by C. T. Phipps
This wasn’t something I’d expected and it made me wonder what exactly Death was planning. People bargained with death all the time, and for the most part, Death gave them exactly squat for their trouble. The fact she was an unreasonable, uncompromising, completely arbitrary force of nature was one of her more charming qualities. It didn’t matter if you were rich, poor, a king, or a peasant—Death treated you all the same. The fact she was changing that policy should have, and did, scare the hell out of me. But I wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip by either.
“My brother is happy where he is,” I said, remembering my conversation with him. “How about Lancel Warren?”
Death removed her arm. “He still has to pay for his crimes.”
“Thank you, Gary,” Cloak said, sounding touched. “It’s the thought that counts.”
“I’ve never thought that statement made any sense,” I said, looking over to Gabrielle. “What do you think?”
Gabrielle looked torn before making a decision that surprised us all. “You should use Death’s power to kill Omega. We need to stop him, no matter the cost. Don’t worry about my father.”
“Wow, even I think that’s cold,” Cindy said.
Gabrielle didn’t respond, just looked over at me.
I didn’t look back, instead mulling the idea over in my head. “This isn’t going to be a ‘Monkey’s Paw’ situation where I make the death and they come back wrong? Because that sucked the first time.”
“No funny business,” Death said, making a little Star of David over her heart.
“You should bring back Ultragod,” I said, finally making my decision.
“Really?” Gabrielle said, looking up. “Gary—”
“Are you sure?” Death asked, taking a step back. “What Merciful said wasn’t entirely untrue. Ultragod does serve as a force that stifles change. Superheroes prop up the status quo and keep it from falling to chaos. It has been a long time since he was a champion for social justice and reform like his daughter is now. Gabrielle is entirely capable of taking up the mantle of the world’s greatest hero, just as you have taken up the Nightwalker’s role alongside your wife.”
“Oh God forbid,” I said, horrified at the idea. “I am entirely not doing that.”
Death didn’t react to that. “He has also earned his rest.”
“Well, give him a choice of coming back or not,” I said calmly. “The fact is that in my old pre-superhero life, Death was pretty damn permanent. You just had to suck it up and deal with it. People talk about the drama of life and maturity of dealing with tragedy, but I became a super-person to get away from all that. It was my escape into a world where things could be made better. It gives me a warm comforting feeling to believe this planet has someone like Ultragod looking out for it. Even if, you know, I intend to eventually take it from him.”
Death nodded. “You realize if he turns down the offer of being resurrected; it will still cancel any debt I owe to you.”
“Is he likely to?” I asked.
“He’s been saving the world for a very long time,” Death said, her voice low. “His wife passed away three months ago when her longevity treatments finally gave way.”
I looked over at Gabrielle. “Your mom’s dead?”
“I couldn’t get in touch to tell,” Gabrielle said. “We were keeping from the media while we sorted through things.”
“I see.”
“Poor Polly,” Cloak said. “She never wore a cape but the world’s greatest civil rights attorney was a hero in her own right.”
It seemed a lot of the world’s oldest stalwarts were passing away these days. Sunlight, Ultragod, Polly Pratchett, the Nightwalker, Ultragodling, and more. Getting Mandy back made the world a great deal brighter for me, but I wondered how darker it had to seem for the rest of us.
“There will always be more heroes,” Cloak said.
“Not the same,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Ask Ultragod anyway.”
Death vanished.
“Thank you,” Gabrielle said. “But you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Your dad did more good than Omega will ever be able to do evil,” I said. “Besides, he’s probably far better equipped to deal with something like this than I am.”
The truth was, I was hoping Ultragod would pop back from the dead and deal with President Omega so I could go back to being a self-entitled bastard ripping off corporations for millions. I wanted to spend the next few years on an island somewhere with Mandy and Cindy, provided they were willing, and relax. I wanted them to be happy because that made me happy. I dreaded Death’s answer, though, because I suspected what it would be before she returned. When she did, the sympathetic expression on her face spoke volumes.
