I'm Not A Hero!

by Mia Archer

  And in that wall of flame they saw the day when it was finally going to catch up to them. The end they’d always known about, always accepted, but always kinda hoped wouldn’t come before they hit retirement.

  Well that end wasn’t happening today.

  “CORVAC!” I shouted. “Shield swarm. Now!”

  CORVAC didn’t waste a moment. One moment those flames were traveling horizontally towards us and looking like the fires of hell itself, and the next moment a massive shield wall spread out from little pinpoints all around the factory as the drones sacrificed a good chunk of their internal power to generate a shield that went up.

  I wasn’t even sure they could do that. It was just an idea that hit me. I figured CORVAC would have shields on his drones, and thankfully collectively they were able to hold back the explosion.

  The flames hit that wall and traveled up. It was touch and go as I watched the readout from the drones. A couple of them winked out of existence as the strain of pushing those shields was too much, but enough survived to save the day.

  A solid wall of flame shot up into the sky in a massive whirling column that they could probably see all the way in downtown.

  Something shot up and out of that explosion. Something that moved in an arc that moved up, up, and then away.

  Shit.

  “Was that what I thought it was?” I asked CORVAC.

  “I believe it was mistress,” CORVAC said. “I cannot say whether or not that explosion was a distraction deliberately created, but…”

  “I’m willing to bet it was,” I said.

  “Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  “Well there’s one thing that fucker didn’t count on,” I said. “I guess they didn’t have satellite coverage on the planet it came from, but we’ll catch up to him.”

  “Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said. “I am already tracking its path through the city.”

  I put my hands on my hips and fought the urge to let out a frustrated growl. I suppose from a certain point of view I’d done well here. I’d managed to stop the evil alien plot, whatever the hell it was, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all those people who’d bought it because the aliens needed a food source for their little hellspawn.

  A hand on my shoulder brought me out of my funk. I almost wheeled around and threw the owner of that hand over my shoulder, but remembered I was surrounded by a bunch of firemen and quieted my instinctive reaction.

  I turned to see the chief, or at least the ranking firefighter by mustache volume, looking into my eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I looked beyond him and saw that all the others had gathered and were nodding at me. They weren’t staring at me reverently like some of the civilians had when I’d fought off giant robots or giant irradiated lizards. They weren’t cheering for me like when I’d stopped that downed plane from crashing into a festival or prevented a shuttle from going nuclear in the middle of a stadium.

  It was simply an acknowledgement. I’d saved their bacon and they were thanking me in their own way.

  I nodded back.

  “No problem,” I said. “I don’t think you’re going to have any more trouble here, but you might want to move your men back just to be safe.”

  This was one instance where I found that I didn’t really mind that they were looking at me like I was a hero. No, in this case I’d take it.

  Also? I totally had work to do that was decidedly not heroic. I thrust my hand into the air and took off, wondering what was happening to me that I’d almost enjoyed saving the day.

  27

  Inhumane Society

  “I should’ve known this would be the place,” I muttered.

  “Excuse me mistress?” CORVAC asked.

  “Come on CORVAC,” I said. “You never had a true appreciation of all the classic villain tropes. That’s why I’m on top and you’re fetching my laundry.”

  “And saving your ass on a regular basis too, I might add,” CORVAC said with a digital sniff.

  “That too,” I said. “I will give you that and thank you for it.”

  “Now will you please explain to me exactly why it is that you should have known the Humane Society would be that cat’s ultimate destination?”

  “Because that’s just how these things work out,” I said. “We were here earlier and I figured it was where they were doing all their secret plotting, but then we had the distraction of that shuttle and chasing after that big white cat and now here we are. It’s always the place you gloss over in your search that becomes important later in the narrative.”

  “But mistress,” CORVAC said. “You are talking about this as though it is a movie or a comic book or something. Real life does not work like that.”

  “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. Take a bunch of heroes and heroines who were raised on pop culture like movies and comic books, add in a dash of them internalizing all that stuff over the course of decades, and you have a situation where a lot of those old tropes suddenly become a hell of a lot more important than you’d imagine.”

  “Interesting. So you are saying there is a generation of heroes and villains who were raised on the stories you are referring to, and so they attempt to replicate those stories in their real world exploits whether they are doing it consciously or subconsciously?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “It pays to know the tropes, because a lot of people use them without thinking about it.”

  “And what of a bunch of aliens from another world who are unaware of those rules?” CORVAC asked.

  “That’s easy,” I said. “Obviously when they came to this world they absorbed a bunch of pop culture so they could pick up the local language and customs. They didn’t learn English from a bunch of cat brains.”

  “Ah, so they went through the same process of internalizing local pop culture, but at a far more rapid pace,” CORVAC said.

  “You bet your ass they did,” I said. “And that means we can use that against them.”

  “Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said. “Will you be needing your disguise this time?”

  I thought back to that stripper outfit he put me in the last time we were here. Sure it was a party outfit befitting a college girl going out for a night on the town, but it still felt like a stripper outfit for me.

