How to Save the World Read online

  “Tell the lady what she wants to know,” Stretchy said. Toadicus smirked. I looked over my shoulder at Tamara, who still had a grip on my shirt. Silence stretched over the bar until—­

  Clang.

  All five of us jumped. Raze, who’d slammed her third and final shot glass onto the bar top, didn’t notice. She let out a ladylike burp. “Sal, I could use another one of those,” she called toward the back room.

  “You can drink at a time like this?” I asked.

  “They’re threatening you, not me. Sal!”

  “Enough.” Tamara nodded at Toadicus, who grabbed Raze around the middle, moving to pick her up.

  He yanked back a bloody hand and screamed.

  No point in waiting for a better distraction. I slapped the side of Tamara’s neck, aiming for speed rather than strength. The taser patch I’d slammed into the corner of her jaw sprang to life with a fizzle of static and a bright blue flash. I launched myself right as it went off, sliding for home toward Guy and Stretchy. My knee drove right into Stretchy McGee’s scapula. Nothing crunched because the woman was probably made of rubber, but she still screamed.

  Tamara stormed toward me, homicide written on every feature. As Guy struggled to free himself from Stretchy McGee, I scrambled upright. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten the telekinesis: Tamara raised her hand, fingers spread, and the invisible force hit like a battering ram. It slammed under my sternum, the force of it scooping me up and backward. My shoulder blades hit the bar so hard that my head recoiled back and agony sang up my spine, knocking the breath from my lungs.

  I cried out and tried to push against the force, but it was like I was surrounded by invisible steel arms that threatened to choke me. Tamara stood in the center of the bar with her hand still extended, the irises in her eyes glowing so brightly that I could see them clearly even in the dim lighting. No wonder she regularly made the top ten lists for scary-­ass villains. The look on her face was going to give me nightmares for a month.

  From the way Guy gasped, I apparently wasn’t the only one to think so. At least on the other side of the bar, Raze seemed to hold her own. She kicked a downed Toadicus in the stomach repeatedly. “Keep! Your! Froggy! Hands!” Each word was accompanied by a kick and a grunt. “Off! Of! Me! You stupid reptile!”

  Guy and I were considerably more screwed. I couldn’t move, and even though I’d damaged Stretchy a little, she was still standing.

  Tamara’s eyes never left mine as she peeled the taser patch from her skin. There wasn’t even a rash left behind, which told me all the other goodies Jessie had given me would be equally useless. Not that I could even use them. Tamara had me completely immobile, which felt truly strange. Usually when I couldn’t move, ropes or chained were involved. The lack of anything visible around my body sent cold fear coursing through me in little choppy waves. We were truly outmatched, and Tamara hadn’t even broken a sweat. My heart began to pound, and I fought the urge to actually whimper as she stalked up to me.

  She dropped one hand so that the telekinetic hold fell away. Before I could even react, though, she had me by the neck again. She tried to lift me, a line appearing between her eyebrows when she realized how heavy I was. In the end, she settled for tightening her grip, which really wasn’t much better. My hands began to shake.

  “You’re a pain in the ass,” she said, “but you’re worth more to me alive than dead. How about you cease these pathetic little attempts at rebellion and I let your boyfriend live?”

  “That doesn’t sound like something I’d do,” I said.

  ­People make fun of short ­people, but they don’t realize that when you’re closer to the ground, it’s simply easier to get at the kneecaps and the groin. I went for the former now, kicking sharply at her left kneecap.

  She didn’t even do me the courtesy of flinching. “Are you done?” she asked.

  “Probably not,” I said, wheezing a little.

  “You know something. And even better, there’s somebody who knows more about the Demobilizer than you do,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me.

  “There is?”

  “Chelsea was there. If I’m not mistaken, she was delivering a ransom payment.”

  “I don’t know anybody named Chelsea.”

  Tamara jerked me closer to her. I stared at her nose. “I think you do. She mentioned a twerp that foiled a few of her plans before she got herself captured by Davenport.”

