Chapter Six
Superheroism Ain’t Easy (Like Pimpin’)
I looked at my daughter. “Have you considered calling the Society of Superheroes?”
“No,” Mindy said.
“The Shadow Seven,” I replied. “Which is now the Shadow Seventeen as I understand it. The New Texas Guardians—”
“He literally gave me this speech when I tried to recruit him,” David said.
“Gary is not dealing well with the pressure of being a superhero,” Jane explained to Mindy, apologetically.
“I am too!” I replied, before frowning. “I just don’t want the responsibility of people’s lives depending on me.”
Mindy looked at me sideways. “Dad, that’s the very definition of being a hero.”
I stared down at her. “That’s part of the reason why I didn’t want to be one.”
I knew some true superheroes in my time. Ultragod, Splotch, Gabrielle, the Nightwalker, and even Guinevere—despite her loathing of me—were the real deal. So was Mandy. God, poor Mandy. Most superheroes were good people, don’t get me wrong, but they were flawed rather than the paragons the media tended to portray them as. They killed, they made money off their name, and they occasionally went the easier route than doing the right thing. It was just like most supervillains were not the psychotic evil doers who would never do any good.
One of the big reasons I’d chosen to become a supervillain was because I never wanted the responsibility of trying to live up to the example of the big heroes. Supervillains did what they wanted when they wanted, good or evil, and didn’t worry about the responsibility. I was pathologically allergic to responsibility, great power or not. Yet, being a supervillain had lost its allure after Mandy had sacrificed herself to save Cindy’s life. I’d done everything in my power to bring her back, but it hadn’t been enough and all I’d achieved was to inflict misery on her vampire remnant.
“Is he okay?” Jane asked, looking at me. “He’s kind of drifted off.”
“He’s brooding,” Mindy said. “Dad does that a lot. When you’re a superhero you either are a bright and cheerful paragon or some tortured vigilante with a dark past.”
“Gary has a dark past?” Jane asked. “Really?”
“You’d be surprised,” David said. “He’s a lot more similar to the Nightwalker than you might think.”
“Uh-huh,” Jane said. “Gary. The guy who can recite Monty Python and the Holy Grail verbatim.”
“Lots of people can do that,” David said, looking aside. “It’s a classic movie.”
“I can’t do it,” I said, sighing. “Listen, I’ve already got a job to do right now. I have to rescue the president’s daughter from Dracula. That’s closer to my level of doing things. No more big cosmic battles, no more fighting archdemons, or zombie apocalypses. I just want to do street level stuff.”
“Dracula kidnapping the president’s daughter is street level stuff?” Jane asked. “It sounds more like the plot to a bad Eighties beat-em-up arcade game. Are you bad enough to rescue the president from ninjas?”
“It sounds like the plot to an awesome Eighties beat-em-up arcade game,” I corrected her. “But, I just can’t. I’m worn down.”
Truth be told, it was the lack of support that had really done me in as a superhero. When I’d been a supervillain, I’d had Cindy and Diabloman backing me up. Gabrielle was there and I had believed that I would eventually have Mandy by my side again. Now everyone had gone their separate ways and while Cindy was there, she was also doing her own thing. I didn’t pry but the weight was heavier now than it had ever been before. It turned out that I wasn’t meant to be a solo act and was practically paralyzed without the others. Maybe that was why I hadn’t gotten any work here in Falconcrest City—I subconsciously didn’t want it. Okay, now I was getting a little too Freud.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Mindy said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“No, you still have to do it,” Mindy replied. “All of reality is at stake.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s just the other six Primal Orbs are in driving distance,” Mindy replied.
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“What?” Jane asked, clearly surprised that the whole “saving the Multiverse” thing was a local job.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Satan’s Swamp,” Mindy said. “Either with Dracula or someone around Dracula. It could be why there are dimensional rifts popping around. Just a few hours ago I had to deal with Mercirat and Cindy Woofkowski.”
“Mercirat?” Jane asked.
I frowned. “Yeah, he’s my cartoon doppelganger from Earth-Toon.”
Jane stared at me. “You have living cartoons here?”