  It was the kind of thing I wouldn’t have minded wearing if Fialux was still around to impress, though that line of thinking only led to that gnawing pain in my soul that I had to quickly push down.

  If I was going to get anything done here today then I needed to forget about my girlfriend and defeat these assholes. I no longer thought I was going to get any useful information about what planet they came from, but I figured I could at least bust some heads and prevent them from doing to the rest of humanity what they’d done to the poor bastards in that factory.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Have the drone swarm ready in case things go pear shaped in there.”

  “If you would like I could…”

  I held a hand up. “Gonna stop you right there. This is not a situation that calls for a giant robot crashing through the city, and even if you did put one together when I told you not to do that I’d rather you save the big reveal for a more appropriate time.”

  “Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said. “Keeping my suggestion to myself as suggested.”

  I stalked towards the Humane Society. I was going to destroy each and every alien I came across, but I was aware that by destroying them I was severing the last connection I had on this world to whatever the hell world Fialux had been spirited off to.

  That put me in a very foul mood indeed, but it had to be done.

  “Y’know I’ll bet you five hundred quatloos that the ultimate bad guy turns out to be that little old lady that was manning the front desk,” I said.

  “Excuse me, mistress?”

  “We were talking about tropes. Well I’m betting you five hundred quatloos that the bad guy is the little old lady. No one ever expect
s the little old lady until she tries to bite your face off.”

  “But if it is a little old lady then wouldn’t that mean she is a bad woman, and not a bad guy?”

  “Figure of speech,” I said.

  I pushed the door open, but the front desk was empty. Not a soul to be seen. Not even all the cats that had been there running free earlier which should’ve been a tip off to me that things weren’t as they seemed.

  “What is a quatloo, mistress?” CORVAC asked.

  I put my hands on my hips and surveyed the front lobby. Then I activated my full scanning suite and did a sweep of the building, distracting myself with admonishing CORVAC while I waited for that scan to complete.

  “Come on CORVAC,” I said. “You really spend too much time watching old Battlestar when you could be watching good stuff like Star Trek instead. Landau has nothing on Shatner chewing scenery.”

  “Does Star Trek have computers that attempt to take over the world?” CORVAC asked.

  “Well sure it does. Most scifi touches on that at some point, but Shatner eventually talks them into killing themselves,” I said.

  “Fascinating,” CORVAC said. “Is that where you came up with the name for the Shatner circuit that prevents me from being destroyed by logical paradoxes?”

  “None other than,” I said. “Now hold on. I have something here.”

  The scan hadn’t completed, but the little old lady who I no longer suspected was actually a little old lady rose up from behind the counter with a smile that looked decidedly sinister.

  Though I couldn’t decide if that was because it truly was a sinister smile or if it was that I thought it looked more sinister now that I was pretty convinced she was the final boss. The fact that the fluffy white fucker from another world jumped up and was rubbing against her on the counter only increased that certainty.

  Not to mention there was something freaky about the way she rose up. We’re talking it looked like a vampire rising out of a coffin creepy.

  “How can I help you dearie?” the old woman asked.

  “I don’t know if you can help me,” I said, holding up my wrist blaster. “Any more than you can do anything to help those people at the factory.”

  “You mean the one that blew up this morning?” she asked, sounding genuinely worried. “Such terrible business. Was anyone hurt in the explosion?”

  I dialed up the wrist blaster. Clearly the old bat wasn’t getting the point. This was a life and death situation we were in here, and we were talking about my life and her death. The ominous hum filled the room and that was enough to get the cat to stop its circuit around her legs. It looked up at me and hissed.

  “That’s right you furry little fucker,” I said. “I’m back, and I’m not pulling my punches this time around. You saw what happens when I’m pissed off. Don’t try me here.”

  The old lady’s eyes narrowed and finally the mask dropped. “You don’t talk to my children like that.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “So when you call that cat your child are we talking in the traditional crazy cat lady sense, or are we talking literally in the sense that you’re an alien queen from another world masquerading as a human and using your position in the Humane Society to infect the nearest local biological equivalent to the hosts from your homeworld with your disgusting progeny?”

  Her face screwed up in confusion. Clearly she was having some trouble following my logic train. Heck, I said it and I was having some trouble figuring out if it made sense. How would that sound to an alien from another world who’d just learned English from a bunch of old reruns?

  “You killed my children this morning,” she said, her voice suddenly sounding lower and more numerous.

  “Interesting mistress,” CORVAC said. “Do you know where I can find quatloos on the international exchanges so that I might deliver you your winnings?”

  “What are you even talking about?” I asked.

  “I’m talking about you killing my children!” the old lady shrieked, again her voice sounding rather off because of its sudden multitudinous qualities.

  “Not talking to you, ya old bat,” I said.

  “Your reward for winning the bet, mistress,” CORVAC said. “I am wondering what country uses quatloos so that I might make a deposit into your account.”

