I Have Met the Enemy and He Is Me
I rushed over to Diabloman’s side, ignoring my doppelganger and trying to cradle my friend. I muttered numerous spells of healing and tried to stop the bleeding, but it seemed to be too late, I could feel my friend’s soul leaving his body.
Diabloman looked up at me, through his mask. “I tried to stop Merciful. I figured I would act like your children’s movie and stop the evil emperor.”
I started to say, “It’s not a children’s movie.” Then I realized there were more important things to focus on. “Hang in there, man. I’ll pull a rabbit out of my hat. You can survive. We still have a lot to do.”
“I am sorry for betraying you,” Diabloman said. “I love my sister and you. It was a mistake not to try to help you both.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, willing to put aside the horrible circumstances we’d shared. “Water under the bridge.”
“That’s good to hear,” Diabloman said, his voice fading. “I shall try and go out saying something funny that’s movie related.”
“Don’t,” I said, tearing up. “Please, don’t. I’ll figure something out, I promise. Please, don’t go.”
“Time to die,” Diabloman said, his soul leaving his body.
“Blade Runner, really?” Merciful said, standing above me. I didn’t think of him as Other Gary anymore. Any version of me couldn’t do what he’d done here. “I would have thought he’d have made a reference to something like Rosemary’s Baby or Santo vs. Dracula.”
I didn’t bother looking up at Merciful. “You didn’t have to kill him.”
“Yes, I did,” Merciful replied. “He wouldn’t have stopped until either I was dead, or he was. You managed to persuade him to the kind of stupid heroics that got him killed. It’s something both of us excel at, really.”
“You manipulated him into making this stupid funhouse,” I said, my eyes wet with tears as I rubbed them away. “All of it was designed to get me and the others here with the Primal Orbs so you could steal them.”
“I thought we’d already covered that,” Merciful said. “I knew if I created enough stupid and ridiculous nonsense on your doorstep that you’d be compelled to investigate. Dracula, the president’s daughter being kidnapped, Nazi gold, and a talking bird. If it had just been a couple of kidnapped children, then you’d never have shown up in force.”
“You don’t know me nearly as well as you think then, chief,” I said, disgusted that we had anything in common. “Cindy thought you were me but for different reasons. I don’t buy that for a second.”
“Perhaps,” Merciful admitted. “In a different world where I was a superhero, I stood like a tall oak whereas you’ve ever flipped around like a blade of grass. When the winds of misfortune struck us, I resisted while you let yourself be blown around.”
“And the man who would not bend simply broke,” I said, a sneer on my face. “You’re disgusting.”
“What truly makes you hate me, Gary?” Merciful asked. “Just for posterity’s sake. Name the act that makes you loathe me above all things.”
“Starlight,” I said, finally looking up at him. “The robot version of your daughter that you let die. Torture me, kill me, fine. Torture and kill billions. Fine. You betrayed your family. I hate what you did to Diabloman and Cloak. I hate what you did to Gabrielle, using her as an enormous battery. You killed my family, but it was what you did to your own family that makes me disgusted with you.”
“She wasn’t my family,” Merciful said. “But given how you mourn the robot dolls I made of your children I don’t think you’d believe that. It is strange how different the two of us are. Keith lived in my universe and was my archenemy. The Cain to my Abel. Here, you mourned him and did your best to honor him. Every day you’ve sought to overcome death, but you’re utterly defined by the ones that have happened in your life. No wonder she loves you so much.”
“What is it you even want?” I asked, looking at him. “I thought I killed you after bringing back your world. Why didn’t you just enjoy it? I’m sure your Mandy and Cindy would have been happy to see you back.”
Merciful’s expression turned sour. “When you brought back my world, you brought back another Merciful to replace me. I could have killed him or gone to live with them, the same as with you, but what was the point? You are correct that I was broken by my ordeal. I had murdered billions, twisted time, and hurt the ones I supposedly cared for. There was no redemption for me. No happy ending.”
“Diabloman thought the same thing,” I replied. “He was wrong.”
“Are you making a last-ditch attempt to tell me to turn back to the Light?” Merciful asked.
“No,” I said. “I hope you rot in Hell. However, D tried to turn it around. To be a rotten bastard, you have to work at it. Every time you were, you were making a choice to continue to be so.”
