TITAN

Titan didn’t let Eric hold him back anymore.

He was in this fight to win. Eric gave in and embraced the power and instinct thrumming in his veins. He had trained with his father, Titan before him, to strengthen and hone his abilities. He was full-on Titan now and that’s how he fought. Standing broad shouldered and staring his opponent in his lifeless eyes, Eric Steele stood as Titan with the sum of all Titans that had come before him welled up inside.

Bone attached with rage and power. He launched haymakers which Titan deftly dodged. Titan whirled back on his hands and launched himself, feet first, into Bone’s chest. The blow knocked Bone back a few steps, but he was otherwise unfazed.

Titan sized up the situation in a matter of milliseconds like Eric always did when he was just a Regular Joe: Bone was big, powerful, armored, heavy, pissed off, and moved better in his skin (so to speak) than before. Titan then compared those attributes with his own in the same span of time: small, fast, strong, accurate, driven, and he had an untold arsenal of moves inside begging to be used. Plus, with his parents and friends in the balance, there was something for which to fight. Bone’s motivation was more toxic: blind rage and hate. All variables considered, Titan decided to start hitting Bone and see what came of it.

Bone walked into a flurry of punches. Titan struck and jived—his position always changing, always moving. His blows drove Bone back and cracked bones here and there, but the hits were just pissing Bone off. Titan’s fists grew thick with metal; his fingers became jagged brass knuckles. He peppered Bone in the chest and stomach, rending and chopping boned armor across his torso. Bone reacted to this with a thick, gurgling roar and caught Titan by the arm in a swinging punch. With a hearty tug, Bone loosed Titan right off his feet and slammed him through the podium at the head of the dance floor and through the DJ’s equipment. Red and black exploded in Titan’s vision and he struggled to free himself from Bone’s grip, which was, sorry to say, rock hard.

“You little shit!” Bone cackled with dry, lifeless laughter. Causing pain was the only pleasure he had left. Titan grappled with the hold on his arm, bracing for impact with anything and everything the big bastard could find to hit him against—tables, columns, the floor, and, of course, the walls.

Moves I don’t even know...

Titan couldn’t think of a move to get out of this, but Tim always taught him: fight to win. With his free hand, Titan formed a dagger like an ice pick and jammed it in Bone’s arm as deep as it would go.

“RRhhaaaaa!” Bone threw Titan away and yanked the pick out of his arm. A jet of viscous scarlet blood erupted from the wound. Those rocky bones protected vulnerable muscle and organs.

Titan crashed through a few tables and people before his inertia was cut by physics and he skidded to a stop. He climbed to his feet and noticed that his suit was slick with blood. His blood comingled with the fibers of metal extending from his pores. Eric was truly joined with Titan.

On Titan’s left, two students, John from lunch and a thick, football player-type, were whaling on one of the soldiers and trying to get his gun out of his hands. Another soldier broke out of the scrum he’d been in and raced to help his comrade. Titan dashed into the man’s path and clotheslined him before he could intervene. Titan tossed the fallen man’s gun to John. “Don’t shoot the good guys.”

John caught the gun and nodded to Titan, astonished. He held the gun on the waiter-soldier. “Ease up, bitch.”

Titan saw his father and mother struggling with the big guard who had been holding them. Tim chopped him down with a couple good shots to the solar plexus, but he really ended things when he flash-jabbed the guy in the throat. The Colonel’s goon gagged on his broken windpipe. Nancy pulled the gun out of his hands before he fell and threw the weapon to Tim. Father and son exchanged looks and Tim called out, “We’re going after Smithe! Do your job.”

Tim and Nancy disappeared through the oak doors leaving their son to his destiny. They did this with hesitation and doubt in their hearts—not of their son’s ability, but of their decision to leave him. As they broke into a run, following the likely path of the monster that killed their daughter, they realized together that they had their fight and Titan had his.

Titan nodded after his parents. He knew something profound and sad had occurred. Their relationship would never be the same again. He allowed himself the briefest of instants to dwell on it.

Then Titan’s gaze fell upon Rose, Drew, and Constance wrestling with one of the Colonel’s men. They were losing. The grim-faced thug had Drew by the neck. Rose and Constance tried to pry the guard’s arms back. Titan moved to take a step in that direction when something that felt like a tree branch caught him from behind, hurling him through the oak doors. Titan experienced this as a flurry of wind, black, red, and pain.

Bone stalked after Titan. “We’re not done.”

The arm Titan had stabbed was coated in thick, black, viscous blood; it was as if Bone was wearing an oil glove that went up to his craggily elbow. If Bone was in any pain, he didn’t show it.

Rose watched Titan get thrown through the doors from over their would-be captor’s shoulder. The sickly thump and loud cracking of heavy, treated wood made her heart drop into her stomach. Iron armor from heaven or not, it was Eric wearing it and he was just slammed through thick oak at eighty miles an hour.

