Burn Baby Burn: A Supervillain Novel

by James Maxey

  "If it's on the edge, we should push it," said Sunday.

  "Or . . . hear me out here . . . or we could just rob some banks."

  "What is it with you and banks?" she asked, shaking her heads.

  "How can you not know this?" said Pit. "Banks are where the money's at."

  Sunday stared at her new foot. In addition to a tan, what it really, really needed was a nice pair of shoes.

  "Okay," she said. "Let's try things your way for a change. Let's rob some banks."

  Pit Geek held the gun toward an imaginary bank teller. "Hand over the money!" he said, then chuckled. "Man, this thing will scare the pants off of folks."

  Sunday giggled, a sound she hadn't made in several years.

  "Did you just laugh?" Pit Geek sounded astonished.

  She shrugged. "Just, well, what you said struck me as funny, considering I'm sitting her in my panties."

  "So you are," said Pit, stepping toward her bed.

  She lifted a glowing finger. "I hope you remember that I can vaporize flesh."

  "So you can," said Pit, dropping onto the other bed. "Man. Robbing banks. Just like the old days."

  "We never robbed banks in the old days," said Sunday.

  Pit went silent as he stared at the ceiling. "I'm pretty sure we did it on horseback," he whispered.

  Things I don't remember eating:

  The Coke machine.

  The 1969 Yellow Pages for Dallas.

  Two cans of purple paint.

  A peacock feather boa.

  What looks like it might be part of an industrial sized air-conditioner.

  The front end of a Dodge Dart.

  An actual set of darts, plus the dartboard they were stuck in.

  A TV cart.

  What might be but almost certainly isn't the real Mona Lisa.

  A five-gallon gasoline can, empty.

  Airline peanuts, still in the bag.

  An ugly necktie, about five inches wide, kind of a snot green with stripes the color of Grape Nehi.

  A penguin. It's dead now. My guess is, it starved. The chickens here eat the bugs in the trash and the goats seem to hang on eating the garbage directly. I guess I didn't eat much in the way of penguin food.

  A set of three by five note cards, about a dozen of them, with writing in what might be Russian. It's got those backwards R's and a half dozen other letters I can't cipher. Or maybe it's my handwriting, from back in the years when I had a pound of shrapnel churning up my gray matter.

  Oh Sunday. Things were so much simpler when I was dumb.

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  Not Bonny, Not Clyde

  THEIR FIRST BANK was a SunTrust central branch in downtown Richmond. It was crowded, lunch hour, when a lot of people rushed in to take care of business. Pit had thought they should start smaller and with fewer witnesses, but Sunday had been adamant that they should do this big. She said she wanted a bank robbery so spectacular people would talk about it in China. Pit had gotten swept along in her enthusiasm. Spectacular was now the plan.

  So, step one was to drive a motorcycle right into the bank's lobby. If Monday had been around, his space machine would have been the right tool for the job, but the morning after they'd used the Regeneration Ray they'd left the motel office to find this beautiful Harley parked next to the Camry. They took it as a sign that their crime spree should begin with a little grand theft. They needed some kind of transportation since Sunday was graceful as an angel when she was in flight by herself, but if she carried anything heavier than a watermelon she usually lost her center of balance and spiraled down to crash landings. Thus, a getaway vehicle was a necessity.

  Pit gunned the bike up the plaza steps in front of the bank. The building had a series of concrete posts near the doors designed to stop people from driving a large vehicle into the building, but the Harley slipped right through. Crashing into the plate glass windows might have damaged the bike, so at the last second Sunday stretched her arm out, wiggled her fingers, and BOOM no more window. They skid to a halt amid flaming debris and about a hundred screaming customers.

  They had moments before cops showed up, not that either of them was worried about cops. When Sunday really lit up, bullets disintegrated before touching her. Pit wasn't scared of bullets, and was scared even less now that they had a Regeneration Ray.

  Despite the fact that the sky was filled with gray clouds and it felt cold enough to snow, this was a fine, fine day to be a supervillain.

