by Logan Jacobs
“You two are the muscle,” I hissed. “Figuratively in your case, literally in his. Benji is the brains. An effective operation requires both.”
“But sweetie, you have all the brains that any operation could require,” Electra cooed as she put her hand on my chest and blinked at me adoringly. Her flirting always seemed like partly an act, but right now it seemed like one hundred percent an act. “You’re a true genius, Benji is just a useless dweeb--”
I grabbed her perfectly manicured hand and threw it off my chest.
“What the fuck happened to Benji?” I screeched.
Electra whimpered under her breath and looked over at the Behemoth as a means of silently assigning the blame.
“Er, he… killed himself,” the Behemoth said.
“He killed himself?” I asked. That didn’t make any sense. Benji had been so terrified by the thought of any form of physical harm to his person, that I just couldn’t imagine him voluntarily destroying himself. Unless maybe to escape torture, but I had never tortured him. So he knew by now that I wouldn’t, as long as he kept doing everything I told him to.
“Yes,” the Behemoth said. This time he looked over at Electra, apparently to invite her to back him up.
“… Yes,” she agreed after a moment’s hesitation.
This was suspicious as fuck. But arguing with the two of them was a waste of time. The Behemoth could keep repeating monosyllabic answers from now to eternity and was capable of stubbornly doubling down on statements that made no sense. And Electra was a deceitful little bitch who could flip a switch and go into a hysterical tearful mode that she relied on as a last resort diversion.
“Okay, show me,” I said.
“Show you what?” Electra squeaked.
“Show me Benji’s body,” I snarled. “When did he die anyway? When were you planning to report this to me?”
“Recently,” the Behemoth said quickly.
“Just now,” Electra agreed. “An hour ago.”
“Show me,” I repeated as I got out of the carriage.
My two right-hand men reluctantly started walking down the track until we came to the chamber with the artificial hay bales. We wound around the large textured bales until we came to a dome constructed to look like a pile of loose hay.
Both Electra and the Behemoth looked over at me nervously. I glared back at them.
The Behemoth then turned miserably to Electra as if he were asking her permission. She pursed her lips and blinked affirmatively.
The Behemoth placed his enormous hands on the artificial pile of hay, which stood about eight feet tall and was about six feet in diameter, grunted, and pushed. The plastic dome toppled over. I could see that the screws that had been keeping it securely fixed to the ground had been wrenched out.
I could also see that, in the hollow space beneath the dome of artificial hay, there was a crumpled body in a hoodie and khakis. There were cracked spectacles that had fallen off the face, and the skull had been crushed like a dropped watermelon. Benji had evidently been the victim of blunt force trauma. If I had to guess, I would guess that the blunt instrument had been a hand. A very large, super strong hand. A cluster of flies disturbed by the lifting of the dome started buzzing around in agitation.
“… Suicide?” I asked sarcastically.
I don’t think the Behemoth understood sarcasm.
“Yes,” he said with evident relief that I seemed to accept his story. “Er, Electra and I found him like this.”
“Benji smashed his own skull in from the back?” I asked.
“Yeah… he… rigged a system to drop, um, something heavy on himself,” Electra elaborated.
I turned and fixed her with a stare. I had been told that my eyes could be very unnerving. My stepmother had called them devil’s eyes, which wasn’t a very original sentiment on her part, but I’d also heard adjectives like “deranged” and “soulless.” I didn’t really understand what people meant by that. They were just very large, very pale blue eyes. Pretty girls with similar eyes got told they were “angelic.”
Just another reason why the world needed to fucking burn. My genius should have been celebrated, but they thought I was creepy instead.
Electra swallowed and looked away. I guess she didn’t think my eyes were angelic.
I wondered how the Behemoth had ended up killing Benji. If it had been a sheer accident, or if Benji had angered him or Electra in some way. I knew Benji wouldn’t have done that on purpose, since self-preservation was always his top priority, but it was possible he had said something unintentionally offensive. Or frustrated them by telling them that some task they wanted from him was not possible. Or caught them fucking, which might have scared them because they didn’t want him to rat them out to me.
I could have tried to question them further about it, but they were both unreliable sources. Almost as unreliable a source as I was myself.
And did it really matter, anyway? Benji was gone. Had been gone for at least the last twenty-four hours by the looks and smell of it. I no longer had my best inventor, my best engineer, my best computer scientist. Not just best. Only.
I wondered whether I should have the two of them killed as an example for disobeying my wishes and endangering my operation by robbing me of one of my best assets. And on top of that, trying to conceal their crime and lying to me about it.
But no.
They deserved it, for sure, but I couldn’t afford to lose them. Not at this early point in my career, when they were still my two strongest allies. Without them, I wouldn’t have enough supers to defend the lair if we came under attack. Just my microchipped human autobots, which were really just meat for the grinder.
But someday. Someday, when my vision had attracted legions of stronger supers to assemble under my leadership. When all of Grayville cowered in fear of me and all the forces of chaos in the universe, their illusions of security and superiority stripped away. When they understood that injustice and suffering were the law of the land. When they lost hope that their heroes and their institutions and their moral codes could stand in the path of my tidal wave of arbitrary and inevitable destruction.
