That was when I saw Sheriff Injustice’s turn into the horrifying humanoid alien thing his daughter had become earlier, growing multiple tentacles that cracked with alien energy. I belatedly recalled that decapitation was not enough to deal with him.
“Ah crap,” I said. “This is gonna suck.”
“You ain’t just whistling Dixie,” Sheriff Injustice said, his voice a horrifying distortion of his traditional Southern accent.
“You are really committing to this Southern redneck thing,” I said, dancing around his tentacle blows, mentally thanking Mr. Inventor for giving me the basics of combat training.
“An adopted son of the South is no less a Southerner!” Sheriff Injustice said cheerfully. It showed that any grief he had for his dead daughter was purely an illusion.
“And yet you’re against immigration I bet. You want to kick the ladder out from under you after climbing it,” I said, pulling out my Nightwalker Shark Repellent. It was useless here, but Nordbert didn’t know that. Also, why did the Nightwalker have such a specific weapon? Even more so, why had I picked it up? “Back off, man! This is Corbomite Spray! It has the power to blow up an entire football field!”
“Corbomite is a reference to Star Trek: The Original Series,” Sheriff Injustice said, pausing in his attacks to rebuke me. “Captain Kirk used it to threaten aliens in two episodes and it was a bluff both times.”
I stared at him. “It saddens me to know you’re a fellow Trekkie.”
“Well, I am an alien,” Sheriff Injustice said, successfully grabbing me with all his tentacles at once. “Say goodnight, fool.”
Feeling my bones crack under the pressure of Sheriff Injustice’s assault, I look him right in the eyes. All three hundred or so of them. “Goodnight, fool.”
Sheriff Injustice paused then let out a hearty laugh. It was apparently something he considered to be funny and gave me a second more of life. That was when all the tentacles were severed by a katana that caused him to pull back.
“Mothersucker!” Sheriff Injustice shouted and he proved to be correct because the katana was in the hands of my former (?) wife, Mandy. Standing next to her was Cindy in her pre-wolf form, which was basically her normal one except six-feet-tall and looking like she was half-feral. Oh and built like she could toss around MMA fighters. I’m not saying it played into any of my personal fetishes but, yeah, let’s be honest. It did. I was a perverted, perverted man.
“Come on, a vampire with a katana?” I asked, stepping away from the pieces of Sheriff Injustice slithering on the ground. “What is this, the Nineties?”
“You’re welcome!” Mandy shouted.
“Oh, and thank you,” I replied.
“You magic fools just make me stronger!” Sheriff Injustice said, growling. “I can feel myself growing fat on your camp’s energy every second!”
“Actually, I’m a magically changed Super that, nevertheless, has science-based lycanthropic genes,” Cindy said.
“What?” Sheriff Injustice said, confused.
“It means kiss your ass goodbye,” Cindy said, transforming into her full wolfwoman form with a long set of canine claws that she used to tear into Sheriff Injustice. It was a bit like watching a rotten banana being thrown into a blender.
I ducked under each of the flying pieces of Sheriff Injustice and watched several move toward me. I used my Nightwalker Shark Repellent on each of them and they shriveled up like slugs with salt poured on them. Refusing to ignore my good fortune, I managed to destroy at least half of the monster’s body before the rest slithered away.
“I think we got him!” I shouted, cheerfully.
“We?” Mandy asked, lifting her katana. “Gary, you’re really not doing well as a superhero. Maybe you should rethink your present life goals and go back to being a bank robber.”
“I like to think of myself as a classy cat burglar,” I said, putting my hand over my heart. I could feel my powers returning but I needed a few more minutes before I was able to go back to helping defend the camp. “Except I’m not really that classy. I’m more like Bruce Willis’ Hudson Hawk or Japan’s Lupin the Third.”
“Any other weird random facts you want to share?” Mandy asked, cutting down a trio of zombified cultists that had risen from the dead after being struck down. I had no idea where Mandy had learned to be a samurai. It was like she hadn’t been content to be a Eurasian vampire assassin but now just wanted to go full anime character. No wait, she was a fully grown adult woman, so anime wasn’t an appropriate comparison. I felt bad for the Red Schoolgirl who leaned heavily into that motif. She was a thirty-year-old woman and still dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform. Not that most men and some women were inclined to complain.
