Supervillain, Us

by Gentry Race

  “Jump and I’ll catch you,” I yelled up to them.

  Each one hopped down, and I caught them with ease. I particularly noticed Crystal’s eyes weighing heavy on my hardened steel face. I gave her a warm smile and slid her gently off my hands. I couldn’t help but feel each gem on her nude sheer suit as she nicked along my metal hand paneling.

  Jess was there to embrace her and calm her mind from the overwhelming situation. Up ahead, I could see a myriad of grated walkways and staircases leading to a large silo.

  “Looks like we could have taken the stairs,” Jess quipped, grabbing Crystal’s hand and pulling her toward the silo.

  When I reached the girls, my mouth fell agape at the size of the large, columnar room. Above was the floor we’d just been on, and below us descended what looked like twenty more floors, each designated by number and color. At the center of the silo’s open area was a gruesome sight that only a horror author could tell.

  Thousands of naked human bodies had been strung up and encapsulated in glass tubes, forming some kind of network or farm. I looked closer and could see that they weren’t just humans, but villainesses, each one presenting their unique mutation. I couldn’t help but notice the girl at the top.

  Gemini.

  Her two-toned skin shone ever so slightly through the gelatinous goo the bodies were contained in.

  BAMF!

  A rushing of energy formed and ripped open the fabric of reality itself in a burst of smoke. I watched a humanoid form materialize holding a beautiful woman slumped in his arms.

  Hera.

  He never stepped out of his portal-like cloud. The smoke stayed constant around him, forming into a sulfurous red mist, and I could see the pale man more clearly. His portal was atop the spire filled with human pods. His face was bleached white, but cracked over fleshy peach to his alabaster, slicked back hair. He looked like a crowned prince of crime, save for the brilliant ice blue, bloodshot eyes.

  “Well, look at this,” the pale man said. “The great Mantium and his harem of superheroines, finally seeing what the government does with their tax dollars.”

  “Jess,” I whispered, trying to give her the signal.

  “I told you, it’s fucking ‘Corset’,” Jess fired back to mind.

  “Fine, Corset,” I said in my mind’s eye. “What is he?”

  “I can’t find his mental tune,” she said, holding two fingers to her temple. “He must be using his jump ability to hide it.”

  “What’s the matter?” the man taunted, placing Hera at his feet outside of the portal and then lightly tapping his temple. “Can’t read my mind?”

  “What do you want?” I yelled out.

  “It’s not what I want, Mantium,” he said. “It’s what they have… of yours.”

  He pointed to a distant spire, crowded with human villainess subjects. One capsule stood out, as its contents looked like a jigsaw puzzle of a body stitched and sewn together. I focused my eyes and saw the man’s familiar reptilian features, his blonde, curly hair floating in the gelatinous syrup.

  My stomach sank.

  Ari. How?

  I had seen the military blow his almost two-hundred-feet-tall body to pieces after he’d been infected by Tessa.

  “Look familiar?” the man called out.

  Anger swelled in the deepest recesses of me. I could feel my eyes burning with their infrared warmth, ready to burn whoever did this.

  “What did you do to him?” I yelled out, the red smoke wafting from my eyes.

  “Oh no,” he said. “I am only of my master, Lazarus—but he and Ari? They are cut from the same cloth. Offspring of Tessa’s virus.”

  “Give us Hera,” Jess yelled.

  “Oh, I’m gonna give her to you.” He leaned down toward the two-toned Gemini, encapsulated below him, and broke the glass. “As you know, superheroines are not our type. We prefer the more… vile.”

  He reached into the broken tube as the goo poured out and he grabbed Gemini by her hair, pulling her out as if she was a rag doll. I was ready to tear the railings from their brackets, but Jess stopped me, carefully studying what he was doing. From his back, four, gooey, pronged tentacles grew and penetrated Gemini.

  I charged my eyebeams, looking for the right body to hit without taking them both out.

  “What’s he doing to her,” Jess cried out.

