by Logan Jacobs
Then Dynamo, Norma, and Aileen came up to join me.
“Who the fuck are you people?” Mayhem asked weakly. “You’re not supposed to… ” His eyes rolled reproachfully toward his wounded stomach.
“We’re not superheroes, ‘supposed to’ doesn’t apply to us,” I said. “Now how do we remove the mind control chips? This is your last chance to do one good thing. Or at least, undo one bad thing.”
Instead of answering Mayhem just gurgled blood, and then his head tipped over. I checked his exposed neck for a pulse and found none. I sighed. Well, we’d just have to figure it out without his help.
“That’s two million you owe me,” Dynamo said cheerfully.
“What?” I demanded. “I hit him first!”
“You did not, I hit him first!”
“Aileen?” I asked. “Tell her. What did your retinas record?”
“The two of you appear to have shot Mayhem simultaneously,” Aileen stated, “although the footage is not clear enough to indicate whose rounds struck a vital organ first.”
“I’ll give you a million,” I told Elizabeth.
“Deal,” she said, and then we bumped fists. Sometimes we were lovers. Sometimes we were best friends.
“Mission complete,” Norma said.
“Well, not quite yet,” I said. “We still have to locate the rest of my nanobots. They must be on the premises somewhere. We’ll start by searching this ride. Let’s go all the way to the end and make sure that it’s clear of hostiles. Then we’ll split up and try to find the nanobots.”
There were only a few more chambers of the ride left, and no more surviving supervillains. The only people we encountered were humans wandering around aimlessly. They had clearly been control chipped and didn’t have normal brain function, but they didn’t seem to have any hostile compulsions anymore either, now that Mayhem was dead. I figured we would leave them for medical authorities to deal with, my Cellar wasn’t exactly equipped to serve as a camp for dozens of patients.
But there was one of Mayhem’s victims that I did intend to take with me. The one that the lightning-wielding supervillain had accidentally fried to a crisp. I figured that if I sent him to the premier medical research facility that I owned, the scientists there could autopsy his brain.
Eventually, Aileen used her X ray vision mode to find the crate of nanobots beneath a false floor inside one of the Munchkin huts. Then she carried out the electrocuted corpse, and Dynamo and I carried out the crate together. The crate could have fit in the palm of one hand if you were only accounting for the mass of the nanobots themselves, but the secure individual packaging made it too bulky for one person to handle alone.
Then we went to our rental home, and I called some people to make shipping arrangements. Both for the corpse to an appropriate laboratory, and finally for the nanobots to arrive at their intended destination after a long unplanned delay. Luckily, the science behind Mayhem’s control chips hadn’t featured too prominently in media coverage of his attacks, so I didn’t think the nanobots’ marketability would be too handicapped by the negative association in the medical industry.
Then, just as the birds started chirping, I finally went to bed.
Chapter Sixteen - Janine Slade
In my dream, a persistent ringing indicated that some kind of alarm was going off. I raced through the hallways of a vague yellow building trying to find my way out before whatever disaster I was being warned about struck, but I couldn’t find my way out, and the alarm just kept getting louder and louder.
Then I jolted awake and realized that the ringing was coming from my phone. My husband beside me groaned out an unintelligible complaint, I wasn’t sure if he was awake or not. I slapped at my phone to make the ringing stop and squinted at the numbers on my alarm clock. It was around seven in the morning on Saturday. Well, that was sort of an obnoxious time to call.
I checked the call log and realized that it was my brother. He had tried calling me three times already in the past ten minutes. What on Earth did he want? Our parents were dead, and we didn’t have any other relatives that we were particularly close to. Even if something tragic had happened to an aunt or an uncle, Dan would’ve waited until later in the day to tell me about it. He wouldn’t have felt that I needed to know immediately.
Also, there was no kind of trouble Dan himself could possibly be in that I could possibly help with. Not only was he Dan Slade, self-made billionaire tech genius, Grayville’s golden boy… he was also, unbeknownst to anyone except me and his apprentices, who had to sign NDAs, the Shadow Knight. Literal fucking superhero. And not just any superhero, the best superhero. Just like he’d always said he’d become ever since we were little kids.
I slipped out of bed so I wouldn’t wake Brian up and went downstairs with the phone to call my brother back.
“Dan?” I asked when he picked up immediately. “Hey, it’s been a while--”
“Oh, thank God,” he muttered. “… Unless that’s just a fake too.”
“What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Say something only Nina would know,” he commanded. “Nina” was a nickname that only he used for me.
“What’s going on, why are you being so paranoid?” I asked. This reminded me of the time Dan had tried to convince me to install a bunch of creepy surveillance tech around the house so that he could “always make sure I was safe.”
“Just prove to me that you’re really Nina,” he growled.
“Dan, what the fuck?” I demanded. “I was asleep. You called me, not the other way around. What do you want?”
“I want to know that you’re you, and not a fake,” he repeated. Sometimes I worried that the stress of his job, well his two very serious jobs, was making my brother mentally unstable.
He never really recovered from the death of our parents, and he just seemed to get worse every year. More paranoid. More angry. More… just an asshole.