When even Maniac bowed before me and asked to serve.
Then, I would no longer have any need for such pitiful creatures as the two that stood stupidly staring at me now like guilty kids waiting to be reprimanded by a parent. Years from now, when they thought this incident was forgiven and forgotten, when Electra had moved on to scores of other supervillains and barely remembered me or the infidelities she’d committed against me, then I would have them both brutally murdered.
I’d think of something poetic. I was an artist of chaos after all.
Preferably, I’d find another super with a lightning power who could electrocute the yellow-haired whore for me, and another superstrong henchman who could crush the Behemoth like a bug. Or maybe I’d just have their skulls crunched like the contemptible Benji’s.
“Sorry this happened,” Electra said nervously, which interrupted my musings. “It’s really unfortunate. We’ll kidnap another scientist for you. Any other scientist you want. I wish we could’ve stopped him, but it was too late by the time we found him. But we should’ve told you sooner. Baby? Baby, you’re not mad, are you?”
I forced a grin. My grin also seemed to unnerve people. I’d heard it described as “skeletal” and “demonic.” I really had been born with the perfect face to fulfill my destiny.
“Not mad at all,” I reassured her.
Chapter Thirteen
“We have a solid plan of attack,” Dynamo said as we lugged our gear back into the rental house. “There’s really only one thing that worries me about it.”
“Do you think the second anti-supervillain gun is overkill?” I asked. “I mean, we could--”
“What if the Shadow Knight interferes again?” she interrupted. “Like he did at the opera.”
“And ruins everything,” Norma groaned. I knew she really didn’t like Dan Slade. “What i
f we capture him like we did Bernardo and leave him in the bathroom with Wanda too?”
“Er, I don’t think that’ll be quite as easy with a superhero as it was with an opera singer,” I said. I might have a lot of issues with the Shadow Knight’s methodology and his unwillingness to be a team player, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t competent in a fight. I’d been working on my suit for the last few months, and he’d been working on his for the last four years. And he’d had the chance to practice using it on many of Grayville’s worst criminals. Even a rather mediocre genius like Slade would be tricky with a head start like that.
I thought about it. It was true. If the Shadow Knight swooped in again at the last second the way he had at the opera house, our best-laid plan would be for naught. Mayhem would just bounce back in and out of prison, laughing all the way. We had to do something to prevent that. Short of killing the Shadow Knight.
“Aileen,” I asked. “Who does the Shadow Knight care about? Really care about. A relative, a best friend, someone he’d drop everything to go and save if they were in trouble.”
“Are you sure there’s anyone like that?” Norma asked doubtfully. She had a point there. Dan Slade seemed superficially friendly with everyone. The Shadow Knight seemed like one cold bastard who cared about ideals, but nothing about humans.
“Slade has a younger sister named Janine,” Aileen answered. “He doesn’t talk about her publicly, he’s never seen with her in public, but they were supposedly inseparable as children, and she writes about him adoringly. Social media posts. A few interviews. She says she always knew her brother would be a hero because he was her protector first before he grew up to become Grayville’s protector.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Where does she live?”
“Nine oh eight Fairview Way South,” Aileen answered. “Thirty-one years old, married with two children.”
“We can’t just kidnap an innocent woman, it would terrify--” Dynamo began.
“We don’t need to,” I said. “We just need to make the Shadow Knight believe that we did.”
“How do we do that?” Norma asked.
“You said she’s done interviews, right Aileen?” I asked. “Well, if I can get at least six minutes of audio, preferably more, I can feed it into a program that can then replicate her voice. Then we script a distress call, send the clip to Slade’s phone. We’ll claim to be Mayhem and say that we’ve taken Janine.”
“Fifteen minutes and thirteen seconds of an audio recording of Janine Hathaway, nee Slade’s, voice found online, including childhood Youtube videos,” Aileen said.
“Exclude any audio of her voice before the age of twenty,” I said. “Otherwise the artificial composite version would sound too young.”
“Nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds,” Aileen said.
“Perfect, that’ll do it,” I said. “We’ll launch the attack tonight as soon as it gets dark. The night vision contact lenses will ensure we can see even if the ride is in an enclosed unlit space. So that’s when we need the Shadow Knight to be otherwise occupied. Where should we say that we’ve taken Janine? It needs to be on the other side of town.”
“Grayville isn’t that big a city though,” Elizabeth said. “After he went there and realized Janine wasn’t there, he’d still have time to go after Mayhem and get in our way. If he knew where Mayhem was anyway, which he may or may not be able to figure out. So we should create some kind of trap to hold him there through the night.”
I smiled at her, grateful that she was on board with this plan, even though the old Dynamo probably couldn’t have imagined actively sabotaging a fellow superhero.
Whatever kind of trap we used wouldn’t be anything too bad, nothing that would cause Slade any real injury, just something that would piss him off and give him a little taste of the frustration we’d felt when he whisked our prey out of our hands at the opera house.
“Create the Janine voice, and make sure that when Slade tries to call them, the call is blocked and block him on their social media, so he can’t get in touch with the real sister,” I instructed Aileen. “And Dynamo, you script a message to Slade from his sister asking for help. Norma, you and I will choose a suitable location where we can prepare a trap.”
