by C. T. Phipps
Did she deserve Hell? Honestly, I didn’t think anyone deserved hell. However, hell came in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. There were places that were your last stop, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. There were places that functioned more like the Catholic Purgatory or the Buddhist Hells where they eventually burned the bad out of you. There was one other type of hell and that was the worst one: the place you created for yourself from your nightmares, self-hatred, anger, and refusal to face your own flaws.
That was Maria’s destination.
“You will never know happiness, Merciless,” Maria said, struggling to resist having her spirit torn from her host body. “You’re a plague.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering what it looked like to the other two people in the room. For them, it had to look like we were glowing with eldritch energies. I could see Diabloman try to approach, only to be shoved back by an invisible barrier. “But so are you.”
“Damn—” Maria started to say before she was gone. Her spirit passed through mine into the Death Orb and into the Great Beyond.
I felt her pain as it happened and got a sense of what her prison would be like. It was a nightmare that was forged from her desire to serve herself rather than the selflessness she’d known in life. To get revenge, to find love (even if the sex wasn’t important), and to live in a way she’d been denied. Normal everyday wants and needs that had been denied her as a superhero—but that had become all-consuming obsessions.
That was why she’d settled into Mandy’s life; it had given her the family she’d always wanted. Maria thought she could just settle into another woman’s life and take it over—no matter how ill-fitting it was. There was potential for redemption there. Maybe in a few decades I’d let her out of the dimension of darkness and regret I had condemned her to. But not before.
“Requiescat in infernus,” I said in Latin. I’m pretty sure you can infer the meaning.
Much to my surprise, Vamp Mandy (for lack of a better term—cut me some slack here) didn’t die. Instead, the undead revenant I’d made of my wife stood there as if she was coming out of a trance. Her eyes turned an iridescent yellow and narrowed as she looked at me. She then grabbed my throat with one of her armored gauntlets and lifted me off the ground. The gauntlets, like all the armor, were made of extra-dimensional metal that drained away my magic just by being near it.
“You!” Vamp Mandy screamed. “You condemned me to this hell of being a prisoner in my own body!”
Ken looked to Diabloman as if this was the most normal thing in the world. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“You cannot kill him!” Diabloman charged at Vamp Mandy, slamming into her armored form as all his tattoos glowed.
“Ah, thanks, D,” I said, flying out of Vamp Mandy’s grip.
“Because I’m going to!” Diabloman snarled with rage.
I was disappointed but not surprised. If I was a superhero, I would have made some sort of apology or tried to justify myself. Instead, I just accepted the fact our friendship was broken. He’d betrayed me and I’d done something unforgivable to the person he’d betrayed me for. Well, I was no stranger to dealing with the consequences of my actions and was prepared to deal with them here. I just hoped I didn’t have to kill my friend.
“Imbecile,” Vamp Mandy said, smacking Diabloman across the room with one power-armored fist. “I am stronger than you without this armor.”
“I have slain heroes and gods,” Diabloman shouted, rising and raising his fists. “I am the champion of the gods the Devil prays to! You shall not defeat me!”
Diabloman then turned around and charged at the windows. I realized in that moment he was going to smash them to pieces and expose us all to the interior of the Inner Sun. It was a suicide move and one that showed he had nothing left to live for. A foolish notion since his daughter was outside, proud of her father showing the world he could be a hero.
“No, D, don’t!” I shouted at him, raising my fist. With the Death Orb, I could kill just about anyone and my emotions were running hot enough that it was close to fully charged. I wanted to live but I couldn’t kill him.
Couldn’t kill my friend.
Ken charged at him with superspeed, but Diabloman managed to grab him by the cape and hurl him against the wall. It cracked under his attack, allowing burning beams of light through. They were only a fraction of the heat outside but fully capable of frying us like vampires. Which, honestly, was a bit of irony I didn’t realize until the moment I thought it.
“Hiss!” Vamp Mandy said, covering her face with a metal arm.
“This was the way it was meant to be, Merciless!” Diabloman said, shouting at the top of his lungs. “I was born to be a taker of life and not giver. I destroyed a whole universe. No one can be redeemed from that, no matter what good deeds they may do after or what cosmic wishes may be expended on their behalf. Hell is—”
“Oh do shut the hell up,” I said, pointing a finger with my left hand at him and generating a glowing beam of prismatic energy that sucked all of the energy flying in through the walls before engulfing Diabloman.
He vanished in an explosion of brilliant rainbow colors.
Ken got up off the ground and looked over at me. “What the hell did you just do?”
“I sent him to Albuquerque,” I said, feeling the Chaos Orb pulse inside my hand. It didn’t like being directed in its magic. I could wield its power, but I suspected it was a power that wanted to wield me instead. Well, I was used to being unable to control myself, so this wouldn’t be anything new. “Maybe he’ll pass Bugs Bunny on the way there.”
“Huh?” Ken asked.
“Shut up and look for something resembling duct tape!” I snapped, seeing the light beams return through the cracks. Each of them was like a death ray shooting a continuous beam around us and I had to duck my head to maneuver around them. Worse, the walls of the control room were starting to crack around us and it looked like this entire place was going to explode.
“I don’t think the Ultranians used duct tape,” Ken said, looking around helplessly. “Listen, I’m sorry about all this, but she made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“Getting your body back?” I asked, searching around frantically and ignoring Vamp Mandy getting up off the ground.
“No,” Ken said, frowning. “Spellbinder said she could bring my parents back. Reyan’s and mine.”