“He’s not coming, is he?” I asked.
“No,” Death said. “He told me to tell you that he believes you will keep the world safe, but he’s...spent.”
“Is he happy? With mom?” Gabrielle asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’m okay with that,” Gabrielle said. “Thank you.”
Death pressed a finger to my forehead and I knew, instantly, where President Omega’s underground base was located along with all of the information Colonel Disaster had about its defenses. It was a fortress even the Society of Superheroes would have difficulty breaching the interior of.
“Good luck,” Death said. “I mean that.”
And she was gone.
Mandy walked over, practically dragging Cindy with her before the latter reluctantly let go and placed her hand on my shoulder.
I embraced her back.
I was so happy; I didn’t notice Other Gary’s body had gone missing for five whole minutes.
***
Fear not! Merciless will return in The Science of Supervillainy. Coming in late 2016 or early 2017!
An Excerpt from Agent G: Infiltrator by C. T. Phipps coming in late 2016
Chapter One
I was sitting in the driver’s seat of a 2010 Mercedes Benz S-Klasse, staring at a small handheld computer screen currently tapped into the security feed of the hotel whose parking lot I was located in. It was a warm summer night in Chicago, rare for this city, and I was feeling the heat in my pressed black suit. I was dressed in a chauffer’s outfit and waiting for a man to come out so I could kill him.
The target, Marshall Redmond, was fifty-two, Caucasian, a closeted bisexual, possessed a net worth of sixty-two million dollars, and was currently attending a fundraiser for the Mayor of Chicago. The fat blond man was sitting at the table in the front of the ballroom with his deeply unhappy-looking spouse sitting beside him. The Society hadn’t told me why someone was paying to have him killed.
Despite the fact we weren’t supposed to pry into our subject’s affairs, it was a game for Numbers to try and deduce the reason for why someone wanted someone else to die. Usually, it was depressingly simple: a subject was having an affair and their spouse was a client. They were witnesses to a crime which could bring an end to a multimillionaire’s business, they were a political activist working for some groups’ rights, they were a political activist working against another groups’ (many times the same group), or they had made the mistake of betraying their employer in some way.
Marshall Redmond was a terrorist. Honestly, that had caught me off guard. People weren’t complex. Nine times out of ten, they were exactly what they appeared to be. In Redmond’s case, I would have thought embezzlement or stock fraud or donating to the wrong politician was the reason a client wanted him dead. Terrorism was an entirely different sort of crime than the kind of one people like Redmond committed. He was more the white-collar Ponzi scheme sort of fellow. Those kinds of criminals could destroy equal amounts of lives but the terrorists tended to have worse publicity.
It made me curious.
Your curiosity will get you killed, my mentor would always say. R had been an awful human being, even by my standards, but he’d known his stuff. The fact he’d managed to live to Reassignment proved that. Eith
er way, he wasn’t here now and that meant I could handle the matter as I wanted.
Waiting twenty-minutes for them to arrive, I saw Redmond and his wife part ways and move to their separate cars. Redmond and his bodyguard moved toward this car, the former looking distressed with the latter. Redmond’s bodyguard was a tall, thirty-two, muscular black man named Charles Dulcimer.
Dulcimer was an ex-Navy Seal who had done contracts for Universiti and was currently working for the world’s largest security corporation. He was looking violently ill and seconds later, threw up on Redmond’s shoes.
“Tsk-tsk-tsk,” I said, shaking my head, adjusting the side view mirror. “You should always watch what you eat, Charles. You never know what someone might have slipped into it.”
Wow, I was so bored I was talking to myself.
Redmond backed away in disgust, yelled some obscenities at the man, and walked over to the car before climbing into the backseat. According to the profile, Redmond had never been comfortable with Dulcimer as his bodyguard. At the risk of pulling the race card, I suspected the ex-mercenary’s looks had a large part to play in it.
