The Secrets of Supervillainy (The Supervillainy Saga Book 3) Read online

  The Secrets of Supervillainy

  by

  C. T. Phipps

  Copyright © 2016 by Charles T. Phipps

  Published by

  Amber Cove Publishing

  PO Box 9605

  Chesapeake, VA 23321

  Cover design by Raffaele Marinetti

  Visit his online gallery at http://www.raffaelemarinetti.it/

  Cover lettering by Terry Stewart

  Editing by Valerie Kann

  Book design by Jim Bernheimer

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Visit the author’s website at http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/

  First Publication: July 2016

  Dedication and Acknowledgements

  This novel is dedicated to my lovely wife, Kat, and the many other wonderful people who made this book possible. Special thanks to Jim, Shana, Rakie, Matthew, Sonja, Bobbie, Devan, Tim, Joe, Thom, and everyone else.

  C.T. Phipps

  .

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Always Open with a Big Fight Scene

  Chapter Two

  Where We Meet My Vampire Wife

  Chapter Three

  Where Mandy Becomes My Ex-Wife

  Chapter Four

  Awkward Confessions

  Chapter Five

  Death is the High Cost of Living – Because She’s Cheap

  Chapter Six

  Where I Meet with the Family

  Chapter Seven

  Back When I was Dating the Lady of Light

  Chapter Eight

  Where the World Gets a Whole Lot Darker

  Chapter Nine

  Yet Another Flashback

  Chapter Ten

  The Bad Guy for the Book is POTUS

  Chapter Eleven

  Where We Discover Not to Screw Around with the US of A

  Chapter Twelve

  A Friendly Chat with Cindy About My Being and Idiot

  Chapter Thirteen

  Where We Choose to be Heroes and Villains

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Big Epic Brawl that Gets Bigger

  Chapter Fifteen

  Where the Cavalry (of Sorts) Arrives

  Chapter Sixteen

  My Last Conversation with Dad (Nothing Funny Here)

  Chapter Seventeen

  Talking to Myself

  Chapter Eighteen

  Where I Deal with the Devil (Me)

  Chapter Nineteen

  Where I Reconnect with My Wife

  Chapter Twenty

  Where I Discover I’m John Connor

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Where We Draw Up Battle Plans

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Long Creepy Boat Ride

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Last Minute Revelations

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mirror Match

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Where I Try to Pass the Buck

  An Excerpt from Agent G: Infiltrator by C. T. Phipps coming in late 2016

  Chapter One

  Agent G: Infiltrator

  Chapter Two

  An Excerpt from To Beat the Devil by M. K. Gibson - On Sale Now

  Chapter One

  To Beat the Devil

  Chapter Two

  About the Author

  Foreword

  The Rules of Supervillainy and The Games of Supervillainy followed would-be supervillain Gary Karkofsky, a.k.a Merciless: The Supervillain Without MercyTM, on a journey that showed him the ups and downs of being the bad guy. If he learned nothing else, it was that genuine evil took effort and was something he wanted nothing to do with. It also cost him significantly as his heroic wife, Mandy, was transformed into a vampire while he put aside his dastardly ways to save Falconcrest City from destruction.

  When I wrote my first two novels, it was with the desire to explore the darker side of comic books in a humorous and intelligent fashion. Falconcrest City was every dark corner in graphic fiction from Batman’s Gotham City to Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. It was easy to be the lesser of two evils in that place because everything was draped in one form of shadow or another.

  The decision to “kill” (I use quotation marks since she’s still around as a vampire and Gary hasn’t given up on saving her) Mandy was a highly controversial one with a lot of fans. A lot of readers complained, asking why it wasn’t possible to have a happily married couple in superhero fiction. Believe me, I understand this sentiment completely and am still hoping for Gary to be able to have his happily ever onward. A marriage should be the start of all your main couple’s best adventures, not the end.

  But the story took me there.

