He missed his old skintight costume, feeling the warmth of this world’s sun on his body, the air rushing past as he flew—
“Quit your bitching. I live where the sun never shines, remember? And the only time I feel the wind is when you break it.”
“EDGEWOOD ASYLUM IS THE dumbest institution on the planet.” Bubbles dribbled up from the corners of Jarhead’s mouth, something that only happened when he was truly pissed. “Crazed supervillains turn cockroaches into giant mechanized war machines or travel back in time to kill the inventor of bacon, and what do we do? Lock them all up in the same place to compare notes!”
This had been Scaramouche’s fourth successful escape. Fifth if you counted the time she programmed a copy of her own mind and uploaded it to Facebook. Thankfully, e-Scaramouche proved to be just as erratic as her creator, and Stranger had been able to trap her in a neverending game of Bejeweled.
“I’m sorry,” Jarhead continued. “But you can’t rehabilitate the woman who tried to assassinate the Prime Minister of Australia with a radioactive platypus. How much have we spent on room and board and therapy for those clowns? If anyone deserves a death sentence…”
His final words hung in the air. Stranger watched the blinking LEDs on Jarhead’s circulation regulator, remembering the sadness on Doctor Y’s pale face as he pronounced Stranger’s own death sentence.
“Ooh. Awkward…”
“Right. Sorry,” said Jarhead. “So you flew to Edgewood.”
STRANGER’S STOMACH GURGLED AS he approached the main entrance, a steel door six inches thick, guarded by twin laser turrets. After a voiceprint check, the door swung open, and he strode inside to greet Doctor April Alexander, administrator of Edgewood Asylum.
“Thank you for coming so quickly.” Doctor Alexander spoke in a whisper, as if this were a church or a funeral home. She avoided looking at his face. “I’m sorry about… you know.”
“From this day forward, I will be known as That Which Shall Not Be Named!”
“We’re on full lockdown,” she said as she led him inside. “Everyone else is secure. Scaramouche was the only one to escape.”
“How?” Stranger asked.
“She…” Her face reddened. “She talked one of the guards into releasing her. The guard died in the escape. I don’t suppose—”
“I can’t talk to the dead.” Stranger sighed. All the precautions in the world couldn’t protect against human frailty. How long had Scaramouche worked to select which guard would be most vulnerable to her manipulations, and to slowly warp her victim’s mind with carefully chosen words?
Each cell was customized to the powers of its inhabitant. Magman lived in a walk-in freezer with precisely controlled oxygen flow to keep him from igniting. Verdana’s cell was irradiated twice a day to prevent her from using her mastery of plants to create a mold-based weapon. Again.
Scaramouche’s cell was unusual in its normalcy. She had no powers beyond her deranged mind, and yet she had proven herself time and again to be one of Edgewood’s most dangerous supervillains.
“Cool new threads.” Across the hall, the Halloween Princess pressed up against the window of her cell. “Tough break, man.”
Stranger stopped. “What do you mean?”
“The cancer. That sucks, dude.”
For a moment, he thought he had stumbled into another of those obnoxious parallel universes, one where supervillains sympathized with their foes instead of celebrating their demise. “I put you in here after you tried to unleash a plague that would have wiped out ninety percent of humanity.”
Halloween shrugged. “Sure, but this is cancer.”
“Me and my boys, we’re the trump card of terror. Steamroller ran over your dog? Cancer! Nemesis stuffs your girlfriend into the fridge? Cancer! Michael Bay announces another Transformers movie? Cancer, baby!”
Stranger threw up his hands and entered Scaramouche’s cell.
“How can I help?” asked Doctor Alexander.
“I need quiet.” He listened to the room’s contents, inviting them to share what they knew.
“She read me last,” proclaimed a textbook about magnetic nanoparticles. An Archie comic piped up to say, “Bullshit! She always took me along when she used the toilet.”
“That was two days ago,” said the stainless steel toilet in the corner. A translucent panel separated it from the rest of the room, providing minimal privacy. “Poor woman was constipated from the meds they fed her to keep her from going manic.”
