SEASON OF DESTRUCTION is based on the theory that everything in our universe is in motion, traveling in its own orbit. All these moving parts - the things we see every day, the things we can't see, the things we'll never live to understand - are being pushed or pulled along paths of attraction, for better or worse.

Some orbits are harmonious, like the circumstances that created Earth and positioned it to produce and support life.

Other orbits are erratic, even destructive - like the radioactive disruption of a single cell that becomes cancerous, then multiplies to corrupt and overcome a body in a mutiny of rot.

The paths of men and women are no different.

A gifted orator can unite the people of a nation or divide them, or incite one half to exterminate the other.

Mark Twain wrote:

"Man is the only animal that causes pain, knowing it to be pain."

Man feels secure when he can convince himself that the brutality of his species, the collisions of force and matter beyond his control, are the aftershocks of punches thrown between two cosmic boxers: Good and Evil.

These fighters wage eternal rounds of combat for the sake of a grand prize: The salvation or destruction of the human race.

Modern religion teaches Man that he and his fate are the pinnacle of all universal purpose, and that every detail of his life, from the grandest action to the slightest impure thought, has been scripted in advance and catalogued by a bearded ghost who lives in the clouds.

A cell is cancerous because God has willed it so. The gravitational pull of a distant star nudges a wobbling asteroid into the path of a doomed planet as part of God's plan. A tropical storm that claims thousands of lives is seen as God's punishment of the wicked, and as His pop-quiz test of faith in the righteous.

Man assigns to God sole and total responsibility for anything that occurs beyond the limits of human logic and understanding. At the same time, Man sidesteps culpability for his savage impulses and brutal actions by chalking his destructive behavior up to binary tosses of God's cosmic coin: heads or tails, good or evil.

Season of Destruction forms the hub of a loosely connected trilogy based on the premise that the killers among us are nothing more than naturally occurring elements of our world - drifting particles whose organic paths result in death and destruction. The characters who collide with these killers are not righteous heroes or principled, chosen defenders. They are merely opposing particles whose orbits bring them into contact and conflict with representations of Man's concept of evil. Two lumps of living matter dangerously arrived at the same wrong place at the worst possible time.

The outcomes of these collisions are neither predestined nor purposed. They simply are.

What if the two-legged predators of our species felt a born-again compulsion to honor their concept of God's imagined opposite number - a universal force of Evil demanding blood instead of prayer? What if our civilization, rather than standing as the pinnacle of this planet's evolution, were nothing but a failed incarnation: the latest, and not even the best draft, of a repeated experiment?

Our little populated rock of a planet would seem a precious stone perhaps, if cut and polished and mounted in a solitary setting. In truth, Earth is only one of a billion loose gems scattered and lost in a deep shag rug, invisible to each other, indistinguishable from above, each a lone winking flash lost among a galaxy of light. We are hardly a prize fit for the winner of an apocalyptic Battle Royale between God and the Devil.

What if there wasn't a single fickle God assigning the content and plotting the course of this world, but a boisterous and varied cast of players with personalities fickle and flawed, and just human enough to act rashly to serve their own motivations - a madcap Mount Olympus meets Sendak's Wild Rumpus?

What if these gods of nature were tasked with rising and correcting the unruly species of Man through the occasional catastrophic do-over, like a cosmic bouncer showing a sloppy drunk to the door?

CHARACTERS - OVERVIEW

The story arc of Season of Destruction has a simple trajectory: Nearly everyone dies. It's a swim meet in a shark tank, and only a handful of people come out of the pool alive. There are no heroes. There are only survivors, people spared by the same dumb luck that decides the winner of a coin toss.

Shared circumstances compartmentalize our characters and the Reader moves like a Pullman conductor from one sleeper car to another as the cast are shaken, sorted and brutally whittled down to a final few.

All the while, universal circumstances (thousands of escaped inmates taking an entire Burning Man-type festival hostage, and a tightening noose of approaching wildfires) quickly drive the speed of the entire train to a rocketing, rail-rocking pace that inevitably jumps the tracks in disaster.

THE VAMPIRES

The term "vampire" is used here for the sake of convenience, but if Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker or Roma storytellers had given creative life to the evil trio at the heart of Season of Destruction, then a different accepted name would already exist to identify and define the villainous brothers LUCIEN, THIBAULT and MARCEL.

That identity would be familiar, and would at once reveal the brothers' motivations, foretell their actions, and betray their weaknesses - to other characters in their world, and to the Reader. How do you kill a vampire? The methods are as well known as home remedies. Seltzer water takes out bloodstains; garlic, crucifixes and wooden stakes take out vampires.

