by Matt Carter
I’d like to think that would make him proud.
I checked the stage. Thunderhead was flying around, lazily punching cardboard cutouts of supervillains and making some long-winded point about how if unchecked, peer pressure would transform us into date rapists. Iguana Boy stood by raptly, asking enough dumb questions to keep Thunderhead talking.
“So I take it you bitched out and didn’t ask her out?”
I glowered. “I didn’t bitch out… but I didn’t ask her out either.”
“You bitched out,” Vic said, nodding.
“I didn’t! I froze up! Talking to girls isn’t easy!” I said, my voice getting higher with every word.
He rolled his eyes. “Yes it is. All you have to do is say, ‘Hey, beautiful. Here are some flowers. Wanna go out sometime and give each other hand jobs?’”
“I don’t think it’s called a hand job when you do it to girls.”
“Semantics,” Vic said, waving off my comment. “Or you can show her your new trick! That’ll get any girls’ loins aquiver!”
“Do you even know what any of those words mean?”
“Mostly,” he said with a shrug.
“I’m not showing her my trick,” I said. “It’s… not ready.”
“See, that’s your problem! You just need confidence, and then you’ll be on easy street!”
Confidence. Easy street. Right.
Vic could say that because he had confidence to spare and was moderately good-looking. Sure, he may have been dim and poor, but he stood out from the crowd just enough that he had no trouble getting first dates.
I, on the other hand, was the utter definition of nondescript. Brown hair, average appearance, below-average height, average clothes… the list went on and on.
I’d never get Kelly Shingle. She was the hottest, sweetest, smartest girl in our senior class. We were never friends, but she talked to me if we passed each other in the halls or when we shared classes. She was always nicer to me than she had to be. I knew that if I could just find some way to stand out that she might go out with me. Maybe I’d impress her with my trick, and then maybe she’d take off her top and let me touch her boobs.
Several actors in cartoonish, black-and-white striped shirts and masks had joined Thunderhead and Iguana Boy onstage. They had attempted to peer pressure Iguana Boy into jumping off of a bridge because it would be “groovy,” and when he said no they had tied him up and were preparing to throw him off while Thunderhead ran around the stage, inconsolable.
“I cannot take on the forces of peer pressure alone! Tell me, are there any heroes in the audience who can help me save my sidekick?”
Almost every hand shot up. Very few of them could have qualified as superheroes. Sure, there was Jim Abernathy from my trig class, who could move metal objects with his mind, that sophomore girl who could enhance the smells of whatever she was looking at, or those three scaleface juniors (Lemurians, the politically correct part of my mind reminded me) whose names I couldn’t pronounce. They might have been able to put up a fight against the forces of villainy and, who knows, maybe even peer pressure, but they couldn’t make it as superheroes.
Vic raised his hand, and then looked to me. “Why aren’t you raising your hand?”
“Not interested.”
He smirked. “Worried they might find out your—”
I punched him in the side, hard, hissing, “Shut up!”
He laughed. “Fine, fine, whatever.”
Naturally, Thunderhead picked three of the cutest girls he could find from the audience, and one freshman boy with a leg brace to prove he was equal opportunity. He taught them, and us, several silly catchphrases we could use to fight peer pressure in our everyday lives. Most of the audience shouted them back obligingly, and he had his volunteers scream them loud enough to knock the cartoon thugs away from Iguana Boy, who sprung to his feet, hugging each of the girls who had “saved” him, copping a feel on at least two of them.
Smart kid.
I must have dazed off, because when I stopped twirling my pen and looked around, I realized that everyone’s attention was on the stage. It was still public, and I knew this was stupid, but also couldn’t help myself.
The trick was like a new toy, and I couldn’t help playing with it.
I looked at the pen.
Focus.
Jerkily, it hopped out of my hand and hovered a few inches above my palm. It took some effort, but it began to spin.
I then tried to focus it back into my hand.
The cheap pen crushed into a tiny ball in midair, splattering ink all over my face and shirt. I dropped my focus—and what was left of my pen—as I looked frantically to make sure nobody had seen me.
They hadn’t.
Phew.
This power was unexpected. Most superpowers are supposed to develop right around puberty, but mine decided to hit me just slightly after my eighteenth birthday.
Dad always said I was a late bloomer.
I’d have to report this soon, too, because there are nothing but horror stories out there about people trying to hide their powers from the Department of Superhuman Affairs (DSA), but for now I liked having it as my little secret. (I shouldn’t have told Vic, but I was excited that first night when I accidentally blew up our mailbox and had to tell someone.)
And then I saw something that pushed all thoughts of responsibility aside.
Thunderhead took a wrong step in his fight choreography and tripped over one of the cartoon thug’s legs, falling flat on his face.
He looked dazed, surprised.
Everyone else onstage didn’t know what to do.
Finally, achingly, he got up, pretending it was all part of the show… but I knew what it was: A non-powered actor had taken out a professional superhero.
Suddenly, it all made sense. My mediocrity. My new trick. Wanting to stand out so I could see Kelly naked. Thunderhead on his face on the stage. They were all individual pieces to the greater puzzle of my life, and I could finally see how they all fit together.
