Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  “I was in town, as luck would have it. News of your depravity reached me in time.” Supercollider sounded profoundly disgusted. I kept backing up slowly, letting the two of them talk it out, hoping to slink to safer ground.

  “Surrender,” Supercollider demanded.

  I looked behind me to make sure my way was clear. The two Meat who had been guarding the door were utterly stunned, frozen in place. This was well above their pay grade. Accelerator was keeping an eye on them, darting back and forth like a barracuda in front of Jeremy, unable to remain still.

  There was a hum over by the shattered window and, almost lazily, Quantum Entanglement stepped through. She hovered just a couple of inches off the ground for a moment then let her boots sink into the high-pile carpet, crunching delicately on the glass. She strode into the room like a windstorm, her bleached-white hair swirling around her. Like Supercollider, I’d never seen her in person and, in shock, I seemed to have time to stare. The tattoos on her lips and chin were beautiful, complex and interlocking shapes that defined her already striking face.

  I expected the Electric Eel to freeze and panic, like the rest of us. Some part of me was waiting for him to hand over the Mood Ring and put his hands on his head, to kneel. E looked down at the device in his hands for a moment, then his lip curled sharply. The air around me seemed to crackle and I could feel the hair on my head writhe, my skirt clinging to my legs with static; he had activated his shock gauntlets.

  He actually intended to fight.

  A blue arc of electricity shot out of E’s hands. It wasn’t especially powerful, but it was bright and loud, and that startled the hero. For all his strength and durability, Supercollider’s reaction time and mental capacity were still entirely human. He blinked and took a step back, instinctively tucking Jeremy a little more fully behind him to protect the boy. That gave E the room he needed . . . and the villain bolted.

  He ran past me, and I saw him grinning with a kind of unbridled, ecstatic fury. It dawned on me he was enjoying this, that drawing the attention of a hero—of a real hero—was his greatest accomplishment as a villain so far.

  “Cover!” As soon as the Electric Eel shrieked, the Meat seemed to come to life. The two by the door pulled out guns. Deeper in the room, one of the three survivors, the one holding the bag the cleaver had been in, pulled out something strange and circular, like a thick saw blade. The weapon spat out a gout of red, wet light in a messy arc, like a spray of lava. The three heroes darted and rolled to get out of the way as the light cut a swath through the room, eating aggressively into the floor. One of the pair from R&D, the giggly woman with red hair from the car, didn’t get out of the way in time when it splashed near her. I saw a chunk of her fall away from the rest, an arm and a flash of white rib, accompanied by the smell of burning flesh, and she collapsed.

  Supercollider used his invulnerable body to shield Jeremy from the spray, keeping the boy carefully behind him. With the hero occupied for a few precious seconds, the Electric Eel managed to make it to the door. He cackled as he left, sprinting down the hallway toward his supercar and escape. Accelerator tried to intercept him, but the spray from the lava gun was too unpredictable and he had to dive behind Supercollider to avoid being cauterized. While he was incredibly fast, the sidekick was almost as fragile as an ordinary person.

  With E gone, all of the henches were left alone with the heroes. Quantum Entanglement made her way over to Supercollider and the pair exchanged a couple of hushed words. She threw up a force field around her and Jeremy, scooping the kid away from her partner. She lifted Jeremy easily, and the traumatized kid wrapped his arms and legs around her as if he were a much smaller child. He stuck his thumb in his mouth.

  Supercollider nodded to her and she levitated herself and the kid out through the broken window and toward safety. I could hear sirens below; in a moment he’d be safely in the hands of some EMTs. The rest of us, however, were trapped with Supercollider and some maniac with a lava gun. The hero’s face was a blank, stern mask. I sank to the floor, trying to become invisible.

  Supercollider began to slog through the spray of liquid heat still being poured onto him. It couldn’t damage him, but it made him grimace as he fought forward. It was slow going and seemed to sting. The carpet and the soles of Supercollider’s boots were melting together, each step a stretch of blackened rubber. The weapon began firing more erratically as he approached, running out of power or beginning to malfunction. The red light sprayed out in a thinning spatter pattern, like water from a broken nozzle. A bit splashed dangerously close to me and I scrambled up, trying to put more distance between my body and the furiously hot, rapidly disintegrating floor.

