My Evil Ex Girlfriends

by Mia Archer

  It looked like she’d been hit with a heavy dose of cynicism. This Fialux had seen some shit, and she wasn’t putting up with that shit from the world any longer.

  Shit.

  “No,” she said.

  “No?” I asked, hoping against hope that this wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not putting up with this any longer. Everyone I’ve ever met since I got my powers has tried to manipulate me. Rex Roth with that stupid mind control. You with the way you got in my head. Dr. Lana with whatever the hell she’s doing here. Sabine with her mind control worms. Well I’m done with it! I’m not letting anyone else control me, damn it!”

  “But Fialux,” I said. “You don’t understand. I never…”

  “Not listening,” she said. “It’s time for this to end. It’s time for all of this to end.”

  She turned to one of the cylinders beside her. One that’d been cracked, but not shattered. That was quickly fixed as her fist slammed into the glass which shattered it.

  The Fialux inside the thing fell forward and slid across the ground, again without any apparent damage from the shards of glass hitting all around her.

  “That felt good,” she said, though she seemed oblivious to the fact that there were living clones of her in these things that weren’t exactly being killed when she destroyed the test tubes.

  “Um, Fialux?” I said.

  “I think she has some stuff to work through,” Nancy said. “Might be a good idea to let her go ahead and do that instead of beating the shit out of us.”

  She certainly had some shit she was working through. Some deep shit that was going to get us into some deep shit. Smashing one of those things wasn’t enough to work through it, either. No, she was ripping apart giant chunks of the room, tossing around Fialux tubes left and right, and freeing those Fialuxes.

  Fialuxes who were starting to get up and blink and wonder what the hell was going on. Fialuxes who were using their powers to slam against the armored walls all around us.

  Which seemed like a recipe for disaster. Sure it was kind of nice seeing a bunch of naked Fialuxes running around the place. Talk about things that would’ve seemed like a dream come true right up to the moment I found myself in the middle of that dream and realized how easy it was for dreams to turn into a nightmare.

  The only thing I needed was Robert Englund appearing behind me and calling me a bitch to put the shit nugget cherry on this crap nightmare Sundae.

  “Yeah, I get the feeling a bunch of Fialuxes running loose is a terrible idea,” I said.

  “At least she isn’t attacking us,” Technomancer said. “You know what you have to do if she does.”

  She glanced down at the weapon she’d been cradling this entire time. A weapon I could’ve grabbed and used on Fialux at any moment if I really wanted to. A weapon I hadn’t used on her because I guess there was a part of me that really wanted her to come to her senses. I wanted the old Fialux back, and I didn’t want to get her back by betraying her and stealing her powers.

  Though the more she fucked shit up in this room the more I was starting to think it was going to come down to taking her out with this weapon. I hated that I had to do it, but it needed to be done.

  “Hand it over,” I said, and Technomancer tossed it to me.

  I looked down at the thing and flipped some switches. Tried to get a feel for how it worked.

  “Set it to the symbol that looks like a weird lambda,” Technomancer said. “I believe that’s what you need to drain her powers.”

  “What are you doing?” Dr. Lana screeched. “I won’t have you destroying all of my work! Do you have any idea how long I had to work to put this together? Do you have any idea what I had to do to get this radiation pumping through that portal?”

  Fialux turned her attention back to us. Her eyes narrowed in fury. The kind of fury that said she was about to violate some of the rules she’d had about killing people back when we were dating.

  Yeah, something told me she’d had more than a few unpleasant experiences on the other side of that portal that made her more inclined to take a murderous bent than she was back in the day.

  “Don’t do it,” I said. “Don’t hurt her.”

  Fialux turned the fury on me.

  “You don’t tell me what to do,” she said. “No one tells me what to do!”

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  If she wasn’t bound by silly rules about not killing people then she’d have no problem icing Dr. Lana. Normally I wouldn’t give a fuck that she was trying to kill Dr. Lana considering the woman had the tenacity of a cockroach when it came to taking a licking and keeping on ticking, but I was pretty sure that with the destruction of her clone chamber up above I’d used up the last of the miraculous recoveries Dr. Lana had in her hat.

  Basically she was a cat who was on her ninth life, and I wasn’t going to let her get away that easily now that I was pretty sure the next death would be for good. So I pointed my wrist blaster at the good doctor and fired.

  Dr. Lana actually looked surprised as she disintegrated. Like she didn’t think I’d go through with killing what I thought was her final copy.

  Or maybe she was surprised that I was doing something silly like saving her from Fialux when, to be perfectly honest, the world would be a better place if she was no longer in it.

  I imagined she was going to be even more surprised when she wound up in the quarantine lab on the other side of town where no one would be able to find her without me making it so.

  “Make sure she doesn’t have any way of getting out of there,” I said. “Hit her with knockout gas or something.”

  “Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  Something flew through the air next to me. It was large enough that it created one hell of a windstorm as it passed. A cry of fury sounded from behind me, and I whirled around, feeling just a touch of shock at how fast Fialux was moving.