I was biracial myself, one of the few clues I possessed to my identity pre-memory wipe, but light-skinned enough to pass as a white man. Really, my appearance was perfect for putting people like Redmond at ease. I was mid-thirties, five-foot-ten, one-hundred-and-sixty-five pounds, possessed short black hair, and had striking crystal blue eyes. All of these things I could disguise with the right wigs, contacts, and prosthetics but tonight I was going as something close to the ‘real’ me.
“Take me home, David,” Redmond said, looking at his shoes. “God almighty, those people. Do we have a napkin or something in here?”
I reached into the glove compartment and removed some McDonald’s napkins I’d collected just in case this sort of situation happened. Putting on a stereotypical Southern drawl, I said, “Here, sir. I hope these help.”
Redmond took them before shooting me a dirty look. “Have you been eating in my car?”
I continued speaking like the expected hick. “No, sir, I ate outside, washed my hands, and came back in. I put the napkins in because you can never have too many napkins.”
“Good,” Redmond said, patting his interior lovingly. “Do you know that fucker actually wants to rezone the city to attract more foreign investment?”
That fucker, I assumed to be the mayoral candidate. “Really?”
“Ugh. I’d tell him to go to hell but I’m getting first dibs on several of those projects.”
I’d been working for Redmond for the better part of a week, having arranged for his previous driver to take a preferred assignment with an ex-fashion model known for banging her chauffeurs. I’d then taken over his job after making sure my name was at the top of the list via my assistant’s computer hacking. Breaking into the limousine service Redmond used wasn’t exactly a challenge for a woman who had cracked the Society’s servers, but Marissa was itching for work as much as I was.
I proceeded to pull out the car onto the busy Chicago streets. The most difficult part of the mission was over and I could dispose of Redmond at any time. However, as I mentioned before, I was a curious man by nature. “Do you ever give any thought to the matter of identity?”
Redmond reached into his jacket and pulled out a bottle of prescription pain killers before popping three into his mouth. “What the fuck are you going on about?”
It was over now. Redmond just didn’t know it. I’d managed to replace the contents of his bottle with a much-much stronger dosage plus several other recreational pharmaceuticals which would kill even a healthy man Redmond’s age. That was just the backup plan, really, to make sure he didn’t get away. Not that I was afraid he would but I wasn’t a Letter because I took chances. I also had something more…elaborate planned for his demise.
“Memory. It’s the basis of our identities but so much of it is malleable. We recast events how we want them to be and how our present-day opinions influence them. For example, a person who commits a terrible crime might think of himself as completely justified in the events and recall things which drove him to it—even if they never happened. It’s why eye-witness testimony is so unreliable because a lot of times, what people recall happening didn’t happen at all.”
Redmond started coughing, unable to respond.
“For me, I can’t help but think it raises some interesting philosophical questions. Do we ever really know a person? Are all the various wars and conflicts of history because we interpret events solely to our own perspective? If you are a person without a memory, do you have an identity at all or are you simply a hollow shell? I prefer to believe we’re like cups, emptied and waiting to be filled anew but retaining some semblance of our past selves.”
“You...” I heard a gasping, labored voice speak behind me. Looking over my shoulder, I watched Redmond clutching his chest, sweating like a pig and reaching for his cellphone. He was desperately trying to enter the number for 911.
I lifted up a small black box. “This is a cellphone jammer. You can buy them at almost any electronics store. It’s hilarious.”
Redmond dropped his cellphone on the ground. “Why? Is it...is it Mahad?”
Mahad al-Malik was a Saudi Arabian real-estate developer who was suspected of having ties to ISIL but was so low on the totem pole he was allowed to conduct business in the United States. I couldn’t make up this shit if I tried.
“Do I look like the kind of guy who works with terrorists?” I said, crossing my arms. “Then again, you don’t exactly look like that sort of fellow yourself. By the way, my name isn’t David, it’s G. I know, that’s a letter not a name but it’s as close as I’ve got. No Men in Black jokes, please.”