  The Meat shifted his aim, sending the staccato spray toward Accelerator, thinking perhaps he’d have better luck doing harm to the sidekick, who had been using his speed to dart ever closer. Supercollider took the opportunity to rush the Meat, and unluckily, trying to keep myself from being burned to a crisp, I had stumbled into the hero’s way.

  He absently moved me aside, out of his path, as though I were a piece of furniture. He might not have been trying to injure me, but it was like a glancing blow from a transport truck. His flesh seemed impossibly hard, the way jumping from a great height into water is the same as hitting a concrete wall once you reach a certain velocity. I felt my body buckle and give.

  I was briefly airborne and landed badly. I sat, stupidly, in the middle of the floor where I’d fallen, legs splayed out, in shock.

  The heat weapon sputtered out entirely. The Meat holding it threw the useless thing at Supercollider, who grimaced as it bounced off the side of his face. The Meat threw a punch and Supercollider caught his hand; he screamed as his fist was crushed. No longer worried about getting sprayed with liquid magma, Accelerator began darting around the room, disarming the other Meat. Supercollider followed behind—still holding the Meat by his jelly hand, dragging him along—parting them from their consciousness. Each of them fell bonelessly, in terrible limp heaps. Often the arrangement of their necks and limbs seemed impossible. He absently punched the Meat he held one last time, then dropped him in the pile. From my angle, I couldn’t tell if his face was swollen or caved in.

  The camera crew was huddled in one corner. The man who had been working with the laptops was sobbing in long, keening gasps; the woman was silent. The camera operator tried to climb out of the broken window, but stopped when he realized how high up we were. He fell back to the floor, his hands bleeding from the glass shards clinging to the frame.

  I tried to stand by myself, but my left leg collapsed under me, refusing to take my weight. It didn’t feel like it belonged to me somehow, ground beef and shattered porcelain wrapped in someone else’s skin. I stared at the offending limb, confused. There was something wrong with the angle, the familiar lines of my body warped and alien. Then, pain finally found purchase in my gut and wrenched down hard. I turned my head and puked, coffee and stomach acid.

  Suddenly the room was filled with lights and noise; I started to lose track of things. The room seemed weirdly still for a moment, then I blinked and it was full of cops, pointing guns at everyone and demanding they put their hands on their heads, or get on the floor. I lifted my arms uselessly, palms open. One officer grabbed me, about to haul me to my feet, and I screamed. He took a closer look at me, and the meat of my leg gone wrong, and flinched away, releasing his grip. A second cop bent down on one knee and asked my name. Instinctively, I asked if I was being detained. She said something in reply, but I was more concerned with the vomit in my hair. I noticed the first cop wiping his hand on his leg in disgust. I asked for a tissue.

  Someone started to cover the bodies with tarps.

  ONCE IT WAS clear that there was no one dangerous left alive or present, the EMTs were allowed in. I screamed as they maneuvered me onto the stretcher, every little jolt of movement hammering into me like a railroad spike. One medic, a young woman with green hair, threatened to tie me down if I kept fighting them; I
hadn’t realized I was resisting. I tried to keep it together. The other EMT, who had a deep tan and incredibly kind eyes, apologized. He found me a vomit bag and a couple of moist wipes for my face.

  The ride in the ambulance was a wailing blur, both muffled and too bright. The friendly medic kept talking to me, trying to keep me awake, but I kept losing little bits of time. The louder the sirens became, and the more forcefully the medic spoke, the easier it became to slip away inside myself. Sliding into shock was almost comfortable, like falling asleep, only cold instead of warm.

  I didn’t lose consciousness, but I did lose track of things for a long while. I knew the shock was wearing off when I got annoyed. No matter how often or how slowly the nurses or doctors explained things to me, it was incredibly difficult to retain and process any of the information. I was so tired of being confused and miserable that my brain kicked into gear again.