“She left you a message.” The words came from the pillow on the floor. Scaramouche had neither blankets nor a cot, presumably to keep her from creating some sort of evil mattress-based superweapon. “She asked me to tell you that you were almost out of time.”
“How did she know?” Socialization was kept to a minimum at Edgewood, but somehow the inmates always kept up on the latest gossip.
“Don’t ask me. I just hope the next inmate has better hygiene. Scaramouche would forget to shower for weeks at a time. Do you know what it’s like having that nest of greasy, sweaty hair press down on you every night?”
“Out of time.” He turned the phrase over in his thoughts, but before he could figure out the clue, a noise like a T. Rex gargling boulders erupted from his stomach.
Oh, gods. Not now. Not here. He froze in place, muscles clenched, but all his strength wasn’t enough to fight against his own body.
“Don’t blame this one on me!” his tumor yelled. “This is what you get for trying to kill me!”
“What’s wrong?” Doctor Alexander started toward him.
“Stay back!” He used his powers to fling her out of the room, then slammed the door. He ducked behind the partition.
“Wait, what are you doing?” the toilet cried. “What’s happening?”
Stranger’s belt flew from his costume, and his pants dropped as he flung himself onto the cold, metal seat.
“It’s a bird. It’s a plane!”
Stranger pressed a hand to the wall as his insides exploded.
“It’s Super Shit!”
“I’M SURE DOCTOR ALEXANDER understood,” said Jarhead. “The side effects of chemotherapy aren’t pretty.”
Stranger’s face burned. That hadn’t been the first such incident, but always before, he had been able to reach somewhere safe and private. “I blew a hole the size of a basketball through the toilet and the floor of Scaramouche’s cell. I left a crater two meters across in the sublevel below.”
“I see.” Jarhead pulled his lips tight, struggling not to laugh. “And how did that make you feel?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’M SO SORRY,” Stranger said for the fourth time. “I’ll find a way to pay for the repairs.”
His tumor hadn’t stopped babbling. “Did you hear when that shit went supersonic? We should weaponize this! What kind of range do you think we can get? We’d have to modify your suit, but—Ha! Your suit butt!”
“It’s all right,” said Doctor Alexander, though her face was pale, and her eyes were still watering. “Our insurance covers acts of superpowers. Even… even this.”
“Imagine dropping a bunker-buster like that on just one villain’s hideout. Every bad guy in the city would either surrender or run for the hills. Nobody’s going to stick around and risk that. It’s the fecal equivalent of the nuclear deterrent!”
“I think I need to turn this over to another hero,” Stranger said.
“No! We can do this! Just you and me, Tumor and his sidekick, Brown Thunder!”
“This isn’t your fault.”
Her sympathy made him feel worse. He swallowed an unexpected lump in his throat. He couldn’t control his own body, couldn’t control his emotions… the only consolation was that his helmet hid his anguish. “What if someone had been working in the sublevel?”
“You’ve still got a bit of gas in here. Stop clenching and let it fly, man! Wait—I’ve got it! This is brilliant! Methane’s flammable, right? If we install a rear-mounted pilot
light, you could fight evil with your superpowered flamethrower!”
“Nobody knows Scaramouche as well as you do,” said Doctor Alexander. “You said she left you a message. No one else could have heard that. We need you.”
She was right, damn it. “Scaramouche said I was almost out of time.” Time… “The university.”
“What?”
Stranger was already rising into the sky. “She’s going after Professor Edison at Lake City University.”
For the past two years, Edric Edison had been working on what he called “magnetic time.” He argued that true time travel was currently impossible, due to the immense computational difficulties in navigating both time and space simultaneously. Travel backward even a single minute, and the entire universe moved around you, leaving you sucking vacuum. But if you treated an object as four-dimensional, an unbroken solid stretching through time, you could yank a future or past version of that object into the present. As long as you had the original to use as an anchor.
How many past and future Scaramouches would she create? She would delight in the paradoxes, and an army of sociopathic geniuses would be unstoppable.