  Mandy chose to give her life so Cindy would survive, and because Gary’s did not respect that choice, a monster is walking around wearing her face. Mandy’s choice to make the ultimate sacrifice has also farther reaching consequences than her husband’s grief—especially for the person she chose to save.

  The Supervillainy Saga world has taken on a life of its own, and I love each of the myriad characters I’ve created. The Secrets of Supervillainy marks a new phase in Gary’s story as we move from gloomy Falconcrest City to explore some of the other locations in the setting as well as the consequences of his actions.

  The world is changing in ways both big and small, a process which was begun by the death of the Nightwalker and will continue until the dust settles. In a very real way, Gary has become a supervillain at the twilight of the superheroic age—something he’s going to fight tooth and nail.

  Also, unlike in comic books, we don’t have to hit the reset button after changing things up.

  Chapter One

  Always Open with a Big Fight Scene

  Sister Christian’s eyes glowed and she laughed before shooting a column of flame at my head. Her attempt to kill me with fire didn’t work out quite the way she expected. Instead, it resulted in her flames striking against my own conjured snowstorm.

  Dropping my briefcase full of stolen diamonds, I held up my arm and used it as a shield while throwing every bit of magic I could into producing an icy defense. The results were a massive cloud of steam that blanketed the entirety of the room.

  If you’re wondering why I was having a fight with a woman who owed royalties to Night Ranger for the misuse of their song in the middle of an abandoned cathedral, it was part of a much larger story that can be summarized as me trying to buy a magic rock which could resurrect my late wife Mandy. I am Gary Karkofsky, a.k.a. Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM, and I am not going to let a silly thing like death stop me from bringing my wife back, especially since I was Death’s number one minion.

  “Gary, look out!” Cindy called as she threw the London Werewolf over her shoulder with a judo throw.

  Cindy Wakowski, a.k.a Red Riding Hood a.k.a my favorite henchwench, had cleaned up her act tremendously since Mandy’s death. Cindy had returned to medicine and now spent a lot of her time treating the destitute in a free clinic. She’d also given up all (okay some) of her ill-gotten gains to help disadvantaged students complete their degrees in medicine. Perhaps the craziest part is she’d taken to fighting crime as well, serving as a semi-noble superheroine in-between helping me in my various schemes against the city’s rich. I didn’t know how she managed to find tim
e for it all.

  “That woman loves you, I hope you realize that,” Cloak, my, well, magic cloak, said. He was the ghost of the superhero known as the Nightwalker and the only source of sanity in my otherwise insane life. Not that I listened to him much.

  “We’re not like that,” I said, feeling the steam burn the side of my face.

  “Perhaps you could be, if you were willing to give it a chance.”

  I sighed, shaking my head and wiping some water from my wife. “I’m a married man.”

  “I see.”

  I could tell Cloak didn’t. He seemed to think this was my going through the various stages of grief. That Mandy was someone I would eventually accept the death of, that I’d move on to someone else. I loved Cindy, maybe as much as I’d loved my ex-fiancé Gabrielle, but Mandy was my life. I’d gotten her killed and I couldn’t stop until I made this right. If I couldn’t, if she really was gone forever, then I didn’t deserve to be happy.

  “Oh Gary,” Cloak said, hearing my thoughts.

  “Forget you heard that,” I said, dodging behind a pew as Sister Christian, dressed up today as a fetish-ware version of a nun’s attire, flew over the steam cloud and threw a storm of fireballs down at me. I barely managed to stay ahead of them, feeling like someone dodging out of the way of a WW2 plane’s gunfire in an Indiana Jones pastiche.

  “The Stone of Elderrah is mine, Merciless!” the Left-Handed Bokor laughed, his zombie-henchmen moaning despite their mouths being sewn shut. He was the guy responsible for Sister Christian, the London Werewolf, and all the other guys trying to kill us right now. He was also the guy I’d been trying to buy the magic rock from. “No force on Earth or the Heavens will separate it from my power.”

