#72: Guardian of the Black Hand, Part 3 (of 4)

Previously, in GREEN LANTERN CORPS…

The hunt for BLACK HAND took a turn for the horrific-- three Green Lanterns, namely GUY GARDNER, HANK HENSHAW and JOHN STEWART found themselves inside Coast City when an impenetrable dome was erected, trapping them inside the city along with a horde of the walking dead!

That wasn’t all though-- in his time travelling the back roads of America, HAND murdered and resurrected a score of villains, all dragged back to a pseudo-life in his own twisted image. Once they were jokes, rejects, but his Legion of the Damned has the Green Lanterns on the run, and they will not be stopped

The trio of heroes separated in the hopes of routing the undead invasion faster, but they’ve each found themselves in dire situations--

After narrowing evading a violent death at the hands of DOCTOR POLARIS, TOKAMAK and TIGER SHARK, GUY found himself without a charge in his power ring and cornered by the undead. He tried to escape but nearly failed-- until KYLE RAYNER, missing for months, pulled him to safety above the hordes!

Meanwhile, even after losing an arm in the ambush that set them on their course, JOHN managed to take out a handful of the undead super villains-- JAVELIN and THE PUPPETEER-- but was cornered by THE CRUMBLER, THE INVISIBLE DESTROYER and NO-FACE, and found himself at their mercy!

Finally, after HANK managed to flense THE TATTOOED MAN over at Ferris Air, the hero turned his attention to helping CAROL FERRIS, only to be blasted by an unknown energy source-- coming from the purple ring on her finger! FERRIS knocked him unconscious, and his torture is only beginning!

How will the Green Lanterns save the day when they’ve not even come face-to-face with BLACK HAND himself yet? With so many questions raised, will they find the answers they need or will they not live to save the day?

Welcome back to the ongoing adventures of the GREEN LANTERN CORPS!

Hank Henshaw awoke with a start and gagged as he felt something tighten around his throat. He found himself unable to move, and when he craned his neck to the side he could see crystalline constructs at his wrists, elbows and shoulders; one must have choked at his neck and he could feel tightened in various places down his body. He was trapped, and his ring had been removed from his hand. He clenched his fist and tried to strain out of the restraints, but to no avail. As he strained to look around, all he could see was purple metal, and he felt panic rise in his stomach. Where was he?

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. That’s not going to work, Hank.”

He couldn’t see the source of the voice but he would recognise Carol Ferris’ husky tone anywhere. He blinked, trying to clear the fog from his vision, and acknowledged that he was on his back. Helpful.

“What’s going on, Carol? What’s happened to you?”

“What happened to me?”

Hank flinched as she jumped on top of him, straddling his lap with her legs. He looked up at her and saw her wearing that same twisted costume he remembered on her when she initially blasted him with her ring. She was mostly naked, if not for the almost organic bra and bottoms she wore.

Her ‘costume’, for want of a better word, was made up of an odd mix of the purple crystals that held him down and an unknown, calcified mineral that could have been bone. It was a bizarre remix of what he remembered the Star Sapphires-- the Love Lanterns-- wearing back when he’d last interacted with them on Oa*, over a year ago, now.


“Don’t you remember giving this to me?”

Carol held her hand up to Hank’s face, and he blinked his eyes into focus. She wore a ring, purple in appearance, like the emerald power ring he’d had on before now. But it didn’t look manmade, like his. Instead, it looked like it had been grown, and there were short barbs across its surface.

“I didn’t-- I don’t-- ”

“Don’t lie!”

She slapped him, and the barbs cut his cheek in a straight line, blood immediately dribbling from the edge of his lip down toward his ear.

“You were so much bigger then-- ” She squeezed her legs at his waist and straddled forward then back. “-- So much better. Bigger and better and nastier. And you came to me, in the night, and promised me the world. Promised me a throne next to yours*.”


It clicked. He remembered through a haze, the kind of haze that descends when you’re possessed by an entity borne from the dirty scraps of obsession that coalesce inside a power battery that collects love.

“Carol, what you’re talking about, who you’re talking about, that wasn’t me-- that was the Predator. The dark side of the Star Sapphires. All the love in the universe, even the worst of it, all of it was pulled into their Central Power Battery. That darkness became sentient, and it escaped into me when I died-- then it went on a rampage, it tried to-- *”


She slapped him again and he winced, another open wound and another trail of blood dribbling down his face.