  Hey, what can I say? I’d been fighting Fialux for a long time now, at least it felt like a fucking eternity since that first day when she started handing my ass to me, and I still wasn’t adjusted to all the amazing things she could do when she had her powers back.

  “You’re going to regret doing that Natalie,” she said, her eyes taking on an eerie flickering pink glow.

  Her eyes echoed the light from the portal on the other side of the room. Though there was something off about that portal light. It’d been pretty steady when we first stepped into this room. Why would it be flickering now?

  I didn’t have long to interrogate that thought before Fialux brought her fist back and tried to hit me with one hell of a haymaker.

  The only thing that saved me was I’d spent enough time fighting her in recent months, both with and without her powers, that I almost knew what she was going to throw my way before she did. Of course she was at a slight advantage considering she seemed to be just a touch more powerful than she’d been back when we first met, but I managed to dodge out of the way and give her a good kick in the back as she whiffed on a punch that would’ve relieved me of my head.

  Not that I thought she’d actually be able to do something like that. Not when I had my shields and suit augments. Still, I wouldn’t have those for long if it came to actually fighting Fialux, and if she was in a killing mood it meant this fight was going to end badly for me sooner rather than later.

  “You need to use the weapon!” Nancy screeched. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

  I looked down to the weapon. The one thing that might actually win this fight for humanity and throw off the yoke of oppression these blue alien bastards were trying to throw on our necks.

  I sighed. I really didn’t want to do this. I guess there was a part of me that never thought it would get to this point. I’d hoped that when it came down to it, Fialux would see the light and realize the worm was manipulating her all along.

  Only getting that worm out of her head hadn’t done anything. She was just as d
angerous now as when she was mind linked with Sabine. Maybe more so now that she’d had a little while to go crazy at that mind link being severed. Or maybe it was seeing a massive warehouse full of cylinders containing clones of her that’d finally unhinged her.

  Whatever the reason, she had to go. I had to take her out. All I could do was hope when this was all said and done I’d be able to get her the help she needed to return her to some semblance of normalcy.

  I raised the gun. Pointed it at Fialux. It’s not like I was doing it slowly or reluctantly either. No, once I decided something had to be done then it had to be done, and I wasn’t going to pussyfoot around.

  The only problem? Fialux was a hell of a lot faster than my intentions and my aim. One moment I was ready to hit her with a radiation treatment that would take care of her rampage, and the next she was there in front of me with the barrel held in her fist. Staring at me with a cold fury that said bad things were about to happen.

  Well, badder things than what was already happening.

  “Fuck,” I breathed.

  31

  New Button

  “You were going to use this on me,” she said, sounding like she was genuinely scandalized at the idea of me using one of Dr. Lana’s weapons on her.

  “Well yeah?” I said. “I mean that’s kind of the point of having a weapon like this.”

  I pulled the trigger. I figured I had this one shot, and I was going to take it. Unfortunately as soon as the beam hit her she shook her head and moved the barrel so it was pointing away from her.

  I used all the power in my strength augments to try and turn it back towards her. I figured the only chance I had was to hit her right in the hubris. Maybe she thought I didn’t have a chance to overcome her strength, but…

  She was absolutely right. There’d been a time when my strength augments could stand up to her in a fight. For a little while, at least. There’d been a time when the problem with fighting Fialux was that eventually all the strength augments in my suit gave out, while the super powers cranking up her body didn’t.

  That wasn’t the case now though. Clearly we’d entered into the “Godzilla hits some radiation that makes him powerful to the point of melting down” phase of Fialux’s power generation, only in this case her meltdown was more figurative while everyone’s favorite giant irradiated lizard tended to have more literal meltdowns in his starring appearances.

  “Naughty girl Natalie,” she said.

  A moment later I was picking myself up from a control console. The thing had cracked straight down the middle, and the only thing that kept me alive as I went flying through the motherfucker was my shields going up at just the right moment to protect both my heart from stopping under the force of Fialux’s punch and my back from breaking under the force of getting thrown into that control console.

  Pink light flickered all around me. Flickering. There was something about that. Something not good. Something that was oddly familiar in a way that made my stomach turn.

  I looked to the other end of the room and it suddenly occurred to me why that flickering was a bad thing. The portal on the other end of the room was flickering. I’d seen that before. Back when Dr. Lana threw Fialux through a portal. Right before the damned thing had blown up and taken a good chunk of Dr. Lana’s robot army I’d been fighting at the time with it.

  Fuck. This was not good. If that thing was on the verge of blowing…

  “We need to get the hell out of here now!” I said.

  Only it would appear that the bad news was only getting worse. Me slamming into the control panel had done something to the room, and all around the place the cylinders carrying various Fialuxes, the ones that hadn’t been ripped open in her rampage that is, were draining of their strange pink liquid and opening up.

  Which meant there were even more confused naked Fialuxes stumbling around in confusion as they emerged into a world that wasn’t ready for an army of invincible hotties.

  “Motherfucker,” I growled.

