by C. T. Phipps
“Alright,” I said, doing so. “See you soon.”
“You bet.”
I was glad we had this conversation. I didn’t believe for a second my father approved of my becoming a supervillain but it allowed me a sense of peace with my life path. I couldn’t just stop being a criminal but I decided to re-direct my efforts to those especially deserving, at least until I was ready to leave. Not as a hero but as a better sort of bad guy. Because I didn’t deserve to be a hero. I’d thrown that away by letting my wife die.
My father passed away two days later.
I remembered that as I found myself standing in an endless nothingness. It was the Nothing Beyond, the complete emptiness that existed beyond Heaven, Hell, and everything else past the physical universe.
“But what if he didn’t have to?” a voice spoke behind me. “What if we could make all this better?”
It took me a second to realize it was my voice speaking.
Chapter Seventeen
Talking to Myself
I turned around and looked into the face of my doppelganger. I’d caught a glimpse of him for just a brief moment during the fight at the hospital and hadn’t really got a chance to appreciate what he looked like. The first thing that struck me about him was, oddly, the fact that he was much better looking than me.
I’m an extremely handsome guy, don’t get me wrong, but all of my features had completely smoothed out to a superhuman beauty similar to Adonis’s. He had porcelain-white skin, platinum-white hair, and crystal blue eyes. The nose was nicely more Semitic than mine as well.
My doppelganger was wearing a silken, brilliant white hooded cloak that seemed to shine with its own inner light. He wasn’t wearing one of the Reaper’s Cloaks but a magical reproduction, like the kind the Nightmaster wore during our final confrontation during the Fall. It made me wonder what had happened to his version of Cloak before I decided I didn’t want to know.
“Hello, Gary,” my doppelganger said, standing in the middle of the endless void.
“Hello, Other Gary,” I said, thinking up a name for him. “The last time I faced my exact duplicate in the middle of a big nothing didn’t turn out so well.”
“Believe me, I know,” Other Gary said, extending his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, I am the Pre-Great Cataclysm Gary.”
I, reluctantly, reached out and shook his hand. “Pre-Great Cataclysm?”
Cloak, as always, was a source of information. “The Great Cataclysm,” Cloak said, his voice low. “The greatest failure of the Society of Superheroes. A gigantic war against the Great Beasts and an endless army of demons summoned by Diabloman. No one but the inner circle of the Society—Ultragod, Guinevere, and I—remembered it. We weren’t able to save reality but we successfully rebooted it. We were told by the Cosmic Monitor there were other survivors but—”
“So you’re a Gary from a previous universe,” I said, uninterested in the details. “Got it.”
Other Gary smirked. “You’re surprisingly accepting of this fact.”
“I’ve long since given up on logic and sanity.”
Other Gary chuckled. “That’s probably for the best.”
I decided to ditch the faux-pleasantness of this. “Why the hell are you working for Omega, you psychotic prick?”
Other Gary was surprisingly forthcoming. “Because your universe sucks.”
“And how does working for President Looney Tunes help that?”
“Perhaps I should clarify I don’t work for him,” Other Gary said, clasping his hands together. “He works for me.”
I paused. “Somehow, I doubt he’s the most stable subordinate. Also, the question still applies. Why?”
Other Gary closed his eyes. “Perhaps it is better to show you.”
He snapped his fingers and we were suddenly no longer surrounded by emptiness but in the middle of Downtown Falconcrest City. It was unlike any time I’d ever seen the metropolis, though. It was beautiful, with shining skyscrapers, clean streets, and air that didn’t choke your lungs. Gone were the dark and somber faces of a people traumatized by a zombie apocalypse; instead was a sense of joy. Across the street from us was the Falconcrest City Bank, the one blown up by the Extreme during my second day out as Merciless. Here, it was still intact and open for business.
I was more than a little unnerved. “It looks like Atlas City.”
