Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  “Experiments?”

  “We start exposing the heroes to stressors.”

  “What kinds of stresses do you have in mind?”

  “Like I said, we fuck with them. Fighting them head-on, we lose more often than not. But if we go at them sideways . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “We make their private and public lives as miserable as we can. Make them late; make things go wrong around them; ruin their dry cleaning and dinners and marriages. Fuck with their social media profiles and public perception.”

  Molly scanned my face. “I see.” They kept their voice even, but they were deeply interested.

  “It’s not entirely out of pure spite,” I clarified, picking the chipped polish off my nails.

  “I mean, I appreciate spite.”

  “Oh, I do too. But I think we can make it actively strategic. People whose lives are falling apart have a harder time being heroic. So we find the cracks and we widen them. We find the stressors that make them as ineffective as possible. And this further gives us opportunities to expose them behaving terribly in ways that are less socially acceptable than pulverizing the Meat. We give them every opportunity to be small and petty and mean.”

  “And when they do fuck up and punch an old lady or kick a kitten?”

  “We do everything in our considerable power to make sure as many people know about it as possible.”

  “That’s terribly unpleasant.” They smiled.

  I felt myself grinning. “Well, we are villains, after all.”

  Molly helped me assemble an actual proposal. If I’m honest I didn’t expect it to go anywhere, but inside of a week Leviathan had reviewed and signed off on it, and suddenly things were moving very quickly. I was told to put a team together, and in a bit of a panic, I reached out to just about everyone I’d met so far who’d been helpful or competent in my presence. I hired Javier Khan, who had been introduced to me as “the Excel Pervert,” to build me beautiful spreadsheets to handle and direct the flow of data. Nour had been doing some front-facing administrative work, but her extraordinary charm and poise made me bring her on for social engineering. Darla started out in Technology, but after they repeatedly helped me hack into systems we couldn’t cheat or charm our way into, I poached them to join I&I full-time. Within reason, we could access Leviathan’s network of undercover agents and plants for inside jobs.

  Within a few weeks, I’d carved out an extremely demanding and deeply satisfying position utterly ruining as many heroic days as humanly possible. It was immediately the best job I’d ever had.

  I CONTINUED TO use an encrypted service to message June every day. At first, there was only silence in response, which I suppose I deserved. I endured it stoically, knowing if she really didn’t want me to message her at all, she’d tell me directly to fuck off. Instead, she kept me on read for weeks. I started to look at the little check that told me she saw my messages as its own kind of reply; I knew when she was reading along and present by how quickly the read receipts came through.

  Eventually, she couldn’t help herself. I sent her all the juiciest tidbits from the archives and that was the bait that got her.

  Of the original Four Corners—Doc Proton, Neutrino, Siege Engine, and Cold Snap—which one was closeted?

  I expected to wait a moment for dramatic effect and then tell her, but after the read receipt, the three small dots that meant she was composing made my heart all but leap into my throat, and reminded me again just how much I missed her.

  Doc

  I almost dropped my phone; my hands were suddenly shaking and clumsy.

  No everyone knows he’d fuck anything

  Neutrino then

  Siege Engine

  Fuck you no way

  I swear. It was his big secret. He and some cop had this long term thing even

  A COP? You better not be full of shit

  After that, we cautiously, tentatively started making fun of each other at regular intervals again. I’d send her selfies of my eye bags or photos of the livid scars on my leg where the pins had gone in. She’d tell me how bad I looked and that I’d have to leave one hip-high sock on if I ever wanted to get laid again. She’d tell me all about the terrible Meat she was still not dating and I’d criticize her choices until she threatened to stop talking to me. Then I’d back off, not wanting to risk she might be serious. But within an hour or a day, she’d be sending me screenshots of her terrible work Slack conversations and things seemed secure again.

  Our relationship wasn’t the only thing that continued to heal. Soon, I was getting around with only a cane, as my first doctor had promised. Even if I became tired quicker and the movement itself was more painful at first, the freedom it afforded me gave me a massive morale boost. I started to own my significant limp; I started to feel at home in my body again.

  A thing I quickly learned about carrying a cane, regardless of how necessary it was, was that it immediately tripled my theatricality. Every gesture gained additional layers of affectation. Every morning, walking into my team’s office felt like the beginning of a performance.

