Normalized (The Complete Quartet)

by David Bussell

  “Okay, I’ll bite, why?”

  “Because you were the one who made me,” he said.

  “Made you? What planet are you from?”

  D’eath gave an involuntary chuckle. “That might just be the first intelligent thing to escape your mouth.”

  He stabbed a button on the arm of his throne. There was a hiss of steam as a pneumatic platform climbed from the bowels of the base.

  “You see, I am not of your planet,” he went on. “I came to Earth as an orphan from a destroyed world many light years away.”

  I guess that explained some things. His weird and wonderful tech. His whole ‘destroy all humans’ kick. Plus it would explain why I could never quite place his accent. It had that Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins quality, you know? Not so much an accent as all the accents.

  The pneumatic platform rose flush to the chamber floor. Sat on it was a large metallic ball about four feet across, kind of old-looking and with one big ding in the side.

  “Don’t you recognize it?” D’eath asked.

  I didn’t at first. Thanks to him I’ve seen all manner of wacky contraptions in my time and this ball thing didn’t stand out from the crowd. Unless... no... it wasn’t just a ball, it was a pod. The same pod that had fallen from the night sky and landed on Earth all those years ago. The pod containing the ultimate illegal alien...

  “I was the baby in the crater!” yelled D’eath, his voice infused with a biblical rage. “A child, sent to planet Earth that I might lead humanity to a new dawn. Except my destiny was denied to me. Denied the day I was returned to sender on the tip of your Size 12 boot!”

  The guy was really pushing me off the shame cliff. I mean, cut me some slack, buddy, how was I meant to know there’d be a karmic price tag attached to kicking a baby into outer space?

  The Professor continued his monologue. “I spent years circling the globe after that, aging at an accelerated rate as a consequence of being denied your yellow Sun’s energizing rays. My growth stunted by the unyielding walls of my Zero G prison. Plotting my revenge. It was only once my spacecraft’s orbit decayed and returned me to Earth a second time that I was able to put my machinations in motion – the death of Captain Might and the subjugation of his entire species!”

  Okay, so my bad on that one, but on a long enough timeline these things are bound to happen.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” I said. “I messed up. But I can’t have you going around murdering people.”

  “Murdering?”

  “You sent fourteen plant workers to the morgue. My friend Gerry too.”

  “So what? This isn’t cowboys and Indians, you imbecile. This is war.”

  “They weren’t fighting a war, they were civilians.”

  The Professor laughed. “Civilians are civilized, my friend, the people you’re talking about were human.”

  May 26th (part six)

  Professor D’eath leaned forward in his throne, fingers tented beneath his chin like he’d superglued his hands to his face. Something told me he was getting ready to share his master plan, and that something was Professor D’eath.

  “Behold my master plan!” he said.

  Before I could hold up a finger he was yammering on about the “Wheels of vengeance” and how everything had come together according to his “Grand design” and blah blah blah nag nag nag.[122]

  There seemed to be a lot of moving parts to D’eath’s plot, so I tuned in and out to be honest. I’m really more of a transmitter than a receiver unless you’re throwing in the right key words (“cooch,” “hot-rail” and “triplets”seem to do the trick). My ears pricked up when D’eath got to talking about that cannon of his though – the one poking through the roof of the building and pointed at planet Earth.

  “Do you like it?” D’eath gloated. “I call it my Immortarlizer, because it puts the mortar into immortal.”

  I guess maybe it worked better on the page, except I’m looking at it now and it really doesn’t.

  The Professor gave us a rundown of the apparatus, pointing to its various stolen parts – the plutonium core that powered it, the tibonium shell of its barrel – but the thing he was really eager to show off was the one component he’d yet to install.

  The Professor held up a ball of amber. “Do you recognize it?” he said. “Of course you don’t, you were too busy toying with my Mandroid to notice it. Remember, at the museum? While you were risking your life rescuing a common sapphire I was yards away, securing the real prize.”

  Using a pair of forceps, D’eath dunked the rock into a beaker of chemical solution. The amber dissolved, melting away to reveal a fossilized butterfly topped with a pair of glittering wings. He plucked one off with a pair of tweezers and admired it.

  “Beautiful isn’t it?” he said. “The closest match we have for its color would be purple, but its actual hue hasn’t existed in nature since the T-Rex walked the Earth.”

  He placed the wing between two crystal lenses and slid it into a drawer of his cannon.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked, sprinkling in a few choice profanities.

  “My dear boy, I’m going to level the playing field is what I’m going to do.”

  “Those people down there are your prisoners. You can’t use them for target practice.”

  “Is that so?” he said, turning to one of his Mandroids and pointing at Birdy. Then, easy as ordering a cup of coffee, he commanded, “Kill the budgerigar.”

  The Mandroid pirouetted and took aim at Birdy’s cage. As its Gatling gun whirred to life I felt my stomach take a swan dive through my pelvis. The robot’s cannon roared and spent cartridges clouded the air like metal confetti—

  —but the shots stopped short of their target, hammering a din against an invisible wall. Doctor Love had come to the rescue, tossing up a force field and saving my brother from getting slotted. It was tits.

