by C. T. Phipps
Including my wife, it seemed.
“And Mandy has kidnapped me and taken me to her secret lair,” I said, shaking my head. “I would be upset, but...”
I reached up to touch my chest and saw it had been field-dressed and there was also blackish-red ichor on the wound.
Vampire blood.
Nature’s unnatural cure-all.
“I guess we’re going to find out if Other Gary was lying or not,” I said, worried he was and worried he wasn’t.
“He might be telling the truth.”
“Usually, you warn me to be cynical.”
“I am not that cruel, even if we both know you should be.”
Standing up, I stretched my neck and headed down the side of the station to a metal door leading to the pumping station proper. The interior of the place was actually quite homey with furniture that resembled the kind we’d had at our house, a television set showing home movies from her childhood, and a variety of stuffed animals I’d put into storage so I didn’t have to be reminded they belonged to my wife.
There was also a collection of television sets wired together with images of various hot spots around the city, a bookshelf-sized Foundation for World Harmony supercomputer processor attached to a million-dollar Aeon Inc. computer terminal, a police scanner, and a hundred open files on the coffee table describing P.H.A.N.T.O.M’s operations for the past eighty years.
There was also a black and white photo of Charles Omega meeting with Adolf Hitler and Tom Terror for the formation of said organization. I also saw pictures of a hellish world of flames and industry that I recognized from Cloak’s files as the planet Abaddon at the end of time. President Omega was meeting with the flamboyant space gods there and had taken selfies.
Apparently, Charles Omega had helped found P.H.A.N.T.O.M on behalf of Entropicus. Wow, he was an asshole.
I walked over to the photo and picked it up. “Okay, this is getting very The Man in the High Castle.”
“I should have realized Omega was a danger long before this,” Cloak said. “To think people used to call me Earth’s Greatest Detective.”
“Missing the fact that all of Falconcrest City’s rich people and politicians were apocalypse-worshiping demon-cultists was kind of a failure on your part,” I replied. “Just how much of time is fucked up by this guy, do you think?” I looked at the photos, which showed a history of President Omega throughout the past seventy years.
Kidnapping Patty Hearst, blowing up the Golden Gate Bridge, starting the Third Cuban Missile Crisis, and trying to assassinate Doctor Byrne during his talk with Martin Luther King about Superhuman rights.
“It could be a stable time-loop and all of this was meant to happen,” Cloak said.
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“No,” Cloak said. “No, your doppleganger’s presence proves that. Either way, this is an outrage. History’s natural flow being violated is monstrous.”
“Is it? I’ve killed thirty-six Hitlers, remember?”
“I try not to think of that. Those were all alternate pasts, though, so they don’t count.”
“This is why no one trusts superheroes. Your morality doesn’t make any sense.”
“I generally don’t think any interference in the time stream is a good idea.”
“You must have hated Quantum Leap.”
“Unlike you, I try not to get my morality from pop culture.”
“Says the guy who dressed up like the Shadow to fight crime.”
“Shut up, the Shadow was awesome.”
I chuckled, recognizing Cloak’s joke.
“It’s possible the world Omega has changed us from was a much better one.” Cloak said, “Take a look here. He killed Henry Ford and turned his company into Omega Automotive. Think about how that may have changed history for the worst.”
“Versus the Jew-hating Nazi sympathizer?”
“I can see I’m not going to make much headway here. We should find your wife and discuss why she’s kidnapped you.”
“Ex...” I started to correct him before shaking my head. I wasn’t so sure anymore.
I heard the sound of a shower going in an adjacent room and walked through a nearby red door into a crude bathroom. There was a shower stall, a toilet, and a sink. The tile was yellow with age and there were three different sets of toothbrushes on the sink along with several different kinds of toothpaste and mouthwash. A white towel, the packaging in a trash can underneath it, was propped up on a nail hammered into the wall.
Mandy herself was taking a shower with her naked backside to me. The hot water was dribbling down her and she was shampooing her hair, an action I know she hadn’t bothered with for almost a year due to the way she’d looked during our previous encounter. It was the same brand Mandy had used for the entirety of our marriage, a smelly verbena-scented one that was popular with the Renaissance Fair crowd.
For a moment, I was transported back to a happier time when I would have just taken my clothes off and joined her inside. It was times like this, every day now really, I regretted I’d ever decided to put on the Reaper’s Cloak. I would have traded all my time as a supervillain, all the amazing adventures I’d had, even saving people’s lives if it meant I could be with Mandy again. That was the reason why I wasn’t, never could be, never would want to be, a hero.
“Cloak, do me a favor and go back into my subconscious for a while, would you?” I telepathically asked.
“I’ll leave you alone, Gary. Just….don’t do anything stupid.”
“Please,” I asked.
“Alright.”
With that, I was left alone with the vampire who had all of my wife’s memories and personality. Who was possessed of a darkness that hadn’t existed in my wife or had been so suppressed I’d never noticed it. Who theoretically had a soul or was missing part of hers. I didn’t know the mechanics of it, but I could only watch her as she showered, lost in the memories of the past and how they contrasted with the present. Mandy didn’t react to my voyeurism and finished washing before turning to me and stretching out her hand.
