Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel

by Matt Carter

  He was never identified, and the Protectors vehemently denied that he escaped from the Tower, so odds are we’ll never know who he really was. Maybe he really was an escapee, or maybe the conspiracy theorists are right and he was planted by the heroes to give everyone a reason to fear the Tower.

  Either way, would you want to chance it?

  #LessonLearned: Fear the Tower.

  15

  MILES AND MILES OF SMILES…

  When I wasn’t awake, or having the weird, scary dreams that Montage binges bring, I was in the black.

  The black was where nothing could bother me. Sure, the dreams made their way in sometimes, but they were gone quick and forgotten even quicker. Only the outside world could break the black, and that was always awful for a moment, but there were things I could always take for that.

  They’d left me in the black a lot longer than usual this time. No alarms. No training. No urgent missions. It was nice, hiding in the black. I knew the outside world was there. I could hear some voices and some things moving, sometimes far away (usually far away) but sometimes close, but nothing liable to take me out of it. Not until…

  Aidan.

  Not now.

  No, now, wake up.

  Fuck off. In the black.

  Have it your way.

  There was wet and cold over my body, but it wasn’t enough. There was too much black. The wet and cold couldn’t make me leave. I would fight it. I would—

  BLAM!

  The pitcher of water that’d been poured on me wasn’t enough to wake me from the black, but firing a gun into my bedroom ceiling worked perfectly.

  Everything was blurry, but I knew I was in bed. Naked, face down. Blearily, I pulled myself up. There was a puddle of vomit nearby, stinking and stinging even though it was dry. Another on the pillow beside me, a different color. Whose is that? Half a moldy ham sandwich was stuck to my chest. The other half was on my crotch. I threw them both to the floor.

  “You’re fuckin’ pitiful, you know that?” I knew that voice. I didn’t want to hear it. Not with my head like this.

  “I’m not pitiful. I’m Apex Strike,” I said. My mouth felt like death. My stomach roiled, and I suddenly realized that the bed smelled of piss. How long was I out?

  “You can be both,” she said.

  I reached for the nightstand. Painkillers. Stronger stuff. Stuff to clear my head. Anything. I had a good collection sitting there normally, but not now.

  “We cleared all your stashes out,” she said. “Needed all your pretty little heads clear today.”

  A dull rage flared within me, followed by a need I’d never been conscious of before. Today’s gonna hurt, but you can get more when you’re free.

  I turned to face her, wiping crusted mustard from my chest. I was in a foul mood and I wanted to share it. “Blackjack, you can be a real cunt sometimes.”

  She laughed. “I’ve been called worse by better and worse folk than you. Wanna know what I did to them?”

  “Just lemme alone, all right? I’m hungover, I’m hungry, I’m—”

  In the blink of the eye she was standing, a revolver in her hand and the boom of a gunshot filling my room. I could feel the wind of the shot passing right between my thighs, hear the slap as it hit the bed half an inch beneath my dick.

  “JESUS, FUCK!”

  She laughed.

  I’d have pissed myself if I hadn’t already done so while in the black, and still a thin jet of water shot out between my legs.

  “You got a water bed?”

  I didn’t remember doing that. “I guess?”

  “Look, unless you want the next shot to take off your twig ’n berries, I’d recommend hittin’ the showers and gettin’ dressed.”

  I liked my twig and berries just where they were. I tried to get up, but almost immediately fell to the ground, moaning in pain. My joints were stiff. My muscles screamed. I just wanted to roll into a ball on the floor, moaning until I passed back into the black again.

  Anything was better than this.

  Instead Blackjack lifted me up in her powerful arms and tossed me over her shoulder, taking me into the bathroom. She gave me the option of showering myself or having her do it for me.

  I opted for the latter.

  She poured half a bottle of shampoo in my hair, and a bottle of body wash over my pale, sticky skin before turning the showerhead up to scalding and blasting me. I moaned and protested feebly, choking and coughing.

  “You can’t do this!” I cried out.

