THE FINAL SHOWDOWN BETWEEN ME, MYSELF, AND I
“Your daughter is dead,” I said, shaking my head. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“She was no more my daughter than a portrait or sculpture of her was,” Other Gary said, shaking his head. “Besides, I’m not the person who killed her. You did that when you rescued Gabrielle from the Grand Capacitor. Who knows how many people you’ve killed now that there’s a shutdown of Ultraforce-provided electricity across the East Coast.”
I shook my head. “You are pathologically incapable of accepting that anything is your fault, aren’t you?”
“Grand words from the man who decided to be a supervillain and ruined the lives of everyone he loved,” Other Gary said. “Mandy’s death and vampirism followed by centuries of torment are all on you. Your mistress, Cindy, is traumatized by the fact that her daughter almost died because she felt opposing me was better than accepting the way things were. Diabloman is going to die too. I intend to put him on trial for destroying my universe and make sure he’s healthy enough to serve a lifetime of torture for every single person killed by his misdeeds. Justice will be long and drawn out rather than swift.”
“Good guys don’t torture,” I snarled.
“I’ll call it something else when I get the courts to legalize it,” said Other Gary. “‘Justice’ is another word for revenge, after all. The only difference is the victim. Society is built upon paying evil unto evil, and I’m going to do it until this world is scoured clean of filth like you.”
I took a deep breath and drew my pistols. “You know, screw talking. I’ve had enough of your bullshit. We may look alike, but we are nothing alike inside.”
Other Gary smiled. “The only difference between you and me, Gary, is a matter of stakes. You’ve cut a bloody swath through everyone who has stood in your path. You’ve ruined the lives of those you love. You’ve betrayed friends and allies to achieve your goals. You’ve built an empire while claiming to be an anarchist. I, however, am going to fix this world. To help everyone. You can’t even help yourself.”
I aimed my pistols at his chest and pulled their triggers repeatedly. The bullets shot forth, only for glowing discs to appear in the air around Other Gary’s head. I shot repeatedly, but I wasn’t very good, and the little blasts of hellfire did exactly nada to the guy.
“Uh oh,” I muttered.
That was when Other Gary pointed at the pistol in my right hand and it cut itself in half. He aimed at the second and I dropped it. I proceeded to conjure every bit of flame in my body and hurled it like a blast of death at Other Gary.
“Hadoken!” I shouted.
The fire washed across Other Gary as if it were raindrops.
“I’ve been building my power up for the past five years,” Other Gary said, walking forward. “You, however, have been stuck in a hole.”
“A hole you put me into!” I threw ice blasts at him.
They turned into steam, melted by a golden aura Other Gary conjured around himself. “Indeed. Perhaps that should have been your first clue to stay down.”
He then grabbed me by the throat and started to strangle me. I grabbed his hands and tried to pull them away before deliberately falling to my knees.
“Goodbye, Gary,” Other Gary said. “I really am sorry—SON OF A BITCH!”
That last line was due to my grabbing the jagged remnant of my first gun and jabbing it into his femoral artery. He’d obviously prepped for dealing with all my spells and attacks but not necessarily for thinking outside of the box. Which is what I did best.
“That and your guns are made of pure anti-life matter,” Cloak said. “I doubt regular weapons would have done anything.”
That was when Other Gary’s leg wound started to heal and his eyes blaze. “You’re going to pay for that.”
“Ah crap,” I said, using the gun’s lower half like a pair of brass knuckles to stun Other Gary. They smacked through his defenses and gave me my first real chance to beat the holy hell out of my doppelgänger. “Cloak, I have a really stupid idea that will probably get us both killed.”
“I’m up for it,” Cloak said. “Even if I don’t see any way out of this.”
“I do,” I whispered, hitting Gary again before he blocked my third strike, then kneed me in the stomach.
The problem was, my plan was a suicide gambit. There was no way in hell I could beat Other Gary in a way that would permanently kill him. He was immortal, and for all my pretensions to being the Chosen of Death, that didn’t give me any special insight into murdering the guy. Still, I had an idea of where he got his power, and that let me know I could probably take it away from him—if I was willing to give up my life doing it.
I didn’t want to die, any more than the Starlight Maiden had. She had been a good person, every bit as much as Gabrielle in her own way. However, I didn’t exactly see any other way around this. Honestly, deep down, if it had been a choice between killing Other Gary and fleeing, then I probably would have chosen the latter. His earlier offer about leaving reality sounded better and better each minute. He’d tried to kill Gizmo, though, and if he was alive, then he’d do it again or try to raise her himself. I wasn’t going to let him get away with doing that. I just needed Cloak’s permission first. It was his life too, after all.
“Are you sure, Cloak?” I asked, as Other Gary grabbed me by the shoulders and started filling me with a painful burning energy that drove out my Death-granted powers. If I guessed right, I suspected it would eventually burn away my insides and make it impossible for Death to restore me. Poetic.