  “It’s a made up currency used by a bunch of magical glowing scifi orbs sitting in a cheesy ‘60s approximation of a chamber buried under an ancient planet, CORVAC,” I growled.

  “Ah. So you are saying it never existed as a currency?”

  “You really need to watch more interesting scifi CORVAC,” I said. “And watching Terminator 2 again doesn’t count because you’ve already seen it a thousand times.”

  “Yes mistress,” CORVAC said.

  I turned back to the crazy cat lady. Though I was starting to get the distinct impression she was more of a crazy cat possessing queen come to earth to spread her alien brood and turn humanity into a snack for said brood.

  “Who are you talking to?” she asked, a frown on her rapidly melting face.

  Though it wasn’t melting so much as it looked like something was growing under her skin. Everything looked off. The bone structure wasn’t in the right place. Not that she’d ever looked great, but I’d chalked that up to saggy skin on an old face.

  Now I realized it was saggy skin on a face made up of a bunch of worms stretching it out to create the world’s most fucked up puppet.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “My computer was buzzing in my ear and I sort of have to take the call when he’s on the line.”

  “Oh. Think nothing of it dearie,” the little old lady said with a thin smile. “I deal with the same thing all the time.”

  “Right,” I said, dialing up the power on the old wrist blaster. “So is that a telepathic link with your children or are you communicating with some sort of tech from your home world?”

  “Telepathic, of course,” the little old lady said.

  There was a snap from somewhere. It sounded like it was coming from right by the old broad. Weird.

  “So are you going to come quietly or do I have to do this the hard way?” I asked. “Because I wouldn’t feel bad about disintegrating you, but I do have a couple of questions for you before we get started on the disintegrating.”

  28

  Final Boss

  “Questions?” she asked.

  “Um, well duh,” I said. “You see there was this crazy bitch who I sort of killed on accident. Like it’s not like she didn’t have it coming, but it also doesn’t do me a damn bit of good if she’s dead and her molecules are scattered all around the solar system.”

  “Do you have a point dearie?” the woman asked.

  There was another crack. Her skin stretched and split and there was something wriggling under it. Gross.

  “Yes,” I said. “The point is you assholes all came in on the back of one of those giant irradiated lizards, right?”

  “Yes dearie,” she said.

  There was yet another crack and this time it was the counter she was leaning against that snapped. She was definitely getting larger and larger. Her skin kept tearing with a disgusting ripping noise as the wriggling worms underneath continued adding mass.

  “That’s disgusting,” I said.

  “You don’t like my children?” she asked, sounding like a thousand voices that were all speaking at once directly into my mind.

  I put a hand to my forehead and shook it a couple of times to get over the shock of having that hit me.

  “CORVAC. I think we need to dial up the McKellen-Fassbender compensator,” I said.

  “Of course, mistress,” CORVAC said. “Would you like me to do anything else?”

  I looked at the crazy old cat lady who was growing to truly gargantuan proportions and decided that maybe it was time to call in some help on this one.

  “Oh what the hell. Take it out for a spin,” I said.

  “Take what out for a spin?” CORVAC asked.

 
“You know what I’m talking about CORVAC,” I said.

  This was starting to annoy me. We were wasting precious moments. The desk she was leaning against split down the middle and the whole thing collapsed.

  That would’ve been bad news for the fluffy white cat, but it also seemed to be wriggling under its surface. Yeah, definitely not a cat that had come from my lab. As I watched it seemed to deflate as a bunch of the little alien worm fuckers burst out of a paw and added their mass to the growing crazy cat lady alien queen.

  “CORVAC. I know you’ve been working on a new giant robot or something you can use to fight something huge like this. Go ahead and break it out. I’m not going to be mad at you.”

  “But I do not have anything like that mistress,” CORVAC said. “You have made it clear on multiple occasions that it would end very poorly for me if I attempted to do something like that again. That was my primary reason for developing the drone swarm.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. “I thought you would read between the lines on that one. I tell you not to do something. You do it anyways and then I ignore that you’re doing it anyways until I get in a tight spot where I need you to bail me out.”

  “Nope. I do not have anything waiting in the wings this time,” CORVAC said.

  “Motherfucker,” I said.

  The alien mass wriggled in a most disgusting way what with the way there were little alien worms falling off the thing as it flailed about. I narrowed my eyes and tried to figure out what the hell it was doing, and it took me a moment to realize the thing must be having a conversation with me but I’d tuned it out because of the McKellen-Fassbender compensator.

  I put a hand to my ear. “I have tech that prevents you from digging around in my mind. Occupational hazard when you’re trying to take over the world. You’re going to have to speak up.”

  The room filled with a strange gargling rasping, as though all the worms were taking in their breath at the same time and figuring out how to use it for the first time.

  When the thing spoke it sounded like a monstrosity straight out of H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares. I’m talking the nightmares he had where eldritch abominations from before the dawn of time tried to take over the world. Not the nightmares he had about immigrants taking over the world.