The guards I had told to wait in Overkill’s laboratory were still there. Most of them were asleep on their feet, but a couple were reading or exchanging anecdotes of the “you think this is a long time to be standing here doing nothing? You should have been around for Oktoberfest last year” variety. The moment I entered they snapped to attention.
I hesitated. This was the moment. “Are you still waiting for orders from me?” I asked.
“Yes, New Worried Master.”
“Good. Uh… resume your normal duties.”
They acknowledged my order with something a little too close to a Nazi salute, for my money. I didn’t know if they were being wise-guys or not, but I made a mental note to change that salute to something a little less controversial. For the time being I just returned the salute and said “sieg heil.”
I found Overkill’s desk and looked through his papers, to see if I could get a better idea of how this place worked, and what exactly his plans had been. He had told me some of it, but I needed to know more if I was going to take his place. I picked up a few stray bits of information, here and there. Overkill’s first name was Orville, for example. But most of what I found I couldn’t understand. There were sheets full of numbers, which can mean anything, of course, and maps with countries circled and the word “Destroy” or “Use Plan 9” stamped on them, and sheaves of legal papers that seemed to be trying to justify what he was doing by claiming it fell under Section 3 of The Homestead Act. Finally I gave up. I just didn’t get what it was all about. Oh, well. I’ve never really known how the detective business works either, and that hasn’t stopped me. Just made me bad at it.
I spent the rest of the afternoon looking around my new home. It was an improvement over my one bedroom house in Central City, I’ll say that for it. This place had everything. All the comforts of home: moats, parapets, you name it. And everything was huge.
The master bedroom had a massive bed in it that Overkill said used to belong to the 7th Cavalry. It had about a dozen beautiful mechanical dames reclining on it, oiling each other. They asked if there was anything I wanted, and I said there certainly was, and outlined my wants in detail for them. They slapped my face, like all women do. But they looked scared after they had done it. That was an improvement anyway. I decided I was going to like being a super villain.
Everywhere I went in the fortress I was confronted by anxious creatures who asked me what they should do now. They needed more orders. I just told them to keep doing what they were doing, and don’t bother the boss. They obeyed instantly, which is what us bosses like. So I guess that’s how I ended up with all those weather machines and bowling alleys. I had thousands of them.
When all the detectives in the dungeon found out I was running things now, they demanded to be let out. I started to let them out, with them saying come on, hurry up stupid, pointing out that they didn’t have all day, when I suddenly decided maybe they had better stay in there for awhile. I wasn’t completely sure which side of the law I was on now. And I was starting to see Overkill’s point of view. Maybe the world would be better off if it was controlled by one evil man, instead of many. It was a thought worth thinking about, anyway. In the meantime the detectives would be safe in the dungeon, I told them. No one could get them there. They said that wasn’t the point. They weren’t worried about someone getting them. They were… but I didn’t hear any more, because I had already slammed the dungeon door.
They made several attempts to escape from my clutches after that, using the only materials available to them, but I stopped that by spraying ant poison around the outside of the dungeon. That ant robot of theirs was stupid anyway.
I don’t believe I’ve ever had a better time than I had over the next couple of weeks.
I roamed the island wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Magellan’s helmet, smoking a big cigar, with a can of imported beer in one hand and an unresponsive mechanical babe on the other.
There were plenty of things to do to keep yourself occupied. You could swim in the pool, make the invisible shield go up and down, play tennis with Joan of Arc, make an example of somebody, anything. And I did them all.
All good things must come to an end, they say, because that’s the way this crappy world of ours works. But I didn’t expect my good thing to end so soon. All of a sudden things started to go wrong all over the island: dungeon leaks, laser cannons going dead and needing to be recharged, parapet trouble, and so on. The usual homeowner problems, but on a much grander scale. I found I was spending all day, every day, making repairs and trying to get parapet repairmen and moat cleaners from the mainland to show up when they said they were going to.
Then one day I had to shut down the island’s cloaking device because it had started malfunctioning and I couldn’t find my way to the bathroom or see myself in the mirror anymore. I didn’t worry too much about it being off, because there was no real need for it right now anyway. It’s not like I was hiding from anybody. It’s not like there was anybody after me. It’s not like that.
That night I was having dinner with some of my mechanical babes and the real Woodrow Wilson. Overkill had brought him forward in time to make slipshod treaties with his enemies that would look good on paper and then turn out to be crap, and he hadn’t popped back to his own time period yet.
He was telling me how he did too keep us out of war, he kept us out of war for months, and I was telling him to shut-up and eat, when suddenly there was an earsplitting crash and glass shattered onto the table from the skylight. The glass was followed by a drunken man in a shabby tuxedo. The man groaned for a moment, then struggled into a crouching position in the chili and leveled a Luger at me.
“Hands up, Overkill,” said the world famous British Secret Service Agent Fred Foster.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I had heard of Fred Foster, of course. Everyone had. He was Britain’s most famous and successful “double-oh” spy. So famous he wasn’t a very good spy anymore. It’s almost impossible to sneak up on an enemy when you’re surrounded by screaming fans and writers waving spec scripts. Try it.