“You gave me a ring. That’s a promise, Hank. That’s a proposal. And you failed to follow through on your end.”

“It wasn’t me, Carol,” he hissed back.

She covered his lips with her left hand, the one where her ring was singing, and she shuddered, light beginning to build up inside his mouth. He thrashed, struggled, but couldn’t escape.

“I’m so disappointed, Hank. But we’ll see what we can do about setting you straight. Bring that man out of you that I fell in love with… do you recognise where we are?” She motioned around their heads. “I built a new battery. You left really detailed instruction on how, thank you,” she kissed his forehead affectionately. “And for the last two years I’ve been collecting all the love in the air and drawing it inside. It’s how I could operate without my ‘sisters’ out there, in the cosmos, from knowing. But like you said, you know what happens when you draw all—and I mean all—the love into a device like this. You know what grows.”

Hank strained desperately against the restraints, but to no avail. He felt a panic attack manifest and couldn’t think, couldn’t function. Carol continued to grip his mouth, and the barbs began to grow into him, and he began to scream. Because he knew what came out of a Star Sapphire’s Central Power Battery. He knew what waited in the dark.

The Predator would come soon.

He was sat in its nest.

And when it got here, it would want to feed.



John didn’t let the world go black. He sent a shockwave out that dislodged No-Face’s hands, and felt his features return to his head. He shot up, allowing his ring back to full operational capacity, and headed upwards, only for the Invisible Destroyer to blast him in the side with an energy discharge sent from his crackling eyes.

“Ah… wahnd… anudda… go…” drawled the Crumbler.

Stewart didn’t fall. He was in agony, he only had one arm, and his side was a burnt mess. Last time he’d been in close proximity to these guys, his friends and he had been trampled over-- quite simply, they weren’t expecting a fight, and they got trounced like rookies for it. But this wasn’t the time for that.

He pulled his sniper rifle from his back and fired off the rest of the clip, the explosive rounds hitting the Crumbler’s obese, putrid stomach with a went thump-thump-thump, then swung backwards onto the roof of a building.

The Crumbler’s stomach exploded, entrails and soggy sacks of meat spraying across the street and into his two fellow dead men.

He wasn’t defeated, of course. Just as the others that John had managed to get a shot at, he trundled about, looked confused, before the Invisible Destroyer-- visible thanks to the viscera covering his suit-- slapped him across the face to focus him.

“We only die once, Percy. Don’t think this will stop you. When we get him, you can pull him apart slowly, but we need to get him first.”

“Oday… oday… ah ged id…” said the Crumbler, spittle and gore running down his mouth.

Stewart was gone, not caring to listen to whatever pep talk the undead gave each other. He shot across the rooftops, keeping low, trying to keep out of sight of any eyes in the sky. He wondered where Black Hand was, and hoped to god that whatever was going on here didn’t have a countdown attached. Guy wasn’t answering hails, and neither was Hank. Had they been compromised? Best to focus on the task at hand. He headed toward the centre of the city, discarding the now empty rifle he’d used to take down the villains on the street below.


“Kyle? What the hell are you doing here? Where the hell have you been?”

Guy’s hands gripped the young man’s shoulders tightly, even as the undead hordes below groaned and groped up at them. They didn’t matter right now-- the young man who’d held almost unlimited power, who’d helped reignite the hopes of the Green Lantern Corps, who’d vanished under mysterious circumstances months ago-- his arrival on the scene was a complete surprise to Gardner.

“Do-- do I know you?” said Kyle, his attention split evenly between this crazy man and the zombies below.

“Know me? It’s-- oh, c’mon. You’ve not lost your memory, have you? That’s god damn typical!”

After all this, Kyle didn’t remember. He held his heads in his hands and tried to imagine a way out of this without the light of the White Lantern. He just hoped the others were doing better than him…

“Look, dude, can we just, I dunno, go inside? My girlfriend is giving me one hell of a dirty look right now and there’s, like, a hundred zombies downstairs who want a taste of us.”

Guy glanced down through the slats of the fire escape they were sat on and then nodded, shuffling after Kyle as they crawled through the open window and into the apartment building. A woman was waiting there, holding a baseball bat, pacing the floor of the kitchenette they were now in.

