Extinction Protocol

The first thing Kade Foster saw when the call dropped was the train.

It hung off the upper rail line like something half-chewed, six silver cars jackknifed over the river with their windows blown out and their undercarriage screaming sparks into the dark. One support tower on Halcyon Bridge had taken the hit when the lead car jumped the track. Now the upper transit line sagged over the traffic deck below, twisted steel whining under strain while cars jammed bumper to bumper beneath it. Sirens wailed from every direction. Smoke rolled over the water in greasy black sheets. News drones hovered above the wreck like flies over meat.

By the time Kade’s reserve-response transport skidded to a stop at the east access ramp, the Crown Guard was already there.

Of course they were.

Aurelian blazed above the broken span, a white-gold figure in the storm haze, one hand braced under a slumping section of rail while a dozen cameras found the exact angle that made him look like a god holding the city together. Bastion stood farther up the deck inside a shell of blue gravitic light, stopping a rain of concrete chunks from crushing an evac line. Helix knelt beside a family pinned under a buckled guardrail, hands glowing bioelectric green over torn flesh. Vesper was a streak of black between shadows, appearing where trapped people needed cutting out. Strafe was everywhere at once, snapping from car roof to car roof in blurs of red and silver so fast Kade only caught pieces. A hand on a child’s backpack. A boot on the hood of an overturned SUV. A grin too quick to pin down.

And below them, on the bridge deck where the blood and screaming actually lived, the reserves got the dirty work.

Kade jumped out before the wheels stopped moving.

“Move, move, move!” Sergeant Lyle bellowed as the back doors burst open. “Lower deck casualty sweep, establish lane to west off-ramp, nobody clogs the Crown Guard route. Foster, with me.”

Kade was already moving past him.

Heat hit first. Then the stink. Gasoline, hot metal, ruptured coolant, river rot blowing up off the black water under the bridge. Civilians stumbled through headlights and smoke, many of them bloody, some screaming names, some too shocked to do anything but stare upward while steel shrieked over their heads.

A woman in a business skirt stood beside a crushed sedan holding her own forearm by the wrist as if pressure alone could keep it attached. A teenager sat on the asphalt with half his face slicked red, staring at two fingers lying near the median like they belonged to someone else. A man in a torn suit shoved uselessly at a concrete slab pinning his wife across the legs while their toddler screamed in the back seat.

Kade reached the car first.

“Don’t pull her,” he snapped, dropping beside the wreck. “You’ll rip what’s left.”

The man stared at him with blood in his teeth. “Help her.”

“I am.”

Kade braced one hand on the slab, the other against the buckled frame, and took a breath. His power wasn’t flashy. No glow, no lightning, no halo for the cameras. Just force and the ugly way force felt in his body. He could catch impact for a few seconds, hold it in muscle and bone, and throw it somewhere else before it tore him apart.

A chunk of rail support dropped from above and smashed into the sedan’s roof hard enough to cave it half an inch lower. Kade took the shock through his palm.

Pain blasted up his arm.

He held it.

Veins stood in his neck. Teeth ground together. The slab trembled, all that violence shuddering inside him like a live thing trying to kick free.

Then he shoved.

Stored force punched out of him in one brutal burst. The slab slid just enough for the woman to scream and yank a leg free. Sergeant Lyle grabbed her under the arms and dragged her clear while Kade reeled back, wrist throbbing like the bones inside it had cracked.

“West lane!” Lyle barked. “Get her moving.”

The husband lunged after his wife. The toddler wailed. Kade was already turning to the next wreck.

His comm crackled in his ear.

“Kade.”

Talia.

Just his name, clipped and steady under the static. His sister always sounded calmer in disaster than she did at dinner.

He shoved his shoulder against a jammed ambulance door and grunted, “Little busy.”

“No kidding. I’m feeding local support load to reserve channel seven. East tower is trending worse than command’s public call. You need to clear the lower deck under midspan now.”

The ambulance door screeched open. Inside, a paramedic lay face-down across the bench with a shard of glass buried to the hilt under his jaw. Blood had sheeted the cabinets and pooled black on the floor mat. Kade looked away before he could clock how still the body was.

“Command isn’t moving civilians yet,” he said.

“Then command can explain the body count later.” Paper rustled faintly on her end, keys clacking under her voice. “Kade. Midspan. Now.”

He heard something in her tone then. Not fear. Talia didn’t sound afraid until it was far too late for that. This was worse. Calculation.

“How bad?”

A beat.

“Bad enough that if the upper line drops where I think it will, it’ll cut the deck in half.”

Kade looked up.

The train groaned on the shattered rail spine above him, nose pitched toward the river, windows spraying glitter over the bridge while sparks streamed off exposed metal. Aurelian still held one section of the sagging line in the air, body rigid, cape snapping in the wind. Cameras orbited him in perfect hungry circles.

“Copy,” Kade said.

“And don’t do anything stupid.”

The line cut before he could answer, which was fine. They both knew he would.

He shoved back into the smoke.