And he wasn’t much use as a spy anymore anyway, even without the fame. The fabulous Cold War lifestyle he had led all those years had finally caught up with him. His liver was shot – one drink and he would completely lose control of his motor functions – and he couldn’t lay in wait successfully anymore because of his smoker’s cough, (“I think the coughing is coming from behind this bush, Alexei”). And his eyesight was starting to fail him, but he was too vain to wear the giant clown glasses his eyes required.
Foreign agents were well aware of all these faults, of course. They no longer feared Foster. To them, he was just a joke. Eventually even the British Secret Service became aware of his physical problems, when they captured some enemy jokebooks.
He was sent to rehab several times, but it never did any good. He just came back drunker and a bigger and funnier joke than before. And every time he was sent out on an assignment, the British Empire got smaller.
Finally his license to kill was suspended, and he stopped getting the plum assignments. To his mortification, he watched younger agents with better functioning livers and bladders getting all the glamorous assignments, while he was reduced to opening the door of MI5 for them as they bowled off on their next action-filled adventure.
I found out later that he had begged as a personal favor from his old friend Z, who ran the Secret Service now that the rest of the alphabet was dead, to give him one last chance and let him handle the Overkill matter. That favor had been reluctantly granted, and now here he was standing in my chili.
“I’m not Overkill,” I said.
“Maybe not, but my supervisor won’t know the difference. Hands in the air.”
I was aware of his current reputation. I held my arms straight out from my sides like I was welcoming my wandering boy home. “You mean like this?”
“No,” he said, raising his hands high in the air, “like this.”
He overbala
nced badly and fell backwards onto the table where he instantly fell asleep in the forks. I snapped my fingers and my guards picked him up and carried him away.
I didn’t have him thrown in the dungeon. I’d seen enough Fred Foster Secret Agent movies to know that a super villain, which is what I was now, I guess, was supposed to treat enemy agents like honored guests. Give them a fancy room, let them hobnob with your beautiful women, and get a good long look at all your defenses and secret plans. I didn’t know why this was so - it made more sense to just kill them, or at least lock them up - but this was the way it was supposed to be done, so I did it that way. For awhile, anyway.
As a house guest, Foster left a lot to be desired. I’d have him for dinner to exchange witticisms and clever barbs, for example, and he’d either pass out mid-barb, or suddenly leap at me, knocking me and my babes over, and then start pounding on us with his fists.
He kept trying to get me to tell him my plan so he could foil it and get his reputation back. I kept telling him I didn’t have a plan, and didn’t care about his stupid reputation anyway, but that just seemed to make him surly. He’d drink some more and tell me I was insane, but I usually couldn’t understand most of what he was saying because his mouth was so far down in his drink. I’d mostly just hear a bunch of bubbles.
His presence in the fortress got more annoying every day. He kept opening, and answering, all my mail before I could get to it, stealing diagrams of my defenses that I needed to show to repairmen, and keeping me awake half the night, every night, telling me I was nuts. He was the one who was nuts, if you ask me.
I could have killed him, I suppose, but he seemed so pathetic it didn’t seem sporting. Plus, he might be an insurance policy I could cash in later. And, I almost forgot, killing is wrong.
But after he had jauntily tossed himself onto my hat rack for the twentieth time, and I had to once again stop what I was doing to get him down, I decided I’d had enough of the guy. I locked him up in the dungeon with the detectives. It wasn’t the way you were supposed to treat secret agents, I knew I would probably get letters about it, but at that point I just didn’t care.
Even locked in a dungeon he found ways to cause me trouble. He insulted one of my guards so much the guard quit and went to work for some other maniac. And after I had finally gotten the detectives calmed down into a nice sullen silence by putting a television in there, Foster got them all riled up again by changing the channels too much. After a couple of near riots, which caused $150 worth of damage to my dungeon door, I finally had them all chained up. And I put double chains on Foster.
Well I don’t know how you can fall out of a dungeon, but I guess if you’re drunk enough you can do it. Foster did it. Suddenly he was just out, staggering across the island, and into the water. He struggled his way out of the water and flew in a hang-glider across the island and into the water on the other side. Then he went by again, this time on the hood of a runaway Aston Martin. Finally he began bouncing grimly towards the fortress on a pogo stick. I don’t know where these secret agents get all their gadgets from at a moment’s notice. If I wanted to fly around in a hang-glider or bounce on a pogo stick at somebody, I’d have to go downtown and buy those things, then wait for them to be delivered to my home. Secret agents just suddenly have them. How do you beat somebody like that?
Before my guards could get to Foster he had bounced into the island’s power station. A few moments later he re-emerged and started speaking into a microphone he had apparently secreted away in a false back to his head. I didn’t like this. I didn’t know who he was talking to, but he seemed a little too sober all of a sudden.
My alert guards rushed up and grabbed him, tearing off the back of his head and dashing it to the ground. I signaled them to bring him to me.