Police cars blocked the street in front of Edison’s building. A crowd pressed around the wooden barriers by the entrance. They exploded into cheers when they spotted him.
He landed harder than he had planned, cracking the blacktop. Damned peripheral neuropathy. At this point, he doubted he’d ever get full feeling back in his extremities. He searched for the nearest uniformed officer. “What happened?”
“Professor Edison is gone, and his lab was ransacked,” stammered a young rookie whose nametag read Conroy. “We’re glad you’re here, Stranger. You look good. I mean, you don’t look sick. Not that I’m a doctor. And I know your costume hides everything, but… you just don’t look like someone who’s dying.”
“Tell him about the superpoop!”
“We love you!” shouted a man near the back of the crowd.
“We know you’ll beat this!”
“You’re so strong!”
“Strong?” Stranger turned to face the woman who had spoken. “You think these malicious lumps of flesh cannibalizing my body make me strong?”
“Temper, temper!”
“Not the cancer,” she said. “The way you’re facing it. Your courage and dignity are an inspiration to the whole city.”
Stranger strode toward her. “You all know I disappeared for two weeks in March.” He heard his voice rising, but he couldn’t stop his anger any more than he could have held back his eruption at the asylum. “I gathered a sphere of air around myself and flew to the dark side of the moon. Do you know what I did there?”
The crowd shifted uncomfortably.
“I cried like an Earth baby. And then I punched the fucking moon. Do those sound like the actions of a strong, courageous, dignified man?” He stomped toward the entrance. “I need to question Edison’s lab.”
“There’s more,” the police officer said, weakly. Stranger sighed, knowing from experience what he was about to say. “Scaramouche has also kidnapped Kelly Kane.”
JARHEAD PURSED HIS LIPS. “Some would say the courage isn’t about your breakdown, but about your choice to come back afterward.”
“Where else was I supposed to go? My own world blew up, remember? Besides, the moon’s boring. Nothing happens there but the occasional meteoroid strike. You want to know what a conversation with the moon sounds like? ‘Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.’ It gets old fast.”
“Have you considered a brain-jar? It’s not as bad as you’d think.” Jarhead began to pace back and forth on the desk, carried by the spider-like metal legs on the base of his jar.
“Even if we could cut off my head, and even if your technology could be adapted for alien biology, it’s too late. The cancer metastasized through my body. It would just follow my head into the jar and kill me there.” Stranger shifted in his chair, trying to find a position that didn’t aggravate the aches in his joints. “Everyone wants to help. Scaramouche is the only one to come up with a solution that might work…”
THE AIRPORT WAS EMPTY when Stranger arrived. Police and airport security had pulled everyone back a full five hundred yards: the government’s minimum recommended distance for a potential superpowered showdown.
In one hand, he clutched the wooden puzzle box he had found in Professor Edison’s office. Scaramouche had defaced the intricate multicolored woodwork with the word Pandora scrawled in blue Sharpie marker. “Repeat the message, please.”
The box was happy to oblige. “Terminal six. Hope to see you soon.”
His tumor chuckled. “‘Terminal.’ Just like you. I like this woman.”
Stranger swooped toward the terminal, where he spotted two figures sitting in a luggage truck beside an abandoned passenger jet.
Scaramouche sat waiting, her legs extended and crossed on the dashboard. A white mask hid her face—the mask of comedy, not tragedy, which was reassuring. When Scaramouche wore her other mask, the body count skyrocketed.
Behind that mask hid the mind of a genius. As Doctor Mona Merlo, she had earned PhDs in psychology, physics, and law. Her masks also hid the horribly scarred results of a scheme gone wrong, something involving a nanoexplosive, a trained ferret, and a microwave. Merlo’s brilliance was matched only by her randomness.
“Stranger!” Scaramouche jumped to her feet. “Long time no see! How’s my favorite butt-bleeder?”
