When the Villian Comes Home Read online

  Gretchen’s knees went watery and her throat got tight. Pinktastic’s smile was gorgeous. She was gorgeous. And now she was wheeling her cart out of line. And now she was coming this way.

  “Okay,” said Gretchen. “Right then. Great to see you, Powerpunch. Later, Succubus.” Gretchen wrenched her cart sideways, dragging the stupid locked wheel across the polished concrete MegaHome floor with a spine-raking squeal. But then the thing seized up again and she was stuck in the middle of the aisle, frozen like she’d been hit with one of Icebergatron’s freeze rays.

  “You’re Gretchen, right?” And Pinktastic was there, right flipping there, looking straight at Gretchen. And she knew her motherflipping name and everything. Oh god. Oh crap. Oh holy flipping hell.

  One good thing, at least: Gretchen’s ex and his new girl had made themselves scarce. No villain in town willingly stood around for close scrutiny by a member of the Chromatic League. Not after the Commissioner’s nifty little speech. Not after the Dastards, one of the most dastardly bands on the coast, had had their asses kicked halfway to Sunday and handed back on a plate, forcing them to disband and lay low, not even go to all the regular baddie bars and baddie parties. Hardly seemed worth following the path of villainy if you never even got to go to the best parties.

  Pinktastic thrust out her hand. Gretchen stared like it was one of Medusaman’s infamous pet monsters instead of a slender-fingered bit of ordinary human flesh with pale pink polish on the nails.

  When Gretchen didn’t move, Pinktastic reached for her hand and shook it. “I’m Alice,” she said. “I have a stall at the Saturday market? I see you there practically every week.”

  Saw her there? But Gretchen had been so careful! She never got close enough to activate Pinktastic’s famous Chromasense, which gave her the ability to see villainy in the air like an aura of darkness. Oh god. Oh crap. She must look like a big old grey smudge right now. Charcoal mist must be clinging all over her, baring her dark heart like it had been ripped from her chest.

  Maybe alarmed by the way Gretchen’s face was turning blue from holding her breath, Pinktastic let go of her hand. “Anyway, I asked around, and Loki’s friend Lucy told me your name. Thought I’d introduce myself so we’d be even.”

  Lucy. Smash Chick. Gretchen thought she might vomit right there in the MegaHome garden aisle, she was so freaked.

  Pinktastic’s smile faltered. Probably because she could tell Gretchen was about to throw up on her shoes. That, or she’d finally noticed the scent of villainy clinging to Gretchen like Pigpen’s dustcloud in the old Peanuts cartoons. “Okay...well, nice to meet you, Gretchen. See you around?”

  Gretchen barely managed to nod, a stilted motion reminiscent of the Grim Puppeteer’s automated minions. As soon as Pinktastic wheeled around, Gretchen bolted, abandoning her traitorous shopping cart near the mountain of bargain sod still filled with stuff she could no longer remember wanting or needing. As she ran, she imagined her villainous aura trailing after her, a tattletale streak of black fog in the clean clear air.

  5

  The old warehouse door rammed shut with a bang and Gretchen sank to the floor, sobbing. After a while her legs started hurting where they’d fallen asleep under her. She managed a clumsy stagger across the room, her feet lumps of pins and needles where circulation tried to return, her cheeks tight and sticky from dried tears. She flopped on the couch, sending a flurry of dustmotes into the air to be caught in rays of light slanting past the enormous casement windows taking up one crumbling brick wall.

  Lying on the couch, Gretchen pictured her life as it should be. She imagined her leaky rundown warehouse as a genuine lair, brick walls painted a deep smoldering purple, no water stains or ancient tarred patches, no looming cracks past which you could see daylight. She imagined her back-alley sofa replaced with something sleek and modern, black crushed velvet maybe, or textured vinyl: some cool fabric that didn’t need old blankets to hide where someone else’s cat had used the arms as scratching posts. She imagined her hotplate and microwave replaced with the latest brushed steel appliances, and maybe a kitchen island of black Italian marble like she’d seen in that magazine at the dentist’s.

