Every other week life throws me a curve ball. Most days I simply step back and let them whoosh by why some imaginary umpire declares it a ball and I get to walk to first base. And, in keeping with this baseball analogy, some of those curve balls hit me square in the face.
That’s a lie. They all hit me in the balls. I double over then get put in the next game regardless of testicular damage.
So, when I’m told that Midnight killed her lesbian lover’s sister, and they brought her back from the dead every other Sunday for kicks, life was yet again curveballing me in the nuts. I didn’t even have solid proof on the lesbian thing, that was just a faint hope that all the girls would get over real life and pretend someone was the pizza woman.
Not me. I couldn’t enjoy it because Alice would show up and stab me. With a sharpened baseball bat.
Okay, the analogy’s getting old, but it served as a useful distraction from the next few minutes of utter confusion which I’ll try to recap.
“Alien planet. Check. Dead school girl. Check.”
“We’re in college,” WhiteWash whispered.
Attempt two. “Dead, college girl.”
“You’re not any older than we are.”
My eyes nearly rolled so hard I passed out. My sanity meter had dipped pretty low after being crammed into a tin box and shoved toward a portal. I hated small spaces every since being in that cave in years ago.
“If you think being doomed to have an ongoing attraction to some girl who’s powers mean you’ll mind meld together and never become your own person even scratches the depths of horror I’ve lived, you’re wrong.”
That didn’t even make any god damn sense. You see how far gone I was? Gibberish. I’d spouted a half-formed set of ideas as an attempt to put them in their place and failed on all fronts. Some teacher I was turning out to be. Lesson one through one million, don’t be like me kids. Be smarter. Be less stupid. Make sense when you talk.
My nonsense spouting aside, here’s the thing, we were up shit creek without a paddle. Hell, we didn’t even have a boat. Any paddles that existed were about to be jammed up our collective asses at lightning speeds, without lube or even a “Hello good sir. Prepare thy bum.”
So, I did what anyone not having a mild panic attack would do, I started over.
Attempt three. “Alien planet. Dead girl. Check. Two ticking time bombs. Che-”
“We’re not time bombs,” WhiteWash said quietly.
You heard her! She interrupted me again!
My arms waved around wildly like one of those car sale inflatables. “The fuck you two aren’t! One day you’ll touch each other and go by our powers combined and freeze in some statue that looks like a Greek artist’s wet dream! Then you’ll do nothing and I’ll be left with her, alive and shouting at me about how it’s all my fault that her sister and,” I flipped my hands at Midnight “Whatever bottled up angst.”
I shut up because this was gibberish again. Or it might have been Midnight’s eyes literally casting off a black flaking light and a budding headache that made me want to curl up and whimper.
Attempt four. “Alien planet. Chec”
“Mole people aren’t aliens,” WhiteWash muttered. “Their origins are terre-”
“What the fuck is wrong with you! I don’t care how old you are! I barely care how old I am. I don’t care how old the mole people or shadow mumble mumbles-” I didn’t actually say mumble mumble. I’m fairly sure I started foaming at the mouth instead. After a bit of frothing they decided to ignore me.
“This way,” Midnight said. “I can feel those shadow people in the hundreds this way.”
Middle of the Whatever wandered away, dragging White Whatever with her. They even held hands. You hear me? They’re not longer stupid names. They’re now whatevers. I ran through a mental list of bad-whatevers to call them and came up with nothing useful.
They left Red-whatever behind. Based on their emotionless wandering they apparently expected me to take care of her dead body.
My shoulders dropped. Defeated, by college girls. “Great,” I said.
I didn’t understand how she’d died before and simply came back to life. Their powers combined could, theoretically, perform crazy deeds like stop lasers in space or alter reality. Bringing back the dead might not be too hard. If a drunk unicorn could do it, they probably could.
The girls were getting further away. I stooped to pick up Leticia and carry her around until she performed a magic trick that caused her to come back to life. Which happened five whole steps into chasing the other two.
A glowing red hand grabbed my clothes and jerked my head down.
Leticia’s eyes were shaking. Her arm had zero strength. The glow infused her eyes until they almost melted. “I will gut you,” she said while shaking violently.
So, I did the most logical thing any man could do when threatened violence by the women he was carrying around to give her a shred of dignity. I panicked, flailed my arms, and dropped her ass on the ground.
“You’re the worst,” she rolled to one side and grabbed her stomach. Her body heaved.
