by C. T. Phipps
“And worse!” Icarus said.
“Come my eromenos, we must put an end to this band of miscreants!”
Icarus looked embarrassed. “Could you not call me that in public?”
Before the rift closed, Omega gave some parting words. “Now, I fully don’t expect my guys to win but I do think they’ll slow you all down for the real heroes to arrive to arrest you all for all the collateral damage. I’ve got a lovely little set of cells for you all lined up in an anti-matter universe. I call it Omegatanamo Bay because, well, I was trying to make a pun and gave up after about ten minutes.”
Battle was joined before he finished his little spiel. Everyone fighting but me.
Not that I didn’t want to.
But Cloak gave voice to what I was already feeling as I turned insubstantial and found cover. “We can’t allow ourselves to be distracted by this pointless brawl, Gary. President Omega is just trying to slow us down to further consolidate his position against us and prevent him from stopping his greater plans—whatever they may be.”
“Brilliant case of detective work,” I said. “What with him having said all that not five seconds ago.”
“Sorry, but it’s been awhile since we’ve dealt with villains willing to share their plans openly. I’m a bit out of practice.”
“I’d say it’s stupid of him but given Omega has been consistently kicking our asses, I can’t really fault his methods.”
Soulflayer, who looked like an empty black and white superhero costume that distorted in bizarre and horrific directions, proceeded to descend on my position. His voice was an unearthly hissing wail. “I sense the blood of the guilty and not-so-innocent on you. I will devour your spirit and use it to—”
I stuck my hand between the folds of the ghost’s costume and sent him onto the afterlife with a blast of magical flame. Reality seemed to shake as a scream and thunder echoed from whatever distant dimension swallowed him up. Screams and wails followed before the echoes stopped.
“I’m guessing that wasn’t heaven,” I said, looking over my shoulder at the massive supervillain brawl tearing up the streets around me. “Seriously, you’d think a ghost would know better than to attack the guy Death sends to do her dirty work.”
“I never liked Soulflayer. He and his gang of ruffians always seemed more interested in punishing the so-called guilty more than protecting the innocent.”
“Oh, you’re just noticing this now?” I snapped.
“The Society made many compromises with heroes we...perhaps shouldn’t have. Law and order became more important than mercy.”
Cloak’s epiphany speech was interrupted by Ninjess slamming against the side of the spot where I was located as Mandy plopped herself in front of me. “Okay, Gary, our last conversation didn’t exactly go very well.”
“You think!?” I snapped.
“Come with me if you want to live!” Mandy said.
“Wait, what?”
Mandy growled, baring her fangs. “It’s a Terminator reference!”
“I know that!”
“Gary, I won’t let you die!” Mandy said, grabbing my arm. There was none of the viciousness that had been there last night. Instead, she was acting almost… human. “Not again.”
“What?”
I reluctantly turned tangible and took it.
Then I saw Colonel Disaster come up behind her with his rifle and fire into us both. The bullets passed through her vampire form.
One of them went right into my chest and out the other side. I fell back against the ground, bleeding out and falling into oblivion.
Crap.
Chapter Sixteen
My Last Conversation with Dad (Nothing Funny Here)
As I bled out on the street, I dreamt of the night my father had his heart attack. It was strange the places your mind went when you were dying, but since it happened so often, I’d learned to just go with it. Besides, this was a memory appropriate to the situation. It was a memory about coming to terms with death.
I was really bad at that.
My parents and I had never really repaired our relationship after my brother’s death. Both of them agreed, at least on some level, that Keith’s supervillain lifestyle had led him to his death, while I lionized him as a martyr who could do no wrong.
By the time I was eighteen, I didn’t want anything to do with them, and they went back to New Angeles. I paid my way through college with student loans and two jobs, later working as Doctor Thule’s teacher’s assistant. Mandy eventually convinced me to make a token effort at reconciliation, though we’d never really breached the rift over Keith.
Then they’d recognized me on television as Merciless.
Oiye.
This would be the third conversation I’d had with them since.
I was presently standing in the hallway of the Falconcrest City Hospital Cardiac Wing, getting berated by my short, blonde, sixty-three-year-old mother who was wearing a pink sweatshirt and long plaid dress.
My bald, sixty-four-year-old father, was sitting in the hospital bed in his room twelve feet to my left, looking horribly embarrassed.
“You’re a disgrace, Gary,” Linda Karkofsky said, staring at me through her red glasses. “I didn’t raise you to be a criminal and here you are, making a mockery of our family name. Is it not enough that we had to endure your brother’s ways? You had to do it to us too?”
I looked at her, trying to keep my temper. “Yes, because your family name is so much more damned important than my brother, your son.”
“Why?” Linda shook her hands as if wanting to strangle me. “You had a good life. You had a wife, even if she was THAT way, and a job. You could have been somebody and now you’re...THIS!”
I narrowed my eyes. “That way?”
“No wonder she left you. I would have too!” Linda said, practically spitting in my face.
I took a moment to mentally count to ten. “Can I see my father?”
“We don’t—”
“Come on in, Gary,” Joel Karkofsky said, sighing. “Linda, go get some ice.”
