A darkened cell. One prisoner lights a cigarette and hands it to her cellmate. One of them – Susan – is a young girl in a school uniform. The other – Meggan – is not older but of bizarre appearance – with fur, antenna, sharp teeth, claws and bat-like wings. As the girls share the cigarette Meggan asks what Sue has heard about him.
Sue begins to talk but Meggan shushes her momentarily. A guard in a beetle armor walks by their cell. With him gone, Sue returns to her tale. Someone said they had seen him in a foodline.
(Sue’s tale)
The London sky is smoggy. Somewhere near Big Ben, worn-down people stand in line before a guarded truck where food is being handed out. In the line stand Brian and Betsy Braddock.
Sue describes that there were “two Beetles,” who pulled someone out of the line. They had singled out a young Punk with a pink Mohawk and began harassing him, first asking for his papers, then beginning to examine him, making comments about his strange looks and claiming that he must be a mutant or other kind of freak.
While the two men are playing their sadistic game, the young man’s girl friend hysterically turns to the man next to her. Asking him for help, she pulls at the coat. It rips open and reveals the costume of Captain Britain. The girl turns to the Beetles shouting at them to let her friend go. Captain Britain is the one they want. Then the foodline parts around him and he just stands there.
Meggan interrupts eagerly, asking if he is as big as they say. Did he stand up straight and have golden hair and burning eyes? That’s what she heard, Sue agrees. And then, she continues, all of the Beetles rushed him at once. All? Meggan interrupts. She’d said there were only two. Actually there were about thirty, Sue corrects her previous claim. And he beat them? Meggan asks. He slaughtered them, Sue describes gleefully. At the end, he was fighting on a pile of bodies, fifty men deep. Hundreds of them. And he slaughtered them. And then he got away.
What has Meggan heard? Bits and pieces, Meggan replies.
(Meggan’s tales)
Someone said he’d come down from the north, marching into London with an army of telepaths and superheroes behind him. And someone else said that they were going to storm through the streets and crush all the Beetles and nothing would stop them. And someone said he’d been executed. And someone said he’d been tortured and informed on all his friends. The fat girl in the end block said that last week.
(present)
Meggan grins as she holds up her claws and informs Sue that she marked the girl’s face. Serves her right. Fat liar. How did they get Sue then?
(Sue’s tale)
Sue explains that they did ESP tests at school with the triangles and wavy lines. She got 48% right. Here she is. What about Meggan?
(Meggan’s tale)
Meggan relates that her people are traveling people. They kept her hidden for seventeen years, but the Beetles searched the van during a roadblock. They didn’t need any card tests with her, did they?
(present)
They got her daddy, William, as well, Took away his crawly dolls. If he had his crawly dolls, he’d make them wish they’d never lived and, if she is still alive by the next full moon, they’ll bloody know about it and all.
Does she think he is really there? That he will come? Sue asks fearfully. He has to come, Meggan replies simply. He’s Captain Britain. He’s got to come.
They extinguish the candle and wish good night both to each other and to their country. They are within a heavily guarded internment camp, next to which stands a poster of Jaspers, proclaiming, “In your hearts, you know he’s right!”
