by C. T. Phipps
“You are the worst supervillain uncle ever!” Lisa said, pulling out her cellphone. “I’m texting my friends to tell them how lame you are.”
“You do that,” I said, taking a glass of orange juice from a small twelve-year-old ghost I’d nicknamed Casper. “Either way, I’m going to try and make sure you’re protected from the consequences of my actions.”
“How’s that?” Kerri asked, looking at the child ghost. “Thank you, Robert.”
“I’m going to give you my billion and a half dollars.”
Lisa stopped texting.
Every ghost looked at me.
Kerri, instead, took a sip of her milk. “That’s nice.”
“You are the best supervillain uncle ever!” Lisa said, rushing over to my side and hugging me ecstatically. “I’m going to buy a car today. No, three cars! Fuck, I’ll buy the entire dealership and then blow it up!”
I shook my head. “While I respect your enthusiasm for destruction and mayhem, I’m actually putting it all in Kerri’s control until you’re thirty.”
“What the hell!?” Lisa shouted before making a strangling gesture with her right hand.
“Sorry, the Darth Vader throat crush doesn’t work in real life. Believe me, I’ve tried on many an occasion.”
Lisa threw out her hands and left the kitchen in disgust.
“What brought on this sudden burst of generosity?” Kerri asked.
“Last night, when I failed to get what I wanted from the Left-Handed Bokor, I ended up finding out someone has put a substantial price on my head. I’m not sure if it’s the government but if it is, I’d rather you guys were taken care of. You know, in case something were to happen to me.”
“That’s sweet of you, Gary, but Lisa and I don’t need your money. You’ve been too generous as is.”
“Speak for yourself!” Lisa called from outside the door. “We definitely need his money!”
Kerri felt her temple. “She is way too much like you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” I proceeded to conjure an iphone from the shadows. The Reaper’s Cloak’s extradimensional pockets were available even when it wasn’t technically in existence. Typing into the phone, I summoned a holographic interface that listed the entirety of my assets.
The Brotherhood of Infamy had included some of the wealthiest citizens of Falconcrest City and they’d contributed a massive amount of their fortunes to their operating budget. I’d done my best to give it back to the city but I’d stumbled in a few places, ending up keeping perhaps a bit more than my fair share.
“You mean, stealing billions of it and using it to become even richer.”
“Job creator!” I snapped back.
Several keystrokes latter, all of my bank accounts emptied out and I was once more a penniless supervillain.
“There we go,” I said, sighing. “I don’t have Mandy’s gift with computers, but I learned something about covering electronic transfers. Everything I’ve stolen looks like it’s been earned through legitimate business transfers, and it’s all yours rather than mine. Indeed, it should look like it’s always been yours.”
Kerri stopped eating and looked at me. “Are you really in that much danger, Gary?”
“I’m a supervillain, I’m always in danger.”
“Maybe you should reconsider that, then. I have enough ghostly friends.”
A young woman who was friends with Kerri in high school, I believe her name was Zoe, gave Kerri a glare.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a spook!” Kerri lifted her hands up defensively.
I paused. “You do realize I intend to borrow ten or twelve million every month from this, right? And by ‘borrow’ I mean ‘spend and never pay you back.’”
“Of course, Gary.”
“Just checking.” I thought about Kerri’s words. “Being a supervillain cost me Keith, Mandy, and may have cost me Cindy. I, honestly, don’t know if I should hang it up or not. I do know it’s all I’ve ever wanted to be, though, and I don’t know what I’d do with my life if I wasn’t.”
“Maybe you should think on that and see if there’s anything you’d like to be as Gary rather than Merciless.”
It was a thought.
Before I could respond, a glowing white streak of light fell from the sky and landed with a thud against the ground outside the kitchen. It caused the garden there to explode, sending up piles of dirt and shattering the windows.
“Oh dear,” Kerri said, rising from her chair and immediately going for the dust pan and broom. With a furious devotion, she began cleaning up the broken glass and kitchen like a woman possessed.
