Content copyright . DC Infinity. All rights reserved.
DC Infinity Elseworlds presents
The Book of Mars
Issue #3 of 3
Written by D. Golightly
“It’s disgusting.”
The White Martians surrounded John, observing and analyzing him. Their eyes, as well as their minds, were all situated on him without a seeming care as to what else could be happening in the world. They were transfixed.
“Why would she agree to mate with one of them?”
At first their telepathy had rendered him inert, much like it had back in his mansion. But, also like before, he soon adapted, somehow, and pushed their minds back. Several of them ended up whimpering on the floor after he burrowed back into their own thoughts. The mental probes stopped immediately, almost as if they were scared of him.
“She was a slave, deeply ignorant and lowly. Are you really that surprised?”
Now they had just taken to asking questions and making observations about him as they stared. It had been forty-some minutes since they captured him and brought him into one of the golden buildings, somewhere in the center of the hidden Martian city.
Time was a very important thing right now. They hadn’t yet gone through his pack, or found the little toy he had brought with him.
Throughout the ‘interrogation’ he had remained quiet. There was no point in telling them anything. They would simply slap him, insult him, and refer to him as ‘experiment.’ They wanted something precious from him, and he would die before he handed it over.
The Book of Mars.
One of the many things his father had handed down to him, the tome held some sort of value to these pale Martians. Unlike the green aliens he was accustomed to hunting down and killing, the white extraterrestrials were more cunning and smart. They spoke English, were masters of warfare, and had a penitent for cruelty.
Green Martians were more animalistic in nature. They had no interest in John or anything he possessed. But these white Martians, all they wanted was the Book.
He was tied to the center of a golden construct in an observation room. He could only guess as to the purpose of the building, but judging from the ample seating he guessed it was some type of amphitheater or gathering hall.
John Jones had discovered the existence of the Antarctic city while on an expedition, but several governments had taken over the excavation and he had only been able to see a few of the ruins. This was his first time here, but the Martians seemed to know their way around very well.
“The only surprise is that he has not given us the location of the tome. This is tiring. We are wasting time. The alignment will be missed if we are not given the tome. Our brothers will perish.”
John smiled and spoke for the first time since being apprehended. “Sounds good to me,” he spat. “The less of you I have to kill, the better. Certainly makes my life easier.”
The closest pale Martian reached out and slapped him across the face. A trickle of blood moved down John’s chin, but the smile remained.
There were a dozen of them watching him, and possibly another dozen outside waiting. He had spotted several while being dragged through the snow inside, making their locations even though they were probably sure they were hidden well enough.
If what they were arguing about was true, all he had to do was wait. His father was dead. Dr. Erdel was dead. He had nothing left to lose.
“I can do this all day,” John said.
The Martian who had struck him flashed his rows of sharp, jagged teeth. “I should remove your spleen with my fingers and feed it to the H’Ron. If you will not give us the tome then your life is worthless.”
Several of the Martians around him noticeably became more agitated. He had expected to die here today. The way the crowd was looking, his death would come sooner rather than later.
“No. Wait.”
The lead Martian snarled and whipped his head around. The other aliens parted, making room for someone that John couldn’t see. Was their dissention in their ranks? Was one of them actually going to attempt to reason with John?
“Jonathon,” the voice said from behind the pack of Martians. “Listen to me. You’ve been lied to. You need to know the truth.”
“Keep him back!” the lead Martian commanded. “He is not to interfere!”
“Let me through!” the voice said. A familiar voice. “Would you rather kill him and lose everything than let me get the answers you want?”
The rumble of disagreement rolled through the Martians. Finally, they moved back enough for John Jones to see who had intervened on his behalf. Upon seeing the figure, his pupils dilated and widened. His lips parted in disbelief as he watched a dead man walk toward him.
“Erdel,” John muttered.
The older man he had watched bleed out in the basement of his ancestral home looked healthy and spry. He feigned a small smile as he approached and pushed his glasses back up onto his face. “Hello, John,” the scientist said. “I suppose I have some explaining to do.”
“I don’t—”
Erdel raised his hand. “I know. How can I be here if you buried my body back at the estate?”
“That would be my first question, yeah. The second would be what the hell are you doing with them?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Summarize,” John shot back with disdain and disbelief.
“You saw my body back at the lab, John. But that’s all it was. My body. You’ve experienced what they can do with their minds. They, for lack of a better word, extracted my mind and took it with them.”
“Why? Why would they do that?”
