Villains Don't Do Time! (Night Terror Book 6)

by Mia Archer

  I pushed those thoughts away. I didn't have time for interpersonal drama or romance or any of that bullshit. I barely had the intellectual and emotional capacity to handle all the crazy potentially world ending bullshit that was going on around me.

  Besides. We were in two different cells. It's not like things could get all that terribly interesting even if I had a mind to give in to some of those desires. Not without contorting ourselves into some very uncomfortable positions that I didn’t need to be imagining right now because it was distracting me all over again.

  “How is a successful alien invasion of Starlight City a good thing for anyone but the aliens doing the invading?” I asked. “Though come to think of it the whole thing might not even be good for them if they didn’t get their shots before they came through those portals…”

  Though something told me I wasn’t going to get so lucky as to have the common cold take care of these aliens. Fialux and that Sabine chick had lived among them and they weren’t all keeling over from a case of the sniffles, after all.

  “Come on. I figure someone is going to defeat these aliens," she said. “That's how it always is. Or at least that's how it always was."

  The piercing look she gave me told me she wasn't counting on me to be the one to defeat the alien menace. It also told me she might’ve pinned her hopes on me once upon a time.

  "Sorry to disappoint you kid," I said.

  "Kid," she said, bristling. "I'm not that much younger than you!"

  "Yeah, but there's a whole yawning chasm of knowledge and experience in between us," I said. "And one of the things you need to learn in this world is the bad guys win sometimes. That's something I’ve proved time and time again."

  "But you're not the bad guy," she said. "Not like these assholes. You cared about people. You stopped villains and heroes alike from hurting the city. You pushed the really bad stuff into the underground. I know, because you kicked my ass and pushed me into the underground where I saw some shit.”

  I waved a dismissive hand. "And yet that underground continued existing without me realizing it was going on right under my nose."

  Though admittedly that was probably mostly because of disinterest rather than because I couldn't ferret out a bunch of wannabe heroes and villains who were clinging to Starlight City’s seedy underbelly. The criminal underground existed because I didn’t care about it. Not because they were pulling one over on me.

  Any further conversation was cut off by an alarm followed by a mist that filled the common room. The only problem there was gases tended to expand to fill whatever space they were in, which meant that mist was working its way into my cell.

  "Great," I said, taking a deep breath and holding it.

  "What are you…"

  The girl, whatever her name was, started to cough and sputter as the mist filled her cell.

  "Fire suppression system," I choked out, using as little of the precious air as I could. “I think.”

  It's not like I thought they were actually going to try and suffocate us, but I figured they didn't care all that much about whatever lovely cancer-causing agents might be in that mist considering they were using it on a bunch of superpowered criminal scum.

  Besides, I wouldn’t put it past the powers-that-be at this place to lace that mist with something that was supposed to make me nice and compliant. I wasn’t breathing that shit if I could avoid it. The only problem there was I couldn’t hold my breath forever and I didn’t have any of my rebreathers available.

  Already I could see the new girl’s eyes glazing over. Meanwhile outside the flames Firebrand had been tossing around were coming to an end. Whether that was because of the fire suppression or because of something they were pumping into the room was anyone’s guess.

  More guards moved in. Human guards. They still hadn’t moved any of the aliens in here to do guard duty which seemed odd. The guards all bore Starlight City SuperMax logos on their uniforms and weapons. Though these weapons were different from the stuff the normal guards had. They looked oddly familiar, and when they started firing I felt a chill.

  Several heroes were enveloped in bubbles that brought them to a halt. Firebrand in particular came to a stop, but the bubble immediately started turning a bright shade of blue because of the kind of power she was putting out. The kind of power that could overwhelm an anti-Newtonian bubble.

  Son of a bitch. I’d give a pretty penny to get a close look at the guns they were using. I had a sneaking suspicion those weapons were designs stolen from yours truly by Dr. Lana and sold to the good people at SuperMax for a tidy profit, but I’d need to get my hands on one of those weapons to have that sneaking suspicion confirmed.

  Once they were finished with the anti-Newtonian bubbles they cleaned up by firing stun blasts. Something I’d invented to interrupt a living creature’s nervous system without killing. Assuming the living creature being stunned didn't have an other underlying medical condition.

  Bastards! They were stealing my shit and using it against other villains! I guess they were using it against heroes, too, which was okay in my book, but mostly they were using it against villains!

  “Wow,” the new girl said. "That stuff is amazing! What I wouldn't give to get my hands on it!"

  "You and me both," I said.

  Of course I’d forgotten that I didn’t want to breathe that mist, but it’s not like I could hold my breath forever. The moment that stuff hit my lungs I started to feel better about the world. Like it didn’t matter that I was stuck in prison. It didn’t matter that I was watching the officials in that prison using weapons they’d clearly stolen from me to put down my fellow villains.

  Shit. They had laced the mist. That or pumping happy mist into the room had been the whole fucking point and it wasn’t for fire suppression at all.

  "Oh yeah?" she asked. "Does it remind you of your stuff or something?"

