The Beast Inside, Issue #002

Issue #002 – – – – – controlled by Frank Devocht – – – – – Credits 17

Beast Nelson didn’t waste a second.  “Get out!” he shouted at the sparse crowd in the nightclub.  “In an orderly fashion!” he remembered to add.  Didn’t want to add people trampling one another to his woes.  Then to Helk: “Call the police!”
“Nothing the Bullies can do about this,” the young man told him.  Nelson had never heard the man seem so unsure of himself.
“Hey, Wild Thing!  Aren’t you supposed to be a hero?  How about acting like it?”
The reprimand seemed to have the desired affect on Helk, who shrugged off his blazer and tore off his t-shirt revealing the lurid red and yellow spandex beneath.  Nelson had seen it before.  Everybody had seen it before.  Helk was quite the local celebrity.

The shapeless mass, for its part, had coalesced rather quicker than Nelson had thought it would.   Nelson didn’t know what he’d expected, but he hadn’t expected that.  Standing in the middle of the nightclub dancefloor was a scarecrow.  The Straw Man wore dungarees over a striped shirt and topped off by the obligatory floppy hat.  It was well-made and creepy looking, particularly because its eyes were dark red, like pools of blood.  It looked distinctly out of place in the flickering light of the glitterball.  “Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” Nelson muttered.  Still, no time to mess around.  The Beast’s intention was to grab the thing while it was getting its bearings and smack it against hard stuff.  Like the ground.  And the walls.

“Oh God!  It’s horrible!” Helk blubbered, apparently reverting back to Spineless Mode fairly promptly.  Nelson was about to make a quip about how he’d always known Wild Thing wasn’t up to much when the fear and horror struck him too.  Hard.  It was like somebody had flicked on a switch, waves of disgust and abject terror washed over him.  He stumbled backwards as the Straw Man approached, steady, relentless, crimson stare fixed on the hero.  “No, please, no,” Beast Nelson heard himself cringing.

Hold on a minute.  What the heck?  Beast Nelson may not have done much heroing in a long time, but he knew what this was.  He recognised it.  This was some sort of psionic effect.  No way did a halloween prop like this hold such terror to the Beast.  And just like that, he was free of the effect.

“You wanna play?” Nelson growled.  Then he bunched his shoulders and rose from his slouch to his full height.  His own red eyes (which, now he thought about it, should have made blood eyes less frightening by the familiarity of the trait) glinting from beneath the deep black fur that covered him.  “Then let’s play.”

The Straw Man and Beast Nelson clashed just in front of the DJ booth, slipping and sliding in the blood of the fallen women.  Nelson was surprised by the strength of the scarecrow which was a match for his own.  The two wrestled for an advantage, with the scarecrow tearing, biting and scratching at the hero, while Nelson tried to get purchase for the body slamming to start, but kept coming away with handfuls of straw instead.
“You can bite all you like,” Beast said, “You’ll find my skin a bit tougher than those helpless women you killed.”

Just then Wild Thing vaulted to his side, flipping over the bodies and landing perfectly without any imbalance.  “Need some help?” he offered.  He’d pulled on his red facemask – though it was for appearances only because the whole city knew his “secret” identity. “Found your cohones, have you?” Nelson asked.
“Saw you break through, realised it was an effect rather than real fear.  Well done with that, by the way,” Wild Thing said with an easy grin.  The arrogant grin that Nelson found so irritating, actually.  The exact one!
Nelson grunted and smashed the scarecrow in the side of the head.  It skittered backwards, but did not seem phased as it came immediately back at the two men.
Wild Thing spun on one hip and his heel cracked across the thing’s face, a near-perfect spinning back hook.  It didn’t seem to care.

“If we can pin it, we can control it until the cops get here,” Nelson said.
“The cops?  We can deal with this ourselves,” Wild Thing said.  “Why do you want the Bullies involved?”
“I’m just a bouncer.”  Nelson said, grappling with the monster again as it thrashed about trying to free itself from his grasp.  “I don’t do the cape and spandex routine.  Normal people call the cops.”
“Normal people?” Wild Thing laughed, grabbing an arm and trying to assist Nelson in pinning the Halloween outcast.  “You’re a giant, covered in black fur.  Where’s the normal?”
Just then the Straw Man managed to get its teeth onto Nelson’s nose and bite.  It really, really hurt.
“Agh!  Get it off my nose!  Helk!  Help me get this straw-faced freakshow off my nose!” the Beast roared.  To his credit, Wild Thing tried, but his blows and martial arts strikes had little effect on the scarecrow.

“Right then,” Beast Nelson raged and delivered a mind-numbingly powerful two fisted blow straight at the monster’s midrift.   It was an obvious strike, easy to defend against.  But the creature didn’t see it coming, so distracted was it by Helk’s helter-skelter attacks and its intention to sever the nose from Beast Nelson’s face.  Abruptly it was gone from him.  It spun across the floor, spilling hay as it slid crashingly up against a glass column.  It tried to rise, but its straw legs seemed unable to support its weight.  Then, it begin to shift to mist again.  “Quick!” Wild Thing shouted, “Stop it.  Don’t let it get away!”