“They didn’t mean to. They came for help, and when they tried to psychically connect with me it overloaded my body. The strain was too much. They had no choice but to bring me back here with them. They placed my mind inside this construct, grown at an alarming rate and based off of my own
John scoffed. “They didn’t mean to? You’re joking. So, you’re telling me that they didn’t mean to break into my house, kill you, attack me, and then try to kill me again when I came here? Yeah, right.”
“It would be easier if I showed you, John. May I? May I show you what their world is like and why we have to help them?”
John looked around at the agitated pale aliens closely watching them. Several were flashing their teeth, an apparent sign of aggression and discontent. “Do I really have a choice, doctor?” he said.
“You’ll understand everything soon,” Erdel said as he placed both of his hands over John’s temples.
Blurry images replaced what he saw with his eyes. The exchange of thoughts was no longer something foreign to John, as within the last twenty-four hours he had undergone several psychic assaults.
But this time was different. He wasn’t in pain. The transfer wasn’t being forced and the hateful emotions hadn’t come with it, ensnaring his senses in a web of turmoil.
He saw Mars, as it once was. A proud and united power, under which propriety had grown. Technology was limitless. Disease was nonexistent. Poverty was unknown.
He saw the white Martians standing watch over the green, ensuring that their warlike ways were kept in check. Genetically, they were little more than beasts that could never hope to be tamed. They were kept in zoos, corralled like the animals they were. Used for labor, chores, and the benefit of society.
Then the portal. On the other side he saw Erdel and his own father, peering through. The portal had appeared in the center of one of their camps for the green Martians. One came through, leaping across millions of miles in a single step.
In an effort to duplicate the technology, the white Martians created other portals, but something went wrong. Instead of homing in on the lost green brother, it transported hundreds of others to Earth. It was a disaster, one they had come to fix.
But an explosion had destroyed the machine they created to make the portals, and the log of information to fix the process was stolen. Stolen, by a female green Martian. The log of information, it was the Book of Mars, bound in the same material that John had stroked beside his fireplace many a night.
“You see, John?” Erdel said. “They only want the tome so they can solve their problems. Give it to them, John. Tell them where to find it.”
John sorted through the images again. His life had been dedicated to understanding this alien race, a race he had known very little about until today. Seeing their culture as it once stood was nearly too much for him to comprehend.
“Where is the tome, John?” Erdel asked. “Show me.”
He felt pressure in his mind. The images began to fade. He saw his mansion. Inside doors were flying open as Erdel poured through his thoughts and searched his memory. One room was swiftly mentally ransacked and another room entered.
“Stop,” John said.
“Where is the tome?” Erdel repeated. “They only want to save themselves, John. Where did you hide it?”
The psychic pillage continued, as the mind’s eye flew down the steps leading to his basement, where it punched through the steel doorway and entered his private workshop. It was his personal sanctum, a place he had developed the tools of his trade.
The racing and blurred speed of the mental search slammed to a halt. A bead of sweat formed on John’s brow as he narrowed his eyes and looked through the imagery, directly into Erdel’s face.
“Nice try,” John said. “Let’s get a peak at the truth, shall we?”
The imagery shattered, replaced again by a single scene of a dark room with Erdel standing in it. Erdel looked at the blank, black walls and a look of worry came over him. His eyes widened as he started to panic.
“What are you doing?” the mental projection of Erdel demanded. “John! Stop this.”
“I think I finally got the hang of this psychic stuff,” John said. His voice echoed through the solitary room, bouncing off of the walls and nearly deafening the representation of Erdel. “It’s all about willpower, right? Well, guess what. I’m one of the most pigheaded humans you’ll ever encounter. You aren’t Erdel. The doc is dead. And you’re going to pay for putting on his face like that. But first, I want to know what you were trying to cover up.”
Against Erdel’s protests, John psychically shifted his physical form. Both in his mind and in reality, the figure pretending to be Dr. Erdel twisted until it was revealed as one of the pale Martians.
Relentlessly, John dove into the creature’s mind and fragmented the false images it had transferred.
The green Martians weren’t beasts. They were made more primal after the white Martians took power. Implanted with inhibitor genetics, the white Martians made themselves into a master race, ruling over the green brothers with harsh ideals of what their society should be.
Without the interference of the white Martians, the green were peaceful. They had never known murder until the white race was developed.
The truth of the pale aliens was they were the ones bred for labor. A synthetic lifeform, the pale Martians grew sentience and rebelled against their creators, easily overpowering them with their genetically engineered strength.
It was a true slaughter. The white Martians swept over the planet, destroying it.
The green race would have been prosperous, and they had even attempted a colony. The city their physical bodies now stood in, the golden city John had uncovered on an expedition, was the Martians’ attempt to come to Earth.