  "I'm pretty sure that is my stuff," I said. "Or at least it's my stuff that's been stolen from me and reverse engineered and then sold to the highest bidder."

  "That sounds like a story I'd like to hear," the girl said.

  There was a long stretch. I finally turned and looked at her. She leaned against the bars with her hands wrapped around them looking at me expectantly.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Usually that's your cue to tell me the awesome story of how they got your stuff," she said.

  "Yeah, well get used to disappointment," I said, feeling a stab of enjoyment that I was turning the whole mystery thing around on her. “The story isn’t all that interesting to begin with. Trust me.”

  She frowned, but didn't ask for my life story again. I wasn't in the mood to go delivering a prison life story anyway. In my experience a villain delivering their life story and experiences to a younger person who worshipped them was the first step towards that older villain being killed off just in time for the new villain to take over their former teacher’s job at a dramatically appropriate moment.

  No thank you. I planned on living forever. Or at least until I got bored and the heat death of the universe came around. Assuming the models that said heat death was the universe’s eventual fate were right. I planned on being around to see whether they were right, is the point.

  The trick was getting out of here and surviving long enough to upload myself to a computer once I figured how to do that.

  Outside the fire seemed to be dying down. The bodies on the floor out in the common area made it clear they’d hit everyone in there with a hell of a lot of knockout gas, though I also didn’t doubt there were more than a few dead villains out there considering how nasty the heroes were going after them.

  I’d gotten a glancing blow of the stuff and I was feeling pretty tired. Pretty good, for that matter. Way better than I should’ve felt considering my current circumstances.

  I smiled. If I had access to a fire suppression system and a knockout gas system you bet your ass I’d use the fire suppression system on a hero like Firebrand before I
did anything with knockout gas.

  It looks like whoever was running crowd control on the current riot didn't have the same twisted sense of humor I did though. A pity.

  "I think I'm going to go take a nap now," I said. "Looks like they've got the riot under control, and whatever they pumped through here has me tuckered out."

  “Same here,” the girl said, her eyes drooping.

  I shook my head. This woman was crazy, but I suppose if I was going to have a crazy person in the cell next to me she might as well be a crazy person who was easy on the eyes.

  For now, though, it was time to get some sleep. At least if I was asleep I wouldn’t have to think about all the crazy shit that’d gone down to put me here.

  Though I was careful to curl up as far from the bars that opened on my shadowy neighbor’s cell. I did want to wake up eventually, no matter how crappy the situation I’d be waking up to was.

  13

  Slop

  "Is that turkey?" I asked.

  "Pork darling," the lady on the other side of the lunch line said. "Delicious, too."

  "I'll go ahead and have some of that then," I said.

  Not for the first time I was struck with how incredibly odd it was that everything was so nice in this place. It wasn't at all what I’d expect from a prison, but then again this wasn't a normal prison. No, it was the sort of prison where they wanted to keep the inmates happy so any rampages those inmates went on when they inevitably escaped didn’t include the good workers at this facility.

  Take this chow line. I expected some low wage overweight lunch lady with a cigarette hanging out of her lips to pour some slop onto a plastic tray that’d been manufactured when Eisenhower was still in office, but they had actual silverware and nice glass plates here. And the food looked delicious. Mouthwateringly so.

  It was all damned peculiar, but as long as I got a good meal I wasn't going to complain too much.

  Even the dining area was a lot nicer than I’d expected. I'd always imagined prison dining areas to be like a school lunchroom, but with a lot more angry people. Not what I saw here.

  For the most part villains sat around tables that had tablecloths and everything. Like we were at a fancy restaurant and not in one of the most notorious prisons in the world. Villains chatted affably with one another and generally seemed to be having a good time.

  I grabbed some mashed potatoes to go with my pork. It was important to get some carbs. I'd been doing a bodyweight routine in my cell since I didn't have access to my usual exercise stuff. I figured getting thrown into prison was no excuse to skimp on my workout routine.

  I’d been a touch annoyed that there was no prison yard with a bunch of weights like pop culture told me to expect, but that was yet another example of prison life not meeting expectations based on movies. Though there were some movies that used to play late night on Cinemax that I wouldn't have minded reenacting here in prison.

  I kept my head down as I walked through the dining hall. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I recognized a few villains whose asses I'd kicked when I was on the way up, and a few others who looked like at me like they’d thought about taking a shot at me once upon a time and decided it wasn't worth it.

  Either way, it was a room full of people I'd rather not go up against when I had no powers to my name except for my contacts that still couldn't get a signal from the outside world, so it's not like they were any help.

  Not that contact lenses that allowed me access to my heads up display would do much of anything if they weren’t attached to my suit which gave me all of my strength and other weapons. No, they were just lenses that had pretty little overlays constantly blinking warnings that I was dead.

  My continued existence seemed to put the lie to that, but that didn’t stop the biometric warnings from getting into a tizzy because they were no longer connected to my suit and equated that with “dead” rather than “disconnected.”

  One of many things I’d have to update. If I ever managed to get out of here.