“I’m already dead,” Cloak said. “Do what you have to.”
“Gotcha,” I said, grabbing Other Gary and lifting him up over the catwalk side. “I’m sorry, Gizmo, I really wanted to come back to you.”
“I’m sorry too, Dad,” Gizmo said, revealing she’d been watching this entire time.
“Die,” Other Gary said. “Die and stay dead.”
I interrupted Other Gary by jumping over with him into the glowing blue lake below as both of us disappeared into raw mystical power. I strangled Gary as he strangled me back, the two of us washed over by the raw, distilled life-force of billions. Had I not distracted him, Other Gary could have shielded himself. I might have been able to do the same. Both of us instead disappeared, dissolved into the greater mystical force.
Being both of us were necromancers, that wasn’t the end of it. The two of us found ourselves surrounded by glowing blue light and strange, free-floating crystals. I thought it looked like a combination of outer space with the interior of an aquarium.
The water of the energy washed over us and flowed even as weird twinkling lights moved all around us. Most of all, however, magic surrounded us. This was where Other Gary had collected his massive amount of stolen life-force. The billions he’d murdered across several timelines were fed into the reservoir and stored across the crystal towers that all linked here. We were in the center now.
Other Gary, for his part, looked more amused than threatened. “So, this was your big plan? Dumping me in the middle of the center of my power? Brilliant.”
“I have access to it too,” I said, shaking my head.
“Yes, but you’re an awful wizard,” Other Gary said. “This will be easy to deal with. My life will return and I will wash away your armies. Forget killing you. I’m going to make sure you never existed.”
I mentally called out to the billions of people Other Gary had murdered with his plan. “I don’t think so.”
That was when a weird snake-like skeleton wrapped around one of Other Gary’s arms, followed by another one. A strange white glowing tentacle stretched out from the infinity around us to grab another of Other Gary’s legs.
“What the—?” Other Gary said.
“You have the biggest storehouse of necromantic energy in the history of everything,” I said, surprised this was working. “Most people don’t become ghosts when they die, but the ones who died in violence and with regrets have a bigger tendency to become them. I figured that all the people you murdered and stored the life-force of would have issues with you.”
Other Gary blew off his attackers with blasts of golden light before a hundred piranha-like spirits charged at him, only to be blasted away themselves. This attracted more attention, and he was soon blasting everything around him.
“This is an irritation, nothing more!” Other Gary shouted, sounding less confident than he usually did.
“No, it’s a distraction,” I said, taking a deep breath despite the fact that I no longer technically had a body. “Cloak, can you show me how to channel this energy?”
“How much of it? I’ve been surrounded by mystical wellsprings before, but this is an ocean compared to lakes,” Cloak said, still with me despite the destruction of my physical body. It was rather disappointing since my original plan was he’d be resurrected in here and handle things for me. Whoops.
“All of it,” I said, stretching out my arms. “We can’t let any of this be harnessed by people like me. Except well, right now.”
“You won’t be able to survive that much,” Cloak said. “It’s not meant for mortal bodies.”
“We’re already dead.”
“I take back everything I ever said about you. Well, most of it.”
“Let’s not make this mushy.”
Cloak then merged his mind with mine and for a single moment, I had a hundred years’ worth of being the world’s greatest magic-using superhero. That gave me just the right amount of knowledge to do the spell I wanted to do. I drew in all the energy inside me, pulling it through Cloak and into my soul.
Other Gary seemed to realize what I was doing. “No!”
“Yes,” I said. “Unlimited power!”
That was when the world exploded. At least the one I was in. It’s a weird sensation, dying, even weirder becoming a god—or at least half-a-god. I became one with the reservoir of magic in a way Other Gary had never been willing to risk. I could see other dimensions, the future, the past, old friends long … well, you know the drill.
I understood how the Primals were fragments of a greater celestial consciousness. I understood how the Great Beasts were errors in the cosmos. I even comprehended what angels, demons, spirits, and other gods were. I saw other galaxies, civilizations, and countless variations on the timelines that had produced me.
Weird—the biggest revelation was that I already knew most of this, as it had been recited to me by my stoner roommate Reggie. Who knew that guy had been the most enlightened being in the universe?
Either way, I knew how to make use of the power within me. Other Gary was too arrogant, too full of hubris, to humble himself before the powers of the cosmos. I, on the other hand, was perfectly happy to kneel before the Lord if it got me free stuff. Borrowing knowledge from Death, Life, and a dozen other deities, I made a wish. A dozen wishes, really. Ones that were all granted.
Boom.
Just like that, it was over. I was standing in the middle of Falconcrest City Central Park in the middle of noon, overlooking Other Gary as he was lying face down on the ground. Other Gary’s white cloak was missing and he was wearing a white t-shirt over some plaid boxers.
