Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  “Are you going to kick me out?”

  “Wh-what?”

  I’d surprised her. “Is this an ultimatum?”

  She threw up her hands. “Fucking—no! I just don’t like it and wish you would stop.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it.

  And then I went back to work.

  After that, I saw her less and less. Her contract ended and she picked up more work from the Temp Agency, something that required longer hours; she didn’t tell me what. As much as she tried to be hospitable—and when she was home we both tried to enjoy each other’s company—it was clear she found what I was doing with the Injury Report deeply uncomfortable. She stayed out later and later more often, and sometimes now didn’t come home at all. I missed her badly, and also felt terrible guilt, like I’d kicked her out of her own place. More than once, I seriously considered heeding her request and shutting the whole thing down. But every time I came close, some hench would wind up in traction or a deli would be liquefied, and not carrying on because I was sad and she was unhappy was an equation I couldn’t balance.

  It was hard to be lonely, however, when I started to attract a different kind of attention. Henches and minor villains I had never heard of before dropped me lines, sending texts from unfamiliar numbers and sliding into my DMs. Being the latest of Supercollider’s casualties gave me a weird kind of notoriety: I’d met the hero and lived. There were lots of professionally bad people who wanted to share in a piece of that, and reached out.

  The pleasure I took in the sudden spike of my villainous social capital was sullied by what a great time the Electric Eel was having. In the wake of the press conference, he’d gone to ground, but even in hiding he was enjoying a huge bump in charisma and notoriety; his public profile had never been higher. I would torture myself sometimes by searching for news stories and social media posts with his name. Every time I found something new, a knot in my stomach tightened.

  Meanwhile, I was running out of money. My cards were long maxed out and I was burning through my savings. The little bits of money that trickled in irregularly from donations and slightly more reliably from Patreon didn’t cover my groceries, the upgraded internet connection, and my not insignificant medical supplies and prescriptions. As flattering as they were, none of the villains were moved enough to hire me. I might be interesting, but I sure had baggage. I tried to apply for municipal Superheroic Insurance—the public purse set up to help anyone whose body or property was destroyed because of “heroic activity”—and was summarily turned down. The paperwork required a copy of the police report from the press conference incident, which I discovered contained no mention I had been injured at all. All of the injuries and fatalities were ascribed to “nefarious activities,” blamed on the bad guys. I was probably “confused by all the noise and violence,” my rejection letter assured me.

  I thought about Supercollider having the gall to appear in my hospital room wearing a stupid fake mustache and reflective highway patrol aviators. I added the rejection onto the pile of wrongs done to me, burned that indignity as fuel. Soon it would be just one more number to run.

  ONE DAY, JUNE and her Meatfriend went to my apartment to bring over the rest of my clothes; they came back with the eviction notice that had been tacked to my door. June didn’t interrupt me while I ugly cried, and then stage-whispered advice and gesticulated wildly at me during the painful and incredibly terse conversation I had with my soon-to-be-former landlord. In the end he threatened to sell all my stuff if it wasn’t cleared out immediately, and I choked on a laugh and told him he’d be doing me a favor. She high-fived me when I was done and graciously refrained from mentioning that I now couldn’t even go back to my shitty apartment and vacate her couch if she wanted me to.

  The next day, a bouquet arrived.

  It was a cheap and thoughtless arrangement, something you might grab at the grocery store, mostly baby’s breath and carnations and a single, anemic rose. But it was delivered by an expensive courier, and the card that accompanied it was of thick, weighty stock.

  June snatched up the card before I could open it, preying on my still-slowed reaction time.

  “I don’t like this.” She pried the thick, velvety envelope open with a talon-like fingernail.

  “It’s probably nothing.” I rubbed one of the rose petals between my fingers until it disintegrated, enjoying the tiny waft of fragrance it released.

  An idea occurred to her that made her visibly relax. “Maybe it’s from that guy. Bustle? Brindle.”

  “Bracken. Oh god.” I had almost managed to suppress the memory of him entirely. I winced in embarrassment, picturing the vomit on his chin and the outraged way he slammed out of Oscar’s car. “Perhaps the last date I will ever have in this life.”

  June opened the envelope and froze. Her hair had fallen in front of her face so I couldn’t see her expression, but her fingers curled around the paper hard and I saw a little tremor in her hands.

  “Dude. What is it?”

  For a moment, she didn’t reply.

  “June.” I said it louder than I meant to, a panicky croak.

  She turned and threw the envelope at me, furious. “How the fuck did he get my address?”

  The card she had begun to pull out of the envelope, now creased from her grip, was embossed with the twin circles of Supercollider’s logo. I swore.

  “He knows you’re here!” Her face was panicked, her lips grayish blue, like she’d just stepped out of a cold pool. “I fucking told you!”

  “Of course he knows I’m here—he’s fucking Supercollider. He probably knows how many pizza rolls I have eaten in the last month.”

  “It means he knows where I live, it means—”

  “It means exactly jack.”

  “What about this? What do these mean?” She snatched the bouquet out of my hands and grabbed the stems hard with both hands, like she was trying to wring its neck.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does the fucking card say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “It’s blank.” I opened it and turned it toward her; there was nothing written inside the fold.

