The Machinist Part One: Malevolence

by Alexander Maisey

  Red lights started to strobe in the room. The cafeteria became eerily quiet aside from the sounds the brawling inmates made.

  “Cease altercation immediately,” a robotic voice blared over the intercom. “Three second warning.”

  The melee didn’t stop. Mike’s opponent punched him in the forehead and there was the sound of celery snapping—the one felon’s hand breaking against the indestructible skin of the other. The attacker cried in agony and clutched his wrist.

  All the three combatants suddenly yelped in pain. They cried out in unison as the hissing noise from their restraint collars grew in intensity. Each grasped at their own throats and collapsed to the ground, twitching. Armored security officers poured in through the reinforced doors of the room, surrounding the unconscious felons before dragging them off.

  The silence in the room persisted for a few seconds after the security doors shut. Then the boisterous conversations and general bullshitting picked up again. Jones continued what he had been saying before the fight broke out. “They say the Master has something big coming up, and we all gonna get our licks in.”

  “Bullshit,” interjected Duffy, a guy about the same age as magnetic kid, but who’d been in the game for a few years. He was on his third month in Blackiron. “Everyone knows there ain’t no ‘Master.’ The Network used to be called the Brotherhood, right?”

  McHenry guessed that Duffy’s question answered his own. When he was in the Brotherhood they’d always given him a fair shake. There was no need, as far as he could tell, to worry about anything just because they changed their name. He nodded, replying to Duffy’s question. “When I was out there, yeah.”

  “Yeah, and it’s all about getting a fair share, everyone’s equals and shit. There ain’t no mastermind running nothing.” Duffy scratched the little soul patch on his chin. “That ‘The Master’ shit is just to keep the heroes chasing ghosts and running down dead ends; keep them off our backs.”

  “You’ll see, man.” Jones leaned back, shaking his head. “You’ll see.”

  ***

  Hours later, back in the cell, McHenry reclined in his bunk and drifted in and out of his thoughts. Krudoff strained to evacuate himself in the toilet at the back wall of the tiny room. After what felt to McHenry to be an eternity, there was a flush. Krudoff stood up, fastening the buttons along the front of his jumpsuit.

  “Damn,” he said.

  McHenry turned his head and raised a quizzical eyebrow at the old man.

  “I was hoping that all that huffing and puffing would’ve given me a heart attack, so I could finally keel over.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I’m an old, old man, Nicholas. It’s going to happen soon.” Krudoff sat down on the mattress next to McHenry and patted his leg. “Besides, it’ll be funny.”

  “What could possibly be funny about dying in prison?” McHenry sat up. “And more to the point, why the hell have you been so giddy this last week?”

  “Well.” Krudoff grinned evilly. “You and I, we’re both scientists in our own ways. You’re an engineer, a gearhead, but I’m a biologist. I owe so much of what I’ve accomplished to what I learned as a little sprout in medical school.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “After I die, I’ve donated my body to my old alma mater for dissection and study.”

  “So ...,” McHenry started speculating, “It’s funny because … they kicked you out for grafting animal parts to cadavers before bringing them back to life? And now … now, I guess, you’re forcing them to take you back, in a way?”

  “Oh, no, no no.” Krudoff waved his hand dismissively. “It’s much better than that. Trust me. It’ll be funny.”

  “Just tell me, you coot.”

  “Oh, just wait and see! It won’t be much longer anyway.” The old man’s face went stern. “And I’m so damn happy because you’re my only friend in this world. By the time I go, you’ll be a free man. You won’t have to watch me die.”

  McHenry didn’t know what to say to that. He frowned.

  “Buck up, Nicholas.” Krudoff leaned in and rubbed McHenry’s hairless head as if the old man was a little league coach giving a kid a pep talk. “Let’s just say, they’ll never forget Doctor Terror, even after he’s gone.”

  ***

  The next few days were uneventful. Routine.

  Every morning, the usual twin blasts of the air horn broke into McHenry’s sleep. The same barely nutritious breakfast sat in his gut for hours.