“It is 1966,” Other Gary said, sighing. “The height of superheroism. Except, in the Pre-Cataclysm world, we were already alive and adults. You were Ultragod’s plucky cub reporter friend, or as to say I was, and we were part of the Teen Heroes who helped the Society of Superheroes solve crimes.”
I paused. “Okay, that makes even less sense than time-travel usually does. How the hell would I be born three-and-a-half-decades earlier?”
“Abandoning logic in the face of superhero-related events is a good policy for a reason,” Other Gary said, giving a dismissive wave of his hand. “Keep watching.”
The alarm went off at the bank and two of my old foes—the Ice Cream Man and Big Ben—ran out carrying bags of loot while their costumed henchmen dragged out a pair of hostages. I hadn’t known either of them very long because, well, I’d killed them both. They were a pair of psychopaths who’d had their deaths coming; I say that with full awareness of the hypocrisy.
These two looked different from the ones I remembered, lacking some of the inherent viciousness and malice I remembered oozing off the originals. This Ice Cream Man, for example, was dressed in a paper hat and white suit with a pair of earmuffs and a heavy overcoat while sporting a harmless freezing ray in his right hand. The one I’d known had filed down his teeth into shark-like incisors and cut off his own lips. Big Ben, by contrast, was a dwarf in a bowler hat and a Union Jack-themed suit carrying an umbrella.
The henchmen were both wearing black and white prison jumpsuits with shoe polish around their eyes and berets. They looked like the kind of comical crooks that menaced Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. I did a double take, though, when I saw the two hostages were a pair of sexy girls in bellbottoms and tie-dye shirts. It was a teenaged Mandy and Cindy, both wearing headbands, and ineffectually struggling.
“You’re not going to get away with this!” Mandy said, without irony. “Merciful: The Hero of Mercy is going to save us.”
“Yeah, you rats are going to get what’s coming to him!” Cindy shouted. “Our boyfriend is going to whoop you!”
“Is this supposed to convince me the world is better?” I asked, looking over to Other Gary. “Because all this is showing is your world is completely sexist. Also curiously devoid of swearing.”
“There’s no shame in not being a fighter,” Other Gary said, defensively. “Cindy is studying to be a doctor and Mandy an investigative journalist.”
“Mandy is a fighter, though,” I said. “So is Cindy. Besides, the sixties had Emma Peel. Not to mention there were plenty of female superheroes during this time as well—Guinevere, the Heroes of Tomorrow, and so on.”
“True,” Other Gary said. “Eventually, Mandy was so sick of being kidnapped that she went to study with her people in the Lost City of Shambhala.”
“Her people?” I said, doing a double take after I realized he was referring to Mandy’s Korean heritage. “You mean Californians? Seriously, your defense is it’s not sexist because it’s racist?”
Other Gary sighed. “Just watch.”
Seconds later, a glowing white cloaked figure levitated down in front of them. It was a younger version of Other Gary who promptly pointed at the ne’er do wells and shouted, “Halt, evil-doers!”
“Got any popcorn?” I asked.
Other Gary conjured a bag and handed it over.
I took a handful of its contents and started crunching.
Mmmm.
Other Gary also conjured me a cola with a straw in it.
“Thanks.”
Younger Other Gary then proceeded to punch out the Ice Cream Man with a resounding whoomp sound, followed by a
wham sound as he punched the first of the henchmen. Big Men fired an energy blast from his umbrella which Younger Other Gary ducked, then delivered a kick to his jaw. A huge boomph noise came, followed by yet another wham noise as Younger Other Gary knocked out the last of the henchmen.
“Oh thank you!” Mandy said, kissing my second doppelganger, followed by Cindy. He then embraced both.
“Are they in like a threesome?” I asked, handing the popcorn bag back to Other Gary and taking a sip of my Coca-Cola. It was the kind of really good classic Coke which was only available before the eighties and had more calories than God.
“No, we don’t really do that sort of thing,” Other Gary said. “I was just caught in a perpetual love triangle. Quartet whenever Gabrielle broke up with her space boyfriends.”