“Do you mind?” Mandy asked.
I took the white robe off its nail and handed it to her.
Mandy wrapped it around herself, this time deliberately giving me a good look at the body I’d held on countless occasions. The one I missed every time I went to sleep.
Tying the cloth belt, Mandy smiled. “You are my torment, Gary Karkofsky.”
“Excuse me?” I said, blinking.
“Becoming a vampire freed me from the ambiguities of my existence. Fear, loneliness, mercy, compassion, and self-doubt. What was once a discordant painful world of colors became a perfect one of black and white. Mandy’s desire for justice gave my life a purpose. A willingness to hunt down and destroy those who do not belong in this world. Yet, around you, I have explosions of those very emotions that confuse and muddle the issue. I’ve also had a long time to form new attachments to you even if you don’t remember them.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I’ll get to that. I’m just explaining it’s painful to be around you….the memories. Good and bad.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “I’m sorry I remind you of the person you used to be.”
Mandy surprised me by saying, “I’m not.”
“I...see.”
“I did not feel as I did for you when I first awoke to this world,” Mandy said. “Could not feel as I did. Yet your presence haunts my dreams. When the sun rises and I return to death, I dream of a time when I loved you and my heart still beat. I remember caring for you, our animals, friends, and a world where my purpose was not the only thing that drove me. It’s a deeper worry than you know because there are places, people, and things I recall which will never be. I don’t like feeling this way. Sometimes, I think it’d be better drive all these memories away and go back to the monster I was. A being who wouldn’t care about what’s to come.”
My heart skipped a beat both from pain
and longing. “Maybe you should try and give those feelings more of a shot.”
“I have considered it,” Mandy said, her voice low. “Even before I was reborn last night, I stalked you. I broke into your house to gaze upon you as you slept. I followed you on missions. I even lay beside you as you lay senseless, leaving before you awoke. So many times, I have wanted to return to you and pretend to be Mandy reborn. To adopt the guise of the woman whose form I wear and pretend—because in that pretending I might feel more happiness than I do drinking the life of my enemies.”
“You say you wear Mandy’s guise, but I think you are her,” I said, saying what Cloak and Cindy as well as Death told me was not true. “Maybe not all of her, but enough of her to be someone I loved. You left me. You abandoned me. I would have given you all of my love if you’d simply been there when I woke up.”
I didn’t care how spectacularly creepy it was that Mandy had managed to be beside me all this time I was mourning her. Given she’d been just a hair’s breadth away from killing me on multiple occasions since her transformation, it should have terrified me. It didn’t. Instead, it told me there was more to Mandy than just the hunger. That my wife, some part of her, still lived on in the vampire before me. Not just physically either. Whether it was because of the magic used to resurrect her, Other Gary, or simply the power of true love, I didn’t care. I had to believe this was her still.
Mandy stared at me. “I am a shadow of who I am. A woman out of time. Not—”
“Then why hunt criminals?” I asked, gesturing out the door. “Why have that radio to the Foundation for World Harmony? I bet you’re working for them. You also look like you’re investigating President Omega. That’s not some monster created by the Book of Midnight’s magic. That’s Mandy. A woman who believed in justice and wanting to give back the world. Maybe all that’s keeping you from being her is not letting that torment in. The pain of living, the pain of love, and the pain of loss.”
Mandy looked down. “I’m sorry about your father, Gary.”
I looked down then over my shoulder. “Yeah, well, everyone dies sometime.”
“Including me.”
“Not if I can help it,” I said, softly. “I wanted to fix this.”
“And if I don’t want to be fixed? If I’m a new person now with a life much, much longer than the living Mandy’s ever was?”
I turned around. “What do you want?”
Mandy was silent for a moment, then unexpectedly grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me up against the wall. Her eyes turned an inhuman shade of blue and glowed. Her fangs extended and in that moment, she was once more the monster that inhabited my wife’s body rather than my wife.
“What do you think!?” Mandy hissed. “I want you, dammit!”
I grabbed her by the side of her head and pressed my mouth against hers. She instantly dropped me as I bit her tongue hard enough to draw blood. She bit my tongue as well, the taste of fluids intermingling. I grabbed her by her behind and proceeded to slam her up against the side of the shower across the other end of the room.
Mandy let out a gasp of joy.
Mandy tore at my uniform, causing me to pull it back and reveal my naked form underneath. She clawed at my chest and bit my throat and wrist as well as the inner part of my thigh. She cut the side of her own throat, so I could drink of her blood in order to heal those wounds instantly.
Vampire bites were not like in the movies; they were painful and disfiguring, but the blood on the tips of her fangs gave the same narcotic effect as well as then some. Mandy wrapped her legs around me and what followed was a very destructive session of vampire sex.
Followed by another round.