  The same jokes and stories were told at lunch, and again at dinner. Every night, as always, Krudoff’s hacking cough kept McHenry up for hours past the point he’d decided to try to sleep.

  The last day of McHenry’s vacation from the real world was less routine.

  “Krudoff, H.” O’Shea’s bored voice called out.

  Hands pressed against the wall inside the glowing circles, Krudoff replied in a hushed voice. “Here.”

  “What’s the matter, doc?” O’Shea asked, looking up from his clipboard. “Going to miss your buddy?”

  Krudoff didn’t answer. He just looked over at McHenry with a sullen demeanor. McHenry met his gaze and made a facial expression to match.

  “How sweet. I’m moved. Truly, I am,” O’Shea spat sarcastically. “McHenry, N.”

  “Here.”

  “Say your goodbyes at the mess, McHenry. You’re getting evicted after breakfast.”

  The guards left without bothering to even pat down either prisoner. After the cell door slid shut, the two men sat down on the bottom bunk next to each other. Neither of them said a word.

  ***

  “Suit. Men’s size large,” Said the clerk who sat behind a bulletproof glass window, sliding a plastic bag through a small slot. He continued reading off a list and pushing bags out the slot. “Shoes, men’s size nine and a half. Wallet, contents: driver’s license, thirty-five dollars forty-two cents.”

  McHenry signed his name and initials on what felt like a thousand pieces of paper acknowledging the proper return of his property from the time of his imprisonment. Simultaneously, he started changing into his suit. It was a little bit tight at the waist and armpits.

  “All right McHenry, here’s your transport voucher.” The clerk slid a bus ticket through the slot. “An officer will drive you to the bus station, and from there this ticket can be used to travel to any destination within the state of New York.”

  McHenry nodded and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

  “One more thing,” the clerk looked up at him, pointing at the computer screen on his desk. “We have a note here.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “When you were convicted, it was stipulated that upon your release you would not be permitted within one hundred feet of any computer or computer-based device.” The clerk made a face as if someone had just told him a hell of a zinger.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing, forget it. The judge rescinded that part of the terms of your release.”

  Well, that greases the wheels a bit for me if I do decide to get back into the old game, McHenry thought to himself. But what if this is some kind of entrapment, a scheme to get me to go out and get caught?

  “Why the sudden change of heart?”

  “It’s impossible to enforce a rule like that these days.”

  McHenry scratched the old burn scar that ran along his chin. He had no idea what the clerk was on about. He scrunched his nose as he questioned, “Okay?”

  “You’ll see,” said the clerk, with a shrug. “All right, follow the officer out to the truck.”

  A cop at the other end of the room beckoned McHenry. The door behind the officer buzzed and swung open. Freezing November air blasted into the corridor and washed over McHenry’s hairless head. He wished he’d been put away in the winter; he’d at least have had a hat waiting for him.

  “Let’s get going, chromedome,” the officer sneered. “It’s going to snow any minute now and I don’t wanna get fucked ove
r by it.”

  As they crossed the parking lot towards a police SUV, McHenry stopped and turned back to face Blackiron Federal Penitentiary. He’d only seen it from the outside once before: that first night when he was brought in and processed fifteen years earlier. There were seventeen stories of reinforced, explosion-proof concrete mixed with chemicals thought up by some super-genius in the early eighties. It was designed to be a formidable structure; one built not only to house super-powered criminals but to keep them in there, too. And maybe--to some degree--it had been designed to scare the shit out of them. Something built to look so intimidating that potential super crooks would simply give up their plans before they started just to avoid going there.

  The building was like a fortress from a science fiction movie, a tower made of countless pillboxes and strangely angled palisades in asymmetric stacks. The few windows on it were no larger than a few inches wide. It was a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture. Nicholas McHenry, finally a free man, raised his one good arm and gave the building his best middle finger.

  Chapter Two

  WOOOSH!

