by Logan Jacobs
“She’ll die!” Mayhem screeched. “She’ll die if you don’t!”
“Yeah, she’ll die eventually, and so will I, regardless of what I do in this moment,” I agreed, “but you, my friend, are going to predecease both of us if you pull that trigger.”
I fully intended for him to predecease both of us regardless, but saying so wouldn’t give him much incentive not to pull the trigger.
“This woman is innocent,” Mayhem declared as he tipped his chin toward the stoic aging opera diva. “I am controlling her mind! Hahaha.”
“Yeah, I get that, and that’s why I haven’t shot you both yet,” I said patiently, “but if you start shooting, well, her life isn’t more important to me than mine and my friend’s.”
If Mayhem started shooting, then Dynamo had a good chance of surviving pretty much anything but a perfect head or heart shot, and I wasn’t bluffing about my willingness to mow down the opera singer if need be to stop the supervillain from getting a second shot off. I just wasn’t the right person to use this kind of hostage tactic on.
I knew that Dynamo, on the other hand, would have rushed Mayhem a long time ago if not for the innocent woman in between us. She was probably just as worried that the supervillain would hit his zombie slave as that he would hit her.
In the background, we could all hear a dramatic duet ongoing between a male and a female opera singer. They sounded like they were arguing passionately. Probably one of them had turned to the dark side and the other hadn’t yet, and their argument had something to do with the eternal fate of their souls. Either that or they both thought it was the other one’s turn to do the dishes.
“What did you want the nanobots for, anyway?” I asked Mayhem. If I kept him talking, even if he didn’t give up any critical information, it might distract him long enough to give me a chance to rush him without getting shot. “No one ever listened to what you had to say growing up, so now you’ve resorted to surgically implanting your voice in their heads? Is that it?”
“All kinds of things,” he giggled. His face lit up with enthusiasm. He was clearly excited to brag about his handiwork regardless of the context. I guessed he was probably that dumb type of villain with a habit of ruining everything by monologuing for too long. I hoped so, anyway. “These people are my bots now. They’ll do anything I want them to. Anything.”
“You know you could’ve just built robots from scratch for that, and they could have been a hell of a lot more effective,” I said. “When you try to adapt biological organisms like this… well there’s just too much about the wiring, so to speak, of human anatomy that we just don’t fully understand. And the interface, in this case, seems pretty glitchy. And they retain their existing physical limitations. You can’t upgrade that much without destroying the central nervous system.”
“Well, the inventor that I kidnapped will just have to overcome those problems, or he’ll die,” Mayhem said defiantly. He clearly had the attitude of a bratty two-year-old, and it sounded like he was saying that he hadn’t even engineered the control chips himself. I was finding it hard to believe that his IQ had at any stage of development been considered above average. But maybe he had some savant type skills.
“Also, your methodology was conceptually flawed,” I continued as if I didn’t hear him. “From what I’ve observed of your victims, they go into a sort of dormant mode when they’re not acting on your directives. They have zero initiative, and their processing power just shuts down. That makes them practically useless to you, maybe even a liability. You’ve clearly overwritten too many of their essential brain functions in the interest of securing perfect control. Micromanaging reduces productivity, you know. What you should have done is more narrowly targeted the regions of the brain that are correlated with--”
“Shut up, don’t tell me what to do!” Mayhem yelled as he shook the gun at me. Now he seemed more aggravated than I had expected.
“Hey, don’t take it personally, it’s just constructive criticism,” I said. “I mean, I know you’re probably fairly new at this. Just trying to make it on your own after the Gray Ghost decided that your performance was unsatisfactory, right? That must’ve been a rough patch.”
Dynamo was staring at me out of the corner of her eye like she didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I guess shit-talking your enemies into doing something dumb wasn’t included as a section in the Warden handbook.
“The Gray Ghost underestimated me,” Mayhem snarled. “Everyone always underestimates me.”
