Glendale disappeared behind us. Ray leaped between spread out cars on the highway, while desert scrub and thinly spaced businesses appeared and disappeared. He stooped, gave a big jump with both legs, and we landed on a sidewalk by a chain link fence. The fence went on and on and on, lit around the edge, and surrounded a big, dark hill.
This had to be it. Puente Hills landfill. Its treasures would be mine!
Ray set us on our feet, then sat down on his butt. His hands moved unsteadily as he slid the bracelets down his arms and peeled them off. “That was fun, but we will not be doing it again,” he chuckled in a theatric wheeze. Personally, I scooped the bracelets up and put them on as fast as possible.
“Do you think the fence is electrified?” Claire asked. It was certainly solid. And tall.
“Why go to this much effort to guard trash?” I asked more rhetorically.
If I was going to be whimsical, Claire could play. “Maybe they get a lot of supervillains stealing materials.”
“Health and safety issues,” Ray corrected us, rising back to his feet. “No matter what it looks like, it’s still a pile of garbage.”
It looked like a big crescent hill cut into terraces, with grass all over it. Protected by a fence made of telephone pole sized posts, with twisted iron wires an inch thick. Well, I didn’t need any more steel back home, but I hadn’t brought any with me either.
Peeling The Machine off my wrist, I gave it a twist to get it started and tossed it onto the fence. “Eat a hole for us to walk through, would you?”
It did. If the fence was electrified I couldn’t tell, but if the fence was electrified my baby sucked that all up the way he did the metal wires—eerily like he was eating spaghetti. The Machine doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size, eating faster and faster, until when we walked triumphantly through the gap he looked like a pillbug the size of a large dog.
No way I could lift that. “Carry him up to the top of the hill, Reviled,” I commanded. Stepping forward away from Claire and Ray, I studied the dark shape of the hill above me. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Five steps, each one taking me up a terrace to the top. I stood on the crest, arms folded impatiently, and looked out over the huge misshapen landfill and the lights of the highway. I even managed to keep my knees from buckling underneath me before the aching exhaustion faded. Score one for getting in shape.
My friends weren’t going to let me be the only one to show off. Sure, we had no audience but each other, but what kind of supervillains would we be if we didn’t keep up the drama? Ray tucked The Machine under one arm and climbed a sheer cliff one handed to the first terrace, then jumped up to the second, grabbed the edge in one hand, and vaulted around onto his feet. He caught up to me in seconds. Claire couldn’t match our speed, so she didn’t try. She figure skated around the grassy lawn, swooping around in wide arcs, spinning in circles, and winding her way up the hill from behind.
Well, that had been fun. I took The Machine out of Ray’s grip with both hands. So heavy! I half-placed and half-dropped it onto the grass. One reminder not to get too cocky. I now had the proportional strength of a mildly fit thirteen-year-old girl.
I pointed at the ground in front of The Machine. “Dig. Separate individual materials and bring them back. Most of it will be variations on wood pulp, and that I don’t need. No more than a cubic meter of anything.”
“A cubic meter of most anything will weigh over a ton, Bad Penny,” Ray cautioned me.
“All right, a half… let’s say a ninth of a cubic meter maximum of any material.” That would be a little over a foot in each direction, right? I didn’t need much more than that of anything I couldn’t get easily. Oh, wait. “Get me a full cubic meter of sugar. I’m going to need a lot of that in the near future.” Another thought. “Extra metals and plastics you collect can be split up to make mini-Machines to help gather, and a storage silo for whatever you scavenge.”
Claire came zipping up. “I like that. If we leave a tower behind, everyone will think we did something nefarious when we’ll actually have helped recycle the landfill. This is my kind of villainy.”
While she talked, The Machine decided I’d finished giving orders and started to obey. The pillbug shape curled up and dug into the ground like a cartoon gopher, sinking into a hole in the packed but artificial earth.
Ray was rather less enthusiastic. “Not mine. We’re robbing a hill in the middle of the night. We could be in for hours of standing around staring at a hole.”