  “This is bad,” Nancy said, stepping up next to me.

  “Are you kidding?” Technomancer asked, as usual more enthusiastic about the potentially world-ending turn this day had taken than the rest of us. “This is awesome! Look at all these clones! All of them perfect, and all of them just as powerful as her!”

  “And all of them are about to cause a real headache for Starlight City and the world if we don’t do something about this now,” I said.

  Only I didn’t know what to do. Fialux held the one weapon in the world that could do something about her, looking for all the world like a triumphant sand person minus the weird sound effect.

  “This is the end of the world as you know it Natalie,” Fialux said, seemingly oblivious to all her doppelgangers coming to life behind her. “This is the moment when a new order has taken over. You were right in a way. I’m going to bring peace to the world in the only way this world can know peace. By force!”

  I rolled my eyes. Of course she would give that speech. It was a speech I’d given her time and time again in an attempt to convince her that villainy wasn’t as bad as she thought, and it was annoying having that speech turned around on me now that she was taking over the world without my help.

  She snapped the gun in two. The thing sparked a couple of times, then went dead. All the lights that’d been glowing on the side went out, and with it went the last chance this world was going to have to stand up to a goddess.

  Especially now that there were thousands of her with the same powers ready to go out into the world and fuck shit up.

  “I can’t believe you were going to use this thing on me!” Fialux shouted.

  I’d thought she was coming unhinged before, but what she’d been earlier was a walk in the park compared to what she was dealing with now. She tore the weapon into tiny little bits and then started stomping on those bits.

  With the kind of power she was putting out it turned that gun into a fine dust. A dust I was pretty sure wasn’t all that great to be breathing in, but it’s not like Dr. Lana was around to provide me with the hazardous materials data sheet.

  “I think we should get out of here while we still can,” Nancy said.

  “And do what?” I said. “Even if we get out of here it’s not going to do a damn bit of good. Fialux will still be flying around with all her powers, and we’re still going to be fucked the moment she finds us.”

  “I…”

  Nancy’s mouth shut. Yeah, she hadn’t thought this through any more than I had. I’d finally found myself in a Kobayashi Maru situation, and I can’t say it was a situation I cared for.

  Fialux was going to kill us no matter what we did. If we ran it would only be a matter of time before she tracked us down and killed us. If we stayed then she’d get it over with nice and fast. I wouldn’t have the length of a frenzied escape sequence to think about how big I’d screwed up.

  We’re talking something straight out of a sci-fi horror movie, only the alien chasing me through the dark corridors of the Applied Sciences Department was a hot superheroine rather than a xenomorph who wanted me to meet its facehugging friends.

  “You were seriously going to try and fight me!” she said. “I mean I thought you were going to, but I can’t believe you’d betray me like that!”

  Technomancer cleared her throat. I glanced at her, but honestly my concern was more for the goddess who was about to kill us. Once she really got going she was going to fuck us over royally. Like I could see her bringing the whole place down on top of us.

  “Night Terror…” Technomancer whispered.

  “Not the time,” I said, waving her away as I scowled at Fialux.

  “What the hell did you expect me to do?” I asked. “You’re trying to take over the world! That’s my job! How dare you get upset with me for doing what I have to do to save my ass and save the world!”

  Fialux stopped stomping on the gun. I suddenly had the feeling that I was a lot better off when she was distracted by stomp
ing that gun into the ground.

  “What did you say?” she growled.

  Behind her things were starting to get out of hand. Some of the cloned Fialuxes were disoriented, something that made sense considering they’d just come out of a vat of irradiated goop, but others were starting to throw themselves against the armored walls with the kind of strength the real Fialux in front of me always had.

  Assuming she was the real Fialux and not another test tube heroine.

  The point is there were a bunch of freshly released Fialuxes who were about to bust through that armor and bring this place down around us as they attempted to get the hell out of this place.

  And behind it all was the ever present flickering of that damned portal on the verge of collapsing. The flickering was picking up the pace, and I had to have Nancy and Technomancer out of here before it blew.

  I might survive with all the wonderful toys I had at my disposal, but the same couldn’t be said for those two.

  “You really think I believe you’re doing this to save the world?” Fialux growled. “After all the times you told me that what the world really needed to have true peace was a benevolent dictator? You’re seriously going to tell me I’m wrong now that I’m doing what you were never able to accomplish?”

  “Wow, that hurts,” I said.

  It was also a pretty typical line of villain bullshit. “I’m going to accomplish what you never could, blah blah blah.” It was a tale as old as villains and heroes, and I didn’t really care for having that scenario being turned around on me.

  “I’m going to make you regret the day you abandoned me,” Fialux said. “I’m going to make you regret the day you ever decided to become a villain and fight me in the first place!”

  Technomancer cleared her throat again. I glanced at her. She mimed pointing at my wrist computer. Why the heck would she…

  I looked down at my wrist computer. Frowned. Sure Fialux was droning on in the background about something, but there was something about the urgency with which Technomancer was interrupting the moment that told me there was something important going on here.