“I don’t need any...” Linda trailed off before shooting my father a look then shaking her head. “I don’t believe this.”
She then stomped off.
I walked into my father’s room. A nurse was checking his vitals. She looked like she would rather be anywhere in the world than here. I just let her finish her business and watched her rush out the door. Joel watched her too, seemingly amused by her reaction to his son, the terrifying supervillain in a black hoodie.
I suspected the hospital had called security, who had probably called the police who were probably calling on someone higher up. That gave me plenty of time to have my conversation with my dad before moving on. In retrospect, I should have just come after visiting hours when my mother wasn’t shouting my identity to the four winds.
Joel looked at me. “Well, I may have been forced to skip Monday Night Football tonight, but at least I got dinner and a show.” He looked down at the plate of Jello in front of him. “Such as it is.”
“Sorry,” I said, looking over at several bouquets of flowers nearby. One set was from my sister Kerri, another was from my niece Lisa, a couple were from coworkers, and a final was from the Silver Lightning. The Silver Lightning had been my brother’s archnemesis for years but had watched out for the family after his death. “That’s nice of John Volt.”
Joel said, “He’s an okay guy for one of those people.”
I sighed. “Those people?”
I assumed he, like my mother, meant John Volt’s divergent sexuality. My mother had never accepted Mandy’s bisexuality.
Or her Wiccan faith.
Or being a Gentile.
Or being married to me.
At least until she was gone.
“A hippie!” Joel said, growling. “Those damn Volts are nothing but a bunch of pot-smoking superpowered peacenik tree-huggers.”
Joel smiled, letting me know he was joking.
I smiled back. “It’s good to see you’re alive.”
“Eh, for now,” Joel said, more seriously. “I made my peace with God in Vietnam 2, fighting those damn P.H.A.N.T.O.M pseudo-Nazis with the Foundation for World Harmony. Every day since getting back has been a blessing.”
I sighed, walking over and taking a seat across from him. “I’m sorry for disappointing you.”
“Unlike your mother, I’m reserving judgment until I’ve heard your side of the story,” Joel said, sighing. “Your brother became a supervillain because he got kicked out of the Navy Seals for a couple of blunts, plus the fact he was dead broke. He had bad friends who encouraged him to make stupid decisions.”
I clenched my fists, trying to hold back my anger.
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t love him, Gary,” Joel said, sighing. “What is family for if not to call you on your bullshit?”
He had me there. “Okay, what do you want to know?”
Joel stared at me. “Why be a supervillain? You could have been a hero.”
I shrugged. “I hate the entire superhero and supervillain dynamic. One side good, the other evil, and never the twain shall meet. I guess I wanted to show my contempt for the world and exactly what I thought about it in a big and obvious way.”
Joel drank a bit of water from his paper cup. “I saw you kill those Extreme people on television.”
I frowned. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“They killed a lot of innocent people,” Joel said, surprising me.
“Yeah, they did,” I said.
“I also saw Ultragod arrest you a few minutes later,” Joel said, shaking his head. “Except, you were free not a few weeks later without any warrants. The FBI and Foundation websites say you’re wanted but you’re not on any pursuit lists.”
“I kind of saved the world. People who agreed with the Extreme’s methods come in every few months to try and take me out, but otherwise, I’m fairly low priority. I think Gabrielle is protecting me, too, which I didn’t want.”
The fact that I’d killed dozens of supervillains, destroyed the majority of zombies in Falconcrest City, and helped the city rebuild hadn’t gone unnoticed. I was a multiple murderer and guilty of countless criminal offenses, but the country had degenerated to the point that no one cared as long as I kept my targets restricted to assholes.
In that respect, I was not so different from Shoot-Em-Up.
Joel looked at me, shaking his head. “So, Ultragoddess is still sweet on you?”
I blinked. “You knew she was Ultragoddess?”
“You didn’t?” Joel said, staring. “I mean, her father was Ultragod in a hat and glasses. Then again, I still have my anti-hypnotism implant from the war. Your mom still thinks of her as that nice colored girl you let slip away.”
I rubbed my temples, wishing my parents were less racist. A lot less racist. “Yeah, I suppose she did slip away.”
“What happened to Mandy?” Joel asked. “Because I know that girl would never abandon you.”
I answered without thinking. “She died.”
“Your fault?” Joel asked, plain and without malice.
I was glad I could answer, “No. She died because of the whole zombie plague thing. Mandy was a hero to the end.”
“Good,” Joel said, taking another sip. “That should make it easier.”
“Not really.”
Joel looked down. “I’m sorry, son. No one in the world should have to outlive their spouse. Someone has to but there’s only one worse pain in the world.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking away from him. “I thought when I became a supervillain, I’d have the opportunity to do whatever I wanted. I’d be able to change the world’s rules to whatever I wanted them to be. For the past seven months, I’ve been doing nothing but looking for a way to find a way to bring her back. To spit in the face of reality and say I didn’t have to deal with the consequences of my actions. With the consequences of life. That I could fix things the way I wanted them to be just by willing it hard enough.”
“That’s not being a supervillain, Gary. That’s being God.”
“I’m starting to get that.”