“The bigger The Machine is, the faster it works, right? When it comes up, we could feed it a tractor,” Claire suggested. She waved a hand at the bottom of the hill, where the cranes and dump trucks and industrial vehicles clustered.
I gave her a slow, amused head shake. “Those have to be tens of thousands of dollars each. I’d feel like an idiot going to this much trouble not to steal my ingredients, then steal a truck to do it.”
Ray split the difference. “Maybe some wheelbarrows.” Then he contradicted himself. “Or maybe we won’t have to.”
Why? Because The Machine came back, widening the hole in the process. It had become rather fatter and more multicolored than when it descended. Plates along the surface lifted and slid around, metal rods extended from inside and planted themselves into the ground around the hole.
That wasn’t all. A fat mini-Machine like an engorged tick crawled up after. The Machine scooped it up, crunched it in its jaws, and seconds later spat out two sleeker plastic mini-Machines with big digging claws. They scurried right back down the hole.
That wasn’t even close to all. While I was still putting words on what to say, another mini-Machine climbed out of the hole, this one metallic. Just like its brothers, my Machine ate it, then spat back out twins. The insides of the Machine churned the whole time, and I saw a small block of copper and a small block of glass laid against an outer metal plate.
A supervillain puts on a show, right? “Any LEDs, light bulbs, and batteries you find down there you can connect to the outside of the tower to light it up.” That ought to make a meaningless silo look important!
Another mini-Machine crawled out and got processed into three more diggers. More little blocks set into place around the edge of The Machine. Yet another mini-Machine emerged, this one a long, crawling metal centipede. My copper block got sucked in, then spat back into place as a finished cube. Three more metal blocks fell into place next to it – zinc, aluminum, and lead I thought. Plates rolled around and extruded. Some sank into the ground. As ordered, my Machine was building me a tower.
I found the process enthralling, but I couldn’t blame Ray and Claire for being less entertained. While I watched mini-Machines climb in and out of the hole, watched the tower rise and constantly rearrange, they wandered off. Claire sat on the edge of the cliff and stared out over LA, and Ray walked around the back of the hill.
Their attention at least came back when the first green light lit up on the side of the tower. The Machine was bringing up huge amounts of plastic and metal it didn’t need now, and the tower grew much faster than the materials it stored. A red light, then three white lights lit. The cheap materials made for a conical rather than straight tower, all mismatched plates and threaded spirals, but I didn’t mind. Even my Dad was going to be completely baffled when the landfill workers found this thing tomorrow morning.
Man, what a lot of plastics. I pulled at a plate of the tower and The Machine opened up obediently to let me examine the collection. That clear block was glass, yes, but the block next to it looked like quartz. Sweet! Just what I needed. The sugar cube had finished already. No surprise there. So many plastics. Who knew there were so many different kinds? How much of this was useless?
I hoped my power did. I leaned against The Machine. “Tell you what. Expand the storage blocks to a foot and a half on each side, but get rid of those plastics.” I jabbed my finger at a dozen glossy, polymer blocks. Maybe my super power guided me, or maybe I’d have to go buy a bunch of plastic items later. I
could use that bar of silver building up. Wow, a bar of pure silver and another of gold—which made that tiny bar platinum? The bars weren’t big or anything, but they made sense. Real silverware, cheap partially gold jewelry—the landfill had to have piles of those, rendered down to valuable forms by my beautiful Machine. I’d need most of those bars as materials, alas. My super power itched looking at the gold, and boy did it like the platinum.
I closed up the tower, and plates rearranged for greater stability. Taking a few steps back, I watched the mini-Machines climb over each other with their loads of plastics, metals, crystals, dusts, liquids in tanks, until a little tiny Machine crawled out holding a thin metal bar with a visible blue glow in the darkness under my erratically lit tower.
A glowing blue metal. I threw myself behind the thickest metal plates of the tower and shrieked, “Eat that now! Put it in the middle of the lead block and carry that into the middle of the original Machine!”
“Are you okay?” Ray called, jogging back toward me.