  The Left-Handed Bokor defied stereotype for a voodoo-practicing wizard by looking more like Jay-Z than Baron Samedi. He wore a ten-thousand-dollar white suit and shoes with a panama hat that seemed to shine every bit as much as the diamonds on his twelve or so rings. All of them contained imprisoned souls he drained for energy. One of the downsides of my ghost-themed powers was I could hear them moaning from here.

  “You offered to sell the stone to me, numbnuts!” I shouted, not really up to my usual game insult-wise. “We’ve all been hurting since the Fall!”

  “I got a better offer!” the Bokor shouted.

  It had been a year since the Fall when Falconcrest City was overrun by zombies, the Great Beast Zul-Barbas killed, and the Brotherhood of Infamy destroyed. None of it mattered because it had come at the cost of what I treasured most in the world. Mandy Karkofsky, my wife, had died sacrificing herself to save my best friend Cindy. I hadn’t taken it lying down and it had resulted in her resurrection.

  Of sorts.

  “Despite what comic books and television have portrayed, death is not as easy a thing to recover from in our world,” Cloak continued to speak. “It may be time to let Mandy go.”

  “Never,” I hissed under my breath, throwing a blast of ice up into Sister Christian’s face which blinded her and send her flying backwards against the stone walls behind me. “Also, stop distracting me.”

  “Oh, you can take a second-stringer like the Bokor out easily enough,” Cloak said. “It’s more important we discuss your love life.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny!” I snapped.

  “I am not a second-stringer!” the Bokor shouted, firing hex-bolts of green energy from his hands at my head. I ducked under them and they slammed into the altar behind me, transforming it into a hideously misshapen lump of rock.

  “You heard that, huh?” I said, preparing a fireball to burn him to ashes. If I couldn’t buy the Stone of Elderrah from him then I guessed I’d have to take it from his cold dead body.

  “Roar!” The London Werewolf tried again to go after Cindy, only to have a fire axe buried into its shoulder as she dodged out of the way of zombie gunfire, shooting them up one after the other with bullets that tore through the spells keeping them animated.

  “Feel the power of the Loa!” the Bokor chuckled, pulling out a wand and sending a glowing death beam at me, which I turned insubstantial and ducked under the floor to avoid before coming back up.

  “Voodoo doesn’t work that way!” I shouted. “You’re making fun of a real-life religion, asshole!”

  That was when Sister Christian fully recovered and landed in front of me, her eyes and hands glowing with hellish energy. She then blasted me with every ounce of power she had, which was considerable.

  I had to use all of my concentration to keep up the resulting contest of powers, and I was terrified of their cutting out at any moment. My abilities had been erratic since defeating Zul-Barbas, sometimes allowing me to defeat gods and other times leaving me vulnerable to has-beens and never-weres. Today, at least, I was operating at a mid-range capacity and just barely holding my own against the pyrokinetic’s attack.

  “It’s actually telepyrotic. Pyrokinetic is a creation of Stephen King in his book Firestarter and he bungled the Latin.”

  “I don’t give a shit!” I shouted, turning insubstantial and going down through the floor of the cathedral. It was time to use one of my classic tricks.

  “He’s going to come up behind us!” the Bokor shouted to his zombie goons. “That’s one of his favorite tricks!”

  In fact, I came right back up to where I was, taking advantage of the steam cloud to come up behind one of the zombie goons and then pull on his trigger finger from behind. He shot another of his fellows and was subject to the retaliatory strike by everyone else’s gunfire. The bullets were enchanted like Cindy’s Uzis, so the zombie instantly disintegrated into a pile of bones.

  Emerging once more into the cathedral, I levitated up to the rafters and tried to figure out how to take down the Bokor without damaging the stone. Assuming he had it at all. Arranging this deal hadn’t been my finest hour.

  “No kidding,” Cloak muttered.

