Secrets of a D-List Supervillain (23 page)

He was referring to the GPS unit they made him wear. It had taken Andy two minutes to override the damn thing and make it fall off Larry’s hand. I was going to have to check him for other tracking devices, but that could wait.

Needing a quick answer, I said, “I think your dad took it into town to have a repair shop put a new battery in it. Don’t worry. So, are you ready to get your medal?”

He seemed a little skeptical, but straightened up. Some of his remaining constructs came to his side and appeared to be cheering him on.

Opening a small compartment in my armor, I slid out the necklace and felt a pang of regret. If this worked, the boy who never grew up was about to be evicted from Neverland. I don’t normally face moral dilemmas, well that’s not true; I usually just don’t let them bother me that much.

Letting it drop over his head and onto his neck, I took two steps back and held my breath.

Larry grabbed his forehead with his right hand and sank to the ground. A couple of his constructs reached to help him, but they disappeared; followed quickly by all the other shapes that had been milling about.

“Mister Hitt? Can you understand me?”

“What’s... what’s going on...? I don’t... what.”

“Take it easy for a minute. Focus on my voice if that helps. You are a superhuman with incredible telekinetic powers. Those powers have been out of control for years. The necklace I just gave you dampens that power. Hopefully, you can think straight now. Do you understand this?”

Thrusting his left hand out, he screamed, “No!”

His energy became an extension of his hand and it was as large as I was. It crashed into me and sent the suit hurtling backward and I was reminded that I hadn’t been concerned about so many constructs before and was glad he didn’t just focus on just a single attack.

I wasn’t glad anymore.

The energy swelled around him, becoming a full body some twenty-feet tall, with him hovering in the center of it. Spending a good chunk of my life dealing with criminal lowlifes, I recognized the look of murderous rage on his face. Whatever was going on in his mind at that time wasn’t my problem.
He
was my problem!

“No!” he shouted again. “It’s not true!”

Both his transparent arms reached for me, but I used my jetpack and went skyward. He responded by ripping chunks of earth from the ground and throwing them at me.

It took all of one hit and the loss of a second shield emitter to break me out of my funk.

“Round two it is!” Four pulse cannons lanced downward and struck one of the arms he used to shield himself.

He ripped whole trees out and chucked them at me. I responded by flying higher and that’s when I knew he didn’t know how to effectively wield his powers. He doubled in size to forty feet, but I didn’t detect a corresponding change in energy output. Sure, he was bigger, but the power was less defined.

If he survives this, maybe I can help him with that,
I thought, and then let him have it.

Sustained fire from the pulse cannons rained down on him like a sleet storm and drove the telekinetic version of King Kong to his knees. When he curled into a fetal ball, I stopped and waited for thirty seconds before descending next to the giant head.

“Mind telling me what that was about?” I demanded, my voice booming over my external speakers.

The energy-being dissipated, and all that was left was a forty year old man, sobbing in the middle of what used to be the side of a mountain that now looked like it had taken a dozen missile strikes.

He mumbled something about his mom and I said, “What?”

“I killed her! My powers went out of control right before I graduated high school and I killed her! Don’t you understand! I killed my own mother!”

Guess that explains why they never had a “mom” living with him. Also, why he never graduated, and always reset to a ninth grader every time he was about to get his diploma.

“Damn,” I said, not expecting that. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, Larry. But you’ve been torturing yourself over this for over twenty years, and it sounds like it was beyond your control.”

“Cal,” Andy said. “I recommend you keep him talking. If you get him to confront the issue, it may defuse the situation.”

“Copy that,” I said.

“Who’re you talking to?” Larry asked. I hadn’t switched off the microphone.

“You ever hear of Andydroid? He’s on my team and wants to meet you. But before that, tell me more about your mom.”

My inquiry pushed him back into a funk and he said, “She had the power too, but nothing like mine,” he babbled. “Mom was always on me about control and not hurting anyone. We got into an argument... she didn’t... want me to go to college until she said I was... ready... and I... I...”

I guess I’ve gotten better with the pop psychologist bit. “Anyone with powers has made mistakes. I’ve made enough of my own to know that. There’s plenty of blood on my hands too, Larry. If you let us, we can help.”

“I don’t want your help! I should die for what I did!”

Okay, maybe I still suck monkeyballs at head games. How about this, then?