No…

Rose kicked the guard in his inner thigh, earning her a chance to escape, and ran after Titan. Drew wrapped up the guard around his middle and Constance was on the guard’s back, clawing at his face. The guard wiggled loose and crosschecked Drew in the face with the butt of his MP5. Drew’s nose snapped and spurted blood. His head lolled and he flopped back to the deck like a rock, rolling in blinding agony. The guard shouldered Constance off of his back and turned his gun on Drew and fired.

Three shots. Drew’s body jerked with each shot and the floor underneath him popped. Crimson roses blossomed on Drew’s shirt where the bullets struck. Drew’s eyes went wide—a look of surprise, not fear—and his head settled. He gasped and choked from the blood pouring from his nose into his mouth and from the perforated lung in his chest. His eyes blinked furiously.

“NOOO!” Constance threw herself on the guard’s back and began beating on the back of his head and clawing at his face. Her fingers came back bloody with dangles of skin hanging off her nails.

The guard twisted this way and that. Finally, he tried to aim his gun over his shoulder, but Constance shoved at the gun and his arm, keeping the weapon pointed away. The guard threw himself back into the wall, smashing Constance between his back and the hard surface. All the air was shoved from her lungs and she rolled off him in a heap. The guard turned on her, sneering, meaning to do to her as he had done to Drew.

Rose leaped on him with a scream and buried a fork in the guard’s temple. The guard turned on her, his face growing white and slack with a look of frozen horror. Blood ran down his face, spitting out of the wound. His trigger hand twitched and fired off random shots before he fell to the ground. The jerks and tremors stopped. Rose stared at the dead man, her hands at her mouth in terrified denial. Constance climbed to her feet and hugged Rose, turning her friend’s face away from the dead man.

Titan was powerless to do anything. He had been so dazed and hazy from being thrown through the heavy oak doors that he couldn’t get up. Trapped inside of himself, he couldn’t move let alone stand. From inside Titan, Eric watched Drew get shot. The blows he had taken to the head muddled his perception, but this he saw with crystal clarity. Drew bled out, suffering a choking, drowning death. Eric watched it, unable to turn away. His only other friend in the world had died and Eric didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t thank him for standing by him when all of the others had gone. He couldn’t stop it.

Unfortunately, in the hazy, dream-like vision of Drew dying, Eric missed the start of Titan versus Bone, round two. Bone stepped into view, meaning to beat Titan into sticky paste. Titan’s breath returned. He drew a deep breath and then whirled up and to the side, dodging the thrashing monster’s crushing opening blow. Titan jacked Bone in the side of the head with an end table that had been resting against the wall in the hall, near where he had landed. Bone laughed through the hit and threw a rocket of a haymaker into Titan’s chest, splitting the “T.” Titan launched backwards through the doorframe and back into the ballroom.

Bone’s battering ram punches were tearing Titan apart. No matter how ready or powerful he was, Titan just couldn’t take hits like that forever. Inside the supernatural metal armor, Titan was still a human man. Hit him hard enough and enough times and he will die. Eric knew this. Titan recovered, climbed to his feet, and faced the monster that had once been a human man, too. If Bone wanted to beat him, then he would have to kill Titan.

Tears ran down Rose’s face—a mixture of revulsion for what she had done and terror. Constance dragged Rose out of the ballroom. Then she grabbed the sides of Rose’s head and looked her in the eyes. “Listen to me, babe. We gotta get out of here.”

Rose struggled. “No!”

She looked at Eric, cloaked in the suit of a hero, rising to his feet with care. His chest was bare and stained with blood. His left shoulder was unarmored. There were rips, tears, and gashes all over his body. A burst of machine gun fire clipped Titan’s bare shoulder, spinning him around and driving him back. One of the Colonel’s men broke free from Mrs. Crowley, the trigonometry teacher, Eric’s old “buddy” Chris, and Mr. Lyle, the assistant football coach. They wrapped the guard up again as soon as he got the shots off.

Rose wanted to go to Eric, but behemoth turned on her. It was as if he sensed her love—the goodness of it wafting off of her—and was repulsed by it. Bone’s monstrous face twisted Rose’s heart into a panic.

“You!” Bone roared. “His whore!”

Constance pulled Rose toward the elevators. “ROSE, we gotta go!”

Seeing the horrible skeleton creature stalking toward her finally got Rose moving. Love was powerful but survival hijacked her legs. Constance and Rose slammed the elevator switch while Bone exploded through the wall behind them throwing drywall and other debris all over them.

“I’m gonna take what he loves most away from him!” Bone reached for Rose and missed as the two girls ducked into the elevator.