Oh right, Mandy was expecting an answer to her question. “In college, I was part of a heavy metal band. Our gimmick was that we dressed as badass warrior pandas. We were called Pandamonium.”
Mandy facepalmed. “Oh Goddess.”
“If I were to time travel back to then, I’d advise my younger self to go with Mage against the Machine,” I said. “Of course, unlike you, I couldn’t sing or play an instrument, but that was never going to stop me. Why I ended up a member of the Black-Eyed Peas.”
“What did the Viking Battle Boars think?” Jane asked, coming up from behind me and shooting her magical pistol into a buzzsaw wielding Lich-Wight with a tanned pig’s head as a mask.
“I don’t think they were a band,” I said. “Which is a shame as that would be a hard gimmick to beat.”
“Gary, do you have a concussion?” Jane asked, concerned.
I blinked. “I believe I do, yes.”
The Pig Man lifted his sickle to decapitate me, which he had plenty of room to do since he was about eight feet tall and built like a brick wall.
“Powers back,” I said, before blasting him with a fireball so powerful that it blew off the upper half of his torso, leaving only his waist and legs. They wobbled a bit before falling over. “I call that one Power Word: Rocket Launcher.”
“You didn’t say any magic words,” Jane said, looking at me funny. “Gary, have you been holding out on me?”
I shrugged. “Never create a system you can’t game.”
“Could you two focus on defending the campers?” Mandy shouted, turning into mist and moving with inhuman speed across the battlefield. She would turn into a bloody cloud, disappear, appear behind a baddie, cut off their head, and then move on. “We’re losing this battle!”
Mandy wasn’t wrong. Despite the fact that I didn’t see any of the campers killed and all of their defenders were still alive, the monsters had pushed everyone into the center of a circle that was eventually going to break. I was pretty sure I could make it out of this alive and so could just about everyone else here among the fighters.
The fighters weren’t the people I was worried about, though. This was a refuge for kids and that was the target of the attackers, I realized. This wasn’t about going after the superheroes here (such as they were) but the children. The next generation of superheroes, perhaps, or maybe just to deal a psychological blow to the current one.
After all, nothing would break Cindy worse than trying to rescue teenagers stuck in the same sort of situation she’d been growing up only to lead them to their deaths. Well, that or losing her credit cards. Ouch! I can feel her psychically pissed at me for that comment. She does love her Omega Corp Black Card, though.
“I can tell!” I said, trying to figure out a possible way to deal with this situation. “I think I have an idea.”
Cindy lopped back in her warg form, spitting out a severed tentacle before resuming her human form. “It’d better be a good one, Gary. We depend on you for plans stupid enough to work.”
“I am both insulted and relieved,” I replied. “Get back to the children and hope that Death is still favorably disposed to me. I’m about to invoke my God of the Dead powers!”
Cindy blinked. “You have God of the Dead powers? I thought it was just a stupid but b
lasphemous title you gave yourself.”
“That too!” I said, conjuring my scythe and drawing on the power of the Primal Orb of Death to supplement my own natural abilities. The grass around me started to die as the bugs in the air began to drop.
Cindy blinked. “Yeah, probably a good idea to run away now.”
“I hate when comic books keep introducing new powers to characters,” Jane muttered as she fired shots into more of the Lich-Wights coming our way. “This is how Superman got the power of Super-Hypnosis and Super-Basket Weaving. Which is only slightly more egregious than the fact you’re a werewolf now, Cindy. I consider that cultural appropriation.”
“Jane, to quote you, shut the buck up,” Cindy replied, turning into a wolf and mauling away a Lich-Wight before it bit a camper on the arm.
