The Good Fight 2: Villains
Page 12
“No, you ain’t. Y’see, you ain’t paid the toll yet.”
“What’s the toll?” Herschel asked. He still had seven dollars in his wallet. He thought maybe he could just buy them off. He had no idea that bullies alone can be bought, but in a group their demands escalate as each tries to come up with something to make the others think he is more impressive. Leroy surprised him by being the first to speak.
“You gonna kiss our asses,” he said in that deep rumbling bass voice that terrorized the nightmares of so many teenagers. “All of us, one after another.”
Herschel felt bile rise in his throat at the thought. His head shook back and forth.
“You ain’t?” Masters asked in response to the negative gesture. “Then we gonna bust up your fingers. See how much mowing you can get done with all your fingers broke.”
“Yeah,” Junior agreed, hefting his stick for emphasis.
Leroy pointed toward the trees that grew beside the roadway. “Over there. Wouldn’t want nobody to see you kissing this,” he said, smacking himself on the buttocks with a powerful right hand as he erupted into sadistic laughter.
Herschel broke and ran. His shoes slapped the dusty road in a staccato rhythm. He didn’t care that he left his mower and trimmer behind. He didn’t care that he was two miles from home. All he knew was that he was not going to do what the trio was demanding of him. The bullies jumped forward to catch him, but they had not counted on what Herschel did.
He ran in the opposite direction of his home. Herschel knew there was no way he could outrun the other teens for two miles. Half a mile, though? That was possible, and in one half of a mile he would be on the front steps of Bayview. He knew that there he would find protection and a safe haven.
His legs churned and his heart threatened to explode in his chest as he heard the others give chase. Herschel put his head down and threw every ounce of power he had into his legs.
It wasn’t enough. He could see the Bayview gate in the distance, just close enough to make his heart leap, when they tackled him. After that, life became a flurry of fists and feet, curses snarled from angry mouths, and vile threats involving acts so graphic that Herschel was sickened by the mere images they conjured up. He felt a couple of ribs crack, but the fire that erupted in his chest was nothing compared to the pain when Junior laid that stick across the fingers of Herschel’s outstretched right hand. Three fingers broke with the first hit, and the stick descended twice more.
Surprisingly it was Kyle Masters who saved him from further abuse. Seeing the damage done by Junior’s bludgeon, Masters pulled the other two off Herschel and threw them aside. He planted one last kick into Herschel’s groin as punishment for making them chase him, and then the trio turned and fled.
* * *
Years passed after the attack. Herschel still visited Bayview for the company and the stories, but he never mowed there or anywhere else again. His crippled right hand made that a fact of life. The trio of bullies had stopped bothering him after that day as well, believing that if they simply made no further contact with him that Herschel would forget they existed. They were mistaken. He remembered every single detail.
The injury had made Herschel into even more of a recluse. He spent months recovering and trying to get his hand to function properly once more, and escaping into his books for days at a time. His mother was forced to take a second job to cover his medical bills, and he rarely saw her any more for longer than a few minutes. His emotional state was dark and grew darker with each passing day.
When he spoke with the residents of Bayview, he maintained a pleasant, friendly manner. They were his only friends. No one his age wanted anything to do with him. He was socially inept and his peers thought of him as untouchable. He was fine with that. Experience had shown him that the only people that mattered were those who had already experienced numerous decades of existence. Juveniles exhibited juvenile behavior, and those adults that had seen little of life were worthless to him. The more time he spent around them, the more convinced he became that they were the problem. Children, at least, could be excused for being truly ignorant, but as they grew and did not expand their knowledge and experience base, he lost all respect and acceptance for them.
He was twenty years old when Fate turned its eye on him. The news all over the country in 1963 varied between horror at the assassination of a sitting President and fascination at the events that had also begun in Dallas when Alicia Mathers had Emerged. Conversations everywhere centered on these two events, often in conjunction with one another. Many wondered what would have been the result had the Emergence begun before the killing.
Herschel awoke on a Thursday morning. The sun had not yet crested the horizon, and his room was lit only by a pale moon that hung low in the sky. His body felt pure and perfect, refreshed as though he had rested for a week. He felt no pain, no anguish from the injuries of his past. With a sense of wonder, he realized his hand once more flexed and twisted as it should. He felt an energy humming through his body, a sense of power unlike anything he had ever known.
He held up his hand, cursing as he was unable to see it in the dark. Before he could reach for his lamp, he felt a stirring in his system that became a tingling in his fingertips. The room was suddenly lit as brightly as if he had turned on every light in the house. He could not tell where the light came from, and the shock of its appearance sent him scrambling from his bed, arms raised in a defensive pose. As his feet hit the floor, a viking-style shield materialized from nowhere on his left arm. He shrieked in surprise and tossed it aside. It vanished before it could hit the floor. Herschel looked at the place where it had been, raising his arm and staring at it. The analytical part of his mind took over, telling him that he had wished for light and it appeared, followed by a shield when he felt scared and vulnerable. He calmed down and began to think through what had happened. He began to experiment, and it was not long until he discovered he could materialize items and effects at will. A wide smile spread across his face as he considered the possibilities.
