“Karma Girl.”
“Mintilator.”
We stood there facing each other, hands clenched into fists and our bodies tense, despite the cheerful holiday trappings around us. Up close, I could see that the Mintilator’s mask was a narrow strip that just covered his eyes. Deep lines creased into his forehead and around his mouth, as though he was always frowning. He looked to be about fifty or so, with thin, wispy white hair that had a few faint streaks of gray. His eyes were green, though—as bright and green as his costume.
“What brings you to Oodles o’ Stuff this late at night?” I asked.
“I suppose I could lie and say I needed one last present, but we’d both know that’s not true. Fact is, I’m here to take all of the presents—every last one.” He had a pleasant if slightly scolding voice, one that made me think of a teacher constantly chastising a student.
The Mintilator turned back toward the tree, making the sequined spearmint leaf on his chest sparkle and gleam. He seemed content to just stand there and stare at the toys, so I took the opportunity to creep a little closer.
“But why steal a bunch of toys?” I asked. “Especially when they’re supposed to go to needy kids? That’s pretty harsh, even for an ubervillain.”
He turned back to me and gave me a triumphant smile. “Exactly. In fact, that’s rather the point of my whole little endeavor here tonight. Tell me, Karma Girl, what do you know about me?”
“I know you’re really, really, really into hand-washing,” I said, creeping forward a little more. “You like to steal delivery trucks full of hand sanitizer, mouthwash, and toothpaste, and Halitosis Hal is your archenemy.”
He gave me a thin smile. “And that’s it, right? That’s all you know about me?”
I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, so I just shrugged.
He sighed. “That’s the problem, you see. No one thinks of me as a real threat, as a real ubervillain, despite the fact that I’ve been kicking around this town for thirty years now. I’m just some kooky guy who goes around Bigtime forcing people to practice good hygiene. I’m not even a B-list ubervillain. I’m barely even D-list.”
His voice was calm and pleasant, but I could hear the cold anger in his clipped tone. No, definitely not harmless.
“So you what?” I asked. “Decided to come here and steal the toys from the charity drive so people would take you seriously?”
He shrugged. “It was the most evil thing I could think of. Besides, do you know how much some of those toys cost? I can make a fortune selling them on the Internet. Not to mention the solidium the tree is made out of. Do you know how valuable that metal is? I can make several million breaking up the tree and selling off the branches. More than enough to fund my long-awaited retirement. And that’s exactly what I plan on doing. Taking the money and running. I hear Cypress Mountain is especially nice this time of year.”
Sadly, it wasn’t the strangest or most bizarre ubervillain plan I’d ever heard. Truth be told, it was pretty damn clever—not to mention profitable.
I shook my head. “We both know that I can’t let you do that. If you won’t be reasonable, then at least be logical about this. Even if you could knock me out or even kill me, how would you get all of the toys out of here? Not to mention the tree itself? There’s no way you could get them all out the door before the store opens in the morning.”
“That’s something else no one knows about me—the fact that I always come prepared,” the Mintilator said.
He pushed back his white cape, and for the first time, I realized there was a holster clipped to his utility belt, one holding something far more deadly than hand sanitizer—a gun.
The Mintilator pulled the gun out of the holster and held it up where I could see it. The gun was an overly complicated-looking thing, with lots of little buttons, switches, and most worrisome, a glass tube filled with a strange green gas. In my experience as a survivor of radioactive goo, any gas, liquid, or pill that was neon-colored never, ever did anything good.
“What’s that?” I asked, wondering which way I should dive when he decided to point that thing at me and pull the trigger. Right, I’d dive to the right and put the sacks of presents between us.
“Oh, it’s just a little something I found in one of Frost’s old labs,” the Mintilator said. “You’d be amazed at what you can find in abandoned ubervillain hideouts. I’ve found more goodies there than I could create in a decade on my own. In a way, I suppose I have you and the rest of the Fearless Five to thank for this particular gem, don’t I?”
