Secrets of a D-List Supervillain (22 page)

“I’ve always wanted a woman to talk about shoving something up my ass. As to where I’m headed, it’s back to the location where we had our first date. Add it to the list of reasons to attack Branson, Missouri. A week ago, I saw Paul West there on a satellite image. I think I’m going to go pay him a visit and say hello. Are you sure you want to come along. I might just be going there to see what he’ll give up before I kill him.”

“Which do you want, Cal? His blood or a lead on the Overlord?”

“He’ll break one way or the other,” I reply.

“I can break him,” she says.

“Really?” I stammer. I didn’t expect that.

“Cal,” she says and gives a rather throaty laugh. “I’m not going to beat him up. He’s a man; I’m the incarnation of the Goddess of Love. The only thing I will break is Mr. West’s dark, twisted, little, heart.”

Having had my heart broken by her once before, I think Paul would be better off letting me kill him. It is less cruel.

We land briefly in a farmer’s field about sixty miles from Mount Olympus and I drag Larry into the barn. Stacy’s Centurion armor follows, and she helps get Red back up the poop chute.

On the other end, I wear some protective gloves and arm-sleeves to help pull him through. The strong radioisotope wouldn’t stand a chance of getting up to the surface, so our base remains secure, but I think it is a good idea to get him out of those contaminated clothes and into his spare costume while we bag up his other one. I worry about the radium exposure if it got into his lungs, but maybe his telekinetic powers shielded him, or can be used to remove it from his body.

“How should we clean our armor?” Stacy asks as Wendy and I drag Larry to the couch.

“They sometimes use a paste-like plastic substance that is applied then peeled off during decontamination, but I was thinking that we take a dip in that pool at the Overlord’s Branson estate. If that doesn’t work, you can lean on your Uncle Sam to get you the right decon equipment. Do you still have a watertight seal?”

“I’m good,” she answers.

“Any word on Gravmatar?”

“Our medical team is working on him, and Robin has sent the chariot to Columbia to bring his personal physicians. Even if he is imprisoned on our planet, I don’t like the idea of what the Rigellians would do if they find out he’s been killed. I was going to ask Apollo to pick us up after we got Larry back to you, but Gravmatar’s health takes precedence.”

“Did they find anything at the launch site?” I ask, and begin unsnapping Larry’s costume. No doubt, if Bobby was here he’d be doing his best rendition of a porn soundtrack and irritating the hell out of me. Wendy’s holding a bag wide open for me to roll the costume into. “Andy? Can you interface with the environmental controls and shut off the vents to this area, and to where Gabby is sleeping? Best not to even chance exposing her to this.”

“All they found is more traps left by the Overlord. Everything okay back at the base, Cal?”

“Larry’s a bit heavier than I recalled, but we’re managing.”

Wendy attaches some monitoring sensors to him and activates a handheld. Her small fortune significantly upgraded our medical capabilities beyond the old wall mounted first aid kits and assorted eyewash stations.

“Pulse is good. Blood pressure is slightly elevated,” she reads off the results.

“All things considered,” I say, and bag up his mask and shirt; followed by dumping my arm-sleeves and gloves into the thick biohazard bag. “He’s in pretty good shape for taking thirty-five missile hits in such a short span. I’m not sure that even with all the extra shield emitters Mega could’ve stopped that onslaught.”

“Do we move him up to his room or just let him stay here?”

“Carrying him over here was enough for me,” I say. “Besides, he’s going to want to take several showers to get anything we missed. I’m already going to have to pitch this couch. There’s no need to crap up anywhere else. In fact, why don’t you go take a long shower and remind me to take one before I handle Gabba Gabba Do?”

“Got it. Since you’ve got a long flight ahead of you, why don’t you let Andy run the suit, and you get cleaned up yourself? Oh, don’t start with that frown Stringel. Andy won’t take the suit into combat without you.”

I just don’t like anyone else, even my best android friend, controlling the armor. Possessive and insecure? That would be yes and yes.