“So stupid, Kyle. So so stupid,” she muttered.

“Alex, c’mon, I’m not gonna let someone die just because I’m terrified of the walking dead,” replied Kyle.

Guy would have smiled at that if the stakes weren’t so high. Overcoming fear. That was the Kyle Rayner he knew. But things weren’t looking great now, and he sighed when the weight of the situation hit him once more.

“Okay, right, guys; I can tell there’s tension here, but there’s zombies out there-- so we gotta choose the lesser of two evils, don’t we? I’m Guy Gardner. Do you know the name?”

Kyle shook his head, his brow creasing, but Alex nodded. “You’re that Green Lantern, right? Where’s your ring?”

He held up his hand but focused his attention on Kyle. “Clearly here, clearly running on empty. Look, I know this sounds mad, but I know you, kid, you and me, we go way back. You saved my life a couple of times and I’ve saved yours. Does the name ‘White Lantern’ ring any bells?”

Kyle shook his head again, and Alex was the one who looked concerned this time. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

Guy checked the front door-- it was barricaded-- then began scoping out the rest of the exits. Content that they were secure for now, he began searching through the cupboards of the apartment, until he found bottles of water in the now warm fridge, and a packet of jerky. He slumped into a sofa and began to hydrate.

“Mister Gardner, what are you talking about?” said Alex.

“What’s your name, kid?” Guy asked.

“Alex. Alexandra… Alex DeWitt,” she replied.

“Uh, nice name. You known Kyle for long?”

“Uh, since college, yeah.”

That made sense. Kyle was in college before he became involved in the Green Lantern Corps. During the Apokolips Invasion, when the Guardians of the Universe went into hiding, became pure energy-- a process that allowed them to transform a young man into a being of infinite power-- he became Ion as a result*. He’d never heard him mention an Alexandra before…


“Oh, that’s nice. What did you study?”

“Photojournalism, what-- why does this matter?”

Guy leaned forward. “Because a couple of years ago, when Kyle was in college, he was transformed into a superhero and he’s barely been on Earth since. Except, a few months ago, he vanished from the face of the universe and now hardly any folk remembers him*. We searched high and low, used these bastard things,” he held up his ring pointedly, “but we had no luck. Asked the Justice League for help-- no luck. Not even his ex remembers him.”


“His ex?” repeated Alex.

Uh oh, thought Guy. “Yeah, one of the Teen Titans. So, whatever happened to him, whatever he did, it means that Kyle Rayner doesn’t exist anymore-- and yet he’s right here, and-- ”

“That’s not my name,” said Kyle, interrupting Guy mid-flow.

Gardner shot him a look. “You what?”

“Kyle Nodell. Rayner is my mom’s maiden name, but she… my dad… they’re… together… they aren’t separated… so I don’t… I really… I really think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

“Clearly I don’t. Do you know the name Donna Troy?” asked Guy.

Donna and Kyle had been dating back in the day, the Teen Titans knew him, he’d shared adventures with Nightwing*, but she didn’t remember him anymore. None of Earth’s heroes did**.

“I don’t!” said Kyle.

“Kyle, he’s a Green Lantern. I recognise him. He’s not lying. Something happened, maybe? I don’t know what, but…”

“No, he’s some nut who didn’t know to stay off the streets during the zombie apocalypse! He’s-- - I don’t-- - he’s talking crazy talk, Alex. I was never a superhero. My mom and my dad, yeah, things were rocky, but they never… my dad… he never left…”

Guy grabbed Kyle by the shoulders and shook him. “I ain’t the most gentle of men, kid. You know this. I wish John were here. Hell, I wish Hal was the one standing in front of you. No one can keep amnesia up when Highball’s about. But it’s me. And I-- ”

There was a banging at the door and Guy raised his hand instinctively, for a split second forgetting that his ring had no charge. He cursed it, looked over at Alex, who still clutched the baseball bat. Behind the door they could hear groaning; the awkward, strained vocals of the undead that were trying to get inside released from their mouths.

“Ah, shit,” said Guy.

“D-do you-- can you-- ” started Alex.