I stepped away before her twitching settled and felt safe enough to be snide.
“Are you flirting with me? Because I’ve got a girlfriend.”
She turned over and badly tried to get to her feet. Remember how I was good at running? This is one of those times where I exercised my skills and ran. But not too fast. Leaving her behind might be better for my health but it’d be worse for hers.
Or maybe we could leave her here as an undying killing machine bent upon the destruction of all mole people.
“Hey!” I shouted at her from a much safer distance.
Leticia continued to stagger toward us with a hand on her side. She lifted her head slightly to glare in my direction.
“Is the reason you’re so angry because they keep bringing you back to life?”
Her step faltered. She said nothing then resumed the march toward me. Or toward the other girls. We were in the same direction.
I watched her for a moment and wondered what the hell could drive a person onward like this. Though her other options were to be stranded on an alien planet full of sharp spiky hills that were the color of obsidian.
“Hey. If you break them up, will you still come back to life?”
Leticia slipped and fell on her face. My body went cold. She lay there, one of two people making noise anywhere nearby. The other two had continued to make progress, seemingly uncaring about WhiteWash’s sister.
Now, I felt like a jerk. See, sometimes I forget that despite all their flaws, most people who put on the cape or cowl or whatever are just people. They’re not great people or even super heroic, just people. And she was trapped here with her sister and her girlfriend until they became one person and left Leticia behind.
“Hey. I know I’m a stupid idiot and a jerk and a man and whatever else,” and not eloquent despite many Emails from Ted telling me how to speak on camera, which I naturally deleted, “but I’m also pretty sure dying hurts. Maybe you should go somewhere quiet and bake pies for a living?”
“Go fuck yourself!”
“I did that once. It was not pleasant.” Maybe I hadn’t actually done that. It’s hard to keep track. Seems like a Thursday sort of event.
She didn’t find it funny.
I prayed for a mole people army to surface and bellow death to us. They didn’t. Apparently, the force that drove my powers found it funnier to watch me flail in a conversation with one of my “Students” then to send people at me. Or maybe it hadn’t caught up with being sent through a portal to another planet yet.
Flux beeped. I didn’t register it right away. By the time it did, Leticia had rolled over and attempted to push herself upright again. Colors swam over her skin of every hue except the grays, whites, or blacks.
It beeped again and swung slowly into view. My gaze shifted to follow the red eyed floating robot as it circled around lazily.
“Got band aids?”
It beeped twice.
“Those cure alls from last week?”
It beeped twice.
“Anything useful?”
Flux’s copying machine eye beams scanned out the user’s manual complete with crayon man and heroically drawn Flux. The robotic eye seemed to be riding on my badly drawn shoulders.
My hand rubbed both eyebrows with more strength than anyone sane would recommend. It did nothing to mute my budding headache. Or maybe the headache had been there since I’d first got my powers.
“To help her?”
“Don’t need your help,” Leticia said, while looking like she could use anyone’s assistance. She continued to lay there.
“How about that jello tub from last month? The one we copied from the college dorm.”
Flux beeped twice.
“Lasers?”
No. I wasn’t going to ask what Flux actually had copied because it would likely be some sort of mechanical porn and utterly useless to fighting aliens, helping Leticia, or making this planet self-destruct in a ball of fire so this stupid war would end.
“Nukes?”
Flux’s eye beam started copying out something that looked like a nuke. He started with parts on the bottom, rock canals formed.
“No! Just kidding! I’m just kidding. Don’t copy that. Don’t paste it. Don’t try to get it in a threesome with a toaster.”
Flux uttered a series of low notes that sounded like a teenager grumbling. The construct fell apart.
“Why do you even have a nuke?”
Flux tilted then spun on its axis.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Seriously? When did you even copy a nuke? We haven’t been anywhere near one in months. Not since that mad scientist’s lair. That’s so unsafe.” Listen to me, disaster magnate, talking about a nuke being dangerous. Though if it was the one from the mad scientist’s lair, it would either explode into marshmallows or make a boom three times bigger than any sane explosive.
The ground rumbled. I ignored the kaleidoscope girl on the path below, Flux staring mournfully at the deconstructed nuke, and closed my eyes. At least my earlier production had come true.
The angry one who liked correcting people staggered up the hill at me. Her knee kept giving away causing her to stumble toward an available outcropping.
“What’s that?” Leticia asked.
Remember those mole people I wished for earlier? Ever think that maybe I shouldn’t expect disaster?