  I charged down, shocked as I looked closer. A black necrotic tissue had begun to form where the tentacles touched her, eating away at her.

  “Lazarus can make you like me…better and stronger,” he yelled out to Jess and I.

  I blasted at his footing with my eyes. “Let her go.”

  The man pulled his gooey tentacles from Gemini and held her aloft, her body slumped and taking on a more discolored white.

  “You see, we already—”

  He fumbled his hands on her wet hair and dropped her.

  My heart skipped a beat, and I kicked the terrace, smashing an opening, but Jess was quick to stop me.

  “No, I’ll get her.” She put her arm up and pressed two fingers to her temple.

  “You get Hera.”

  Gemini’s body slowed down to a halt. Her skin was in bad shape from the four gouges she’d received. Jess’s telekinetic powers were young, but I could see that she had a handle on getting our girl to safety.

  I shot my eyes back to the culprit: the man who had tried to kill my team — the jumper with a hidden agenda.

  I blasted my eyebeams toward him, just above Hera’s slumped body, making sure not to hit her. My aim was too high, and the pale man ducked the blast with ease.

  “You and Lazarus are not so different, Mantium,” he said, now looking down at Hera and placing one foot to Hera’s back as she lay on the ground. “We are your allies. We want the same thing.”

  “Right now, all I see are foes,” I said.

  The pale creature balled up his fist, and a portal ripped open behind him.

  “Send my respects to Tessa,” he spat.

  Then he kicked Hera over the edge of the spire and went through his portal.

  Hera was falling.

  “I can’t get them both,” Jess said, already struggling with Gemini.

  “You need to push me to her,” I yelled out.

  I leapt off the broken terrace in a swan dive, smoothing any air resistance I could. I felt Jess in my mind and acceleration upon my body. It wasn’t much, but it could be enough. Floors passed by in a blurred haze.

  My hand got close enough to Hera’s foot that I could grab her ankle. With a quick pull, her body was with mine. I held her in an embrace, cuddled away from the oncoming ground. Random thoughts came to mind.

  Terminal velocity. Thirty-two feet per second.

  BOOM!

  4

  Roadside Motel

  After forcing our way out of the compound, and killing a few troops — which I was glad Hera did not see — we found our van on the premises and hightailed out of there before more reinforcements could be called.

  The place we ended up shacking up for the night wasn’t far from the nightmare we’d just experienced. It was a roadside hotel that Jess had spotted and said she ‘had a good feeling’ about, but I didn’t share that impression. None of this felt right. The hunt, my abilities changing, a jumper feeding on villains, and now I find my exploded best friend stitched back together and kept alive as some kind of experiment. Who knew what kind of creatures they’d cooked up with his DNA/Gatica profile?

  I looked back at Crystal, tending to Gemini’s wounds. I couldn’t help but notice Crystal’s gorgeous thighs poking through the slits of the trenchcoat we’d given her to cover her nude bodysuit. She smiled at me and then gently patted Gemini’s head, motioning her head back down to our fallen comrade.

  This is a goddamn mess.

  Jess came out of the hotel lobby swinging their hips and her hands, proud of the room she secured for the night.

  Probably got a discount by flirting with the desk clerk.


  She hopped in the driver’s seat.

  In the rearview, I saw the large capsule in the furthest back seat of the van, with Ari’s gator-like body soaking in a vat of crimson liquid.

  It’s probably oxygenated and past its time. We’re going to have to crack that thing open like a soft-boiled egg soon and pull him out.

  In front of Ari, Hera was coming to, slowly shaking her head and looking wild-eyed as she remembered the events that had transpired. I could read the jaded look on her face. She was tired and disappointed that she’d been overtaken — twice.It was not something she was accustomed to.

  She looked back and was startled by the sizable container that looked alien in tech.

  “What the hell happened?” she asked.

  I frowned, looking at Jess and Crystal. “You got taken again, Gem got infected with something we don’t know, and…”

  Hera was quiet; I could tell that she didn’t like when I pointed out her shortcomings.

  “And what?” she prompted.