Guy rushed over to the door and checked it tentatively with the palms of his hands. He could feel scratching and he could feel limp, banging fists smash against its surface. He darted across the room and began putting all his weight behind a bookcase, hoping to move it in front of the door. Kyle joined in, helping him heft its weight to where it needed to be.

“See… back in the day… with you firing on all cylinders… our rings never ran out of charge… you were a walking battery and it made everything so much… easier… now they run out like nobody’s business. Frustrating as all hell,” said Guy.

“I… I…” Kyle couldn’t find the words before the door exploded inward, sending shards of wood and plasterboard at the trio inside. As the dust cleared, the undead swarmed inside.


Tendrils of light worked their way through Hank’s head and into his brain. He could feel each strand cut through meat and grind through bone, and then there was the pop as they entered his skull proper and wended their way into his brain proper. He couldn’t feel what they were doing in there, of course. There were no nerves in the brain. Just everything that made him the man he was today, and that… was vulnerable, once you gained access.

A rainy night and a busy road, appearing in front of a car and sending a father and son careening into the cold black…

Hank jerked forward but his throat and head were caught against his restraints. He gagged, half-choking himself due to his panic. That wasn’t his memory. That wasn’t him. What was Carol’s ring doing? As much as he hated it, he knew what that was. When the Predator declared war on Hal Jordan, his family was fair game. He’d caused a car accident that had paralysed Jordan’s brother, nearly killed his nephew*. They lived, they survived, but he didn’t want to relive that.


“What’re you-- what’re you-- what--”

Carol rocked forward, her hands clamped around his face. Her mouth was close to his, and she spoke quickly, feverishly, and he couldn’t help but hear every word.

“Just because you say it wasn’t you doesn’t mean it wasn’t. Just because you’re ashamed doesn’t make the act shameful. You loved so much. Your heart was so big. Hal didn’t want you sharing that with the world. But I know better. You will soon too. The ring you gave me held a piece of you. A fragment. And it told me how I could bring you back. All the love I could collect, every piece and scrap. It’s all coalescing now, and William told me he could bring you back to me in time for it to go inside you. Yes. I’ll slip it inside. And when you wake up… you’ll be the man I love.”

“P-please don’t,” whispered Hank.

He’d worked so hard. Tried so damned hard to get past it all. He didn’t want to be that man again. He didn’t want the Predator inside him. He had finally found himself in a place where he accepted that the actions that monster undertook using his face weren’t his actions, and now Carol-- or whatever this woman was now-- tried to undo it all.

“Don’t beg, Hank. Don’t. I give this to you freely, without you asking. That’s what lovers do. They give and they give and they give. All the lies you’ve believed since will wash away. You’ll be pure. You’ll be the man I need. The man I lust for.”

“I’m not him-- I’m not-- you need-- need-- to let me go-- Black Hand-- he-- he--”

She dug her nails into his face, drawing blood at every point.

“There is so much more here than what William is working toward. He wants to bring about the death of all things on Earth, but we made a deal. He would destroy everything, but before that, I would take all the love in the world, bring you back to me, and then we’d have the cosmos. Our survival is all but guaranteed. He gets his wish, I get mine.”

“This-- isn’t-- you-- “

Carol moved her hand between his legs and found what she was looking for. With a violent squeeze, she punished Hank for his impudence, and he winced in pain as the agony shot upwards, past his crotch and into his stomach. “Hank, you never used to be so rude.”

Through gritted teeth, he replied, “you… you… weren’t… always… infected… by the… Predator…”

“I was saved! You saved me! And now you say you can’t remember. I’ll make you remember! I’ll dig him out of you in no time at all. Can you see it? Can you see the man you’re supposed to be?”

Purple flashes began to fill Hank’s eyes. He clamped them shut, and began to beg, “please not again please no not again,” but Carol began to rock back and forth, slowly at first, as her ring did its business in his brain.

“No begging. That’s for later.”


At the centre of Coast City was Rodriguez Cermeno Tower, named for Spanish explorer Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeno. He’d founded the principality under a different name, Presidio San Georgio, back in 1778, and they’d honoured him for that with a building.

It was one of the tallest buildings-- built to last, and a man like John Stewart found beauty in that. The tower was a tourist hotspot, great for the views that gave you glimpses of the take-offs at Ferris Air, as well as the numerous military bases on the outskirts of the city. You could also see the harbour, the botanical gardens, all great spots if you were visiting.