“Seven idiots in a minivan,” I answered.
The ground shuddered sending me sliding around. I slipped into Leticia, who’d caught up at some point. Flux managed to stay in place as the earth shook. Imagine that, shaking earth landscape, Flux somehow shaking the other way so it looked like he was staying in place and the world had gone mad.
Grinding filled the air. Metal screeched. I flopped onto my back and thrust a hand into the air.
“Got anything to drink?”
Flux zapped me what might have been panties for a tarantula woman. I threw them in the direction of the upcoming mole machine. It finished surfacing, tore up my donation, and landed on the ground like a submarine breeching onto ice.
Gears ground. I put my hand up and asked for another drink. The time I got a cactus plant.
Metal scrapped against metal badly making even my seasoned ears sob. Leticia screamed. The world flushed with some weird mix between red and green that might have been Christmas but felt like puke.
A heavy object thudded. I knew it to be the door to their machine basically falling on the ground to expose a small army of mole people.
Sure enough, their leader slurred, “Death to surfacers!”
Ears rang from the dropping hatch. I threw the cactus badly toward the mole people. Leticia grunted and yelled as she swung at something I wasn’t paying attention to. The earth rocket. Gobs flew overhead.
“Kill them all!” one of them gibbered.
“Millard,” Leticia yelled in return. “Get to cover!” She ran off toward danger like a well-trained hero.
“Right on it.” I stayed there. It wasn’t self-defeat. It was realism. If she couldn’t die forever, and nothing could kill me, then the only thing we’d avoid was pain.
A gob splattered next to me. Drops sizzled my clothes and I flinched from pain as they ate away at my skin. I put up my hand again, got a fresh bit of clothe from the perverted robot, and used that to dab away the offending goo. Then I threw it onward. One of the mutant rodents screamed.
“Millard! There’s too many.”
Girls shouting my name never worked out well.
Something cracked and the vehicle rocked. “Stay dead!” she yelled.
I looked over briefly then winced.
Ever seen a glowing woman with red fists punch a hole in a mole person’s head? It’s glorious. Or gorious. If I didn’t have Alice, I might have been in love. Never mind her raging psychopath and hating me thing. I could work around such trivial red flags.
“You’ve got to defend yourself!”
I didn’t. Both shoulders inched up in a bad shrug. “Against what? Do you remember who you’re talking to. I can’t die. Even if you wipe them all out,” I paused, leaned up, and glanced around again.
She bobbed out of goo being shot from duct taped guns. Red flashed and shielded her against a shut from behind. Leticia spun and punched out a fist, sending a ray of energy twenty feet into the person that’d tried to shoot her in the back. Leticia actually had some intense moves for a college girl who’d spent all our time together arguing with everyone.
The ground shook again. I rode it out then stood up slowly.
Leticia crossed both arms in front of her. Red surged toward her in waves. “More! This is too dangerous.” She screamed and sent the energy flying everywhere. Her foes gibbered. They went flying away. Green sludge and the mole people clown car were knocked backward.
A second vehicle surfaced, bumping the first out of the way. Passengers who hadn’t fully exited the original vehicle went flying to one side. Gears ground as the second door flopped down. I stood up, dusted myself off, and got ready to fight.
“Flux! Weapon.” Fingers curled in a grasping motion.
It beamed a vibrator into my hand. I blocked a shot toward my face with the exaggerated martial aid, pretended not to notice that it was covered in slime, and hurled it somewhere toward the newest enemy carried.
Enemies came out of the second one in droves. A bit of darkness moved along the ground. I put my hand out for a fresh weapon, and Flux gave me a second pink device with some attachment on thte end. They functioned as nun chucks.
“Wahhhh,” I waved them. The attachment went flying off and slammed into a bit of oddly moving darkness. It paused then slunk away.
“What are you doing?”
Leticia found cover and huffed. She looked at me, back to the gathering army which started line up on another ridge, then back to me.
Her eyebrows tightened. “Seriously?”
I cackled madly. Or maybe smiled a bit and shrugged.
“Watch your teacher in action! This how a seasoned professional fights the moles.”
Both hands came up in a bad boxing pose. “Bring it on,” I said with false bravado.
“Kill him!” Miles of green goo were shot in streams toward us. I stood there and weathered them while twirling around my remaining plastic defense.
Here’s an image for you. In Florida, a state I’m technically banned from, they have wet teeshirt contests where people can use water guns on the girls. This was a lot like that, except they were mole people, I wasn’t a girl, and those weren’t water guns.
