“Hell is for other people,” I said, making light of his statement. “Also, Heaven. Let's get going.”
Gabrielle nodded and extended the Ultraforce around our group, raising us all up in a bubble behind her which carried us in much the same way as the Shadow Seven. Much to my surprise, Mandy took my hand and stepped forward through the bubble's exterior.
It sloshed around us and I briefly thought we were going to fall before finding myself floating through the air at speeds identical to what we were travelling at. An aura of Ultraforce was clinging to us and Mandy took us down into a swimming like pose before speeding us up fast enough to come just behind Gabrielle's flying form.
“I thought you'd like a chance to be up front,” Mandy said, smiling. “Gabrielle taught me how to manipulate her aura through thought.”
“Wow,” I said, staring forward, blinking. “I'm flying for real. This is...wow.” I then blinked, doing a double take. “Wait, are you two friends now?”
Cause that wasn't awkward.
At all.
“Oh yes,” Ultragoddess said, hovering directly in front of me. I briefly wondered if this was why she'd switched from a skirt to shorts. “Your wife is a fascinating woman. I've completely forgiven her for trying to kill me with the Black Witch.”
“What's that?”
“You knew I was in love with her,” Mandy said, looking away.
“There's a difference between being in love with a supervillain and aiding and abetting a murder,” I said, with a great deal of hypocritical moral outrage.
Mandy looked at me.
“Yeah, I've not got a lot a leg to stand on, I know,” I said, still troubled by it. “I'm just not a very forgiving sort. I don't know how you can work with so many people who have tried to kill you, Gabrielle.”
“Of course not,” my wife grumbled. “You're Merciless.”
“Forgiveness is the path to healing. It's also the path from turning an enemy to a friend, which is the sweetest victory,” Gabrielle said. “It's not just a song by Survivor.”
Silent, I looked down and saw the beating my hometown had taken. It looked arguably worse from above than it did on the ground. With only a few superheroes to guard against the hordes of supervillains, zombies, and zombie supervillains—plenty of them had chosen to go to town. The WFCR Radio Station was covered in a glacier, for example, and I could see places where fires were still burning unattended.
The one saving grace was it didn't look like they were anywhere near the city's population in undead shambling down below. As bad as the deaths had gotten, it seemed the vast majority of the population had been evacuated. There were thousands of shamblers below, tens of thousands even, but a good number of them were raised from the existing dead. I wanted to believe not that many had been killed.
“Eighteen thousand, seven-hundred and fifty-two,” Cloak said, his voice low. “That's how many the Brotherhood of Infamy and their monsters have murdered in the past month. That's not counting those who have died from starvation, exposure, thirst, accident, disease, lack of medical attention, or suicide. I can feel their spirits calling thanks to your pact with Death.”
Sometimes there were no words.
Then there were.
“We're going to kill these bastards,” I said, my voice low and cold. “Every last one of them.”
“Yes, we are,” Gabrielle said, her voice surprisingly calm and cool.
“Isn't that against the superhero's code?” Mandy asked.
“Not during war,” Gabrielle said, her voice cold.
Mandy gave my hand a squeeze.
She'd killed her first person to save my life.
Now I was going to ask her to kill more.
This whole superhero and villain thing wasn't working out nearly the way I'd wanted it to.
“It just took the end of the world to make you realize that,” Cloak muttered.
“Oh like that doesn't happen every Thursday,” I muttered.
“We're here,” Ultragoddess said, slowing us down.
The sight which greeted me was less like a superhero battle and more like a war zone. The Falcons Stadium had been barricaded up by a gigantic wall of cars, presumably moved by Ultragoddess and Black Witch's powers, with lots of towers manned by courageous mundanes fighting with weapons taken from the National Guard Armory.
Laser bolts sailed through the air against the thousands of zombies formed into a horde by the black robed-necromancers interspersed with them. They weren't wearing the Reapers' Cloaks, I would have felt it if they were, but their clothing was clearly inspired by the Nightwalker's attire. Hundreds of them were present, many using scavenged weapons in place of spells or staves. They had managed to roll over a number of ground based defenders and were either eating them, hacking them to pieces, or just celebrating their kills even as the horde was shot at from above.