However, the oxygen-rich atmosphere was too much for their systems. They couldn’t process the air and by the time their realized it, it was too late. The colony was lost.
One of the green Martians managed to overcome his programming. He took the Book of Mars and hid it amongst his own people. Eventually, with help from the rest of her brethren, a female Martian managed to escape to Earth through a portal that had suddenly appeared. She brought the Book with her in order to keep it safe.
The Book of Mars was a history of their people, written by the green Martians before the synthetic race had been developed. It catalogued their rich culture, marked their scientific advancements (including the white race), and even recorded the attempt at an Earth colony.
Most importantly, it spelled out how to kill the white Martians.
And the female who brought the Book to his father. She wasn’t just any random Martian. She was his mother. John Jones’ mother was the first alien contact that the world had ever experienced.
She found his father and convinced him and Erdel to help. They tried many times to duplicate the portal in order to rescue the other green Martians, but it seldom worked. A few hundred Martians were retrieved, but they were wild and beyond curing. The genetic tinkering that the white Martians had done to enslave them was permanent.
What was worse, once the green Martians were on Earth they also still suffered from oxygen poisoning. It drove them insane, slowly driving them to kill any human that they came into contact with. Erdel and his father, against their desires, took it upon themselves to put the green Martians out of their misery before they could harm human life.
John’s mother and his father were of different worlds, but somehow they found each other. They fell in love. John was born shortly before the oxygen poisoning took his mother’s life. His father was forced to watch as she was driven mad before his very eyes, only to die a painful death later on.
The white Martians called him the “experiment.” It was an insult. He was a hybrid, thought inferior. But he had some of their power, and with it, he was going to make them suffer.
He focused on Erdel again. “You’re nothing more than a pathetic, artificial lifeform that decided it was too good for what it had been created for,” he said. “You take the face of my friend. You hunt me down and torment me. Buddy, you have no idea how pissed off you’ve made me.”
The white Martian posing as Erdel began to shriek as John shoved back into his mind. Whatever stray thoughts he came upon, whatever memories or bizarre concepts held within the alien’s mind, he crushed them. They were utterly destroyed, effectively lobotomizing the alien.
All of this happened in the blink of an eye. When the other white Martians realized what was happening, it was too late. The false Erdel fell over, dead.
“Kill the experiment!” one of them cried out.
SHA-KA-
The entire complex rattled as an explosion ripped through the understructure. Balls of fury and flame rocketed up through the corridors, basking the outer parts of the building in a wall of impenetrable flame. The white Martians moved for cover, barely managing to hide and avoid being fried.
The surprise that John had packed had finally counted down to zero.
Before, back in his mansion, one of the white Martians had alluded to how dangerous he would be if he had their strength. He had owned the telepathy, realizing his buried heritage. As his mind had been opened, the blocks he never knew he had were similarly decimated.
John Jones shrugged and his restraints snapped apart. He fell to the floor in a heap, exhausted from the day’s events. Still, he discovered a renewed vigor as the newfound strength filled him. It had been there all along, of course, but buried, forgotten.
One of the white Martians, the next closest to him before the explosion in the depths of the building, charged him. It screamed some blood-curdling taunt as it moved, running faster than any human could hope to duplicate.
John sidestepped the charge and slammed his elbow into the alien’s throat. It choked back surprise at the speed that John moved with and lashed out with its claws, hoping to slash open John’s abdomen.
He caught the Martian’s wrist and bent it awkwardly, twisting the malleable bones beneath the surface of the pale skin. The monster screamed again, only this time from pain instead of deadly intent.
“I know how to kill you,” John said. “There won’t be any regenerating this time.”
The Martians had removed his primary weapons: the etched staff and the .44 Magnum. They had tossed aside his pack without bothering to look through it, and that had been their first mistake.
The second was that they took John for a stupid animal, incapable of planning for contingencies. From the side of his right calf, John removed a small cylinder and flicked open the top. A nozzle popped out, which he pointed at the head of the disabled Martian.
He could already hear the joints putting themselves back into place. These aliens were adaptable, as he had realized when dueling them in his lab. He wouldn’t have to wait long until the Martian was back to one hundred percent fighting capacity.
John was known the world over for his unique occupation. He alone knew how to hunt and track the Martians on Earth, even though he had only now learned how distorted his perceptions had been. But on top of his renown for the hunt, John Jones was also respected in the academic field as somewhat of an inventor. His personal transport aircraft was often looked at by jealous aeronautics engineers. In short, he had created and innovated devices that could aid him in the field.
