Evil Genius 2: Becoming the Apex Supervillain

by Logan Jacobs

  “I’m not going anywhere, I take care of you now,” came the calm, heavily accented reply through the tablet soundsystem. Russian maybe, I wasn’t sure. Eastern European anyway. But definitely female and definitely not belonging to Miles Nelson.

  “Miiiles,” I singsonged. “I know you’re theeeeere… hiding… creeping around in the corner… I can still see you.”

  “No Miles, just you and old Wanda,” came the reply. I didn’t think the old hag was lying. She didn’t have enough imagination or enough of a sense of humor to do that.

  “Nelson, I will kill this old bitch if you don’t let me go,” I screeched next, to test a different tactic.

  “You know, usually children talk like this, I soap their mouth,” Wanda mused. I wondered what kind of children she’d been hanging around that had been threatening to kill her. I thought that only my younger self had been like that. Well, and the toddlers whose bodies I’d hijacked a few days ago to my enormous amusement. “But you, this is different I think. Mr. Nelson, he tell me this not your real body.”

  “Does that bother you?” I asked. “The things that Mr. Nelson requires of you when he hires you for a job. This is not merely illegal, to imprison someone in this manner. It is an experiment in the dark arts. It is beyond the pale of human experience. This constitutes a form of demonic possession. And your employer, Mr. Nelson, is exposing you to the risk of a similar fate. These stories never end well for those who have seen too much, you know. Seen things that mortals were never meant to see.” I wished Bernardo’s voice were a little lower, raspier, and more menacing, but absolutely everything I made him say came out sounding like some kind of sexy Italian commercial.

  “I have seen what humans can do, why would demons bother me?” Wanda asked. “There are ways to, how do you say… be rid of them. But anyway, I do not think you are a demon.”

  “What do you mean you don’t think I’m a demon?” I demanded. “You heard them talking, didn’t you? Miles and his Warden whore. You heard them talking about all those people that I manipulated into murdering each other onstage at the opera? It was magnificent! Heads rolled! Literally! And the audience… ah, the audience cheered, they rose to their feet and clapped for me! It was beautiful! Their assumption that the gore they beheld was merely simulated allowed them to relish the spectacle without compunction. Without questioning themselves and the flimsy moral constructs that allow their degenerate society to preserve its self-delusions. But let me tell you a secret, Wanda. What those pearl necklace wearing, shiny shoed, genteel people in the audience loved best of all was that somewhere deep down they knew the violence and death were real. They knew instinctively, but they pretended not to know, so that they could cheer it on openly. So that they could enjoy that moment of freedom to reveal their true selves. I used to be like them once, but I only live as my true self now, Wanda.”

  “I only live as my true self too,” Wanda replied complacently.

  “You’re no fun,” I grumbled. “You just don’t get it. You don’t understand the terrifying implications of my vision. You could never conceive of the monstrous revelations that I have in store to expose the hypocrisy of modern society.”

  “Men are animals, women too, of course I know this,” Wanda replied. Even without being able to see her I could hear the shrug in her voice. “I am sixty years old. I know more than you.”

  I wanted to tell her that age didn’t guarantee an increase in wisdom, but I didn’t think she’d care what I thought about that. Besides, I was starting to get the sense that maybe this lady had seen some shit in her sixty years on earth.

  “I am going to chip away at the foundations of the world as you and all the other oblivious opera-going suckers know it,” I persisted.

  She might not have been the brightest bulb, but she was still human, wasn’t she? Not some kind of automaton that Miles had invented to trick me? The old bat was a waste of my time, I had better things to do than occupy Bernardo as my avatar just to converse with her, but I just needed some kind of human reaction of fear or rage or hatred out of her.

  I just needed to know that my work meant something. To her, and to all the other ordinary people whose lives it would impact forever. Even if they were never affected physically, hearing about my attacks, surely, would scar their psyches with the notion that they were never truly safe. That none of them were really safe. Not even inside their very own minds that they incorrectly thought were private.