  And in the middle of this sleek modern wonderland of ultimate villainy, Gretchen imagined Gretchen. This imaginary Gretchen had the hair she’d always wanted: long and loose and darker than midnight. Her clothes were just the right clothes, her Super suit a dream of sophistication, her waist and hips and thighs worthy of a Parisian catwalk and of the sleek lines demanded by the latest in villain fashion.

  The rest of the afternoon passed as so many had passed in recent weeks: with Gretchen fading in and out of sleep, arm thrown over her eyes to block out daylight filtering though the grimy cracked windows, dream mingling with fantasy mingling with memory, until Destructova and Pinktastic jetted through the air via the latest Super technology, zapping each other with forked lightning and chromatic rays...biff!...bam!...pow!...boom...

  5

  Wasn’t it dark enough yet for the random old guy to bugger off and get out of here? Who gardened after dark? Gretchen stifled a curse and hunkered lower in the ancient rosemary bush. It wasn’t the same random old dude who’d been in the community garden last time; a small truck was parked at the curb rather than the jalopy. And this dude listened to the radio as he weeded—the freaking radio! Who listened to a motherflipping radio anymore? Random old dudes hoeing cabbage at the community garden, that’s who.

  Trying not to resort to her old nail-biting habit, Gretchen, from sheer boredom, began listening to the old dude’s radio. Geezer music played awhile, kind of peppy and orchestral. Then an interview with some hero Gretchen had never heard of, who’d written a memoir about discovering his Super powers as a smalltown boy in the middle of Noplace, Nowhere. Seemed they were making it into a movie. Sheesh.

  And then the regular programming was interrupted by that sound. It was a buzz, a howl, a screech or a hum or a combination of all those. Whatever, it was designed to get your attention, and it did. It was an alert from the Emergency Broadcast System.

  “Regional Alert! After forcing what would have been a passing meteoric cluster into a collision course with Earth, powerful archvillain Tectonic Shifter has perished in the upper stratosphere. Minutes earlier, the International Antivillainy Coalition received his demand for an undisclosed amount in gold bullion. But before negotiations began, Tectonic Shifter was killed by one of the first meteors diverted toward Earth. Repeat: Tectonic Shifter is dead. The Coalition is calling all Super heroes in the region to instant action. Non-Supers are urged to begin immediate emergency evacuation...”

  At some point without realizing, Gretchen had emerged from the rosemary bush. The old dude had gone ramrod straight, hoe poised midair as he listened. Gretchen made one scrambling leap at the fence and vaulted over, scarcely noticing the rip in her tights when her leg didn’t quite clear. In a few strides she was at the old guy’s side.

  “Did they say where the Supers are supposed to meet?” Gretchen swooped the small radio off the ground from between two modest pumpkins barely starting to show. The man shied away, shaking his head, even older up close than she’d thought, all skinny and weak. She could break his back with a powerful gust of wind if she wanted, or ram rainwater up his nose until he drowned on moisture materialized from the very air he breathed.

  “Well,” said Gretchen, “you heard the alert: go!” He cowered, half lifting his hoe as though it afforded some small protection. Gretchen kicked it from his hand so it went spinning off into the dusk. “Evacuate, motherflipper! Don’t you know what emergency means?”

  He nodded and backed away toward his truck.

  “And I’m keeping this freaking radio, though if you’re not gone by the count of three I’ll ram it down your non-evacuating throat. One. Two.”

  As the old dude’s taillights disappeared around the corner, Gretchen fumbled with the dial, tryin
g to tune into a station not preprogrammed with rush-hour talk shows or insipid pop music. Any station. Any station at all. Stupid antique piece of crap.

  With an offhand flip of the wrist she sent a small rainshower scooting across Pinktastic’s end of the gardens. The neighboring plots would benefit from Destructova’s attentions, just this once. Couldn’t be helped. Destructova had someplace else to be tonight.

  5

  The city was a mess. Cars idled bumper to bumper, belching invisible poisons for miles along every possible route out of the city. Destructova congratulated herself for the millionth time on never learning to drive as she sprinted along the empty sidewalks, radio clutched to her ear like an icepack to a bruise after a Super training session.

