by C. T. Phipps
Checking my surroundings, I saw several white hills that it took me a second to realize were piles of bones. There were thousands of corpses that had been left to rot out in the open, their skin bleached white by the eternal sun. Demonic rat-bat scavengers feasted on them before my eyes. At one point, I saw a bunch of corpses being pushed up against that wall of death by bulldozers. I couldn’t tell if they were victims of Tom Terror’s experiments, former heroes, or just the dead from his war against the rest of the Hollow Earth.
“It’s a rare occasion that I encounter something simultaneously so ridiculous and horrifying,” I said.
“Seems pretty normal to me,” Mercury said. “Also, if I’m not supposed to be hidden, then why am I tiny?”
“Oh, right,” I said, putting her in my pocket. “Better?”
“No, not in the slightest,” Mercury said.
“Listen, my plan is brilliant,” I said, lying through my teeth. “You just don’t know the details because I’ve psychically purged myself of the real plan and hypnotized myself into believing the real plan is the stupid one that I told you earlier.”
“I literally don’t know if you’re being serious or not,” John said.
“Shut up, people aren’t supposed to know you can talk,” I said, pausing. “Actually, my having a talking cloak is something I’m famous for. Never mind. In fact, do you want a job?”
“No!” John said. “Gods and Old Ones, I may return to my world to get back to people properly terrified of monsters.”
I was about to agree that was a good idea when a beautiful woman with blonde hair tied in dual pigtails and a form-fitting blue jumpsuit used a jetpack to fly over to my side and pull out a clipboard. I blinked. She was identical to Cindy except for hair color.
“What the hell?” I asked.
The Not-Cindy pulled out a clipboard. “Hiya! I’m Tina Terror, Assistant to Professor Terror! I’m here for your orientation into your defeat, capture, and brainwashing.”
“What now?”
“Defeat, capture, and brainwashing,” Tina said. “You are Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM, correct?”
“Uh, yes,” I said, confused. “Why do you look like Cindy?”
“Because I am a Cindy-model bioroid! Cindy Wachkowski is widely believed to be the best henchwoman who ever lived and I’m the prototype for an entire line of executive supervillain assistants based on her. When you need a perky female minion, shop P.H.A.N.T.O.M’s quality selection of merchandise.”
I stared at her, outweirded by someone else for possibly the first time in my life. “I fully believe Cindy will be less upset by the fact she’s been copied by P.H.A.N.T.O.M than the fact she’s not getting paid for the use of her likeness.”
She leaned in and gave an exaggerated wink. “We’re fully equipped, you know. Feel free to make use of our services before your horrific death of personality.”
“I think I saw this bit in Austin Powers,” Mercury said.
“It bothers me that movie survived the apocalypse,” I said. “Listen, Lisa, the only fascist I have ever been attracted to was Alison Doody’s character in The Last Crusade. That caused me a lot of confusion and forced me to do a lot of soul-searching before I remembered there are a lot more fish in the sea. I am immune to your robotic charms.”
“Mmm hmm,” Tina said, writing on her clipboard. “Do you have anything to declare before your capture?”
“Uh, I’m not going to be captured?” I asked.
“Tinaisabombsayswhat?” Tina said.
“What?” I replied.
That was when Tina exploded, releasing a torrent of anti-magical energy that caused me to scream and fall to the ground thrashing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE SUPERVILLAIN IN THE IRON MASK
I was buried alive. I was surrounded by empty darkness with a thick metal membrane weighing down on all my body. I’d never been in a suit of armor before, let alone one that felt like I was inside a tank but that’s how I felt now.
“Khan!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, uncertain anyone could hear me.
No one did.
There are some fundamental truths to the universe. Don’t eat yellow snow. Don’t date your ex’s sister, there’s no way it will work, and you will look like a monster. Sorry, Keith, but you shouldn’t have done that. Also, don’t trust guys who peddle easy answers. These you and others can buy in my book Merciless’ Book of Universal Truths for $29.99 in eBook format. Another truth, not in the book, was if you weren’t killed by a supervillain attack, you were probably going to wake up in a deathtrap of some kind.