  “Really? I thought I was doin’ a pretty good job, actually!” I reached out to her, my hand shaking and blasted a pretty weak wave of focus at her. It would have normally sent her across the room. Instead, I was flung into the shower, hitting my head hard enough to send the world spinning. Right, she touched me.

  Finally, she turned the water off.

  “You want me to dress you too?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Finish cleaning up and meet down in the rec room in fifteen minutes. I gotta wake the rest of y’all,” she said, leaving. Slowly, painfully, I got back to my feet. I gripped the wall, a towel rack, slowly remembering how to stand. I grabbed a towel and started drying myself off, letting the anger build.

  She had no right. She wasn’t one of the lead Kayfabe heroes, not like Helios or Fifty-Fifty. She was just supposed to be our trainer, a glorified drill sergeant. When I found my phone, I was going to call Helios and tell him, oh man, would she be in trouble…

  But first things first…

  She was right about clearing out my stashes. My medicine cabinet was empty, save for a couple tabs of aspirin she left on one of the shelves. I dry swallowed them, almost choking on them, sipping water straight from the tap to force them down, hoping they’d kick in soon.

  I closed the medicine cabinet, almost screaming for the ghost I saw in the mirror.

  Only it wasn’t a ghost. It was me, somehow. My face had gotten long and slack. There were heavy bags beneath my eyes, and close to a month of patchy beard stubble on my chin, cheeks, and neck. My hair had never been this long. Just what the hell is going on?

  I managed to stumble to my room and pull on a clean T-shirt, jeans, socks, and shoes without dying. My phone was gone. Have to find one downst—

  A heavy blow hit me in the gut, knocking me to the floor. I cried out in pain and began to dry heave, but there was nothing to come up, nothing except two chunks of aspirin that stayed halfway between my mouth and stomach that felt like two dice wedged in my esophagus and a little water that just gurgled in place.

  I knew that heavy blow. That was just as hard as Trojan Fox could punch out of her suit.

  “FUCKING… BLACKJACK!” I cried out in pain.

  I made my way downstairs, collapsing onto one of the rec room couches. Soon Geode was sitting next to me, asking some question in a faraway voice.

  “Fine,” was all I could say, pulling my eyes open with effort. Geode looked just as bad as I did, maybe even worse, which must have taken some work considering how much more handsome he was than me, normally.

  “Are we dying?” I asked.

  “No. But we are in trouble,” he said, cradling his head in his hands.

  Trojan Fox came down next, a thick pair of sunglasses obscuring her eyes and a bathrobe her body. Wish I’d thought of that.

  Odigjod teleported in next, crying out when he came in merged halfway through the coffee table. With another puff of smoke, he teleported to a nearby couch, no worse for wear, though the hole in the coffee table remained. Odigjod seemed unable to decide whether he wanted to be human or imp, and was now some awful mix between the little imp we all knew and loved and his less impressive raver kid human form.

  Blackjack helped Nevermore into the room. Like Trojan Fox, she’d taken the heavy sunglasses approach, while covering much of herself in a baggy sweatshirt.

  “We gotta talk,” Blackjack said, tossing Nevermore roughly to the couch next to me.

  “What about ou
r archnemeses? Why aren’t they here?” Odigjod asked.

  “They didn’t want to deal with this, so they called me,” Blackjack explained.

  “What about Circus?” I asked. “Shouldn’t he be here too?”

  “He’s what we’re here to talk about,” Blackjack said, idly playing with the clasp of one of her revolvers. “You guys don’t remember?”

  “Odigjod does,” the imp said, holding his head with a moaning wail. Nobody else answered.

  “Circus was so fucking stoned out of his mind that he OD’d and had a seizure in the middle of your job. He wasn’t s’posed to be captured, but with him on the ground like that, they didn’t have no choice but to take him in. If any of you were in better mind, you coulda stopped this. You coulda rescued him. But you were all so shitfaced you could barely stand, let alone mount some half-assed rescue mission. Seriously, JUST WHAT THE FUCK WERE Y’ALL THINKING?”