They thumbed the door-close button and the heavy metal doors rumbled shut, closing out the awful demon. Constance slammed the lobby button, but the elevator wouldn’t move. “Fuckin’ GO!”

Rose flattened her sweat-streaked back against the back wall of the elevator and pulled Constance with her. It was quiet for a few moments. The distant rattle of gunshots and yelling bled into the elevator. The doors pounded inward and the whole car shifted. Constance and Rose hugged each other.

“Jesus, what the FUCK is going on? That thing knows you! And that shit with Eric’s parents...? What the fuck, Rose?! Why is there a monster at the prom?” Constance screamed.

Rose squeezed Constance tight. “I’m so sorry, Connie! I’m sorry!”

The elevator doors ripped apart! Death’s face stared through the opening, surrounded by a body of marred bone and twisted muscle. His huge arm groped forward, grasping for Rose. Reaching, reaching...

A long, steel tendril wrapped around the monster’s neck. It cinched tight, closing around Bone’s throat. Bone had exactly one split second of surprise before he was yanked back through the hole and into the ballroom. Titan gripped the whip with both hands and swung Bone across a line of tables before releasing it. Then he reeled the whip back, allowing about eight feet of slack. In a quick flash of metal, Titan’s other hand molded a short, thick, two-sided gladiator-style sword with a “T” for a hilt.

Bone staggered to his feet. His bony neck wore a ribbon of thick, oozing blood where the whip had cut him. Hot rage boiled from his maw of bared white teeth. His eyes clenched into narrow slits that focused on Titan.

“You wanna fight, you big bastard? Then let’s fight! You and me. Come get me!” Titan snapped.

Bone dashed forward, quicker and lither than seemed possible. Titan cracked his whip at Bone’s head and landed one lash home. The whip’s hard, spiked end lashed across Bone’s right eye, exploding it from the socket in a burst of blood and dark fluids.

The sound that came next was easily the most terrible thing Titan had heard since the scream his faux-sister had roared at him in that dark, frightening room. Bone’s fingers clawed at his face and he mewled with agony and a deep, dark sadness that perforated the air grabbing everyone’s attention.

When Bone’s hands dropped, his face was truly that of death. Anything that might have still been Jim McNulty was extinguished by the lash of Titan’s whip. Bone’s face was a mess of dark blood and gore. The grinning skeleton’s expression somehow turned downward into a grimace.

Titan summed things up as he braced for the onslaught.

“Shit.”

* * *

Tim and Nancy trailed the Shadow Man. Trailed the Colonel. Trailed Dr. Smithe. All names for an evil man who had wrought death and destruction in pursuit of God’s power. It occurred to Tim that about seventy years ago, another man named Hitler did the same thing.

Dr. Smithe had Beth McNulty thrown over his shoulder, which prevented Tim from shooting him in the back. That was exactly why he did it. A curious sense of calm washed over Dr. Smithe. Everything had fallen apart. Jim had gone mad in his rage for Eric, which Dr. Smithe had to admit was his fault. His men were either dead or scuffling with teenagers. And odds were good that he wasn’t going get Titan. Not today anyway. But the inappropriate calm stemmed from the fact that his door prize would be good enough—killing Tim Steele. That bastard had a nice death coming. That was for damn sure. And a nice surprise, too.

Dr. Smithe kicked open the door leading onto the roof. The roof was saturated with pebbles like downtown roofs usually had. The helicopter his team had hidden up there rested near the edge, quiet and practically invisible in the night sky. Around the front of the building, police lights flickered as a police helicopter thrummed through the air. Dr. Smithe was hidden by the geography of the building, so the police helicopter wouldn’t see him until he took off. Once he did, his chopper could easily outrun that old D.C. piece of shit.

Tim and Nancy appeared moments later. Tim stared down the MP5’s sights, but didn’t shoot because Dr. Smithe was holding Beth in his arms. Tim wanted to shoot more than anything, but the McNultys were all dead. He wasn’t about to throw another one on the pile.

“Come on, Titan, shoot me,” Dr. Smithe grinned. “Killing is the only thing you’ve ever been good at. What’s one little girl against all you’ve killed?”

“Get in your helicopter and leave her,” Tim said. “Just go.”

“After all these years… your daughter… your honor. You think you’ll just let me go? I understand revenge, Mr. Steele. Believe me, I do,” Dr. Smithe said. “When you have your shot, you’ll take it.”

Tim looked at Nancy and then lowered the gun. He didn’t drop it, but it hung by his side. “You’ve killed enough people... so have I. Put her down and leave. What I want is for you to leave us alone.”

Dr. Smithe’s lips curled into a cruel smirk. He hurled Beth at them. Tim and Nancy ran to catch her. Dr. Smithe smiled as they played right into his plan. Like a cat growing ready to pounce on a mouse that’s played into its trap, Dr. Smithe lanced forward. Literally.