“Again, you have a really sanitized view of the sixties,” I said, slurping on my straw. “Archie was totally hitting both Betty and Veronica while the two of them were with each other. Jughead pined for Archie, but eventually ended up with hamburgers and the occasional moment of solace with bisexual Reggie.”
“That’s completely not how that series went.”
“Well, its how I read it. It was the era of Free Love, man. I much prefer the hippie part of the sixties to the sexist douchebag Mad Men version.”
Other Gary smiled, then waved away the universe about it, returning us to the emptiness where we were before. “The thing is, I come from a more innocent time. A place where good and evil were absolutes. Heroes were heroes, villains were villains, and the former always triumphed over the latter. This world you live in is a mistake, full of complexities and cruelties that have no place in a world of flying jetpacks and talking apes.”
“Yeah, but gay people can serve in the military and blacks can sit in the front of the bus. I consider that a pretty good trade-off.”
Other Gary gave a wry smile. “Touché. But what if I could tell you it was possible to have the best of both worlds? Literally. All of the social progress of the last fifty years mixed with a complete absence of the worst excesses of superhero mythology. An idealistic world where we believe people with superpowers make the world a better place rather than one where we fear they’re going to destroy it.”
“You mean a place where the president isn’t trying to put every Super in death camps?” I asked. “Which, again, brings us to the fact you’re allied with the psycho guy who tried to kill my family.”
Other Gary frowned. “You keep coming back to that.”
“Blowing up my house and allying with the guy who killed my ex-girlfriend’s father isn’t the best way to start a relationship.”
“Omega didn’t kill Ultragod,” Other Gary said, lowering his gaze. “I did.”
I threw the Coke in his face and pulled out my pistols to shoot him during the distraction. Before I could respond, though, he had levitated underneath and then behind me and had wrapped his arm around my neck.
“Be at peace!” Other Gary shouted.
“Fuck you!” I shouted, furious. “You son of a bitch! You murdered the greatest superhero in the world!”
“Yes, I did,” Other Gary said, his voice low. I’ve discovered we have a gift, my younger self. We have the ability to do whatever it is necessary to achieve the ends we require no matter how horrible or monstrous they may be. I’d make a pithy remark or pop culture reference to illustrate what I mean, but honestly, I don’t remember any of Earth’s films or books. It’s been too long.”
“For the love of God, why!?” I snapped, struggling against my doppelganger’s grip but was unable to turn insubstantial or overcome it while he had his arm around my throat. I even bit into his arm, but it didn’t seem to do any good.
“To bring back my Mandy,” Other Gary said.
I stopped struggling. “What?”
Other Gary then looked up into the nothingness above us as if still seeing Falconcrest City’s skyline. “This was the heyday of the good times, but not the end. Reality took Mandy from us, Gary. We had ten beautiful years of marriage in my timeline before she ended up dying. This was before Diabloman destroyed the universe during his days as a supervillain and the Society of Superheroes had to recreate it. I was within inches of resurrecting her and starting our life together over when the universe exploded around me. I survived, though, because I was already at one with Death. I woke up in a universe that was similar, but different from the one I’d come from. All of the superheroes were here, but nastier, meaner, and less able to save the day. The villains were crueler and more prone to being psychotic monsters. The government was awful and plotting Nazi-like genocides against Supers. There was also a new Gary and a new Mandy.”
“Why kill Ultragod?” I growled, filled with a murderous fury toward the man who had quite possibly ruined my world.
“Because we can fix it,” Other Gary said, letting go. “I can fix it. Gary, this is the future without my intervention.”
Our surroundings changed again but what they turned into was a far cry from the campy city we’d left behind. . The sight that greeted us on the other side was the blasted ruins of Falconcrest City. Most of the city’s skyline was rubble, reduced to nothing more than hollowed-out metal girders, the bones of the buildings I’d grown up beside.
Most of the suburbs had been replaced with half-mile-tall black concrete factories that poured out massive amounts of black smoke, making the stars impossible to see. A single skyscraper remained, twice as tall as the factories, with an obelisk shape and the P.H.A.N.T.O.M symbol emblazoned across its front. As if the scene wasn’t frightening enough. the lights inside the obelisk were an ominous shade of red.
