by C. T. Phipps
I made a zip gesture over my mouth. “So, Keith is dinner almost ready?”
“You’ll love what I’m doing. It’s a seafood recipe which uses all organic ingredients plus a new flavoring,” Keith said, walking out of the kitchen wearing an apron, jeans, and a Grateful Dead t-shirt. Aside from the scars on his face, arms, and New Angeles Highwaymen tattoos, you couldn’t tell he’d ever been a supervillain.
It was disappointing.
“You’re still trying to become a chef now,” I said, looking at him.
“It’s honest work,” Keith said.
I tried not to roll my eyes. I didn’t have much of an opinion of honest work given how the System worked. It was deliberately designed to prop up the one-percent and protect the establishment at the expense of social mobility, non-military superhumans, ethnic minorities, and non-capitalist systems. I’d tried explaining this to Keith but he’d looked like, well, I was a fourteen-year-old trying to explain how the real world worked.
“Uh-huh. How’s that working out for you?” I asked.
Keith looked away. “It’s working out.”
“Just remember, you have to look after your little girl,” Joel said, getting up from his chair. “That’s the most important part of your life now. A man is a breadwinner and it’s his duty to provide for his family.”
“Trust me, I know,” Keith said, wiping his hands off with a cloth. “I thought I could make her a princess but all I did was let my shit roll down on my family.”
Joel stared at him. “I’ve heard that speech before, Keith.”
“Right before you tried to seize the Atlantean throne, which was fucking awesome!” I said, looking up. “You totally hit Aquarius’ evil sister, right?”
“You shut up boy.” Joel pointed at me.
Keith looked to one side, guilty. “This time, I promise you. It’s different. I’ve got a clean slate from the government and—”
A wailing siren sounded, threatening to deafen everyone in the house. Looking outside the window, I saw a NAPD cruiser tricked out with armor and machine guns flashing its lights outside. It had a pair of speakers attached to the top with the words ‘Shoot-Em-Up’ spraypainted on the side. I blinked, wondering what the fuck this was about.
Seconds later, AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” started playing on loudspeakers. I was confused as all get out before the door to our living room was kicked down and a man wearing riot gear spray-painted with a SEU in a diamond in the center stepped on in. The visor on his helmet was down and had been outfitted with a mirrored front. In his hands was a laser-sight equipped, advanced, hand-gun which looked like it had probably cost more money than most cops made in a year.
“THIS IS THE AGE OF PUNISHMENT!” Shoot-Em-Up shouted, lifting up his gun at Keith’s chest.
Everyone but Keith was too stunned by the anti-hero’s sudden appearance.
Keith pushed Joel to the ground and shouted to me, “Get down!”
I started to move toward him, however three bursts of bullets came from Shoot-Em-Up’s gun into Keith’s chest and showered me with gore. Shoot-Em-Up stayed long enough to put an additional set of rounds in Keith’s face before looking down at us both and saying, “Scum comes from scum.”
The memory became fragmented and a swirl of imagery as I tried to keep my head clear of the gory remains of my brother.
They picked up Shoot-Em-Up, a disgruntled police officer named Theodore Whitman, about an hour later and it turned out he’d visited two other inactive supervillains’ homes before Keith and was on his way to blow up a fourth’s with a rocket launcher. That one had probably saved a lot of lives since the last target was attending his six-year-old daughter’s birthday party.
Despite this, there was no changing the media reaction to Shoot-Em-Up. The police deliberately botched the investigation and he was let off with a technicality. Everyone across the country, seemingly, supported his actions and there had been promises of a book deal as well as promotional tours.
His actions helped trigger a slew of imitators ranging from Bloodscream the Retributive, to the Extreme. Many normal heroes grew a lot more comfortable with killing, too, even though the Society of Superheroes officially condemned their actions. But for my family, it was the end of everything.
I found my own way of coping.
I hated this next part.
And loved it.
Shoot-Em-Up didn’t exactly keep a low profile after his initial murders were resolved and was back on the streets in months. None of the gangs, crime lords, or supervillains would touch him because they were all too afraid of him.
