Burn Baby Burn: A Supervillain Novel Read online

  Burn Baby Burn: A Supervillain Novel

  James Maxey

  (2011)

  Rating: ★★★★☆

  Tags: Fantasy, Suspense, Adventure, Superheroes, James Maxey, supervillains

  Fantasyttt Suspensettt Adventurettt Superheroesttt James Maxeyttt supervillainsttt

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  Product Description

  Pit Geek and Sundancer are supervillains in an age when superheroes have been outlawed. After years in hiding, the two team up for a series of spectacular bank robberies that threatens to disrupt the world economy. When a new government sanctioned team of heroes known as the Covenant appears to halt their crime wave, Sundancer and Pit Geek are forced to take desperate measures to retain their freedom. When they finally run out of places to hide, can the world survive when Sundancer unleashes the full force of her solar powers?

  Burn Baby Burn

  Copyright © 2011 by James Maxey

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Cover art by James Maxey

  Formatting by:

  E-QUALITY PRESS

  www.e-qualitypress.us

  The name "e-Quality Press," and the colophon

  consisting of an open book with power cord and

  the letters "EQP," are registered and unregistered

  trademarks of e-Quality Press.

  For Jeremy Cavin

  who first said the words "pit geek" to me while

  we were sitting in a Pizza Hut on Battleground

  Avenue. In the midst of the mundane,

  wonders abound.

  Also, sincere thanks to Chandon Harris for

  coming up with the "Airhead" power used by

  the superhero Ap in this novel.

  CONTENTS

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  Chapter 1:  How Sunday Met Monday

  Chapter 2:  The Beast of Bladenboro

  Chapter 3:  A Leg to Stand On

  Chapter 4:  Not Bonny, Not Clyde

  Chapter 5:  The Covenant

  Chapter 6:  The Kind of Dance Where You Take Your Clothes Off

  Chapter 7:  Hounded by Heroes

  Chapter 8:  Kissing the Grim Reaper

  Chapter 9:  Homes of the Heroes

  Chapter 10: No Human Casualties

  Chapter 11: Hollow

  Chapter 12: Monkeys and Robots Make Everything Better

  Chapter 13: The Secret Origin of Pit Geek

  Chapter 14: A Terrible Actor

  Chapter 15: BOOM BOOM BOOM

  Chapter 16: Burn Baby Burn

  Greatshadow Preview: Bone-Handled Knife

  Teh The quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog.

  The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

  Sonof a bitch.

  I can type.

  Chapter One

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  How Sunday Met Monday

  Ten Years Ago

  SUNDAY JIMENEZ was fifteen when she killed her first nun. She was a relatively new arrival at the Trinity Life Solutions School. Her mother had recently remarried and to say that Sunday didn't get along with her new step-so-called-father was an understatement.

  Her mother's new husband had accused Sunday of being possessed by demons. Sunday had an odd . . . well, ability didn't seem the right word to describe it. "Ability" would imply that she was "able" to control what she was doing, and she couldn't. For reasons she didn't understand, sometimes she would get hot. Really hot. She wouldn't feel any different when this happened. Her usual first clues were the faint odor of scorched cotton and, if the lights were on, tiny wisps of smoke. If the lights were off, the heat would be accompanied by a soft glow, sometimes bright enough to cast shadows. Usually, it happened in her bed. When she realized what was going on, she would jump up and find her sheets covered with scorch marks ranging from light tan all the way to charcoal black patches that crumbled when she touched them.

  The therapist her mother sent her to had a simple explanation. Sunday was acting out due to her stress over Phil (her mother's latest Mr. Forever True Love). She was sneaking the iron from the laundry and burning her own sheets, then claiming ignorance of how her bed had been damaged. Basically, she was flat-out accusing Sunday of lying, though she did allow that perhaps Sunday was suppressing the truth from herself.