At the moment, John noted that the undead were congregating at the base of the tower. He noted that this was where the three Green Lanterns had started this nightmare, on the observation deck, chatting like old school buddies.

With the undead below, John scanned the building from a nearby vantage point and found that there were people alive on every floor-- herded there, perhaps? There was a distortion his ring couldn’t push through in the basement area, and he had to focus on the fact for it to dig any deeper.

Something occurred to him. If he were scanning a large area, that kind of distortion would have been missed, overlooked by the ring. The scanning field the ring projected wanted to look away, it wanted to look elsewhere. That kind of localised anomaly could best be described as some kind of anti-awareness field-- an anomaly that forced your brain into ignoring it. A perception filter, almost.

Black Hand was invisible to cameras, he was untraceable by satellite or by Green Lantern ring. The Justice League couldn’t find him, science couldn’t track him, magic couldn’t get a bead on him. Was he a walking anomaly, forcing you to look away before you even knew you’d seen him?

John descended, choosing to be invisible on his approach. He slipped past the undead, hoping his ring charge-- currently at 24%-- would hold out in the interim. He forewent the elevator and headed down the stairwell. Opening doors drew attention but he didn’t want to phase through objects, counting it amongst an unneeded energy expenditure.

When one of the zombies lurched round-- all cataract-eyed and slack-jawed-- in his direction, he pulled the knife he’d taken from the gun store earlier and slipped it through the dead man’s brainstem. Instantly it flopped to the floor and died a second death.

John moved invisibly down until he reached the basement level. A large hole had been excavated in one of the far walls, and he could see bloody claw marks around the edges.

Before he entered, he collected all the data his ring had collected, bundled it up, and sent a silent message across the ring-ways to his colleagues. If their rings had charges, they’d receive it. Along with it, he sent a psychic call-- “If either of you are receiving this, find my coordinates attached. I’m going in. I don’t know what I’ll find. Back-up would be appreciated. Just keep it quiet, Gardner.”

Stewart descended, unsure of what he’d find down there.


Guy had led Alex and Kyle back out onto the fire escape before the door had folded, and they scrambled upwards, against their better judgement, to the roof. When Guy looked down at the way they’d came, he saw the undead following, slower than them of course, but following none the less.

“So, what, uh, brings you to Coast City?” he asked.

“J-job interview,” said Alex.

Guy nodded enthusiastically. “Oh! How’d that go?”

“I’ll find out tomorrow,” she replied.

“She’s got it, for sure,” said Kyle.

Alex shook her head. “He’s an optimist.”

Guy laughed. “We need that right now, don’t we?”

He pulled Alex onto the roof, then Kyle. The zombies were a couple of floors down, but they’d follow them up soon enough. But they had time, and they had space. Back on solid ground, he began to pace again.

“Look, here’s the thing… I want to be patient, I really do, but I’m not sure what’s going to do it. I’ve explained the situation. I’ve been really god damn nice about it. Against my better judgement, I’ve not thrown you over the ledge and down into their waiting arms, because I’m not entirely convinced the shock will wake you up.”

“Please don’t throw me anywhere,” said Kyle. Alex stepped in front of him defensively.

“I’m not gonna!”

Momentarily distracted by something, Kyle pointed across the city toward Rodriguez Cermeno Tower—a massive emerald flare illuminated every nook and cranny of the building, and a Green Lantern symbol hovered over it for a couple of seconds, before dissipating.

“Well, I guess we know where one of my--”

There was a sound, like the world’s biggest stapler going to work on a pile of A4. SHUNK. Like metal sliding through paper. Guy spun around and saw Doctor Polaris floating above the building, arms glistening with energy as he watched the trio below.

“What the hell was--?”

Guy looked back and saw Kyle pinned against a smokestack, a metal pipe jutting out of his chest. Alex was by his side, trying to hold his blood in with her hands.

“Oh, no, no, no,” whispered Guy.

“Did you make friends, Green Lantern? Like you tried to make friends with me?”

Guy rushed over to the couple; Alex had tears streaming down her face, and Kyle was beginning to go pale as the blood left his body. “Keep talking to him. Just… keep him awake. Okay?” Alex opened and closed her mouth repeatedly but no words came out. “Okay?”