  No matter what laws and regulations and customs and courtesies they might concoct to convince themselves that they lived in a civilization somehow different and superior to the animal reality. A reality that could only be interfered with, postponed, but never actually cancelled.

  “How?” Wanda asked.

  “Well, I cannot tell you the specifics, in case you were going to alert someone, but let’s just say I have many more spectacles planned,” I said. “In venues frequented by the rich and powerful, or by the conspicuously vulnerable. I have targeted children already, yes? And the leisure class? So some of the other demographics that would be particularly impactful--”

  “What I mean is,” Wanda said, “you are locked in… bathroom, here. Stuck in chair. This not good position for… attacking whole world.”

  “But this isn’t me,” I said in exasperation. “I’m not here. This is just Bernardo, a random victim of mine. I, Mayhem, am free! I can do whatever I want and no one can stop me!”

  I pictured Wanda squinting as she paused for a moment to consider that. Then she said, “But you have body, yes? Somewhere?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And I also have the power to remotely manipulate--”

  “Well, then, you end up in chair too,” she said decisively. “How do they say… frying chair? Yes.”

  “You cannot scare me,” I hissed. “This isn’t about my mortality. My body is just an arbitrary conglomeration of molecules. It’s about the rest of the world’s mortality. It’s about the mortality of these big ideas that arrogant people have, people that think the world was made to serve their interests.”

  “Well, you can’t scare me, so we get along good,” Wanda replied. “It has been a long, long time since anything scared me. When I was a little girl in--”

  I cut off my connection with Bernardo to avoid having to listen to her boast about the harshness and poverty of life in whatever godforsaken Eastern European Soviet shithole she’d come from.

  Some people just couldn’t be reasoned with.

  “Was that Miles Nelson?” asked Electra as she sidled into the green plastic ride carriage that I was sitting in. She was wearing a yellow tube top and a yellow mini skirt and yellow thigh-high boots. She didn’t have a very good taste in costume, but she could turn heads in anything skimpy thanks to her slightly above average beauty, natural skinniness, and artificially enhanced assets. As for her monochromatic palette, which even extended to her dyed blonde hair, that was meant to signal her extremely useful superpower. She wasn’t just my best long-range weapon. She was also able to power parts of the amusement park that I had taken over as my lair and just had to recharge them periodically.

  “No, just his housekeeper or something,” I said. “Some crazy foreign bitch.”

  Electra pouted, and I realized that she might have reason to be sensitive about that particular combination of words.

  “Hey, British barely counts as foreign, and crazy is a good thing in my book,” I reassured her quickly. I needed to stay on Electra’s good side, or not only would I lose my best fighter, besides maybe the Behemoth, but I might end up facing a fate similar to the “frying chair” that Wanda had predicted for me.

  There wasn’t really any reason that supers like Electra followed me, a villain who had no powers, except that they had no vision or creativity of their own. I gave them a sense of purpose and direction in life, an outlet for their worst impulses. And plenty of encouragement. A sense of community. Without me, they could never function as a team, they probably couldn’t even live togeth
er without killing each other.

  “You think I’m a bitch?” she exclaimed, and I realized I had forgotten the most important disclaimer.

  “No!” I said quickly. “I think you’re an absolute sweetheart. And honestly you’re so hot that it wouldn’t even matter if you were a bitch.”

  Electra was hot, technically, but she wasn’t really my type, but I knew that was the trait that she was proudest of and the one she most enjoyed being complimented on. Even though her lightning power was the real reason, so many supervillains were still eager to take her on as their mistress.

  She had slept with pretty much every supervillain in Grayville. That was her exclusive type, which meant that even guys who looked like me barely had to crawl out of jail and buy her one drink, whereas smoldering-eyed square-jawed douchebags with six-pack abs and six-figure salaries didn’t stand a chance.