“Of course I’m me,” I sighed.
“But that’s what a fake would say,” he persisted.
“Okay, ask me a question that only I would know the answer to,” I replied. Obviously Dan wasn’t going to calm down until I humored him.
There was silence on the other end of the line, and I could hear his agitated breathing.
“What did I tell you, the morning our parents were murdered?” he asked.
“Oh, God,” I groaned. “Dan, it’s been over twenty years. I don’t even remember them, and you keep bringing them up every time we tal--”
“What was the very first thing I said to you when the adults left the room?” he hissed.
“You told me that you were going to adopt me,” I sighed and softened at the memory as I always did. He had been a painfully serious little boy, and I had depended on him entirely and believed everything he said. But it hadn’t turned out that way, with him becoming my legal guardian, because at the time of our parents’ murder, Dan was only seven to my four.
“Yeah,” Dan said with relief evident in his voice. “That’s right. And I know it didn’t work out legally that way, but I always honored that commitment to be your new guardian, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did,” I agreed wholeheartedly. It was the truth, and I would never stop being grateful to him for that. I did, however, want him to stop acting like he still had parental rights over me now that I was thirty one and married with kids. “So, you gonna tell me what’s up and why you called all of a sudden like that? Just to make sure I hadn’t been replaced by a robot? Ha, ha?”
“Uhhh just, you know, had a pretty weird night… you know, with uh, work stuff… and got the urge to check in, make sure you were okay,” he answered. The undoubted truth, with a lot of gaping holes in it. That was just like Dan. He wanted to know every detail of my life and tell me how I could improve it but he didn’t think I was, I don’t know, mature enough or tough enough to handle the grittier details of his life. That kind of irked me and didn’t exactly encourage me to be extra communic
ative with him.
“Er, okay, well I’m perfectly fine,” I replied after a pause. “Miss you, though. Maybe we could get together sometime? At a restaurant or something. You could rent one out like last time. It’s been six months or so since we’ve seen each other, and I’m just on the other side of the cit--”
“Yeah, absolutely,” Dan agreed. “You can bring the family. I bet your kids have grown a lot, huh? I’ll uh, I’ll tell my secretary to check my schedule and see when that will be possible. But, about last night… so, nothing strange happened to you? Nothing at all?”
Well, Brian and I had gotten a little more experimental in bed than usual, but other than that, nope.
“Zip,” I said. “Zero. Zilch.”
“Okay, okay,” Dan said and then let out a heavy sigh. “Hmm, I wonder how that was fabricated. Maybe your phone lines aren’t secure.”
“What?” I asked.
“Sorry, I was just talking to myself,” he said. “Hey, what about your social media accounts? Did you get locked out of them in the last eight hours? Are you able to access them?”
“I don’t know, I was asleep for the last eight hours,” I reminded him, “not checking Facebook.”
“Check now,” he said.
“Say please,” I reminded him.
“Pretty please with a fucking cherry on top. It’s important, Nina.”
I put him on speakerphone and clicked on my Facebook app. The news feed loaded as usual. “Oh hey, did you see that Jules got remarried?” I asked.
“Hmm, the block must have expired,” he grumbled.
“What block?” I asked. “There was a block on Jules getting married? Or are you referring to her ex? He didn’t ‘expire,’ they just got a divorce after that incident with the--”
“No, no, never mind,” Dan said. “But you know, if you gave me your social media passwords, I could make your accounts more secure for you. Investigate this hacking issue and patch the vulnerabilities.”
“What hacking issue?” I groaned. “Nothing happened to my accounts! I just checked Instagram too and it’s fine… oh, if you had an account, I could send you this video, you’d love it. There’s a parrot and a hamster and a hamster wheel in the same cage, and this cheeky little bird--”
“Your accounts are not secure,” Dan repeated. “Let me fix the issue for you.”
“No,” I said flatly. “You are not getting my passwords.”
“The world is dangerous,” he growled. “If I’d been able to protect our pare--”
“Stop with mom and dad!” I yelled into the phone, but then I remembered that everyone was sleeping in the house, and I took a deep breath. “I swear to fucking God, I can’t have a five minute conversation with you without you bringing them up. Dan, they died. It sucks, and I wish they were here, but they aren’t. You need to focus on making a new family so--”
“No,” he grunted. “My family is the city. My children are its citizens that I must protect.”
“Here we fucking go again,” I sighed.
“Why don’t you take my profession seriously!” he seethed. “I’m doing this for you.”
“No,” I said. “Dan, I love you, but you’ve never really done anything for anyone else. It’s always been about the optics on you and reliving Mom and Dad’s murder over and over again. That’s why you never want to spend time with us unless it fits your agen--”
“That’s not true!” he groaned.
“It is!” I argued. “And I know we’ve talked about this before, but it’s the crack of dawn and here we are again. You need to talk to someone. I’m not a trained professional, but there are people who--”
“I don’t need to see a fucking shrink!” Dan yelled into the phone so loudly that my speaker actually clipped. “No one understands! You’ve never understood!”