Some kids were playing Frisbee nearby before chasing after their dog over the closest hill. The air was clean around us and the sense of grim foreboding that had hung around my city was absent. Mostly because it wasn’t my city.
“Cloak?” I asked, checking on my friend first.
“Goodbye, Gary,” Cloak said. “I know you intended to die with me, but I think I can handle this on my own. The price is mine to pay. Try not to completely wreck the world without me.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw Lancel Warren, as a man dressed in a trench coat and fedora, enter a door of light. There was a price for using the kind of power we did, and he was the one willing to pay it.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
Then my friend was gone.
“Where am I?” Other Gary said, holding his head. “What—”
I pulled out the remaining pistol Death gave me and pistol whipped him across the face. “The Greeks were very fond of the concept of the deus ex machina. That’s where the gods stepped in to make everything all right. Well, here, I had to make them get involved.”
Other Gary felt his face, which was bleeding badly. “What did you do?”
“Assuming they followed my plan, we’re in opposite orbital rotation to the earth. You killed billions of people to try and get the magical energy necessary to create a new universe. I, instead, just tried to remake your old earth. This is Earth 2.0—or maybe 1.0, since it’s the original one. All your dead friends and loved ones are here. A bunch of copies of the existing superheroes are here as well. Sadly, not Ultragod or the Nightwalker, since that’s just not how stuff works. Don’t ask me why.”
Other Gary looked at me. “You did that for me?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Thank you,” Other Gary whispered. He thought he knew what was coming.
He was right. I shot him in the head. His body collapsed on the ground, a big hole leading from one side to the other in the middle of his forehead. He didn’t regenerate, get up, or show any sign he wasn’t truly dead this time. I still shot him six more times. You know, just to be on the safe side. Then, driven by hate, I conjured a flame so hot it burned Other Gary’s body down to its atomic particles. I continued until his remains were nothing more than a burnt shadow on the ground.
“That was for Cloak, you son of a bitch,” I hissed before tossing my remaining gun on the ground. Had it been worth it?
No, no it hadn’t.
“Congratulations, Merciless. You have successfully completed your task,” Death’s voice spoke behind me.
I turned around to see my boss wearing a pair of black blue jeans and a corset with her hair tied in a ponytail. It was an unusual look for her, but one that worked.
“Woo,” I said dryly. “Aren’t I special?”
I was tempted to fly away then, since I could already see parkgoers running away while others used their over-large cellphones to call the police. Unlike in my Falconcrest City, it seemed gunning down someone in the middle of the park wasn’t normal here. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“Do you regret killing him?” Death asked.
“No,” I said. “I regret the cost of killing the crazy-ass bastard, though. Lancel Warren was worth all the Garys in a million universes.”
“Perhaps, but perhaps not. Your doppelgänger wasn’t crazy, though,” Death said. “Just differently sane. A factor you share.”
“Thank you for making my day worse.”
“You’re welcome.”
I paused. “Will I ever see Cloak again?”
“Lancel Warren has gone on to his afterlife. What that is doesn’t matter. It is not your place.”
I sighed. “Then I hope this was all worth it.”
“Five billion people live on this earth,” Death said. “Merciful is dead and his regime is crippled. Ultragod is avenged. President Omega is also lost in the spaces between time due to your destruction of his body and radical changing of the future. It will be a long time, if ever, before he returns.”
“Not enough to make up for Ultragod and the Nightwalker, for Mandy’s and my suffering, for all the years I’ve lost with my daughter, and for what happened to Gabrielle,” I said. “Not by a long shot.”
“True,” Death admitted. “But you should take what you can get.”
I blinked. “You know, it just occurs to me I could have used all that power I had to bring back everyone. To make all of this go away. To have a world with the Nightwalker, Ultragod, my brother, and me as the world’s most awesome supervillain, everyone I love happy as well as safe. A paradise limited only by my imagination.”
“Perhaps,” Death said. “But then, what would have been the difference between you and Other Gary?”
“I’d have succeeded in getting everything I wanted without dying?” I asked.
Death laughed. I didn’t particularly like her reaction, but I understood it. This whole thing was a comedy of the blackest kind.
“What happens now?” I asked.
Death placed her hand on my shoulder. “I restore all of the power you were supposed to have as my chosen. You will find Lancel Warren’s books of magic and The Book of Midnight waiting for you back at your restored mansion. Merciful enspelled it to regenerate anyway. If you wish, you can—”
“Claim his stuff, gotcha,” I said. “I intend to. But what about me? What exactly do I do?”
“Anything you want, Gary. That’s the benefit of being you.”
With that, she was gone.
I decided to float off with my levitation powers.
I had some things to take care of before I returned home.