I could finally see where my life was supposed to lead.
“I think I can take him,” I said.
“What?” asked Vic, glaring at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Thunderhead. I think I can take him.”
#Supervillainy101: Lester & Lyle
You’ve probably heard a million stories like the one of Lester Luck and Lyle Laughlin. Lester and Lyle were identical twins, separated at birth, yet both led remarkably similar lives. They both got poor grades in school, both married women named Mildred after knocking them up at the age of sixteen, both fought in the army during World War II, both drove Buicks… and the list goes on from there. The important similarity is that, in 1948, both of them manifested the ability to control fire, and both decided to become supervillains.
This is where the similarities end.
Wearing a fedora and trench coat whilst throwing fireballs, Lester first made headlines when he robbed a bank in his hometown of Vancouver, American Columbia. He got away with just shy of six grand, but was arrested later that night after being identified by more than a dozen eyewitnesses. Since this was before the Tower existed, he was sent to a local prison, where he probably would have gotten out in fifteen to twenty if he hadn’t been stabbed to death with a pair of scissors in the fall of ’49.
Lyle, on the other hand, draped himself in a garish black and orange costume with a flowing cape and a shocking, face-covering mask while going by the name of Mr. Smoke. He robbed a bank in Richmond, Virginia, and made off with five grand, but because he could disappear by simply taking off his mask, he was never caught. Mr. Smoke enjoyed a long career as a supervillain, working with the earliest iterations of the Villain’s Union and the Offenders supervillain teams while amassing a fortune of close to fifty million dollars during his career. He enjoyed one of America’s longest and most successful careers as a supervillain, that is, until he was shot in the head by the Gamemaster during the War on Villainy.
#LessonLearned: For an enduring career in supervillainy, invest in a good costume and secret identity.
2
I AM… APEX STRIKE!
I hope you weren’t too set on the idea of me hooking up with Kelly or seeing Vic again, because neither of those is going to happen. Considering how busy my next year would be, they never really made an appearance. That’s not to say I stopped thinking about them. In fact, during some of my drugged-out self-pitying stages, I’d stalk them online to see what they were up to.
Kelly became prom queen (naturally), dated the star quarterback (naturally), and attended a nice college out of state, far away from the crushing boredom of Hacklin’s Hall (naturally).
Vic got arrested after blowing two-and-three-quarters of the fingers off his right hand playing around with some illegal Lemurian explosives he bought off of one of the scalefaces at school (naturally). He probably would have gotten away with it if he hadn’t posted it to YouTube (naturally), but at last report it had close to 11.5 million hits and was pretty damn funny, which made him a local celebrity (naturally). Sometimes, during my really dark days, I would watch that clip and pause on his laughing, stupid face as he held up his mutilated hand and think: That should have been me, dammit.
Everything changed after that assembly. I was consumed with the image of Thunderhead faceplanting on that stage and wondering just how I was going to take advantage of it.
Villainy, however, wasn’t my first idea.
At first, like every kid, I wanted to be a superhero. They got all the money and endorsements, and had their faces smeared across numerous posters (yeah, I had posters of El Capitán and the Gamemaster on my walls, so what?), and pussy… lots of it. If I was ever going to stand a chance at fame, fortune, and pussy, becoming a superhero was my best bet.
The only reason I didn’t pursue this path was because becoming a superhero was difficult… very difficult. Unless you’re one of the lucky few to win America’s Next Protector (a pretty crappy show, but it has its moments), you have to wait for the annual hero Spring Training, where you try out with something like twenty thousand wannabe heroes from around the world for a spot with the Protectors or one of their satellite teams. At these training events, potential heroes are put through mental and physical tests, psychological and moral evaluations, boatloads of paperwork, and the hassle of dealing with the DSA…
Like I said, heroism was hard.
If I really wanted to take a risk, I could always go vigilante, like the Gamemaster back before he helped found the Protectors. But unlicensed heroism held little to no reward. Everything you did had to be out of your own pocket and you spent about as much time running from heroes as you did fighting crime.
Yeah, no thanks.
So, with those unappealing options aside, supervillainy just sounded like the perfect fit for me. It had its risks, of course, but you’d get to keep 100 percent of the profits and gained automatic bad boy sex appeal with a lot of the groupies out there.
I’d be a fool not to try supervillainy.
There hadn’t been a real supervillain since the heroes won the War on Villainy back in 1993, when the Protectors captured, exiled, or killed all the villains who opposed them. Sure, every so often you’d hear of some idiot with a superpower pulling on a cape and a mask and declaring himself the next great villain, but the Protectors would usually take them out within a few hours.
Idiots.
These wannabe heels were being taken down by heroes with more experience filming commercials than fighting crime. The old heroes had gotten soft, and the young ones didn’t know what real villains were like.
Even so, these villains-in-training didn’t properly prepare, didn’t think, and when push came to shove, rarely even fought back.
I was going to be different.
Better.
No, the best.