Kelly Kane was chained to the passenger seat. Scaramouche had used multiple chains, making it harder for Stranger to use his powers to free her. A metal tank sat in the first of three luggage carriers hitched to the tiny truck. Explosives covered the tank like oversized, blinking pimples.
“Sulphuric acid,” said the tank. “Strong enough to burn the eyes right out of her head. If I move, the bombs go off. And the boss can set them off by remote. Oh, her seat’s wired, too.”
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Kelly grimaced. “It’s not like this is my first kidnapping. Be careful. She’s even more manic than usual.”
Her pulse and respiration belied her outward calm. Trying to keep his own anger under control, Stranger held the wooden box out to Scaramouche. “All the evils of the world escaped from Pandora’s box, until only hope remained. Hope for who?”
“For you, of course.” Scaramouche brought a cup of Starbucks coffee to her mask. She fitted the straw through the mouth and sipped slowly. “You and I go way back, Stranger. You’re like the husband I never had.”
“You had a husband. You mutated him into a gorilla.”
“Details. The point is, I can give you something the doctors can’t.”
“What’s that?”
“A choice. Two, in fact. Cancer is such an ugly, boring death,” she said. “You deserve better.”
“I resent that. Punch her in the face!”
“You’re going to do me a favor and kill me? No thanks.” Stranger concentrated on the chains, asking them for their weaknesses.
“Oh, but it would be a glorious death in the arms of the woman who loves you.” She laughed. “Don’t look at me like that, K.K. Everyone knows. In supervillain circles, there’s a running bet as to what would happen the first time you two kids did the deed. I’ve got five grand that says the first super-orgasm would kill her.”
“What’s the other choice?” Stranger snapped.
She shrugged. “I could just cure you.”
“Don’t listen to her, boss! It’s a trick!”
Of course it was a trick. And yet… “What’s the catch?”
Scaramouch took another sip of coffee before answering. “You have to help me kill the Stranger.”
“YOU’RE GOING TO NEED to explain that one,” said Jarhead.
“Professor Edison’s time magnet.” Stranger stared at the carpet. “Scaramouche couldn’t really cure my cancer. What she could do was reach into the past and pull a younger version of me—a cancer-free version—into the present. Combine
that with any halfway decent mind-swapping device, and voila. I’m young and healthy again.”
Jarhead whistled. At least, Stranger assumed that was what the sound was supposed to be. It came out more like a dolphin’s clicking laughter translated through a synthesizer. “Ingeniously cruel. How did she respond when you refused?”
Stranger didn’t answer.
“You did refuse, right?”
“YOU’RE INSANE.”
“That’s beside the point,” said Scaramouche. “What’s important is that you survive. And since you’ll know your younger body is susceptible to cancer, you can start screening earlier. You didn’t discover the tumor until our shootout at the ice cream factory, right?” She giggled. “I thought I had finally built a bullet that would work on you. Hit you right in the ass. Made the whole ‘getting-the-shit-kicked-out-of-me-by-cartons-of-ice-cream’ thing totally worth it.”
Stranger wasn’t exactly bulletproof, but bullets liked him. They tended to lose their way and tumble to the ground when fired in his direction. At point blank range, they simply refused to leave the gun’s barrel. “You want me to sentence my past self to this?”
“I want to offer your past self the chance to save your life.” Scaramouche’s frozen, grinning face tilted to one side. “Or are you saying the younger you wouldn’t sacrifice himself to save a fellow hero?”
“The paradox—”
“Timeline split, just like the Parallel Universe War of ’09. Or the evil Gold Panther and his ridiculous goatee. Don’t sweat it. The universe is very bendy. It will be fine. Probably.”
Stranger struggled to focus through the mental haze that clung to his thoughts. “That’s what you really want. To create an alternate timeline. One where Scaramouche never had to worry about the Stranger.”
“It was either that or steal some fossils and try to raise an army of dinosaurs. I may do that anyway, because who doesn’t love dinosaurs, right?”
Stranger studied the tank again. The acid wouldn’t hurt him, but it would almost certainly kill Kelly. He couldn’t suppress all of those individual explosives at once.
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