I tried to use my powers, even though I was pretty sure Tom Terror had disabled them. Much to my surprise that resulted in machinery activating inside the suit of armor. I could suddenly see in 360 degrees (that was awkward), feel the weight around me lift, and a sense of tremendous power emanated from the suit. Then I tried to move, only to find myself still restrained to a table akin to the one Doctor Frankenstein used to keep down the Creature.
I was inside a laboratory that nicely combined Gothic Mad Scientist with 24th-century futurism. The place had globes full of electricity like those science toys in the Eighties, tubes full of iridescent green fluid with bodies floating in them, chemistry sets, and weird half-completed electrical projects. It was terrible if you were a serious scientist since they had the biology, engineering, and physics projects all pushed up against one another. It was also just a sign of how brilliant a polymath Tom Terror was since his personal workshop was a place that he could advance disciplines of science alone in his spare time. Either that or he was just reverse-engineering alien and Ultranian tech so he could claim it as his own. The Nazis did that in Wolfenstein because they couldn’t invent shit.
Jewish Super-Science 4 Ever.
Tom Terror walked into the room wearing a blood-splattered smock and carrying a tray with a brain on it. Following him was another Tina Terror that looked eerily like Cindy. “Ah, good to see you’ve finally awakened, Merciless.”
“You expect me to talk?” I asked, doing my best Connery impersonation.
“Nothing you could say would be of interest to me,” the mad scientist said, cheerfully.
“Dammit, you ruined it,” I said, sighing. “But what could I expect from the World’s Second Greatest Criminal Mind?”
“Oh, you flatter me,” Tom said, seemingly genuinely amused by my efforts rather than insulted. “Unfortunately, no, I do expect you to die.”
“Thank you, I appreciate a little Goldfinger,” I said.
“As do we all,” Tom Terror said. “I prefer the original Fleming novels, though, in all their misogynist, racist glory. Written back in a time when you could get away with curing a lesbian with masculinity.”
I grimaced at the “cure” line and would have blasted him if I could turn insubstantial. The metal suit I was in was sucking up all my powers, though. “I thought you said you weren’t a racist.”
“I lied,” Tom Terror said. “Mind you, I consider all beings my inferior. I just consider some more inferior than others.”
“It was nice knowing you,” Tina Terror said, smiling cheerfully. “Want a handjob before you die?”
I blinked. “Well, you got some of Cindy’s mannerisms down at least.”
I had a feeling Cindy had heard that somehow and was going to kick my ass for it the next time we met. Well, either that or insist on tummy rubs and snacks. I had no idea what were-Cindy would want now.
Tom Terror grimaced. “Ugh. Time compression. I hate that. Always trying to find out what you’ve done, who you’ve done it to, and who still exists in your reality.”
“Yeah, it’s terrible,” I said, not really caring about what Tom Terror thought about how reality had been altered repeatedly.
“I’ve been a mad scientist, Nazi, businessman, gangster, powered armored conqueror, and redheaded Australian clone at various points in my career. Sorting through all the memories is a royal pain in the ass. One
of the high costs of time travel and traveling the multiverse. The exposure to unusual tachyons can have quite the effect on one’s sanity.”
He proceeded to go over to the side of the table I was tied to and pull out a power drill, which caused my eyes to widen. “What are you going to do with that?”
Tom pulled the trigger on the power drill and held it in front of my face. “I’m going to hold it up in front of you menacingly for a few seconds.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Bet you wish you’d taken that handjob now, right?” Tina asked, grinning.
Tom reached over and shut her off, apparently having built-in a switch on the base of her neck.