“Dude, I’m sorry to hear that, that must really suck,” I said with a chuckle. “Like your dad, you mean? Was he getting pretty sick and tired of you, just like your mother? Is that why he got that nice new family to replace you, and you just didn’t fit in with them? So he had to try to--”
With an anguished roar, Mayhem shoved the large opera singer away from him so that she fell on her face. That gave me the split second of warning I needed to hit the ground as he opened fire. I rolled aside, fired back, and hit him somewhere in the lower leg. Then, as he fell to the ground, I swung my muzzle aside as Dynamo pounced on top of him, punched him in the face, and wrested the gun out of his hands. Then she stood up and kicked him in the ribs once for good measure. That was a rather vindictive and un-Dynamo-like move that I supposed boded well for her character development.
“Where are the rest of the nanobots?” I demanded as I pointed my rifle between Mayhem’s eyes. He just screamed in agony and clutched his leg which was bleeding from the calf.
“You shot me!”
“That’s not a fucking answer!” I groaned, and then I considered shooting him in the other leg.
Then, the frilly yellow opera singer leapt at me like an enraged animal.
Normally, I would have shot her in the face, but in this case she was an innocent, and so in one fluid motion I sidestepped her leap and smashed her in the side of the head with the butt of my rifle.
She hit the ground like a sack of bricks, and I pinned her down with her arms locked behind her back.
Dynamo handed me a length of electrical cord that she must have ripped from some part of the control panel. Then, she went over to secure Mayhem with another cord.
As I started knotting the deranged opera singer’s wrists together while being careful to avoid her now lipstick smeared chomping teeth, I heard the one-way glass shatter and felt light pricks as I felt a few shards shower over me.
I looked up to see a masked black figure in a billowing feathery cape leap into the room.
“Oh, now you show up?” I asked irritably. “We don’t need you, go away.”
“I’m not judging your preferences, Nelson,” the Shadow Knight replied with an audible smirk in his voice as he observed me straddling the struggling mound of costumed flesh. “I’m just here to take a menace to society off your hands.”
Then he scooped up the already hog-tied Mayhem while a startled Dynamo shouted, “Hey!”-- and then he leapt right back out the jagged hole in the window before either of us could do anything.
Chapter Eleven
“Fuck!” I yelled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Sorry,” Elizabeth groaned. “I should’ve stopped him. I just wasn’t--”
“Don’t apologize, I wasn’t expecting that either,” I interrupted. “And, you couldn’t have stopped him. Well, I mean, maybe you could physically, I don’t know. But in the long run, Grayville will take the Shadow Knight’s side. And if we had tried to fight him, then law enforcement and every other superhero in Grayville would turn against us. Even if they’re pretty weak superheroes compared to The Wardens, we still wouldn’t stand a chance against all of them together. You did the right thing.”
“How can nothing be the right thing?” Dynamo groaned. “Now we can’t question him. We still don’t know where the rest of the nanobots are.”
The large opera singer in the yellow dress squirmed against the electric cords like a fish caught in a net.
“And we don’t know how to rem
ove the control chips from these people,” I added as I watched her.
“All clear,” Norma chirped in my ear. “Well, there were two boxes I couldn’t check because the occupants had hired private security, but I don’t think they were Mayhem, the bodyguard said, uh… do you remember that guy who played the nerdy cousin in that romantic comedy about the girl with narcolepsy?”
“Mayhem has been apprehended,” I informed her.
“… You don’t sound happy about it,” Norma said. “And the passive voice… you’re not the one who captured him then? Who did? What happened?”
“Meet us one block down at the intersection of Pinehurst and forty fifth,” I said. “I’ll have the car brought there. Let’s go home, and we can talk about it there.”
“Okay, see you soon,” Norma said. “The opera singers finished their last song anyway. Now it’s sort of just like, a Battle Royale type situation. The audience is getting kind of uncomfortable about it out here. There’s a guy demanding a refund for his tickets.”