Yes, unless I had cancer. I should be okay, right? I’d only seen it for seconds. I wasn’t that close. My jumpsuit probably shielded me. “I think so,” I answered, pushing myself up. “We dug up some uranium. Or it might have been radium. Something radioactive.” Radioactive enough to glow. Radioactive enough to glow was bad.
Not to the super power in the back of my head. I had to push away the thought as it tried to expand my anti-bullet design to include uranium elements, and I got a jab of headache for my trouble.
Back on my feet, rubbing the back of my head through my helmet, I was looking right over the edge of the cliff as the girl wearing gray floated up. Gray sweatshirt, gray jogging pants, gray ski mask over her head. I’d never seen a more pathetic imitation of a superhero’s costume. Except for one thing. She could fly, which made her more qualified than me, Ray, and Claire put together.
No jet boots or wings, either. She floated like a cloud. A cloud with balled up fists and a monotonously flat voice that explained, “I don’t usually give warnings. Give up. I’ll give you to the police, they’ll give you to the superheroes, and they’ll give you to your parents. It will all be over and no one will go to jail.”
Ray walked straight toward her, deliberately steady, and answered, “It seems we’ve inspired new heroes as well as villains.”
The girl had been right about not being a talker. She landed on the grass and walked toward him without saying a word. They matched each other pace for pace. They hadn’t been that far to begin with, and the distance closed fast. A couple of body lengths apart Ray tensed, but the girl in gray shot forward like a lightning bolt. I don’t know if Ray attempted anything fancy, but she slammed into him with her whole body. He went sailing through the air and down the side of the hill out of sight. I heard the thump when he hit.
My heart turned into a knot in my chest at that display of strength, but Claire didn’t sound concerned. She sounded gleeful! “Wow. Oh, wow. Flight, super strength, super speed. Are you just starting? You have to be. There’s no way you have that much power and I don’t recognize you. Did we really inspire you?”
Claire loved those inserts I’d given her. She drifted up on one foot in her lumpy bear costume, arms behind her back, grinning at the girl in gray curiously. I was sure she meant the smile. Her power kept the violence away, and a new superhero was an undiscovered treasure to a fan like her.
“Just give up,” the girl in gray grunted.
“Aw, come on. What’s your superhero name?” Claire pleaded, head on one side.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when the superhero girl grabbed the neck of Claire’s pajamas, threw her down onto the ground, and planted a foot on her back. Even pinned there on her belly with her fists clenched next to her head, I knew Claire’s power was working. The gray girl didn’t hurt her, just held her down.
Movement flickered off to the side. Ray jumped up a sharp slope, landing on the top of the hill with us again. It took my eyes off Claire, whose power had nailed me, too. I’d just been standing around watching!
I raised my right arm, reached out a foot, and twisted. The girl in gray appeared in front of me. I shot her in the head. She hardly reacted! I’d seen the blast roll over the knit of her mask, but her head barely twitched. Claire had really hit her with the juice. I had enough time as the gray girl’s head started to turn to flip the levers on my air conditioner cannon to maximum strength and shoot her again, point blank, right in her ski masked face.
It blew her off her feet. Ray lunged up behind, grabbed her leg, and swung her at The Machine. Claire rolled onto her side and unleashed the static charge she’d built up. Ray let go, and the girl hit the metal tower.
She peeled herself off it. Her sweater and pants didn’t want to let go, but she got her hand underneath and levered herself free as quickly and casually as climbing out of a chair. I lost a half-second staring, but what could I have done with the time? I couldn’t hit her any harder than I had.
That half-second was useful to her. As soon as she pulled free of the tower, she flew off into the black night sky as suddenly as a darting hummingbird.
Hopping to her feet and skidding a few paces in the process, Claire asked, “Do you think we chased her away?”
That was ridiculous optimism. Ray said as much. “No. She’s more experienced than we are, more powerful, and she got that way without my having ever heard of her. She’s outmaneuvering us right now.” His head turned from side to side, scanning the darkness. I hoped the Serum gave him better senses than me, because outside the tower’s patch of light the sky looked featurelessly black.