His bad hand shot forward and the fake hand formed into a long spear that caught Tim right above his left breast bone and ran through him. Tim cried out in pain, gripping the long spike with his left hand. He tried to remove it but failed. Nancy slid under Beth and caught her, cushioning the girl’s fall with her body.

Tim tried to come up with his gun hand, but Dr. Smithe kicked the gun away. The look on the old man’s face was complete and utter glee. Tim was pinned to the deck, but still he struggled, each movement seizing him with pain. Nancy took a step in Dr. Smithe’s direction. The doctor held up a wagging finger. She froze.

Dr. Smithe regarded the long spear jutting from his wrist and laughed. “For as much as it hurt when you cut my hand off, it was really excruciating when I injected the nub with this. But I suppose you did me a favor… my old hand wasn’t so versatile.”

“Just fucking do it, you cocksucker,” Tim spat. “You’ve got me dead to rights. You know that if this was where I had you, I’d rip your goddamn head off.”

Dr. Smithe nodded. “Oh, I do. But first, I want to remind you of an old adage… ‘The sins of the father are visited upon his son.’ Know that one?”

“Eric didn’t do anything to you. You hear me?” Tim gritted his teeth through both the pain and rage he felt. “You want revenge? Here it is. You got it. Tear me apart!”

Dr. Smithe’s smile faded. “No, Mr. Steele. I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about your father.”

“My father? What are you talking about?”

Dr. Smithe knelt down and pressed the spear into him. Tim seethed and took the pain. He took all of it.

“I had a father once, too, you know.” Dr. Smithe spoke low, almost too low to hear above the noise of the city and nearby police activity. Something crawled onto his expression that might have been an emotion other than hate. Tim couldn’t tell what it was. He didn’t really give a damn.

“He fought in the Great War. He didn’t believe in Hitler, you see. No. He believed in Germany. He was a patriot who loved his homeland and his family,” Dr. Smithe said. “My father met your father once.”

Smithe twisted the spear. Tim clenched his jaw and grasped the slick metal that stabbed through him. He wasn’t going to give the bastard the satisfaction of hearing him scream. If Dr. Smithe wanted to kill him, Tim would die in silence. The pain lessened and Tim started to get used to the metal. He tricked his mind into loving it.

“In fact, your father was the last person my father ever met.” Dr. Smithe’s eyes grew small and stared into a distant past only he knew. “Arthur Steele killed my father. But you know, that’s not so bad really... but you know what is?” Dr. Smithe’s body trembled and his good hand shook. Something terrible lived in the man—a force that had grown and nurtured hate and invited evil into his heart. There was nothing human about the Shadow Man left, but what Tim saw in him now was probably a flash of the scared boy he had once been.

Dr. Smithe’s hand lashed out and jammed down on Tim’s neck. Tim clutched at Dr. Smithe’s forearm, but his air was fleeting and the pain from the spear was overwhelming. Dr. Smithe’s lips were wet with spit and rage as he yelled, “I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S BAD, TIM! When soldiers come in the night and they rape your mother, kill her, and mutilate everyone else while they’re still alive! My brother, Joseph, crawled out of our house with his legs chopped off! He died in the dirt! ALL because of your father! Some hero…”

Dr. Smithe lost control and punched Tim in the face with his free hand. He hit him again. And again. Tim took them. Each hit. Every blow.

Cold, bitter tears rolled down Dr. Smithe’s face. “Some God, huh? I bet you think your father was some kind of hero. That he helped people. He destroyed people. Just like you. My family was murdered by the SS because my father failed his mission. You didn’t fail the Führer, Mr. Steele! They killed whole families.

“But I was ‘lucky.’ I was just a baby. Mother took me to a neighbor’s house before the soldiers came. What they did to her can never be undone. For all of eternity she is dead and gone, raped to death by the soldiers of Satan himself. That’s my family’s legacy. Fools. Failures. Whores.”

Dr. Smithe rose back to his feet still jabbing the spear. Tim silenced a moan deep inside. This man, this creature had nurtured its hatred for half a century just to experience this moment. Tim hated him, too. But then again, his own mom had died peacefully in her sleep, not at the hands of Nazi killers.

“The only thing worse than a legacy like mine is not having one. I’m going to kill you, your son, and your wife. Then, I’m going to find the rest of your family and kill them, too. There will be no more Steeles and no more Titan. I can’t kill God, but I can break his stick,” Dr. Smithe sneered.

Tim felt something change inside.

The feeling was familiar and immediate, it swelled in his gut and spread like a warm drink on an empty stomach. It filled him as it once did with all of its strength and scope. At first, Tim thought he was dying—that God was finally taking him. He thought he was sensing everything because he was being drawn back to where everything began at the Source.