“What do we do with her?” Dynamo asked as she pointed at the opera singer, who was still mutely struggling to free herself and had a blank, slack-jawed expression. It was clear that she hadn’t regained her senses since Mayhem’s physical departure. Her mind still belonged to him.
“The cops are here,” Norma warned in my ear.
“We’d better just leave her here,” I sighed. “She’ll be taken to the hospital, or the psychiatric ward, like those kids from the daycare. I wish we could bring her with us and try to figure out what’s going on with her brain, but I don’t think we can exactly carry her out unnoticed. And we need to go before we get stopped for questioning.”
Dynamo nodded. We quickly wiped our prints off Mayhem’s rifles and left them in the control room, since that was another thing we couldn’t exactly carry out inconspicuously. Then we hurried down the stairs, retraced our steps, and managed to lose ourselves in the panicking crowd of opera guests before the authorities went backstage to investigate.
We managed to find Norma outside, got to our waiting car, and piled into the backseat.
“So how did the second half of the opera compare to the first?” Elizabeth asked Norma.
“Well, it lost a lot of narrative cohesion, and the actors became a lot less expressive, but they committed to their roles more fully,” Norma answered, and the other woman covered her smirk with her hand.
“Elizabeth, innocent lives were lost today, is that an appropriate reaction?” I demanded with mock indignation.
“Maybe I don’t know what an appropriate reaction to anything is anymore,” she muttered and stared out the window. I laid a hand on her knee. I didn’t move it any farther up than that because right then I just wanted to offer her reassurance.
When we got home, Aileen had surprised us with a lovely cheese and fruit spread, a warm lobster bisque, and freshly baked sourdough bread. Even if all she could do was cook and say random gibberish in that voice of hers, I still would have counted her as a worthwhile investment.
“What are they saying on the news?” I asked her.
“They’re saying that Mayhem, ‘the author of the daycare horrors,’ was captured at the Grayville Opera House during an attempt to sabotage tonight’s performance of The Demon’s Delight,” Aileen said. “… by the Shadow Knight.”
Her unspoken question kind of hung in the air.
“Yeah, fucking Dan Slade,” I muttered. “He jumped in just after Dynamo and I nabbed Mayhem. We could’ve questioned him, figured out how to resolve this nanobot situation. And then we could have ended him. But then Dan Slade had to stick his nose in things. And now this whole cycle will just play out again. Mayhem goes to prison, Mayhem gets back out of prison, Mayhem turns more innocents into homicidal zombies.”
“I should have believed you sooner,” Dynamo said.
“About what?” I asked.
“About Dan Slade being the Shadow Knight,” she said.
“It wouldn’t have made any dif--” I began.
“I just wanted to believe that the Shadow Knight was different,” she continued. “Better. I mean, better than some socially oblivious billionaire schmoozing on a yacht, of course, but also… better than The Wardens. Above the things that frustrated me most about working for them. But in his own way, he has just as much of an obnoxious ego as Optimo and the Kitten do. It doesn’t take the same form. He’s not posting selfies on Supergram every few minutes like they do. But, he’s just as convinced that he’s the best thing since sliced bread. And for him, that means that no else is worthy of cooperating with him. Even though this mission directly concerns your property, even though I was the one who told him about it in the first place, he won’t listen to anything we have to say and acts like we’re the ones interfering where we shouldn’t.”
“Yeah, we should just kill him,” Norma agreed cheerfully.
I bit back a laugh in order to see what Elizabeth would say.
“Have to admit it’s tempting,” she said with a wry smile. Her tone indicated that she wasn’t seriously considering the prospect by any means, but her lack of shock and horror at Norma’s suggestion also showed that she wasn’t the same upstanding Warden she had been when I first met her.
For personality reasons, I was probably significantly more susceptible to that temptation than Elizabeth was. But killing Dan Slade at this point probably would have placed us squarely in supervillain territory, and I sort of preferred to walk the line between hero and villain without committing to either ethos.