They weren't the real threat, though, but merely the support for the mounted dinosaurs which were breathing fire and shooting laser-beams from their eyes. They weren't just dinosaurs, you see, but cybernetic dinosaurs which meant the Brotherhood of Infamy either had looted the stash of or had the help of Doctor Dinosaur.
Which was a shame because I liked that guy.
The Amazons on top of brachiosaurs, triceratops, and a pair of Tyrannosaurus Rexes were tearing through the stadium's meager defenses. They were tough-looking women, some beautiful, others not, but all wearing modernized Grecian armor and helmets with specialized lenses which allowed them to see in the dark. They were working methodically, murdering the defenders one by one, showing no sign of the crazy slaughter their associates were engaged in. They were professionals doing a job, which made them so much worse than the insane cultists they'd been bought by.
There were even some supervillains in the air, both living and dead, like long-time Ultragoddess annoyances Nega-Goddess, Xerox, Blood Eagle, and the Smog the Elemental Spirit of Corruption. There were also the dead and zombiefied forms of Canadian heroes Avro Arrow and Ms. Mountie, presumably having come across the lake to help the city with the Backwoodsman. I felt for the guy and hoped he was still alive out there somewhere. Either way, all of this was a massive amount of overkill for butchering a stadium full of helpless people. If this was supervillainy, I wanted no part of it.
“How many people are in that stadium?”
“Twenty-one-thousand,” Gabrielle said.
“Drop me down.”
Like that, Mandy dropped my hand and the battle was joined. I levitated down onto the head of the closest Tyrannosaurus Rex, landing right behind one of the Amazons who was using a weird saddle with levers and buttons to manipulate the creature's brain. I felt guilty placing my hand on her shoulder, filling her lungs up with ice, and then causally dumping her over the side of the creature's body.
The controls weren't terribly complex, a little more difficult to manage than your average video game and I'd played a lot of video games. Moving the central lever to one side, my T-Rex buddy moved in a similar direction and a pulling of the trigger on its side resulted in glowing red death shooting from its eyes.
It was a testament to how thoroughly pissed off I was that riding a frigging cyborg Tyrannosaurus Rex with DEATH RAY EYES was not something I could take the time to enjoy. Instead, I turned the monster against the necromancer's down below.
Deliberately targeting them rather than the zombies around them. As they screamed, going up in burning flame, much of the zombie horde below became a disorganized mass of mindless hate-filled monsters which turned on the non-necromancer cultists around them. Dozens of them died, then perhaps as many as a hundred while the rest of my time went to town on the enemy army.
As Ultragoddess said, it was war and no effort was spared to keep alive the Brotherhood forces. Well, let me correct that, no exceptional effort was spared. Bronze Medalist did his best to knock out living cultists then tie them up against the side of the fortifications outside of the zombies reach with his kinetic energy bands.
> He could afford to do that since he could reach speeds of several thousand miles per hour. Ultragoddess, likewise, did her best to knock out the living rather than kill them. None of us hesitated against the dead, though, and no one objected when the Human Tank fired rocket launchers into the gun-wielding black-robed sadists who'd unleashed this horror on the city or their Amazon allies.
Really, I couldn't help but be proud of my henchmen as they showed off their own fighting skill. Angel Eyes floated in the air, blasting zombies with glowing beams of arcane might. Cindy plopped herself down on one of the towers and pulled a Foundation for World Harmony laser rifle from her basket and shot Amazons off their mounts into the zombie hordes below.
Amanda threw big objects around, even grabbing a stegosaurus by the tail and hurling it into the air at Nega-Goddess. I was particularly impressed by my wife. She moved like a ninja, using a pair of eskrima sticks charged with magic that seemed to cause the undead to explode when touched while having a taser-like effect on humans. I'd have to, very reluctantly, thank the Black Witch for providing those.