In response I turn toward one of the trees that’d been knocked over and had the root ball exposed and fired all my weapons at it. Satisfied with the destruction, I turned back to him. “You’ve got three choices, Larry. Number one, take off the necklace and go back to being the ninth grader worried about oversleeping for your morning class and if Peggy Sue likes you. A few more decades and you can use social security to pay for your lunch money. Number two, I leave this mountain with your blood on my hands. I’m sure if you learned how to use your powers better, you might be able to stop me from killing you, but you haven’t. If you really want your ticket punched, I’ll be your huckleberry! Or, you can pick what’s behind door number three, which means you accept what happened twenty years ago and man the hell up! Obviously, your mom was right, and you weren’t ready for college, but the only school I’m offering is the school of hard knocks. You’ll be around a few other misfits of the superhuman world and you can figure out your powers, and figure out what kind of man you want to be. Take a few minutes and think it over, Hitt. This is the biggest decision you’ll ever make, maybe the last one too, so think long and hard.”

Activating my jetpack, I gave the guy some space. Andy immediately asked me, “Calvin, I fail to see how eliminating Imaginary Larry would advance our cause?”

“Can’t make a person who doesn’t want to live, want to, Andy. If he wants a mercy killing, I can’t think of a good reason to deny it.”

“You were able to coax Aphrodite out of suicidal depression during the bug crisis,” he replied.

“Not the same, in my eyes. Aphrodite was a functioning hero before the bugs. This guy’s a train wreck. The only person who can get him out of this mess is himself. They’ve had an army of specialists try to help him through the years. Other than the necklace, I’ve got nothing to offer him when it comes to how to live your life. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretending to be dead to the world at the moment.”

“Not quite knowing what it is like to be alive makes it hard to fathom why someone would want to abandon it so quickly.”

The robot had a point, but I wasn’t really the person to debate deep issues like that. Instead, I went for something we could both grasp. “Did you get the readings on his energy levels? He was pumping out megajoules even with the necklace on. You could power a whole city with what he’s capable of!”

“Quite true, Calvin.”

“Yeah, if he’d compressed those rocks into a tiny missile and shot it at me, it’d be like one of those railguns the Navy keeps working on. Even with my extra shielding I wouldn’t have stood a second hit from something like that unless I was really, really lucky.”

Holy shit! That’s it!

“Andy! Andy! I know what we should make for this suit’s ultimate weapon!”

“Based on your level of excitement, I am guessing you would like to make a railgun. Is this correct?”

“You bet your ass it is!”

“It is difficult to imagine a reason why wagering an integral part of your anatomy is justified. As to your proposition, we will require an additional power supply for this base in order to charge the weapon, but the space in this area should be sufficient. However, the cost of the materials would be a problem.”

“I was already trying to figure out how to approach Wendy, this just gives me another reason.”

I did see an interview where she said she’d be happy to see me one more time. The question is would she be happy enough to buy me the parts to make a hypersonic railgun?

For the next few minutes, I went over the possibilities of what we could fit into the area. That went on until Andy reminded me that it had been twelve minutes and I should go check on Larry.

I’m OCD, not ADD, but who wouldn’t get distracted by the prospect of their very own megaweapon?

“I was beginning to think you weren’t coming back for me.” Larry said, sounding a bit defeated.

“Sorry,” I replied. “I got held up with another issue. Did you decide what you want to do?”

“I remembered that woman, she got into my mind and said that she’d help me make everyone pay. I didn’t like that.”

“Oh, General Devious,” I said. “Yeah, she’s a megabitch. As I recall, you sent her packing with her tail between her legs.”

“What do you want from me?”

“A dead guy, who could see the future, sent me a warning that something is gonna happen in San Francisco in a few months. His warning said I needed the most powerful people I could find. Most supers would lose half their powers with that necklace on. On you, that’s a good thing, but even with it, you’re still one of the most powerful people on this planet. I want you on that team, at least for whatever is going down in California. You wanna walk after that, I won’t stop you. In the meantime, you can lay low at my base and figure out what you want to do with your life; or you can take either of the other options tonight.”

The manboy thought it over. He didn’t strike me as the suicidal type. If he was, he’d have done himself in already.

