back to his skull.
“Suuusannn,” said the mouth as she repositioned it in the proper place.
As if on cue, Johnny came stumbling out of the bushes, which were consequently on fire. Trailing behind him was something that Sue had never seen before. It was a towering boulder-like monster. It was covered in orange rock and also a bit of fire, Sue assumed that this was Johnny’s doing. Then it yelled and Sue knew at that moment, that this monster was Ben.
“You little fucker!” Ben slammed his fists into the ground just behind Johnny breaking and throwing soil up into the air.
Johnny leapt up at the moment of impact and kept going, the fire propelled him up and into the sky. Sue, ran towards Ben as he turned his attention on Reed.
“Ben, Ben! Listen to me, I’m going to need you to calm down.”
Ben’s clothes were in tatters, and she could see the intricate mess of rocks on his body shifting and moving around his body as he aggressively hyperventilated. Eventually slowing down to a steady, and mildly come state.
“I’m sorry, Suz. I...Fuck, just fuck look around us.”
“I have Ben, I just. We need to focus on getting our bearings right now. We can work out our…”
Sue was nearly blinded by a great ball of white fire that flew past her face and hit Ben in the face.
“Step away from my sister!”
Ben growled and started to trudge angrily at the boy. But then things became very surreal and gross. Reed’s elongated body started to descend from the tree branches and wrap around both Johnny and Ben, keeping them separate, but not without making the most grotesque stretching sound Sue had ever heard before in her life. Up above their heads, Sue could see Reed’s pale body snaking in all directions across the branches of the trees and down the floor of the woods.
Then Reed’s head spoke a full sentence, “Both of you stop!”
She hadn’t heard Reed so angry before in her life, even when they were kids and he would talk about his father. His body began to reform taking on a vaguely humanoid shape, he was still a bit too tall and thin with his neck giraffe-like with his bulbous head moving from side to side like a cobra. His arms were both wrapped around Ben and Johnny, holding them just a little bit away from one another. He looked grotesque, but Sue felt relieved in a strange way.
The two eventually called their tempers and Reed’s long arms released their grip over them. He seemed to take on a more normal shape, but his body was still a little too thin. She turned his attention to Ben, and he wore a forlorn look.
“Ben, I...I’m so sorry that you got all mixed up in this terrible business. I...I don’t know what else to say, but I’m sorry.”
“Save its, stretch, ” Ben growled before turning his back and walking off into the woods.
“Wait, no, Ben. Please wait.”
“What is there to wait for Reed? I can see how you all look at me. Johnny tried to set me on fire, I’m done. I am going to go find a cave somewhere and stay there. Forever.”
“Ben, don’t be ridiculous. I am going to fix this, I am going to help you.”
Ben breathed out a very weary sigh, “No, I don’t buy that for a second, Reed. You’re smart and all, everybody knows that. But there is no chance that you can fix this rocky pug face.”
“I mean it, Ben, I will fix this. I will help you. I am going to do everything in my power to help you.”
Ben laughed a bit, “It’s going to get in the say of your and Suzie’s big bright tomorrow.”
He did a slight flourish with his hands when he said, ‘big bright tomorrow’
“Tomorrow can wait, Ben,” said Sue as she walked up to him and walked him back to the groupd. He refused to look anywhere near Johnny. “We have to figure out where we are. It’s clear, to me at least that the teleporter worked.”
Johnny spoke up, “I saw a town not too far from here when I was up in the air.”
As he spoke Sue noticed that he was a bit shaken, but she didn’t say anything about it.
“Okay, that’s good. That’s a start. Which direction was it in?” spoke Reed.
Johnny made a pair of finger guns and gestured towards a line of trees.
“Alright then, we’ll head there. I’ll see if we can secure a ride back to new york.”
“Here’s hoping,” Said Ben, mournfully.
The walk was quiet and carried with it a dull, somber energy. The only real sound was Johnny snapping his fingers to make a flame appear and disappear. Ben took up the space near the back of the group, his eyes still blue and human focused on the ground in front of him. Reed, figured out finally how to make his hand resemble how it did before and he grasped Sue’s hand, the two clasping their fingers together. For a moment, Sue felt a bit of calm wash over her. It was a kind of familiar, loving calm that she and Reed really appreciated in such an alien circumstance.
None of them noticed how quiet the woods were.
The sight of the billboard on the side of the road just outside of the tiny little town made any feeling of calm vanish in an instant as her eyes scanned over it’s words:
“Whites Only within city limits After Dark.”
The four of them exchanged glances and slowly made their way into the woods surrounding the town. The calm was dead now. Sue and Johnny were now gripped with true fear, a kind of anxiety that was very real and easily traced. Looking down at her hand, the hand that still hung onto that of her lover was flickering in and out of visibility.
“Reed,” She spoke, unable to hide the existential fear in her voice. “I think we should get the hell out of here. Now.”