He spent a full year in isolation, locked in his house with no outside contact. During that time, he discovered things about himself and his power. He could control how much or how little his body needed food, water, or sleep. On normal days he simply kept those needs ‘switched off’, as he needed no distractions. On increasingly rare occasions, he would indulge his system with a heavy meal and a good nights’ sleep, but he did it more to remember what it was like than from any need. He spent the vast majority of that time conscious and working out his abilities, testing his limitations and strengths. The former were few and the latter many. When he emerged from his self-imposed hermitage, he began his new life with a few simple acts.
He bought all the debt assigned to his mother and cancelled it, purchasing a house outright and moving her into it. He also purchased the entirety of the Bayview retirement community, hired additional staff, and improved the quality of the food and medical care there. One of the residents asked him how he had managed the expense. He told them it was done through shrewd investment, a much more palatable answer than telling someone he had gone to a junkyard and transmuted four crashed automobiles to pure gold.
Once he had established those changes, Herschel set about the task of tracking down three men. It was simple for a man of his ability to find them, and he approached each of them individually. Kyle Masters recognized him immediately, and laughed in his face when confronted with Herschel’s declaration of intended vengeance. Masters was found nailed to seven different trees in a park, each part of his body branded with the word ‘bully’. Leroy Hoover was found beside a public street, his body twisted around on itself. His lips were fused to his own buttock. He had died of slow suffocation. Junior Wilks was beaten by an army of invisible foes armed with heavy sticks. His body was pounded and thrashed until no bone was more than quarter-inch fragments, from the tips of his toes through his skull, with only the jawbones spared so the teeth could verify the identity.
* * *
From those beginnings, Professor Pain stepped into a world inhabited by metahumans and quickly established himself as being atop the metaphorical food chain. He hired the best and brightest scientists he could find, putting them to work creating new drugs to ease the pains and aches common to the elderly. He set them to work looking for the newest technologies in attempts to slow the aging process, scarcely noticing that he himself never changed, being stuck forever looking as he did at age twenty.
He tolerated his hirelings, but never believed he could trust them. Their ambitions were too great, and he occasionally found himself facing a coup attempt from one or more employees who had decided to make a poor decision. Shortly after the bloody and public battle against the fusion-emitting meta known as Pulsar, he decided it would be best if his hirelings set up shop for themselves, and disbanded all but the scientific branch of his metahuman followers.
Those that left carried word of Pain and his methods to the outside world, and he soon found himself faced with visits from various law enforcement agents, each bent on stopping this new threat to humanity. Police attempted numerous times to take him into custody, but eventually ceased those attempts, as it only ended with their men dead or worse. Metahumans who took on the risk of hunting him - and the list of bounty hunters for the so-called ‘evildoers’ was large in those days - met with similar fates. He had no qualms at all about killing those who opposed him. They were merely obstacles in his path, and there was no reason to allow obstacles to remain unchallenged.
His ambitions were small, and for that the majority of the public was highly grateful. Professor Pain could easily have set his sights on becoming a dictator or a king and been well-nigh unstoppable on his path to such a lofty ideal, but he had no such desires. He maintained himself in a fortified castle-style building with a veritable army of henchmen and servants. Each of them was doubly loyal, as not only did Pain have a tendency to pay extremely well, but he provided for the care of the elderly members of his employees’ families. It was known only to a select few that many surrounding retirement communities were being purchased outright and improved to allow for a higher quality of life for all residents. He was, in a manner of his own, improving the quality of life for hundreds, and then thousands.
The establishment of the Department of Metahuman Affairs as a branch of the Department of Justice was a tremendous stepping stone for the advancement of metahumans nationwide, and it was mirrored in many other countries. Unfortunately for Professor Pain, he became the focal point of more than one of the government-sanctioned metas. It soon became clear to the heads of that agency that sending Agents to deal with Pain was an exercise in futility. Most of them did not come back, and those that did were in bags. Even if they managed to get past what was a privately-financed military, the Agents had to face Professor Pain, and he had evolved beyond the concept of mercy.
It was when the suggestion was made in Congress to mobilize the United States Marine Corps against him in direct violation of Posse Comitatus laws that Pain went public. He gave an interview with a selected journalist. In that interview, he made it clear that he had simply been defending himself against perceived threats and that he would continue to do so. He also made it known that the production and implementation of nuclear devices was an easy thing for someone such as himself, and unless the governments of the world wanted a new player in the nuclear game, that it would be wise to simply leave him alone to live his life.
“It is quite simple,” he declared in the interview that earned a Pulitzer for its author. “You are all outmatched. I do not wish to harm anyone. I do not have need of yet more bodies sprawled at my feet and further expenses due to damage in my home. You, the public, see us as saviors or demons. You cannot understand the concept that there may be more to existence than those you have previously been inculcated to believe. You look at us, and you will never truly understand us. We, those with enhanced genetics, sometimes simply do not care about you. It is not a matter of wishing to rule you or serve at your behest. We are quite honestly not like you any longer. We are different. We are singular. Unique. I am unique even amongst my own kind. I have grown weary of your bullying and threats. I shall establish a new stronghold, and I will deal harshly with any who attempt to stop me, now or in the future. Be it a single human or the population of the world, I will bring to you a Hell like none your holy books could imagine.”