  Sunday wasn't suppressing the truth. She just wasn't telling everything she knew. She didn't think it was anyone's business that the first time she'd burned her sheets, she'd just experienced her first orgasm. This had only been six months ago, when she was still fourteen. The fifteen-year-old Sunday was embarrassed by the naiveté of her younger self. She'd still been in public school back then. Franky Bodin, a boy in her class, had gotten in trouble when he called a teacher a 'jerk-off.' Sunday was stunned that the teacher had taken offense. She'd heard the term thrown about since she was in kindergarten. In the context she normally heard it, she'd thought it meant someone was, you know, extra-jerky. Like, lift-off was when a rocket shot into space. Jerk-off was when someone was such a jerk they entered a whole new orbit of jerkdom.

  She went home and used her mother's computer to look up the term. What she discovered was both mortifying and tantalizing. That night, she touched herself with some of the images she'd seen bouncing in her head. She discovered a new thing that her body could do as a result. Two new things, technically, but her first orgasm, which under different circumstances might have been utterly fascinating, lost its position of importance when she realized that her bed was almost, but not quite, on fire.

  In the most technical sense, the therapist was right. Sunday was burning her sheets on purpose, sort of, a little bit. Even knowing she was literally playing with fire, Sunday had continued her experiments in bodily manipulation, not for the feelings of pleasure the act generated, but for the feeling of power. When her heart rate passed a certain level, she felt a switch click deep in the center of her belly, and suddenly heat and light would seep from her pores like flaming sweat. She couldn't trigger this just by running, which only left her tired. She needed the growing internal tightness in her abdomen to trigger the effect. The feeling was both addictive and terrifying. She dared not explain the truth to anyone. She was certain she'd be swooped off to some secret government facility where she'd be locked up and forced to masturbate in front of teams of stone-faced scientists in white lab coats. They would probe her with horrible, horrible devices, long iron sensors covered with metal studs that would force their way deep into her belly to stare at the trigger of her powers with cold, mechanical eyes.

  The fact that she often came while the imagined probe drew near added to her sense that, just perhaps, she was a disgusting pervert as well as an inhuman mutant. When Phil first brought up the possibility of demon possession, she shouted, "I'm my own demon!"

  They sent her to boarding school.

  And then she killed the nun.

  The nun's name was Sister Cecilia. She taught algebra, and by the time Sunday had finished her first week of classes, she'd figured Cecilia out. The woman had obviously been a stoner in her youth, a hippy-dippy flower child who'd dressed in nothing but tie-dyes until bad acid had frightened her back to the Lord. Her algebra lessons always turned into rambling anti-drug lectures. She'd go to the blackboard to solve for "X" and wind up weeping about how ten million babies a year are born without eyes because their mothers used "E." Cecilia struck Sunday as slightly amusing and mostly harmless.

  On her fifth day at the school, Sunday went into the bathroom near the science lab. She smelled cigarettes. The back room was L-shaped, with a short line of sinks when you first walked in, then a long row of stalls around the corner facing windows to the courtyard. T
urning the corner, she found Anjelica and Moon standing next to an open window, their hands behind their backs. Sunday had made no friends since coming to the school, but she'd noticed these two girls in English Composition. Jewelry was strictly forbidden at the Trinity Life Solutions School, but a line of holes on Anjelica's left ear indicated she'd once had a whole row of rings or studs along the upper edge. Anjelica was tall and blonde but a little heavy set. Moon was thin as a broomstick, with straight black hair and dark bags under her eyes that made her look like she hadn't slept in weeks.

  "You can keep smoking," Sunday said. "I'm cool."

  Anjelica and Moon relaxed. They'd already thrown their lit cigarettes out the window but Anjelica reached into her bra and produced a pack of Virginia Slim Menthol's and a pink BIC lighter.

  Anjelica popped one of the cancer sticks in her mouth and handed the pack to Moon while she struggled to get the lighter going.

  "Almost out of gas," she grumbled.

  "Fag?" Moon asked, holding the pack toward Sunday.