  The first order of business was the rent-a-cop stationed near the door. His face was red as a beet as he ran toward them, drawing his pistol. He aimed it toward them with trembling arms and shouted, "Put your hands up!"

  Which they did, but only to take off their helmets. They both dismounted the bike, smiling at the guard.

  "Put that thing down before you hurt yourself," said Pit. Then he turned to the rest of the room and shouted, "Everyone on the floor, please! We'll be done robbing this joint in five minutes and y'all can get back to your lives."

  "Put your hands up!" the guard repeated, shouting louder. "Put your hands up!"

  Pit sighed. "What are you, a broken record?"

  Sunday began to undress as Pit walked toward the guard. Under her biker's jacket she was wearing a leather halter top and blue jeans that looked painted on. She'd spent the seven longest hours of Pit Geek's life shopping for these jeans and the calf-high zipper boots that went over them, and she wasn't planning to just blow these things to atoms the first time she wore them in public.

  Pit felt a little sorry for the guard. Sorry for himself a little too. They both would have preferred to watch the strip show, but instead their eyes were locked on one another. Pit approached with his palms open. The guard probably wouldn't fire at an unarmed man.

  The guard shot him in the chest from a yard away. When Pit didn't fall, he shot him again, and again, until his clip was empty.

  Pit snatched the empty gun away. "First nice clothes I've worn in months and you had to go put holes in them," he grumbled. He was decked out in biker's leathers, even leather pants. Secretly, he was happy that the jacket now had a nice pattern of holes. He'd felt a little dainty wearing clothes without even a scuff mark.

  Pit pointed the gun at the guard. "Now you get on the floor."

  The guard looked confused. "The . . . the gun's empty," he said.

  "So it is," said Pit. "I knew that." He frowned. "Well, I'm in luck, because my doctor told me I have an iron deficiency." Then, in three neat gulps, he ate the gun. He could have downed it in one bite, but it wouldn't have had the same impact. The guard's eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his skull.

  "Down," said Pit.

  The guard went down.

  Pit looked back and found that Sunday had finished stripping. Unfortunately, she was already sheathed in white radiance that forced him to shield his eyes. She walked toward the row of tellers, leaving a line of flaming footprints. As she neared the first customer lying on the floor, she climbed into the air like she was walking up invisible steps. There were red velvet ropes forming a little maze for customers to traipse through. They caught fire as she walked over them. She descended on the other sided of the tellers, in front of the steel vault door. She walked into the door as if it wasn't even there, because, by the time she reached it, it wasn't. At her hottest, she could vaporize steel. Fortunately, in the ten years Pit had known her she'd honed her powers so that she could direct her full body blasts in a single direction, or else everyone behind her would now be dead.

  Pit ran toward the wall of tellers and vaulted behind the counter. He could now hear distant sirens. He shouted to the room, "Everybody just stay calm and stay down! Sounds like help is on the way. No need for anyone here to be a hero."

  He ducked to slip into the bank vault. The Sunday-sized hole in the door was a good six inches shorter than he was. Inside, Sunday was already vaporizing locks on safe deposit boxes and yanking them open. Gold coins, jewelry, and comic
books in polybags were being tossed into a pile. Legal papers were reduced to ash.

  Pit sucked down the valuables. Then he turned his attention to all the cash, shoving stacks of hundreds, fifties, and twenties between his teeth. It took several minutes to finish off the vault. Pit wasn't good enough at math to have a real guess of how much he'd just swallowed. Certainly at least a million.

  They went back into the lobby.

  "You guys are doing fine," Pit said. "Give us two more minutes and you can all whip out your phones and tell folks how you were just robbed by the modern Bonnie and Clyde."

  Sunday turned her head sharply towards him, in what might have been a nasty look, though with her face too bright to focus on it was tough to say.

  She said to the room, "When you get on your phones, you tell people that no bank in the world is safe. Not just from us: the so called authorities of this world create a theatre of safety to make you feel as if your money is secure, while all the time they steal you blind. The safest place for your money is in your mattress. Tell people!"