It was also during the course of that interview that Professor Pain coined the term ‘geneboosters’ for those of metahuman genotype. It became the preferred term for metahumans in a matter of months. The term metahuman or parahuman still appeared on legal documents and anywhere formality was required, but variants of ‘booster’ or ‘boosted’ soon flooded the media and the markets.
* * *
Chapter Three
Dropping the Hammer
Outside the hospital, the police had set up a perimeter. Squad cars idled with their lights spinning, cops raced back and forth with rolls of yellow tape marking the edges of the no-go zone. Detectives and a pair of Lieutenants stood beside a SWAT van, examining blueprints on a folding table with the commander of the tactical unit. The security officer from the hospital, clad in a raincoat and nothing else, was pointing out areas of import. Communicators struggled to set up specific lines into the hospital and isolate all outgoing ones. News vans had arrived, drawn by scanner traffic. Their crews were unlimbering massive cameras and portable lights as reporters touched up their makeup and practiced their intro speeches.
Into the maelstrom of activity roared a motorcycle. Slung low to the ground and with wide wheels, the machine was painted in a garish red-and-white scheme. Its rider was also clad in red and white, a blindingly bright uniform that proclaimed his presence with nearly as much flair as the rider himself. He switched off the roaring bike and dismounted, heavy boots striking the ground with authority. His masked face scanned across the assembled police, settling on the tactical commander.
He lifted the caution tape and strode under it, mountains of muscle shifting with each step. The crimson bodysuit with its white trim seemed to struggle to hold back the physique within it.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered the commander. “Somebody woke up the Hammer.”
“No. No, no, no,” said one of the Lieutenants in response. He turned and approached the costumed booster, hand extended in a silent demand to halt. The booster swerved around him as if the officer was simply an obstacle. The Metahuman Affairs badge emblazoned on his breast was authority enough to outrank any local officer in any dealing with the Emerged.
“Hey, Lou,” he greeted the tac commander. His voice was deep and sonorous, a bass assault on the ears of all within range.
“Hammer,” the man responded, nodding a greeting. They shook hands in a brief, single pump.
“Understand you’ve got a booster issue here. Thought I might go in and have a word.”
“There are procedures that have —” began a detective. Hammer cut him off with the casual ease of someone supremely confident in themselves.
“I’m here on behalf of the Department of Metahuman Affairs,” he said. “We have our own procedures.”
He glanced over the table, memorizing the layout and the information assembled there. He was quite accustomed to having agencies withhold data from him and had trained himself to recognize what he needed to know at a moment’s glance. That was what he told himself, anyway. In reality, he absorbed enough detail to place himself into position to get into the best fights, which was what he enjoyed more than anything else. If he just waited, Vapor and Hellhound were on the way, but standing about while the stealth experts crept through the target area was not his style. It had not been when he was in the Army, and it remained not his way since his Emergence. He strode past the officers that were leaning on their vehicles with rifles train
ed on the hospital and made his way to the main doors. Once inside, he looked at the elevator and sighed. The target had gone that way, but that only screamed TRAP to Hammer. He popped open the door to the stairs and peered up.
“Nothing to it but to do it,” he said, and mounted the stairs. His heavy tread became a solid rhythm akin to a march as he ascended. His arms and back flexed as he loosened himself up for what he hoped would be a decent match. The last fight he had been in that had actually challenged him had been the one with Asmodeus that had ended with Hammer indefinitely banned from Las Vegas due to indiscriminate collateral damage to the tune of nearly a hundred million dollars. He knew that with this being a hospital he would have to tone it down, but figured he could easily arrange an “Oops, we fell out the window“ introduction to the fight that would put them on the ground outside.
Eleven floors was a good warmup for his legs. He opened the door with only the slightest trepidation. If the door was wired, he was screwed, but hopefully the booster was only planning to keep out the local cops and wouldn’t rig it with anything too destructive. To his surprise there was nothing but a faint click and the door opened on smooth hinges. He stepped into the hall and looked at the nurses’ station, noting idly that it was abandoned. A sideways glance into the first room he came across showed him that it, too, was empty. The entire bed had been removed, along with the patient. The nurses, he supposed, had evacuated the floor. That left Hammer with the task of locating the booster unimpeded by the presence of additional people. He started a slow walk down the hallway, pushing open each door and looking inside.
He had made it through a third of the floor when he heard the voices. They came from behind him, and he quickly homed in on them, his ears guiding his feet to stand outside the door to room 1138.
* * *
“So that’s about it,” Professor Pain told Richard. “I do what I must, and sometimes there are those who are caught up in my wake or who stand opposing me. They both end up falling, and I take their deaths in stride.”