The founding premise of this vampire reinvention assumes they are a rare but organic occurrence - humans converted into a new subspecies through natural circumstances never fully explained to the Reader, nor correctly understood by the vampires themselves. Like wolves walking among domesticated dogs, our vampires are nothing more than human predators hiding in plain sight within the family of Man.

Season of Destruction hijacks the vampire genre from the classic interpretations by Murnau and Lugosi, and the late-model Anne Rice-era creations, and exposes them as complicated, overblown and greatly glamorized. The Reader, and the characters who deal closely with our vampires, quickly learn that the old-school vampire story is an inflated distortion of something natural, visceral and real.

As human converts, however, our vampires are not immune to the overwhelming human need to feel called and controlled by divine powers. The trio's mentor, MASTER LAVOISIER, believes that a full-moon ceremony of human sacrifice meant to honor his imagined goddess, Lady Death, was the cosmic catalyst that transformed him, and empowered him to transform others.

Taking lives goes against the man-made concept of God; therefore, Lavoisier creates a goddess of Lady Death. He ascribes his body's transformation, and his instinct to kill and cannibalize, as part of Her grand plan. Like a born-again Christian eager to strut from door to door and spread the Good News, Lavoisier becomes a born-again killer sowing seeds of doom.

Young Lucien, Thibault and Marcel become his first converts.

MASTER LAVOISIER and THE CEREMONY

ISSUE ONE contains a flashback that reveals a scene of the boys' tutelage at the hands of their mentor, Master Lavoisier, and hints at the history of bad blood between eldest boy Lucien and youngest brother Marcel.

As the vampires prepare to sacrifice LINDA DOYLE (ISSUE 008), we flash back to the original ceremony that converted them and reveal the back story of Master Lavoisier. This flashback is our only extensive trip into the past. It fuses everything the Reader and characters have learned about the vampires through observation and exposition - and explains the origin of a conflict between two of the brothers that will claim one of the boys' lives before the story ends.

We transition into this back story when a gang member, working as a sort of personal assistant to the vampires, forms a theory about who the trio really are. The vampires have never referred to themselves as "others"; nor have they hidden the time and place of their origin. They have openly used their abilities to support the gang's criminal enterprise, to ensure their supply of meth-tainted blood (drunk from glasses, not sucked from fang-pierced necks). Their calm fearlessness, and their capability to quickly heal - even regenerate - convinces their personal assistant (a former goth and lifelong horror fan) that this strange trio are, in fact, vampires.

The assistant screens his collection of vampire films during a meth bender. The films intrigue and amuse Lucien, Thibault and Marcel, who've never seen themselves as "others", but were taught by Master Lavoisier that they're like dark saints, blessed by Lady Death and favored with the gifts to live long and carry out Her will. They're dazzled by the week-long film festival, and when pressed by an eager audience, they are willing to admit that - yes, perhaps they are indeed vampires.

When a hanger-on asks to be bitten and initiated as one of the undead, the brothers imitate the films they've just seen by stripping the flesh from her throat and watching her die - partially in jest, but half-expecting that she might actually transform to become one of them.

We flash back to pre-revolution France, when the boys' father, DOCTOR MURAT, serves as personal surgeon to a young artillery chef-de-battalion - the future Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. During Napoleon's early campaigns, Doctor Murat shares bivouac quarters in the field with Master Lavoisier, Napoleon's distant cousin. A hemophiliac, Lavoisier has been raised in isolation, living in constant fear of the slightest scratch or bruise. From a young age, he devoted his life to the study of blood, hoping to rid the disease from his family line and sire healthy heirs to retain the family's property and fortune.

Protectively clad in a padded Michelin Man-style moonsuit and traveling in a specially upholstered coach, Lavoisier attaches himself to Napoleon's surgical corps to learn the latest techniques and theories of modern medicine. Each night he tours the bivouacs of rank-and-file troops to research alternative remedies that range from farmhouse folk medicine to the darker practices of foreign born conscripts, including curses and superstition, shamanism, voodoo and witchcraft.

Tagging along with Napoleon's army also affords Lavoisier unique opportunities to perform his own experiments. He dispatches his footmen to snatch wounded soldiers from the battlefield to serve as helpless test subjects. Ever the curious scientist, Lavoisier considers the variable of gender, and then of pregnancy upon the properties of human blood. Soon, expectant mothers go missing from the Grand Armee's support train of wives, mistresses, nurses and whores.

Lavoisier stands alone and unparalleled in his field of gruesome research - a bizarre blend of mad science, Mengele-style torture medicine, elements of the occult and bloody Stonehenge-era sacrifices geared to the cycles of the sun and moon.

