Every Day is Like Doomsday

This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are
intended only to give the fiction a sense of authenticity
and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, and
places, and all incidents portrayed in this book are the
product of the author’s imagination.

EVERY DAY IS LIKE DOOMSDAY. Copyright ©
2013 by Selena Jones. All rights reserved. Printed in the
United States of America. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews.

It was a bad idea from the start. The lights were
blazing and the crowd tittered nervously for the first, and
likely the last, game of its kind. It was a football rivalry
that no one would have expected: Norms vs. Villains.
Wrapped in heavy coats against the autumn chill, clutching Starbucks cups like cardboard imitations of the Holy
Grail, the line of both teenage and adult Norms waiting
to get into the stadium snaked into the full parking lot.
It seemed everyone in the small town simply needed to
watch as the Home team, the Fort Rose Beavers, were
murdered by the Villains Academy… Well, Villains.

This should be a blast, thought Innya as she stepped
off of the black, armored bus and onto the pockmarked
asphalt of the Fort Rose High school parking lot. She
shuddered under the weight of her own blistering sarcasm and walked toward the visitor’s entrance. She had
no desire to be there but the school had made the event
mandatory, so she had pulled on her knee-high, black
Doc Martens and boarded the bus with the rest of them.
She was not going to smile, or cheer, or participate in the
wave. She probably wasn’t even going to watch the game,
preferring instead to revel in her daydreams where she
ruled the world and all of her wishes came true because
she hurt people when they didn’t.

Ahead of her the line of Villains marched through
the gap in the chain link fence as if they owned the place,
which they probably would, come halftime. Standing
beside the gate was a lanky, brown-haired kid she had
never seen before. Dressed in jeans and a thick, brown
leather coat whose shapelessness belied the unimpressive
musculature underneath, his eyes were like twin, wide
moons and the flyers clutched in his hands shook as the
Villains filed past. He was so far out of his element that
he was off the chart.

Innya looked away from the boy and started toward
the entrance when someone came up from behind her
and hit her shoulder hard enough to pitch her forward.
Her heavy boots scuffed the asphalt as she stumbled for a
few steps but she quickly righted herself.

