by C. T. Phipps
“Not yet.” This all tracked with what Other Gary had said so far. “So, the heroes failed to stop Omega twice, huh?”
Mandy looked to one side. “It’s not the first time I attempted to change history. I tried warning the Society of Superheroes and killing Omega, and genuinely did my best to keep you out of danger. I didn’t want to see you harmed.”
“What happened?”
“He released the Nanoplague anyway, only he adjusted it to kill all non-Super humans. You managed to survive because of your recessive genes. Omega reincarnated himself as a machine and humanity became a war-torn mutated wasteland where the strong Supers dominated the weak while purging those deemed genetically inferior. You still rose up to be a major resistance fighter.”
“Wow, future me is badass.” I had to wonder if that’s because my insane doppelganger was protecting me.
Mandy looked down. “And colder. In this reality, without Cindy, he proceeded to wipe out the ruling Supers of Earth and left nothing but the burning ruins of a world behind. Better humanity go extinct than super-powered Nazis rule it.”
I paused. “The problem is, I agree with that sentiment.”
Mandy closed her eyes. “Yeah, so do I. Either way, some force sent me back again.”
I knew what that force was even if she didn’t. Other Gary had lived up to his end of our ‘bargain’ even if I had no intention of letting him proceed with his plans. “How old are you?”
“You should never ask a girl her age.”
“I just wanted to know how many birthday presents I owed you.”
Mandy gazed into my eyes. “A lot. Centuries of coming to terms with worlds very different from this one and loving two very different Gary Karkofsky’s.”
“Can vampires love?”
“It seems so,” Mandy said, unaware of the monster who had restored her soul. “Just not the way humans do. It’s why the Gary’s of both times loved others. Cindy in one reality, Gabrielle in another.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m in love with Cindy.”
“I know.”
“You do?” I looked up. “Then why?”
“The heart wants what it wants.”
Well, there was no use arguing with that logic. Stepping up out of the bed, I said, “Okay, well, I guess it’s time to think about how to save the world. God, I hate this falling on me. I want to conquer the world, not save it.”
“Doing the latter is necessary to achieve the former,” Cloak pointed out.
“Details, details!” I snapped at Cloak.
Mandy wrapped her arms around her knees. “There’s another option.”
“Which is?”
“Go into space,” Mandy said. “It’s like Star Trek out there with millions of species, most of which look like human beings the various colors of Skittles. Earth, despite how much importance we put on it, just isn’t that interesting. There are countless cultures, some better, some worse, just waiting to be visited, who don’t have anything bad to say about humanity other than its superheroes keep interfering in state business. We could steal one of Doctor Aeon’s hyperdrive-equipped rockets or the government’s impounded spaceships to leave this place.”
“So, you’re telling me that after two tries, you just want to give up and let Omega conquer the Earth.”
“Pretty much, yeah. Still a vampire.”
I paused, thinking about that.
“Gary...” Cloak muttered.
“I’m not seriously considering that!” I snapped back at Cloak. “Well, I am, but not the way you’re thinking. We should get one of those spaceships to get the people I care about into space and as a possible avenue for escape once we kill the president and stop his evil plan. I’m going to be a really unpopular guy after I kill him, even if I don’t kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it on the way to stopping him. It’d be nice to have a place where extradition treaties don’t reach or black ops.”
I envisioned myself finding a nice developing planet which hadn’t yet reached the seventies, downloading a bunch of inventions of the galactic equivalent to the internet, settling down on said planet, and then proceeding to break the Prime Directive all to hell by selling them Google and bottled water to become the world’s richest supervillain. Then I would parley my wealth into ruling that planet as their Benevolent Leader.
It wasn’t Earth. Not even Australia.
But it was a plan.
“Gary, don’t you think I’ve tried that?” Mandy said.
“Becoming a non-racist Ming the Merciless?” I said. “I dunno, you strike me more as a Princess Aura type.”
“Gary, you had two-hundred years to try and figure out ways to defeat him. All you managed to do is stalemate him.”
“I’ll get the Venusians to invade.”
“Ultradevil defeats them.”
“I’ll go to the forty-ninth century and kill him before he goes back in time.”
“He already killed his younger self as a baby so he could live paradoxically.”
I clenched my teeth. “I’ll blow up the White House with a miniature-nuke.”
“Emergency time-reverse microchip and teleportation unit.”
“Voodoo curse!”
“Protection by a secret order of witches that deflect all magic worked against him.”
I balled my fists together. “I’ll figure something out.”
“Gary, he’s smarter than you!”
I closed my eyes. “Lots of people are smarter than me, Mandy. No one is a bigger magnificent bastard.”
“That term was originally used to refer to General Rommel....who lost. Also, he was a big Nazi.”
I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. “Mandy, and I do think of you as Mandy now, maybe not my Mandy but a Mandy, and one I care for—do you really think I would be the person you claim to love if you thought I would turn tail and abandon this planet? This planet full of Judaism, Star Trek, Star Wars, Captain Crunch Peanut Butter cereal, The Lord of the Rings, goth girls, Mass Effect 1 and 2 but not 3, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, dogs, tabletop role-playing games, sex, and Blind Guardian.”