The one who did the most damage of our group, though? That was Diabloman. He went to town with his summoned tattoo monsters and enhanced strength. A man who had struggled against a super-enhanced gorilla was going to town in a way not seen since his heyday in the Eighties.
I suspected he planned to die here.
“He has a family, he wouldn't do that,” Cloak said, conspicuously silent as I launched a pair of rockets on the sides of my mount into the other T-Rex. I ducked underneath the eye beams it shot wildly as it died, collapsing into the ground.
“Unless he thinks he isn't worthy of them,” I said, watching an Amazon run up and jump on the side of my mount. She was climbing up the side of the creature like it was an obstacle in basic training.
She was a rough and tumble dirty-blonde haired woman with an eyepatch, a bloody knife in her mouth (which couldn't be sanitary), and a host of scars across her face. Her armor looked like had been scarred by Ultragoddess’ energy blasts and I was surprised at the vehemence in her eyes. Reaching the top of the T-Rex's head, she stood across from me and pulled the knife from her mouth before holding it threateningly at me.
“You killed my sister,” she hissed.
I supposed she meant the one I'd seized the T-Rex from. I'd like to say being confronted with this display of my attack's humanity affected me. That it reminded me every single person I killed, living or dead, had relatives who loved them. I'd like to say it did, but I'd be lying. I just hit her in the face with a fireball, knocking her off the side of my T-Rex, and then I brought the cyborg-dinosaur around to stomp her. I even sang Walk the Dinosaur by Was (Not Was) during it. Because there was no way in the world I was going to ride a T-Rex and not sing it, inability to enjoy my situation or not. Perhaps I'd have to wean myself off supervillainy a little bit at a time.
“You're enjoying this too much,” Cloak muttered.
“I'm not enjoying it at all,” I said, growling. “They're the ones who brought this fight to the people inside. Not me.”
It was a good lie to tell myself. The truth was I was getting angry again. Seeing all this slaughter, mayhem, and bloodshed on both sides was reminding me I'd become what I hated. My brother had been killed by a fanatic who thought he was making the world a better place by murdering people. These assheads were doing the same thing, though I wasn't sure how they thought summoning a giant god of chaos would help. Cultists were funny that way. The fact was, I was killing them because I thought it would make the world a better place.
Talk about irony.
“That's more apropos,” Cloak said. “Murder is in the details, Gary. You are killing to save lives.”
“Am I? Or am I just doing it because it feels good to let all that rage out?”
Cloak had no answer.
Nor did I when one of the Amazons on the ground fired a rocket launcher which blew up the T-Rex's head underneath me.
I flew through the air, on fire, and hit the ground amongst a horde of hungry dead.
Blacking out.
This was getting to be a habit.
Chapter Seventeen
Where We Discover Our Princess is in Another Castle
I didn't stay blacked out very long, only a few seconds. Long enough for a pair of zombies to grab my leg and start biting down hard on it.
That woke me up real quick.
“Argghhhh!” I screamed, incinerating every one of the damned monsters around me.
I lashed out in a rage thereafter, bleeding from my leg wound as I destroyed every single monster I could throw fire at. I didn't stop burning, slashing, and killing until the better part of ten minutes had passed.
And that was because everyone was dead. Everyone on their side at least. Spread out around me was the burning remains of a lot of cultists, zombies, and more than a few of Ares' daughters.
If this was Greek Mythology, I would have really offended said deity by my actions and now be under some kind of curse. As such, I was under a curse. I couldn't help but look at what was around me and feel like throwing up.
Guilt.
Sickness.
Horror.
It had to hit me sometime.
Falling down to my knees, I felt my face and tried to figure out whether I'd gone insane. No, that was obvious. Sane people didn't put on costumes to become supervillains when they had happy lives. Hey, they didn't do that when they had unhappy ones. No, I was afraid I was becoming sane. Which was so much worse.
I just sat there, collapsed, for a long time. I tried to muster my strength to move but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I wasn't cut out for this life and now was realizing it. It was a hard realization, like you just woke up one day and discovered everything you'd worked to for your entire life was pointless.