They didn’t realize he wasn’t a superhero, just a cop in a cheap costume. I gave credit to the Silver Lightning, he attended my brother’s funeral and tried to give his condolences. But the Silver Lightning didn’t bring in Shoot-Em-Up and a lot of ‘unsolved’ murders started to pile up. I was wearing a hoodie and gloves, a backpack over my shoulders, walking up the stairs of a ratty hotel in the Southside of Falconcrest City. My parents had moved there in hopes of getting a fresh start, but they hadn’t realized just how much worse things were there. It had, ironically, attracted the very bane of our existence.
I’d gotten a tweet about Shoot-Em-Up’s location from a guy who’d caught him on his camera phone not ten miles from my location. I wasn’t a great believer in divine intervention, but that seemed like it to me. The smell of the Rusty Scabbard, a lovely name for a hotel which charged by the hour, was horrible. It was like someone had combined vomit, a men’s’ bathroom, pot, and desperation into a single odor. I passed by a collection of passed-out drunks as well as prostitutes. A few of the latter said I’d have to wait in line, ignoring the fact I was fourteen or perhaps counting on it since some of them weren’t too much older.
Reaching Room Fifty-Two, I took a deep breath and went over my escape plan in my head. The building was old and still had fire escapes with an exit just down the hall which lead to a window. I knew this because I’d made sure to get a good look at the place first. I should have gone over the details with a fine toothed comb but I was still a kid.
And seething for revenge.
Looking at the red door with a pair of numbers painted on, I pulled off my backpack, unzipped the top, and looked in to see the gun with a silencer inside. It hadn’t been difficult to acquire. This was Falconcrest City after all. The wretched hive which gave wretched hives a bad name. Holding the grip tightly with my right hand, the backpack’s strap keeping it in place, I knocked on the door.
“Go away!” Shoot-Em-Up shouted. “I’m paid for the next three hours!”
“There’s a guy who wants to see you about a television interview. He says you’re on something called Superhero Watch.”
“What?” Shoot-Em-Up said, and I heard him come to the door. It swung open and he looked down at me. He wasn’t in uniform, wearing just a pair of boxers and a wife-beater t-shirt. He wasn’t an impressive looking man, ginger hair and a receding hairline, but I’d recognize his face even if I were blind.
I pulled the trigger.
Shoot-Em-Up fell a step backwards as a red hole appeared in his chest.
I pulled it again.
And again.
I just kept pulling the trigger and soaking up the recoil even as he fell on the ground. I ended up emptying the chamber into him.
And I kept pulling the trigger still.
It felt good.
And horrible.
But mostly good.
My hand shook as I held the gun; where was a big hole in my backpack from where the bullet had passed through. Shoot-Em-Up’s uniform was lying strewn about the crappy hotel room along with a platoon’s worth of guns. Either Shoot-Em-Up was a great believer in overkill, or the majority of the weapons were for show.
Then I saw the witness.
She was lying on the bed, her crimson hair tied in girlish pig-tails, in a little pink dress. The girl was no older than I, her hands duct-taped together. The girl didn’t look particularly upset by what had happen
ed to Shoot-Em-Up and was currently chewing off her restraints.
“Crap.” I debated what to do. The smart thing to do was to shoot her but I wasn’t that sort of villain. “You didn’t see anything!”
“We go to the same school, Gary,” the girl said, chewing her restraints off.
I blinked, recognizing her as a girl from class. Which made this so much worse. “Uh, Cindy?”
“Yeah,” Cindy said, stepping over Shoot-Em-Up’s corpse and picking up his wallet from the desk and his watch. “Wow, there’s like a thousand bucks in this. Not to mention credit cards with false names! Sweet!”
“Uh, keep it.”
“Awesome,” Cindy said, not looking up. “You’re learning already. Pity about the average height thirty-something guy who shot him.”
I blinked.
Cindy looked at me. “Oh, you should dump the gun in the dumpster at Seventh and O’Neill. The International Crime League processes the weapons put there. They’ve been making inroads in town recently.”