“Yeah?” I asked. “What?”
Jane shook her head. The expression on her face was one of pure disbelief. “A frigging rat.”
I stared at her. “Like that’s so much worse than a deer.”
“Yes!” Jane said, throwing her hands up.
“Speaking as a bird, you’re all just hairless monkeys to me,” David replied.
“No one can enter Satan’s Swamp without potentially alerting the other holders of the Primal Orbs to their coming, which will escalate things considerably. You’re the one exception, Gary. You won the tournament,” Mindy said, “You’re linked to them. You can do this.”
“The only problem is that if I head into Satan’s Swamp, I’m going to get my ass kicked,” I said, feeling more embarrassed than troubled. I’d fought gods and supervillains, but it was the only place I’d well and truly gotten my ass kicked.
“Okay, Satan’s Swamp?” Jane asked. “Really?”
“It’s the most haunted swamp in the world outside of New Bourbon and a lot of that city’s ghosts came to live here after Hurricane Bedalia,” I replied. “Satan’s Swamp is the bayou that exists just outside of Falconcrest City and is full of every conceivable problem you can run into. It’s got mutant hillbillies, will-o-wisps, inbred Great Beast cults, weregators—”
“Hey!” Jane said. “Don’t be racist against shifters.”
“Cannibal demon weregators,” I said. “The Hills Have Eyes version of shifters to your CW Drama.”
“Okay, you can racist against these,” Jane said.
“Plus, Sheriff Injustice has it in for me,” I said.
“Sheriff…Injustice,” Jane said. “Is that his real name.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I replied. “His name is Sheriff Integral Nordbert Justice.”
“So, Sheriff I.N. Justice,” Jane replied. “I hate your world so much.”
“Says the weredeer named Jane Doe,” I replied.
Jane glared at me. Then she looked confused. “Wait, you’ve killed literal gods, why are you afraid of a redneck sheriff?”
“You’re not questioning how there’s a bayou in Michigan?” Mindy asked. “Also, why the Deep South is apparently in the Far North?”
“One problem at a time,” Jane replied.
“It’s a leftover from the Second Civil War when General Terror revived the Confederacy here,” I replied. “Thankfully, John Henry and Ms. Steam stopped him with some time traveling Society of Superhero members.”
Jane blinked. “Now I kind of want to hear that story. But let’s stick with the sheriff.”
I frowned at the memory. “Sheriff Injustice is the duly elected Sheriff of Satan’s Hollow and Satan County. I was full of excessive confidence after beating Tom Terror. I decided to throw my weight around. Nordbert is a kind of magic parasite who absorbs the strength of those he fights. He kicked my ass, peed on me, and left me to drown in the swamp. It was the most humiliating defeat of my life.”
The truth was I’d been lucky a lot of times in my career. I’d managed to take down a lot of powerful foes with the help of others: Diabloman, Cindy, Mandy, Jane, G, Amanda, and Alex to name a few. Other times I’d managed to succeed against my foes because I’d been underestimated or through sheer dumb lu
ck. Nordbert had stripped me of my powers, humiliated me, and given me the worst beating I’d had since high school. I’d been alone and he’d taken advantage of that. I’d also been stupid.
I had the Death and Chaos Primal Orbs but even they didn’t make me feel invincible—mostly because I didn’t know how to use them for small projects. They were made for epic godlike feats, not precision work. If I used them on Nordbert, I’d probably make him a god rather than show him up. Wow, there was an emotion I didn’t often admit to: fear. I was afraid of the guy. The only other ones I’d ever been afraid of were Entropicus and Spellbinder. One because he was a god and the other because she screwed with my head worse than anyone else I’d ever faced.
“Satan County?” Jane asked.
“Don’t question it,” Mindy said.
“It’s hard not to!” Jane said.
“So, let’s go kick the conspicuously northern-located southern redneck sheriff’s ass,” David said. “Then stop Dracula, rescue the princess—err president’s daughter—and then get your balls back.”
“Orbs,” I said.
“Same difference,” David said.