  “Why would he send you fucking flowers?” The accusation overflowed from her voice.

  “This is not my fault.”

  “How is it not?” She stared at me a moment. “Nothing else better come.”

  “The next time we have tea, I’ll ask him not to send any more tokens of affection to the apartment.”

  She dropped the strangled bouquet into my lap, stormed out of the room, and slammed into her bedroom.

  After she left, I sat stunned for a few moments, staring at the smashed flowers and trying to steady my breathing and my hands. When I looked up, I noticed something on the carpet where she had been standing, a small slip of paper. I painfully dragged myself up, using a crutch and the coffee table, and retrieved a business card that had fallen out of Supercollider’s envelope.

  The business card was for Sherman Moving & Storage, a local place with an address in the suburbs. Written in tight, angular letters on the back of the card were the words “Your belongings are in Unit #311” and a jagged initial “S.”

  I felt the strangest twist in my chest. On one hand, this meant Supercollider felt guilty for the swath his casual backhand had cut through my life. On the other, fuck him.

  I lay awake very late that night, wondering how much longer my welcome at June’s would stretch, going through the very short list of other people I could call on if I needed to suddenly leave. And when another unexpected delivery arrived the next day, I was absolutely certain I was going to be homeless. The courier didn’t know what to do with the simmering rage radiating off June while she signed for the package, but when the sender wasn’t another goddamn hero she settled a little.

  A little. “Explain to me,” she said, clearly making a mighty effort to keep her voice calm, “why the Villains’ Union also has my address.”


  The Union was a joke. The loose association of second-tier baddies and ambitious henches thought having meetings, taking minutes, and participating in panel discussions on popular topics of villainy were the best ways to advance their careers; they were generally considered horrifically uncool.

  I held the heavily padded, rectangular package addressed to me from the Union carefully, wondering the same thing she was. A light went on in my head. “What are the odds,” I said slowly, “that this is Greg’s fault.”

  June pressed her lips together, and a little more of her anger toward me evaporated. “High. Fucking high.”

  I tore open the package and found my suspicions were confirmed: inside was a framed certificate, decorated with the garish official Villains’ Union coat of arms and scrawled over with overdone calligraphy. It read, “Congratulations, you have been Supercollided!” and included the time, date, and circumstances of my encounter with the hero. It was an honor bestowed on every villain or hench upon the occasion of their first verifiable encounter with the world’s greatest hero. Sure enough, Greg was listed on the certificate as my union sponsor.

  June called Greg to scream at him for handing out her address while I texted him my heartfelt thanks. The frame came with a little stand, and I proudly set it up on the coffee table by the couch. June took the certificate down and used it as a TV tray for her dinners or a place to rest a coffee mug at every opportunity, and each time I would defiantly replace it. The stupid Villains’ Union logo, with a snake and a bat and a skull, made my lip curl in a smile every time I saw it.

  THINGS BETWEEN US continued to be tense. It was clear she felt endangered by my presence in her house; I was acutely aware that I didn’t have an alternative place to go back to even if I wanted to. I felt precarious, and that anxiety wound itself around my brain and into every one of our interactions. I no longer felt like I had the luxury of a reasonable recovery time. I started to cut back on my painkillers even more drastically to alleviate some of the opiate brain fog, and started to look for new work again in earnest. It was hard to pry my time away from the Injury Report, but I reasoned that I couldn’t continue the work if I didn’t have anywhere to work from.

  Almost exactly two months after the collision, I came across some data entry and content creation work for a fairly run-of-the-mill shadow corporation, which seemed to be a supervillain’s off-site property rather than their everyday operating base. It looked boring and safe, which seemed like the best possible outcome. Instead of running math, I spent a day redoing my résumé and quickly secured an in-person interview. It would mean traveling much farther from June’s than I had since my injury, which made me intensely nervous, but it seemed like my best shot at somehow righting the tipping ship of my life.

  THAT NIGHT, I dreamed about being measured.

  I was little, and standing with my back to a doorframe, as though a parent were about to tell me how much I had grown. But around me, there were towering figures in lab coats, with clipboards and calipers and measuring tape.

  I could hear the squeak of latex gloves close to my ear as one of them wrapped the tape around my head. Another pinched my scalp with the calipers, and goose bumps rose on one side of my body.

  “There should be something here,” one of them said, annoyed, “but I can’t get a reading.”

  “She’s got some of the markers.”

  “Do you think it’s worth further testing?”

  Then my alarm went off, the violence of waking suddenly fixing the dream, like nebulous gel stiffening into an image in a Polaroid. It wasn’t exactly a nightmare, but I was sweaty and limp with relief to find the dream hadn’t been real.

  I gave myself hours to get ready in the morning, beginning the long and laborious process of becoming presentable while June slept. I was almost used to navigating the tub by now, carefully propping my leg up and keeping it out of the water. I stayed in the water until after it cooled, trying to keep myself calm; I was profoundly aware of my physical vulnerability, and traveling across the city on crutches was intensely daunting. Eventually, I heard June starting to bang around in her bedroom, and left the tub and my wallowing behind.