  The air conditioner in the bus blasted in his face. Why it was running in the dead of winter was beyond McHenry’s comprehension. Sitting in the frigid bus for nine hours gave him a lot of time to think about this, and also about his future. By the time he saw the distant sunrise over New York City’s skyline he’d made up his mind:

  His only option was to get back out there, to be a supervillain again.

  He didn’t have anywhere to stay, and he was too proud to shack up at a YMCA. As a convicted felon—a superpowered one, no less—his chances of finding a steady paycheck were slim. And he’d already been offered a leg up by the Network.

  The bus pulled into the Port Authority as McHenry figured out what his next step would be. He settled on heading towards “The Hood,” an old Brotherhood dive in the East Village. He hoped it was still there, but if not, the Fortress was a good alternative: only a few blocks away from the bar, the section formerly known as Stuy Town had been entrenched with villains since long before McHenry had been locked up. It probably still was. There were over fifty buildings there, and one in three residents had powers, were armed to the teeth, or both.

  McHenry had the money for a cab but decided to take the forty-or-so-block hike anyway. He needed to see how the city had changed in his absence. To get a feel for her again. With his good arm, he pushed his way through the crowded bus terminal and started walking.

  As he navigated the sea of tourists, businessmen, hot dog vendors, and degenerates, McHenry made note of a few things: Gone, it seemed, were pagers. Cellphones had gotten significantly smaller, which was not surprising. Televisions he saw in shop windows had gotten bigger, thinner, and clearer. Movies had gotten stupider.

  There wasn’t a single phone booth in sight. McHenry chuckled as he wondered where the heroes where changing clothes these days.

  It also appeared that the psychiatric hospitals had emptied their wards into the streets; a man in a suit was talking loudly to himself as he walked, gesturing as if he were talking to some invisible person. No one else seemed to take any notice. McHenry looked around and realized that this man wasn’t unique: dozens of New Yorkers walked around, flapping their mouths at no one in particular.

  A thought crossed his mind: Maybe one of McHenry’s villainous brethren had released some kind of neurotoxin, and this was the start of some scheme to hold the city hostage.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  He wanted to get back in the game, sure, but he didn’t want to get caught up in the middle of somebody else’s Big Plan. He blinked and activated his HUD, setting it to scan the air for toxins, gases, anything he could think of. The HUD reported no biological or viral anything, aside from the usual Manhattan air pollution. Interestingly, though, it recognized hundreds—no, thousands—of tiny devices transmitting on low-band radio frequencies. Although they were poorly encrypted by McHenry’s standards, there appeared to be no malicious nature to them. What he was more suspicious of, actually, was the fact that they were demonstrating compatibility with his systems. He resisted the urge to connect to something calling itself “Tommy’s uPad.”

  It didn’t take long for him to figure out what was going on; a woman carrying on a conversation with an unseen partner started poking at her ear saying, “Hello? Hello? Susan?” She fiddled with her hair, extracted an earpiece then repeatedly jabbed her finger against a power button on it. She cursed the whole time.

  Of course, he thought to himself. They’re wireless headsets for phones.

  And based on the pings he was getting, the phones must have some kind of wireless data transmission protocol now as well. McHenry made a mental note find a computer with a secure modem line later so he could investigate further.

  ***

  It wasn’t even fifteen blocks before McHenry saw his first superhero since leaving Blackiron Penitentiary.

  The first one he’d seen in person, that is. The televisions scattered all over the city were broadcasting news and celebrity gossip about the capes-and-spandex crowd. Newly-divorced, forty-year-old hero Silver Streak was dating a heroine half his age from Wisconsin. Was Stargazer gay? And so on.

  A motorcycle weaved through traffic on Broadway. The bike’s passenger held on to the rider with one arm while twisting backwards to fire a handgun into the air. Seconds after the bike sped past McHenry’s position, a hero flew by only a dozen feet above the traffic.

  From what McHenry could see, the hero wore a blue bodysuit, yellow gloves and cape, and was muscled like a wrestler. There was a stylized yellow star on the flier’s chest. The few bullets that came close to the hero as he rocketed through the air were deflected by a translucent golden force field.