Our strategy was obvious. I told Ray and Claire, “This isn’t worth it. I’ll disconnect The Machine. We’re getting out of here.”
Ray saw the movement before I did, but neither of us in time. Claire let out a squeal as a roll of sod twice the length of a car dropped on her, then three more, burying her in the heap. Floating down to stand on top of the mound of dirt and grass and tarp, the girl in gray asked, “Without your friend with the mind control powers?” She didn’t even sound sarcastic. That flat voice might have been testing us, or just exasperated that we hadn’t been smart enough to give up yet.
She certainly wasn’t stupid. She’d spotted Claire slowing her down and buried the problem in dirt to keep it from happening again. Now she stood on top of the pile where we had no choice but to come to her.
Ray did just that. More cautiously this time, hands in front of him, he walked right up to her. As he set his foot on the first roll of sod they came in arm’s reach of each other.
I teleported behind her. I couldn’t affect that fight. I was there to bend down and grab one of the rolls, wrap my arms around and pull so hard pain jolted up my arms and down my spine. The sod didn’t even budge.
Those few seconds were all the time the fight took. They grabbed for each other, and they moved too fast for me to see everything. Ray must have been faster. I thought I saw him punch her in the stomach, and I did see him twist around to elbow her in the back of the neck. It didn’t help. She’d grabbed hold of his shoulder, and his arm raised to block might as well have been a noodle for all it stopped her slapping him across the face. His whole body jerked, and she slapped him again.
Then she turned to me.
I lurched forward, heart cold, barely thinking about it as I teleported to the exact opposite side of The Machine. The girl in gray didn’t wait. She zipped around the side of the tower to meet me. I’d been ready for that and teleported behind her, aiming my cannon at her head again.
I meant to keep pulling the trigger until it ran out of power. She’d been ready for me again, and I didn’t get the chance. As my arm lifted hers swung around, and she grabbed the barrel of my cannon. The ceramic I’d thought was so durable splintered like eggshell in her grip.
But shattering my cannon left her not holding me. I leaned forward, teleporting around to the other side of The Machine. She’d follow me before I finished a breath, bu
t I only needed time to dive my hand into my pocket. Twisting, I teleported right back behind her again. Yes, she knew I was coming, but the time it took her to turn let me reach up and grab the arm coming at me in both hands.
“Are you done?” she asked me, still no more than tired and annoyed.
I didn’t answer. I panted for breath. Too much teleporting. Too much fear.
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously behind the ski mask. “Now you’re delaying me. For what?” she demanded. Rhetorically. She wasn’t asking me. She jerked her arm out of my grip, and the penny from my pocket stayed stuck to her sleeve. That was something.
Not much. She turned her suspicious stare to my Machine’s tower and the mini-Machines still scuttling in and out. Drawing her arm back, she punched a fist through the metal cover and into The Machine’s guts.
I screamed. No, I bit down on it, and the shriek of metal covered any noise I made as she ripped the nearest plates off the tower. Her arm had left a twitching hole of shattered cogs and leavers right through The Machine’s middle. The twitching didn’t stop. He was still moving. Maybe The Machine wasn’t dead.
Swinging around, the girl in gray grabbed me by the front of my jumpsuit. It hurt when she lifted me off my feet, but that was the least of my worries now, wasn’t it?
“That’s it?” she asked me. She sounded disappointed. Sad and disappointed. “You’re mining a trash heap. Not for uranium, just for junk. Stop pretending to be a supervillain, Penelope. This isn’t a game.”
I dangled. I had more important concerns than fighting. She knew me. How? No, that was easy.
I only knew one person with that tired tone of voice, one person who never sounded happy. “Then why are you playing, Claudia?”
She let go. I stumbled and landed on my butt. I saw her streak away into the air out of the corner of my eye, but by the time I could look up she was already gone.
The threat was over. I pushed myself up and ran the two steps forward to plunge my arms into the tower, wrapping it around the damaged mess Claudia left behind. Tears stung in my eyes as I begged, “Please be okay. Please be okay. Put yourself back together. Detach your original self.”
Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain Page 23