Lisa popped her head in. “Did something cool happen?”
“Stay inside!” I said, getting up from my chair and rubbing my ears. They were still ringing from the miniature explosion.
“Like hell!” Lisa shouted.
“Is where I’m going to send you if you don’t stay inside!” I shouted back.
“That doesn’t actually make sense,” Cloak said.
“Hush, you,” I said.
Heading through the kitchen door to the site of the explosion, I saw a fifteen-foot-long and two-foot-deep hole in the ground from where the white light had struck. On the ground, in a gold and white uniform was the brown-skinned and black-haired form of Gabrielle Anders a.k.a Ultragoddess. My ex-girlfriend from college.
Her uniform consisted of a white bodysuit with a golden miniskirt and golden thigh-high boots with no insignia on the front like so many other heroes. Her golden cape was tattered and there were cuts all across her face. This, despite the fact that she was indestructible. Walking over to her, I slid down into the hole to touch her, only to draw my hand away from her like she was a hot iron skillet.
Please, please don’t let her be the superhero who was murdered. I didn’t feel the same way for Gabrielle I did in college but I still cared for her.
There was a lot of that going around lately.
Gabrielle opened her eyes and slowly climbed to her feet, staring at me. “You better be the real Gary.”
“What?”
Chapter Seven
Back When I was Dating the Lady of Light
I remember the first time Ultragoddess saved my life. I’d been sitting across from Gabrielle at a little outdoors cafe done in a deliberately 1950s retro style, the bright sun and brilliant colors of Atlas City visible around us. It was, in every conceivable way, the opposite of my adopted hometown. There were brilliant white-glass skyscrapers, ultra-modern architecture, clean streets, and people who looked genuinely happy to be there.
Gabrielle sat across from me, wearing a white sports jersey with a short gold skirt, and glasses, her hair back in a ponytail. The fashions of Atlas City tended toward the old-fashioned, but this somehow helped with the wholesome atmosphere. Even so, it was one of the most progressive cities in the country, with its civil rights attorney Polly Pratchett constantly moving to help the disadvantaged.
She slurped on her milkshake, looking over at me while I tried to choose where we’d head next on our visit to the city. “You’ve been staring at that thing all day.”
“There’s just so much to see. The first Earth-based transstellar spaceport for alien-human interaction. The submarine residential area inhabited by Atlanteans and Merrow. The world’s first clean-energy fusion plant.”
“So, an airport, the suburbs, and the power plant?” Gabrielle said, smiling.
I looked down from my map. “I know this is all old hat for you but I’ve never been in a city like Atlas City. I mean, the air is clean downtown. That’s just... wrong.”
Gabrielle chuckled. “You can blame Ultragod for the majority of this. You can’t have a superhero in a city for eighty years without it impacting things.”
“Yeah,” I paused, putting down my map. “Ultragod.”
“You’re not a big fan of superheroes,” Gabrielle said. It was a statement of fact. She’d known it for years.
“No,” I
said, looking down. “I don’t like superheroes. You know about what happened to Keith.”
“Yeah,” Gabrielle said, sighing. “Shoot-Em-Up was the first superhero to start killing criminals. He served as judge, jury, and executioner before inspiring a generation of copycats. Your brother was his second kill out of fifty-seven, before someone killed Shoot-Em-Up in a dirty hotel in Falconcrest City.”
I was silent. “Yeah.”
“I know, Gary.”
I looked up. “You do?”
Gabrielle reached over and put her hand on mine. “How long have we been living together?”
“Three months,” I said, smirking. It was a smile without happiness.
“I know you,” Gabrielle said. “You are a good person. What you did is something that weighs on your soul every day. You torture yourself because of what happened and I can see how it warps you. Makes you want to be someone you’re not. I see it. I also know you can rise above that.”