  “Twerp? Really? That’s hurtful.”

  “Bring her to me. She owes me.”

  “I told you—­”

  “If she helps me find the Demobilizer, I’ll consider her debt forgiven.”

  Guy made a soft noise behind me and I tried to remember if he knew that Brook was in debt with Tamara Diesel. Sometimes I had a hard time recalling who knew which piece of information at any given point in the day. Eddie Davenport and his bizarre insistence on keeping my friends apart had struck again.

  “You want her to know that, you tell her yourself,” I said.

  “Linda,” Tamara said.

  Linda must have been Stretchy’s real name, for her arm tightened around Guy and he grunted in pain. I struggled, but Tamara Diesel didn’t even flinch. If anything, her grip doubled. How she wasn’t crushing my larynx, I had no idea. I tried to pry her fingers free and get to Guy, who was going from red to white. “Leave him out of it! I mean that.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” She scoffed and I had to admit that it was a good question. I was outclassed on every level: every villain in the bar—­including the one I’d brought with me—­was stronger than me, I couldn’t depend on Raze in a fight, and even with the doomed Toadicus down, both Linda and Tamara could kill Guy without breaking a sweat. I’d been in some bad situations during my Hostage Girl days—­and the person who usually saved me then was the reason I couldn’t effectively fight back now.

  I opened my mouth. I didn’t exactly know what was going to come out, other than something sarcastic. But as my luck would have it, Raze ceased kicking Toadicus and walked over to the bar, stopping me before I could speak. “Sal!” she called. “Seriously, it’s not fair to cut me off so early. I want—­”

  “Shut up,” Tamara said, her voice rising to a roar. She turned, hand up to knock Raze back with her weird telekinetic powers.

  Raze turned and shot her in the face.

  I saw the little flash of her green-­and-­gold pain gun and instinctively flinched, years of being the target of the same gun working out in my favor. I was close enough to hear the crackle of the bolt striking Tamara’s cheekbone. She jerked back, her grip loosening, and I dove out of her grasp. I didn’t bother with grace. Instead, I scuttled back like a crab, desperate to put as much distance between me and the scary supervillain as possible.

  Tamara wiped at her cheek and swung toward Raze, homicide in her eyes. “You little—­”

  Raze’s rocket boots kicked on, propelling her out of range of Tamara’s swipe. Telekinetic force buffeted against the walls, rattling the window blinds. Raze darted about like a persistent frog dressed in outdated clothes. “Do you know how hard it is getting her to return a fight? Do you, huh? Do you?”

  With Tamara distracted, I bolted for Linda. She still had Guy trapped in the stretched-­out rope of her arm, which was coiled around him like an anaconda. I lunged for them. Right as I did, Guy stomped hard on her instep and brought the back of his head smashing into her face. They both reeled a little.

  I punched her hard in the midsection. It was like driving my fist into rubbery foam: way too much give. “Eugh,” I said.

  Either way, it was enough for Guy to break free, shoving Linda away so that she rolled behind a stool. His eyes went wide and he tackled me to the ground. A second later, gunshots echoed, sounding like explosions and making the ground beneath us reverberate. Wood splintered and flew as I gawked at a hole in the wall right
where my head had been.

  Common sense kicked in. I shoved Guy behind the bar, ignoring his yelp of surprise, and rolled after him. “Is it just me,” I said, “or is using a gun cheating?”

  “Definitely cheating. Effective cheating.” Guy shoved his hair out of his eyes. The bar wouldn’t protect either of us for long, but we remained crouched there for a second. Over our heads, Tamara continued to ventilate the walls of Mind the Boom.

  Raze dropped down on my other side, looking grumpy. She clicked her tongue, and pulled out a fist-­sized green sphere from her jean jacket. “Should’ve let me have another lemon shot,” she said, like Sal was somehow at fault for all of this. She tossed the green thing carelessly over her shoulder, so that it arced over the bar top and into the main seating area.

  A second later, the walls shuddered. The air turned vaguely cyan for a moment.