“It is time to wake up, Gary,” Merciful said, sighing. “There isn’t a real world of capes and hoods. Superheroes are just enforcers of the establishment and rescue workers with powers. Supervillains are just disruptors of said status quo and criminals. One might be a freedom fighter or terrorist depending on how their actions are perceived. The good, the bad, and the ugly are determined solely by the public’s whims.”
“You know who tends to say good and evil don’t exist?” I said, just sick of these kinds of conversations. “Bad guys.”
Merciful lifted up the bracelet to show me. “I wasn’t lying when I told you about the war going on outside of time. There’s a fatal flaw in your universe that was created when Diabloman destroyed my reality and the universe was reborn. That flaw is us.”
I stared at him. “Bull felgercarb.”
Merciful gave a half-smile, absent any mirth. “Perhaps it is better to say it is related to us. Tom Terror, Entropicus, and President Omega are manifestations of the errors building up in the universe overtime due to its fundamentally flawed nature. However, we are a paradox due to the fact I was knocked out of time when the universe was made. The two of us cannot exist in the same universe without sharing each other’s role in the grand tapestry of the Primals’ plan. We have been bouncing into each other and screwing each other’s lives up repeatedly.”
“I seem to recall that was you murdering my friends and allying with Omega to blow up the world multiple times,” I said, wondering how I could straight up murder him. “You also sent a woman to impersonate my dead wife.”
“Sorry about that,” Merciful said, shrugging. “I shouldn’t have half-assed it like that by combining Spellbinder with vampire Mandy’s demon soul. Don’t worry, I did my job here much better. I went to Jane’s universe and killed the Mandy there. I think the current Mandy’s soul works much better. She doesn’t even know she’s got a new one.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re lying.”
“Maybe,” Merciful said. “Maybe years of having Maria’s soul smoothed the rough edges off of her demonic one, maybe it turns out that vampires have free will, maybe vampire Mandy learned to pretend to be pleasant in order to seduce you. In the end, you wouldn’t question it because you don’t question things. You just accept them.”
“Maybe you just want to hurt me as much as you can because the only person you hate more than the universe is yourself,” I replied.
Merciful looked like I’d punched him, but the expression lasted only a second. “One of us has to go, Gary. I’ve sliced off a piece of Heaven to merge with our reality. Diabloman tainted our reality when he destroyed it the first time and this will purify it. I’ll remake it to see how it should have been without the Primals tampering and a new age will begin.”
I stared at him. “Yeah, then the only one borked up will be you. I’ve seen your utopia, Merciful, and it was police state where people had smiles painted on their souls.”
“But smile they did,” Merciful said, showing no hesitation. “I just wanted to let you know that this will be a better universe. You agreed with me before it happened, too, or you never would have taken the Primal Orbs to undo the rule against resurrection.”
I stared at him. “That’s what this is all about? You wanted to make sure that I undid the rule as some sort of therapy? To make sure I agreed with you trying to kill me and rewrite my world the way you want?”
Merciful smiled. This time, genuinely amused. “It is the rare occasion you get this kind of self-reflection. You are a harder man than I gave you credit for, Gary. I should have seen that earlier. For all your childishness, you don’t hesitate to crawl through broken glass for your loved ones. It’s a pity the ones you love don’t reciprocate. All your relationships are doomed: Gabrielle chose to keep fighting the Lich-Wights rather than rescue you, the orbital satellites started firing at your mother’s house when Dracula died, Mandy is only someone I restored to give you a chance to say goodbye, and Cindy was destined to exceed you as the world’s greatest supervillain. Diabloman? Well, you saw what he became.”
I shook my head. “It was never about being better than them. It was loving them for the flawed mess that they are.”
“We are the Chosen of Life and Death, two sides of the same coin fighting for a different vision of the future. Your world was dying and soon to be empty of superheroes. My world couldn’t survive the awfulness. Still, one of us has to win and my world will be a place where good always triumphs over evil. Like now. Goodbye, Gary. There is not a damned thing you can do to stop this.”
I put my hand on his bracelet and squeezed. “You mean, like this?”
Merciful’s eyes widened as I immediately struck at him with the Primal Orbs and had a few microseconds head start in channeling the power. The two of us began a contest for the ultimate force in the universe. His vision of the world was sterile, cold, censored, and edited of everything that was offensive.