I knew that I could succeed where all of them had failed.
While all of them rushed out to buy spandex and bust open the nearest bank, I studied. I absorbed all the information I could on historical supervillainy. When I should have been doing homework and worrying about graduation, I was reading Villainpedia articles and books while streaming every true crime special on supervillains I could find.
During this time, I worked out with my powers some, enough to learn some pretty good tricks. I could levitate things pretty well, and was even better at breaking things. I could’ve spent more time trying to hone these, maybe do some real cool stuff like flying, but that would take years, and I couldn’t wait that long. Besides, I was confident that I was strong enough to deal with any problems, heroes or otherwise, that might come up.
Only then, after I was confident in my strength, did I let myself work on my costume and codename.
The costume part was easy. The thrift store two towns over had everything I was looking for: black leather jacket, black leather pants, and black leather boots. None of them were the right sizes, as the pants were too tight and the jacket was too big, but I figured I could make it work. Especially seeing as I had no sewing skills nor access to those tailors and polymers the heroes could afford.
It took a separate trip to the bike shop (while sneaking some money out of my dad’s emergency stash) to get a motorcycle helmet, and another to the craft store to get the bright-blue puffy and spray paints I’d need. They wouldn’t sell me the spray paint, something about them not trusting teenagers, so I had to pay a not-too-terrible-smelling bum off the street to buy it for me.
After getting some advice from my mother on how to use puffy paint (for an unrelated school project, of course), I set about decking out the jacket and pants with bold blue lightning bolts, while spray-painting the same pattern on the helmet. They didn’t come out straight, but I felt they got the point across. Then some duct tape and strategic cuts to an old electric-blue tablecloth I “borrowed” from grandma’s house gave me the cape to complete the costume.
I looked good. In the right light, I could almost pass for a real hero or villain. I spent a lot of time in front of the bathroom mirror posing, taking a few selfies for posterity.
So I had my costume. That just left the codename.
After gathering all my online resources, I’d made a list of nearly five thousand supervillains that used codenames. Almost two-thirds of them were from English-speaking countries (stupid British Empire), and no way was I going to use one that had already been taken. I mean, the last thing a newbie villain wants to do is worry about some ex-villain breaking out of the Tower and seeking vengeance for stealing his gig. I mean, yeah, the Tower’s supposed to be inescapable (with its miles and miles of smiles), but I didn’t want to take my chances; most of those old villains are really scary people.
I spent a lot of time with my thesaurus app looking for something that sounded tough and menacing. The first word that called to me was Apex, because it means being the top of something. Research told me that there had been six superheroes who’d gone by the name of Apex, so unless I wanted to call myself Apex (the Supervillain), I knew I’d had to expand on it.
Don’t ask me how, but that led to Apex Strike.
I could just see it on the news: “Apex Strike Strikes Again!”
Wait, no, that was awful.
“The Wrath of Apex Strike!”
Better, but still pretty cheesy.
“All Shall Kneel Before Apex Strike!”
…
All right, I’d have to trust the news guys to come up with the headlines. That was their job anyway.
So I had a codename, and I had a costume. Now to break them in.
It took nearly a month of planning, but I was finally ready to introduce the world to Apex Strike.
There were some pretty big butterflies in my stomach on that “Administrative Leave Day” from school as I biked two towns over to my first target, my backpack bulging full of costume, my helmet barely balanced on the handlebars.
I parked in an alley two blocks away from the target, all
owing myself some privacy to change. Actually walking around in the full outfit proved more difficult than posing in front of a mirror; the pants rode up my crotch more than I liked and were very squeaky, while the jacket sleeves almost completely covered my gloved hands.
At least the cape covered up the fact that the puffy paint on my jacket was starting to flake from being crammed in my backpack for so long.
I reminded myself that I didn’t have to be functional; I just had to look cool.
Everything else would come out of that.
I stood outside the door, my heart pounding as I prepared to pull it open.
All right Aidan—Apex Strike, time to be a legend. Time to be a badass.
Seeing the sign above the handle that said PUSH, I swung the door open and stepped inside the Sunnyside Liquor Store.
The store was empty, save for the clerk, who was an aging hippie chick with thick, tied-back gray hair that seemed to stretch to the floor, and a fat guy mopping near one of the beer displays. Neither of them paid me much mind, even when the bell jingled above the door.
Showtime.
“I AM… APEX STRIKE!” I announced, proudly.
The fat guy kept on mopping, his attention held by the music in his earbuds. The clerk behind the register looked up at me, idly, a slow smile crossing her face as if she recognized me.
“Don’t tell me the Malkinsons are having another cape party. Which one are you supposed to be, Electronaut?” she asked.
This wasn’t quite what I planned.
Again, I announced, “I AM… APEX STRIKE!”
The clerk shook her head. “Speak up, darlin’, can’t hear nothin’ through that helmet.”
Fine, time to try something else.
With slight focus, I waved a hand at the beer cases, exploding them outward in a shower of glass. The mop guy yelped, diving into a rack of Twinkies and sending them all over the floor.