“Not Game of Thrones?”
I gave her a sad look. “It’ll always be A Song of Ice and Fire to me. Also, it’s kind of creepy how much Sophie Turner looks like a young Cindy. I sometimes wonder if HBO cloned her and put her duplicate onscreen.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Things may look tough, but it’s always darkest before the dawn, because of solar orbiting patterns work that way, and they may take our lives but they’ll never take our freedom. Which will still mean we’re dead but that doesn’t matter because friends, Romans, and countrymen will lend us their ears to always fight and never surrender like Corey Hart! Oh and something about Saint Crispin’s Day!”
Mandy shook her head in disbelief.
I put my hands on my hips. “Okay, I’m not very good at making up speeches on the fly.”
“No shit.”
“Still, the sentiment remains.” I stretched out my hand to her. “Will you help me save the world so we can rule it?”
Mandy smiled. “I’d be delighted.”
It was the first real smile I’d seen from her in a long time.
“The third time’s the charm, I suppose,” I said, feeling the full weight of what we were about to embark on hitting me all at once.
Also, that we were still naked.
Well, at least no one was here to walk in on—
“Gary, you son of a bitch!” I heard Cindy’s voice at the door.
God, are you screwing with me deliberately?
Seriously?
To quote Bill Watterson, someone is out to get you, Cloak said.
I turned around to see Cindy and Gabrielle, both in civilian clothes, who had somehow managed to track us down. Diabloman was present too, wearing a business suit and his luchador mask. Gabrielle and Diabloman mostly just looked embarrassed that they’d caught me naked with Mandy, but Cindy looked absolutely furious.
&nbs
p; “How could you, Gary? With her!” Cindy snapped, turning and walking away from the door.
“Listen, she’s not what you think she is.” I got up and walked past the others, still not wearing any clothes.
“You can conjure me, you realize this, right?” Cloak said.
“I’d prefer something between us,” I said back. “It doesn’t make any sense but it’s a preference.”
“As you wish.”
I cornered Cindy as she sat down on the mattress I woke up on. “I have never been madder at you! This is worse than that time you cheated on me with Christina Scabbia!”
I blinked. “That was actually Mandy, Cindy.”
“Really?”
“Or the Black Witch,” I said, trying to remember the details. “Admittedly, she’s a lesbian, but we were both really drunk that night. It wouldn’t be the first time people explored their bi-curious leani—err, all I remember is it was one of the Black Furies.”
“The third one was Christina Scabbia’s alternate universe counterpart from Htrae,” Cindy pointed out.
“Really?” I said.
Cindy nodded. “That’s what she claimed to me at the bar. Honestly, I think she was just an alien impersonating her. Our college was weird.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, seriously. I was so furious with you after I found out. If I hadn’t blown three other guys that week, I would have killed you.”
“Sometimes, there are no words,” Cloak said.
“You stay out of this,” I whispered, wondering how I could make this right.
“It was me, by the way!” Mandy called from in her lair.
“Oh thank God,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.
“Do you love her?” Cindy asked, looking up, and I realized she was crying. “I could bear you never being with me because you were with your wife but not the...the...”
“I love you.”
Cindy got up and kissed me.
“What is it about you?” Cloak muttered.
“I have no fucking idea,” I thought back to him.
I kissed Cindy back and held her.
Chapter Twenty-One
Where We Draw Up Battle Plans
“So what does this mean?” Cindy said, burying her head into my shoulder.
“I don’t know,” I said, holding her. “I’ll have the power to resurrect Mandy soon, but Other Mandy is in her body now and she’s had centuries to become her own person. I can work around that, but—”
“Other Mandy?” Cindy interrupted. “Wow, she got to you fast.”
“She’s actually a two-hundred-year-old version of vampire Mandy who has survived two iterations of this universe by living through a century of dystopia, psychically travelling back in time to possess herself, then doing it again, failing to stop Omega again, then doing it again.”
I wondered when all this insanity had become normal to me. It made me think I’d reached a milestone of some kind.
Cindy grasped the basics immediately. “So, Quantum Leap meets Terminator meets Dracula?”
“Yeah. I already blew my Quantum Leap reference, though, so I’m kicking myself. Either way, though, she’s not the bad guy she used to be.”
“And you learned this in between waking up and boning her?”
“Err...yes.”
“Just checking.”
I took a deep breath. “Whatever the case is, though, I’m willing to deal with the consequences, but actually willing to put that aside for once because of the imminent end of everything.”
Cindy pulled away, still holding my hands. “How inconsiderate of the genocidal maniac to interfere with our personal crisis with his planned mass-murder on an epic scale.”
“Just what I was thinking.”
“Bloodthirsty Murder Skank isn’t going to tear out my throat for interrupting her booty call, right?”
“Nope,” Mandy said, causing both Cindy and me to jump as we noticed she was right beside us without having been noticed. It was one of the innate powers of vampires, at least from my research; they could sneak up on just about anything.
“Don’t do that!” Cindy said, putting her hand over her heart. “At least play a scare chord or something.”