I closed my eyes. “Yeah, I can understand that.”
“Sorry,” Ken said, clearly expecting to die.
“Yeah, me, too.”
I, of course, had a plan. One more trick, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. I wanted to try to use the Chaos Orb, which was raw, undiluted magic in its purest form, to teleport Ken and me from this place. The problem was I felt that it had a will inside it. It had already just teleported Diabloman to “safety” and didn’t like repeating its tricks. I didn’t know if I was anthropomorphizing the orbs too much, that maybe I was just crazy and hallucinating things like my daughters speaking to them, but I was kind of in a spot.
So, I was willing to try anything. “Listen, Cersei, isn’t it more chaotic to do something twice than always refuse to do something a second time?”
Yes, I named the Chaos Orb Cersei. I immediately got a bunch of annoyance from the Death Orb that I hadn’t given her a name. I told her I’d get back on that. Either way, I felt the orbs glow in my hand as the walls around us began to collapse.
“Get over here!” I shouted to Ken.
Ken didn’t hesitate and was at my side in an instant, even as he almost burned himself by nearly running into one of the light beams. The room was becoming an inferno and I only avoided being cooked by the ambient heat by turning insubstantial.
“Gary!” Vamp Mandy hissed to one side.
Leaving Vamp Mandy here to be destroyed was an elegant solution to the fact I hadn’t been willing or able to kill her until this point. Mandy had been someone who wanted to be a hero. She wasn’t a kille
r, unless the monster was undead, and Vamp Mandy had hundreds of deaths to her name. Yeah, most of them were complete bastards but we were trying to cut down on murdering people in general.
Being trapped at the heart of a sun would be a quick and painless way of dying. It surprised me how much I cared about that, given I’d gone to elaborate lengths to reassure myself Vamp Mandy was just a shell. So, of course, I reached out and grabbed her metal hand and teleported her away as well before the Ultranian station detonated in an explosion of mystical light.
The three of us appeared on the surface of the Hollow Earth a few hundred miles away from the Inner Sun that, thankfully, wasn’t exploding or shooting out fireballs. Whatever the Ultranian station was designed to monitor or fix didn’t seem to influence whether the Inner Sun was still going to remain stable. It would kind of suck after all to survive that place exploding, only for the entire Hollow Earth to be destroyed due to normal physics suddenly applying in the Earth’s core again. That probably would have resulted in the death of not just everyone living here but also on the surface of the Earth, too.
We were in the middle of a field of large manure piles from a herd of nearby brachiosaurs. It was not the best place we could have landed but I was thinking any port in a storm. I wasn’t looking forward to hiking wherever I had to in order to reunite with everyone else. Then I remembered I could fly and decided to stop whining. Also, I was really hoping Captain Dumbass would give me a lift.
“You saved my life,” Ken said, blinking. “That was really cool of you.”
“Yeah, I’m just awesome,” I muttered under my breath. “Kid, as a general rule, you’re going to find that allying with supervillains has a lot more in the way of consequences than I think you were prepared for.”
“Yeah,” Ken said, looking down. “Can I pretend my brain was fried by Nazi brainwashing and everything is good now?”
“Sure,” I said, not looking at Vamp Mandy.
“Good,” Ken said, before flying into the air.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered, watching him fly off. “He didn’t even offer to give me a ride. You okay, Vamp Mandy?”
“Call me Mandy.”
“No.”
“Fine.” Vamp Mandy was tearing pieces of her armor off. Her face had been badly burned but was regenerating before my eyes. I hoped that didn’t mean she was feeling peckish.
“Yes, I am,” she said.
“We cool?” I asked, deliberately evoking Pulp Fiction. I wasn’t in the mood to quote Star Wars.
“Are you going to hunt me in the future?” Vamp Mandy asked.
I sucked in my breath. “No, I’m sentimental that way. Even for soulless abominations.”
I was surprisingly glad to have her back. I didn’t think we were going to become besties but there was a peace with what Mandy had become, or at least a part of her. I was prepared to let her go the way I’d let go of Keith and Cloak. I wasn’t sure about Diabloman, but I was glad he’d survived as well, even if we were now enemies.
“Demon, not soulless,” Mandy corrected.
I turned around to look at her. Her injuries were completely healed, and she was in a slightly charred bodysuit. “Well, excuse me all to hell.”
“Demons are made from the regrets of humans. Things they hate about themselves and leave behind when they ascend to become divine beings. You should wonder, Gary, why I still care for you so much. Was it because your wife’s love for you was so strong or it was something she left behind.”
“Ouch.”
“It means you might have been the most important thing in the world to her,” Vamp Mandy said. “Something she needed to let go of if she was to ascend.”
“You’re really terrible at this reassuring thing.”
“Well, I am made of pure evil.”
I looked at her. “Just don’t do anything too horrifying, alright? I’m sorry for what I did. Trying to turn back the clock.”
Vamp Mandy snorted. “Gary, you’re not responsible for everything. I made my choice to sacrifice myself. You can forgive yourself.”
I, not Mandy.
I shook my head. “And then what?”
“Go be a hero,” Mandy said. “You always were meant to be one. Cloak saw it. I saw it. Let the world see it.”
“And if I suck at it?”
“Oh, you will, I’m sure. But it’ll be entertaining as hell.”
Merciless will return in:
THE KINGDOM OF SUPERVILLAINY
Book Seven of The Supervillainy Saga