But then Tim knew it wasn’t death he was feeling. It was life. All at once he knew it came from the Source. He wasn’t being pulled to The Source—it was coming to him.

Dr. Smithe must have felt it, too. He tried to pull his arm back. It wouldn’t come. He yanked, but it was fixed. The darkness that always swelled around his features receded. The look of supremacy on his face changed to confusion. Then agony.

“What?! Oh, God, no!”

Tim grasped the spear with both hands. The pain was still there, but he gritted through it. The cool metal warbled in his grasp and warmed. Dr. Smithe kept trying to pull away, but it was too late. This was meant to be. Tim drove himself into the spear and it didn’t hurt anymore because it wasn’t firm. It was liquid.

Liquid metal.

The fragment of Titan that was left in Dr. Smithe surged out of his arm and into Tim. It looked like running water as it rushed into Tim’s shoulder, sealing his wound. Dr. Smithe howled. He fell to his knees and clutched at his arm, spilling blood.

The surging liquid metal, glowing almost effervescent in the moonlight, coalesced with Tim’s arm, which was running with fresh, flowing Titan steel. It extended outward into a double-sided axe gripped in his palm.

Tim rose over Dr. Smithe and held the man who killed his daughter in his gaze. Once upon a time, Tim had hated this man. He wouldn’t have just killed him; he would have cut his body parts off, piece by piece, and watched the blood flow. But that wasn’t Titan. That was Tim Steele. Now all Tim felt was a nearing sense of completion. He remembered what he told Eric—what his dad had told him. It had been advice he had not ever really followed.

Destroy evil so good may flourish.

Tim regarded Evil on its knees before him. Dr. Smithe looked up, his eyes still dark and hungry with hate.

“Grow this back,” Tim said.

He swung the axe clean through Dr. Smithe’s neck in one stroke. Dr. Smithe’s head bounced, rolled, and careened over the edge of the roof. His body trembled, twisted, and collapsed.

The weight on Tim’s shoulders lessened. He blew out a big breath, one he had been holding onto for twenty years. Evil had thrived in the Shadow Man—Dr. Smithe—the Colonel… it had taken hold in the man’s heart because he had invited it in. Tim had done that once. And he lost Titan.

Tim had let Evil take hold in the world. But its hold on Dr. Smithe was lost. Evil was gone from this place for now.

The axe disappeared back into Tim’s arm. He looked at his wife cradling Beth McNulty. Nancy had fresh tears flowing down her cheeks. He threw his tuxedo jacket around Nancy’s shoulders and walked the two of them inside. The sounds of breaking glass, crashes, and screams drew them into a run back to the ballroom.

* * *

The “waiters” were all dead, disabled, or held captive under gunpoint by the prom attendees. Several students were dead. More were injured. The graduating class of St. Paul’s Academy outnumbered and overwhelmed the Colonel’s men. Perhaps it was meant to be so that this final fight had an audience who would remember that it had happened. No one would ever forget this night.

Everyone cleared the center of the ballroom. The students and chaperones dragged the dead and wounded to the edges of the room or into the hallway. But no one could leave. The Colonel’s men had stopped the elevators and barricaded the stairwells with hotel room furniture. Cell phone calls to the police wouldn’t connect. There were probably cell phone jammers stationed throughout the floor. The academy was a captive audience to the improbable spectacle unfolding on the dance floor.

Two impossible figures—the giant monster, Bone, and the diminutive protector, Titan—beat the hell out of each other. Titan was still in the fight against all reason. His once brilliant, silver, chrome skin was now tarnished, torn, and bloodied. Patches of bare, bruised skin and tuxedo wore through. The leviathan, Bone, while clobbering the hell out of Titan, was not unscathed. His bony hide was cracked and broken. His face, such as it was, was a mask of gore and had one remaining hateful eye. Titan’s strikes were not as potent as Bone’s, but they were precise—he hit everything he aimed at, rending bone and mutated muscle with every blow.

Titan realized early that stylized brass knuckles were not going to defeat Bone. In fact, he was starting to wonder if Bone could be defeated... his eye was gone; his ribs were a tangled mess of blood, muscle, and fractured bone pulp; and the arm Titan had stabbed was spilling blood.

Still, Bone came.

Titan had a weapon in each hand—a heavy broad sword in one hand to crush as well as cut and a mace in the other to crack that bony armor to pieces. So far, the weapons were doing what Titan wanted them to, but Bone persisted. Titan now believed that if he cut the monster in half, Bone would crawl after him on his hands. This wouldn’t be over until Titan defeated Bone and that meant killing him.

Of course, it could go the other way.

Maybe dying while trying to save these people was what he was meant to do. Sarah died and passed Titan on to him. He had a chance to do something important. He couldn’t believe that Sarah died for nothing but a failed experiment.