I smacked myself in the nose with my weapon and bent over. Both eyes watered. The foes firing naturally went over my head while I gasped in pain.
They unloaded for ages. Everything around me sizzled. I sniffed and felt tingles all over my face. That damned double ended dildo hurt. I stood up slowly and surveyed the landscape.
The obsidian shaped earth had puddles of green ichor everywhere. It burned and filled the air with a foul gas. The stared at me in a long line of furry ugly walking mops. I felt light headed, held up my weapon, and proceeded to give an awesome speech.
“You fools! I am the Herald of Failure. Your plans are doomed!”
The still stared at me. Leticia expression was about the same. Her mouth hanging open. She’d catch flies eventually. I rocked slightly and held my breathe. While I could survive anything because of my powers, these gases might knock me the hell out.
I held up the Flux copied weapon and rattled it at the line of foes. “Your world is next. Abandon your plans with the Shadow Lords of Gibithon! So sayth the all knowing Frilled Broom.”
That’s not what the shadow people were called. It’s also not where they’re from. I don’t actually know either. Also I actually said Frilled Broom, or something close enough. My eyes were blurry. A knee gave out.
Leticia moved slightly in my direction then paused. “You heard the man. Fuck off!”
“Death to surfacers!” they responded in chorus.
They launched another volley. I fell over in time to avoid the second round and lay there gasping for fresh air. This planet sucked. The ground had sharp rocks poking into my legs. My clothes were a mess. I couldn’t get anything from Flux, and my amazing speech had failed.
The ground shuddered. Cracking sounds came from where they were. Mole people screamed. Leticia pointed an arm out from behind the rock like a cannon and fired blindly back at them.
“No. The earth betrays us!” one of the idiot foes said.
My head lifted slowly. One of the vessels had started slipping back into a widening hole in the ground. Mole people were falling into the widening gap. Another glob of red blasted out. Enemies stumbled back. More fell.
“You doing that on purpose?” I asked.
“Yes. Yes god dammit. I’m not stupid! Push people in holes. Let gravity do the work.”
“That college education paying off.”
She looked over at me then fired another blind shot out toward the moles. “Physics is actually a great class.”
Leticia may have been stupid about relationships, but not about fighting. She had a lot of skill on that front and I’d seen my share of heroes over the years. Which made me wonder how she hadn’t broken my bones earlier when first attacking me.
The splattering goo may not kill but it finally got annoying. I scrambled for cover near Leticia, fairly sure her punching me would hurt less than being itched to death.
“Kill the foul above worlders. Before the earth takes us all.” They gibbered at each other. Or maybe another insulting threat.
We sat with our backs pressed against the small rock outcropping. We had the advantage of height but they had numbers. And technology, and insane xenophobia coupled with weak logic skills. How they build digging machines and guns was utterly beyond me.
“Why are you sitting back here if you can’t die?”
“Why were you laying on the ground?” she asked back.
“Lack of laser beams from my eyes.” Flux had laser beams. Maybe. It scared me sometimes. “But I got up and used my nun chuck skills.”
The continued to pelt our location. More reached over the rocks causing her to wince with pain. I wondered about that bomb from earlier of Fluxes. Maybe I could get the eyeball to deposit one behind enemy lines.
“Fuck it. But I hate you.” Leticia dove out from behind cover. A yellowish glow followed her.
I poked my head out and watched as chaos finished unfolding. She leapt into two, grabbed one, and spun him into another pile. How she found such strength to fight after limping before, and being charred, melted, or dying, was beyond me.
“You recording that?”
Flux beeped happily. It had a perfect view of my face, and was high enough to get a panorama of all the insanity going on behind me. Leticia screamed. Flux chirped with low tones. Mole people cried. The earth crumbled.
I sat there wondering about lunch on a foreign planet and if superheroes who couldn’t die needed health insurance.
On the fight went for a minute, maybe two. Flux’s eyeball whirled like a saucer after each crunching sound. Finally, after everything died down, I poked my head up and looked around.
Gory. That’s the word for it. There were bits of mole people everywhere. At least four bodies were plastered up along the remaining bus sized drill machine. Six others were dismembered and all over the slopping hill we’d been climbing up. Leticia huffed and continued to pound her fist into another one’s lumpy body.
I almost opened my mouth but decided to shut the fuck up instead. Even I could tell that she had a lot of anger. Or bitterness. Or whatever it is girls who kept coming back from the dead because of their - you know what, I’ve labeled their relationship enough. The whatevers had stuff to work out.