  “No need to give me any ‘I told you so’s.’”

  “On the contrary, those are the high point of my day.”

  Seeing there was a heavy set of wooden beams over the Bokor, I moved my hands to freeze them and cause them to fall on his head. Nothing happened. Apparently, my earlier assessment about my powers working at mid-range capacity today had been overly generous. Something was interfering with them and had been doing so since I’d cast the spell to bring Mandy back.

  “Fuck!” I shouted, which was about the absolute worst thing I could do when trying to remain stealthy.

  Sister Christian responded by throwing a series of fireballs up towards me, some landing against the rafters and others passing me by. The wooden beams proceeded to catch fire and I was soon surrounded by a magical inferno which would probably hurt me even when turned intangible. Magic was funny like that. The others just started shooting at me, which I did turn intangible to avoid.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” I said, running along the beam despite my intangibility. Shouting into my carefully-hidden earpiece, I said, “Diabloman, where the hell are you?”

  Diabloman was my second-in-command and the heaviest hitter I had on my payroll. During the late eighties/early nineties, he’d been one of the most feared killers in the world. He’d possessed an army of Satanic cultist followers, unimaginable resources, and the respect of his peers. He’d killed heroes and nearly destroyed the world on several occasions. Hell, there was even a rumor he’d succeeded in destroying the universe once (obviously, it got better). Then he’d killed his superhero sister, fell in love, had a child, and decided being a complete monster sucked.

  “I am trying to get to your position, Boss!” Diabloman shouted, the sounds of moans and grunts accompanying him along with the sound of gunfire. “The spot where you had me waiting to ambush the Bokor’s men is overrun with ghouls! The Bokor has re-animated the entire church graveyard to come after me!”

  I grimaced. Animating the dead in Falconcrest City was about as crass as sinking ships at Pearl Harbor or threatening to nuke Japan. The Bokor didn’t care abo
ut anything like that. Honor amongst supervillains was a joke, but we were supposed to have rules, at least, and it was clear he didn’t have anything of the sort.

  “Just stay alive!” I said, running out of space to flee. I was on a cross of two wooden beams underneath a gigantic circular stained glass window of Saint Kirby, Patron Saint of Superheroes.

  A terrible screeching noise was heard over my head and I looked up to see that we were being joined by yet another supervillain: the Fruitbat. Contrary to their depiction in media, it wasn’t the vampire bat which was the scariest of flying rodents. No, it was the vitamin-C-munching motherfuckers, the ginormous monster-bats that could tear shit up.

  Frederic Fledermaus, a relatively okay guy when he wasn’t a seven-foot-tall monster, was a modern-day alchemist who helped henchmen who wanted to make the transition to supervillainy with various strains of lycanthropy. Last year, Cindy had briefly become a werefox and I’d been tempted to get in touch with my inner furry. Apparently, whoever was paying the Bokor to go back on our deal was really shelling out the big bucks tonight.

  “Lycanthropy only refers to werewolves,” Cloak corrected me again. “Theriomorphy is also a condition, not a source of superpowers.”

  “That’s just bigotry!” I said, turning insubstantial along with the beam underneath me. That resulted in the Fruitbat passing through us both and plastering himself on the ground. “Shapeshifters are people too!”

  “You did not just say that,” Cloak said. “Especially since you’re curing your wife of vampirism.”

  “Not curing her, just getting her soul back! There’s a difference, okay!”

  “Whatever.”

  Cindy had already taken care of the vast majority of the Bokor’s zombie goons as well as proven she was in a different class than the London Werewolf. The latter wasn’t terribly surprising since werewolves seemed to seek her out from some sort of twisted need for verisimilitude. At last count, I thought she was up to a dozen or so dead homicidal werewolves. It was doubly-weird since her best friend at the hospital was one.

  “Kill them, you idiots!” the Bokor shouted, trembling with rage. “We don’t get the bounty and pardon if we don’t get them all!”