Jane looked skeptical. “Let me understand this, there’s a cosmic quest to protect the multiverse by ending the Time Disaster—”
“The Big Ass Time Disaster,” I corrected her.
“I’m not calling it that,” Jane said. “Yet, the way to do it with the omnipotent Primal Orbs is all possible within a fifteen-mile radius.”
“More like thirty but yeah,” Mindy said.
“And our primary opposition is Dracula, which is terrifying even if he was once killed an ordinary cowboy with a knife, and a crooked alien sheriff.” Jane blinked as if processing something that doesn’t make sense. “This seems like it should require five or six movies. Maybe a cosmic space god or two as the villain.”
“Not all superhero stories are Avengers: Endgame,” Mindy said, making a reference I didn’t get. “We don’t have to worry about satisfying the House of Mouse’s hunger for cash.”
“It just seems suspiciously easy,” Jane said.
“Maybe it’s like Spider-Man: Far from Home and this is all a trick to get Gary to steal the Primal Orbs that will only obey him because he won the tournament,” David said. “By the way, Earth-USOM has the best version of that movie. Making MJ a vampire was a great call.”
Jane did a double take.
“I watch a lot of alternate universe television back at my nest,” David said. “Technology was so much cooler back during the Silver Age. Alternate reality televisions, casual space travel, and time treadmills. The internet really ruined super-science. Now it’s quantum this, atom that. No imagination.”
“I both love and hate this world,” Jane said. “Mostly love but hate whenever I think about all the cool spoor I’m missing.”
“You can say ‘shit’,” I replied.
“I prefer to use deer swearing,” Jane said. “Buck off.”
Mindy reached out and took my hands. “Dad, you can do this.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said, lying to my daughter.
I wasn’t afraid of being killed. No, I’d just had my throw-down with my Lich-Wight former mentor and that hadn’t been a problem in the slightest. I was the Chosen of Death, for whatever that was worth, and knew an afterlife existed. No, I was afraid of failure. I’d failed Mandy, Cloak, and Diabloman, too, after a fashion. I’d instituted an “all deaths final” rule on superheroes and villains too, which had seemed like a good idea at the time but now seemed to remove the best of us while leaving the worst to carry on.
“So, what happens if I get all my balls together?” I asked.
“Now you’re doing it,” Jane said.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“The Big Ass Time Disaster never happens,” Mindy said. “The bad guys lose and life returns to the way it’s supposed to be.”
“Who decides what it’s supposed to be?” Jane asked, suspicious.
“Clearly we do,” David said. “Caw, I say. Caw.”
“Did you just say caw?” Jane asked.
“I had to remind you I was a bird,” David said, waving his wing. “Too bad deer don’t have a recognizable animal noise. What do you do, anyway?”
“We bleat,” Jane said.
“Sounds dirty,” David said.
Jane lightly smacked David and sent him flying.
“Oh, the deermanity!” David said.
I sucked in my breath. “I have a bad history with trying to fix my past mistakes. I’ve been trying to move forward. Badly. Still, I would do anything for you and Leia. I’ll go get the balls full of magic and rub them down.”
“In front of your daughter, really?” Jane asked.
“She was raised by Cindy and me,” I replied. “We’re lucky she’s not like the child from The Exorcist, and I mean that literally.”
“Oh Great Deer Jesus,” Jane said. “You poor woman.”
“I learned from your example, Jane,” Mindy replied, smiling. “You were the best babysitter since Elizabeth Shue.”
“That’s not a movie reference by the way,” I replied. “Cindy and I kidnapped Elizabeth Shue to save her from a vampire stalker. She was really nice to the girls.”
“I feel like I’ve missed some issues of your comic,” Jane said. “To be fair, I work in a diner and it’s not like I have the disposable income to pick up your entire run as well as crossovers. I’d like to help here too. I feel like a third wheel with the Society of Superheroes Dark.”
Mindy gave an enigmatic smile.
I sucked in my breath. “Okay, I’ll head to Satan’s Swamp and take care of this for you.”
“We’ll send reinforcements when you’re ready,” Mindy replied. “Good luck, Dad. We’ll be seeing you.”