  I wasn’t clear on whether Electra’s particular preference was just an extreme version of having a penchant for bad boys, or whether she did it to court infamy in the hopes of eventually becoming a standalone supervillain in her own right, but I didn’t really give a shit. It was convenient.

  “Why, thank you,” she purred as she batted her false lashes. “You’re very sexy too. In an unconventional way.” She nibbled on my earlobe.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” I lied, “but we gotta get some work done.”

  “We do?” Electra asked. “On the shopping mall scheme, or the old folks’ home one?”

  “Well, both,” I said, “but I have another concern that’s even more pressing than that. I don’t think Miles Nelson and his superhero bitch have any way of finding out where we are, but I know they’re trying to track us down, and I think we should prepare some security measures just in case we end up getting any unwanted guests.”

  “You think they’d come here?” Electra asked as her voice became a bit excited. “I thought he didn’t even live in town. Wouldn’t his shipment have been insured or something anyway? Why would he care so much?”

  “I don’t know,” I groaned. “But why do you sound so excited?”

  “Uhh, because it’s Miles Nelson?” she scoffed. “The richest and most eligible bachelor in the world? Well, besides Dan Slade, but I don’t really dig the meathead steroid addict look.”

  “You think you’d have a chance with Nelson?” I asked as I tried not to roll my eyes. Maybe I’d been wrong about her type.

  “Well, maybe I’d kidnap him, and one thing can lead to another, and…”

  “Just stop talking,” I groaned as I rubbed the bridge of my nose. I was trying really hard to take the Miles Nelson situation in stride. The more chaos, the better, right? If I ended up causing the death of America’s favorite playboy billionaire, then the whole country would have to pay attention to the hard truths I was trying to illustrate.

  But I hadn’t really planned on going head to head with him. I had just planned to tweak his nose a little by stealing those nanobots. I had expected the Shadow Knight to be my biggest obstacle in this campaign of destabilization. And the Shadow Knight, as competent as he was at what he did, was extremely predictable and safe. I didn’t really know anything about Miles Nelson. At least, not the crime fighting side of him, which wasn’t in any of the magazines. He didn’t have an established superhero personality.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” Electra cooed. “If he shows up here, I’ll take care of him for you.”

  “And I’ll puuulverize him,” growled the Behemoth as he came up to the side of the carriage we were sitting in. He showed signs of wanting to climb in and sit with us, but both of our faces probably looked so alarmed that he seemed to think better of it. I had just taught him the word “pulverize” the day before and already regretted it. It was his new favorite, and he had been using it in every other sentence ever since. He’d actually considered changing his supervillain name to “Pulverizer” but I talked him out of it. “Who is ‘he’ anyway?”

  “Just a handsome billionaire, but since money is his only superpower he is still mortal,” Electra said.

  “How is he a billionaire?” Behemoth asked.

  “A tech dweeb,” I answered. “He builds cool toys for people like us to use.”

  “For people like us?” the Behemoth repeated. He really looked especially hideous when he was trying to form a thought in his Neanderthalish head. I didn’t understand how anyone could want to fuck him, but I was pretty sure Electra had been doing exactly that behind my back, mainly due to the extreme bruising around her intimate areas that I knew I hadn’t inflicted. But when I asked her out of curiosity, she hotly denied it, as if I cared either way. She had proposed getting double penetrated by the two of us once, and when I vehemently rejected the suggestion she had pretended that it was just a joke.

  “Well, not specifically for people like us,” Electra said impatiently. “I think he mostly does government contracts. But he doesn’t really care who gets their hands on his weaponry, as long as he’s making money.”

  “Then why don’t we buy… the itty bitty robots?” the Behemoth inquired as he pinched his sausage-sized thumb and forefinger together to signify what “itty bitty” meant. He couldn’t seem to remember the prefix “nano” because it didn’t make any sense to him. “When we steal, we make him mad.”

  “Do you think I’m made of money?” I demanded. “Nelson products are too fucking expensive.”