Finally he said, “Dying’s like giving up, and Mom only wanted me to be the best person I was able to be. I don’t want to go back to thinking I’m some thirteen year old, so I guess I’ll go with you. Maybe if I work real hard at being a hero, it’ll make her proud of me.”

Guess he’s been upgraded from Neverland, to the Island of Misfit Toys. There I go again, mixing metaphors.

“Fair enough, Mister Hitt. We got the one government tracking device off of you, but Andy needs to scan you to see if there are any others. We’ve spent too much time here, so let’s put some distance between us and here and then meet up with him.”

“You weren’t really going to kill me,” Larry stated, rather than asked.

“Why would you think I wouldn’t?” I answered.

“Well, you’re a superhero. You wouldn’t do that. Hey, why are you laughing?”

“Get to know me a little and you’ll understand. Now use your telekinesis and grab onto my arm. I’ll fly us deeper into the mountains and Andy will meet us when we land.”

The dude didn’t make it a hundred feet before he started blowing chunks all over the suit.
Airsickness! Add that to his list of problems... and mine too.

• • •

“I don’t think you would have killed him,” Stacy says.

“I agree with your assessment,” Andy adds.

Hesitating before I toss the towel into the hamper, I instead set it on the sink. I’d need to check it for contamination before deciding its fate.

Glad they seem so certain, I think. Wish I could say the same.

“I’m just happy I didn’t have to make the decision. Larry’s a decent guy who was dealt a pretty raw deal. Except for being a decent guy, he’s a lot like me.”

As I finish telling Stacy about how I recruited Larry, Wendy marches in with a fussy Gabolicious in her arms and holds her out to me. She’s got her “I’m annoyed face” on. I’m pretty used to it at this point.

“Naked here!” I protest.

“If you spent less time running your trap, you’d have some clothes on. Your daughter wants you and won’t take no for an answer. Besides, been there done that, and she’s the proof. I’m going to finish getting into costume. Andy, what’s the ETA?”

With Stacy’s stifled laughter crackling on the channel, Andy replies, “We are currently ninety minutes out. Larry is awake, but I have told him to remain on the couch until one of you can provide protective clothing so that he may access the showers.”

When Wendy looks at me, I smile and hold up the Gabster. “Can’t watch her, get dressed and help Larry at the same time. Booties and coveralls are in the utility closet. Yell, if you need anything. You’re really good at that. If he’s up for it, he’ll be able to put it on with his powers.”

“You blow chunks, Stringel. You know that?”

Smiling at my daughter I say, “Mommy doesn’t like to lose arguments. That’s right! No, she doesn’t.”

“Get over yourself,” she retorts.

I point at the speaker and say, “They were just saying what a decent guy I am.”

The brunette baby mama gives a derisive snort and says, “You keep saving Andy’s life, and as for Aphrodite, it’s a known fact that gorgeous women have questionable choices in men. If she’s the most gorgeous in the world, that makes you the biggest questionable choice in history! Compared to her last boyfriend, you might actually be a decent guy, but I know better.”

At least she admits I’m an upgrade over Lazarus Patterson, may he never rest in peace.

As Wendy vacates my suite and my girlfriend openly cackles across the radio link, I grab a fresh towel and carry my daughter out to her playpen. She fusses when I set her in it, but I give her Mr. Quackers and hope the plushy duck buys me enough time to get changed. The way she is yanking at him makes me wonder if this will be the stuffed animal’s last stand.
This isn’t a playpen! This is Sparta!

“I hope you don’t get your mom’s temper,” I say to my daughter as I note the gleeful look of destruction on her otherwise angelic face. “Then again, my temper usually ends up with people dead, so here’s hoping you get your disposition from someone else in the family.”

Pulling on a fresh set of undies, I grab a pair of shorts and one of my many Biz Markie concert shirts. To the speaker I say, “Where’d we leave off before I was so rudely interrupted by a washed up TV starlet?”

Wendy chimes in from downstairs, “The speaker is on down here, I heard that!”

Of course, I knew that already. “You just washed up, you were a TV starlet, and were pretty rude about interrupting us. Tell me what part of that is untrue?”

Her angry growl is so worth it. If Shakespeare wrote a play about us, it would be
The Taunting of the Shrew
. I would probably be killed at the end of the play, but I’ve learned that death is what you make of, or perhaps fake of, it.

“Larry was yakking all over your armor,” Stacy says. “I’m guessing that irritated you.”