  Fraulein Frigid took advantage of the distraction. “Everybody chill!” she screamed, unleashing a floe of ice at the remainder of D’eath’s Mandroids and freezing them like Windows 98.

  The Professor acted fast though, returning fire with a blue pulse from his Nemesis Gauntlet and parroting Frigid’s power. Before we knew it he’d flattened her with a snowball the size of a watermelon and we were dragging her, semi-conscious, to safety. The team took shelter behind one of D’eath’s half-built contraptions to avoid another missile but the Prof had flair to spare.

  Adopting a controversial ‘kill everything that isn’t me’ policy, D’eath used Frigid’s stolen power to whip up a razor-storm of ice needles – a cyclone of white arrows, like the wind barbs from a TV weather report.

  “I’m going to peel off the top of your head and use it like a hairy Frisbee!” he hollered.

  Gone was D’eath’s majesty. No more the stately swan powering serenely down the river – at last we were seeing the ugly feet pedalling furiously beneath the surface.

  “What do we do now?” Miss Transit shouted over the screaming gale.

  The chamber was a stinging whiteout of tinkling frozen thorns. It was music to my ears. Really terrifying music. I looked to the rafters to see that D’eath’s icicles were cutting all too close to Birdy, who had nowhere to take cover. Trapped in that cage he was a sitting duck (just an expression, bro).

  “I have to get him out of there,” I said.

  Acro-Bat hooked a hand on my shoulder. “You keep D’eath busy and let me take care of your brother.”

  I gave Acro the nod and made a target of myself.

  “Hey, Professor, you pitch like a bitch!” I distracted.

  D’eath hurled a frozen javelin in my direction but I Hammer Danced out of the way. He threw another and shanked it way into the rough. Whatever the Professor’s doctorate was in, it certainly wasn’t marksmanship.

  I ducked back behind cover and checked on my teammate’s progress. In the few seconds of grace he’d been given, Acro-Bat had used his gymnastic skills to shimmy up the wall of the chamber and find his way into the
rafters. While D’eath continued to bombard the rest of us, Acro-Bat trapezed between overhead cables until he arrived at the winch mechanism for Birdy’s cage. Working it with all his strength, he got the cogs moving and the cage began to descend, finally lowering to within a few feet of the floor.

  The Professor wasn’t having it though. Spying the saboteur, he blasted Acro-Bat with a cone of cold and froze him solid. The man-shaped block of ice plummeted from the rafters, only narrowly snatched up by Strong-Man before it shattered on the ground. Acro was alive but it’d be a while before he thawed. Another teammate down. This plan of mine was getting goofed on hard.

  There was a PING from D’eath’s glove, signifying that his loan of Fraulein Frigid’s power was up.

  “Stay down, everyone,” said Doctor Love. “If he can’t see us he can’t siphon off our powers.”

  But the Prof had boned up extensively on the Big Book of Smart Guy Stuff. He fired a trick shot from his Nemesis Gauntlet, bouncing a blue pulse off of the throne room’s angled ceiling and into Miss Transit, kiping her teleportation power. A thin second later he winked behind us, and in a manner most ungentlemanly, punched Transit the hell out. Three down, three to go.

  “Strong-Man turn puny man to paste!” said our colossus as he went to do the chivalrous thing and put a fist through D’eath’s ribcage.

  But the Prof had away with Love’s power and blocked his blow with a force field. CRUNCH went Strong-Man’s shattered knuckles with a sound like chewed up hard candy. It was brutal. As the big guy nursed his shattered fist, D’eath zapped him, poaching his muscle. Amped on brawn, D’eath tore up the contraption we’d been using for cover, hefted it into the air and hammered Strong-Man into the ground like a railway spike.

  It was just me and Doctor Love left standing. I went for broke and gave D’eath a jab to the jaw, but it wasn’t going to fly. In fact, going by the look he gave me, the only thing that was going to fly was my head, right after he teed it off my neck.

  The moment never came though. Instead, PING, and the situation flipped. D’eath started to stagger backwards, unbalanced by the heft of his makeshift club. Suddenly there was an almighty clang as he dropped the thing to avoid being crushed under its weight.

  Of course, that was it! The Professor’s Achilles heel! How had it taken me this long to figure out? His Nemesis Gauntlet would only let him duplicate someone’s power so long as they were conscious... so if there were no superhumans left standing, D’eath had nothing to play with.

  I turned to Doctor Love but she was already a beat ahead of me.

  “Just make it quick,” she said.

  I’m not proud of the way we jumped that next hurdle. KO’ing a woman – it’s a faux pas, I won’t deny it – but you can’t make an omelet etc. Believe me, if I’d known some cool kung-fu grip way to put her out I would have used it. Instead it was Bang, Zoom, straight to the.... well, I guess Earth in this case.

  I gave Love a peck on the cheek then Ike Turnered her to sleep. As I set her on the ground I saw D’eath’s face drop.