Gabrielle and Diabloman, watching our entire encounter from the sidelines, looked amused.
Mandy, however, didn’t take offense. “This may surprise you, Cindy, but I consider you a close friend. I think you’ll feel the same toward me in time. As much as I love Gary I’m not threatened by you. Time is on my side as Mick Jagger would say and you’ve both been lengthy parts of my life.”
“What, you intend to wait for me to die of old age?” Cindy said, not at all reassured by her statement.
“Pretty much, yeah,” Mandy said, still smiling.
“And I’m back to hating you,” Cindy said, glowering.
Mandy chuckled.
Cindy didn’t look like she found it funny in the slightest.
Gabrielle, however, interrupted our little get-together. “As amusing as I find this—and believe me, I do find it amusing—we should get you some clothes on, Gary, and get back to thwarting the Nanoplague.”
“You know about that?” Mandy asked.
Diabloman nodded. “Si. We took Colonel Disaster on our way out and interrogated him.”
“Interrogated or tortured?” I asked.
“Interrogated,” Gabrielle said, harshly. “My ultra-mesmerism got him to cough up a few details before he committed suicide with a cyanide pill, muttering something about being immortal.”
“Pity,” I said, not clarifying what I referred to.
“Colonel Disaster mentioned they were planning to unleash the Supers plague to wipe out millions of humans across the planet. He also said that the missiles that would carry the plague were being prepped in an underground base somewhere in Canada. It is part of the larger Project-Z Initiative.”
“That creepy black ops thing where they cybernetically enhance Supers, brainwash them, and unleash them on the public?”
“Si,” Diabloman said. “P.H.A.N.T.O.M was blamed for its existence but it appears to have been the United States all along.”
“As much as I love blaming the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave for everything wrong with the world since Reagan, I’m going to say that’s probably more Omega’s doing,” I said, remembering Mandy’s files. “The guy is the founder of P.H.A.N.T.O.M and has been manipulating events in this country since the early twentieth century. Who knows what kind of awful stuff he was involved in?”
“He’s the reason the Beetles never got back together for a reunion tour after you saved John Lennon,” Mandy said. “Nice job on that, by the way.”
Man, I did a lot more time travel than I realized. All of it largely unrecorded too. My fans were going to be pissed.
“Time travel is fun,” I said, going back to the bedroom to get dressed. I didn’t have time to take a shower, which was a pity. I could really use one after all I’d been through. “Which is another reason this guy is ticking me off. I’m surprised he hasn’t gone back in time to polish me off while I was on the toilet.”
“Exposure to chronotonic energies is known to make interference with individual time-lines more difficult,” Gabrielle said. “Given the amount of time-travelling my father did, it must have taken a massive amount of anti-time molecules to alter history enough to kill Ultragod. Given your little Hitler-killing jaunts, it’s very likely you’re immunized to retroactive assassination. I doubt there’re enough anti-time molecules in the Multiverse to repeat what he did.”
“What in the who now?” I asked.
Diabloman sighed. “Whenever time travel is involved, I find it best to just nod my head and go with it.”
“Probably for the best,” I admitted. “I don’t really want to get into the who’s and the what’s of things. We’ll need chalkboards and, graph paper, and we’d be here all day.”
Cindy translated anyway. “She’s saying Omega can’t k
ill you anymore than you can kill him. Which is about our only advantage now.”
“Another reason why we have to keep you safe, Gary,” Mandy said.
“Yes, well, Danger is my middle name.” I paused, walking out and restoring my costume around me. “It really is. My parents had issues. Since directly taking down President Omega isn’t an option, we need to stop his Nanoplague. From what Mandy is saying, that’s the key to the world going to hell.”
“Unfortunately, we failed the previous two times,” Mandy sighed. “Canada, it turns out, is a rather large place to search.”
I paused a few seconds to think. “Okay, we got anything of the late Colonel Disaster?”
“His corpse is nearby,” Diabloman said. “I could cut off his head and put it in a bowling bag.”
“Or, maybe, cut some of his hair off?” I suggested. “Take his wallet or watch?”
“That would work too,” Diabloman said.
“Cool,” I said, remembering just how dangerous my henchmen were. “We take the head...err, samples, to my sister’s safe house and have her talk to the late colonel’s ghost. We find out where the base for Project-Z is and destroy the Nanoplague.”
I wasn’t happy about the prospect of involving my sister in all of this nonsense but given she was a Super and would be the first up against the wall when the revolution came; it seemed like a good time to break my policy of not involving family in superhero business.
“That and she was almost bombed because of you,” Cloak said. “You know, when my family home was destroyed.”
“Are you still holding that against me?” I thought back to him.
“Yes, yes I am.”
“Bah, think of it as preventing me from defiling your home further.”
“There is that.”
I wanted to tell everyone about Other Gary and his potential danger to everything. That a psychotic version of me from a dead universe was the one responsible for Gabrielle’s dad’s death and was serving as the quality control expert forcing Omega to read the Evil Overlord’s List. I couldn’t, though, because I didn’t quite believe it myself. I didn’t want to admit something of me, no matter how distantly removed, was responsible for all of this suffering.