“I can’t help it if I don’t like to fly!” Larry says defensively.

“No harm done,” I reply to him. “Anyway, Larry came here, started mastering his powers, got season tickets to the Panther’s games, met Bobby and learned the high art of watching porn on one screen while playing video games on the other—and the judge at Bobby’s sentencing hearing said he’d never have anything to offer society!”

“Hey, that’s harsh,” Larry protests.

“In defense of Mr. Hitt,” Andydroid states. “He is also taking college level courses from me and is a very capable student.”

“He also cleans up after himself, and his cooking is worlds beyond what you are capable of!” Wendy fires back.

I start to teasingly ask how many times Larry took home economics and stop myself. That’s a low blow that I’m not willing to throw.

Instead I go with, “I build robots to clean up after me and give me time to raise a beautiful little butt kicker. And you’re not one to point fingers, Ms. Laguardia or should I say Ms. ‘Where’s the catering truck?’ Your cooking isn’t much better than mine.”

“Many of our culinary problems would be solved if you would prioritize building a new body for me,” Andy comments. “I am able to emulate master chefs when properly outfitted.”

“You know how busy I’ve been, Andy,” I protest. It’s kind of a hollow one. I’ve been keeping my friend on the back burner for way too long, and if I’m being honest, Andy is more like a sculpture than a robot. I’m afraid that nothing I build will be up to the genius of his creator. Albright is a DaVinci, and I’m a guy who makes stuff go boom.

“I can give you a detailed breakdown on the amount of time you’ve spent in the past week fornicating, if you would like?” Andy deadpans. Clearly, he thinks working on the new chassis is more important than sleeping with Stacy. He’s very wrong in this instance.

“Well, this just proves you all are as dysfunctional as any team I’ve been around. Say, Andy?” Stacy interrupts our banter. “Why can’t you build your own body?”

“I can repair an existing body, but my programing prohibits creation of a brand new body. Doctor Albright specifically encoded this in his robots to prevent them from self-replication.”

“That might be a problem,” she says.

“What are you thinking, Stacy?” I say.

“Well, I know Robin will go to Doctor A. and find out if there are any things our team can do, if we are forced to fight the Megasuit. If you know of any other backdoors in your code Andy, you might want to consider how to defend against them.”

“The lady has a point,” Wendy says. “Since Cal is the best qualified to help you, and it’s his fault to begin with, he’s going to check your code for any Easter eggs after he finishes your new body.”

By the end of that, Wendy sounds rather smug. “Sometimes I regret asking you to be the leader, La Guardia.”

“Not as often as I do,” Wendy says in a sing-song voice. “Go ahead and tell her, Cal. You’re pretty much up to that part anyway.”

• • •

It was a miserable day for a reunion. All the credit in the world goes to those folks who fly out into hurricanes to take measurements, but gusts of wind up to one hundred and twenty miles per hour kicked the suit around as I approached the eyewall of Hurricane Ishmael.

Sixty miles north, the southeastern part of Cuba was already taking a pounding from the storm, and a certain pregnant superheroine was out in the middle of it all, trying to weaken it. This was the chance I’d been waiting for to get her alone. Her mother had hired Paper Tiger to be her bodyguard and he rarely left Wendy’s side. There was even a rumor of a budding romance between the two of them. I wouldn’t say I was jealous, but she could do better.

She’s done worse!

Using logic, I was able to narrow my search area. She had to be on the northern side of the storm, near the center. I tapped into weather buoys to try to find any area where the barometric pressure was significantly higher than the rest, but that came up empty. There were bursts of radio transmissions from her, garbled in static, which I used in a “getting warmer/getting colder fashion.”

Essentially, she was a five foot three inch needle in the haystack of a dark and angry sky. It took me exactly one hundred and twenty-seven minutes of searching before I finally located her, or more appropriately, the six hundred foot tall waterspout, rotating counter to the direction of the hurricane, which was what caught my eye. She was chipping away at it, and had been for hours—all in the name of improving relations between the US and it’s considerably smaller neighbor.

I don’t think it really does a damn bit of good for international relations, but Wendy is the most popular hero in Cuba who isn’t a national, so bully for her. Even if she’d clearly like to be somewhere else.