He was closer to the truth than he knew, because I was the one responsible for Frost’s disappearance. During my fight with the Terrible Triad, I’d used my new empathic power to open the cages where Frost had kept the poor critters he’d experimented on with his freezeterium. The mutated animals had wasted no time tearing into Frost with their genetically altered teeth and claws. That was the last anyone had seen or heard from the cold-hearted ubervillain.
“I’m not sure what Frost called it, and honestly, I don’t really care. As for what it does,” the Mintilator said, “how about a demonstration?”
“No! Don’t—”
Before I could stop him, he turned toward the tree and pressed a button on the gun. That strange, green gas shot out of the end of the barrel and hit the trunk.
For a second, nothing happened. Then, the gas solidified into a liquid that started oozing over the entire tree, leaping from one branch to another and somehow going up as well as down. In less than a minute, everything on the tree—all the toys, all the clothes, all the lights, all the ribbons—was covered with a thin layer of glistening, green goo.
And then, it all started to shrink.
Down...down...down...
The tree seemed to draw in on itself, taking all the toys and everything else with it. I felt like Alice who’d just drunk the wrong potion in a Christmas-themed Wonderland and was watching everything around her suddenly get so much smaller as she grew and grew and grew.
In less than a minute, it was over. The tree stopped shrinking, and the green goo evaporated like fog off the solidium branches, dissipating into the air. The Mintilator walked over and stood beside the tree, which was now only ten feet tall—and easily transportable.
I’d seen some strange and amazing things since coming to Bigtime, but this was definitely up there in terms of sheer weirdness. I shook my head, pushing away my confusion. Shrinking tree or not, I couldn’t let the Mintilator leave with the toys—even if I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get them back to their correct size in time for Christmas morning.
“All right,” I snapped. “You’ve had your fun.”
The ubervillain smirked at me. “Why, I’m just getting started in the fun department.”
His green eyes looked past me, and he gave a sharp jerk of his head. Quick footsteps sounded behind me, and my inner voice started to wail.
Too late, I realized that the Mintilator wasn’t alone. I’d just started to turn my head when a fist plowed into my face, and everything went black.
Chapter Four
I woke up with a start.
One second, everything was dark. The next, I had a migraine that was bigger than Fiona’s appetite. A bright, steady glow filled my vision, hammering against my closed eyelids and adding to the pounding misery in my head. I cracked open my eyes, squinted against the harsh glare, and realized the glow was the Christmas tree the Mintilator had stolen from Oodles o’ Stuff—and that it was the right size once more.
Somehow, all the toys, all the clothes, and even the tree itself had been returned to their normal, original size. I supposed the gun the Mintilator had swiped from Frost’s lab had a reverse switch on it somewhere. Despite my migraine, I let out a sigh of relief. Well, that was one problem solved.
Now on to the next—figuring out where I was and how I could get out of here.
I was sitting in a metal chair, my arms and legs securely shackled to it. I rattled the chains, but un
less I missed my guess, the cuffs and links were made out of solidium. I wouldn’t be getting out of the chains without help. The good news was I still had on my costume, and my mask still covered my face, so I didn’t think my real identity as Carmen Cole had been compromised yet. It also didn’t seem like much time had passed, although I couldn’t be sure; I didn’t see any clocks on the walls.
My eyes flicked over the rest of my surroundings. I seemed to be in an abandoned warehouse, judging from the smushed cigarettes, crushed soda cans, and other trash littering the dingy concrete floor. The windows had been boarded over, no doubt to hide the glow from the Christmas tree, and a pair of double doors off to my left was shut and probably locked.
I sighed. Sometimes, I wondered if there was any other kind of warehouse in Bigtime besides abandoned ones. You’d think the city planners would raze them all to the ground, because they made such great ubervillain hideouts—
“Well, it looks like Sleeping Beauty is finally awake,” a low voice murmured.