Eric knew in his heart that he was supposed to do what Sarah could not. Toe to toe with his best friend, the bone monster; covered in blood; and wobbling in pain, Eric knew the truth. Titan was supposed to exist. And maybe it was so that Titan would make it to this point and put his life on the line. It wasn’t ideal. Eric didn’t want to do that to his parents. To his mother. His dad might understand, but his mom never would. A person can only lose so much until they can’t bear it anymore. But if he died, Bone would massacre these people.

Titan had to take Bone with him.

Bone staggered forward on powerful legs. “You can’t beat me. You’re half dead, ‘Titan.’ Hmm? You like that name?” Bone lunged for Titan, bringing his arm over the top to smash him down.

Titan dodged to the right and brought the mace down on Bone’s arm, splattering bone and blood in all directions. The mace stuck itself in the tangle of bone and muscle; Titan knew not to remain too close long enough to yank it free. Bone growled in pain, or maybe annoyance, and tried to shake the mace loose. He reached for it with his other, wounded, arm. Titan came forward with the sword double-handed over his head and then brought it down on the wound from the ice pick dagger. Blood and bone splattered again, this time clearing a plate of armor from Bone’s arm. It revealed an undulating flap of giant muscle, gooey with blood and other liquids he couldn’t have begun to identify.

“Rrrwwaahh!” Bone roared and shoved the sword off. He came across with his mace-stuck arm and smacked Titan through the few remaining pillars on the left side of the room. The first two pillars slowed him enough that his body only cracked the last pillar, jarring it loose from the ceiling. The ceiling buckled and the last pillar groaned.

Titan struggled to his feet, watching Bone, who thrashed around trying to yank the mace from his arm. It genuinely pained him to do so.

...pained him...

Pain. He does feel pain.

Titan didn’t have long to think about it. The cracked column began falling toward several students taking refuge along the wall. He only had a moment to reach them. Titan dashed over debris, tables, and chairs, and then launched himself across one final table, to put himself between the pillar and the students. He touched down just in time for the column to fall onto his back with the force of a Bone-punch. He strained to stand so he could lift the beam. His eyes had closed from the strain and weight bearing down on him. His legs surged and locked with burning steel to reinforce his muscles and bones as he hoisted the pillar into the air.

When Titan opened his eyes, he was face to face with Melanie Picolo. Her dark hair was slick with sweat and it stuck to her forehead and neck. Her face was white with fear. Despite how super powered Titan was, inside Eric was still an eighteen-year-old boy that once loved her. He stared into her eyes seeing what he used to see in them. Her chest, mostly bared in her incredible dress, rose and fell in heavy gasps.

Man, what a dress...

Melanie stared, fearful at first, then mesmerized. Her lips sparkled with lip-gloss and when they moved, he couldn’t watch anything else. “Thanks.”

There was something dark and dirty about Melanie coming on to Titan but hating Eric. He could read her surface feelings with his heightened senses—he knew what she was feeling; fear and wonderment. Inexplicable lust.

But this was Titan, not Eric. He wasn’t the little boy who had lashed out with his jealousy and insecurity to break Melanie’s heart. He wasn’t the broken soul pining for her anymore. And thiswasn’t the time.

Titan edged the column out of danger and nodded to the door. Melanie held his gaze for a moment longer before she knelt beside Kyle, who wore a gash on his head and a bloody leg wound probably from a gunshot. Titan answered her, not Eric; his voice deep and firm, “Get him out of here. Move everyone into the hall.”

Melanie began pulling Kyle by the arm toward the door. Sophia had been hiding under a nearby table and came out to help her. Titan stared after Melanie. For as much as Eric had given himself over to Titan, he found a way to slip through. He called after her—in Titan’s voice, “Melanie.”

She looked up, wide-eyed.

“I’m sorry.”

Melanie’s eyes were conflicted and confused. Her expression turned to panic. “LOOK OUT!”

“Enough!” Bone bludgeoned his way through the tables and debris. He seized Titan from behind and hurled him through the glass wall along the observation deck.

Titan held onto the support column in his hands and carried it with him as he flew. Soaring through the air, out of control, Titan hurled the beam back at Bone like a spear. It jammed itself in the edge of the dance floor and tumbled, end over end, through the room. As Titan whirled around, crashing through the glass, the last thing he saw was the cartwheeling column connecting with Bone’s chest, slamming the giant to the ground.

Bone coughed blood and other unidentifiable, nasty goo. His coarse voice gurgled, “Little shit...”

Bone pushed the column off with a grunt and climbed to his feet. Then he cradled the column like a bat. Titan pushed himself up from the deck just in time to see Bone lumbering at him with his Paul Bunyan sized weapon.

A fucking support column.