  Tamara blasted a bottle of vodka off the shelf in retaliation.

  One of Linda’s creepy too-­long arms snaked over the side of the bar. I shoved Guy out of the way, grabbed a jar of olives, and smashed it down on her fingers. A hiss of pain erupted from the other side of the bar as Linda drew her hand back. Juice dripped everywhere.

  “Tamara wants you alive, I think,” Guy said. “So we’ve got that going for us.”

  “The part where we’re literally in a shootout with supervillains in a supervillain bar, not so much.”

  “Well,” Guy said, his smile pulling to one side, “you can’t have everything, I guess.”

  Inexplicably, even with terror making it difficult to see straight and expensive alcohol exploding all around us, I wanted to laugh. “I love you,” I said.

  His eyes lit up. “Ditto.”

  Raze rolled her eyes at us, breaking the moment. Whatever. It was romantic. “You might not have everything,” she said, “but you do have me.”

  And with that said, she began to pull a frightening amount of weaponry out of her jacket and boots, disregarding the laws of physics. Guns, tasers, shock sticks, little green grenades, vials, pressurized needles, all of it formed a pile while Tamara continued to unload into the walls. It felt like a tantrum by this point. Raze turned to us with a wicked grin. “Take your pick.”

  I reached for one of her ray guns. Raze’s frigid fingers latched around my wrist and jerked me back. “This does not make me a do-­gooder,” she said. “I am doing this in the hope that you will show up for a real hero-­villain fight someday, and you can’t do that if you’re dead.”

  “Razor X, you are the baddest villain I know,” I said.

  Raze preened and pulled a different gun out of the pile. “Take this one, it’s got better reverb.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and Raze wrinkled her nose at the courtesy.

  Angélica had not actually trained me on much weaponry that wasn’t a bo staff or nunchucks, but it wasn’t like I had much of a choice now. We were pinned down, Guy didn’t have his usual fortitude, strength, or ability to heal, and Tamara wasn’t leaving without me. So I took a deep breath, looked over the ray gun to make sure there wasn’t a safety (there was, which startled me), and readied myself. I peeked over the counter and fired off two quick zaps. They missed Linda by half an inch and destroyed a potted plant in the corner. I dropped back down and winced. I hoped Sal wasn’t too attached to that fern.

  Rather than choosing a weapon of his own, Guy looked around, craning his neck.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked as Raze laid down a blast of purple fire.

  He pointed.

  It took me a second to realize he wasn’t pointing at an outdated Supervillain of the Month calendar, but at the little red box next to it. “The fire alarm, really?”

  “You think Davenport won’t pay attention if the fire alarm goes off in a known supervillain bar?”

  “That is a really good point.”

  “Think you can cover me?”

  “I think Raze has us covered,” I said, since she was grinning and chucking every weapon in her arsenal at Tamara and Linda. They weren’t firing back as often, but they were still making their presence known with the occasional shattered bottle of fancy tequila.

  “Wish me luck,” Guy said, swooping in and stealing a kiss.

  “Ew,” Raze called over an explosion from one of her cyan-­grenades.

  Guy crawled across the area behind the bar on his belly, wincing occasionally at the shattered glass. I doubled my efforts to try and hit Linda with the ray gun, letting Raze deal with Tamara. She was the one who’d pissed her off, after all. And I really didn’t want to add Tamara Diesel to my personal list of enemies, though I figured she’d already seen to that. Dammit, I was actually trying to stay out of the Davenport world and live something of a normal life. Getting into a gunfight with supervillains over a substance that could change the entire superhero community was the core definition of not doing that. No wonder Jessie had said I should never want to save the world. It was kind of a pain in the ass.

  Guy finally reached the fire alarm. I nudged Raze, jerking my chin at the fire alarm and then back at the unseen Linda and Tamara.

  But Raze frowned. “Really? You’d do that to Sal?”

  “Raze. We’ve already destroyed half of her bar.”

