Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel (26 page)

I woke up screaming, kicking my blankets aside.

“Betcha didn’t know I could play the trumpet, didja? You should see what I can do with a tuba, then we’ll
really
start rockin’.”

I knew that voice. I never thought I’d hear it again.

“Showstopper?”

He crossed the room to me, spinning the trumpet on his finger and smiling. His shadow was so wide it nearly blocked out the sun streaming in my windows.

“How’s that for a plot twist?” he mused, sitting at the edge of my bed. “One moment the tube closes around me and I think I’ve seen my last glimpse of the world, the next I’m out again and being told that I’m needed on the team because you guys fucked up so royal.”

Seeing him again was such a surprise, I couldn’t stop myself from diving across the bed and wrapping him in a huge bear hug.

“Okay, that was sweet for like the first three seconds, but now that I know you’re naked and you’re not letting go, it’s getting a little weird.”

“Sorry!” I said quickly, parting from him. “And we didn’t fuck up,” I clarified.

The look he gave me said that wasn’t good enough, so I added, “Not royal, at least.”

“You say to-may-to, the heroes say you fucked up royal, and with enough of ’em from the Empire to know royal, who am I to argue? Doesn’t matter to what degree you did or didn’t fuck this team you got up, because in your fucked-uppedness you got me paroled. So please, if you can find another way to fuck up that benefits me like that, fuck away.”

“I will,” I said, running a hand through my hair.
I need a haircut.

“You smell like shit,” he said.

“Showers and me haven’t exactly been on speaking terms lately,” I said. I looked to the tray of food, and felt my stomach growl. “That your doing?”

“Yeah. Ghost Girl and me have been here about three weeks while you five have been playing your zombie game, making sure you didn’t die. You’ve all had it pretty rough, but you, mate, I thought you were going to die there for a while. Almost had me wishing they’d taken Spasm out instead of me.
Almost.
”

His words sunk in slowly. “You’ve been here three weeks?”

“Indeed we have. You guys needed a lot of time to recover. You
really
know how to party.”

“And Ghost Girl’s with you!” I said, leaping to my feet (well, trying to leap at least).

“Yeah. She and the others took a field trip up to the Chin to try and get some fresh air.” I started for the door. “Well, let’s go then!”

“Need I remind you about your still being naked?”

“Right,” I said. I found some boxers, shoes, and a bathrobe, and gobbled down the sandwich he’d put at my nightstand as we left my room and headed to the Chin.

“By the way, you do know that dick pic you tweeted is one of the most retweeted in the world, right?”

“That happened?” I asked, feeling green.

“Oh yeah.”

“Fuck.”

“Well, it’s not all bad…”

My muscles started to scream after the first few steps from the house. My lungs hadn’t had a breath of fresh air in ages and started to complain, and the sun felt like it was searing my skin off. I wanted to go back to the mansion and just wait for them to return, but Showstopper prodded me, and I kept pressing on.

We made it to the Chin in good time. I could hear laughing. Talking. Happiness.
Real
happiness.

When we finally climbed to them, I could see that they had a bag of golf clubs and were using them to chip balls into the jungle. Geode used his superstrength to send one sailing far into the distance, causing a large ripple when it bounced off the force field. Odigjod and Trojan Fox laughed, exchanging high fives. Nevermore went up next, and through summoning her pendulum tattoo managed to match Geode’s shield-hitter. I couldn’t quite read her smile at first, before I realized that it was genuine.
Has anyone ever seen that?

And there she was. Ghost Girl. She was dressed in civilian clothes (loose, but flattering), but still wore that creepy porcelain doll mask to cover her face.

She was a sight for sore eyes.

“Hey guys, who’s winning?” Showstopper asked, pulling a club from the bag.

Everyone turned to us. The more I looked at them, the more I saw that they were every bit as haggard as I, but their happiness was infectious. Ghost Girl’s eyes briefly flashed gold on me, but as ever she remained difficult to read.

I didn’t care.

I hobbled to her, throwing my arms around her neck.

“I’ve missed you.”