“Well, I hope you’ll stick around. I’ve barely gotten to speak with Amanda for the past year and I miss Mr. Inventor too. I want to talk to Adult Leah and—”
That was when Mindy disappeared along with everyone else but Jane and David. The warehouse was cold and empty.
“Or, you could just disappear,” I replied. “Does she normally do that?”
“All the time,” Jane said. “I’m going to say, I expected a bit more from being part of a superhero team.”
“Well at least you’ve got the health insurance and weekly check,” I replied. “The Society of Superheroes benefits are top notch.”
Jane blinked. “Wait, superheroes get paid?”
I smirked. “Let’s get going, Jane, I’ll buy you lunch on the way out.”
“As long as it has mushrooms and lots of meat,” Jane said. “Oh and cherry pie.”
“So pizza,” I said. “Also, aren’t deer herbivores.”
“We’re opportunity omnivores,” Jane said. “Most herbivores will eat anything if it’s available.”
“So noted,” I said, smiling and glad to have my friend back. “Well, let’s eat up before heading to Omega country.”
“Omega Country?” Jane asked.
“There’s Blue Country, Red Country, and Nazi Black country,” I replied. “Satan County is the latter. There’s no place more antithetical to a middle class suburban liberal than the last remaining Sundown town in America.”
Jane grimaced. “Great.”
“Last remaining? You sweet summer child,” David said. “You have no idea.”
Chapter Seven
Small-Town Sheriff Blues
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou” was playing as I drove down the dirt road leading into Satan’s Hollow. The transformation of the temperate forests surrounding Falconcrest City’s suburbs to the hot, muggy swampland was like someone flipping a light switch. Despite still being in the state of Michigan, we might as well have been transported to Northern Florida.
“How the hell is this even possible?” Jane asked, consulting a map in the front seat. “I think this is Ann Arbor. My hometown doesn’t even exist in your world. Also, why the hell are you weari
ng that goddess damned hat?”
I was wearing a big RCA cowboy hat that was deliberately modeled on the one Burt Reynolds had worn in Smokey in the Bandit. I’d discovered the Reaper’s Cloak could imitate almost any piece of clothes and used it to adopt a black button-down shirt, jeans, plus a necklace of fake gator teeth. I deplored the hunting of rare animals in real life but thought the look was good for journeying here in the Blue Meanie. Jane didn’t exactly have room to talk since she’d changed into a pair of Daisy Dukes with a flannel shirt tied above her belly. I suspected she was already making use of my open-source magic to warp her fashion.
“It’s a stylistic choice,” I said. “As for why there’s a massive swamp outside the city, the answer is always magic. Swamp Beast and his daughter Nightshade are supposedly the reason Satan’s Hollow is the way it is,” I replied. “It’s like when an area is inhabited by a unicorn. It’s always temperate and pleasant, even in Alaska.”
Jane stared at me. “Unicorns?”
“You don’t have those?” I asked.
“I kind of shot one once,” Jane said, putting down the map. “To be fair, it was a jerk.”
“They always are,” I replied. “Never trust anything that has a fondness for virgins. Are you okay with leaving behind the rest of your group?”
Jane put her bare feet on the dashboard and crossed her arms. “I could ask you the same question. Don’t you have an entire crew to go with you?”
“Gabrielle is in space,” I said, dryly. “There’s like a royal wedding or something on the asteroid city of Vargo where the last Ultranians live. Diabloman and I haven’t spoken since I kinda murdered his sister and sent her to Hell—”
“What was that?” Jane asked.
“Diabloman and I aren’t speaking,” I replied. “Mandy, well the vampire Mandy, is off doing her own thing. Sometimes I see her hanging around the mansion’s gardens, looking in on us. Cindy, I gave a text too, but she said she is working on her own project right now. Apparently, it supersedes saving the Multiverse.”
“So who’s watching your kids?” Jane asked. “The small versions, not the adult ones we just left behind. I mean, I did for a year but I’m not an easy to replace babysitter.”
The Supervillainy Saga (Book 7): The Horror of Supervillainy Page 6