“I know Sue, this situation is hardly ideal,” to which Johnny made a dismissive click with his tongue, “But we won’t make it very far without a truck. For all we know, this whole county is populated with these sorts of towns, we would be better off with a truck than without.”
“I don’t want to get murdered!” responded Johnny in a louder, harsh whisper. “I don’t want to go in there and get fucking crucified.”
“Nobody is getting crucified, Johnny. I will go in there, I’ll steal a truck and we’ll escape to New York.”
“Stretch...I don’t mean any offense by this, but you don’t know how to drive.”
Reed looked up at Ben and briefly inflated his cheeks as he considered his response, “I...am a fast learner, I’ll figure it out and come back, no problem.”
“You’re nuts, when we get back Sue oughta see about getting you committed.”
“Certifiable,” Responded Johnny with a fear tinted smile.
Sue sighed, knowing that there was not much she could do to persuade him, she could only hope that he didn’t get himself killed. He turned to her and held his hand hers to his chest before planting a brief kiss on her forehead, “I will be back as soon as I can.”
“Please be safe.”
“Always.”
With that he climbed through the woods, his limbs making gross rubbery like stretching sounds as he crept past the trees.
After a minute or two without Reed, Johnny sat on a rock, still wild eyed at the strange elasticity of Reed, “Sue, your boyfriend’s going to get us killed.”
“Heya, kid. Just sit tight, nobody’s going to get killed.”
“Oh that’s right, they probably won’t just kill us. They’ll hunt us for sport!”
“Johnathan Storm, do not exaggerate right now! I’m not going to let you give me a panic attack in the middle of the woods. We are going to remain calm until we get this nightmare sorted out.”
“You haven’t been reading what I have Sue. For all we know the whole damn town council is the local Klan chapter. An H.H Holmes murder house system in every home. They’ll sell our skulls to colleges for beer money!”
“That is so ridiculous, don’t say that.”
Just as she said that they could hear Reed calling out, “You can come out now, things have become complicated.”
Sue made herself invisible and slowly crept out of the woods to see Reed, standing in the middle of the woods just outside of the town, wearing a confused look on his face. She reversed the process and watched Reed jump slightly, though his expression remained unchanged.
“Reed, darling, what’s happened.”
Reed clicked his tongue and tapped his fingers against his thighs, “Well, it’s the damnedest thing. The town’s empty.”
Johnny and Ben exited the woods just as he said that, “What?”
“The whole town is just empty. Abandoned...Just, come with me I’ll show you what I mean.”
The four of them searched together and sure enough, they came up with nothing. Tables had been set. Food, still steaming. It was as though everybody had simply gotten up and left before eating. The four of them found themselves in the Mary Celeste of towns. Granted, it was still a very small, very racist town, so it wasn’t a big loss to anyone. They decided to take up residence in one of the small houses on the edge of town. If the truck outside worked, Reed wasn’t going to subject Ben to a several day drive in the rain. Instead he sat on a worn leather couch with his knees to his chest, his eyes on but not focused on the fireplace where coals still crackled. Johnny and Ben went through the kitchen. Johnny briefly considered setting something on fire, but decided against it.
The rain tapped roughly against the windows and somewhere further they could hear the crash of thunder. Sue sat next to Reed and watched him as he tried to work out just what the hell happened.
“Reed, do you think that it’s possible that our experiment did this? When it brought us here do you think it displaced the people of this town?”
Johnny ducked out of the kitchen at the sound of his sister’s voice, “So? What does it matter if it is? It’s what a couple hundred fewer shitheals in the world.”
“I think you might be correct Sue. Johnny. You aren’t entirely wrong, but consider this.” Reed walked over and plucked a pencil and a loose leaf piece of paper off of the counter. With it he drew a little circle and labled it ‘Baxter’ and the other he wrote ‘here’.
“The teleporter clearly works, but in going beyond it’s barrier it took us here, wherever here is.”
“And it did...this to us.” Said Ben as he appeared beside him, looking down with a rather morose expression carved into his features.
“Right. So, it’s probable that the people who were here might have been taken to Manhattan.”
“Where this probably happened to them too?” offered Johnny. For a second he had a small smile on his face and it slowly faded to a look of sheer horror, “Oh shit.”
Ben shuddered at the notion of a thousand bigoted rock monster tearing through Manhattan like it was paper.
“It’s possible, but that also means we can reverse these changes if we were able to teleport ourselves back to The Baxter.”
“Not going to lie to you, stretch. That might be a touch too challenging, even for you. I mean, looking around this town ain’t exactly lousy with eggheads.”
Johnny gave a small chuckle, “We could probably build a primitive version of the one at The Baxter out of some things from around town.”
“See, that’s the kind of energy we need. Outside of...well enough energy to power the east coast.”
“You don’t think we caused a power outage, do you Reed?”
Reed gave his fiance a pause before answering, “No…”
Before Sue could respond Johnny noticed a small face looking at them through the darkness of the window.
trashynishiki on Chapter 2 Fri 05 Mar 2021 06:49AM UTC
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