Gabrielle suspected, even if she didn’t know, that I was planning on becoming a supervillain. My brother, Keith, had been Stingray the Underwater Assassin. He’d been one of the Nefarious Nine and had tried to take over Atlantis. The archnemesis of both the Silver Lightning and Aquarius. She was right. I had killed Shoot-Em-Up and had been thinking about following in my brother’s path.
To honor him.
I loved my brother’s memory more than anything on Earth.
Or I thought I did.
I looked at Gabrielle and squeezed her hand. “As long as I have you in my life, the light will drown out the dark. I will never follow in my brother’s path as long as I have you.”
“You always will.” Gabrielle smiled.
“Ugh,” Cindy said from about three feet away. “Must you two be so disgustingly saccharine?”
I turned around to look at my best friend, who was standing behind us. She was dressed in a red football jersey and black sweatpants. She had a tray with a fountain drink, burger, and fries on it. Her hair was kept in place with a headband with a little skull pattern on the top.
“Yes,” I answered her automatically. “Yes we do.”
“What do you suggest we do, Cindy?” Gabrielle said, smiling.
Cindy smiled like a Cheshire cat. “I say we hit the bars, score some Z, get utterly blitzed and have a threesome back at the hotel room.”
A customer looked up at her.
“What?” Cindy said, looking back at him.
“Uh-huh,” Gabrielle said, looking back at her. “Gary, is your bestie always like this?”
I sighed. “Only when she’s sober.”
“What’s she like when drunk?”
I started to answer only to be interrupted by a glowing orange fireball falling from the sky and landing in the middle of the crowded city street just a dozen yards away. A few of the customers screamed and got up, running away, while others just looked on with a curious indifference.
“Aw, man, not on my lunch break,” Gabrielle muttered, turning to look at the object from space.
The glowing meteorite was roughly twelve feet in diameter and cracked open like an egg. This revealed an eight-foot-tall square-bodied figure with rock-like orange skin and bone protrusions jutting out of his joints and chest. It was twice as large as any muscle-bound bodybuilder, with a craggy face and stringy long white hair coming from the back of its skull.
The monster had a big bone protrusion coming out of its chin, almost like a beard. Strangely, it was also wearing a pair of scarlet swim trunks were unharmed by the fact he’d just fallen from space. A huge battle axe was attached to its back via a harness, glowing with little black energy dots surrounding it.
“I am Akuma the Accursed!” the figure bellowed. “The Harbinger of Pyronnus the Destroyer, Master of a Dozen Worlds, and Slayer of a Thousand Heroes! I come here to challenge Ultragod to a duel to the death and claim his daughter as my bride.”
Gabrielle narrowed her eyes at that last bit, frowning deeply.
“Is this common around here?” I asked, looking at the sudden appearance of an alien warlord amongst us.
“You have no idea,” Gabrielle muttered, growling. “They’re always here to challenge my fat...Ultragod. Never Ultragoddess. This despite the fact she was trained from birth to be the greatest warrior on Earth.”
“It’s a man’s galaxy, huh?” Cindy said.
“Ain’t that the truth.” Gabrielle shook her head.
Akuma removed his battle axe from his harness and started shaking it. “My ship’s sensors detected an Ultraforce energy signature in this area! Someone who has been touched with the power of the First Ones! Show yourself, Ultragod or I will begin destroying these people!”
“Should we get out of here?” Cindy asked.
“That’d just draw its attention,” Gabrielle grumbled. “Moron doesn’t even know Ultragod is off in the dimension of Mister Imagination.”
“So we should just wait here?” I said, not sure if we should help evacuate the surrounding citizenry or just wait for the authorities. I wasn’t used to being inactive in the face of a threat and hated feeling powerless.
“Take some pictures,” Gabrielle said, smiling. “The paper would pay big bucks for these. In the meantime, I need to use the bathroom.”
“Wait, what?” I said, watching Gabrielle duck from her table to the interior of the restaurant.
“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” Cindy said, shrugging. “Someone should tell her she needs to go see a doctor, though, since that’s the third time today.”
I was about to speak when Akuma pointed at me. “You, puny mortal.”