Reserves in matte black armor swarmed between stalled cars, dragging civilians toward the west off-ramp where more responders had set up triage under pulsing emergency lights. Nobody looked at them unless they were bleeding. All eyes kept going to the sky.

That was how it always worked.

Reserves got sweat in their eyes, blood on their gloves, and screaming people clawing at their sleeves. The Crown Guard got the drones.

A little girl with glass glittering in her braids stood on the hood of an SUV shrieking for her mother. Kade sprinted for her, boots slipping on coolant and blood. Above him Strafe flashed across the wreckage, red-silver afterimages stuttering in the smoke. He landed on the roof of a delivery truck, ripped its back door off, and came out with two passengers under his arms like they weighed nothing. The crowd nearest the barricade actually cheered.

Kade reached the girl, scooped her up, and turned just as a body hit the pavement three yards away.

It landed wrong.

Too fast. Too limp.

Kade flinched back as the corpse bounced once and left a fan of blood across the lane divider. One of the upper train passengers, maybe, or someone thrown from the bridge deck above. The head had split open on impact. Gray-white matter shone under the strobes. One eye hung lower than the other.

The girl in Kade’s arms saw it and started screaming harder.

“Don’t look.” He tucked her face into his shoulder and ran.

He handed her off to a reserve medic at the barricade, turned, and nearly got flattened by a chunk of concrete the size of a refrigerator.

Bastion caught it mid-drop inside a blue grav field and hurled it toward the river. The block spun away trailing dust.

“Keep your lane clear!” Bastion shouted down at the reserves, voice amplified hard enough to cut through the sirens. “We’re still pulling live bodies from the rail line.”

Kade bit back the first answer that came to mind and went back in.

Another shudder ran through the bridge. Not a sound this time. A feeling. The whole deck flexed under his boots like some giant thing breathing pain through steel.

He looked up again.

Strafe stood on the side of the hanging train car, one hand jammed into a torn door frame. For half a second he didn’t move.

Not slowed. Not blurred. Stopped.

That alone was enough to punch cold straight through Kade’s chest.

Strafe never stopped.

Then the speedster’s head turned.

Not toward civilians. Not toward the sparking undercarriage about to shear loose. Toward Bastion, who was still locking down debris fall over the lower deck.

The movement was too sharp. Too clean. Like a joint snapping onto the wrong track.

Blood ran from Strafe’s left ear.

“Kade!” Lyle shouted. “On me!”

He tore his eyes away and ran to where a city bus had skewered itself against the median wall. The whole right side was peeled open. Seats had ripped free of their mounts. The aisle looked like a butcher’s floor. A woman with a steel rod through her abdomen moaned weakly while another passenger tried to hold a coil of intestine inside his own belly with both hands and failed. Blood slicked the steps in a dark glaze.

Kade vaulted into the wreck.

“Anybody who can move, move now!” he shouted. “Leave bags, leave everything, just move.”

A man with half his scalp hanging over one eye stared at him in dumb terror.

Kade grabbed him by the jacket and shoved him toward the torn side of the bus. “Move.”

He dropped beside the woman skewered to the seat. She was pale already, lips trembling blue, fingers digging at the rebar as if she could pull herself free. He caught her wrist.

“Don’t.”

“My son,” she gasped.

“Where?”

She pointed with bloody fingertips toward the back.

Kade looked.

A boy maybe ten years old crouched under two collapsed seats, face streaked black with soot and red with someone else’s blood. His left arm bent at the wrong angle. His eyes locked on Kade’s and stayed there.

“Hey,” Kade said, voice rough. “You can hear me?”

The boy nodded once.

“Good. Stay down till I get you.”

He turned back to the woman. The rod had gone clean through. Pulled now, she died fast. Left in, she died slower. Her pulse fluttered like a trapped bird under his fingers.

“Kade, upper deck is shifting,” Talia said suddenly in his ear, voice back over the reserve channel. “Get out from under midspan. Now.”

Not possible.

The bus screamed as something hit the bridge above.

Outside, the noise changed.

At first Kade thought another section of train had broken loose. Then he realized it was people. Hundreds of people all trying to scream at once.

A blast of white-gold light washed through the torn bus side as Aurelian dropped to the deck twenty feet away.

The impact shook the whole wreck. Windows blew. Loose glass burst inward in a shining wave. Kade threw an arm over the boy’s head on instinct while the woman on the rebar sobbed through clenched teeth.

For one impossible second, the bridge seemed to hold itself still around Aurelian.

He stood in the lane amid smoke and strobes, tall and broad-shouldered, his white-gold suit unmarred except for a slash of black grime across one thigh. Light pulsed under the seams of it, soft and contained, as if his body ran hotter than the city around him. Up close he looked less like a man and more like an answer someone had built.

His gaze swept the wrecked bus, the pinned cars, the flood of reserves and medics and blood.

Then he looked up.

Not at the train.

At his team.

“Aurelian!” Helix shouted from above. “The coupling’s going!”

“I see it,” he said.

His voice carried without effort.

He was calm. Too calm.

