Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel (8 page)

“Chatty, isn’t he?” I said.

“Nobody talks things up like a Lemurian,” Showstopper added. “I’ve worked with a few of ’em on one of my uncle’s cattle ranches, and they treat everything like a battle. One of ’em goes to take a dump, he’ll come out speechifying about how he slew and conquered the slimy beasts that once dwelled within his bowels.”

Artok hissed. Lemuria and Atlantis had hated each other for centuries.

“Disgusting,” Artok said.

Showstopper shrugged. “Maybe, but they tell their stories well.”

“They are boastful and proud,” Artok said, haughty.

“And you aren’t?” Iron Bear laughed. “I’ve worked with both your kinds when I was an enforcer on the black markets. Lemurians, they speak big but tell the truth. Atlanteans, they talk flowery, but almost all of it is a lie.”

Artok looked scandalized. “We speak the pure truth, only embellishing for greatest dramatic impact because we have true respect for the art that is speech! And if you wish to split fins, our women are
far
more beautiful than theirs, and you can trust that they were always women.”

He did have us there. For better or worse, Atlanteans were near-universally gorgeous.

I had nothing to add to this conversation. These people had been around, had seen and done things that I could only dream of. They’d make far more interesting additions to the team than me.

I had to work on that if I wanted to make it.

With two more chops severing the gene-job’s tail and one of its hind legs, the scaleface darted in for the kill, stabbing it with his dagger in the middle of its back. Stroking a jewel at the base of the weapon, the dagger glowed a bright blue. The monster let loose one last, plaintive scream of pain before wisps of steam shot from its wounds and mouth. The scaleface knelt down beside it, whispering a quick, wordy prayer in his native tongue.

“Cooked ’er up real nice from the inside out. Not bad,” Showstopper said, impressed.

“Indeed. She’ll make a fine meal,” the scaleface replied, looking to all of us except Artok. Looking at the charred monstrosity, my stomach did a somersault.

“You don’t expect us to actually eat that, do you?” I asked. I didn’t want to vomit a second time today.

The scaleface sneered, “Let not your human squeamishness guide you, psychic warrior.”

Psychic Warrior.
That had a nice ring to it.

“The rules as you know them do not exist out here. We know not if we will sleep on fine feather beds or on the dirt beneath our feet—”

“Cots,” Odigjod interjected, waggling a hand back and forth in a noncommittal gesture. “Not fine, not floor.”

“—we do not know if they will feed us, or if we must find our own food—”

“They’ve an mess hall. Mostly cold stuff, but they said they’d have an Subway truck by the end of week,” Odigjod said again.

“Subway? Nice,” I said. Odigjod nodded.

“They’re putting in a metro?” Iron Bear asked.

“No, Subway, they make sandwiches,” I explained.

“We do not have these in Lithuania.”

“Your
Iron Curtain
has its disadvantages, no?” Artok smiled.

I said, “Oh man, you don’t know what you’re missing, you can—”

The scaleface roared primally, stabbing his sword into the ground.

“Do none of you realize that we are trapped here, and that without each other we will not survive? This island is harsh, and our captors are harsher. You may think you are strong, but I have watched you all. None of you knows how to fight. I am a warrior of the House of Kosal. I survived the War of the Thirteen Houses! I have defeated the Sons of R’lyeh cultists on the Plains of M’tsalka! I have been to war against foes greater and more dangerous than any of you have ever seen. This land is harsh, but it is nothing compared to my home; I can teach you how to thrive off it. Stand by my side and together we can survive and become the team that is needed to bring order to this world!”

Showstopper was right. The scaleface was good at making speeches. He may have looked like a giant lizard stuffed into red and gold medieval knight’s armor, but he knew what he was talking about. I didn’t want him to be
my
leader or anything, but I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, he’d be good to keep around.

I stopped thinking that about two seconds later when the tree behind him bent over, opened its jagged, toothy mouth and gobbled the scaleface up. He tried to fight the tree as it reared back up, screaming and hollering and kicking his legs. The screaming stopped when the tree bit down on his armor with a loud, meaty crunch. The kicking stopped then, too, but that probably had more to do with the fact that his bloody, severed legs dropped free from the tree’s mouth not long after it bit down.

Artok, Showstopper, and I screamed in horror.

Odigjod simply looked up at the tree and said, “Wow.”

The tree belched, loudly.

“Can we go find the barracks now?” I asked Iron Bear.

We were the first walkers to arrive at the barracks, though there were nearly twenty others already there when we entered. Fliers, mostly, with a couple speedsters and teleporters to even things out. We’d been set up in the remains of a small company town Professor Death had made for his minions, and while most of the buildings were burned out and full of bullet holes from when the Protectors invaded in the early 70s, there were a couple sets of barracks, a mess hall, and group showers still intact. There was some electricity, and running water that was clear more often than it was brown. We even had a great view of the force field that bisected the island, keeping us prisoner on this side under the ever watchful gaze of Death Mountain.

Word had it that the Protectors invaded before Professor Death could finish carving his face into the island.

I hated it already. It was hot and humid and full of bugs, the food was mediocre, and the barracks slept like fifty people and had no privacy.

How was this supposed to lead to fame and fortune?

How would this lead to anything that Blackjack promised?

Well, everything except the pussy at least. That was pretty prime here.

She also had the freedom part right. If you ignored the Creepers buried under our skin, we were pretty much left to our own devices. We could eat what we wanted, when we wanted. We could go to bed whenever we wanted, hang out with whoever we wanted. By nightfall, when the last of the stragglers had made it to the barracks (by then there were seventy-three of us left), we had a few bonfires going. It felt like summer camp, or at least what I always imagined summer camp to be like since my parents never shelled out the dough to send me.