“Too bad, Overkill,” he smirked as he was thrown down in front of me. I was surprised to note that, for the first time since I had met him, he wasn’t slurring his words. He had obviously dried out partially in the dungeon. “Your operation is finished.”
“I’m still not Overkill,” I reminded him. “And what do you mean my operation is finished?”
As if in answer, the lights suddenly went out all over the island.
“I’ve killed your island, Overkill. It’s dead. Your power plant, your cloaking device, and your laser cannons. They’re all out of commission. And I’ve jammed your invisible shield so it can’t be closed. There’ll be a government fleet here in a few minutes, and they’ll be able to walk right in with nothing to stop them. When they do, I’ll be handing you over to them personally.”
He pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pocket and snapped it open. It quickly transformed into a miniature machine gun. He had it pointed at himself instead of me, but it was still a dangerous situation. Guns can be turned around. I had to think fast.
“Have a drink?” I asked.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Once he had accepted the first martini, it didn’t take long to get Foster successfully re-inebriated and safely locked back up in the dungeon. I put a half dozen chains on him this time, as well as a granite slab and a small guard. Then I took a moment to consider my situation. It didn’t look good.
If I had really been Overkill, I probably wouldn’t have been worried about a government attack. I’m sure a real super villain would have known exactly what to do - who to kill, what cities to target for annihilation, what threats to yell over a bullhorn, and so on. I didn’t know any of that stuff. So I figured I’d better pack.
Before I could get the first Rembrandt smooshed down into a suitcase, the fortress began to shake and plaster started falling from the ceiling. I ran to the nearest window and looked out. The island was being pounded from all sides by federal gunboats and police cruisers. They were really socking it to me. Even worse, almost every shot was blowing up something I had just gotten repaired at great expense. It would take weeks to get repairmen out here to fix them again. I found myself muttering kill maim frighten destroy under my breath.
I used a signaling device to contact the fleet and let them know that there was no need for all the fireworks. I told them I wasn’t Overkill, and anyway I was quitting. They responded that I certainly was quitting. “Quitting to prison.” I signaled back that they should get some new writers.
The shelling increased. I kept signaling frantically and with growing incoherence, suggesting a truce, a peace conference, an armistice, every euphemism for surrender I could think of. I even, in my desperation, advanced the idea that maybe if the U.S. government’s theme song were combined with mine into one beautiful song, then maybe we could be friends. Or maybe if I married the government’s daughter, it would unite the two warring sides forever more. They ignored these signals, and by this point I wasn’t paying much attention to them either. When I noticed that I was signaling that the attacking ships should go screw themselves, I stopped signaling entirely. Those kinds of signals don’t solve anything. They just make things worse.
Since they didn’t want to talk, and there was nowhere for me to run, it looked like I was going to have to fight. Fortunately, I had thousands of Unholy Army men at my disposal.
After a brief strategy conference with Napoleon #47 and U.S. Grant #6, I ordered my fighting forces out into battle, for the glory of good old Unhappy Island, or whatever the hell it was called.
This is when I found out that I was supposed to be regularly maintaining my troops. The ones that ran on batteries shuffled out of the fortress to do battle, rather than charge. And many of them just stood there and made clicking sounds. Some of the steam powered ones had clogged pipes and blew up when they were switched on. A great many of the wind-up ones had misplaced their keys, and lied to me about it, saying they had never been issued keys. And I lost track of how many vital rubber bands had snapped through neglect.
I could see why Overkill had wanted to get those advanced fighters from the future. They were self-maintaining, and… you might think me dense, but it wasn’t until I was thinkin
g about this that I remembered The Time Nozzle, and the future fighters waiting to be transported to the island.
I raced into the laboratory where The Time Nozzle was located and turned it on. Overkill had told me that the machine was already set to receive a half million fully armed fighters as soon as he agreed to the health and pension benefits the fighters were demanding, so I looked around for an “I agree” button on the console. This was no time for economy. I’d screw them out of their pensions later. I couldn’t find a button that said “I agree,” so I just started hitting every button in sight that had an agreeable look to it.
Nothing happened. Fortunately, I know how to handle balky machines. First you say “Aw, come on!” then you bang on the controls, then you throw small objects at the machine, then you give it a good swift kick in the slats. Then the machine is repaired.
I had to hurry though. The government troops had landed and were making rapid progress across my lawn. So I banged on the controls furiously, then started throwing things into The Time Nozzle to see if that would get things moving. I threw coffee mugs, staplers, ashtrays, and some books from Overkill’s collection of first editions: “A Clockwork Orange,” Orwell’s “1984,” and “The Life of Lincoln.” They were all pretty valuable, I guess, but I didn’t have time to count the cost. I needed to get that machine going. Unfortunately, nothing happened.
I heard the sounds of battle move inside the fortress itself, past my scandalized butler, and up the stairs. Now I really didn’t have much time.
I kicked at the entrance to The Time Nozzle, but that didn’t do anything. So I raced into its spirally interior. There didn’t seem to be any machinery I could kick in there, but those stripes looked like they might be the problem, so I started fiercely kicking them.
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