  We’d heard Blackjack yell plenty of times, but she never roared with this kind of anger. It was scary.

  “WE’VE SPENT SO MUCH TIME, SO MUCH MONEY ON YOU, AND YOU PISS IT ALL AWAY ON SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK ’N ROLL?”

  “Very little rock ’n roll was involved, I think,” Trojan Fox said wryly. With that same lightning speed, Blackjack whipped out her revolvers and fired a shot from each into Trojan Fox’s mechanical feet. As quickly, she reholstered them.

  “FUCKING BITCH!” Trojan Fox yelled, trying to stand but unable to.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” Blackjack said, taking her hat off and setting it on the table. “We got a field trip ahead of us, and I need you mobile. Shooting your feet was stupid. Any of you gentlemen feel strong enough to carry her?”

  “I can,” Geode said.

  “Good.”

  Trojan Fox protested, “I don’t need to be—”

  “Yeah, you do,” Blackjack said, pulling a Tri-Hole generator from her pocket and opening it in front of us. “You kids need to see some harsh truths, and whether you believe it or not, I’m doin’ this for your own good. The other heroes thought we just oughta kill one of ya as an example for the others. My way might be more painful, but at least you’ll all survive it. Now get in the damn hole.”

  We cursed and grumbled, but God help us we did what she said, walking single-file through the Tri-Hole with Geode carrying Trojan Fox.

  We came through in a large white room with a high ceiling. The wall we’d stepped through was lined with at least a dozen triangular frames, perfectly sized and shaped for Tri-Holes. The rest of the room was sparsely furnished, save for a row of massive doorways built into the opposite wall, some ancient couches, some low wood paneling along the walls, and a few potted plastic ferns to give the place color in a cheesy, 70s sort of way. Some low, poorly digitized Muzak filtered in from unseen speakers, the Carpenters, I think, probably hoping to set us at ease.

  If it weren’t for the pair of fifteen-foot-tall robots that stood in front of us, this might have even succeeded.

  They were vaguely human shaped, though lacked heads and walked on four spindly, steel legs. The thickness of their pale white armor, aged and dented in places though it was, made it clear that fighting them was not an option.

  “White Knights…” Trojan Fox said, her voice full of wonder. “I thought they stopped making them when they formed the Protectors.”

  Instead of attacking us, they stretched a banner between the two of them.

  WELCOME TO THE TOWER

  There were screams. Curses. All of us turned and ran for the Tri-Hole, but Blackjack blocked our path. Nevermore, Geode, and I raised hands to fight her. She just raised a small controller in her hand and pressed the button.

  Agony, blinding and fiery, burst from my Creeper, dropping me to the floor, screaming and thrashing alongside Geode, Nevermore, and Trojan Fox.

  “Stop it! Stop it! Hurting them!” Odigjod pleaded in some faraway place.

  After what felt like hours of agony, Blackjack let off on our Creepers. I didn’t want to get up. I just wanted to lie down and die. I couldn’t live here. I couldn’t go in. I wouldn’t. I’d just swallow my tongue, or focus on my head, cause an embolism or a stroke or an explosion, or…

  … or I’d just slowly get to my feet with Odigjod’s help, sulking and looking angrily at Blackjack as she went on in her angry drill sergeant voice.

  “Now you ain’t stayin’ here. Like I said, this is a field trip, and a warning. You got off lucky this time. Fuck up again, and the capes up top will arrange an extended stay.”

  She opened one of the tall doors along the far wall and led us into the dark corridor beyond.

  It didn’t stretch on for miles, but it did seem to go on forever. Like the foyer, it must have looked classy and high-tech in the 70s, but now looked like some industrial alien abduction nightmare. On either side of the metal walkway were large, heavy glass tubes full of a thick, clear gel. Hundreds, thousands of them maybe (remember the other doors, tens of thousands), only broken up by the occasional White Knight stationed between every few tubes.