His personal transformation from man to vampire is never fully understood nor explained, but his petitions for Lady Death's favor, though structured as a sham ceremony, just happened to incorporate the right combination of astrological, biological and scientific ingredients - a fluke with concrete, repeatable results, like the natural occurrence of mold yielding the miracle drug penicillin.

Lavoisier remains unaware of his success until he suffers a small cut - exactly the type of tiny but fatal wound he has feared all his life. He is astonished to watch it heal with incredible speed, almost before his eyes. Before he can begin to comprehend what he has achieved, however, Lavoisier is arrested. Doctor Murat reported his suspicions of Lavoisier's twisted practices, and Napoleon's military police have unearthed the bodies of wounded enemy prisoners meticulously mutilated for no obvious medical reason, and a score of pregnant women murdered in a gruesome and sadistic ritual fashion. Lavoisier is summarily executed and buried.

After a long period of darkness, Lavoisier's mind stirs, then awakens. A scattered range of sensations gradually accumulate and sharpen, and the dead man becomes aware of his limbs flailing in an automatic, mechanical motion as his body struggles beneath a great weight. Though this claustrophobic suffocation should feel like a nightmare, Lavoisier delights as if experiencing a sweet dream.

In this dream Lavoisier's body is no longer a fragile vessel, but something robust and renewed, capable of great stamina as he thrashes to break free of the cold mass pressing down on him. When his fingers claw beyond restriction and into empty space, Lavoisier realizes he is neither dead nor dreaming, but awake - altered, and alive.

Cold night air rushes into his lungs as he finds himself in a surreal scene: he is emerging from a shallow grave beneath a grove of splintered trees on an abandoned field of battle. A cluster of musket balls fired by his executioners erupt from the torn skin of his chest, pushed from healing cavities as the fatal wounds close. He blinks wildly, brushing the dirt from his eyes, spitting soil and staring slack-jawed at the strange roots that sprout from beneath the nails of his fingers and toes.

Lavoisier staggers from the grave, then breaks into a run, following his heightened predator's senses to a nearby village. He slaughters the occupants of a farm and consumes their flesh and blood before laying down to rest. Lavoisier licks his lips, picking skin and sinew from his teeth while sketching a plan for revenge against the informer Doctor Murat as he drifts off to sleep.

Guided by the scent of blood and the smoke of battle, Lavoisier strolls carelessly between two skirmishing armies, then infiltrates Napoleon's rear echelon by dressing himself in the bloodied uniform of a dead French captain. When he is brought to Murat, Lavoisier springs from the litter and murders Murat's nurse and attendants. Their screams draw no special attention in this age of unanaesthetized amputation.

Murat's final pleas for mercy make mention of his pregnant wife and three sons in Marseilles. Lavoisier's sadistically inquisitive mind spots an opportunity to conduct more research to further explore and refine his dark new practice. He makes a quick meal of Murat's warm flesh and then sets out for Marseilles to call on the good doctor's family.

Received by Mrs. Murat at the family's mansion, Lavoisier portrays himself as a colleague bearing terrible news of Doctor Murat's demise on the battlefield. He insinuates himself into the family as the boys' tutor, claiming their father's dying wish was for Lavoisier to oversee their education.

In shock and inconsolable, the pregnant and grieving MRS. MURAT withdraws to her chambers as Lavoisier takes over. One by one, the household's servants depart in the night without bothering to pack or collect their pay. The boys' days are filled with classical studies and sport, but nights at the Murat mansion become Roman scenes of debauchery as Lavoisier drains the family's fortune playing host to Marseilles' most wretched denizens, snatching unwitting subjects to further his strange experiments.

The wildest celebrations take place when the moon is full, and each occasion begins with a grand feast. The boys awaken with groggy heads after these blowouts, unable to account for large gaps in their memory or the origin of bloody bruises in their wrists, ankles and arms. Lavoisier claims to be administering medication while they sleep, a regimen of vitamin therapy to help the teenage trio grow strong and tall enough to earn commissions and fulfill their dreams of serving as junior officers under Emperor Bonaparte.

But Marcel suspects they're being drugged by their mentor, and at the next full-moon feast, he avoids much of the wine Lavoisier presses upon the boys. Retiring with his brothers when excused from the table, he attempts to remain alert, but falls asleep ... until the sound of his mother's screams bring him running to her chamber.

Marcel finds a horrible scene. The ceiling of his mother's chamber, and the roof of the room above, have been hacked open to expose her bed to the night sky. Mrs. Murat lay bleeding and hysterical, nine months pregnant, womb quivering and white under the full moon.