“Hmm?” I said, having pulled out my cellphone to take a picture.
“You have had sexual contact with an Ultra-force tainted being!” Akuma shouted, pointing his axe in my direction.
“Gary, you’re cheating on Gabby with Ultragoddess!” Cindy said, horrified.
“I’m not!” I said, stunned.
Akuma was serious, though. “If you have defiled my bride, your pain will be endless.”
I stared at him, fully aware your average alien could obliterate me with a thought. “I don’t know about you, bub, but where I’m from women can have sex with whoever they want. So fuck off.”
Cindy grimaced then sighed. “Well, it was a nice life. I only regret it wasn’t longer.”
Akuma lifted his glowing axe at me and there was a humming noise, as if it was charging up to do something unpleasant. I didn’t bother to move. Instead, I just stared at him, knowing that I would never be someone like him.
A predator on the weak.
Scum.
A murderer of the innocent.
Or close to it, in my case, at least back then.
I was spared from obliteration by the sound of a mighty THWACK as Akuma went flying through the air with the force of a hundred speeding locomotives.
Ultragoddess had arrived. She moved faster than the Harbinger by a significant amount, catching him in the air before he slammed into a building and then punching him out over the bay. It was a well-known fact the biggest number of deaths from supervillains wasn’t their actual murders—well, at least until the Big Disaster—but the aftermath of their attacks.
That was why every Society of Superhero member was trained in controlling the direction of a battle. Even so, I couldn’t help but notice Akuma was trying to direct the battle back into the center of the city, perhaps in hopes of breaking Ultragoddess’s spirit.
“Ever wonder what you’d do with those sort of powers?” Cindy asked, watching the resulting ballet of punches and cosmic energy blasts.
“Every day,” I said, keeping my eyes squarely on Ultragoddess. There was something familiar about her that I couldn’t place.
Little did I know, Gabrielle used her Ultra-mesmerism in order to make sure my brain, along with the brains of countless other civilians, couldn’t put together the fact she was Ultragoddess. It was a personal betrayal, one I still struggled with, but one I understood at le
ast.
Superheroes had revealed their identities to boyfriends and girlfriends, even spouses, only for them to let them slip or sell them to the media in exchange for immense amounts of cash. Several of these occasions had resulted in tragedy, either the superhero being forced into retirement or their family getting targeted by criminals.
People who didn’t understand the secret identity thing, who thought of being a superhero as something more or less like being a celebrity, mistook what it was all about. The mob targeted witnesses and investigators in order to prevent them from testifying. What lengths did people think they’d go to avenge themselves on people who threatened their operations every day?
What lengths did they think madmen who could build a-bombs in their basement would go to? I’d been on the receiving end of a hero taking advantage of the fact my brother’s identity had been open.
Cindy kept watching, unable or unwilling to take her eyes off the spectacle. “Yeah, but then you’d have to live a double life. You’d never be able to open up about who you were.”
I shook my head. “Nah, I’d just live twenty-four/seven as my supervi...hero identity. No point in having a secret identity if you’re Stingray or Merciful or Wrathful the entire time.”
“Wouldn’t that erode Gary Karkofsky? You’re kind of cool as is.”
“Am I?” I asked, sincerely.
“It’d be a shame to lose you.”
I had no idea how to respond to that.
In the end, Akuma wasn’t anything approaching a match for Gabrielle. He had fought Ultragod to a stand-still, even defeated him on a couple of occasions, but the Harbinger hadn’t come prepared for someone trained by Guinevere of Avalon and the Nightwalker, in addition to her father.
His power-axe landed on an abandoned car a few blocks away from us, slicing it in half, before Gabrielle unleashed a hundred punching Ultra-force energy fists followed by a gigantic glowing energy hand that slapped him silly. Gabrielle had won the fight by that moment, but she continued for a few minutes more. She conjured an electric chair to shock him, battered him between a pair of gigantic ping pong paddles, and created a screen full of Tetris blocks she slammed down upon him.