  “What have we got today?” I beamed at the rest of my team, balancing on my cane.

  Nour put her headset on mute, wished me a quick good morning, and went back to the animated conversation she was in the midst of having; it sounded like she was posing as a customer service rep for a charter flight company.

  Jav, surrounded by external monitors, raised his hand in greeting. It was all of him I could see, but I could hear him fine. “Right now, we’re in the process of making Pneumatic and Typhoid’s charter flights to Austin as uncomfortable as possible.”

  Nour’s ability to transform into any imaginable corporation’s customer service representative was extraordinary. Hostile or helpful, dull as a spoon or scalpel sharp, she could tell someone exactly what they wanted to hear or serve as a human roadblock. There was also a quality about her that people trusted, something in her voice that assured you everything was going to be okay. She was an invaluable weapon. I heard an apologetic note creep into her voice as she relayed over the phone the bad news that there were going to be delays. So many delays.

  A little warmth bloomed in my shriveled apple core of a heart. “Great. What else?”

  “Eclipse Computing has a product announcement next week, so we’re DDOSing a bunch of their clients.” The COO of Total Eclipse Computing was the alter ego of Absolute Zero, a hero with heat-sucking powers.

  I navigated my way over to Jav, coming to stand behind his shoulder so I could see what he was looking at. “Sounds lovely. On my way over, I heard that there was a media tour today of the new megaprison, Dovecote. It’s just north of the city.”

  “That’s right, the replacement for Kensington supermax.” Jav pulled up another spreadsheet, opened some news sites, and Googled a press release on three separate screens. “Yep, that’s starting in a couple of hours: ‘Press is invited to an in-depth, hands-on tour of the facility, including some special containment procedures.’”

  “Excellent.”

  Nour hung up after ensuring that the suspected heroes’ luggage would be misplaced by the airline they’d chartered and that they’d be stranded for several hours between flights. Her lovely face beaming, she scooted her rolling chair over to us. “I’m pretty sure I heard about this; one of the containment rooms they’re going to demo is a flash-freezer that supposedly doesn’t damage flesh.” She was visibly excited.

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “Does it work?”

  “Seems to.”

  “But . . .”

  “There are some reports that thawing out can be slow, painful, and cause temporary incontinence. But it’s not like they’re going to be thawing prisoners very often.”

  “Perfect. Who do we know is going to be there?”

  Jav started digging; I let him work. Nour had a steaming cup of something wonderfully fragrant in her hands.

  “What is that? It smells lovely.”

  “
Oh, the break room has chai now.”

  “I am so getting one of those in a minute.”

  Jav made a trilling noise of excitement; he’d hit on something. “This journalist here, who’s tweeting about attending?” He pulled up a woman’s profile. “She’s almost certainly Tardigrade.”

  I frowned. “That’s a new one.”

  “She used to be Glassblower’s kick: Blast Furnace.”

  A light went on. “Oh right—I know her. They broke up, it went thermonuclear.”

  “Sure did. She just struck out on her own maybe six months ago, but the name is newer than that. It has to do with her ability to withstand extreme circumstances and endure inhuman levels of punishment, or something like that. She’s pretty much unkillable.”

  I nodded, my earrings bobbing. They were shaped like tiny axes, dripping with enamel blood. “This is the one.”

  “What’s happening, terrible people?” Darla was standing in the doorway, carrying a tablet and a stack of papers, fresh from their meeting.

  “I think we’re going to flash-freeze Glassblower’s former sidekick.” I allowed myself to sound exactly as pleased as I felt.

  Jav shook his head. “This is some Demolition Man shit.” It wasn’t a criticism.

  “That’s why you’re in charge, Anna,” Darla said

  I smiled at the compliment. “Darla, see if you can get Tardigrade registered as an inmate. I think we have a tissue sample and fingerprints on file. It’s older information from her Glassblower days, but should work fine. Jav, pull up everything we have on her.”

  “You got it,” Jav said. Darla put two fingers to their temple in salute, added the papers in their hands to the hellscape of their desk, and started working.

  “It’s important to love what you do,” Nour said sweetly.

