Origins of a D-List Supervillain

by Jim Bernheimer

  If the bullets and the explosion hadn’t killed the occupants of the van, the rain of death punishing the courtyard left no doubt to their fate as a dozen of the most dangerous villains in the world fought for their freedom.

  For two or three of them, it was the only taste of freedom they’d get. Eddie and Maxine started taking out the turrets, but the prison exacted its price in blood. One of them was ringed with flames when a plasma bolt slammed into him and he exploded in a brilliant blast that left me rubbing my eyes.

  That might have been Fiery Doom, I thought while trying to focus. I tried looking for a body, but there was only a twenty foot diameter crater where the man had once been.

  When a plasma bolt hit and dissolved part of the window ten feet away from me, I revisited my “turn the table over and cower like a scared little girl” idea from before. Like the four inches of wood would really make a difference!

  Even so, it was much better than standing there waiting to be a casualty, and I put myself to work.

  Pushing the table over into the corner of the room, I formed a crude little barricade and huddled behind it while Armageddon’s warm up band was playing just outside.

  It was there, in my pathetic little fortification, that I looked at the paperwork I’d pushed off the table. There before me was my parole paperwork. The chairperson had been passing it to the rest of the board when all hell broke loose. Three of the five had signed it already while I’d been in the pissing match with the empath and then I noticed the most important sentence I’d ever see, right above the signature block.

  Parole has or has not been granted for the prisoner at this time. (Circle one and line out the other)

  It wasn’t filled out! She must have been waiting for everyone to sign it first.

  A delightfully evil thought occurred to me, I’m just a circle, a line, and two forged signatures away from freedom.

  I dug around in the empath’s purse and found her driver’s license and a pen. After a couple of practice tries on the one dollar bills, I taken earlier, I made my best effort at her name, but that still left me one name short and I had no idea who the last guy was. That’s when I began a frantic search of everything on the floor in hopes of finding some clue of the man’s name and I completely ignored the ongoing apocalypse that no longer concerned me.

  My efforts were rewarded when I stumbled on a sign in sheet. Three government employees can’t even talk in the hallway without someone calling it a meeting and producing an attendance sheet.

  Saved by procedures! Halle-fricken-lujah!

  • • •

  It was four hours before someone came and got me and eight more before they had power and a way to get me back to my cell via the damaged main shaft. When the guard said something about rescheduling my hearing, I told them that they were finishing up with me when the breakout occurred. He seemed suspicious, but said he’d take the papers to the acting warden, which didn’t sound great if you were the regular warden.

  Guess I’ll just cross my fingers and wait and see what happens.

  “What happened out there, mate?” Kenneth asked when I finally returned to the cell, sweet cell, only to find that it smelled like an outhouse. I recalled that the maintenance crews on the way down said that the plumbing, along with the power, lights and just about everything else on the maximum security level was destroyed. Several of the prisoners in the hallway had been drafted into hazmat suit wearing pooper scoopers, and Gunk was being hailed as the hero du jour for plugging up the shitters and stopping all the crap from reaching the lowest point in the prison.

  On a related note, we’d need new toilets, amongst many other things.

  “It was crazy, man! The max security level broke out like nobody’s business. I think a bunch of them made it beyond the gates.”

  “Bloody hell, did you see any of them get out?”

  “The guards were pretty tight-lipped, but I heard a few of them saying that Maxine Velocity, E.M. Pulsive, The Sea Otter, and Captain Caligula got away for sure. Fiery Doom and Whistlin’ Dick were both killed and there are at least six more that aren’t accounted for.”

  Kenneth smiled broadly and said, “Good on them, then.”

  “I wonder if we’ll ever hear how they did it.” I commented.

  “I’m sure we’ll never know, mate,” he said and I knew something was amiss.

  Kenneth didn’t have many tells. He was about as straight a shooter as one could find on this floor full of minor league supervillains. That said, when he was nervous about something he had a tendency to call me “mate” instead of Calvin. He’d done it twice since I’d walked back in.