  “They were holding Ari,” Jess said.

  “Ari?” Hera asked, her mouth agape as she touched the glass, wiping away the condensation building on its surface. “What the hell did they do to him?”

  “We’re gonna find out,” I said.

  I pulled the van around the back of the hotel, pulling up to the room. The early morning was starting to rise. We made it just in time to sneak the capsule into the room.

  I motioned for the ladies to get the door to the room. I bulked up my skin and hardened the flesh of my arms, opening the back of the van. With one arm, I lifted the capsule, and the van’s struts made a wrenching noise, relieved of the weight. In my metal form, the capsule was surprisingly light.

  I carried it through the double bedroom and into the bathroom, resting it inside the tub, against the wall. The girls were behind me. From my position, I could see that the front door was shut and locked.

  I looked at Hera, who was now fully alert, but deep down, I could see the worry she carried for Ari. He had been our friend and coworker when all this happened — when Tessa broke loose from the SubSpace. Iconoclast Games had still been paying his family as a result of a wrongful death lawsuit, until the company went bankrupt.

  I turned back to the capsule and stood it up with my left hand, punching through the glass with my right. Gelatinous goo came pouring out of the cracked opening and into the tub.

  I stuck my fingers into the opening in the glass and peeled the rest open like a hard-boiled egg. A thin plastic membrane tried to hold the shards together, but it was eventually torn away.

  I tipped the capsule forward and caught Ari’s pieced-together head, stitched shut with black sutures, just before it hit the bathtub. Hera knocked away the rest of the glass, and we pulled him out, laying him on a set of towels.

  Jess knelt down and placed her fingers on his temples. She closed her eyes and concentrated hard. I lowered myself, watching her eyes roll around beneath her eyelids.

  “After San Diego,” she relayed, seeing the events unfold in her mind’s eye, “they collected his body parts and stitched him back together.”

  “How in the hell did he survive?” I asked.

  “His virus, it’s mutated, like all ours have. He has an incredible healing factor now,” she said.

  I unbound the metal around my body, and touched his wounds with the flesh of my finger. His stitches were deep and thick, but his face was the same as when we’d left him in San Diego — gator-like.

  “Jesus,” I said, trying to imagine the horror the secret government program had put him through.

  “They’ve had him here, living off the dead. Intravenously feeding him the remains of those who didn’t survive,” Jess continued, almost throwing up.

  “What were they doing?” Hera asked.

  “They were categorizing his DNA, his Gatica,” Jess said. “Making something new. A defense against supervillains.”

  “Corset!” Crystal yelled from the bedroom.

  I motioned for Jess to stay with Ari while I shot past Hera. On one of the double beds, Crystal was holding down Gemini’s wrists as the woman convulsed heavily.

  I formed the metal around my skin and laid the weight on her scrambling limbs. She was unable to move.

  Her mouth foamed and her eyes became a deep black. Within a minute, I noticed the darkened half of her two tones become a chalk white. She was looking more and more like her sire — the man that had given her the altered infection.

  She started to scream out. Her calls were maddening, able to woo or paralyze her victim.

  “Cover her mouth,” I yelled to Crystal. “Hera, get the IV dose we’ve been working on.”

  “But we need to test it first,” Hera protested.

  “I don’t care,” I yelled out. “Inject her.”

  Gemini emitted muffled screams under Crystal’s hand as she screamed and kicked, but she couldn’t throw me off. Still, if Crystal let her hand off, it would be over. Men were her specialty, and even I would be fodder to her.

  Luckily, we’d been working on a more conventional way of administering Hera’s cure for the villain virus, hoping to help curb the ones that we had to kill or in this case, call Hera’s bluff — like she would kill someone. Although, the serum was still experimental, but I couldn’t think of another way we could help Gem.

  “Fucking bitch!” Crystal grunted. “She bit me.”

  I started to feel hypnotized by Gem’s sweet screaming serenade. The shrieks were exasperating yet heavenly. I could feel my fists start to loosen. I felt like floating.