Kade shoved to his feet and jumped out of the bus.

“Midspan needs to clear!” he yelled toward Lyle. “Now, now, now!”

Lyle stared at him like he’d lost his mind. Then the deck groaned hard enough to make the decision for everyone.

“Move them!” Lyle roared. “Move everybody!”

Reserves surged into the lane, dragging, shoving, carrying. A man with both legs mangled under a collapsed motorcycle screamed as two responders lifted him by his jacket because there was no time to do it clean. Someone slipped in blood and went down under a stampede of feet. A medic knelt over a child with half his ribs showing through a shredded shirt and then had to leave him there when the bridge jolted again.

Kade grabbed the trapped boy from the bus and hauled him out across his shoulder. The kid was lighter than he should’ve been. Too light. Shock made people feel hollow.

“Kade,” Talia snapped in his ear. “Upper line is failing.”

“I know.”

“Then run.”

He did.

Two steps out from the bus, Kade looked up and caught Strafe freezing again.

The speedster stood on the side of the hanging rail car with one foot braced on bare metal. Wind whipped his blood into a thin red line down his neck. He twitched once. Hard. A jerking full-body shiver that looked nothing like fatigue.

Helix moved toward him across the rail spine, hands glowing. “Eli, hold still.”

Strafe turned his head toward her.

Too fast.

Kade saw the grin go first.

Then the face under it changed.

Not physically. Worse than that. It emptied out. Every scrap of bright showboat arrogance, gone in one blink, replaced by something flat and dead and fixed so hard on Helix it made Kade’s stomach drop.

“That wasn’t right,” Kade muttered.

Aurelian was already moving.

He launched upward in a bolt of white-gold, not toward the collapsing coupling but toward Strafe.

Too late.

Strafe vanished.

A red-silver smear knifed across the rail line and hit Bastion square in the side.

The sound wasn’t human.

It was metal folding. Bone breaking. A shield failing all at once.

Bastion went through the side of an emergency evac bus in an explosion of blue light, glass, and meat. The whole vehicle lifted off its wheels. The people inside it never had time to scream properly. One second faces at the windows, the next a red wash as Bastion’s armored body punched through seats and torsos and out the far side, dragging half the bus wall with him.

Blood sprayed thirty feet.

A severed arm slapped wetly onto the hood of a police cruiser.

For one stunned heartbeat, the entire bridge went quiet.

Then Helix screamed Strafe’s name.

Strafe hit her before the echo finished.

He tore her off the rail line in a blur, drove her headfirst into the upper support beam, and came away with half her face painted across the steel. Bone flashed white through red. Her body spasmed once, bioelectric light erupting uselessly from her hands as she slid limp and broken toward the edge.

Civilians started running in every direction at once.

Vesper burst from shadow near the broken rail and slashed for Strafe’s throat. He caught her wrist. Twisted. Kade heard the snap all the way from the lower deck. Vesper’s blade spun free into the night. Strafe drove his fist through her stomach and out her back in a gush of black-red blood that pattered down over the traffic below.

Someone on the bridge beside Kade vomited.

Someone else started praying.

The boy on Kade’s shoulder began to sob into his back, small desperate sounds Kade almost couldn’t hear over the ringing in his ears.

This isn’t happening.

Except it was.

Aurelian hit Strafe hard enough to crack the air.

White-gold force slammed the speedster off the rail spine and through a support tower, shredding steel in a burst of sparks and pulverized concrete. For an instant Kade thought that was it. That the strongest man in the world had stepped in and the nightmare would stop making sense.

Then Strafe tore back out of the cloud, blood fanning from his mouth, and went for Aurelian’s eyes.

Not wild.

Not confused.

Precise.

Predatory.

Below them, Bastion dragged himself out of the ruined evac bus in a waterfall of blood and broken safety glass. Half his face was caved in. One arm hung by strips of suit and muscle. Still, blue gravitic light started to build around him again, pulsing harder and harder with each ragged breath.

He looked straight at the nearest knot of civilians.

Kade stopped dead.

Bastion wasn’t looking through them at falling debris or route geometry or anything a hero should’ve been tracking.

He was looking at them the way starving men looked at meat behind glass.

The whole bridge lurched.

A fresh section of rail snapped overhead. Metal shrieked. One of the dangling train cars dropped another foot toward the deck, windows vomiting passengers into empty air.

Lyle was yelling something. Reserves were dragging bodies and living people and sometimes both at once. A man without a lower jaw crawled over broken glass, leaving a dark slick behind him. Helix’s corpse rolled off the upper line and hit the bridge near the median with a wet crack that burst bone through skin. Vesper still hung impaled on Strafe’s arm above while Aurelian burned brighter and brighter against the night.

Kade stared up at the carnage and understood it all in one cold, impossible flash.

The Crown Guard wasn’t losing control of the rescue.

They weren’t failing.

They were turning on each other.

And down on the bridge, with the city still cheering through live feeds that hadn’t caught up yet, Kade Foster was standing in the middle of the first superhero massacre in history.