Bone swung the column and it tore through the remaining glass wall onto the observation deck. Glass and wood peppered the air like a cloud. Titan flattened to the ground and the support beam cut the air just over his body.

A police helicopter whirred up from between the buildings, deafening the senses. Its bright searchlight locked on to Bone. A megaphone voice echoed from the chopper, “Holy shit, look at that thing! Stop! This is the police! Surrender. Let the hostages go. Or we will open fire!”

Bone swung the column over his shoulder like a rocket launcher and cocked his arms along the sides. “I get the first shot!”

He hurled the column at the chopper! The pilot did not react fast enough. The craft lifted and veered to the right, but as the rotor swung out the column connected with it head on. The blades crunched and the back shattered; the support column caromed away and down to the street below. The helicopter spun like a top and smoke gagged from the crushed rotor. Titan could hear the men on board screaming and calling for help. He leapt to his feet and ran toward it to do something, anything—but Bone snagged him by the back of the neck and held him out over the edge.

“Watch.”

Titan couldn’t free himself in time. The chopper spun and spun until it nosedived almost turning upside down. The chopper blades ripped and tore into the roof of the National Portrait Gallery building, sending glass and metal away in a plume, before the whole vehicle crashed and exploded in a flash of flame and smoke. Its passengers blasted out, aflame, screaming and soon dead.

“You motherfucker!” Titan jerked free. He kicked back, finding Bone’s bloody mess of ribs, and pushed off. Bone winced, letting go and shoving Titan out over the edge.

But Titan had a plan, plotted in seconds.

Titan’s whip lashed out from his forearm and into his hand. The lash cinched around the observation railing and Titan used the momentum from leaping off the building, redirected into the whip’s hold, to swing back up and right into Bone, feet first. The collision caught Bone dead in the chest knocking him through the air, smashing him off the wall of the ballroom, and landing him face first into the last column support on the right side. The column gave way and crashed down on top of him. The pile of debris, with Bone underneath, didn’t move.

The prom attendees and their wounded friends and colleagues had begun escaping into the hall, but they stopped to look when Bone exploded back into the room and was pinned underneath the final column. Titan stormed into the room. He moved upon Bone lying beneath the rubble, struggling to get up. Titan kicked Bone’s arm out from under him and punched him squarely in the back, cracking his left shoulder plate.

Titan grabbed Bone’s massive shoulder and spun him onto his back. He climbed on top of Bone, the thing that had once been Eric’s friend Jim, and started beating the shit out of him. Bone struggled to hit back, but Titan batted the blow away and continued whaling on him. Titan’s punches became overhanded slams, bashing Bone’s cracked face with his fists and splattering blood and skull fragments all over himself.

Something had snapped in Titan—in Eric. When Bone wanted revenge on Titan, Eric almost understood why. It pained him. It saddened him. But he understood it.

But Titan couldn’t understand how Bone killed and hurt people just because he could. He hurt people who had nothing to do with any of this. Those cops in the helicopter would never see their families and loved ones again because Jim Fuckin’ McNulty was pissed off about his life. Titan unleashed everything he had on Bone. All of the pain of his transformation. His loneliness. The anger in his heart that he had once held for Melanie. Everything. All of it concentrated in his fists driving into Bone’s horrific face, broken and bloodied.

Titan grabbed Bone’s craggily neck and brought his face down to his. “You sonofabitch! Is this what you wanted?! Huh?! This? Those cops did nothing to you! These people... Drew! Fucking DREW! He was your goddamn friend! Was it worth it? Did you get what you wanted? Everyone feeling like a piece of shit, just likeyou?”

Titan let Bone drop to the floor and climbed off of him. The beast was finished. His death’s head was broken and smashed. His massive body was now only an amalgamation of blood and bone stew. This fight was over. Titan’s arm extended out and shaped into a long rod with a sledgehammer’s head. Eric’s face—now barely hidden beneath the ripped, battered mask—twisted into a flurry of different emotions, all of which were hate-filled for the friend he apparently never really knew.

“You’re not going to hurt anyone else,” Titan growled.

“Titan!” Tim Steele entered the room. He held Beth McNulty in his arms. All of the students and chaperones jerked around in surprise. Tim paused at the sight before him. Titan stood over Bone with a giant sledgehammer ready to smash what was left of the monster’s head. The ballroom destroyed around them. A prom in Hell.

“Don’t do it, kid,” Tim said. Something in his voice told Titan that his father spoke with authority. The Titan armor around him remained oddly silent on the subject. “It’s over.”

Titan hesitated. He wanted to do it. He felt the darkness sitting in his chest. But it wasn’t just whispering in his heart anymore. Not just coiling out like a squid. No, the darkness had spread outward, filled his chest, and was about to take root.