Even so, I bow to Wendy’s sensibility and run down the checklist to surrender control of my pride and joy to someone who isn’t me. I also patch the scanner monitoring Larry’s vitals into Andy’s circuit so he can alert me if anything changes for the worse.

“Hurry back, Cal,” Stacy says. “You can finish your story as soon as you’re done showering.”

“Actually, if I patch the audio up to my bathroom, I can talk and shower at the same time.”

“Two things at once?” she mocks. “I wouldn’t want you to stress yourself.”

“Ha, ha. Funny. Too bad you aren’t here. It would make showering more fun. It’s a damned shame I don’t have a shard big enough to use as an escape hatch from your armor. Actually, I can start by transmitting you the video from my suit on the night I went to liberate Larry.”

“Do you have any idea how much panic that created when everyone found out he was missing?”

Knowing she can’t see my smile, I laugh and say, “Watching people run around in a panic is something of a habit of mine. Even when I’m shallow, I try to be deep.”

“Or full of shit,” Stacy’s zinger follows me up the steps.

“That too,” I acknowledge.

• • •

There wasn’t much to be said about the area surrounding Asheville, North Carolina. It was as scenic as any other part of Appalachia, and looked to be more exciting as the flat portions of Nebraska that dominated my childhood and became the motivating factor for me to do well in school, so that I could leave and never return. Even so, twenty miles northwest of the largest city in the western part of North Carolina was mostly mountains, the Appalachian Trail, and one really special facility.

It had been a strange ride since I got my acceptance and scholarship to UCLA. If I could go back and tell that wet behind his ears kid something, I wasn’t sure if I’d have him swallow the red pill or the blue one.

The green tint from my night vision gear gave everything an unearthly glow. This was also my first real time out in the armor rather than sitting in the control chair.

Imaginary Larry was a world class telekinetic, and I had no idea if his powers could somehow muck with the armor. Plus, there was something about being in the suit that made the heart pump a little faster, and provided an extra edge that remoting sometimes lacked.

Sometimes being a “hands on kind of guy” is a good thing. Unless that crushes my ubersuit like a beer can; then it was a really bad idea.

Then again, I have that big shard installed in the tail section. I should be able to pull my legs up and slide right back through into the base if my suit gets a failing grade on the Imaginary Larry test.

Larry’s high school was more like a complex. Part of it is an actual old high school that’s been repurposed into a personal sanitarium. The nearby middle school, or at least that’s what Larry thought it to be, was an always manned, National Guard Armory.

I actually wasn’t too concerned with those dudes. It was three in the morning, and Larry was situated far enough away from any major population centers that the Olympians, and whatever reinforcements they could scrounge up, could recapture him before he got too far. He simply wasn’t worth the effort for the bad guys to control and transport to wherever they planned to unleash him. A few had tried and failed miserably, most notably General Devious who thought her own mental powers could soothe the savage beast.

Momentarily regaining his faculties didn’t sit well with him, and the General ordered a tactical withdrawal, with my old pal Maxine carrying her away at super speed, while Larry destroyed her floating throne chair and beat the snot out of her minions. The General’s catastrophic failure firmly established that only an idiot would ever try and free Larry from his padded cell.

Perhaps nature actually does abhor a vacuum, because it produced me—a bigger, better, idiot. A montage played in my mind of everyone I’d known who had, at one time or another, called me the “I” word, and it didn’t calm me.

“Is something wrong, Calvin?” Andy asked. The android was the only one I could recall who’d never accused me of being mentally challenged in some way, shape, or form.

“Just thinking of all the ways this can go wrong,” I replied.

“I am confident you will succeed. Based on the capabilities of your new Mechani-CAL suit, I estimate that you have a sixty-three percent chance of victory should you be forced to defend yourself from him.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Athough, I’m not sure I want to call this armor, Mechani-CAL. It seems like it is so much more.”

“What name would you choose for it? In almost all categories, it outclasses the performance parameters of the Ultraweapon armor.”

“With him going to prison, I guess I could start calling myself the new Ultraweapon. What do you think, pal?”

“It seems like an acceptable name for now. Perhaps you will come up with one that is more suitable, in the future.”