  “Oh,” the Behemoth said. “Well I could… rob bank?”

  I did appreciate his sense of initiative and desire to help out.

  “No ski mask in the world would be able to disguise your identity, my friend,” I said. “And you’re my secret weapon. You and Electra and the others. The world knows my name, after the daycare and the opera, but it doesn’t know that you’re both helping me.”

  “Oh,” the Behemoth said. “Well, after this, you make me famous? Like Optimo?” He grinned at the thought. His grin was horrifying. It was the kind of grin that someone would make before eating the flesh of a child. Hmm. I wondered if I could convince him to do something like that in public. Sometimes good old fashioned gory horror was better than any kind of sophisticated villainy I could dream up. The Behemoth wasn’t naturally inclined to be cannibalistic, but it was pretty easy to manipulate him into doing pretty much anything.

  “Optimo is a superhero,” I reminded him. Also, Optimo was good-looking. Even if the Behemoth had been ten times the hero, he never could have achieved the kind of fame and adoration that fucking Optimo enjoyed. “You don’t want to be a lame ass goodie like that. You want to be a terrifying monster. The thing that keeps children lying awake at night.”

  The Behemoth hung his head. “Well, I don’t want to be this way, I don’t want to be a murderer, but people don’t give me any choice. Children cry when they see me, women always reject me… well, except--”

  Electra reached her yellow-booted foot past me to kick him in the shin, and I pretended not to notice.

  “Every woman reject me,” the Behemoth corrected himself. “So it’s not my fault that I kill them all now instead. What else am I supposed to do?”

  “What else indeed,” I agreed. Sometimes I was ashamed of myself for the company I kept, but then I had to remind myself that the rest of the world wasn’t any better. They just thought they were. But really they were just in more fortunate circumstances and had never been pressed to the level of desperation of people like the Behemoth. Or people like me.

  Those prep school boys… my step siblings… my bitch of a stepmother… all of them thought that I had to grovel before them, beg for scraps, that I was lucky to receive a pat on the head from them. They thought they had all the power. And that if I acted out or rebelled against them in any way instead of meekly accepting that situation, then that meant there was something aberrant about me. Something that needed to be institutionalized and drowned with drugs. Those were the rules of their world. But now it was time for them to get introduced to the rules of my world.

 
“So, we’re going to strengthen our defenses here?” Electra prompted. “In case of an attack by either Miles Nelson or the Shadow Knight?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think we need some automated security measures. We can take advantage of the existing structure of the amusement park. If we can set up some motion sensors or weight plates, or remote controlled detonations… I mean we could have exploding giant teacups or missiles flying from rollercoasters or animated Wacky Wonderland characters shooting lasers, the possibilities are endless. Where’s Benji? Bring him to me now.”

  Benji was the genius computer scientist with a neuroscience background who had invented the control chips for me and figured out how to use the nanobots to install them. Every time he completed an engineering task for me or proposed a new solution, he felt the need to preface it with, “This is so wrong, but… ” which was annoying, but I tolerated it because he really was a genius.

  A nervous, rat-faced little genius, but still a genius, and it took very little effort to persuade him into doing something. I’d been fully prepared to inflict grotesque tortures upon him, but as it turned out that was completely unnecessary, because the slightest allusion to torture had him turning pasty and sweating and assuring me that he was prepared to cooperate.

  Both of my companions stared at me in consternation and neither of them made a move to fetch the extremely useful Benji as I had just ordered them to do.

  Electra opened her glossily painted lips and then closed them again.

  “Er,” said the Behemoth.

  “… What?” I asked.

  “Benji is… ” the Behemoth began.

  “Benji is what?” I demanded.

  “You don’t really need Benji right now, do you?” Electra asked. “You have us. We can help you. Benji isn’t your real friend, he’s just someone you kidnapped and forced to work for you. But the Behemoth and I work for you because we want to.”