“Are you going to keep doing it?” Joel asked, not sounding condemnatory or angry. Just curious.
“No,” I answered him, bluntly. “It’s not fun anymore and I’ve done whatever good I can do as the bad guy in Falconcrest City. It’s finally out of the hole the Omega Corporation and the Brotherhood of Infamy dug for it. I also have no interest in being a drug dealer or pimp. I think people should be able to do what they want but consent is a kind of negotiable concept to the majority of people involved in those businesses.”
“Will your supervillain friends object to your leaving?” Joel asked. “That was always a problem for it.”
“Some will,” I said, shrugging. “I’m not afraid of them.”
“Maybe you should be,” Joel said, finishing off his drink. “Did I ever tell you why we moved to Falconcrest City from New Angeles?”
“You mean after Keith died?”
“Did we move some other time?” my father asked, looking at me like I was a moron.
I stared at my dad. “Really? You want to take me to task over grammar?”
“Hey, you get your sarcasm from me.”
“I always assumed you just wanted to get away from the media circus following Keith’s death.”
Theodore Whitman, the aforementioned Shoot-Em-Up, had lucked out by killing my brother and two other supervillains the day he did. It had been a perfect storm of timing as not only was it a slow news day, but it had also followed a series of particularly heinous crimes by repeat offender supervillains.
The media had embraced Theodore Whitman, as had his lawyers and the New Angeles PD, as a hero. The fact that Whitman was a cop had also gone a long way to getting him on their side as a man doing “necessary” vigilante justice. He had triggered hundreds of copycats, some successful and most not, who believed killing supervillains was the solution to them.
It had taken massive collateral damage, supervillains deciding there was no reason not to kill superheroes (or their families), and the general nihilistic scumbags the “Nineties Antihero” tended to attract to convince the public they’d made a mistake in embracing him.
By then he’d already been dead for a few years.
Killed by me at age fourteen.
“No,” Joel said. “It wasn’t that, though I was pretty damned disgusted when reporters asked me whether or not I thought my son deserved it outside of Keith’s funeral. It was because of the Nefarious Nine.”
I blinked. “My brother’s old gang?”
“Why do you keep asking stupid questions? Yes, your brother’s gang!”
“Excuse me all to hell.”
The Nefarious Nine was a club, for lack of a better term, of supervillains who operated in the New Angeles area. They were primarily mid-card supervillains, no one exceptionally powerful but no one particularly weak either, who preferred nonviolent crimes over the bloody messes some left behind. They were theatrical bank robbers, jewelry-store thieves, technology bandits, and hold-up men. People died when they attempted to mess with the gang but they avoided killing cops or civilians. At least, until they took over Atlantis and hundreds died in the resulting civil war.
That had been ugly.
“I remember ‘em,” I said. “Most of the original crew is dead, retired, or in hiding. One turned into a hero around the time of their gender-reassignment.”
“I blame them for ruining your brother’s career,” Joel said, sighing. “Keith was an adult, he made his choices, but he wanted to be somebody, and they convinced him the best path in life was to become a criminal. Your brother didn’t want to be Stingray the Underwater Assassin when he died—he was trying get out of the life.”
“I know,” I said, thinking back to my meeting with his spirit. “He told me.”
“How is he?” Joel asked. My powers freaked out a lot of people.
Much the same as Kerri’s. They didn’t freak out my father.
“Happy,” I said.
“Good,” Joel said. “The thing was, what I’m trying to tell you is when Shoot-Em-Up killed your brother, the Nefarious Nine wanted to initiate you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your brother struggled for money between prison stays. For both his daughter and his wife. Yet the moment he died, money came pouring in with an offer to send you to special schooling with P.H.A.N.T.O.M or some weird cult of ninjas in the Himalayas. They saw in you a potential replacement five or six years down the road. I didn’t want that for you, so I took you to Falconcrest City and prayed they wouldn’t care enough to follow.” Joel paused. “They didn’t.”
I’d never heard any of this and a part of me, I’m sorry to say, grew mad at my father. It had taken me until my thirties to become a supervillain because of a freak stroke of luck. As much as it had become a bitter pill, I’d yearned to be one from the time of my brother’s death until I’d slipped the Reaper’s Cloak on for the first time.
Knowing I could have had ten more years of being a supervillain, even if it involved something as reprehensible as P.H.A.N.T.O.M, filled me with a sense of missed opportunity. The rest of me knew exactly what my father had done. He’d given me a chance. A chance I’d squandered.
I took a deep breath. “Thank you. I mean that.”
“You’re welcome.”
I tried to choose my next words carefully. “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you, Dad.”
“You haven’t.” Joel surprised me. “You saved Falconcrest City from zombies. You steal from real assholes. You also killed Magog the Biblical giant.”
“You heard about that, huh?”
“Also, a bunch of other bad people. I’m not saying I approve of what you’ve done but you were true to yourself. Be who you are, son, even if it’s a villain. At the end of the day, you only have to answer to yourself and those you love.”
I stared at him. “Would you be telling me any of this if you weren’t worried about dying?”
“No way in hell,” Joel said. “Your mom is waiting outside the day, ready to give you another earful. Give me a hug, Gary.”