  According to the radio, heroes from all over were gathering at City Hall. The first tiny meteors—practically pebbles compared to the largest—had already crashed in the suburbs. Thousands were reported missing or dead, while wildfires sparked by the blazing missiles devastated farmlands to the east. Every station had either ceased broadcasting or was playing repeated emergency alerts urging the locals to flee. Gretchen finally settled on a station with moment-by-moment analysis of the situation.

  Only Tectonic Shifter, it was believed, had possessed Super powers capable of rerouting solid masses the size of the biggest meteors headed for Earth. Ironic that he’d been killed by the smallest of them, a rock so tiny it probably would’ve burned to nothing before hitting the planet. The largest mass, the one that Supers around the world were preparing to meet, was capable of unspeakable destruction. Dinosaurs were mentioned, followed by long smarty-pantsy sounding discussions about the effects of smoke and dust in the atmosphere. Stupid brainiacs might as well have been yelling, Duck! We’re all going to die!

  After her summer of lying low, Gretchen was more out of shape than she’d realized. The weeks since the Dastards’ disbandment had left her flabby and soft. Okay; the weeks of lying on the couch all day sobbing her guts out and eating coconut chocolate ice cream with peanut butter swirls had left her flabby and soft. Whatever. All she knew was, she was totally huffing when she sprinted the last block.

  City Hall was blazing, lit like a white stone beacon with wide marble steps and fifty-foot columns. And the heroes! Gretchen had never seen so many Supers gathered in one place at the same time, not even when the Commissioner had held her big party honoring the Chromatic League for driving baddies like the Dastards underground, keeping the citizenry safe to guzzle their Big Gulps and drive their sucktacious SUVs back and forth from the suburbs, strewing pollutants and poisoning the air.

  The Chromatic League. Gretchen could see them from the street, a rainbow of Supercolors and self-righteousness. Leader Roy Gebiv stood at the top of the steps under the brightest spotlight, his shifting multihued cape with its patented bulletproof coating a fitting backdrop for his square jaw and smug weatherman’s grin. Flanking him were his personal sidekicks, Rain and Bow—like either of them were even worthy of kissing a real rainbow’s feet. In a semicircle behind Roy—the Chromatic League liked a good covershot pose and always snagged tons of media footage—stood the rest of his band: Indigo Avenger and Green Axe and Violetina and Orange Alert and, at the very end, Pinktastic. She looked small compared to the rest, but glorious, radiating goodness like a perfume.

  The Commissioner finished her rousing speech to a flurry of flash photography and a smattering of halfhearted applause, and was whisked away in an armored car. Probably to an underground bunker, or a waiting helicopter. The airspace above City Hall was conspicuously empty, cleared for the Supers to take off en masse and try to save the planet from what the radio commentator Gretchen had ceased listening to the minute she’d seen Pinktastic up on the steps—little pink flats and pink headband and thin matching mask making her hair look more strawberry than rose—called impending destruction on a scale unprecedented in human history.

  Gretchen pushed past a crowd of gawkers. Hundreds of non-Supers stood watching, smoking, crying, laughing. Either these people had decided it was useless to try to get the hell out of the city deemed ground zero for the biggest asteroid Earth had seen since the brontosaurus, or they had way too much faith in their heroes. Heroes were only people, after all. People with problems. People with leaky apartments and overdue bills and jerkoff ex-boyfriends.

  “Here,” Gretchen thrust the little radio at the nearest onlooker, a patchouli-scented private school girl reeking of a future English degree. “You might want to listen to this. Something about an emergency evacuation of the region.”

  Without waiting for the girl’s reaction Gretchen bounded up the enormous steps, dodging Super heroes she’d seen on the news, heroes she’d defeated in minor skirmishes with the Dastards, heroes who’d defeated her, sent her and her fellow villains running from thwarted heinous acts like cockroaches from a bare bulb at midnight. Heroes, heroes everywhere, and she wasn’t even nervous. They were all going to die anyway; nobody living had enough power to divert a mass the size of Jamaica from plowing into the Earth.

  Abruptly Gretchen was at the top with no more stairs to climb, and it was just her and the Chromatic League up there under the bright lights between soaring stone columns. Her and Pinktastic.