  The hero closed in and snatched the driver and the gunner off of the bike, leaving it to careen into the back of a delivery truck. Both vehicles exploded, but the hero didn’t take notice. He flew off holding the two badly bruised thugs by their shirt collars, one in each hand.

  The delivery truck’s driver came running out of a building yelling to high Heaven about insurance, and did anyone get the name of the hero so he could file a report with his company?

  “Typical.” McHenry shook his head and muttered. At least the heroes were still as irresponsible as he’d remembered. They never cleaned anything up unless there were cameras rolling. He kept going.

  ***

  Half an hour later, McHenry found himself making his way down East 13th Street. A man his age should’ve been dead on his feet at this point in the jaunt, but his augmented adrenal gland and pain suppression system had kicked in several blocks earlier. He quietly commended himself for having the foresight to invent those when he was a younger man.

  Cars chugged by in the opposite direction. A passing bus bore the image of the freshly re-elected President standing shoulder to shoulder with the superhero called Rampart. The hero’s costume was primarily red, including the retro-style jacket with a row of buttons down one side of his chest. Everything but his glowing orange eyes, mouth, and chin were covered by a yellow cowl that stretched from his matching cape. Rampart and the President smiled as the hero gave the camera a yellow-gloved thumbs-up. Bold text at the bottom of the advert read, “The President and the Titans of Liberty: Keeping America Safe!”

  Rampart was a relatively fresh face in the hero world, but even McHenry knew of him from the television in Blackiron’s cafeteria. Someone of that level of prestige was hard to miss, even by someone cut off from the rest of the world for fifteen years. Rampart had come onto the scene a few years back and quickly made a reputation for himself in New York State’s local hero union as not only an indestructible, flying powerhouse but also as a brilliant strategist. When the Titans’ founding member, a World War II veteran called American Eagle—a patriotic hero bearing a similar set of powers—finally passed away, it was no surprise that Rampart took his place as the leader of the most prestigious of superhero teams. The Ti
tans of Liberty tended to replace members in terms of their “niche,” so they always had a powerhouse, a sorcerer, a technologist, and so on: Rampart blew all other comers out of the competition during the tryouts for the spot.

  McHenry hocked a gob of spit at the bus on principle, but missed.

  As he bore down on the corner of 1st and 13th, he started to pick up the pace. He rounded the turn and saw the half-mile-tall metal walls of The Fortress two blocks away.

  A streak of smoke soared into the air from behind the parapets, traced by bolts of purple plasma and gunfire. McHenry let his augmented vision take effect and he zoomed in on the streak: It was a hero, his uniform torn and his cape burning, making a hasty exit from the Fortress. He must have been a new one, trying to make a name for himself--Even fifteen years ago being a hero in Stuy Town was a death sentence. It hadn’t changed. McHenry smiled to himself.

  The smile faded the moment he turned to his left to push in the door of The Hood and saw a strange new logo on it. Artemis Coffee said green lettering that hovered over the stylized image of a woman firing a bow into the air. He looked up and through the glass door to where the dirtiest, most dangerous bar in the city once stood, and saw it was occupied by twenty-somethings in badly fitting clothes gabbing away on cellphones or hunched over laptops. Every one of them had a paper coffee cup either in their hands or in their vicinity.

  Then he looked to the counter. Wedged in the small space between the cash register and shelves of gourmet gyros and brownies, stood Ivan Stanislav—a fellow villain simply called The Butcher in his heyday, before he retired to take over as the proprietor of The Hood. It was unmistakably him—You don’t forget the face of the man who had killed fourteen heroes in his time. But with his bulky frame, thick mustache, Spetsnaz tattoo and facial scars Stanislav looked almost comical in a green apron.

  McHenry contemplated this for a moment before pushing the door in all the way and stepping inside. If the Brotherhood had changed its name, this coffee shop could still be a front business. It was certainly less suspicious, if you didn’t take the infamous hero-murderer manning the register into account.