  "What the hell was that about?" Pit asked as they reached the motorcycle. "That wasn't in the script."

  "I was unaware there was a script," she said.

  "Not a real script, but, y'know, there's a flow to these things."

  "I've never gone with the flow," she said, moving on.

  Sunday had folded up her clothes as she undressed and placed them neatly in the saddlebags. Pit secured Sunday's helmet to the back seat as she floated out to the plaza, the glass windows melting like ice at her approach.

  Pit straddled the bike as gunfire erupted outside.

  "Y'all keep your heads down, y'hear?" he said to the customers on the floor. "It's been a nice, clean robbery so far. Hate to see any of you kind folks get perforated by a stray bullet."

  Then he gunned the motor and roared out onto the plaza. He skidded to a halt to watch the action. He felt rather heroic, standing in front of a smoking bank with a hail of bullets flying around him. Of course, none of the bullets were aimed at him. The flying woman sheathed in white flames had a lock on the cop's attention at this point.

  "No one is safe!" Sunday shouted from overhead. He stretched her arms toward the first cop car. It exploded, taking out the cops next to it. She pointed toward the second car. These cops were fast learners and started running. Two seconds later the car went off like a bomb. Smoking bits of twisted steel clattered on the cement plaza like a shower of hail.

  There were four more cop cars and four more booms. Any remaining officers had retreated behind a freshly arrived fire truck.

  The firemen hastily hooked a hose to a hydrant. Sunday crossed her arms as she waited for them to finish.

  She glanced down at Pit. "See you in Short Pump."

  Pit nodded, then put on his helmet.

  The jet of water shot toward Sunday. And then there was steam, vast, billowing clouds of white vapor that rolled across the plaza and quickly reduced the line of sight for the surrounding blocks to about three feet. Pit wheeled out ahead of the billowing cloud, darting through traffic stalled by the police action. There was a helicopter overhead, but only for a moment. A second sun flashed through the sky near the chopper and it began to spin out of control.

  They met up behind an old vacant K-Mart in Short Pump. Sunday made Pit turn his back as she dressed.

  "We're not Bonny, not Clyde," she complained as she pulled on her boots. "Where did that come from?"

  "What's your problem with Bonny and Clyde?"

  "To start with, they were lovers," she said. "I don't want the world to think we're sleeping together."

  "Why the hell not?" Pit asked. "You don't mind being known as a terrorist, but you're worried people might think you're loose?"

  Sunday pressed her lips tightly together. Then she said, "In any case, it's unoriginal. We aren't copying anybody. We're originals. Pit Geek and Sundancer."

  "I don't want to be Pit Geek no more," said Pit.

  "What do you mean?"

  He shrugged. "I got a new face. I got some nice clean clothes. Maybe I don't want people to know I used to live in a pit and bite the heads off chickens."

  "I have a feeling that, face or no face, people are going to put two and two together. Pit Geek could shrug off bullets and eat solid steel. On the debut of your new face, you shrugged off bullets and ate a pistol. I've got a hunch someone is going to make the connection, Pit."

  "Devourer," said Pit Geek.

  "That's your new name? Devourer?"

  "It's more dignified."

  "I don't like it. It doesn't roll off the tongue. It has two soft 'R' sounds mushed together."

  "Eater?" Pit said.

  "Pithier, but I don't think it's that much more dignified than Pit Geek. People reading about you in the newspaper will think you have a weight problem."

  "You should go back to Burn Baby."

  "No," said Sunday. "And it was Baby Burn. And what's wrong with Sundancer?"

  "You're the one who wants to be original. Any time I hear Sundancer, I think of the Sundance Kid. People will start thinking I'm Butch Cassidy."

  "I've heard of the movie," said Sunday.

  "There was a movie?" asked Pit.

  "That's where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid come from," said Sunday.

  "Naw, they were real people," said Pit. "Butch had a gang that used to rob trains and banks. The Wild Bunch. Sundance was part of the gang. His real name was . . . was Harry. Harry, uh, Harry Longbow? Anyway, he stole a horse from a ranch in Sundance was how he got his name."