“I can pay—”
I rolled my eyes. “I hate when targets say that, I really do. First of all, if I spared your life then you’re not going to pay me because you’d be going to call the police or the FBI. Next, if you paid me beforehand, there’d be nothing to stop me from killing you afterward. Use your head.”
Redmond looked at me with pure hatred in his eyes. “You’re...insane.”
“Possibly,” I admitted, shaking my head. “The people who employ me put me through a fairly punishing regime of mental conditioning and drug-therapies. Things designed to remove those qualities which don’t find humor in your situation, for example.”
Redmond started to cry. It was kind of sad, really. I usually felt better about these things when my target was dirty as fuck. Then again Redmond was a racist white-collar criminal terrorist, which was a trifecta of things I loathed.
“I would like to know why, actually. That might change a few things.” It wouldn’t but he didn’t know that.
“The money,” Redmond said, raising his hand into the air. “ISIL robbed the banks of Mosul of...four hundred million dollars...they…needed someone to launder it.”
I stared at him, frowning. “Money? Really?”
So pedestrian a motive.
“I had no choice.” Redmond wheezed. “They would have killed me and my family if I’d refused.”
“I’m sure they would have, once you took their money.” I shook my head and turned on the lights again before driving toward Chicago’s industrial district. It wouldn’t be long, now, until Redmond’s heart gave out. I’d have to work quickly if I wanted to make sure I got this whole thing resolved the way I wanted it to. A good hit was like a work of art. If it was done properly, it was an amazing sight to behold and could be talked about for hours. It had to be done just perfect, though, or the whole thing was ruined.
Redmond proceeded to surprise me again. “You...you work for the Society.”
I looked into the rearview mirror. “Really? A twit like you knows about the Society?”
Redmond gave a bitter gallows’ laugh. “You fucking bastard, they’re the people who arranged the meeting between Mahad and I.”
“As bad as I think my employers are, I don’t think they finance terro
rism.”
Terrorists, by and large, couldn’t afford us.
“They’re going to steal...the money.”
“Good for them.”
“I can arrange for the... CIA... to help you. To protect you. They can... get you your memories back.”
Redmond knew way too much to be what he appeared. Worse, he was dangling the one carrot in front of my face which might entice me.
The chance to know who I was.
Pulling onto a set of train tracks just moments before the barriers moved down both in front and behind me, I heard the sound of the warning bells as the flagger began flashing. I could see the train coming down from my left. I turned off the headlights to make sure the car wasn’t visible to the engineer. I had to make a choice now.
Eh, who was I kidding? There was no choice. “The CIA is one of the Society’s biggest clients.”
I stepped out of the car, went to the back of the trunk, pulled out a drugged and confused looking David Johnson a.k.a Josh Harden. He was the man whose identity I’d stolen. An ex-convict and registered sex offender who was operating under a false identity while he sold pills to rich clients. We had a vague resemblance. Especially when you put as much effort into not being noticed as I did.
Putting him in the driver’s seat and adjusting his hat to be perfect, I shut the door and walked forward as the 11:30 train barreled down the tracks. I was fifty-feet-away before I heard the screeching, smashing, and crushing noise which was the death rattle of Redmond and his driver.
Looking back, I confirmed both kills before walking away from the crime scene and turning my chauffer’s attire inside out. The black suit top became a Chicago Cubs sports jacket and the hat a ball cap. The pants would become blue jeans but I would wait until I was somewhere more private to change those. I also needed to contact the Home Office in order to confirm my kill.
Cramming my tie into my pocket, I pulled out my cellphone before removing a thin metal wire from its side with a needle at the end. I jabbed the needle into the right side of my temple, linking it up to the IED implant they’d removed part of my brain to install. Cybernetics came with being a Letter. The Society had access to a lot of technology well above what regular humanity did and, instead of using it to help people, used it to make better killers. Says something about the world, doesn’t it?