Footsteps slapped on the concrete floor, and a man shuffled into view in front of me. Despite the December chill in the air, he wore only a loose, one-shoulder, toga-like garment done in a garish, black-and-white, zebra-stripe pattern. The only saving grace was that he had the hard, muscled body to actually pull off the look. His hair and eyes were both a light brown, and a black mask covered his face, although his hands and feet were bare. An ebony club dangled from a slot in the leather belt cinched around his waist. Like the Mintilator, he looked to be middle-aged.
My head might be pounding, but I still recognized him—Caveman Stan, another one of Bigtime’s ubervillains, one known for his incredible strength. Actually, the Caveman moniker was a bit of a misnomer, because Stan was quite articulate, hip, and urbane—except for his old-fashioned views when it came to women. Caveman Stan thought the female race had been created specifically to feed him peeled grapes, massage his hulking shoulders, and sing his praises—literally, like sing about how awesome he was.
Stan attracted his share of willing women, but what he really liked to do was kidnap female heroes and villains and make them serve him. I supposed it made him feel even more powerful than he already was.
Supposedly, Stan had been buried in a cave-in the last time he’d battled Fiera, but reports of his death had obviously been greatly exaggerated. They always were when it came to ubervillains. No matter how sure you were that they were dead, no matter how impossible it would be for them to survive something like, say, getting pushed into a wood chipper and spit out the other side in bloody pieces, ubervillains always found a way to survive. Cockroaches could learn a thing or two from them.
Caveman Stan stepped forward and curled a lock of my auburn hair around his finger. “Normally, I prefer blonds, but I guess you’ll have to do.”
“I’ll have to do for what?” I asked in a guarded tone.
He grinned at me. “Why, to be my newest slave girl, of course.”
Slave girl? Seriously?
“It’s getting harder and harder to find good help these days,” he continued. “Women are so uppity now, with their power suits and fancy high heels and careers. You girls need to remember what life was like back in the good ole days, when you lived to serve your man and see to his every need. And I do mean every need.”
He winked and wet his lips with his tongue, telling me exactly what he was thinking.
Somehow, I managed not to shudder, even though my inner voice was wailing at me that I was in big, big trouble. Yeah, I didn’t need my empathic powers to figure that one out.
The ubervillain smoothed back my hair and walked around me. “First things first. We’ll have to get you some extensions. Your hair is way too short. I like long, flowing locks on my ladies. We’ll have to get rid of all that silver spandex too, and get you something in a nice animal print. Leopard, I think, in a pink-and-black pattern. And slim you down a bit. Slave girls should be svelte, and you, my dear, are definitely not svelte. Not to mention your regrettable lack of oomph up top.”
I rolled my eyes. If he wanted svelte and oomphy breasts, he should go after Fiera again. All the slimming down in the world would never give me the supermodel figure and perfect boobs Fiera had.
“So you’re the one who decked me inside Oodles o’ Stuff,” I said. “Why are you working with the Mintilator?”
Caveman Stan shrugged. “Old Minty makes some good points about us not being taken seriously as ubervillains. I mean, folks still talk about the Terrible Triad, and no one has seen or heard from any of them in more than a year now. But me and Minty? We’ve been around since before most of today’s so-called villains were hiding their pimply teenage faces with their very first masks, but we get never get any press. No calendars, no photo shoots, no video games, no action figures, nothing. And we’re out there every single day, pounding the pavement and doing bad things. But do we get any recognition? Hell, no. Well, that’s all going to change now. You gotta admit, stealing the tree and all those toys was a stroke of genius. It’s the kind of crime that people will be talking about for years. Why, me and Minty will go down in the annals of ubervillain history for this heist alone.”
What was this? D-list villains unite? I felt like I was trapped in a really bad, really cheesy holiday special. All we needed now were some evil singing elves, and the bizarreness would be complete.