After that, Norma and I went to go construct the trap we had planned out, and by the time we all met back up, we were ready for dinner. Aileen had prepared a delicious clam vongole.
“Feeling ready?” I asked the team as I twirled some noodles around my fork.
“More than,” Norma replied.
“I don’t think Mayhem himself is that big a deal,” Elizabeth remarked. “It’s all the complicating factors… not just Slade, but all those innocent people he’s using, and the fact that we still don’t know how to free their minds. I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than losing my agency like that. I mean, can you imagine if someone else were able to wield my body as a weapon? Or Optimo’s? Or Atlas’?”
“It wouldn’t happen,” I said. “Anyway, Mayhem wouldn’t be able to do it. Not with my nanobots. They still require physical insertion, and you would kick Mayhem’s ass if he ever tried to get close enough to do that to you.”
“Where do they get inserted?” Norma asked.
“Orally, usually,” I said. “It depends on the site they’re targeting though. For the brain… probably up the nose would be the most direct route.”
“Poor Bernardo,” Norma said. “All he wanted to do was practice the art that he loves in front of an audience that appreciates it and look at everything he’s gone through since then. Think he’ll remember any of it?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know whether it’s going to be possible to remove those control chips and restore those people to the way they were before without severely damaging their brains. Neuroscience isn’t my area of expertise.”
“Well, it must be possible,” Dynamo said fiercely. “It must be. It just wouldn’t be fair.”
“Mayhem might not be right about much, but he’s right that life isn’t fair,” I said.
“The job of a superhero is to make the world fairer,” Elizabeth said. “Safer and kinder for the innocent. More deadly for the wicked.”
“Is it?” I asked with mock surprise. “I always thought it was to make crime fighting look sexy. Generate public support for defense spending. Boost the entertainment industry. You know.”
Elizabeth stuck her tongue out at me.
“No reason you can’t do both,” Norma said supportively.
“I’m not on the taxpayer dollar anymore,” Elizabeth pointed out. “Hey, so what am I getting paid for this one, anyway, Miles?”
“Do you want a flat wage?” I asked. “Or would you rather I placed a reward on Mayhem’s head? If you kill him, you claim it? If I kill him, no pay for this mission other than living expenses?”
Elizabeth narrowed her turquoise eyes. I knew she couldn’t resist a challenge. I didn’t care about the money, and she was wealthy enough not to care either, but if anything could have increased our desire to destroy Mayhem, it was turning this into a competition between us.
“Two million,” she said.
“And you’ll kill him?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Absolutely,” she growled.
“Done,” I replied as I raised my wine glass.
Elizabeth clinked with me, but Norma didn’t. We both looked at her.
“Can I get in on this bounty hunt too?” she asked sweetly.
“Oh,” I said and actively tried to repress any trace of surprise or amusement from my expression. “Yeah, of course.”
My dorky little assistant grinned like a tourist posing for a picture.
I raised my wine glass again. Both girls clinked, and we all sipped.
“Revenge for Bernardo,” Norma said next, and we drank to that too.
“A gallant rescue for Janine Hathaway,” Dynamo said with a smirk, and we drank to that too.
“What’s for dessert?” Norma a
sked.
I checked my watch and replied, “A trip to the amusement park.”
Chapter Fourteen - Shadow Knight
I was just settling in at my desk to update some spreadsheets when my phone rang. I picked it up, but before I could answer the call ended and I saw that a new voicemail had appeared. When I played the voicemail, my whole body froze.
It was my sister’s voice, filled with a tone of such panic that it sent a chill down my spine before I even processed her words.
“Dan, please help me. Mayhem took me. I think he’s going to kill me. He said you have to meet him at the Eidon Clock Tower in Veller Square at midnight to… to get me back. But be careful, I don’t want him to hurt you. I’m sorry Dan, I didn’t mean to-- I never wanted him t-to use me like this, against you. If it doesn’t-- if you can’t-- tell Brian and the kids I love them so much.”
I stood up and punched the table. If I were wearing my suit, it would have cracked in two, but since I wasn’t it bruised my hand. I yelled, partly in pain, but mostly with rage.
How had Mayhem found out about Janine anyway? I was so careful to keep her out of the limelight. Both limelights, the one I had as Dan Slade, uber successful businessman and brother, and the one that I had as the Shadow Knight, the dashing, mysterious hero of Grayville. But nothing at all was known about the Shadow Knight’s family, although it was possible for someone who really did their research to figure out that Dan Slade had a sister.
Mayhem must have somehow discovered my superhero identity.
But how?
There were only a few people in the world who knew about that. My servants, and my current and former apprentices. And now, maybe, Miles Nelson and his girlfriend too. And his dweeby little secretary, what’s her face. So which one of them had betrayed me to Mayhem? Surely, Mayhem wasn’t intelligent enough to have figured out my secret on his own. He was a lower grade of supervillain. A Maniac wannabe.
But I couldn’t afford to underestimate him at this point. Not when my sister’s life depended on it.
I checked my watch. An hour to midnight. Was there anything I could do in the meantime to help Janine?