  Raze looked around at all of the holes in the wall, the wood splinters and glass on the floor, and nodded. “You may have a point. Very well. The loud one is mine—­you take the slinky one.”

  “I thought all of you supervillains knew each other’s names,” I said, squinting at her. Guy gave us a hurry up and do it already look.

  Raze, unexpectedly, began to tear up, which was always weird to see with her overlarge eyes.

  “What?” I asked, impatient now. “What is it?”

  “You—­you called me a supervillain.”

  “Raze.”

  She snapped to attention. “Right, yes. Protect the overgrown ginger. Got it.”

  When I signaled, Guy surged up to yank the fire alarm, and Raze and I rose up to lay down a blanket of cover fire for him. I heard a very un-­villain-­like yelp as Linda dove to safety, but Tamara didn’t even flinch. She continued to shoot not at us, but at Guy. I saw her hit the wall next to him in slow motion, then an inch closer, and then—­

  Raze’s blast hit her in the wrist and the shot went wide, missing Guy completely and hitting a black box on the wall I hadn’t noticed. Sparks exploded outward and foul-­smelling smoke began to spew. An instant later, Guy’s fingers closed around the lever of the fire alarm. Loud, piercing shrills broke out, so deafening that all of us clapped our hands over our ears.

  Another scatter of sparks shot into the air, and Mind the Boom flickered and changed.

  The weathered booths meant to look like driftwood suddenly became dark and scarred, broken in half time and again and clearly fixed haphazardly. The stool legs were all bent crookedly, the metal dinged up and rusty, the fabric covered in duct tape. Scorch marks covered the walls at almost regular intervals. A gigantic hole clearly caused by a fireball had been boarded over with obviously new wood. Every piece of nautical décor vanished. The photographs on the Hostage Girl wall remained the same, but the corkboard beneath them had warped like it had been too close to the aforementioned fireball. Apparently I wasn’t the only one shocked: all of us stood up and looked around, gaping.

  It looked like a place you’d expect dangerous supervillains to hang out, actually.

  There was a loud thwack and all of us jolted in surprise. A blink, and I was looking at the regular Mind the Boom, with its cheesy nautical aesthetic. Sal, looking well and truly grumpy, stood next to the black box that Tamara had hit, holding the broom she’d just whacked it with. “Are you done?” Sal asked in a tone that dripped with acid.

  “No.” Tamara turned and fired off a single shot.

  Raze whimpered.

  “No!” I dove at her as she
crumpled. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sal and Guy duck out of the way, but I focused on Raze, who’d curled up, one hand clutched around her shoulder. She hissed out a variety of swearing that didn’t sound like any language I knew.

  “Raze—­Raze, are you okay?”

  Sal was suddenly there, pushing me away and yanking off her over-­shirt to help stop the blood flow. She had a cluster of raised horizontal scars on her shoulder, but that was probably par for the course for a supervillain barkeep. “Focus on getting the morons out of my bar,” she said without looking at me.

  Raze let out a little mewl of pain.

  I tossed Guy a ray gun and turned, anger boiling in my midsection. There wasn’t really any way I could damage Tamara, but in that moment, I wanted to. Raze was my enemy, not hers. The only one allowed to fight her was me.

  And god, I really needed to stop spending so much time with Raze if that was my logic.

  I sprang up onto my feet and aimed, this time at Tamara. She barely flinched when the ray bolt tagged her shoulder, but it did turn her vindictive smile toward me. Until her cell phone rang.

  She answered it, ignoring the fact that I hit her knee and her side. She fired off another bullet in my direction that splintered the bar in front of me. I yelped and dodged out of the way of the debris.

  Sal’s annoyed hiss was plenty loud in the following silence. “Would you please convince her to stop destroying my bar?”

  “She got a phone call. That might convince her to—­” I heard the front door opening and closing and risked a peek over the top of the bar. Tamara and Linda were nowhere to be seen, though Toadicus remained in a crumpled green heap. I rose to my feet, half expecting this to be some kind of trap. But no, apart from us, the bar was empty. “Huh. She’s gone.”