The Supervillainy Saga (Book 4): The Science of Supervillainy

by Phipps, C. T.

  “No,” I said, “though you’re getting the hang of this referencing thing. If we’re genuinely doing wrong, then the door will open here.”

  “Well, that’s not likely to happen.” Amanda snorted. “We’re in the right fighting him.”

  That was when the walls of the alleyway started to pull apart, revealing a red light beyond.

  Amanda stared at the walls, then slumped her shoulders. “Goddammit.”

  The walls continued to open . . . very slowly.

  “Is it supposed to be taking its time like this?” Mandy asked, looking over at me.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Entrance into Diagon Alley isn’t immediate. The worst things come to those who wait and all that. That and we’re also bringing a—bleh—hero into the place.”

  “Me or Amanda?” Mandy said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Mandy looked away while Amanda stared at the ground, clearly uncomfortable with this latest development.

  “This place looks familiar,” Mandy said, looking behind us at the building next to Club Inferno. It was an old garment factory and didn’t look particularly interesting, yet from her reaction, it was someplace important.

  “Are you OK?” I said, walking up to her and placing my hand on her shoulder.

  Mandy ran her hands along the graffiti-covered brick wall of the building. “I remember this place as it will never be.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Mandy took a deep breath. “This is the place Howler Squad met its end fighting the Fifth Regiment of the Death Legion. They ended up killing seventy times their number using a combination of stolen mines and hologram projectors. Even so, it wasn’t enough to hold Omega’s forces back, and the village they’d been guarding was massacred to the last child.”

  “OK, that’s dark,” I said.

  Amanda swatted me.

  “Perhaps,” Mandy said. “I can’t help but feel for the people who have no one but me to remember them now, because they’ll never even exist. Children whose parents and grandparents never met because they grew up as the scattered survivors of a world in flames. They paid the ultimate sacrifice and I can’t even recall their names.”

  “They have a memorial,” I said, taking a deep breath.

  “Me? A bloodthirsty monster?”

  “This world,” I said. “They were soldiers who fought and won a peace.”

  Mandy stared at me, then looked up in the sky as a drone flew past us, scanning the streets. We just barely managed to move out of the way of its beam.

  “OK, it’s a shitty peace, but it’s better than President Jackboot,” I said. “You’ve got to give me that.”

  Mandy laughed. “I suppose I do. Do you ever wonder about who you might have been? You were a leader of men in the New World. When the last of the governments was dissolved and humanity’s resistance was all but broken, you rallied us all.”

  “I bet you did a better job than me,” I said.

  Mandy shook her head. “I’m a vampire, Gary. I can’t lead. I spied, assassinated, sabotaged, and seduced, but I never led.”

  “Well, I suppose we can be glad I never have to lead in this world either,” I said. “Look at what Other Gary has done.”

  Mandy stared. “He’s managed to guide the entire planet. Imagine what you could do with your friends beside you.”

  The entrance to Club Inferno started opening much faster. It was almost completely open now.

  “Fuck up things worse?” Amanda offered.

  I glared at her.

  “What?” Amanda said. “The club agrees.”

  “Does it bother you?” Mandy asked, looking over at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m never going to change, Gary,” Mandy said, frowning. “I’m always going to be the woman I am today, who isn’t quite the woman you married. A woman caught between the urges of a monster and someone who failed as a hero. You can grow old, have a family, have children, or change your life, but I’m . . . stuck.”

  “I love you, Mandy,” I said simply. “I love Cindy and Gizmo, but not the same way. I love you. I searched the world for a way to bring you back, and if not for the fact that he’s an enormous asshole, I’d have let my doppelgänger go for bringing you back to me. I don’t care about you being a vampire, and you’re not a failed superhero. You and Cloak are the reason I’m not that thing ruling this city.”

  The entrance to Club Inferno started to close.

  “You stay out of this!” I snapped at the door. “You do not want to piss me off! I will burn this city to the ground to get at you.”

  The entrance opened fully.