“I noticed,” she said. Her voice was neutral. She made no move to hug me back.
What the hell?

We separated, quietly. I knew we never got the chance to say good-bye to each other, but I thought she’d have looked on me a little more fondly than that.

“So the gang’s all here now, is it?” Showstopper asked. “Feels like we oughta celebrate. Whaddya do for fun ’round here?”

“Party with celebrities and do a lot of drugs,” I said, eyes never leaving Ghost Girl. She barely acknowledged my existence.
Maybe she wouldn’t be so cold if she’d been here with us…

Or maybe she just doesn’t like being sent to the Tower while we fucked everything up out here.

“No, I meant what do you really do for fun around here?” Showstopper asked, laughing.

“He’s serious,” Ghost Girl said. Showstopper looked to the others for confirmation, and they nodded.

“I thought they were joking when they told us to keep you out of trouble,” Showstopper said. “Well, fuck me, that changes things some.”

“We could stay here. Video games. Board games. Odigjod has always wanted to learn Twister,” Odigjod said.

“No, no, that won’t do,” Showstopper said, shaking his head. “You’ve been cooped up too long. We need to take you out. Do something fun.”

“But with no alcohol or drugs,” Trojan Fox grumbled.

“Right. Wholesome. Got it. Who’s got a tablet?” Showstopper asked. Odigjod tossed his to Showstopper, and within minutes he was rattling off ideas and shooting them down before we could say anything for or against. As ever, he had the energy of a puppy and enough power to keep us all just the slightest bit afraid of him.

Like old times…

“Boom, got it!” Showstopper exclaimed, his smile broadening like a kid on Christmas morning. “There’s a Mary Rising tonight. Any of you ever been to one?”

I’d always heard those were pretty cool, but had never actually been to one because my parents didn’t want to make the trip.

It wasn’t going out and partying with superheroes, but it could be fun. The others must have thought the same, because nobody opposed the idea.

So we were going to a Mary Rising. Cool.

Maybe there I’d get to find out just what Ghost Girl’s problem was.

#Supervillainy101: Mary

Have you ever heard of the Grand Sorceror? No? I don’t blame you. Although he was a fairly famous superhero back in the Golden Age, he was almost scrubbed completely from the history books because he kinda created one of the twentieth century’s most dangerous supervillains.

You see, our friend the Sorceror had a problem keeping it in his pants, and this came back to bite him when he knocked up some school marm in rural Pennsylvania. She became obsessed with him and started following him everywhere, begging him to take care of her and their unborn child, but he wanted nothing to do with her. When she threatened to make this misfortune public, he arranged a magic spell to silence her permanently. Instead, he mispronounced one word in the spell and wound up killing her with an as yet unknown curse. He dumped her in an abandoned coal mine in Centralia, wiped his hands, and presumably walked away whistling whatever superheroes in the 20s whistled.

Unfortunately, the mine he dumped her in was severely haunted from a cave-in and cursed by said cave-in’s victims. This, combined with the Sorceror’s botched curse, transformed the unknown school marm into Mary, a hulking, thirteen-foot-tall, one-thousand-pound zombie with no real memory or intelligence but enough rage and superhuman strength (enough to give the Golem a run for its money) to more than make up for it. Time and again she has fought the Protectors, sometimes on her own, sometimes after having been roped in by some supervillain team or another, and time and again she’s proven herself to be a force of nature. Every time she’s killed, she appears ninety-six days later in that same mine, clawing her way to the surface and ready to rampage. Her clockwork resurrections and the superheroes killing her have created a booming tourist industry in the area.

As for the Grand Sorceror, well, there’s few records of what happened to him after the Mary incident, but I’m a fan of the theory that he was fed to Mary by a bunch of pissed off, Golden Age heroes as payback.

#LessonLearned:
Don’t fuck with magic users.

17

THE WORST THINGS ALWAYS STICK AROUND

Maybe it came from hearing too many stories about how awesome Mary Risings were when I was a kid, but I was a bit let down when we first teleported in and saw that it was really just an overcrowded, small-town carnival. There were rides and games, cheap food and screaming kids, poorly piped in music, and that ever-present smell of popcorn and vomit. The early evening air was cool and bracing, enough to wake you up and remind you that winter was right around the corner.