Yes, it was possible to rationalize that the Shadow Knight essentially rescuing Mayhem from my grasp would most likely result in the deaths of more innocents once the supervillain inevitably escaped again. It was possible to rationalize that killing the Shadow Knight to stop him from interfering with my hunt of supervillains would save lives. But the fact remained that Dan Slade wasn’t really a bad person, as far as I knew, just an exceptionally annoying and misguided one. And my code about killing, insofar as I had one, was that committing murder or plotting to do so made you fair game. Which was exactly the last thing the Shadow Knight would ever do.
So I wasn’t going to press for his assassination, at least, not yet anyway.
But if both girls had been really gung ho about the idea, I might not exactly have discouraged them, either.
“Well, I’ve got Slade’s number,” I said in a carefully jokey tone. “We could always just call him up. You know. Invite him to come hang out. Maybe an accident--”
“Breaking news update,” Aileen’s voice announced from my phone’s speaker. She wasn’t in the room, I think she was doing laundry. After a dramatic pause she continued, “Of the thirty-four surviving cast and crew members believed to have fallen under the influence of Mayhem, thirty-three have been recaptured, with the aid of local superheroes. … One remains at large.”
“Who?” Dynamo asked.
My phone screen filled up with an image of a red-nosed, rosy-cheeked, somewhat jowly man with twinkling eyes and dark, impeccably groomed facial hair.
“The younger version of Santa Clause?” I asked.
“Bernardo Ramondini, a thirty-eight-year-old baritone with the Grayville Opera Company,” Aileen responded.
“And where is this Bernardo now?” I asked Aileen.
“Last spotted heading west on foot on Rupert Avenue,” she replied.
“Let’s nab him before the police do,” Norma said.
“That’s the plan,” I agreed. “But how do we find him?”
“If this were Pinnacle City, we could just use the C.D.S., but Aileen doesn’t have access to all the security cams in Grayville,” Norma reflected.
“Right,” I said. “That would be more of a net method, which we don’t have time for. We need a way to pinpoint Bernardo more specifically. A tracking device or something.”
“But we never had him in our grasp in the first place to have the opportunity to plant one,” Dynamo said.
“Most people volu
ntarily carry their own tracking devices on them every day,” I said. “Car GPS’s, laptops, smartwatches… cell phones. If Bernardo has a cell phone on him, then we’re golden.”
“But do performers carry their phones with them onstage at the opera?” Norma pointed out.
“Might as well check,” I said. “Aileen?”
“Looking up his publicly listed work email address, [email protected]… hacking the email account to identify the associated phone number… searching for the device… activating the ‘Find my phone’ G.P.S. function… and, bingo,” Aileen replied.
“Bring up a map with his dot on this,” I said as I grabbed the nearest laptop and held it up. “You and Norma load everything we really need into the car. We’ll pick up Mr. Ramondini on the way to the airport.”
Once we got our gear together and piled into the car, we zoomed off through the streets of Grayville. While I drove, Norma rode shotgun with the laptop open so we could follow along visually with Bernardo’s haphazard, zigzagging route, but I didn’t base my driving route off that. I just listened to whichever turns Aileen told me to take, because she was able to calculate faster than a human could what the most effective path would be, as well as incorporating factors like traffic data and the whereabouts of the Grayville police patrol cars so that we could avoid them.
It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes before we caught up to Bernardo’s location, and Norma was the first to spot him on the sidewalk.
“There he is!” she shouted.
The street wasn’t that busy, but there were a few pedestrians and other cars, so I didn’t pull over immediately. Instead we followed Bernardo for another two blocks until he took a turn onto an isolated street.
Then we pulled over and shoved Bernardo into the waiting car, old fashioned kidnapping style. He kind of resisted, but clumsily and ineffectually. That was the problem with Mayhem repurposing people’s existing bodies as his automaton slaves. They still only had the athleticism, coordination, and strength of their original owners, unlike Aileen, who was a human-shaped machine.