I slowly nodded, stunned. “Uh, are you all right?”
“Eh, a girl has to make a living. At least according to my drug-addict mother,” Cindy muttered. “This should take care of her for about a week, at least.” She looked over to the nearby weapons. “Or maybe longer.”
I slowly backed away.
“See you at school?” Cindy asked. She sounded hopeful, like she’d made a new friend.
Which she had. Just not for any bonding we’d done over my recent murder. I needed to befriend her to keep her quiet. I admit, though, my fourteen-year-old-self was impressed by her attitude. She was handling the murder far better than I was. I wanted to find a toilet and throw up, which I would in a few minutes. “Sure, I guess. That sounds great. See you Monday.”
“Awesome!” Cindy’s enthusiasm was sincere and we’d go on to be good friends. Albeit, ones who would drift apart as she sank farther into crime and I tried to get out of it. Apparently, she’d had a better idea of where she wanted to go with her life than I had.
Still, I couldn’t help but remember Shoot-Em-Up’s bullet ridden corpse. The image was burned into my memory. I remembered it whenever I went to sleep and sometimes when I was just daydreaming. I didn’t feel guilt, per se, but I felt something. Acknowledgement that I wasn’t a normal person anymore perhaps. It hadn’t been as satisfying as I’d hoped, but it had left me feeling a sense of, closure I guess.
They never did find out the cause of Shoot-Em-Up’s death. Otherwise, I’d have been in jail. Cindy sold his weapons and costume on Crimebay and managed to pull herself out of the worst of Southside’s poverty. The Society of Superheroes did an investigation but never managed to find out the truth, perhaps because some of them didn’t want to.
Or maybe I just got lucky.
Either way, I got away with it.
For what it was worth.
Thrashing in my slumber, I woke up, covered in a cold sweat. Cloak had receded into my skin so he wasn’t present anymore. Yet, I could feel him in my head still.
“The Nightwalker handled the investigation of Shoot-Em-Up,” Cloak said, “He interrogated his ghost for an hour.”
“Why didn’t you arrest me?” I asked him, mentally.
“Whitman didn’t remember who you were,” Cloak whispered. “The Nightwalker should have sought you out, made sure you got help. You were turned into a killer at an age you should have been playing or noticing girls.”
“Superheroes should have stopped Shoot-Em-Up from happening in the first place,” I muttered. I looked over to see Mandy’s naked form on the other side of the bed, sleeping peacefully. I got up to get a drink of water.
“Are you so different from him?” Cloak asked. “Can you truly say you are walking a different path?”
“Yes. I can.”
Chapter Eight
The Ethics of Being a Supervillain
Staring into the bathroom mirror, I tried to see if there were any signs of my nightmares on my face. I’d worked for years to get rid of the signs of stress and worry about getting caught, pushing down the emotions until they were nonexistent. I wondered if I was a sociopath like Cindy had suggested, or if I was simply very good at fooling myself.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Cloak said, invisible but still inside me. “I think I have a better understanding of you now.”
“Yeah, I’m a cold-blooded killer. Ever since I was a teen. Quite the step down for the Nightwalker’s cloak.”
“The Nightwalker had his own secrets. Other heroes may judge you for your actions but I won’t be one of them.”
I turned on the hot water to splash some on my face. “You just said I was as bad as Shoot-Em-Up. You could have been more sensitive, you could have compared me to Hitler.”
“I’m sorry.”
That surprised me. I hadn’t expected Cloak to show such a humanlike reaction. Then again, he’d done that at the sight of the little girl’s exorcism too. “Apology accepted.”
“I would, however, like to discuss your choice of pursuits to use our powers.”
“Ah-ha, so there’s the judgment.”
“You don’t seem to be a supervillain for reasons of insanity, though I questioned that a few times. You do not need the money—”
“Mandy’s family had money. We’re not rich but there’s enough of a cushion we don’t need to worry about losing everything like so many of the bastards in this thirty-percent unemployment city. At least until—”
“You get a job?”