There was a surprising amount of singing and dancing considering that there wasn’t any alcohol going around. Artok had an audience of nearly a dozen girls swooning by his fire as he played an Atlantean lyre, singing songs of home and telling stories of his heroics on the hike over, saving us poor humans from monsters and scalefaces.

There were stories and gossip aplenty.

Everybody was talking about the competition.

Everybody was certain they’d make the team.

There were small cliques and alliances forming already, just like on TV. Carnivore (yeah, he’d made it this far, unfortunately) had made some fast friends with a guy dressed like a pirate, the ten-foot-tall Cyclops, and a short, fast-moving kid who literally looked like a brightly colored, angular, anime clown.

Seriously, if you caught him at just the right angle, he had only two dimensions. It was creepy.

People were laughing.

People were making out.

People were having fun.

None of them were me.

I sat by our bonfire, occasionally hovering a log into the flames and watching it burn. Odigjod kept Showstopper and Iron Bear laughing, jumping into the fire and making it transform into various funny faces. Firewall joined us, not so much out of desire as finding the least populated fire to work on her suit by. She’d destroyed a robot in the jungle and was adapting its tech to her suit. It was weird, seeing her outside of it; an average-looking (compared to the rest of the girls around here) girl with light brown skin and short, mussed-up black hair, her legs missing just below the knees and hands that moved with machine-like precision. Occasionally she’d say something like “Impressive, for its time,” but she mostly left us boys alone.

“It’s not fair,” I finally said.

“What? Us being trapped here?” Showstopper asked.

“No. I’m the most famous villain here. I killed Icicle Man! Why doesn’t everyone want to hang around me?” I complained.

Odigjod teleported out of the fire, putting a comforting claw on my shoulder. “We want to hanging around you!”

“Yeah, that helps,” I said, sarcastically. Odigjod let out a low coo before stepping back and again teleporting into the flames.

“It is not as bad as you think, I think,” Iron Bear said. “You are correct when saying that you are the most famous here. I doubt that anyone else here has made headlines like you, and I think they are jealous.”

Jealous?
That perked me up.

“Keep going,” I said.

“Well, look at it from their view. They enter into a competition that means either freedom or prison, and they think they all have a chance, but then they see you. They see
Celebrity Supervillain Apex Strike
. They see someone they think is going to be on the team for sure, and they are jealous that they do not have that,” he explained.

I looked to Showstopper. “You think that’s true?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Who cares about those assholes anyway? Once we get to competing and you show off what you can really do, they’ll be begging for your friendship just so they can get a few pointers from someone who’s actually been there. Not like some posers who want to make everyone think they have.”

He didn’t have to point to Artok or Carnivore, but I got the idea.

“Thanks guys, that really means a lot.”

Odigjod teleported in front of me. “Even Odigjod?”

I smiled, ruffling a hand through his fluttery ears. “Yeah, you too, Odigjod.”

There was a sharp, sarcastic laugh from across the flames. “You really believe all that bullshit?”

“It’s not bullshit,” Iron Bear said.

“Yeah, it is. You guys have just piled it so fucking high you can’t see what it is anymore,” Firewall said, using a severed, robotic arm to pull herself across the ground toward us.

“What’s bullshit?” I asked.

“The way they jack you off just because you got in a lucky shot at a superhero that had probably never fought a supervillain before,” she said.

“That wasn’t luck—”

“Yeah, it was. You were running, he caught you, he almost killed you, you killed him first, and you couldn’t run away fast enough.”

“You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t there.”

“No, I wasn’t. But I watched that video a few dozen times, and I know you’re not the hot shit you think you are. None of us are, really. Some of us are petty criminals, sure, and even a few real bad guys, but mostly if you look at our files we’re just a bunch of stupid kids the heroes know they can push around.”

“You’ve seen our files?” I asked, a bit taken aback.

She rolled her eyes as if I’d just asked the stupidest question in the world. “I can talk to machines. They do what I want them to. The computers on the boat had really shitty encryption.”

She looked down and started talking at her chest. “And yes, I know you guys are listening in on this, and if this was a big surprise you would have killed me by now. I know you want me here on the team because I’m that good, so don’t even give me a suspense shock, all right? That’d annoy me and slow down the upgrades on my suit and will mess up your whole ‘show and tell’ day tomorrow because I can put on a really, really good show if you don’t annoy me.”

It took me a moment to realize that she’d started talking to her Creeper.

“Hey, we’re bad guys,” Iron Bear said, defensively.

“No, you’re sweethearts,” Firewall stated.

“Wanna bet?” he asked, flexing his suit as if it were a second set of muscles.

She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve broken some legs for a black market mob boss, but you’ve smuggled goods to dissidents and refugees—for free—under your boss’s nose if you thought you could get away with it.”

She turned to Showstopper. “You’ve used your hive mind powers to create flash mob musical numbers in an effort to pick up women and jumpstart your career as a performance artist, and the heroes branded you a villain just to shut you up.”

“That works?” I asked.

He chuckled. “The girls and getting arrested part, yeah. The art… not so much, no.”

She turned to Odigjod. “And you… actually, they don’t have a file on you.”

Odigjod nodded. “Hell magic. We cannot show up in an formal file, it just does not working.”

“File or no, though, it doesn’t take a genius to see you’re a sweetheart,” she said.

He bowed. “Guilty.”

“See?” she said, moving her hand as though showing off a host of prizes. “Sweethearts.”

“So what you’re saying is, you don’t think we can cut it as supervillains?” I asked.