  I was asked over and over for my name, if I knew where I was, if I could remember what happened. The nurse had to try three times to get my IV in, but once I was finally hooked up, the steady drip of painkillers went a long way toward helping me communicate. At first I was only able to blurt out the odd word here and there, but as the pain became more manageable I worked my way up to ugly little sentences.

  “Thrown.”

  “He threw me.”

  “The hero threw me.”

  “Supercollider. He threw me across the room.”

  I repeated it over and over, the simple fact of the cause of my injury, and it made almost everyone who heard my answer grimace and blanch, and change the topic. Only one doctor pursed her lips together and nodded, as though unsurprised. She didn’t look much older than I was, with luminous black skin and long, deft hands. She seemed exhausted but projected an air of utter competence that was incredibly comforting.

  “I should have been a doctor,” I drawled. She smiled.

  “Maybe. What you do seems dangerous. Might have a longer life expectancy than working with heroes.”

  “Wrong side, I’m afraid.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t say that too loud or too often.”

  “Fair.”

  “Explains why you’re in such bad shape, anyway. Before I saw your chart, I assumed you were in a car accident.”

  “I feel like I got hit by a semi.”

  “Your femur looks like you did.” She was gravely considering some X-rays.

  “My leg?”

  “Yes. Bones don’t distinguish between trucks and someone who can throw trucks.”

  I was fitted with a brace, a grotesquely painful process that made me squeal, even with the drugs. The imaging confirmed what was already apparent from how badly my leg was twisted: that the break was bad and complex. At first, I wasn’t able to process much more than my body’s steady, dreadful bleating there is something wrong with my leg, like an internal siren.

  Later, I would become intimately, obsessively acquainted with everything that was happening under my rapidly swelling skin. But at that moment, I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just slap a plaster cast on me and call it a day.

  I had broken my wrist once, in middle school. A quick trip to the emergency room and a neon-green cast later, and I was home watching TV and eating a popsicle. I missed a couple of days of school, almost ceremonially; it didn’t even hurt very much, just a deep, weird ache and later the terrible itch of healing. Lying there now, I thought at first they just needed a bigger cast, and soon I’d be home with some Percocet, bingeing on Korean horror films.

  “I want a black cast,” I announced to no one in particular, imagining I could pick the color again, like I had as a child.

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” my doctor said, and I looked up in mild surprise that someone had bothered to answer.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to have surgery in the morning.”

  “On what?”

  “Your leg.” I could hear the struggle for patience in her voice.

  I stared at her, blank and confused. She tried to smile but managed only a weird tightening of her lips.

  Later, a nurse helped clean some of the vomit residue off my neck and chest, and I made a feeble attempt to wipe more of it out of my hair. He also brought a cup of ice chips; I had to keep my stomach empty before going under anesthesia, and I sucked on them fretfully. At least it helped make my sour, acidic mouth feel cleaner even if it couldn’t dispel the unsettled emptiness that had taken the place of hunger.

  That night, my blood pressure began to dip. Things began to become vague again, but without the chilly, numbing edge of shock this time. A couple of doctors conferred at the foot of my bed for a moment. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the hushed urgency of their voices was an almost soothing, slightly distant susurrus.

  My eyelids startled open when one of them tapped my good foot to get my attention. My doctor, who somehow seemed both more exhausted and more in command every time I saw her, told me then I needed a transfusion to stay stable enough for surgery. My femoral artery was intact, so I wasn’t going to bleed out, but the leg had shattered down to the marrow, and blood was pooling in the soft tissues of my leg.

  I tried to distract myself from how deeply distressing the idea of internal bleeding was by focusing on weird details. I wondered whose blood I was getting. It seemed so intimate and alien—and strange that I would never know whose red and white blood cells were shoring me up, keeping my brain wet enough to function.