“Y-yes,” she mumbled back.

Guy took the baseball bat out of her hands and then walked toward where Polaris had landed. “I’m done being nice, you crazy bastard. I tried to be good. I tried to do what Johnny would do, or maybe what Highball would, but you threw that back in my face. Black Hand murdered you, you god damn moron! He pulled your heart out of your chest and did god knows with it! And now you’re his lapdog? His god damn sidekick?”

“Black Hand freed me,” said Polaris.

He raised his hand and Guy felt his jaw jerk up. Every filling in his mouth suddenly screamed, pain sliding down into the nerves beneath his teeth. His gums ached, like they were being shredded.

“F-freed you my ass. You’re under his thrall. It’s like watching god damn Dracula. Are you his bride? You his little, submissive wife? Don’t! Make! Me! Laugh!”

Guy screamed as his fillings were wrenched out of his mouth and smashed together into a sphere before him. Polaris was shaking, Gardner clearly touching a nerve. He’d responded in kind, of course, and the Green Lantern was paying for his impudence.

Kyle gripped the pipe that was slotted through his abdomen, shaking as he tried to find the words. “…Alex… I don’t know what’s… what’s going on… it… it hurts… but I can see… see two lives… the one I should have lived… the one I think… I think I deserved… with you and then… I can see the blue guy… giving me all the power of his people… I can… I can… see myself becoming… becoming Ion… becoming the Torchbearer… then dying… then coming back… coming back different.”

“Kyle, it’s okay, I’m here for you, whatever happens, I’m here,” said Alex.

“N-no, that’s the point… I think I changed reality… made my wishes come true… my parents aren’t together… I didn’t… I don’t… my father was never around. And now he’s… he’s here? Some government suit? And… they’re happy… my mom is happy… was that me? I don’t… did I do that? Did I change things?”

“It doesn’t matter, we’re here now, that’s all-- ”

Kyle shook his head vehemently and instead of the panicked gasps, he spoke quickly, urgently, whisper-hissing words at Alex as she listened close. “What if I made this happen? What if I made you love me? Did I cheat? Did I change everything to get here? Am I that kind of person? Am I-- ”

He winced, clutching the wound. Something pounded inside him, something desperately wanting to get out. Alex didn’t know what to do, she didn’t fully understand what her love was saying, but she understood the implication. She clasped her hands around his and leaned in close.

“If we’re meant to be together then we’ll be together. You can’t hold onto… onto everything so tightly… life doesn’t work like that… but if… if you and me are supposed to be… be us… then no matter what… Ion… Torchbearer… Kyle Rayner or Kyle Nodell… that’ll be the result. And if… if not… I… we… should accept that. If there’s something inside you… that can make a difference. That can change the world… the universe even… you have to let it out…”

Alex looked at Kyle’s eyes and saw that they were open, and staring behind her. He wasn’t breathing. Blood stained his shirt and trousers, and had begun to seep into the concrete beneath them. He was perfectly still, and it would have almost been beautiful if it wasn’t for the fact that the undead had finally managed to pull themselves up the fire escape, and Gardner wasn’t been systematically tortured by Doctor Polaris.

Kyle Nodell-- or Kyle Rayner-- was dead.


An explosion of mauve and lilac light erupted between Carol and Hank, and she flew backwards off of him in surprise.

She rolled into a crouch outside of the inner chamber of the Central Power Battery she’d built in her apartment, hissing as smoke poured out of it.

From inside she could make out a figure, and her eyes opened wide as he emerged.

“My darling girl…” The voice was smooth and seductive. “My heart and my soul…”

“Y-yes,” whispered Carol, her ring flickering excitedly.

Hank emerged from the smoke as it pooled around his feet, a sinister expression across his face. “…I’m back.”


John reached an antechamber beneath the tower, and the first thing he spotted was a chair. In the chair sat a woman with her back to him. She didn’t move. Her head was half-covered in a scarf, and he could see no hair. What skin was visible to him was pale, and he deduced that this was Priscilla, William Hand’s sister.

She’d been kidnapped nearly two months ago, during Hand’s rampage across the West Coast, and had been present at the murder sites the FBI had investigated. He didn’t say anything, not wanting to set off any traps, but a scan told him there was nobody else here-- and that she was already dead.