I did my best to avoid a mental joke about wishing Cindy had one of those. Dammit, failed that one. This wasn’t good, he was being more entertaining than me. I didn’t know if there were laws of universal narrative progression, but I did know that if you weren’t the one making the jokes then you were screwed. The brain had only so much power and when you were trying to make sense of comedy, that meant you were only using about thirty percent of your brain on whatever task you were trying to do. I fully attributed this to fifty percent of why I’d managed to survive as long as I had. The other fifty percent being a combination of dumb luck and the fact the Reaper’s Cloak combined with the Orb of Death were a surprisingly versatile set of powers.
“What is this thing?” I finally asked, unable to think of anything witty. The worst sign of my predicament yet.
“You are presently in the Overlord suit,” Tom Terror said. “It is a magi-tech suit of battle armor that absorbs all of your powers while redirecting them to P.H.A.N.T.O.M’s robot army. It’s also completely under my control as you might imagine. I’ve stuffed numerous would-be rivals into it over the years.”
Overlord was yet another villain I was familiar with. I know, surprise-surprise, I know everything about everyone as the major supervillain geek that I am. Well you’re wrong, as seventy-five years of superheroism is a lot of information to process. There are quite a few heroes and villains I haven’t memorized the adventures of completely. Like Canada’s superhero team? Nada. The Iron Age independent guys? Stayed away from them like a once-burned infant to a hot stove. But the Overlord? The Overlord I knew.
He was the “modern” leader of P.H.A.N.T.O.M and generally considered the lesser evil due to the fact he ruled his own country and mostly just bothered various science teams. Yes, he’d tried to take over the world a few times, but he’d done it with style. He also had denounced the organization’s racial supremacist roots, which was part of why you could occasionally find toys of the group despite their being a fascist organization devoted to evil. A lot of people thought he was based on Darth Vader or vice versa.
“Wait, the Overlord is a fake?” I asked, horrified.
“Yes,” Tom Terror said, amused. “One of my ways of leaving behind a mouse for the various superhero cats to play with. I’ve faked my death many times with robots, clones, and explosions that would incinerate my body but that doesn’t give people the closure for me to operate in peace. So, on occasion, I send out the Overlord to be beaten up then die in my place. There have been a number of Overlords, and there are all manner of Internet theories as to whether they were the real Overlord or a catspaw.”
“And how does this deal with me?” I asked, wondering how badly I’d screwed up.
“Well, you’ll be the last,” Tom Terror said. “It will be a great tragedy when you kill the Society of Superheroes along with every single Hollow Earth citizen with a devastating plague. One that will shock and horrify the Earth. Sadly, a heroic Superior Boy will destroy you, and then the United States will move in to claim the suddenly empty Earth. I drew from history and the fate of the Native Americans for this plan.”
God, he was a racist old fuck. “I don’t think Ken will be too happy about this plan.”
“Don’t worry,” Tom said, his right eye glowing. “I plan to replace my consciousness with his and vice versa. From then on, I shall be known as the Superior Man.”
“I think that title is taken,” I said. “Like, outside of our planet, there’s this whole media empire about him. He seems nice enough, and was created by two Jewish guys, according to Jane.”
“Silence!” Tom Terror said, looking down on me. “You robbed me of the chance to eliminate my greatest enemy and I will make your death more painful for it. You will be there when you kill your niece, your children, your brides, and all your friends. You will go down in infamy. People will spit your name for centuries.”
“Yeah, I’m not up for that,” I said.
“You will be,” Tom Terror said. “But first, a random bit of cruelty.”
That was when Lisa walked into the room and I felt like someone stabbed me in the gut. She was wearing a P.H.A.N.T.O.M officer’s uniform, which was kind of a gray S.S. Officer’s with a miniskirt (yes, Tom was sexist as well as racist—who could have guessed?). She looked a great deal like my sister except she had fiery-red orange hair and glowing eyes that sparked. You know, because her powers were based on generating tiny explosions like fireworks.