  "She's on a British kick," Anjelica said. "It's their word for cigarette."

  Sunday was bugged that Anjelica thought she wouldn't know that, but kept quiet. She took the cigarette and popped it between her lips.

  "Fucking lighter," Anjelica grumbled as the BIC continued to produce only sparks. "I don't suppose you have one, do you?"

  Sunday didn't carry a lighter. But she unconsciously felt completely at ease in the company of two fellow reprobates. She lifted her right index finger to the tip of the cigarette and . . . something happened. She couldn't really explain it. Even though her heart wasn't racing, and even though she didn't feel the tightness in her gut, the tip of her finger flared like a flashbulb. In the aftermath, the cigarette was half the length it had been, but what was left was burning. She sucked in the smoke, then coughed violently. She was embarrassed to reveal she was such a novice.

  Sunday glanced toward the two girls, worried they'd laugh at her incompetence as a smoker.

  Instead, they were staring at her, slack-jawed. Both were pale as ghosts, their cheeks flecked with gray ash from the disintegrated cigarette.

  "How did you do that?" Anjelica whispered.

  "Um," said Sunday.

  Such was the intensity of the moment, none of them had heard the bathroom door open. Sister Cecilia came around the corner and both Moon and Anjelica froze, staring at her. Sunday looked over her shoulder, the cigarette still dangling on her lips.

  She jumped back as the nun snatched the cigarette from her mouth.

  "This is how it begins!" Sister Cecilia screamed, her spittle spraying Sunday's face. "Tobacco is the worst gateway drug! Do you want to be a whore, selling your body to disease-ridden beasts to get your next fix? Do you want to die on some filthy mattress covered in your own vomit?"

  Sunday crossed her arms and turned her face away from the nun. "It's just a cigarette. Chill out."

  "You, young lady, are the one who's going to chill out!" the nun shouted, grabbing Sunday by the wrist. The middle-aged woman had a grip like a gorilla.

  "Let go!" Sunday protested. "You're hurting me!"

  "You don't know what hurt is," Sister Cecilia said, dragging her forward.

  "I said let go!" Sunday tried to pull away, but couldn't break Cecilia's grip. She grabbed hold of a stall door but felt her fingers slipping as the raging nun proved superior at tug-of-war.

  Sunday wondered if she could make her wrist flash, the way she'd made her finger flash.

  There was heat. There was light. In the aftermath, Sister Cecilia lay dead, her hand completely gone, her arm nothing but blackened bone all the way up to the shoulder. Her habit was on fire. Seconds later the sprinklers came on, drenching them all.

  Sunday stared down at the woman she'd just killed. She suspected that a normal person who wasn't a pervert and a mutant might feel remorse at this moment. Cecilia had gotten what was coming to her. The nun had been the one to turn this into a physical confrontation.

  Sunday turned and found Anjelica glued to the far wall, eyes filled with terror. Moon was sobbing in a tight fetal ball at Anjelica's feet.

  The two girls would never be her friends now. All she would ever have was their fear. That gave her a little thrill, the thought of being feared.

  "Tell anyone what you saw and I'll kill you," she said, her voice low and firm. She thought her words sounded especially dramatic with the fire alarms blaring, the hiss of the sprinklers overhead, and the sizzle and pop of nun-fat still burning behind her.

  But inside of fifteen minutes, both girls had talked and Sunday was on her way to jail. She was placed in a holding cell by herself. She wasn't sure why she was afforded the privacy. Obviously, they couldn't put her in a holding cell with men, and maybe there just weren't that many women getting arrested at ten a.m. on a Friday. Her first thought on being left in the empty holding cell was, "Good. I can finally pee." Her trip to the bathroom at the girl's school had gone in a direction she hadn't really planned. But even though she was alone in the cell, she still couldn't go, because there was a surveillance camera in the hall aimed directly at the single exposed toilet. Did the ACLU know about this?