Eric knew what the darkness was now. He understood that the darkness was nothing more than choice—the will to do evil instead of good. Eric realized that he and Titan were not two different people; they were one and the same. One person. Titan was a tool God gave man to fight Evil. The wearer decided how to use it and that was the point.

The darkness fled from him. Titan drew the sledgehammer back unto him like it had never been a solid thing. He backed away from Bone and beheld what became of Jim McNulty. Jim was put into a terrible situation, but he chose to do what he did. He welcomed the darkness inside. It infested him with strength, resilience, power, and hate. For a time, he enjoyed it.

Now Jim wasn’t even a man anymore. He was a creature, a thing lying on the floor, covered with debris, bleeding and broken. As Eric stared at his friend through a film of tears, he wondered if Jim could still choose even now. If Jim was in there somewhere, he should be given a chance to choose.

“Jim.” Titan’s voice sounded a lot more like Eric’s. “Beth is here.”

The living skull tilted in Titan’s direction. Its remaining eye, swollen and swimming in blood, found Titan. It was human. Jim’s voice could never return; whatever mutilation that was done to him had destroyed it forever. But in the monster’s tone, Eric heard his friend. “Let me see she’s safe.”

Tim carried Beth over and held her so Jim could see her. His living eye closed in gratitude and then flittered open again.

Beth saw Bone. A monster. In her drugged state, Jim was a terrible sight—he wasn’t so great when lucid either. Beth cried. Tim hugged her and took her away.

Jim’s eye closed. His fist clenched in the knowledge that he was a living nightmare, something for his sister to fear, not love. She would remember him in her dreams now and forever, a demon skeleton crushed in blood and sinew. That was his last memory to her. If he could have cried, he would have. But his tear ducts were gone. Jim couldn’t even express his sadness.

“Eric.” Jim’s rasp called. It sounded more like “Eragh.”

Eric wanted to drop the mask. He wanted to show his friend the face he had known, but everyone was watching. They couldn’t know who he really was. His identity had to stay secret. There was more to be done. As it was, the people here would wonder how Tim Steele knew Titan and where Eric was during all of this. He decided to keep his mask on.

A terrible realization struck Eric, not Titan, as he watched his best friend stew in the death they had made together. He stamped the revelation down for now. It was an understanding that Titan knew already.

“Yeah, Jim,” Titan stood over him.

Jim’s eye fluttered again until it focused on Titan and remained open. “You...” Some blood dribbled out of his mouth. “You play the hand you’re dealt... but...” Jim’s eye squeezed shut, lost in a sea of blood. Titan wanted to know what he was going to say. The words didn’t ever come.

Jim’s hand snapped up and closed around Titan’s. Titan jerked, not out of surprise but from the flurry of thoughts, feelings, and images conveyed to him in a span of seconds. Bone’s arm dropped.

Titan staggered. He recovered and walked toward the wrecked observation platform. He couldn’t go with everyone else. That wasn’t his way anymore. His soul was crushed to pulp. Eric’s life was over. It was Titan’s now. He had suspected that for a while, but had refused to believe it. Before he could take another step, his mother’s voice cried out, “Wait!”

Titan turned and faced Jim, who was now holding the grenade launcher that the Colonel’s man had tried to use. It was pointed at Titan. He held his ground and stared at Jim—not Bone—unsure he wantedto dodge the shot. He didn’t have to.

Jim turned the gun on himself and fired. His head, neck, and upper chest vanished in a burst of light, smoke, and blood. Titan’s eyes went wide. He knew Jim was dying, but to see it happen was another thing entirely. Deep down, Eric knew from the start that this was how it would end. He hadn’t wanted it this way, but he knew. That didn’t make it any better.

There were gasps and cries of surprise from the prom folks. A few cheers even. None of that mattered. Titan found his parents’ gaze at the head of the onlookers. He couldn’t even acknowledge them. His dad would understand, but his mother would not. This is what he was supposed to do.

Before Titan disappeared into the night, he saw Rose standing off to the side and holding Constance’s hand. Both of their cheeks were wet with tears, their beautiful dresses ripped and stained. Drew’s body was at their feet, covered in a table cloth. Titan missed his friend. He didn’t have any more friends. That jarring realization came too late.

Eric’s eyes met Rose’s for a brief instant. He saw what he expected in them. It had been love after all. At that, Eric did smile—his mask was torn and it showed on his lips. The smile faded. Titan turned away from Rose. He turned away from everyone. There was silence; only cars, the police, and the city outside made any sound. It was like they were in another world.

Titan leapt over the edge of the deck, out into the night air, falling, free. He heard gasps behind him, but that’s all they were—behind him. His whip lashed out and wrapped onto a railing. He swung down and around, curling to the west. The police spotted him and tried to pursue, but he disappeared behind the FBI building.

The authorities didn’t find Titan. No one else did, either.