“I’ve tried,” I whispered. “Dan, I’ve tried so much to understand, but--”
“You need to give me your social media passwords,” he spat into the phone, and I realized that he was trying to get back on the subject.
“Nope,” I said. “You can’t have them.”
“It’s a security--”
“Dan, it’s not happening,” I said impatiently. “I’m a grown woman, okay? And I’m fine, but you don’t sound fine. You never sound fine.”
“I’m fine,” he replied in an extremely frazzled tone. “I don’t need a shrink. I’m just… there is a lot going on.”
“I know,” I sighed. “I’m sorry about what I said about the shrink. I just think it would really help you get your anger issues--”
“Hey, look, I gotta go, okay? I’ll text you back about that restaurant thing. We’ll set something up. Tell Brian hi, tell the kids hi.”
“Will do,” I sighed. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” he replied, and hung up.
“Damn it, Dan,” I sighed as I stared out the dark window in my kitchen. “You really need to get help. It just keeps getting worse.”
But I knew he wouldn’t. I knew that eventually, I’d read that the Shadow Knight was dead.
But in most ways, I had lost Dan back when we were children and our parents died.
Chapter Seventeen
In the morning, I woke up to the sound of aggressive knocking on the front door. That was a little weird since no one should have been able to get past the front gate without the security code.
I felt sore and remembered that I had the blue supervillain version of Optimo to thank for that. I looked over at Elizabeth and realized that she was starting to stir awake in response to the disturbance, too.
The knocking on the front door continued.
I quickly threw on some sweats and a t-shirt. By the time I was done, Elizabeth had jumped out of bed and was quickly doing the same.
I hurried downstairs and met Norma in her pink pajamas as she headed toward the door too.
“I’ll get it, stay behind me,” I said. I looked through the peephole, and what I saw made me smile from ear to ear.
I unlocked and opened the front door as both Norma and Elizabeth came up behind me.
Standing on the front door was the Shadow Knight. His costume was a bit wrinkled, and he looked a bit droopy overall, but he appeared to have painstakingly picked all the hay out of his feathers. I only spied one piece stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
“What a pleasant surprise,” I said only slightly sarcastically. “Good morning, hope you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”
Norma giggled slightly behind my shoulder.
I couldn’t see most of the Shadow Knight’s face but his mouth tightened in anger. “That was you?”
“What was me?” I asked.
“The… clock tower… Janine--”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Use complete sentences, please. It’s fucking five in the morning.”
He stared at me in silence for a minute and apparently decided that the matter wasn’t worth pursuing. Or that it was too humiliating to talk about and that he should just pretend it never happened.
“I know what you’ve been up to,” he growled. “At Wacky Wonderland last night. I have sources, and I know that that was you. That was mass murder.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, “but hypothetically, if I had committed a mass murder, and you had proof of that, I would have to assume that you would go to the police, not to my doorstep.”
“The lack of proof is the only reason I’m not doing that, I assure you,” he said. “I wanted to like you. I wanted to believe that you had good intentions. But you’ve shown me that you are nothing more than a supervillain masquerading as a superhero. You, Dynamo… if you truly believe in Warden ideals, in any kind of ideals that have to do with being a force for good, and not becoming the very kind of evil that you purport to be combatting… you should get out now. He already has a dangerous hold over you. But I can tell it will only get worse. He is evil.”
“My own judgment is perfectly intact, thanks fo
r your concern,” she replied. “And Miles is the farthest thing from evil.”
“Did you just come here to insult us?” Norma asked.
“No,” the Shadow Knight replied. “I came here to warn you.”
“Warn us about what exactly?” Norma asked.
“Warn you to get out of town,” he said grimly. “And never show your faces here again.”
“Or else what?” I asked.
“I’ll imprison you myself, if the courts won’t,” he said. “Where you’ll never see the light of day again. Unlike you, I do not kill, but I can make you feel pain that will make you wish you were dead.”
“You think you can take all of us at once?” Elizabeth laughed aloud.
The Shadow Knight shifted his weight but did not reply, which I took as an admission that he could not.
Also, he didn’t even know about Aileen, who was waiting out of sight.
“You have no idea what I am capable of,” he growled finally.
“I know you’re incapable of coming up with an original weapons design… Mr. Slade,” I said.
His masked head jerked toward me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he spat-growled.
“Yes, you do,” I said patiently. “I’ve appreciated your hospitality while we’re in town, you know. And that bartender of yours really knows his shit. Maybe we really could have been friends with Slade, but this Shadow Knight alter ego of yours… he’s the one I’ve got an issue with.”
He probably considered denying it further, but realized there was no point.
“You stay out of our way, and we’ll stay out of yours,” I said.
“Or what?” he growled. “Is that a threat? Are you going to tell everyone about my real iden--”
“No,” I scoffed. “You just said you’d imprison and torture me. Sounds pretty much like what a villain would say, but I won’t turn your people on you.”
“So, then you threat is empty,” he said. “If you stay here in Grayville and you keep doing what you’re doing… then it’s not me you’ll have to worry about. The Maniac will ensure that your crime fighting career is as short as it is ill-advised.”