  Sunday gave him a puzzled look. "You can't remember your own name, but you know the name of some fictional cowboy?"

  "He ain't fictional."

  "Whatever," said Sunday. "I'm vetoing Baby Burn right now. Burn Baby also. You can call yourself Toiletman for all I care."

  "Toiletman?"

  "Since you shove crap down a hole," she said, sounding as if it should have been obvious.

  "Speaking of crap, what was that bit about putting money into mattresses? We want it in banks so we can steal it."

  "You want to steal it. I don't see much point in us acquiring a lot of wealth. But I do think that, as you said, the whole world's on edge right now. The planet's already suffering economic turmoil. If we trigger a run on banks, we might bring down the house of cards. Money only has value because people think it has value. Destroy the underlying belief system, and you destroy money. Destroy money, and civilization crumbles."

  Pit nodded slowly. "Um-hmm. And, just so I'm clear, why, exactly, do we want to destroy civilization?"

  She rolled her eyes. "Didn't you pick up anything from your time with Monday?"

  Pit shrugged. "If I did, it got blasted out at some point."

  "Civilization was once a great evolutionary innovation. It elevated mankind above the animals. But, sadly, civilization has now become a destructive force."

  "Like pollution?" asked Pit.

  "I mean it's destroying mankind. Nature's law requires that the fittest survive if a species is to thrive. But powerful men have co-opted civilization to ensure that the strongest members of the species are thrown into prisons. They pay the most dimwitted and weak to stay at home and breed generation after generation of imbeciles. Civilization has become a tool of devolution, returning men to the state of animals, where the whole goal of life is to consume and breed as little more than two legged cattle."

  "Why would they do that?" Pit scratched the back of his neck. "And who are they, for that matter?"

  Sunday shrugged. "I can't say if the harm inflicted was by accident or by design. But the only hope for man to return to the evolutionary fires where he can be forged into something stronger is to wipe out this poisonous culture. One day, future men will thank us for destroying the value of money."

  Pit patted his belly. "Could you maybe wait until we spent this million bucks before you destroy civilization?"

  "That was a lot more than a million that you wolfed down,"
said Sunday. "But so what? Where the hell are we supposed to be spending it? I mean, I have to lay out some dough each year to keep the yacht fueled so the generators can keep the place air conditioned, but it's not like I can take the boat anywhere. Dad's bribed the local officials into thinking I'm a mafia informant under witness protection by the FBI. But I can't take the boat to another country, because I don't think the faked paperwork would stand up to scrutiny. And, anyway, why do I need a boat? I can fly!"

  "Yeah, buck naked. You could show up places wearing clothes if you had a boat."

  Sunday gave a grim smile as she nodded.

  "What do we need money for?" she asked, not looking at him directly. She was staring off in the distance, thinking out loud. "We can't buy a house with it. Cars? If we want an expensive car, we can just steal it. Diamonds? We can rob a jewelry store just as easily as a bank. Anyway, who wants jewelry? What's it good for?"

  "Most women like jewelry."

  "Most women like being given jewelry," said Sunday. "Our warped society has taught them that they only have worth if they have a diamond on their finger. All sexual relationships are tainted by this thinly disguised variant of prostitution."

  "So you wouldn't sleep with me if I gave you a diamond ring?"

  "Nope."

  "How about if I make a solemn vow not to give you a diamond ring?"

  "Definitely not."

  "What if I were a woman?"

  "What kind of stupid question is that?"

  Pit shrugged. "You've just never shown any interest in men."

  "And that makes me a lesbian?" Sunday rolled her eyes. "The day I met Rex Monday, I knew that I'd never have a relationship with a man. He opened up my mind to the truths of the world, things I'd always seen, but never had the courage to accept."

  "Like what?"

  "Like I'm not human. I'm the next step up the evolutionary chain, the first of my kind. I need to kick start evolution so I won't be the last. Sleeping with an ordinary man . . . it's like you sleeping with a monkey." She gave him a sideways glance. "You, uh, wouldn't do that, would you?"