  The thing was, she really needed to pee. She'd watched enough television to know that at some point she'd be given an attorney, but doubted she could wait until she had legal representation to argue her right to urinate in private.

  The camera had to go.

  In the police car, she'd tried to melt the handcuffs. She'd mentally tightened every muscle in her gut one by one to trigger the release of heat, to no avail. The problem, of course, was that her powers normally kicked in when she wasn't thinking about them. Once you start thinking about not thinking about something, it's all you can think about.

  She had to try. She went to the bars of her cell and reached into the empty hallway, pointing her fingers straight at the camera. In her mind's eye, she could imagine jets of flame spouting from her fingertips and engulfing the camera. She furrowed her brow and clenched her teeth, her arm trembling as she willed the fire to come.

  After fifteen minutes, her shoulder was really sore. Worse, with her arm stretched up like that, whoever was on the other side of that camera probably thought she was some kind of Nazi. She could stand people thinking she was demon-possessed, and she was resigned to the fact that word would soon spread that she was a horrible nun-burning mutant, but getting branded a Nazi was too much.

  She lowered her arm and walked to the toilet. If she kept her skirt down, really, how much could they see? She reached under the hem and hooked her fingers into the edge of her panties.

  Behind her, a man cleared his throat.

  Sunday spun around to find a middle-aged white guy in the cell with her, leaning against the bars, his back to the camera. He had his arms crossed and he stared at her with a look that made no sense at all. It was the same look her mother had given her the first time she'd brought home a report card that was all A's. It was a look of pride.

  "Are you my lawyer?" she asked, smoothing down her skirt.

  "Do I look like a lawyer?" the man asked, in a tone of mock offense.

  Sunday didn't know any lawyers, so it was tough to say. She'd assumed a lawyer would be wearing a suit, but maybe that was just on television. This man was wearing blue jeans and scuffed up Nikes. He wore a white cotton button-up shirt, a bit wrinkled. She guessed he was probably close to fifty, since his hair was mostly gray. He wore it long, not down to his shoulders, but still kind of shaggy. He had a deep tan and his mouth and eyes had settled into kind of a smirk. The wrinkles on his face hinted that this was a common expression for him.

  She asked, "So . . . are you a cop? Because this conversation can stop now." She'd been read her rights. She liked having rights.

  The man shook his head. "If you must identify me by a career, I used to be a physicist working for the army. Then, I blew up the world. Then I rebuilt it. So, I guess my job description is god."

  "I thought they had
a separate ward for psychos."

  "Nope," said the man. He glanced around. "But they sure give nun-burners their space."

  As he spoke, three female guards burst through the door at the end of the hall.

  "I've been spotted," said the stranger, reaching into his back pocket. He produced a small black pistol and fired three shots toward the guards. All three dropped instantly.

  "Oh my God!" Sunday screamed, the report of the pistol still ringing in her ears.

  The man shrugged. "There are better places for us to have this conversation." He pulled a calculator out of his front pocket and began to punch in numbers.

  Sunday felt her body fold at an unnatural angle. Before she fully understood what was happening, she found herself staring at the back of her knees.

  Then her body snapped back to normal and they were standing in the middle of a vast, trackless desert. The sky above was full of stars, so crisp and clear that Sunday could see the Milky Way. She spun around, off balance in the shifting sand. She dropped to her knees, temporarily forgetting how to breathe. The sand burned like it had just been pulled straight out of an oven.

  "What just happened?" she gasped.

  The man held up the calculator. "I moved us to the Sahara so we could talk in peace. This is my space machine. Like it? I can move anything I wish anywhere I wish by something analogous to a cut and paste of spatial coordinates. I should have built this years ago, but I got side-tracked trying to perfect a teleportation belt."

  "Who are you again?" Sunday asked.

  "My original name was stolen from me," the man said. "Now, I answer to Rex Monday. It's a play on words. Get it?"

  Sunday didn't get it.

  "Are you with the government?" she asked. "Are you here because of my powers?"