  “Bring it home!” Birdy cheered from his cage as I advanced on my nemesis.

  As D’eath backed away I saw something in his eyes I’d not witnessed before; good old-fashioned fear, human as any I’d ever seen. He zapped me a couple of times with that blue light of his but it was a lost cause. You can’t steal from a man with nothing. That was the fatal irony of D’eath’s plan. The only way I could beat him was to fight as an empty vessel, and he’d emptied it himself when he gave me a superpowers enema.

  I had the Professor up against the ropes.

  “I surrender!” he said.

  But I wasn’t taking “I surrender” for an answer. Giving myself a run-up for maximum impact, I kicked the Professor square in the nards, causing a satisfying “Baaaaaaaaastard!” to jettison from his lungs as he folded in half like a lawn chair. As finishing moves go it lacked finesse, but you can get too avant-garde with these things.

  D’eath was down. I couldn’t believe it. I spiked an imaginary ball and did a victory lap so hard I thought I’d knock the Moon off its axis. But the game wasn’t over yet.

  “Careful!” Birdy shouted, only it was too late.

  In the split-second I’d taken my eye off the ball the Professor had let go of his balls long enough to activate another toggle on his gauntlet. A siren sounded, then the giant cannon pointed at Earth shuddered and readied to fire.

  Honestly, did that glove of his have a button for frigging everything?

  May 26th (part seven)

  CHOOM!

  The cannon let rip with D’eath’s money shot. Birdy and I watched helplessly through the skylight as the bolt of energy scratched purple fire across the cosmos like the cover of a badly Photoshopped sci-fi novel. Despite all our efforts - despite everything we’d done – mankind was about to make the endangered species list.

  The Professor aimed a throaty laugh into the sky. I didn’t care for that – I didn’t care for that one bit. The purple bolt collided with the Earth. POW! Smack dab in the middle of New York City. That was that. The end of the human race. And we made such good TV.

  —but instead of leaving a smoke ring where the world used to be, the bolt ricocheted off the Earth’s surface and pinged back into space.

  What the what? D’eath spent all that time building a Moon cannon only for it to rebound without so much as making a dimple? Unless... I could see now that the purple bolt hadn’t just ricocheted, it was heading on a return course, the same way the blue light from D’eath’s gauntlet rebounded to its source. Could it be his cannon wasn’t a doomsday device but another kind of Nemesis weapon? What if instead of turning the planet into kitty litter D’eath was trying to mooch more superpowers? The superpowers of an entire city? He’d be the Swiss army knife of supervillains.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  The Professor responded with a pithy, “Soon enough.”

  I turned to see that D’eath had crawled back to his throne and hauled himself onto its cushion. Above him a pair of mechanical arms lowered a crown towards his head. I recognized the headwear right away; it had belonged to the magician, Dr Rune, right before it went missing along with his upper half.[123]

  Attached to the crown was a cable that connected to an antenna on the roof of the building. Well, I didn’t care how fancy his hat was, the Professor was about to get his ass kicked purple. I went to drag him from his throne but before I could cover the distance he pressed another button on his armrest and a gun turret sprang from the floor, halting me in my tracks. No slouching with this assh*le.

  “Kill me if you like, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve seen your toy in action – borrow all the superpowers you like – you won’t have time to do any damage with them from up here.”

  The crown nestled on D’eath’s head and he offered a rictus grin so wide I thought it might reach round the back of his head and make the top of his skull to fall off.

  “How many times must I tell you, dear boy,” he said, “talent borrows... genius steals.”[124]

  The purple bolt struck the roof’s antenna, bathing the throne room in a flickering violet glow. It got me thinking. If the light D’eath had used to rub out my powers had been red, and the color to borrow powers was blue... what did that make purple light? Wasn’t purple a combination of red and blue, and wouldn’t that mean it’d have the effects of both? And if that’s was true—

  —holy sh*tballs.

  I suddenly got what D’eath had meant by that “genius steals” crack. He was about to pirate those superpowers for keeps![125]

  The current continued its journey from the antenna, threading down the cable and into the crown, which pulsed star bright as it absorbed its payload. The room became a spectacle of kaleidoscopic colors and retina-searing light – I’m talking some real industrial light and magic crap. The Professor went into a spasm and bellowed like he was trying to shout the last of the crazy out of his face.

  Finally, the light dimmed
to reveal him stood there, tall and majestic, purple electricity arcing from his fingertips. He shucked off his robotic exoskeleton like a lizard shedding old skin and addressed me in a voice that could have shaken the bolts from a battleship.

  “I WIN!” he said, and pointed a glowing finger my way. “NOW GET IN THE POD.”

  Just in case the message didn’t land, he threw a jolt of purple lightning my way that shook my bones like an old rollercoaster and turned my fillings into hot bullets.

  “Okay!” I said, holding up my hands. “I’m getting in the pod.”

  What else could I do? I approached the platform and climbed inside D’eath’s cosmic trashcan, closing the hatch behind me. D’eath leered at me through the hatch window, creepier than a pedophile made of spiders.