  I let it slide and told him about making parole. He was suitably impressed and gave me a calculating look that said he didn’t quite believe me either.

  That night when, all of us bottom feeders had cleaned up “all the shit we could take,” I sat in bed and stared up at the same ceiling I’d looked at every night since I’d arrived, trying to put my finger on what was bothering me. They’d set up port-a-potties in the rec room and a few other spots for us to use. We’d been issued some empty plastic bottles to pee in during the night.

  “I wouldn’t make any of your little guys until after they get all this fixed,” I whispered down to my cellmate.

  “Good advice,” he replied. “I already have it covered. Night.”

  “Night,” I answered. I’ll miss the way he always makes them dive into the toilets if, they do let me out of here.

  The second that thought crossed my mind, everything fell into place in my own little Keyser Söze moment. In my mind, I heard him say how he was caught fighting solo against the East Coast version of The Guardians and how it takes six weeks of dedicated work to grow a proper horde. Then there was a mental montage of him disposing of the little bits of moss he’d been able to make each day, which finished with him mentioning his father’s plumbing business.

  Well, I’ll be damned! He’d been stockpiling moss in the pipes for a year now. I wonder how much they paid him to spring all these people. He’s been hinting that he intends to get out of the game when he makes parole. People only do that if they’re beaten down or they hit the jackpot. Damn, they must have paid him a small fortune!

  The most badass prison in the world was just punked by a D-List Supervillain and then again by me if the warden buys off on the paperwork. Nice!

  Chapter Five

  Of Better Guns and High Performance Vibrators

  “I was starting to wonder if you were going to show,” I said to the hulking frame standing outside my cheap hotel room.

  “Cal Stringel,” Hillbilly Bobby said. “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you for another year or two. Just got back into town and couldn’t believe my eyes when I got your letter. So, how you been?”

  Shrugging, I replied, “Down to my last thirty bucks. How are things?”

  I didn’t bother to mention that things were pretty dire. I’d actually looked up the nearest homeless shelters and had spent yesterday in one of those temp places where people waited around to see if anyone needed a person for a crappy minimum wage job. The whole paroled felon thing hadn’t really been working for me, yet, but perhaps that was about to change.

  Things couldn’t have gotten much worse than my oh-so brief stopover in Nebraska. Mom refused to see me and Dad gave me five hundred bucks to get the hell out of Dodge. Yeah, I took his money, which was kind of the idea behind stopping there. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, but that money helped get me here.

  “Well, grab your stuff and let’s get you out of this flea trap. Did you check in with the parole office?”

  “Some dumbass named Leonard.”

  “That’s one of my cousins, Cal. Second or maybe third, hell, I can never get that shit straight,” he said.

  “Oh, sorry, man,” I said, verbally backpedaling as fast as I could.

  “Nah, Lenny’s a tool and a kissass to boot. I can’t stand the little wuss either, but he’s real easy to fool so he�
��s got his uses. For instance, he thinks I was on a charter fishing boat this weekend out in the Gulf.”

  “I’m guessing you weren’t,” I said.

  “Someone needed a little muscle to convince a guy who owed him money to pay up—easy dough. Guy pissed his pants when I crushed a brick in my hand and he ponied up. I didn’t even have to break any bones. It was actually kinda disappointing.”

  Nodding my head, I started flinging my meager belongings back into my duffel bags and made a mental note to not get on Bobby’s bad side—ever. Out in the parking lot, the strongman waited in his full-sized Dodge pickup while I checked out of this fleabag motel.

  The truck looked new and I began to wonder how much crime really did pay. Tossing my bags into the bed, I climbed into the passenger seat and said, “So, what does Lenny think you’re doing to earn an honest living?”

  Bobby laughed and replied, “Of course, I’m on the straight and narrow these days. Five nights a week, I’m a bouncer at Floozies.”

  “Floozies?”

  “Titty bar,” he said, as if it explained everything.