William and Nancy were barely managing to hold off a half-dozen of the enemy Lich-Wights as well as the horde of zombified cultists that had been created from the rest. The campers, to their credit, were not planning on going down without a fight themselves. One of them could generate shields and had created a large bubble over the others. Another had eyebeams that she was using to blast the attacking monsters one after the other. A third? A third was blasting them with flower petals that, well, weren’t doing much, but points for trying.
As I felt my power reach the limit my body was capable of handling, David proceeded to land on my hand. “Yo, what’s up?”
“Not the time, David!” I shouted, feeling like I was about to explode. “Also, I know you were leading me into a trap. Not cool, dude!”
“Ah, what’s a little betrayal between friends?” David asked, not even bothering to deny it. “The important thing is that I get what I want. Which is you to confront Dracula.”
“Why?” I asked, confused and angry.
“That would be telling,” David said, his voice devoid of humor.
Growling, I held tight to my scythe and shouted to heavens. “I command you, in the name of Death, to return to your graves. I, as the psychopomp for this dimension and Lord of the Dead, compel you to die.”
One of the hillbilly cannibal zombies hurled a pitchfork at my head that I instinctively ducked under. The rest had the gall to laugh as if I’d just spoken the funniest thing the cursed horde had heard all year. It appeared that I didn’t have any special power over these particular undead. It could be because they were from another dimension or just my plan was stupid from the beginning.
“It didn’t work,” David replied.
“I know,” I said, watching the horde ignore me and descend on the children. Cindy, Mandy, Nancy, and William had made a wall out of the attackers, but I noticed they were all getting up after being destroyed. Severed hands, severed limbs, and more moved of their own accord to merge together into new horrifying abominations that seemed to get more terrifying with each attack.
“Gary!” Cindy shouted. “Do something! I stopped your guy, the least you could do is stop mine!”
One of Sheriff Injustice’s tentacles went for my face, only to be grabbed by David’s claws before he flew over the lake to toss it in. That gave me and idea and I sucked in my breath before slamming down my scythe. “GO BACK TO HELL!”
That was when I opened a portal to Hell.
That was a good idea, right?
Chapter Nineteen
Where My Plan Completely Backfires
Sometimes I just do things.
This is going to what they write on my tombstone if there’s enough left of me to bury. I am the poster boy for Chaotic Neutral, which isn’t even in an alignment in the modern edition of Dungeons and Dragons as I understand it. I have almost zero impulse control and I swear, getting older and becoming a father has only made it worse. Like, for example, when confronted with an unkillable horde of Lich-Wights, why did I think for a second that opening a gateway to Hell was a good idea? Seriously? That was my solution and I’m not even sure that qualifies as one.
As mentioned, I’ve been to Hell a few times in my life and it’s never been a pleasant experience. The Underworld has a wide variety of places to visit and plenty of interesting people but you’re never going to have a good time in even the nicer sections because, again, Hell. They will somehow manage to make a four-course meal of the best food you’ve ever tasted an experience that you won’t want to recall. I remember when I managed to get the world’s greatest BBQ as a meal and after finishing, they led in my rabbi in order to make sure I felt guilty for violating kosher. So damned good, though. Literally.
Wait, where was I? Oh yes, I’d opened a gateway to Hell because I figured that if you had a bunch of monsters that were unkillable abominations against God then the only thing to do was take them off the board—literally. Hell is the place you put unkillable abominations against God, after all. I assumed. It’s not like I actually bothered to take a census down there about whether Kronos and the Titans plus Azazel were the only guys imprisoned in the fiery pits. Really, this is why I preferred Jewish Hell because a really dark empty place was less theatrical but no less effective for an afterlife. Oh dammit, I keep getting distracted. Why was that? Oh yes, I’d stupidly opened a gateway to Hell!