Lucien and Thibault lay unconscious beside their mother, wrists and ankles bound to hers, veins pierced and plumbed with a strange series of glass tubes and rubbers hoses, routing blood in a complicated circuit through the bodies of Mrs. Murat, her eldest sons and Master Lavoisier. Kneeling naked in a creeping pool of blood flowing from Mrs. Murat's lacerated womb, Lavoisier's has attached a needle and tubing into the unborn baby's umbilical cord.

Master Lavoisier gasps and throws his back into a deep arch like a drawn Mongol bow as his chest is pierced by the tip of a fencing foil: Marcel has run him through from behind, and the boy works the handle as if cranking a Model T, driving Lavoisier from the growing circle of blood on the floor and into the shadows beyond the moonlight's perimeter. Awkwardly grasping but unable to reach the weapon bobbing from the center of his back, impaled Lavoisier scuttles across the room, an insect specimen unwilling to be pinned to a classification card.

Marcel pulls a cavalry saber from a wall-mounted display and falls upon Lavoisier with all his might, firmly anchoring the flailing man's torso to the floor. Marcel grabs a double-edged sword from the wall and stands over Lavoisier, savagely plunging the weapon through his body again and again until his hands slip over the hilt and slide down both edges of the blade, laying his palms open deep into the muscle.

Marcel recoils, falling to his knees in the pool of blood flooding from his dying mother as she gasps her final words, begging Marcel to save the baby. Marcel's slashed hands fumble to remove the bonds lashing Mrs. Murat's ankles and wrists to those of his motionless brothers. This dislodges some of the connections that join their circulatory systems and Marcel is doused with pulsing red spurts that blend the blood of his mother and brothers with the blood of Master Lavoisier. The hot cocktail also mixes with the gushing lacerations on Marcel's palms, and the disconnected tubing gripped in his hands suctions the queer red blend into the circuit, carrying it to the others. The stillborn body of his new brother emerges, tumbling between Marcel's knees into the dark circle of blood that surrounds him, the full moon's glow reflected in its surface.

Marcel's mind slips from gear and idles for hours until daylight as the moon passes overhead and out of view. The body of his mother and the baby in his arms have grown cold by the time dawn breaks. His mind and spirit have broken, their pieces scattered beyond the point where they might be retrieved, never mind repaired.

Thibault wakes and reaches for the baby's corpse, cradles it with gentle but detached fascination as Lucien stirs to overcome his drugged stupor. Their arms show no signs of bruising, not the slightest mark from the strange assortment of intravenous catheters that earlier pierced their skin. Marcel's palms stopped bleeding hours ago and are very nearly healed.

Marcel doesn't react, doesn't even blink when Lavoisier noisily gasps and gurgles back to life, grunting as he does a push-up to unpin his sword-bristling body from the wooden floor. He crawls from the shadows like a kicked dog, sword tips gouging the planks beneath him.

Lucien hurries to remove the swords from the perforated body of their mentor, then lashes out at Marcel, furious that he would attack Lavoisier and interrupt the experiment. It is revealed that Lucien was transformed in a similar ceremony with a pregnant woman at the last full moon, and willingly participated in tonight's sacrifice of their mother and baby brother in order to transform Thibault.

Lavoisier recruited Lucien as his research assistant, and together they decided Marcel was to remain unaltered and serve as a mortal source of genetically similar blood: a one-man control group to be monitored as Lavoisier furthered his research with Lucien and Thibault, perfecting the means to one day raise an unstoppable army to dethrone Napoleon and rule France.

Now that Marcel has gone from guinea pig to Godzilla, however, Lucien is given permission to play junior scientist. He presses his youngest brother into service as a crash-test dummy. Marcel is submitted to physical mutilation, amputation, torture, gunshots, drowning, strangulation, falls from great height, crushing, fire and drowning - all at the hands of brown-nosing Lucien, who relishes reporting the results to Master Lavoisier, who is always eager for more data and understanding of this new breed's capability.

However, that which does not kill Marcel, over and over and over, only warps the youngest Murat boy from case to core, making him a meaner, tougher and more sadistically twisted character than his elder brothers or Master Lavoisier could pretend to be on their best day.

Marcel's body regenerates without fail, rebounding from each catastrophic injury like a cartoon coyote. Then the tatters of his scarred psyche slowly begin to turn like the ripped sails of a dark Quixote windmill. Driven by Lucien's endless cruelty and humiliation, the stones of Marcel's heart and mind grind his anger and resentment into the fine, bitter grist of revenge. The idea of killing Lucien becomes the centerpiece of Marcel's concept of Happily Ever After.