More footsteps clacked on the concrete, and the Mintilator stepped out from behind the Christmas tree, striding across the warehouse toward us. Now, the ubervillain’s lips were turned up instead of down, and he was positively beaming with delighted evil.
“Ah, Stan, I see you’ve been entertaining our guest,” the Mintilator said. “I’m sorry we wound up with Karma Girl. I know you were hoping that it would be Fiera guarding the toys this year.”
Fiera, Fiera, Fiera. What was I? One of the Invisible Ingénues compared to her?
Stan shrugged his massive shoulders. “Oh, she’ll do, I suppose. In the end, one girl’s just like another.”
“That’s the spirit.” The Mintilator turned to me. “Well, Karma Girl, what do you think? Does my plan sound so outlandish now?”
I sighed, knowing what he expected me to say. “You’ll never get away with this.” I muttered the cliché line.
The Mintilator threw back his head and laughed. “But I already have. Come on, Stan. You can play with your new doll later. Right now, we need to get to work. We don’t have long before the Fearless Five will come looking for her and the tree.”
The Mintilator and Caveman Stan both moved over to the Christmas tree. While I’d been unconscious, the ubervillains had apparently been hard at work stripping the toys off the branches. Dolls, trucks, clothes, and more were stacked on a nearby metal work table, while others had already been packed into shipping boxes. The ubervillains walked around the tree and started discussing how best to go about getting the remaining toys off the branches and which ones they wanted to put up for Internet auction first. They focused in on a few video game consoles and laptop computers. Stan started ripping off the ribbons that secured the items to the branches and passed the electronics over to the Mintilator, who snapped a photo of every item with a digital camera before labeling it and placing it either on the work table or in a shipping box. I had to hand it to the ubervillains—they were nothing if not organized in their larceny.
The villains were so busy talking and working that they didn’t notice the faint tap-tap-tapping that whispered through the warehouse—but I did. My eyes narrowed, and I slowly turned my head to the left to see Lulu peering at me from around the corner of a stack of shipping crates.
The computer hacker grinned and waved at me. Somehow, she’d managed to track the Mintilator and Caveman Stan, following them to the warehouse.
My cell phone, I thought. I could feel it resting in the hidden pocket in the side of my boot. With her computer skills, it would have been easy for Lulu to use my cell phone to pinpoint my location. No doubt she’d alerted the oth
ers, which meant that Fiera, Mr. Sage, and Hermit were probably on their way here. I might have wanted to handle the ubervillains by myself, but right now, I’d take all the help I could get. All I had to do in the meantime was get free and make sure the Mintilator and Caveman Stan were still here when my teammates arrived—and that Lulu and I were still alive.
Lulu started to creep forward, but I shook my head, telling her to stay put. There was just too much open space for her to cover to get to me, and the ubervillains were bound to see her if she tried. Lulu stayed where she was, but she didn’t seem happy about it. Instead, she started looking around, probably searching for a metal pipe or something to help me get out of these chains—but I already had an idea about that.
I started squinting at Caveman Stan, who was still pulling toys off the tree. It took only an instant for me to see the black waves of energy pulsing around his muscular body. The waves felt like raw, brute force, and I reached out for his energy and grabbed it for my own.
Immediately, this unbelievable power filled my body, like I had the strength to do anything—even break the solidium chains that held me down. I kept focusing on Caveman Stan, grabbing more and more of his energy, his power, and making it my own.
It took a few seconds, but the ubervillain finally felt what I was doing, felt his strength being siphoned away. He staggered back a step and turned around and glared at me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing—”
But it was too late. By that point, the energy had built in my body. With a roar, I unleashed that energy, ripping the chains off the chair arms and legs and causing the whole thing to collapse. I kicked away the pieces of the chair and scrambled to my feet. I wasn’t completely free, because the metal cuffs and links still dangled from my arms and legs, but at least I wasn’t tied down anymore.
“Get her!” the Mintilator hissed at the other ubervillain.
Karma Girl Page 94