“Out of the way, freak show,” growled a voice as it
went past.
Looking up to see her attacker, Innya saw the beefy
shoulders and nearly buzzed, orange hair of Red. Two of
his group, Ventriloquist and Crusher, walked behind him,
giggling like a couple of demented coeds on their way to
a frat party where some guy would probably roofie their
drinks. Innya wished them luck with their delusions but
didn’t immediately follow. Instead she hung back and
watched as the group of Villains approached the trembling Norm who was stupidly standing too close to the
entrance to the field. Only he didn’t seem to notice the
approach of certain death because his wide brown eyes
were locked on her.
The Norm’s mouth was slightly ajar as he drank
her in and Innya watched back as Red walked by him
and smacked his flyers with his meaty hands. The flyers
erupted from his fingers and drifted swiftly through the
frigid air onto the wet, filthy asphalt. The Norm tore his
gaze from Innya and looked down at the flyers in disbelief, then over his shoulder at Red, then back to her.
Innya strode by him slowly, making a show of every
step. He was either very brave or very stupid, she thought,
to stand his ground on the sidelines of the procession of
Villains. When she reached him he took a breath as if he
was about to say something but she shot him a look that
she hoped would be cold enough to make his man bits
crawl up into his body cavity. He closed his mouth and
she passed by without incident. Smart boy, she thought,
much in the same way she would think about a dog who
had sat up at her command.
Carefully avoiding Red and his cronies, Innya
made her way up into the stands and sat at the very top.
Slightly curious, she looked down to the Norm to see him
talking to two of her peers, Greg and Billy, the classic duo
of brains and brawn. Billy was almost as large as Red and
so he stood a full two heads taller than the Norm kid, who
wasn’t all that short himself. Greg handed something to
the Norm that looked like a pile of damp flyers, which the
Norm kid promptly threw in the trash.
Innya wondered what they could possibly be talking about right up until Greg pointed in her direction and
the Norm turned and looked directly at her. The Norm
nodded. Greg smiled and waved but Innya just narrowed
her eyes in response, a gesture that was likely lost on them
considering the distance. A moment later they turned and
started to walk away from the entrance, the Norm following them. Part of her thought that maybe she should
say something to someone, but then she reasoned that
some Norm who was stupid enough to follow Villains
into shadows wasn’t her problem.
She settled onto the cold, metal bench that was
quickly numbing her shapely butt to watch the inevitable
destruction of the Fort Rose High football team. She
wished she had thought to bring some Red Vines.
By halftime only the special teams were left and
even they were looking rather worse for wear. The score
was 12-7, which was still low according to the announcers but Innya wouldn’t have known the difference. This
alleged low score was probably because the VA team was
more interested in trick-plays and illegal gadgets that
kept popping up right after the shouts of ‘hike!’The entire
offensive line had been taken out at once when the VA
defensive players had blown a sleeping powder into their
opponents’ faces during the lineup. The game had been
stopped while the snoring footballers were carted off the
field but since there was no permanent damage the game
was allowed to continue. Innya had been happy for the
break and had used it to go grab herself some Red Vines
from the snack bar.
She was just returning to her seat as the band
marched out onto the field, their impeccable blue and
gold uniforms quite stunning against the mud and dead
grass of the field, and started playing an odd-sounding
rendition of some song Innya didn’t recognize.Then again,
unless it came off of a movie soundtrack she wouldn’t
have recognized it. That didn’t bother her at all, though,
because an extensive musical knowledge was unlikely to
be a trump card in her eventual bid for world domination.
Innya sat in the top row of bleachers and chewed
on her fingernails and wondered why so many of the kids
on the opposing side were all bundled up as if they were
in the middle of a snowstorm. They didn’t know anything
about snowstorms. Innya had spent the first eight years
of her life in Russian winters, toiling away in a traveling
circus before her family’s act was picked up by a troupe
in the states, so to her this weather felt practically balmy.
“It’s all relative, you know,” said a voice to Innya’s
left. She turned her head to see the Dean of the Villains
Academy, Mr. Ian Woon, climbing the last row of bleachers to her position. He wore a long, chocolate brown wool
coat over his thin frame. Innya guessed that underneath
it he was dressed with his usual flare, in a smart, old
fashioned three piece suit that, in this case, was fashion
overkill. He stepped up onto the bleacher seat just below
hers with his brown and cream-colored wingtip shoes
and then took a seat beside her.
“What’s relative?” Innya asked. “And you’re overdressed for a football game. And how are you reading my
mind? When I arrived a few weeks ago you yourself gave
me a pill to stop that sort of…” Innya’s voice trailed off as
the Dean gave her a somewhat guilty smile.
“
Sacapuntas
,” she muttered, chagrined even though
she had to admit that it was a brilliant move. She looked
at all of the other students, hatching plots and schemes,
unaware that the Dean knew every thought that passed
through their heads. “I’ll find a way around it.”
The Dean shrugged and smoothed his pencil
mustache with a brown-gloved hand. “There are ways,
unfortunately, but you’ll never find them. But your
attempts would be most amusing. And please, watch
your language. Have you no respect for your elders?”
“What language? I called you a pencil sharpener.”
“I know. But does anyone else?”
“Nope,” Innya grinned. To curse in a language
everyone understood was so blasé, so cliché. And Innya
was anything but cliché.
“Good then. I shall keep your secret and you shall
keep mine. As for your other questions, I was referring to
the cold and a good suit is never overkill. And, as you now
know, I can still read your mind and you will not be able
to stop me. I am what I am, just as you are what you are,
just as they are what they are,” he gestured to the crowd
of teenage Villains around them.
Innya turned back to the field and for a few
moments they watched the marching band do its thing,
the oddly dressed flag girls tossing and twirling their banners almost in time to the music. Then Innya said, “This
bores me.” This game called football had never made
sense to her. The only thing that made the evening bearable was imagining the ways in which she would make
the marching band suffer the way that they were making
her ears suffer with their pathetic renditions of indecipherable music when she ruled them all.
“It’s ‘Louie, Louie’,”said Dean Woon without looking at Innya.
“What?”
“The pathetic rendition you were talking about isn’t