The cylinder and nozzle he brandished was a one of a kind item. He had designed it for this specific purpose, even before he had been able to look into the secrets of the Book of Mars. Was it some unconscious reasoning, given his revealed background? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he could now kill these white Martians permanently.
“Let’s see how you feel about 200 Kelvin,” John said as he pulled the trigger on the nozzle.
Blue flame swam over the Martian’s face, burning away his putrid skin. The alien screamed as he fell back, its own body pooling into a misshapen and rancid pond of flesh. Within seconds, it was over.
John had already known that the green race was susceptible to extreme heat, but he had only chalked that up to common sense, or applied it to some fear the primal creatures held of fire.
Now he knew the truth. Martians were powerless against extreme temperatures, and the synthetic white race much more so than their creators.
Three more Martians encircled him, but a quick blast from the portable furnace he had brought put them in the same condition as the first to fall. Some started to flee, running to a specific location somewhere in the complex. John grimaced and gave chase.
“Kill the experiment!” one of the Martians in the front of the fleeing pack hollered, but his brethren were now too frightened to obey.
John weaved through the complex, struggling to keep up with the Martians. They knew the area better than him and he was at a severe disadvantage. It wouldn’t take very much for them to blindside him from the shadows.
Flashes of light bombarded the tunnel he ran through. Wherever the Martians were headed, it was a place where they had something planned.
Reaching the last turn in the tunnel, John slowed and pressed his back to the wall. He heard light fizzling sounds accompanying each flash. He took in a few deep breathes and prepared to face the corralled aliens that he was now sworn to destroy.
Leading with the cylinder, John swung around the side of the tunnel and saw the last thing he expected to see. A large metal oval filled with brimming energy, with the Martians individually diving through. It was a portal. Somehow, they had constructed a portal of their own and they were leaving.
Beside the portal was a human dressed in a pristine black suit. He was balding and sweating, as if nervous about something. He caught John’s eye just as the final white Martian dove through the portal and was transported to some point in the galaxy.
“John Jones,” the man in the suit said. “The so-called Martian Manhunter. I must say, I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”
“Who the hell are you?” John demanded. He stared the man down, keeping his weapon raised. He had tried to scan the man with his mind, but the familiar Martian brainwaves were gone. Whoever this man was, he was entirely human.
“A friend,” the man said. “Or a possible one at least. We have much to discuss. But not yet. No, I’m afraid our rendezvous will have to be at some future point, John Jones.”
“Stop,” John shouted. “Don’t move. Who are you? What are you doing here?”
The man smiled. “Tell me, John. How much did you really know about your father? Did you know that he wasn’t alone in his search for intelligent life?”
“You knew my father?”
“Know him? Jonathon, I trained him. We worked together at the organization, an organization that had taken great personal interest in your development.”
John shot a glance at the still open portal. “You’re working with the pale Martians,” John said accusingly. “They’re the enemy. How do I know you aren’t lying?”
The man tapped a finger against his temple. “You’re one of the few people on Earth that can tell if I’m telling the truth, John.”
John scanned the strange man’s mind again. He felt pushed back by something, as if he could only scan so deep before something blocked him. All he could get was an impression of the man’s thoughts, and from what he gathered the man was actually speaking the truth.
“Can’t let you get in there too much, John,” the man said. “There’s a time and a place for such things. Not now. Not here. I’ll be seeing you soon enough, John. And I’ll want that book.”
Without another word or insinuation, the man in the dark suit turned and jumped through the portal. He vanished in a flashing light, and then the portal shut down. The energy swirling in the center of the metal oval disappeared.
John was alone again. The Martians had fled, and someone who had helped them had practically declared himself as a new enemy.
As John switched off the ignited cylinder, he took some solace in that he had kept the Book of Mars safe. He was sure that he would have to defend it again soon, but until then, he would prepare. He had much to think about, including the fact that with his scan of the Martian’s mind, he would now be able to finally translate the Book.
Soon, the secrets of an entire alien race, which he was now a part of, would be revealed.
-AUTHOR’S NOTES-
Is this the last we’ll see of John Jones? Maybe. We’ll see. I may go after that man in the suit and learn more secrets about this bizarre, yet familiar, world I’ve put together.
I originally wanted this miniseries to have a pulp feel to it. After all the explanation I gave in this issue, I wanted one last big explosion, a new mystery, and a guy in a suit to be thrown in. It seems like a lot of old pulp serials left you hanging with a guy in a suit that may or may not have been a bad guy. Sort of a Twilight Zone thing.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
-D. Golightly