  Speaking of things I’d be updating if I ever got out. I was definitely creating a subdermal pattern buffer after this that carried a new suit. That way I’d always have a suit waiting to be teleported around me, and no one could get to it without doing an invasive surgery. I also wouldn’t be telling any girlfriends about it, and I’d make sure to put it someplace where they couldn’t find it even if they did a little non-surgical exploration of some of my insides.

  Giggity.

  I should’ve already had something like that. I’d simply never conceived of a scenario where I’d be stuck in a place like this stripped of all my stuff.

  Recent events had proved to me that my imagination wasn't nearly up to thinking of all the potential bad scenarios that could be visited upon me as it probably should’ve been.

  "What the hell is going on in here?"

  The voice was loud and firm. When I looked up it didn't seem like the kind of voice that should belong to a silver haired woman who looked like someone's grandma who'd kept in shape over the years. But that's exactly who was saying it.

  Everyone stopped and looked up. Firebrand had made an appearance in the dining hall. That was another odd thing. People seemed to be able to come and go whenever they pleased. As long as there weren’t any of those aliens around, at least, in which case everyone got shuffled back into the lockup.

  The looks she got weren’t pleasant. Considering the way she’d used a riot as an excuse to have some of her hero buddies beat up on some of the villains who’d made this place their home I couldn’t blame them for glaring.

  "You mean to tell me our tax dollars are paying for a bunch of villains to have a fancy dinner party in the prison we created for them?" she said, still loud.

  She wanted the villains to hear her. She was trying to provoke something here. I wondered if she’d get the reaction she was looking for, and movement caught out of the corner of my eye showed me that she was going to get a reaction, all right. A big reaction.

  One of the villains, the hulking guy who looked like he was made entirely of rock, stood. It struck me as a little odd that a living rock would be in the commissary eating in the first place. Did rocks need food? I wasn't going to inquire too deeply about his physiological needs, though, since that would involve getting close to a dude who looked like he could snap me in two without any of my toys to protect me.

  "You got a problem?" he asked.

  Surprisingly his voice was high pitched and a little nasal. Not at all the deep gravelly voice I expected.

  "Yeah I've got a problem," Firebrand said. "I don't like that all of you are living the high life in here while real heroes and real people on the outside are suffering!"

  The rock looked around. Looked back to Firebrand. Smiled. Which was an odd look considering he was made of rock. It didn’t seem like a rock creature should be able to articulate in as many ways as he did, and yet somehow he pulled it off.

  The people at Mattel would kill to be able to create something that realistic with that many non-obvious points of articulation.

  "I don't know if you've noticed lady," he said. "But you're one of us now. Welcome to the ranks of the criminals."

  He held his hands out to the side encompassing everyone in the room and laughed. It was a low rumbling noise, and all the other villains picked up on the cue and started laughing right along with him. Which didn't seem to sit well with Firebrand. Her eyes narrowed.

  She weaved her way through the tables, and her path took her right in front of me.

  I'm not sure what impulse caused me to do it. Maybe there was a part of me that was itching to cause some trouble in some way. Even if it was in a very small way. Maybe there was something about this brash heroine that rubbed me the wrong way.

  I couldn't tell if it was because of how cocky, arrogant, and downright annoying she was, if it was that she reminded me of me, or if it was simply that she’d done something to try and stop these aliens while my attempt at saving the world
had consisted largely of having a chat with my ex-girlfriend while the world burned around me.

  Or maybe it had something to do with that prison riot I’m pretty sure she’d manufactured as an attempt to beat up on the good villains who called this place home. If there was one thing I hated in this world it was a bully. Especially a bully who was as full of herself as Firebrand seemed to be.

  Whatever it was, she annoyed me and I had a sudden impulse to do something about that annoyance.

  I stuck my foot out and caught Firebrand by surprise. Clearly from the way her eyes went wide she wasn't expecting anyone to stand up to her. She went down, and her body started to smolder as she went down. The exposed parts of her skin and hair were flames by the time she hit, but that hit seemed to cause the flames to go down for a moment before she caught her breath and reignited.

  Fascinating. I wondered if the prison gave her a flame retardant prison jumpsuit to walk around in, because otherwise we would’ve been treated to an unfortunate view of some old lady bits when she dropped the flames.

  There was more laughter from the gathered villains. Clearly they liked the idea of watching this idiot heroine who’d helped beat the crap out of some of them fall flat on her face.

  She popped up and glared at me.

  At least I thought she was glaring at me. It was difficult to tell what with the way her entire body was wreathed in flames. Also? It was a little uncomfortable standing so close to her when she was in flames, but I wasn't about to let on that I was uncomfortable or slightly intimidated. Even if it was unpleasant feeling hot flames when I didn't have my suit or my shielding to stop it from bothering me.

  I wondered if this was what Fialux felt like when she'd lost her powers and found herself interacting with the real world as a mortal for the first time.

  If so then I was getting a totally new sympathy for her and the funk she’d gone into after losing her powers.