Over I went to the hole. I stared down the long tunnel and braced myself until Leticia pushed me over the edge. She didn’t, content on repeatedly pummeling her long expired foe. That left me to contemplate genocide upon a race of idiot mass spawning creatures.
The hole looked deep enough. The edges were huge after two vehicles had come out, the earth had crumbled in on itself, and vehicle one fell back down into the hole.
“Hey Flux. That bomb from earlier? Can you scan it over here?”
The camera eyeball beeped then immediately started scanning its earlier explosive over the hole. I stared blankly. One arm rubbed down goosebumps. Ten feet, then twenty, then thirty feet of metal and god knew what other parts. It made me sick to look at it, and honestly, I shouldn’t stand near an explosive.
With that, the girls who’d left us behind showed up. They stood at the top of a ridge that had been torn to shreds in only a few minutes.
“What’s going on?” WhiteWash asked quietly, still holding Midnight’s hands.
They were even worse than before. To the point that their hair had changed colors until they had opposite tips. WhiteWash had black at the end of her hair.
“How the hell didn’t you two hear all that? Wait, you were lost in each others eyes.”
“Get away from her,” Leticia shouted, limping up the hill toward them.
Midnight’s eyebrows tightened. “You can’t stop this.”
“I’ll die before I see you turn my sister into some mindless idiot.”
For anyone out there listening, relationships turn everyone into mindless idiots. It’s not just these three girls. It’s all of them. Guys too.
I hit a wall. The last few weeks were as much a roller coaster as any other before them, but my family existed again. A small blip really, almost as minor as other people threated Christmas gatherings, but it left me drained.
“Look, the three of you need to work the shit out and accept where it’s going, or not. You’re fighting each other and I think that’s making it worse.”
The dead bodies around me should attest to that. If nothing else, this was screwing Leticia up beyond all recognition.
“They can’t-” red-whatever started.
I put up my hands and pointed.
“I may hate Willhelm with a passion, but he put me here for a reason. He let you come for a reason. This weird thing between you guys is probably part of it.” I waved my hands at them. “And whatever argument you’ve been having forever clearly isn’t working.”
“She’s just-” WhiteWash started.
For once, I did away with the sarcasm and spoke. “You’ll circle around to the same sides over and over. One of you says, you have power, and the other respond that I wish you didn’t. The other says, your power scares me, and then she’ll say, I wish it didn’t. Another says I can’t stand to see you together while the other says I can’t stay away.”
I blinked slowly and thought of my own shit storm of a life.
“Wishes don’t do any of us any good. It fucking is. Life sucks. Do something about it or don’t, but all this whining doesn’t change reality.”
And oh, how I wish I’d been wrong.
Leticia looked at her sister. Her sister looked at her girlfriend. Her girlfriend flipped me the bird with her dead eyes.
The ground shuddered and a high pitched whine filled the air.
“What’s that?” WhiteWash yelled.
That, was my marsh mellow maker going off just in time to avoid an awkward follow up conversation. Of course, we didn’t need it since Laticia lost her marbles and attacked the two girls. Presumably because Laticia thought Midnight’s middle finger was directed at her.
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Q&A With Adam Millard
Dear Adam,
You have insane powers. Why do you take shit from anyone?
How is this even a question? Because heroes have insane powers too. Ever tried to punch a steel beam? No amount of jet fueled powers helps. Ever tried to moon someone who’s powers let them put you to sleep with a thought? I barely got my zipper down. Even if I get some stupidly broken weapon from another planet that can nuke someone from orbit, the minute I seriously try to use it, I get caught on that jet’s wheels as it cruises Mach 1 a bit too low for the governments liking. But hey, my neck doesn’t snap because they’re also testing out jetfuled technobabble air cushions that reduce friction and drag or whatever.
Then the jet flies into a wormhole to the desolate future, with me on the wheel and my nuke people from orbit weapon going off in time to stop a war between slobber faced mutants and dog headed normal people. If you can tell the difference.
Being unkillable doesn’t mean unstoppable. Being a walking disaster basically means the only thing I can do to people is exist nearby until something else gets them. Direct action on my part? Minor at best, despite trying to use Flux’s abilities over and over to kill a certain asshole.
And Flux doesn’t make it easier. I can barely get him to keep a waffle maker on tap so I have breakfast, much less any mix.