My baby mama was seven months along, and past the point where doctors would advise against a normal human flying in airplanes. Several people were questioning whether even a superhero should be out in this, given how far along she was. I happened to be one of them. Her leadership of the Gulf Coast Guardians was spotty at best, because her condition somewhat limited her ability to fight crime. I was certain that very much annoyed her, because I knew she wanted to lead a team, and not simply bankroll it. Sheila didn’t seem to mind, because it left her in charge most of the time.

Approaching the waterspout, I had Andy begin jamming the Guardian’s frequencies and hoped it would be seen as just a random atmospheric disruption occurring in a monstrous Category Five hurricane.

The windspeed picked up as I approached Wendy’s funnel cloud. If Larry was here, he’d be spewing vomit everywhere. As it was, I wasn’t doing so hot when I broke through the outer rim.

My worries about how much longer it would take to find her were pushed aside in a near fit of hysterical laughter. She had this neon orange vest thing on. I didn’t know whether to take a picture, or mindwipe the image from my brain before it became trapped in there.

She didn’t notice me because she was fiddling with her headset and looking angry, so, I drew to within twenty feet of her and activated the floodlights attached to my armor’s shoulders.

Startled, the headset fell from her hands and was swept away by the currents of air swirling around us. Guess I didn’t have to worry about her calling for backup.

Her mouth was moving, but it’s not exactly like we could carry on a conversation in the middle of her smaller storm, which sat in the middle of a much larger storm. So, I held my hands up in what I hoped to be a peaceful gesture and beckoned her to come closer. I would have moved toward her, but I was having a hard enough time staying level.

Wendy waited for a few seconds; no doubt evaluating how much of a threat I was, before drifting to within five feet.

“What do you want?” she screamed.

“Sorry for the scare, but I wanted to come talk to you in private,” I used my external microphones to let the suit answer for me.

“I don’t recognize you!”

“I’m still working on a name, how does the new Ultraweapon sound?”

“Retarded!” she replies. “Well, you went to all the trouble to find me, what’s so fucking important?”

“I hope you can rein in that mouth of yours when you’re raising our daughter!”

“What did you say?”

“I said our daughter! Or am I that easy to forget? I’d open the helmet to prove it, but there’s no way I’m letting that much moisture into the suit.”

“Cal Stringel is dead! And trying to make me think he’s alive is only going to make me kick your ass even harder!”

“Here I didn’t think you cared, Wendy. It’s good to see you, too! What’s with the stupid vest? I know it’s not your idea.”

“If you really are Cal Stringel, you could tell me something that wasn’t in the book. Something only the two of us would know.”

“I sanitized most of your dialogue in the book to cut out the foul language.”

“Not good enough! Anyone who knows me knows that I have a New York City mouth.”

“Okay,” I say going over my mental list of things I could tell her that I didn’t choose to publish. “After I’d asked if you wanted me to get down on one knee, and you shot me down, I joked with you in private the next day that we should at least sleep with each other again and see if we liked it. You kicked me in the shin, hard. I asked why you couldn’t just slap me across the face like a normal woman, and then you kicked me in the other shin—just as hard.”

Small wonder that incident didn’t make it to publication, isn’t it?

The waterspout began collapsing, as a cocoon of air enveloped us. It was dead calm inside, no driving rain or anything else.

“All right, open up! If you’re really Cal, I want to see it, and then I want to hear what you have to say for yourself.”

I pop open the helmet, which spreads on a vertical line and look at her large, vest covered stomach. “How’s little Gabby doing?”

“You look like Cal and sound like him, but shape changers do exist, so how about you tell me how in the fuck you managed to survive a nuclear explosion?”

“Remotely operated armor, Wendy. Those pieces of that dinosaur’s magic mirror are a functioning two way portal. After I got it finished, I went back to my little hideout in Alabama and ran it from there. When that armor was destroyed, it took me awhile to build this new set. I was just going to stay retired, but I was visiting the site of my old base that I blew up to flee from the Olympians, when I got a postcard from Prophiseer. I could have it passed through one of the portals in my armor if you want to see it, or I can just show you a hologram of it, your choice.”

She opted for the hologram and I projected it. “That’s in four months! If this is legit, you should have fucking come to me earlier!”

“Didn’t want to blow my secret, and didn’t have a suit ready. My team needs a leader, and you’re the best one I know.”

“Your team? You have a fucking team! Who else is on it? I’m barely leading my team as it is!”