  A person floated in each tube. Some of them wore gaudy, super costumes, others street clothes. Most were human, but not all. Some had small black hoses piercing their skin, leading to machines at the tops of their tubes.

  Each of them wore a face-concealing, bright-yellow smiley face mask.

  Miles and miles of smiles…

  Blackjack guided us further down the hall. “Back when the War began and we proposed setting up our own inescapable prison for villains, the brass at the DSA and the Ministry of Metahuman Concerns only gave us one guideline: no killin’. Even though these were villains, scum o’ the earth, they knew the people would turn on us if they knew we were killin’ ’em all. So, we had to get creative. Our best and brightest got together, combinin’ the best technology we had with the best we could acquire elsewhere, to make this.”

  For emphasis, she rapped her knuckles against one of the tubes nearest to her. The glass and gel were so thick that it barely made a noise. The man on the inside, one of the ones with black hoses going into his skin, skull, and spine, didn’t move. His smiley face mask leered down at us.

  “We couldn’t just leave the villains up and about, since on their own they’d eventually figure a way out. Thankfully, we found this gel in a crashed Gray scout ship down in Roswell, New Mexico, back in ’47. It completely shuts down all bodily functions, from your shitter to your thinker to the aging process itself. You’re basically immortal, but nothing but alive once you’re forced into one of these. I’ve been told by folks who’ve tried it out that you don’t even notice the passage of time from when you’re put in and let out, but I gotta wonder, what’s it like if you’re never let out? Does life just end? That’s one for the philosophy majors out there.”

  She chuckled, but the laugh sounded forced and bitter, as if she was imagining being in one herself. “The smiley masks, well, back when we used to have heroes workin’ this place, it used to get depressin’ seein’ all those faces behind the glass. Minuteman, I forget which of him exactly said it, but he put out the idea to put masks on ’em to make this place cheerier.”

  “He was wrong,” I said.

  Blackjack shrugged. “To each their own. Just know that, once you’re put in one of these tubes, you’re in here until we say you can leave, and that’s probably never gonna happen. Especially if you got a gift like our friend here that can be put to the betterment of po-lite society.”

  “What does that mean?” Nevermore asked.

  Blackjack pointed at the black hoses attached to the man’s spine. “It means that this villain’s body produces an enzyme that can aid rich bitches in losing a few pounds, or a unique kind of magnetic field that’ll allow our listeners out there to better hear the phone calls of dissidents. Anything they can use. Just be glad you didn’t have anything they wanted. Otherwise you wouldn’tve been given this chance.”

  “What chance is that?” I spat out. “The chance to be lectured by a has-been superhero a
nd—”

  She hit the button on her Creeper controller, and again I was on the floor. The pain was more severe this time, burning and dancing beneath my chest.

  Death. Death. Just get this fucking thing out of me!

  Blackjack turned it off, her voice solemn when she continued. “No. I’m offering you a chance not to end up like these pitiful fucks.”

  The tubes rumbled, moving down the hall like clothes on a dry cleaner’s rack. Even though I was on the ground, I could see the tubes that rotated into place beside us as clear as day.

  Carnivore. Circus. Other drummers.

  Showstopper. Ghost Girl.

  I cried out, some impotent, sad, angry, animal sound. I wanted to focus on Blackjack. I wanted to rip her limb from limb. I wanted to destroy this whole place. But I couldn’t do that. If I tried, if I even seriously thought about doing it, they’d put me in here (or use my Creeper to prevent me from ever doing anything else). All I could do was be angry.

  “Look, I’m sorry I had to burst y’all’s bubble, but I wanted you to know the stakes. You fuck up again, and you’re all in here. So, for now, we’re gonna make some changes. We’re givin’ you some time off to rehabilitate. You can still leave the island, but you can’t have nothing in your body harder than smokes, pot, or a glass or two of alcohol. You feel your Creeper movin’, and you’ll know when you’ve had enough. There’s gonna be no more parties. No more spendin’ time with the heroes until you kids learn to take better care of yourselves. Do you understand?”