It reminded me a lot of home, actually.

My old home, at least.

The mine entrance itself was the centerpiece. It was surrounded by large light towers and cordons to keep people out of harm’s way, and vendors selling hero pennants, Mary balloons, and “Genuine Mary Teeth.” There were no heroes yet; they would come a few minutes before sunset (when Mary typically rose) to get ready and probably sign a few autographs. Until then, we had to make our own fun.

Showstopper acted as master of ceremonies, trying to cheer us all up at any cost. He talked us into games, terrible fried food, and one by one even got us all onto the mechanical bull. We couldn’t use our powers—not if we didn’t want to attract any attention—but it was actually pretty fun. Nevermore and Trojan Fox were naturals. Showstopper and I weren’t. I tried to hold on, but wound up wrapping my legs around my head when I faceplanted off the front. Showstopper’s fall was more spectacular (weighing three hundred–plus pounds will do that, I guess), but he took it in good humor, waving to the crowd and bowing as he hobbled back to us.

“That was awesome,” he said. “I need food.”

“Don’t mention food now,” Geode said, holding his stomach. I tried to look stronger, but I shared his queasiness. Maybe combining fair food and mechanical bulls wasn’t the best idea after detoxing.

“More for me then,” Showstopper laughed.

He may have been fat, but he was a breath of fresh air. He was energetic, he was positive, and he didn’t judge us. He was just glad to be free.

I couldn’t say the same for Ghost Girl.

I’d never seen her in public (it was weird seeing her with that scarf wrapped around her face instead of her usual mask), and maybe that gave her some of the awkwardness, but that could only account for some. The way she looked at us… it seemed like she was only hanging around out of a sense of obligation, talking when spoken to, following us where we went but never adding anything. She wasn’t hostile, but she wasn’t friendly.

She wasn’t the Ghost Girl I’d remembered.

I was glad when we’d decided to split up. I knew she would make a break from us, and it was easy enough to follow her, for a while.

I’d forgotten how fast she was—and in what poor shape I was in. She might have actually gotten away if I hadn’t put up a small wall of focus in front of her.

She stopped.

“Let me go, Aidan,” she said without turning around.

“No. Not until you tell me what your problem with me, with all of us really, but especially
me
is!”

She turned around. Her eyes weren’t angry, not really, but they were pretty close to it. “You want to know my problem?”

“Yeah, I think I’ve earned that much!” I said, doing a pretty good imitation of sounding strong and confident. “I mean, after what we shared—”

“You earned
nothing
! We had sex, Aidan. Desperate sex because I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see the light of day again and because I briefly thought that you might still have some human decency hiding within you. Seeing you now, I’m beginning to regret that decision.”

That hurt. A lot.

I didn’t love Ghost Girl—at least I was pretty sure I didn’t love her—but I did like her a lot. Probably more than any girl I’d ever known (even more than Kelly Shingle). Though she was creepy and quiet a lot of the time, she was also kind, smart, and hid a pretty good sense of humor.

She was my friend. One of the best friends I’d ever had (and a mostly hot one, too). I’d hoped beyond hope that I would see her again someday, even knowing that it would likely mean seeing her as a drummer, just so I could show her what a big man I’d become.

And now she was looking at me like I was the worst person she’d ever met.

“Back in training, I thought you all might be decent people. That beneath the pretext of villainy we were all just scared, misunderstood kids who got roped into this because the capes backed us into a corner. That we did this because we had to, not because we wanted to.”

“But we
did
want to do this. At least, I know I did.”

She shook her head. “I know that, now. I knew it then, but I thought you stood a chance at being something different. You had this naïveté and sweetness to you, beneath all the selfishness and stupid fucking posturing, that I thought might have made you into a better man once you saw what supervillain life was
really
like.”

“You were wrong about that,” I laughed.

She started to walk away, further into the carnival, but did nothing to stop me from following.

“You let this life poison you. You let
them
poison you,” she said harshly when I caught up.