  I felt another person come stand next to me, holding a syringe the size of a fist. Its needle was at least six inches long. She pressed a few drops of the clear liquid out to make sure there was no air left inside the vessel.

  Hera shook her head at me, knowing Gem’s song was having an effect.

  “Men,” she huffed.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Crystal asked, nursing her bite.

  Hera just pushed me over and slammed the needle directly into Gemini’s chest.

  THUNK!

  She squeezed the contents of the ampoule into Gemini, and her convulsions slowed. The kicking and screaming halted. I slowly got up to see her white spots begin to fade, but not completely.

  I looked at Hera and sank to the ground, relieved Gemini was reverting to somewhat normal.

  That’s when, from the corner of my eye, I saw them. Jess was propping up a fully awake Ari walking him from out of the bathroom. He blinked his reptilian eyes and gave a smug, stitched-up grin, his teeth sharp and gator-like.

  “Yo,” he finally said.

  The night was far from over.

  Ari gave us the recap in his infamous Floridian, white trash, gator jargon. It was much slower than Jess’s burst of quick visions.

  The last thing he remembered was being infected by Tessa at the con, growing gigantic with anger, and then rampaging throughout the convention center. The only thing that saved him from dying was his reptilian ability to regenerate his limbs and body parts — in this particular instance, his brain. A reptilian ability that the agency had heightened when restructuring him.

  Hera didn’t believe him, but she always had a biased opinion when it came to villains. I, however, tried to see the good that one could possess despite the fact that they were doing harm. Sometimes being a villain meant the goal wasn’t entirely different from the hero’s. They just obtained it in a more…creative, extreme way.

  Ari told us the putrid stories of being fed the dead, and then being tortured and harvested inside what was called the BAMF program. Jess fake gagged some more into Crystal’s lap, while Hera nursed Gem’s stable wound sites. I could tell she was doing more than nursing by the way she was inspecting them.

  She was searching for an answer, as we all were.

  “If you are telling us the truth, then what was the creature exactly?” Hera asked. “A jumper? Some kind of modified virus carrier?”

&n
bsp; Ari was resting against the wall, next to the television. He finally looked like he had enough strength to pick himself up. I could tell he was still villainous inside. His slit eyes were thinly sharp in the shitty, ambient hotel light. We would have to turn him soon.

  “He’s not an A.I., he’s human,” Ari said, shaking his head and trying to muster the energy to talk. “Let me show you what I think.”

  He reached over and grabbed a notepad and pen from the desk. He began to draw what looked like a graph with two axes, numbered from four to ten and zero to ten, respectively. I immediately knew what he was doing.

  “Michael, you remember the matrix I showed you?” Ari asked.

  “Yes, but—,” I said.

  “Well, for you that missed my genius revelation of where Tessa falls on the graph, here it is,” Ari said, cutting me off and drawing some more. “She is on a whole other dimension. A third one. A Psychopath axis.”

  The girls were all impressed by the thoroughness and enthusiasm Ari exuded. However, I had to try to stop him from clowning around. Even with the revelation he showed me in San Diego, all the fucking graph showed me was Tessa was a crazy bitch.

  “I don’t think the Sexy-Evil Matrix will help us here,” I interjected.

  “No, it does. Now, there is another axis I haven’t told you about,” Ari said, drawing out another line from Tessa’s origin and labeling it ‘Lazarus’.

  “There is Psychopath axis, which Tessa lands on, and a Sociopath axis, which Lazarus extends from,” Ari said.

  “What’s the difference?” Jess asked, intrigued by the the nonsense Ari was spewing.

  “In essence, their difference reflects the nature versus nurture debate,” Ari said. “Psychopaths are born, whereas sociopaths are made. This guy was created in the BAMF program, but for what, I don’t know.”

  We looked at Gem lying limp on the bed, recovering from the infection. We all knew that her infection would hold the key to discovering this sociopath’s motive. However, by looking at Gemini and her condition, Hera’s new serum was weak and would only hold the new infection off for so long. As long as we administered small doses over time, she could manage for now.