  “You’re the reason I’m not tearing open random people,” Mandy said. “I draw strength from our bond to keep the Hunger at bay. Even at my worst as a vampire, a part of me still loved you and wanted to keep killing only the evildoers. Now that I can feel love again, I can hold it down. Granted, just barely.”

  “That’s . . . terrifying,” Amanda said.

  “I find it romantic,” I said. “Sort of like how Edward devoured Bella after she followed him into the woods as a willing sacrifice to his ravenous thirst.”

  “That’s not how Twilight went,” Amanda said.

  “Is it? Is it really?” I said, smiling.

  “You shouldn’t trust Mandy,” Cloak said.

  “Careful, Cloak. I’m never going to choose Mandy over anyone else. Not you, not Diabloman, not even Cindy—” I projected at Cloak.

  “What about your daughter?” Cloak said.

  My response was to project a feeling of cold, hateful malevolence at Cloak. That was a low blow and one that made me want to reach into the astral plane and punch him. “You heard Mandy. She’s still the same person she was two centuries ago. She can’t change and that’s a good thing.”

  “Vampires are deceptive creatures. You desperately wish to turn back the clock to the point before she became one of the undead. I appreciate this now, but what she says—”

  “Shut up, Cloak,” I said, walking through the entrance. “I trust my wife.”

  Mandy did a double take and gave a harsh glare to my cloak. “Trouble with your friend?”

  I shrugged as Amanda followed. Beyond the doorway was a long circular black stone hallway that had windows along its sides looking out to a massive, brightly burning inferno. I was sure the conflagration beyond wasn’t firewater, since I could feel the heat coming up through the stones. The hallway led to a single metal door with a neon sign reading “Club Inferno” in fuchsia letters. Behind us, the entrance closed back up, leaving us no way to go but forward.

  While our surroundings were strange, it was the feeling I got from them that was the most unsettling part of our journey. My mystic senses were only slightly better than your typical Muggle’s (and, man, do actual wizards hate when you call regular people that), but I could feel the power radiating outward. Unlike the energy stored in Other Gary’s towers, I could reach out and take some of the power without if I used it for selfish purposes.

  Reaching the metal door, I knocked on it with my fist. “I solemnly swear I’m up to no good.”

  “Jesus, Gary,” Amanda muttered.

  The entire place shook a bit.

  “Yeah, don’t mention that guy,” I said. “You also shouldn’t mention Buddha, Muhammed, Moses, Luke Skywalker, Link, Mario, Santa, Lao-Tzu, the Easter Bunny, or Commander Shepard.”

  The club rumbled. Apparently, it didn’t appreciate my warning any more than Amanda’s invocation of her god. I turned around and flipped the club off with both my hands.

  “Gary, what are you doing?” Amanda said.

  “Being an ass,” I said.

  “Well, I suppose it is what you do best,” Amanda muttered.

  Mandy, I kid you not, giggled at that.

  There was another rumbling throughout the chamber that sounded distinctly like laughter. The metal door promptly swung open and I headed on in. What greeted me was a dimly-lit lobby and ticket center wher
e six garishly dressed supervillains were waiting for me, as well as one woman in a suit of power-armor. The Human Tank was over six feet tall with the armor modified from the last time I’d seen her. She was also aiming a massive arm-cannon at me.

  “You were an idiot to come here.” A deep female voice greeted me. “Prepare to die, Merciful.”

  Huh, I should have seen this coming.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE STATE OF THE SUPERVILLAIN UNION

  “Must I?” I asked, raising my hands. “Because I’d prefer to live.”

  The Human Tank’s helmet retracted, revealing the brown-haired woman beneath. “This is no laughing matter.”

  “I laugh in the face of Death,” I said. “Well, not really, because she’s really done well by me.”

  Clarissa Montehaven (formerly David Stockwell), a.k.a The Human Tank, was someone I didn’t want to fight. Not only because she’d been one of the people who’d helped fight against President Omega as part of the Shadow Seven, but also because I had known her longer than Cindy and Mandy put together.