John floated past her, and he saw no signs of foul play.

Cause of death? he asked his ring, psychically.

<Cancer cells became metastatic to a terminal degree.>

John sighed. He raised the knife he bought with him-- he couldn’t risk her coming back. He slipped it into the back of her neck, at the brain stem, and removed it, confident that she wouldn’t lurch back up and come at him-- unless she had whatever the super villains had going for them, driving their bodies forward no matter what.

He continued forward, and found himself in a second chamber, larger than the first. The vast hall, for want of a better word, was lined with the undead. Once bitten, John would join their ranks, becoming a mindless drone; or perhaps he’d become one of the twisted, masochistic sentries that regained some semblance of their brains but none of their compassion-- like the Crumbler, like the Invisible Destroyer-- like the rest.

They didn’t move to bite him. They stood still for the most part, opening and closing their mouths, the only sounds the wind rattling their lungs, the click-clacking of teeth snapping shut against each other. It was an eerie sight. A Greek Chorus waiting for--

His ring blared as the anomaly suddenly fell upon him. He managed to roll with the punch, but it still sent him sprawling, and he saw the source as he rolled to a stop. Black Hand was here, and the force of the punch had caused whatever sinew holding his arm onto his body to snap. It hung loose, and John was reminded of his own awkward, de-limbed situation.

“Not gonna brag about this whole thing, Hand? You’ve killed so many. I thought you’d be proud,” said John.

He sent an energy beam at Hand, and it punctured his chest, where his heart would be. It didn’t stop him. There was a hole you could push quarters through, a hole you could see the zombies behind him through, but he wasn’t downed.

Another shot then-- through the head and brain stem. He’d fallen back on the old ‘shoot-em-through-the-heart’ tactic, which was a Green Lantern ploy, not a marine one. Two shots, zap-zap, in the brain pan. Instead, there were holes, but no end to Black Hand trudging toward him.

Even as Hand’s arm began to slooooowly fall away from its socket as the strands of muscle and meat became too weak to connect them together, he grabbed one of the freshly dead men nearby and held him up; tiny, black threads seeping from his palm and into the throat of his chosen vessel. Connecting them?

“I DIED-- AND I CAME—BACK,” growled the dead man Black Hand held.

Was the villain speaking through the dead now? It looked like his throat was a gutted mess, all worn away and empty, so maybe his vocal chords were gone, the same way his tongue had crumbled to nothing. It didn’t help that John was blasting holes through him.

John’s ring was nearly empty now, and the rifle he’d had long gone. It was him and this devil, alone, down in the dark. And the devil kept coming, one step followed by another, dragging his victims along with him. John began to summon all the charge. One last blast. One capable of atomising. That might do the trick. It would drain the ring dry, and whatever there was working against him was fighting that, trying to drain his charge even faster.

Another step, and Hand threw the zombie away from himself, then grabbed another, a woman this time. There was a hole where her stomach should have been, and Stewart could see her spinal column twitching like an eel.

She said, in a voice guttural and with no semblance of life, “-- AND IN-- THAT MOMENT-- OF ETERNAL-- DARKNESS-- I-- WAS TOLD-- I DIDN’T-- HAVE TO DIE-- NO ONE DID.”

“You died and you came back, sure; and with great horror comes great power, I’m understanding that too,” said John.

Hand shook his head and dropped the woman, the zombie groaning as she pulled herself back up to standing. As his right arm finally slipped off the coil of his torso, he put a finger to his lips as if to shush the Green Lantern. On the floor his limb shuffled for a second, thick tentacles of energy appearing at the stump and immediately beginning to crawl up Hand’s leg and back towards its original moorings. A second later, it had reattached in a gruesome, micro-surgical display.

“So, what? You’re killing and you’re killing and you’re killing. That’s all you’re good for, now? You come back from the dead and all you have is murder on your mind? Isn’t that unoriginal?”

Hand grabbed another one of his legions and it became rigid as it received his words through it’s own mouth, “I KNEW-- WHAT WAS NEEDED-- OF ME-- “

“What’s that then? Murder on a citywide scale?” spat John.