  What no one tells you about a transfusion is that the blood goes in nearly ice cold. The bag of gore they hook up to you comes straight out of the refrigerator. I expected something hot, arterial, life-affirming, but what hit my body was cold and sluggish. It takes hours to transfuse and I ended up needing two units to keep pace with what I was losing into the sinkhole of my injury. I shook with cold harder than I ever had before in my life, the arm my IV was attached to frozen and livid. I couldn’t get warm, no matter how many thin, terrible blankets the nurses brought me, and I shivered all night.

  The next morning, when the anesthesiologist covered my nose and mouth with a mask and told me to count backward from one hundred, I was simply relieved at the prospect of getting some rest and finally feeling warm.

  While I was unconscious, surgeons inserted a metal rod into the marrow canal of my femur. The bone—harder than concrete, the thickest and sturdiest in the human body—was in pieces. It was not a clean break; later I would learn the phrase “comminuted fracture” to describe the way shards of bone were left floating in the meat of my leg. The doctors scooped the broken pieces back together and packed them in place, hoping they’d mend as well as possible. They made a second incision in my knee, matching the one at my hip, and attached the rod to my bones at both ends with titanium nails.

  Waking from anesthetic isn’t like shaking off sleep. The weight of your unconsciousness has to wear off. It’s a slow swim back to the surface of your mind, a fight against the drag of grogginess. I found myself clinging to uncomfortable little sensations to anchor myself, like the ache from the IV and the terrible cold—which hadn’t, as I’d hoped, gone away—the huge new throb of my leg all the painkillers couldn’t quite wipe out. My skin was clammy and seemed to itch everywhere. In the recovery room, finally being able to fill my mouth with a little cold water was bliss. I made a joke about setting off metal detectors at the airport for the rest of my life. No one laughed.

  By that evening I was sitting up, hands curled around a cup of tea (which, if not hot, was at least blessedly warm). My doctor reappeared, bearing the air of someone who’d just showered and changed their clothes in lieu of sleeping.

  She showed me new X-rays, the rod and nails showing up crisp and vivid against the ghosts of my bones. “It went well,” she said, satisfied. “It was an ugly break, but surgery went as smooth as it could have. You may be able to put some weight on that leg in a few days.”

  That sounded promising. I tried to think of what I knew
about breaking a bone. “So, what, in eight weeks I’ll be back to normal, then?”

  “Six months.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve known a break like this to heal in a little less time, and you are young, but considering the type of spiral fracture this was, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes longer. You’ll be on crutches for most of that, maybe a cane in the last weeks. You’ll get a referral for physio.”

  She might have said more but I lost it. I stared at her earrings, fiercely bright diamond studs, focusing on them to keep from panicking.

  She pressed on through my unresponsiveness and blank, horrified expression. “Do you understand, Anna?”

  “What?”

  “We’re keeping you for a day or two longer, to make sure no complications arise. Then you can go home.”

  I managed to nod, and she left to deliver terrible news to someone else. A wave of loneliness hit me, and for the first time it occurred to me I should try and tell someone where I was.

  This was harder than I expected it to be. My purse had, almost miraculously, made the trip to the emergency room with me, and was stowed in a small locker beside my bed. The bag had been stepped on repeatedly, either by cops or capes, and my phone’s battery was dead and the screen even more badly cracked. I realized that I didn’t even know June’s number off the top of my head, so I couldn’t call her from the terrible, strangely sticky landline in the room.

  My best nurse, whose name was Nathan and whose muscular arms were covered in full-sleeve tattoos of tentacles and warships, found me a charging cable and managed to plug in my wrecked phone. It took me three tries to input my password and I sliced my thumb open on the shattered glass of the screen, but the device still worked. Dozens of texts and chat messages from June arrived in a squawking swarm of notifications.

  Her messages started out affectionately mocking (good luck today, dick), but quickly became concerned (what’s happening over there? holy shit you’re on tv!!). After the footage cut out, there was a string of panicked messages detailing how everyone on-site was told to clean out their desks and leave, that the building might be raided; someone ripped the hard drive out of June’s computer while she was still in her office, putting on her coat. Eventually her messages devolved into her alternating between calling me a bitch, sending poop and explosion emojis, and begging me to call her.