Andy doesn’t really understand human pettiness. I, on the other hand, am all too familiar with it. Taking Patterson’s name would be the icing on the cake! That’s right! I’m the new Ultraweapon and one badass mofo! What the hell? If a nuke couldn’t kill me, what’s the worst a forty-year old teenager could do?

Larry and the therapist playing his “dad” lived in a two-story farmhouse within walking distance from the school. Supposedly, he’d have his telekinetic construct “friends” over for sleepovers and study sessions. The therapist was a cousin to that Mather bastard I waxed at Mount Olympus, and also a projecting empath, but on a much weaker scale than MindOver.

While Andy disabled the alarm systems, I planned to use the hose that replaced one of my grenade launchers. It was hooked to a tank of knockout gas. The plan was to get in, snatch Larry while he dreamed, and take him somewhere else to meet his new world.

It was a good plan, which was precisely why I felt it was doomed to failure.

• • •

To the credit of my armor’s builder, namely me, it survived being dashed into the ground from one hundred and fifty feet in the air. One minute I’d been flying along with the sleeping prince on his twin-sized bed, and the next thing I experienced was the telekinetic pile driver.

The shields protested, losing forty percent and frying one emitter outright, but they held. Already, they were recovering as I pushed the suit into an upright position and brought my weapons online.

Larry’s bed was smashed into the ground and he stood next to it, flaring with his power. A small army of telekinetic constructs surrounded him.

When Wendy and I had fought him, she said that the Olympians usually wore him down until he dropped. That might take some time, but I didn’t have much to do anyway.

“Looks like we’re doing this the hard way,” I said, and opened up with the four pulse cannons. There were cases and cases of grenades and fifty caliber machine guns also available to me, but I still lamented not having some kind of unstoppable weapon yet.

His constructs swarmed over me, but the large number he created actually worked to my advantage. My shields were repowering faster than the constructs could wear them down. If he focused his attack into bolts like the one that had knocked me down, or into a couple of giant sized energy forms, I’d be in trouble.

With cannons blazing, I walked toward him like one of those stupid TV weathermen in a hurricane, trying not to let the band members climbing onto my back and beating at me with their instruments bother me. We’d crashed into the side of a mountain and he held the high ground, so it was a foot-by-foot struggle to break through the energy barring my way.

A construct in the form of a pole-vaulter slammed into me and I responded by turning on the fifty calibers and added something physical that he’d have to deal with. I also kicked on the sonics built into the thorax, thank you Bo Carr.

For the first time in my life, I actually was the unstoppable force, breaking through wave after wave of constructs. Though it slowed me, I cut off the steady stream of bullets. I didn’t want to injure the man if I could avoid it. I also eventually turned off the sonics.

The tide started to turn in my favor, and maybe on a subconscious level he was starting to panic. Detecting an energy anomaly ahead, I angled my shields forward and seconds later a powerful bolt smashed into them. The wedge of power I’d created in front of me turned white against the exertion, but stayed active. Larry’s bolts came at the expense of his constructs, which dwindled in number.

Seeing that wasn’t working, he spun and fled. Some of Larry’s “friends” tried to help him run, but I closed the gap and brushed them aside.

Finally, it was he and I. “Take it easy, Larry. I’m just here to give you your medal. Don’t you want your medal?”

“What medal?”

“The state championship basketball game in Charlotte; don’t you remember? You were the MVP.”

His medal might have once belonged to Chain Charmer’s husband, but that was beside the point.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Coach Cal. The basketball coach. Remember?”

“Uhhh, what are you wearing?”

“This? Oh, this is one of those suits they make for you to help you walk. I got in a bad car accident after you won the game and they only let me out of the hospital last week. When I found out you didn’t have your medal, I came to give it to you.”

Lying to someone not fully in possession of his faculties turned out to be really easy for me. I’d prepared this whole lie earlier with Andy and Bobby, but even so, it just flowed out of me as natural as could be.

I guess that doesn’t speak very well about me, but what’s a guy gonna do?

“Where’s my watch?” Larry asked in a panic. “Dad said he’d never forgive me if I lost it! It’s a priceless family heirloom.”