Time lost all meaning as I focused on this one thought, Cloak leaving me to it.
I appreciated that.
“Gary?” I heard a feminine voice behind me. It woke me from the self-pity was throwing myself.
I thought it was Mandy, before I looked over my shoulder and saw it was Gabrielle instead. She'd descended down behind me and was hovering a few inches over the ground. Mandy was interrogating one of the captured cultists alongside the Black Witch. The Shadow Seven and my gang were off to the side, not interacting and doing their best to avoid one another.
“How long have I been sitting here?” I said, looking up.
“About twenty-minutes.”
“I don't think I'm cut out for supervillainy,” I said, taking a deep breath and getting up. It felt like confessing to murder.
“Gary, can I tell you a secret?” Gabrielle said, walking up toward me and putting her hand on my shoulder.
I looked over to her. “What's that?”
“Whether you're the good guy or the bad guy depends greatly on your perspective,” Gabrielle said, helping me stand up. A glowing bandage appeared around my leg, remaining there even when she broke away.
“Should you really be telling me that?” I asked, surprised to hear it coming from a hero.
“Let me show you,” Gabrielle said, extending her Ultra-senses to me.
For the briefest moment, I felt the world the way she did. I heard Mandy, Diabloman, Angel Eyes, the spirits hovering over the bodies, and the presence of the twenty-one thousand people in the stadium. The latter were discussing the battle which had just taken place. They were a mixture of scared, elated, relieved, and hopeful. Most of them focused their gratitude on Ultragoddess and Nighthuntress. Others were grateful I was there, which stunned me.
I heard one old woman say: “Did you hear? That Merciless guy who killed the Extreme is outside. He's fighting the zombies.”
“Isn't he a bad guy?” A man said back to her.
“Yeah, but the Extreme blew up a bridge. He's our bad guy!” An eleven-year-old child said.
A middle-aged woman replied, “Maybe need some bad guys to get things done.”
�
��I'll follow anyone-good or bad as long as they get us out of here.” That came from a seventy-year-old man.
They were already making up contrived stories as to why Ultragoddess and I would be allied together even as they had similar tales of Nighthuntress and the Black Witch. It was flattering. I hadn't realized I'd made quite such an impression.
“For better or worse, superheroes and supervillains are a part of this world's ongoing mythology,” Cloak said, sighing. “You are one. Both hero and villain. Don't ever believe otherwise.”
Gabrielle held my hands in hers. They weren't smooth but covered in tiny healed scars from countless battles. I had forgotten how warm and reassuring they were. “I grew up amongst the Cape and Cowl crowd, Gary. I know every conceivable type of hero, villain, anti-villain, anti-hero, fallen hero, risen villain, and everything in-between. I don't see the archetypes anymore but the people under the mask. You're the same person you've always been to me, whether you have superpowers and a codename or not.”
I wasn't ready for this sort of pep-talk. “You can't tell me you can look at all these bodies around me and say I'm the same person I was in college.”
Gabrielle blinked. “No, you're not. If you were like this, I might have believed you could survive my enemies. We might still be together.”
Wow.
That...was awkward.
Stumbling for something to say, I said, “Careful, you might ruin your clean-cut image.”
Gabrielle snorted. “I'm not in this for my image, Gary. I'm in this to help people.”
I stared at my hands. “I got to talk with Keith's ghost, recently. He's not proud of who I've become.”
“Don't be ashamed of who you are,” Gabrielle said, looking at me. “Be who you are for you.”
“That is appalling advice, Ms. Anders,” Cloak said in my head.
Gabrielle could hear Cloak's voice, just like her father. “Eh, I call ‘em like I see.”
I thought about what Gabrielle was saying and tried to parse it in my mind. I couldn't be a superhero. I was too selfish, too stubborn, too mean, and too ruthless. I would never not be these things. I also couldn't turn a blind eye to all that was going on around me either. The Nightmaster and her insanely stupid flunkies were turning my city into a cemetery.
The Games of Supervillainy (The Supervillainy Saga Book 2) Page 14