  Not well, but she’d been part of my brother’s gang, the Nefarious Nine, which was one of the more longstanding supervillain “clubs.” Clarissa had broken with the group not long after my brother’s death and had embarked on a successful solo career before trying to reform. She was also looking good for a woman pushing fifty, still sporting the Linda Hamilton look. Compliments to her surgeon. Maybe there was something to Cloak’s claim that superheroes and villains didn’t age until they did.

  “There isn’t,” Cloak said. “I just made that up. The Society of Superheroes and Fraternity of Supervillains just have longevity spells as perks.”

  “Nice to know,” I said, waiting for them to make the first move. Mandy and Amanda had moved into attack position, and I was more worried about them than I was Clarissa or her crew. Mostly because we were here to recruit an army. Not kill more of Falconcrest City’s supervillain population.

  “Do you recognize any of these guys?” I mentally asked Cloak.

  “No,” Cloak said. “Which could be good or bad.”

  Falconcrest City’s collection of supervillains had been all but wiped out between our miniature zombie apocalypse and Mandy’s subsequent bloodthirst-driven rampage. These were all out-of-towners who’d been unable to cut it in their hometowns or newbies, which meant I could probably mop the floor with them.

  Mandy, however, stepped in front of me. “Clarissa, put that gun down or I swear I will rip off your arm and shove it up your thermal exhaust port.”

  “Mandy?” Clarissa said. “He’s made a robot of you too?”

  Amanda glared. “This isn’t Merciful; it’s Merciless.”

  A man dressed in a polka-dot leotard with a glowing eye-visor pointed at me. “Like it matters! You made a big mistake coming her—oh my god, my foot is on fire! Help! Oh shit, Christ, help! Oh god, now it’s frozen!”

  The next supervillain, a woman dressed in a 1950s bubble-topped astronaut’s suit, aimed her ray gun at me only for Amanda to knock it out of her hand with a moon-shaped boomerang.

  “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” Amanda said. “Yesterday, I let a bunch of decent people die to rescue these two. You have no idea what lengths I’ll go to in order to protect them.”

  That was when Clarissa blasted Mandy with a concentrated blast of sunlight and caused her to smash against the wall behind me.

  “Sunlight actually doesn’t work on vampires,” I said. “It’s annoying and makes them grouchy, but it doesn’t actually do anything.”

  Then I looked at Mandy’s face, which was half-burned off and now regenerating. She looked really pissed off. Her fangs were jutting out and her claws were extending. I was pretty sure she was going to kill everybody here and that would defeat the purpose of coming here to recruit a supervillain army.

  I turned intangible as a six-armed guy with a spider-costume jumped on me, followed by a samurai woman with a glowing katana that turned out not to be enchanted save to glow, and a guy who just made pew-pew gestures with his fingers at me. He was wearing a t-shirt that said “I’M THE STUPIDIFIER.” I was worried about that guy.

  I took a deep breath. “Clarissa, it’s me. Other Gary kidnapped and imprisoned me after the attack on President Omega’s base. We’re kind of friendly, we both like Gabrielle, and you really, really love football despite it being a dumb sport.”

  “You shut your mouth!” Amanda said, lifting the spider guy over her head. “You have no right to complain with all the useless crap you love.”

  Clarissa switched over her arm cannon to a setting I suspected would be able to hit me in my intangible form. “I don’t believe you.”

  I closed my eyes. “My brother, Keith, and you had an affair that left him really, really confused. It’s part of the reason he was going straight.”

  Everyone stopped at that.

  Clarissa stared at me then, scrunched up her face in horror. “Why the hell would you just announce that!?”

  “Because you’re shooting at me and my wife!” I snapped. “The other option is just killing you.”

  “My goddamn foot!” the polka dot guy said.

  “I am going easy on you, pal!” I snapped. “Also, what’s your codename? I’m not getting a theme here with the helmet and leotard.”

  “I’m the Polka Dot Zapper!” he proclaimed.

  I blinked. “OK, that’s not a name that has any theme. Do you zap polka dots? Project them as like a laser-targeting sight, or what?”