By the time the two of us were done, much of Mandy’s lair was completely trashed and only the fact I was partially invulnerable kept me from having killed myself. On the other hand, Mandy was snuggled up next to me on the floor with a surprisingly content look on her face. It was like the past. Too much like the past. We’d both changed greatly. I, not for the better. Still, if she had asked me in that moment to become a vampire like her, to abandon everything that I was, I would have said yes in a heartbeat. But then I might not love Mandy anymore. No, I needed to complete my mission for Death and avenge Ultragod. When I killed the parties responsible, then I would have her back.
I had to keep telling myself that.
“So, uh, how is everyone else?” I said, realizing I should have asked that question a few hours ago.
“They all escaped,” Mandy said, a satisfied look on her face. “Ultragoddess generated a wormhole for some while the rest teleported out with the wizards. The media has branded them all traitors, though, and the Society has vowed to hunt down Ultragoddess’ killer—which they continue to believe is you.”
“That’s good…kind of. What did you want to talk to us about?” I asked, finally ready to listen.
“I need your help, Gary,” Mandy said, pressing her head against my shoulder.
“I take it has to do with President Omega’s crazy-pants plan of crazy-pants?”
Mandy nodded, looking over to me. “It goes far beyond them, though, as well as you. President Omega is going to kill every single superhuman in the world.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I heard the whole spiel from him while he monologued on a black and white television.”
“I see I’ve missed quite a bit.”
“Not that much, I’ve been kind of lost.”
“I understand,” Mandy said. “But we need to stop him now.”
“Can’t we just inform the Society? Fake Ultragod and all?”
“No,” Mandy said. “Because in two days, he’s going to release a nanite plague that will kill every superhuman in the world.”
“We’ll stop him.”
“That’s the problem, Gary. He’s already succeeded. Twice.”
Suddenly, things weren’t quite so relaxing anymore. I also wondered if my actions here were betraying the other person I loved.
“Yes,” Cloak said.
“Shut up,” I muttered. “No one asked you.”
Chapter Twenty
Where I Discover I’m John Connor
I pulled away from Mandy as we lay together on the bed. “Okay, you’re going to have to pretend I’m a guy who doesn’t understand what you mean by saying President Omega has already won twice. Is it a time-travel thing?”
“It’s Omega the Time Ravager. It’s always a time-travel thing.”
I blinked. “Wow, that’s a much cooler name than President Omega. He shouldn’t have changed it.”
“He only would have gotten Northern Kentucky to vote for him if he’d gone with that.”
I smirked. “So, what happens?”
“He wins,” Mandy said, taking an entirely cosmetic deep breath. “Out of all the supervillains in all of human history ranging from the beginning to the very end, he’s the only one who successfully defeats them all. He destroys them all. The Society of Superheroes, the Tomorrow Society, and even his rivals in the Fraternity of Supervillains. The world’s Supers are eradicated and he creates a new race of humanity to pour out as a plague of locusts on the rest of the universe until the very name ‘humanity’ becomes a foul word.”
I sighed. “To think, there was a time when I thought Warhammer 40K’s humanity was actually kind of cool.”
“Gary, this is no time for jokes.”
“And yet when has that ever stopped me?”
Mandy paused. “Perhaps you’re right. It is better to laugh than cry. I have shed enough bloody tears.”
“Which is a song from the Castlevania games. You and your band did an awesome cover of it.”
Mandy smiled. “The fact is, Gary, you’re probably the only person in the world who President Omega fears.”
“Excuse me? John Simms’ Master with an American accent is afraid of me?”
“I actually have no idea what that reference means.”
“Bad guy is afraid of me?” I offered, surprised at Mandy
’s lack of pop culture knowledge. Clearly, becoming one of the undead had affected her worse than I thought.
“Yes,” Mandy said. “When he unleashes the Nanoplague on to Earth, it targets the Super gene. That string of DNA in every human being that, when active, bestows the ability to use magic or has a simple manifestation of magic in a single superpower. Millions die from mutants, mediums, psychics, and super-inventors to the famous names we’ve all come to know thanks to the crazy world we live in. The only people left are those who got their abilities from technology, training, and you.”
I sighed. “Because I don’t have an active supergene. Even with all the magic I use, it’s all channeled through Cloak.”
“Yes,” Mandy said. “You organize what resistance there is and turn Omega’s victory to ashes. For the next hundred years, you and your friends manage to thwart his efforts until Earth is finally destroyed by Entropicus for Omega’s failure.”
“Not really a heartwarming story of overcoming a dark apocalyptic future.”
“I did say he wins. Though, I suppose it’s better to say everyone loses under him.”
“How do you know all this?” It wasn’t like vampires and time-travel were particularly well known concepts.
“I lived it,” Mandy said.
I blinked. “What now?”
“I lived through the destruction of the Earth—not once, but twice. The Nanoplague doesn’t apparently recognize vampires as Supers due to the way the gene is mutated. Later, I was inoculated when he refined it. I learned a lot about controlling my dark side, helping others, and...falling in love with you again. When the world was about to be destroyed and you finally died, Death appeared to me and sent me mentally back in time.”
“Oh that bitch,” I said, growling.
Mandy blinked.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t normally use gendered language. I just am really pissed off right now. She knew this was going to happen.”
“Most certainly, being omniscient and all,” Cloak muttered. “Are you going to bring up Other Gary?”