  Dressing for an interview was also suddenly stressful, as I simply could not fit into most of my sharply tailored clothes while still confined to a bulky hip-to-ankle leg brace. Even if I could get them on, maneuvering in those clothes while on crutches would have been doubly impossible. I ended up settling on a much softer outfit than I would have preferred: a long, charcoal-gray sweater dress with a cowl neck, with a single stocking on my good leg and a dainty little sock on the other. It felt like I was walking into a battle without my armor on, and I tried to compensate by channeling all the imposing energy that I could into my eyeliner.

  I balanced in front of a full-length mirror, looking myself over critically, while June bustled behind me, leaving for work.

  “You’ll do fine,” she said, popping in a pair of earrings and then patting herself down for her keys. “They might even have heard of you by now. It’ll help.”

  My throat closed. I unexpectedly found myself fighting tears; that was the nicest thing she’d said to me in weeks. I couldn’t answer for fear of my voice breaking. I nodded, and she left. I shook my head to clear the unfortunate emotion. After a final, critical look at myself—I took a last deep breath and summoned Oscar. Wondering if he’d give me shit for not ringing him for months, I began the slow and painful process of navigating myself down to street level from June’s third-floor walk-up.

  I stepped out onto the cold sidewalk, enjoying the sharp, freezer-burn smell of threatening frost the way only someone who has spent weeks and weeks inside can appreciate. It took a moment too long to register that it wasn’t Oscar’s serviceable car with the rust rings in the rear wheel wells that was waiting for me. Instead, there was a thrumming supercar, the looping, muscular shape of it recalling a predator, muscles coiled tight and ready to strike. The exterior was a strange matte black that appeared to slither like scales, with oddly liquid-looking windows. A woman stood by the back door wearing something that looked like a cross between tactical gear and a tuxedo. She was more muscled and confident than she’d been all those months ago, but I recognized her short blond hair, face, and bearing as those of the driver I’d seen hired through the Temp Agency.

  She was looking at me expectantly, obliterating any confusion I might have had that she was there for someone else.

  I nodded to her. “How can I help you.”

  “Your ride, ma’am,” she said, opening the door for me.

  “I have a ride coming.” The I have a boyfriend of getting into strange cars.

  “Oscar has been informed.”

  That both disturbed and impressed me. She approached, offering me an arm to help me enter the vehicle, which even at rest felt menacing. The escaping warmth of the interior hit me like an exhalation.

  I took her proffered arm. She smiled at me from behind her dark glasses, which were not sunglasses, I saw, but smoked lenses that obscured the details of an internal display. The potential danger of the situation didn’t detract from (and maybe added to?) the flutter in my stomach. She took my crutch from me and together we slowly moved toward the car. “I was going to an interview,” I told her. I wasn’t sure if I was protesting or not.

  “You still are. Just a different one than you expected.” She lowered me into the back seat. As soon as I was settled, legs tucked in and crutches resting at my feet, she shut the door with an authoritative snap.

  I felt a brief surge of panic rise and fall in my chest. I let it come up, held it a moment, and then let it dissipate. In its wake, a strange calmness and resolve came over me. It was entirely possible something awful was about to happen to me, but at least it wasn’t the bleak future I’d been staring down a few moments before. Something was going to happen, which frightened me less and excited me more than I expected. It had to be better than the shambles of my current life. I settled back into the leathe
r seat, which held me almost fondly.

  I touched the wall comm, opening the panel that separated the front seats from the back, as soon as the driver took her position behind the wheel. “I recognize you,” I said. “From the Temp Agency.”

  She chuckled. “Those were dark times.”

  “You been back?”

  “No, thank fuck. I got my contract picked up.”

  “The placement worked out?”

  “Incredibly well.” She steered the car with a sensual, buttery smoothness.

  “I’m Anna.” She probably knew that, but it seemed polite.

  She made eye contact with me in the rearview, and I hoped very hard I wasn’t blushing. “Melinda.” I could see green lights flickering in the periphery of her lenses, some kind of digital readout.

  “Can I ask you a stupid question.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Am I about to die?”

  “Ha! Not stupid. But no, definitely not. You do have an interview; that part is true.”

  I leaned back. Even if she was lying, I decided to enjoy myself and luxuriate in what might be my last ride in a supercar. There was a mobile espresso machine in the back seat, and with a few button presses I was enjoying an entirely passable flat white.

  It was a long drive, clear past the other side of the city, through industrial parks and the edges of several suburbs, and then long minutes of emptiness, just highways and frost-burned fields. Finally, we came to the edge of a huge, walled compound and stopped at a pair of gates. A light passed over the exterior of the car, scanning it, and Melinda tapped something on the center console. The gates rose like a portcullis.

  We coasted slowly down a few of the interior roads, not unlike driving through a university campus, before coming to a stop in front of a huge, glossy steel-and-glass low-rise building. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and the roundabout where the car came to a stop was flooded with chilly white light. Along the walkways between the buildings of the compound, as well as the sidewalks and in the small green spaces all around us, people hurried to get back indoors; it was unusually cold, and their breath was visible as they walked and chatted.