The idea that I’d made a terrible mistake was instantly understood as a swirling vortex appeared underneath the majority of the Lich-Wights. Most of them didn’t have a chance to react other than to scream in shock or surprise as they suddenly started to fall into the demonic red light that blasted forth an unnatural heat. This was the fire and brimstone Hell that was not the place I’d visited. The flames belched forth and consumed many of the Lich-Wights that had been already falling to their doom. So far, so good. If I had closed the portal then, I would have saved the day.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t. I reached out to start closing the portal I’d conjured—or at least try to slow its expansion—but it turned out that I was unable to do either. Instead, inch-by-inch, the vortex to the second most feared place in the Multiverse (the first being Oblivion) started to grow. Worse, I could already some unearthly howls of unholy abominations coming to escape through the hole I’d poked into their prison. Things I could sense were powerful and terrifying enough to make the Lich-Wights look like a set of rowdy toddlers. Yeah, that was not good.
“Gary, you idiot!” David shouted, flying around my head. I noticed he didn’t actually fly so much as levitate, which made me start to wonder if the whole bird thing was just an affectation on his part. Mind you, most birds I knew didn’t talk either.
“I didn’t know this would happen!” I shouted, trying to figure out some way to fix the situation.
“You opened a gateway to Hell!” David shouted. “That is by definition a bad idea!”
“Details, details!” I snapped. “If you’re not going to help me solve this, then flock off!”
“You mean bork off,” David said.
“I mean fuck off!” I snapped.
“Listen,” David said, ignoring my curse. “You need to absorb the Hell energy into yourself!”
“That sounds bad!”
“Do not try to argue with me about this!” David said. “I am way better at magic than you!”
“Just who are you?” I snapped, deciding to follow the bird’s advice as I saw something start to emerge from the Hell gate I’d opened. It looked very large, red-skinned, and horned in a way that made me realize that at least some depictions of the Devil might be accurate. Either that or the demon emerging liked to play to stereotypes.
“I will devour your soul!” the booming voice of the giant, skyscraper-sized, red demon said, its enormous hand reaching up through the top of the gateway.
“Yes, because quoting the Evil Dead 2 makes you cooler, not lamer,” I muttered, concentrating on the power within the gateway as well as attempting to link the power of the Primal Orbs with the Reaper’s Cloak. “Real fans quote Army of Darkness!”
“I think that’s the reverse,” David said.
“Shut up!” I said. “Bruce Campbell is a god and that’s a
ll that matters.”
David didn’t argue the point, probably because it was self-evidently true.
“Absorb and close the gate! Absorb and close the gate! Absorb and close the date!” I shouted, making up a new spell on the fly in the silliest way possible. Well, not quite the silliest way possible, there were no rubber chickens, but if I’d had Fozzie Bear there then everything would have worked out fine.
What followed was a tidal wave of negative energy pouring through every cell in my body. If I wasn’t someone that Death had been subtlety manipulating the bloodline of for millennia—assuming you believed the Queen of the Underworld—then I probably would have been shredded in an instant. Instead, I was just washed over with more Hell energy than the protagonist of Doom.
I was hit by the usual standbys of regrets and horrors that I had experienced over the past thirty years of my life.
The death of my brother, Keith.
The failure to save Mandy.
The failure to save Falconcrest City.
Cloak’s death.
Diabloman’s betrayal.
The fact that I read Cindy and my fanfiction from junior high to our kids when they were barely old enough to understand English. I mean, I don’t know if the fact reading My Immortal at story time qualified as child abuse, but it probably should.
That time I won the Grammy Award for Best Single when I absolutely cheated using sorcery and it belonged to the K-Pop superhero team Alt-Language. Kayne and Taylor Swift were right to call me out for that.
“Focus, Gary!” David said. “Also, have you considered that your crimes are less actual crimes than mischief?”
“I am not mischief! I am a serious supervillain, I mean superhero, goddammit!” I snapped, feeling a thousand burns across my body as red lightning poured from the portal like the Emperor’s Force lightning being reflected by Mace Windu. I felt agonizing pain but that increased my ability to channel sorcery.
Strangely, I felt another presence helping me draw in the Hell energy expanding before us. It was a much more powerful wizard’s presence that managed to drain away many times more than what I was accomplishing. It made me realize that if I was being suckered by the little raven then I was being suckered by an archmage of considerable power.
The Supervillainy Saga (Book 7): The Horror of Supervillainy Page 17