  “I’d answer but I need a doctor!” Polka Dot Zapper said.

  “Quit whining,” Clarissa said, looking about ready to slug him. “Archanodude, Robot Samurai Girl, take him down to the Painful Nurse for healing.”

  They lifted the Polka Dot Zapper and dragged him away, leaving only a fragment of her original group. That was when Mandy stepped through me and looked ready to rip the Human Tank in two, which I fully believed she could do.

  “Down girl,” I said. “Clarissa is probably a friend now.”

  “I want to rip open her throat and gorge on the blood as her heart pumps it in my face,” Mandy said.

  “I suspect the demon inside Club Inferno is affecting her,” Cloak said. “Evil magic calls to evil magic.”

  I wanted to conjure Cloak’s spirit so I could punch him in the nose.

  I took a deep breath. “Mandy, please don’t kill the Human Tank. You can beat her within an inch of her life later.”

  “Hang on,” Clarissa said.

  “No buts,” I said, raising my hand. “We have more important things to talk about.”

  “Like the fact that he’s here to recruit a supervillain army to take down Other Gary’s power plant, which he believes is powered by Ultragoddess,” the Stupidifier said.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “My power is actually telepathy,” the Stupidifer said. “It makes—”

  Amanda broke his jaw with one punch and sent him spiraling on the ground.

  “What the hell!?” Clarissa said.

  “Operational security,” Amanda said. “Keep him away from us.”

  I looked at her. “We’re trying to convince her we’re legitimate.”

  “Operational security protects You-Know-Who,” Amanda said.

  “Voldemort?” I asked.

  The Stupidifier crawled away, presumably to the Painful Nurse.

  “Your daughter,” Mandy said, once he was out of sight.

  “You have a daughter?” Clarissa said.

  I glared at Amanda and Mandy. “Nice job, you two. Brilliant. The best way to keep telepaths out of your head is to not think of stuff you’re trying to hide. You instead think of inane stuff that no one cares about it until they get bored and leave.”

  Mandy stood there, shaking until she finally pulled back her fangs and claws. “I’d say that would give you an impossible advantage over them, but there’s like six on Earth, so it’s not much of an ability.”


  “Seven,” I said. “Mention my daughter to anyone, Clarissa, and I will kill you. Friend of my brother’s or not.”

  I was deadly serious.

  From her reaction, Clarissa believed me. “You have my word as a former member of the Shadow Seven, I will not betray your trust.”

  “What happened to the team?” Mandy said, her hands shaking.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. She grabbed it and bit into it. I grimaced and let her use it to take some of the edge off. Thankfully, vampire saliva was a natural coagulant. The wounds sealed up as soon as the vampires stopped drinking.

  Clarissa looked over to where the others had walked away. “The world was a different place after World War Three. Everyone blamed everyone else, but most of all, they blamed the superheroes for not preventing it and the supervillains for existing. Merciful rose to power in the chaos and recruited countless supervillains to his cause for rebuilding. He also dismantled Gabrielle’s reform program. Shadow Team Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and more were replaced with his own troops. They were less interested in reformation than in making use of the psychos and eliminating anyone who could stand in his way.”

  “Ironic for a supposedly reformed villain,” I said, pulling my hand away before Mandy drank more blood than I was comfortable giving. “Then again, in Other Gary’s mind, he was never a villain.”

  Clarissa sighed. “It explained a lot. We never believed you and Merciful were the same person. Not only had your family informed us of him, but we’d fought with you before. That made us targets. We were all framed for returning to our life of supervillainy. General Venom allowed himself to be captured to let us all escape. Other Gary made sure he was tried, convicted, and executed for the crimes he’d committed before his attempt at atonement.”

  I couldn’t say I felt much. General Venom was, in his own way, sort of like Diabloman. One of the genuinely evil supervillains who’d once been a big deal before becoming considerably less so (both evil and a big deal) as time passed. Venom—I didn’t know his real name—had been a massive big deal as a superpowered militia leader in the 1980s before the word “terrorist” had been a household word.