Lisa gave the P.H.A.N.T.O.M salute. “Schreck Heil!”
“Mother puss bucket,” I said. “I am never going to be able to look at her the same way again. This is what ruined my friendship with Prince Harry.”
Tom Terror looked confused before shaking it off, showing that I hadn’t completely lost my control. “Your niece will supervise your brainwashing. I’ve almost completed turning the Society of Superheroes into mindless obedient servants.”
“Versus killing them outright or selling them into intergalactic slavery?” I asked, immediately regretting what I just said. Tom Terror was a narcissistic sadist according to the talk show psychologists of the time (many of whom ended up mysteriously dead soon after). That meant he was addicted to the, “slowly lower a superhero into a death trap while I’m away” sort of villainy.
That might have been subtly due to Destruction’s influence, but it was also possible he was just a super-genius serial killer of the kind that mostly exist in pop culture (since actual serial killers tended to be dumber than a post-Hannibal Lecter aside). He got off on the fear, which made his name apropos. By the way, his birth name was Tomas Schreck, which means Tom Terror. Crazy, huh?
Damn, my undiagnosed ADD or just general easily distractedness!
Tom Terror looked down and chuckled. “When you have hated as long and deeply as I have, Merciless, you’ll find that mere death is the least of the things you can deal with. Besides, I don’t believe your wish that death should be final worked.”
“I’m…what?” I asked.
Tom Terror smiled. “Alternate reality doppelgangers, clones, brain uploads, time-plucked past selves, and more. There are so many ways to get around literal resurrection. Besides, we both know you didn’t really mean it.”
I had no answer for that. “Maybe you just want to make sure you’ll get the hero next time. Because in this new world there won’t be a next time.”
Tom Terror chuckled and walked away as if he was amused by a private joke. “Begin the process to strip him of his memories. I want him pledging allegiance to the battle flag of Ruritania by the end of the hour.”
“Yes, mein führer,” Lisa said, sickening me.
Tom Terror turned around and walked away. “There’s something you should know before you die.”
“Your evil plan?” I asked.
Tom Terror laughed, which was not a pleasant thing to hear. “Oh, that’s good.”
“What do you mean?”
“I already told you my evil plan,” Tom Terror said.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Actually, that was more like your evil objective.”
Thank you, John, for that.
Tom Terror shook his head. “The thing you should know is why I’m doing this.”
“Oh, the other thing that supervillains always tell people they’re planning to kill,” I said. “Sure, Tom,
go ahead.”
“It’s fun,” Tom replied. “Something you’ve hinted on but never quite fully embraced. You hated your drab, boring, and eventless life. You hated your wife, the children you never got to have because of her, and all the little peons you weren’t murdering. It’s why you secretly rejoiced when you were freed of it.”
“I’d give anything to go back to that boring life,” I said, only partially lying. I couldn’t give up Leia and Mindy.
But I’d die to get back Mandy.
“Sure,” Tom said, entering an elevator. “You just keep telling yourself that.”
The elevator doors shut on him and I heard it moving up out of the room as I was left alone with Lisa.
“Do your worst, you evil Nazi bitch inhabiting my niece’s corpse!” I said, growling. “I will never betray the Good Old United States of America and Old Glory, except for all the times I have, but not to you! Torture is an ineffective means of interrogation, anyway, even though you’re doing it just to torture me. May God strike you down in the name of the Ark of the Covenant that I really hope the U.S. government eventually gave to Israel after Indiana Jones recovered it. Oh, say can you see, by the dawn—”
“Gary, I’m not a Nazi,” Lisa said. “I’m just pretending to be brainwashed.”
I paused. “Oh, well, I knew that.”
Lisa made a strangling gesture. “I swear, you are so bad at this!”
I turned my metal faceplate to her. “Ah, but wait, how do I know you’re not actually brainwashed into pretending not to be brainwashed?”
“Because Tom Terror isn’t as crazy and/or stupid as you.”