“HAL JORDAN-- STOLE MY-- CHANCE-- AT A-- LIFE-- SO I NEED-- HIM DEAD-- TO LIVE-- AGAIN.”

John went quiet, his brain processing the words. Hal had deprived William Hand of a second chance at life by virtue of refusing to accept the body swap situation the villain had placed him in. Hand’s second chance came at the expense of Hal’s continued existence, and Jordan fought valiantly against that endgame. Hal won. Hand was sent to prison, then whatever happened to him happened and here they were.

“You will never get your hands on Hal,” said John.

“THEN-- EVERYTHING-- HE KNOWS-- AND LOVES-- DIES-- “

Hand released his grip on the undead woman and continued to walk toward John.

John checked his ring. Low power but the ring was ready-- what choices did he have? He could escape, but how far would his ring get him? Where were the others? Where were the Green Lanterns he’d entered this hell with?

Another voice echoed quietly into the chamber: “Perhaps you did not listen close enough to your Guardian’s words.”

Black Hand froze and lurched around, back toward the entrance of the chamber, where the room his sister had expired in connected with the way back out.

John took this moment and sent all the power left in his ring through Hand’s body. The villain vanished in a blast of emerald, and the Green Lantern had to cover his eyes as his protective aura faded, going into the ring along with everything else to make this blast as powerful as it could possibly be. If you were outside, you would have seen the flare riddle every single floor of the tower, as if the Lantern had sent a signal out into the world.

Downstairs, Black Hand, now a scorched, skeletal ruin, paid no attention to John Stewart. He was focused on the voice that had interjected, and it was clear that the source was his deceased sister.

She stumbled forward. Empty eyes and her mouth open at an awkward angle, her skin taking on the pallor of the recently deceased. She did not drag her heels like the rest of the undead Hand himself had brought back, there was an ugly elegance to her movements, but she was clearly, and irrevocably, dead.

Priscilla Turner, nee Hand, continued to speak. “You were dragged back from death. And now all you think to do with the power you have been granted is bring more death. We had thought you had begun to understand. Your sister was a disciple. They all are. Now it is time we interject. What are you, Black Hand? What is your purpose?”

Hand would have blinked if he had eyelids.

John skirted round the fringe of the room, out of reach of the zombies lining the walls, but far enough away from the siblings as to not put himself into the fray. What was going on here?

Without hearing an answer, John saw Priscilla nod slowly.

“Yes. You are correct. You are not here to bring death, William. You are here to bring life.”

“What the hell--?” whispered John.

As he watched, Black Hand’s body started filling out, tentacles of flesh rolling out from inside him to rebuild musculature and flesh, until the rotting skeletal form he’d been reduced to was replaced completely. He was strong. Tall. Instead of the corpse mask he had before, he wore his old face-- the one he had before his lips fell away, before his tongue rotted, before his nose slipped off his face. He was the handsome young man with a full head of hair that he once was, before the villainy, before the cancer, before he died and came back.

“This isn’t right,” said John. And he was correct.

“It… is… the way… it should… always… have been…” said Black Hand.

His voice was like that of a man who hadn’t spoken in years. He turned his attention to John, and the smile he now wore was almost as horrible as the face he’d worn minute prior. He nodded, enthusiasm rushing through him, understanding brimming in his eyes.

“My Guardians… reveal all…”

“Yeah? And who’s that then? Who’s your Guardian? Your sister?”

Black Hand laughed. “She’s a suit… they deign… to wear. No. No… my Guardians… are infinite. They are all. My Guardians are true life. The relentless… never-ending… never ceasing… cellular multiplication… cellular generation. My Guardians are the cancer gods… they are M'Nagalah… and they… are… here..!”


IN THE ANNUAL: What are the secrets of M'Nagalah, and why did they chose Black Hand as their emissary? Has Carol Ferris, twisted by the ring on her finger, managed to bring the Predator back through Hank Henshaw? Is Kyle Rayner dead, without ever reclaiming the power of the White Lantern? Has all the dental work Guy Gardner ever had gone to waste at the hands of the twisted Doctor Polaris? And will Coast City ever be the same after the events of the last twelve hours? All that and a glimpse into the future in our extra-sized annual extravaganza, a story so big it couldn’t fit into the regular series! Be here in two weeks for STATE OF DECAY!