Looking to my side, I saw we were in the half-collapsed ruins of an elementary school with child-sized skeletons scattered across the ground along with the broken stone. The walls were covered in freshly-applied posters extolling the virtues of Supreme Leader Omega, wanted posters for various superheroes (most stamped “Terminated”), and various art deco artwork which Stalin would have been proud of. One displayed a board with a nail in its end being held over a tied-up man in a cape, saying, “Resist the Supers who have ruined the world.”
I didn’t know what was more disturbing, that they’d bothered to paper up the ruins of a school massacre or that they hadn’t bothered to clean up the children’s corpses. I suppose both were equally horrifying in their own way.
“James Cameron takes over the world?” I said, looking around for Arnold and Linda Hamilton.
“Not funny,” Other Gary said, breathing in the smoggy, ash-filled air. “Your universe was broken from the time it was rebuilt following Diabloman’s destruction of it. The conflicts between superheroes and supervillains got more and more destructive until the public turned against them both. Unfortunately, they hadn’t counted on so much of the population siding with the Supers, even if it was a minority. Humanity destroyed itself in an apocalyptic war. That was before I got President Omega to go back in time and replace the bastard who was going to be elected instead.”
“So, your solution to the coming genocide of all superhumans is to kill the world’s greatest superhero and replace him with a guy who wants to commit genocide against all superhumans. This is a worse plan than I usually come up with. Where did I go wrong? Literally?”
Other Gary said, “To remake the universe, Gary, I needed necromantic energy. A lot of necromantic energy. The best way to get that energy is death. Massive amounts on a global scale. So, I figured the only way to achieve my goals was to absorb the energy of the world’s destruction. Which I did when Omega destroyed it for me—the first time.”
I paused. “The first time.”
“After I absorbed the destruction of the world the first time at Omega’s hands and his subsequent mismanagement, we reversed time and proceeded to conquer the world again so I could gain it again. One hundred years of death, followed by another hundred years of death. I only need to do it again and I’ll have all of the energy I need to rewrite reality forever.”
Other Gary waved his hand and I saw my sorcerer doppelganger supervising a century of warfare following the release of the Nanoplague. All of those individuals who hated Supers rejoiced at their destruction only to be exterminated themselves.
Other Gary, Ultradevil, and President Omega together annihilated everyone in the world who could resist, and when they were done, Other Gary betrayed them and gave Omega’s time-travel technology to the resistance so they could go back and just barely fail to prevent events from happening again. Allowing Other Gary to do it over again. This would be the third time he helped destroy the world.
I stared at him. “Wow, I never thought I’d say this about anyone, least of all me, but you are worse than Hitler.”
Other Gary just laughed. It was the bitter humorless laugh of someone who’d forgotten how to. “Aren’t you the one who said he’d do anything to bring Mandy back?”
“There are limits. Limits she would never want me to cross.”
Other Gary looked down. “Like I said, we can cross any line we want to save our loved ones. For example, right now, I’m happy to restore your Mandy to you in exchange for you walking away.”
Chapter Eighteen
Where I Deal with the Devil (Me)
My mouth went dry at Other Gary’s offer. “You could do that?”
“Gary,” Cloak said, his voice low. “Don’t.”
“Just let me handle this,” I whispered, not knowing how to react.
Other Gary dismissed the post-apocalyptic future we’d just visited and started pacing around. “I want to resurrect my world, my wife, and my family. That’s a concept I’m sure you can appreciate even if you disapprove of the means.”
“I think murdering literally billions of people, resurrecting them, and then murdering them again goes a little beyond disapproving of the means.”
Other Gary gave a dismissive shrug. “If you say so. The simple fact is I have more than enough necromantic energy to re-arrange events in your reality so that Mandy gets her soul back. The moment you come back to reality, she’ll be exactly as you planned to make her. A vampire with your wife’s soul.”