quite as indecipherable as you think. It’s ‘Louie, Louie’.”
“Whatever.” Innya said, irritated that once again
the Dean was reading her mind. She would never get
used to someone being able to pluck thoughts out of her
brain. To quell her burgeoning anger at what she considered a flaw in her otherwise perfect existence, she decided
to get someone else in trouble.
“There’s quite a police presence here tonight, isn’t
there?”
“And CIA. And FBI. And a SWAT team. All to
make the Norms feel safe as houses.”
“So how do you think they would take it if they
knew that a couple of the students under your charge
took a Norm beneath the bleachers?”
The Dean swiveled his head towards her, the movement carefully controlled not to convey panic but Innya
saw a slight gleam of fear in his eyes. “Explain, please.”
“They’ve probably already killed him by now. That
was before the game.”
“Who?”
“Golden boy Greg and that great lout, Billy.”
The Dean breathed out slowly and the panic faded
from his eyes.“How do you know they intended to kill him?”
Innya narrowed her eyes and bit her bottom lip.
Her revelation was not going quite as planned. The
Dean didn’t seem to be too concerned. Perhaps a change
of tactics was in order. “Should be fun when they find
his entrails strung like a cat’s cradle around the support
beams beneath us. Though I’m sure they won’t even think
to look under here until the smells starts. Or until some
amorous teenage couple decides to bump uglies beneath
the bleachers. Won’t they get a scare?”
The Dean’s answer was drowned out by the sudden cheers from the students around them. They hadn’t
even cheered when the Villains’ defense sent three of
the Norm players off the field on stretchers. They hadn’t
cheered during the first or second touchdowns scored
by the Villains. And yet all of a sudden, during halftime,
they were cheering. Innya studied the field and eventually
saw the reason for the sudden shift in attitude. Greg and
Billy, fresh from their imagined murder of the brownhaired Norm boy, were towing something covered by a
black sheet onto the field. They were both grinning like
the idiots. Something interesting was finally happening.
“Well, I must be off,” said the Dean. He stood,
straightened his coat and started down the bleachers, no
doubt to find out what was underneath that sheet and
stop it from killing everyone in the stadium. Only a small
part of Innya hoped that he’d succeed.
She watched her classmates plow through the
marching band’s routine, sending a dozen kids sprawling,
along with their ridiculous hats and shiny, headacheinducing instruments. The rest of the band scattered,
their carefully choreographed routine decimated. As the
last strains of music died out—the tuba was the last one
to give up the song for dead—the Villains came to a stop
in the middle of the field. Greg pulled a megaphone out
from under the sheet and stepped away from the object so
that he could easily be seen by both sides.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we at the VA would like to
present you with a token of our appreciation for allowing
us to live and study in your lovely town.” He paused for
applause from the Norms. A tentative round of applause
arose from the home crowd, who were wholly unsure of
what was required of them at this point. A line of police
officers formed up on the sidelines, hands on their firearms, ready for anything.
Greg raised the megaphone to his lips and said,
“So without further ado, I present our gift. We hope you
enjoy it!”
Billy reached down and whipped the sheet off the
float to reveal a massive silver and black something covered
in colorful wires. On the Villain’s side there was a large
clock with red numbers showing 5:00.One second later the
numbers started to count backwards.
As the rest of the Villains caught on they all started
to hoot and giggle. A few of them even danced. Then the
dancers slipped and fell and cracked their heads on the
metal bleacher seats and the Villains laughed even harder.
The Norms did not find any of this humorous and as soon
as they realized that they were looking at a bomb they
started up with the anticipated screaming and the running and the falling all over themselves. It was all much
less impressive than Innya would have imagined.
“May I have your attention please? It appears there
is a bomb on the field,” the football announcer said in a
shaking voice, “Please exit the field and the stadium in
an orderly fashion.” But Innya doubted the Norms could
hear over the din of the stampede of wailing humanity.
Nothing about what was happening throughout the stadium was orderly.
Innya watched the police on the sidelines slowly
approaching the bomb. Greg jumped on Billy’s back,
threw something at the ground, and suddenly both of
them were engulfed in a cloud of smoke. Then the police
started running directly into the smokescreen. From
where she was sitting she could see Billy and Greg running towards the back of the stadium and the only place
devoid of cops running at them.
When the smoke finally cleared the countdown
clock had eclipsed the one minute mark. At this point
even the Villains were heading towards the exits, not
willing to hang around to personally witness the blast
radius of the device. Innya remained in her seat with no
concern for her personal safety, too intrigued by what was
going to happen next. The Norms across the field were
in a full-fledged panic and quite amusing to watch. She
felt certain that many of them had already been trampled
to death, a fate probably worse than just getting blown
up. But it was no use telling them that now. They were
screaming far too loudly to listen to reason.
The countdown continued. The stadium was almost
empty but the parking lot was full, which meant that the
screaming was quickly giving way to angry honking and
the roar of engines. Innya studied the bomb’s components
and decided that she had been right in staying. With its
wires and random bits of metal the bomb looked wicked
but even if it managed to explode it likely wouldn’t cause
much peripheral damage. From the limited attention
she’d paid in Weapons Class she could tell that it seemed
to have only two canisters of accelerant (probably the
very ones the teacher had shown them in class) and they
weren’t very large. Innya thought that perhaps the plan
was to cause panic, not to directly hurt or kill. Or maybe
the plan had been to just kill the marching band, which
she didn’t think was a bad idea.
As the pandemonium reached its zenith, a figure
dressed all in blue spandex strolled out onto the field. His
skintight, royal blue costume accentuated his V-shaped
body and his impressive musculature. His head was covered completely by a tight headpiece of the same color, and
he wore a black mask over his eyes. He also had a black
cape that billowed dramatically behind him as he walked
toward the bomb with more bravado than a stack of action
movie heroes. He studied the device from all sides, paused
for a few moments, and as the clock reached the final ten
seconds, he hefted the entire hulking piece of machinery
into his arms and flew up into the air with it.