Mine was a violent, punk, and disordered world where the consequences of one’s actions could never quite be escaped. I didn’t like my world but I was surprised to find out that Merciful didn’t care for his either. It was a fascinating tug of war as we both had unlimited energy to draw from in this place. The struggle between us lasted only a moment but I could feel whole sections of reality being rewritten around us. Then the Primal Orbs shattered.
“Gah!” Merciful cried out, falling backwards to the ground. The wrist holding the Primal Orbs had exploded along with the hand past it. Fragments of the omnipotent energy sources swirled around in the air before burning up like embers in the wind. I looked over to see Diabloman’s body was gone, as was the blood from his injuries. It was just Merciful and me in the emptiness of his pocket dimension.
I hesitated to approach him and stared down at him. He was aging before my eyes, slowly turning from a middle-aged man not too much older than me into an elderly, white-bearded one. From there, he aged even further until he was a man older than a century, a desiccated mummy, a skeleton, and finally dust.
“Damn,” I said, looking down at the white robe that gradually faded away too. “I think he’s finally dead-dead.”
“No one truly dies in the story we’re telling,” Death said, walking out of the nothing. “That was your wish, after all? You wanted to story to go on.”
“‘The NeverEnding Story’ is not just a song by Limahl,” I said, “who was the best part of Kajagoogoo.”
“The universe as created is what he wanted,” Death said. “As you both wanted. Life and I compromised. The Big Ass Time Disaster, as you called it, never happened and reality has corrected itself to become as it would without the Primals’ interference. Good or bad, humanity has been allowed to make its own mistakes. We’re merely here to pick up the pieces now.”
“Is the Earth a blasted cinder?” I asked.
Death smirked. “Even if it was, there are other realities to tend to. This will be the last retcon and time now flows in a straight line. No more killing Hitler, though the realities where you did kill him have all gone on to their own histories without him.”
“I’ll find something else to occupy my time,” I said. “Provided my family is okay.”
Death stared at me. “Goodbye, Gary. We won’t be seeing each other again. At least until you get tired of this layer of reality. That may be at the end of the multiverse or in a few minutes. Even I can’t tell.”
“Wait, is that an answer?” I asked, panicking. “Is my family okay?”
Death leaned over and kissed me. It was a beautiful, soul-touching, fantastic moment that felt like all the love in the universe.
When I opened my eyes, I was in the middle of Sunset Memorial Park in Falconcrest City. The sun was shining brightly in the sky and people were wandering around, visiting the graves of their loved ones.
Looking down, I saw Lancel Warren’s grave was in front of me. It listed the same date of his death as had existed before. Merciful had maybe rewritten the world but he hadn’t restored the Nightwalker to life. Then again, Lancel hadn’t really wanted to live had he? He’d wanted to atone for what he’d done, which he’d done many times over, and then rejoin his family. Still, it made me wonder who had won in our battle of wills.
If either of us.
I pulled out my cellphone and called my mother. Instead I got a pizza service. I called Cindy next and got a phone sex line, which wasn’t necessarily wrong but not the usual result. Gradually, I started to get more and more worried as every number in my contacts proved to be a dead end. By the end, it was clear that none of my numbers worked and while that could mean nothing, it could also mean everything.
“Don’t panic,” I muttered, looking at my cellphone. “Everything could be fine. I mean, it’s probably not fine but it’s maybe fine. Which could be me thinking too much about this or not thinking hard enough. What I need to do is check the house and maybe the internet. I’ll just bring up Superpedia and find out what’s happened in this reality—”
“Merciless!” A voice spoke above me. It was Gabrielle, floating about five feet above me. “We need to have words!”
I looked up my cellphone. “Oh Gabrielle, thank God. Well, at least I know people still recognize me. I need your help getting in touch with—”
That was when Gabrielle summoned an enormous Ultraforce hand and proceeded to slap me with it. My cellphone went flying through the air before smashing against Lancel’s headstone, shattering into a thousand pieces. It would have knocked me out under normal circumstances, but I’d been battered around a lot lately and had developed a tolerance.
“What the hell, Gabrielle?” I asked, stunned. “That’s a fine way to treat your fiancé.”
“We’re nothing now, Merciless!” Gabrielle said, growling. “I’m bringing you in.”
I stared at her. “Ah hell.”
That didn’t bode well.