  Oddly enough, it did.

  “I’ll put in a word with Chubby and get you on the payroll. You’re a little too scrawny for bouncing, but maybe you can DJ, work the bar, or mop up.”

  “How much does he pay?”

  “Nothing,” Bobby answered. “I pay him, and he pays me most of the money I gave him right back. C’mon Cal, you worked in a laundry at the prison, only we ain’t washin’ no clothes anymore. You’re on the outside now and it’s time to get down to business.”

  The hulking brute driving gave me his best “you’re so smart, but you’re so dumb” look that made me feel like an idiot. Bobby used the bar to launder his ill-gotten money. His scheme was practical and simplistic, which made me realize that I still had much to learn about being a supervillain.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked after we’d left the city twenty minutes behind us.

  “My new hideout. I’m glad you got out when you did. I’m gonna need your help with it.”

  Driving another fifteen minutes, he turned off the county highway and down a winding dirt road leading to an abandoned farm that looked like it had seen better days—probably four or five decades ago.

  “It’s definitely out of the way,” I said, trying to come up with something nice to say about it. That was the only thing I could think of that didn’t start with the phrase, “My God! This is a shithole!”

  He didn’t notice the look on my face and continued, “Like it? Technically, one of the dancers at the bar owns the land, but it’s what’s under it that really counts!”

  “Interesting,” I said, not wanting to commit to a hole in the ground, but compared to what I could see it probably wasn’t any worse.

  “Yeah, I still have some digging to do. Amydillo did most of the work, before she up and got herself caught tunneling up inside a bank vault, so it’s not finished yet.”

  “When did you meet the ‘Dillo?” I asked. Amydillo was one of Doctor Mangler’s test subjects who survived. She’d actually been an actress on WhirlWendy’s kiddy show and tried to get her own superpowered TV deal. Instead she ended up looking like an armadillo crossed with a pinup—kind of hot and kind of icky all at the same time.

  “I called in a few of my markers. Amy owed this guy who owed me. She showed up and started; you shoulda seen her go to town, but she got bored and decided to knock over some banks while she was in town, but on the second one Andydroid came down from Atlanta and got the drop on her.”

  “How are they going to hold her in North Dakota?”

  “They aren’t. She’s been sent to some island in the Pacific, not Hawaii either. Begins with a G.”

  “Guam?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one!”

  I nodded. “Can’t really dig her way off of that, I guess.”

  “Yup,” he agreed. “But she didn’t seem too worried. She said she ends up doing work digging tunnels for the government and they eventually let her go. Word on the street is that Amy dug the Overlord’s Omega Base and he mindwiped her afterwards so she couldn’t give away the location.”

  As interesting as Bobby’s time with Amydillo was, I wanted to see what I was up against. “So let’s see what your base looks like.”

  I started toward the crumbling farmhouse, but he shook his head and pointed at the old grain silo.

  Inside was a hole in the ground with a knotted rope leading down. A pitiful strand of glorified Christmas lights were plugged in to a class A powercell illuminating the way into Hell’s bunghole.

  Seriously? I should have just stayed in prison for another year! I’ve just traded one hole in the ground for another and the other one was furnished by Uncle Sam.

  Making Bobby show me that the rope was attached to a metal pole driven several feet into the ground, I pushed aside my growing doubts and began my descent. Amy had done some quality work, and the walls of the tunnel were perfectly smooth, but I kept wondering how I could climb out of this place if that rope ever failed. This place was in dire need of an elevator.

  After reaching the bottom, I changed my mind. This place was in dire need of everything! Power, water, fresh air, a way to get rid of sewage—Bobby hadn’t put much thought into anything beyond the fact that he wanted an underground base and our deal meant I was going to build it for him in exchange for getting me on the ground floor of the supervillain network.

  The central chamber was a large circular area about sixty feet wide and twelve feet high. It had a leather couch and coffee table in the middle in front of a massive television. A gaming console and a large plastic trashcan filled with the debris of a takeout lifestyle completed the room.