  All Gretchen’s forward momentum drained away. All the purpose and impetus, gone. “Hi, Alice,” she said.

  Pinktastic smiled. It was a strained smile, the smile of someone about to try to save the world, pretty sure she’s going to fail. “Hi, Gretchen. You shouldn’t be here. Emergency evacuation in progress, you know.”

  “I know.”

  Roy Gebiv and his sidekicks were powering their infrajet boots, which were way noisier than Gretchen remembered. Alice gave Gretchen an apologetic look. “That’s my cue,” she said, shouting over the jets, reaching to flip the toggles on her boots.

  Gretchen nodded and stepped back to give the Chromatic League room for their fancy signature group takeoff. But Pinktastic called to her, shouting even louder above the drone of dozens of powerboots warming up under Supers without natural flight ability: “Destructova!”

  Gretchen looked up. Pinktastic was holding out her hand.

  “Destructova! Gretchen...”

  Gretchen leapt over the top couple steps in a single bound and grasped Pinktastic’s hand. Alice pulled her close, shouting into her ear.

  Want to come? she was saying. Want to come with me to save the world?

  And Gretchen nodded and stepped behind Pinktastic and wrapped her arms around the other girl’s slim capeless shoulders. The Chromatic League could afford the very best Super technology, their boots able to lift two people, or three—handy for saving the hapless from rising floods or oncoming trains or stampeding rhinos. Handy for taking your nemesis with you into the stratosphere to meet almost certain death in the process of great heroic sacrifice.

  Roy Gebiv gave the signal and they rose in a flurry of capes and jets and air, Destructova and Pinktastic and all the Chromatic League and other Supers. A sense of rightness settled in the core of Gretchen’s middle, and she finally understood what Smash Chick had meant: the best of all possible worlds. She felt that rightness sing through her blood, surging along with her power, and hugged Pinktastic tight as they zoomed up, up, up into the stratosphere, together.

  CAMILLE ALEXA currently lives in the Pacific Northwest in an Edwardian foursquare filled with limestone fossils, dried willow branches, pressed flowers, and other very pretty dead things. Her evil superpower is the relentless ability to ruin a joke by forgetting the punchline halfway through. Her short story collection Push of the Sky earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was nominated for the Endeavour Award. She can be found on Twitter @camillealexa, online at camillealexa.com, or zipping through the sky in an embarrassingly bright pair of purple powerboots, but only after dark, and never on weekends.

  HUNGER OF THE BLOOD REAVER

  A Tale of the World of Ruin


  Erik Scott de Bie

  As the two riders climbed the jagged mountain pass into the lands of the Aza, a cold wind rose around them. It billowed relentlessly, the land’s rebuke for the very sins Azallé the Blood Reaver sought to expunge. She tightened her cowl against the elements and urged her shivering horse up the path between the guardians of the valley.

  Snow swirled around the riders, stirred to fresh violence in a centuries-old war. Two petrified warmachines, locked in eternal combat, formed an arch over the path. The iron-clad monsters had met on this lonely ridge and clashed until their joints froze and their anima faded into darkness—yet another lost secret from an age when sorcerer-kings ruled the world. Petrified, they became old gods of their own sort, and none who feared the spirits of the past dared draw near.

  An age hence, the legends held no fear for the Children of Ruin. However, five years before Azallé’s return, the heathen barbarians had descended upon the lands of the Aza, an unstoppable tide of misery and destruction. If Azallé had not done as she had...

  But she would not think on it—not yet.

  Instead, she focused on the rotting monoliths that warded the pass, and upon the drip-drip-drip of brackish sludge that leaked from each, like the water of a perched dog. The foul streams joined and flowed down the mountain. Over the centuries, the caustic stream had carved a canyon of corroded stone.

  Azallé’s companion coughed raggedly into his arm. Seemingly unaware, he had driven his horse close to one of the streams.

  “Mind the Black Seep, Mask,” she called. “Unless you want to walk.”

  The sorcerer jerked his reins, and his horse shied away with an anxious whinny. “Damned creature!” Mask cried, rage in his rough voice.