I paused. “Yeah, I just realized I don’t have to do that now.”
“I don’t think you’ve fully internalized being a supervillain, dream or not.”
“Do you understand why I want to be Merciless?”
Cloak was silent.
“Tell me,” I said, daring the Reaper’s Cloak to deny he did.
He didn’t. “Yes, I do. If there’s one thing I understand, its exorcising the ghosts of the past.”
“You know all of my secrets now.”
“I am privy to everything you think, feel, and see. I am not privy to those secrets you hide from yourself.”
A thought occurred to me. “Uhm...were you watching when...uh?” I was referring to what Mandy and I had just done.
“Do you really want me to answer?”
I shook my head.
“Good.”
I splashed some water in my face. “This city has the highest crime rate in America for a reason. It is riddled from top to bottom with predators. While some of them are pretty damned obvious, I’m not worried about the guys dealing drugs or selling themselves or even stealing to survive out there. I’m more concerned about the guys who have driven this city into the ground since before I moved here. The guys who steal a thousand families’ savings and never see a day in court because the system is designed to prop them up. I don’t have anything against superheroes in-general, Cloak. The only ones I hate are like Shoot-Em-Up and I know they’re a minority.”
Thank God.
“We call them anti-heroes, Gary. They’re not part of the team even if we have to work with them. The government demands it.”
I ignored Cloak, not bothering to dignify the hypocrisy. “The fact is—superheroes are tools of the establishment. They prop up the system with super-planes, super-tech, super-powers, and super-justice even though that’s what they should be tearing down.”
“As bad as the system is. It’s better than the alternative. I’ve seen lands where the system gets torn down.”
“And that’s because they were allowed to run screaming into the wall.” I turned off the faucet. “So, if you’re asking me if I should use my powers to be a superhero then no. No, I’m not. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my powers just yet but I’m pretty sure it’s going to involve robbing people as well as putting the scare into the people who piss me off about the world.”
“How noble.” I could tell Cloak was being sarcastic.
“There’s nothing n
oble about it,” I said. “I intend to do this because it’s going to make me feel better. I’m probably going to throw a lot of the money I take back out into the world but I’m also going to keep plenty. I don’t have to justify myself or my actions. That’s the fun part about being a supervillain. You don’t have to justify yourself. You do what you want, and what I want is to make some noise.”
“That is a remarkably juvenile view of the world.”
“Out of the mouth of babes. The only billionaire who was ever worth a damn in this city was Arthur Warren and he died last week, not long before the Nightwalker. It took like fifteen minutes for his heirs to shut down his Foundation and divert the money to golden parachutes for the disadvantaged Ivy League fratboys they hired to replace his social workers.”
“...yes.” There was genuine anger in his mental voice, which surprised me.
That was when the lights all over the house went out, plunging the house into darkness. “Oh, for crying out loud. What now?”
“Well, it could be one of the Nightwalker’s countless supernatural foes. He was Dimensional Guardian of Earth in addition to being an opponent of street crime. The Fear Lord, Mammaloth the Eternal, and so on could all be coming to kill you and steal his cloak.” Cloak paused. “Or you could have a short in your wiring.”
“I’ll choose option two.”
“Wise decision,” Cloak replied. “I’d suggest you study magic but I somehow think the humility and enlightenment necessary to successfully navigate such things is beyond you.”
“I can’t sell my soul to something for those?”
“I’m really hoping that was sarcasm.”
“Probably.”
Turning around in the dark and stumbling around my bedroom, I heard Mandy was still snoring gently in the night. While it was likely the Omega Energy Company was just shutting down again to drive up energy prices like they did every couple of years, I decided to check the circuit breaker anyway. It was unusually cold, which was strange given it was a hot summer outside. I felt like all of the warmth had gone out of the place.
“Why did the Nightwalker fight so many mystic supervillains anyway? Did they just come here to Falconcrest City to take a shot at him? I never understood how so many superheroes ended up getting villains who followed their theme.”