  “I can’t get a signal down here, but I reckon you know how to do those kinds of things.”

  I nodded and said, “We can run an antenna line up the shaft to the silo. Getting free internet out this far might be tricky, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. We might have to sign up for the Wireless Wizard’s underground internet service.”

  The answer made Bobby happy, even if it did the opposite to me, and he eagerly dragged me down the hallway to where the bedrooms and the main storage area were located. The one bright spot was that his kitchen and pantry area had enough can goods to feed us for two years and several miles of toilet paper. It looked like he’d stolen the contents of an entire Costco truck, but I didn’t want to ask. On the other hand, the bathrooms were four stolen port-a-potties and I added plumbing to my growing list of problems.

  How much is this powersuit worth to me, anyway? Ah, screw it! What else am I going to do?

  Just as I thought my suffering was nearing an end, he led me down a set of steps to the lower level, where I found more storage area and a large circle made out of barbed wire.

  “Are you looking to bring some livestock down here?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.

  “No,” he replied. “I figure if I ever catch me a hero, I’d toss ‘em in there.”

  Personally, I wasn’t certain whether I should be laughing or crying at that moment, so I did neither.

  “Unless, it’s a pretty lame one, I’d recommend that we build some actual cells.”

  “Okay,” Bobby said. “So where do you want to start?”

  Sizing up Bobby, I could tell he could handle all the brawn and heavy lifting, but his fine motor skills were likely to cause more problems than they solved. I was going to need some serious help and I didn’t have Kenneth’s powers to simply grow some assistants.

  “Bobby,” I said. “I’m going to need you to steal me a couple of robots.”

  • • •

  “So, how do I use this contraption, again?” The man in the large black outfit said as we skulked around a half-occupied industrial park. My partner in crime looked like the Michelin tire mascot had decided to take up being a ninja.

  I, however, was the epitome of stealth and the personification of danger.

  I wa
s also prone to exaggerating wildly.

  “It’s just like a cattle prod,” I answered Bobby, who eyed the long metal rod in his hands. “You jam it into one of those robots and it’ll drop like a sack of rice. You’ll have to wait ten seconds before it has enough juice to knock the second one out.”

  Bobby nodded and cast a glance at the darkened warehouse with the pair of mechanical watchman ambling around the exterior. “You sure we shouldn’t try and steal whatever’s inside? If’n they’re paying to have robots, the stuff inside must be worth something.”

  “Oh, I’m sure all that machinery in there is worth a small fortune, but we’d need three semis to haul it out of here, and finding a buyer to sell it to would be a nightmare. They’re some natural gas equipment supplier who has too much money, and doesn’t want to be bothered to hire real people. I say we go create a few new jobs and help out the economy. Just try not to bust them up too badly.”

  By “we,” I meant Bobby. The big lug would barely be bothered by those taser pistols they carried. I was actually looking forward to getting my hands on them. The two weapons would be a good start to my collection of miscellaneous items. I might even be able to incorporate them into my suit and reserve the force blasters for when I needed to maximize my damage potential.

  The nice part of being on Bobby’s payroll was that there were at least a dozen witnesses who would vouch for our presence at Floozies. In fact, I was supposedly in the private room right now getting a lap dance from some woman named Jade, Amethyst, or Sapphire. I don’t know, some jewel-related stage name, and Bobby was shooting pool with the owner.

  Considering my last partner was an inflatable sex doll, I thought I was moving up in the world.

  From my time at Promethia, I knew quite a bit about these vintage type A robots. The humanoid frame was in service all across the globe in various uses, ranging from legal to other endeavors that were more of a questionable nature. Patterson would always blow a few of them away whenever he added a new toy to the suit. The Type A’s were good for sentry duty or attacking something en masse. Beyond that, they weren’t much more sophisticated than any other industrial robot. Even so, there was code all over the internet on how to program one to do various tasks and all it took was a little modification on my part to have a pair of construction workers.