  After a quick trip to the break room to grab my own cup of chai—which was even spicier and more delicious than I expected—I settled back at my desk, got my own suite of external monitors lit up, and started opening as many live feeds, social media platforms, and news sites that were engaging with the Dovecote opening as I could find. Nour helped me monitor social, and we fired links back and forth.

  A few hours later, the team was clustered behind me, watching gleefully as the Dovecote media tour got underway. What began with a cool, sober air of penal efficiency was about to quickly descend into utter chaos. We were all a bit breathless when the media were invited to walk through the flash-freezer to demonstrate how it was completely safe to anyone who wasn’t a registered inmate of the facility; when the freezer suddenly sprang to life and locked down around Tardigrade, we cheered like it was a touchdown.

  The livestream kept rolling as security was trying to hustle all the media out of the room and get the obvious cameras shut off. A cluster of people in lab coats scurried around the flash-freezer in a state of utter panic, furiously flipping through notes and fiddling with controls. One of the researchers even kicked it.

  Just before whatever cell phone that was running the livestream was finally knocked off the tripod, I caught a glimpse of the woman trapped in the containment field. I managed to grab a screenshot.

  “That’s going in the next progress report, isn’t it.” I could hear the grin in Darla’s voice.

  I nodded. “Spectacular work, everyone.”

  “Hey, isn’t Tardigrade-née–Blast Furnace supposed to be doing a meet-and-greet at a children’s hospital tomorrow?” Nour asked cheerfully.

  “It will be a chilly reception,” Jav said.

  “I wonder if she’ll be thawed by then,” Darla mused aloud.

  “I wonder how temporary the incontinence is,” Nour said pleasantly, and Jav gave a weird, hiccuping laugh.

  I felt an extraordinary surge of pride for my team; they’d kicked ass this morning. All three of them were looking back at me, expectant and eager. “All right, who else can we freeze or make shit their pants before lunch?”

  THE PROBLEM WITH ruining a hero’s day is that often we did it too well. Because we were in the business of public humiliation, our activities tended to rival the more typically aggro, smash-and-grab enforcement missions for media coverage. Sidekicks and henches duking it out was still news, of course, but Tardigrade being turned into a popsicle went viral. We’d given her a shockingly unpleasant experience and embarrassed the entire security team for a supermax prison, which would have been a success of its own, but there was something about her particular experience that people really latched on to. It got passed around with the kind of despicable glee that we couldn’t have predicted or bought, and the media saturation was beyond anything we could have hoped for.

  As spectacular as it was to watch one of our enemies become a meme, we never could have anticipated Glassblower’s reaction to it all. We didn’t think he’d be thrilled that his former partner and recent ex had broken the internet by being turned into an ice cube (though, hell, she thawed in record time and had only a relatively mild case of uncontrollable diarrhea as a result). So we thought he might release a public statement condemning whatever negligence or malice caused the events (Jav joked at one point we should change the name of our department to Negligence or Malice, considering how often our activities were thus attributed in the media).

  We couldn’t have imagined that he’d release a rambling, almost incoherent video swearing vengeance on whoever had wronged his beloved. Jav happened to be working late, saw the video moments after it was posted, and, thinking quickly, saved a copy. When it was taken down in the morning by Glassblower or one of his teammates or handlers, we had a copy we could keep in circulation, reposting and releasing it whenever another was taken down, making sure the video was always hosted somewhere.

  We could never have dreamed that our luck would hold, but it did. Over the next few days he would keep a vigil outside Tardigrade’s hospital room, despite her adamant refusal to see him. We paid more than one orderly to capture regular cell phone footage of him lurking about. He spoke to the media often and at length, despite his team’s obvious disapproval (and occasional horror), demanding that anyone with knowledge of what had happened to Tardigrade tell him all they knew or “face his wrath.”

  It was clear he was on the brink of something. If his team, or their civilian handlers, truly intervened, it might be staved off. They might talk him down, he might come to his senses, and his mildly weird behavior would recede as the news cycle moved on.

  But we weren’t about to let that happen.

  “That is a man,” I said to the team, “who is about to have a meltdown. What we need to do is make sure that it happens, and that the incident is as spectacular and public as possible.” We were all watching the video for the eight hundredth time; I was eating the last third of a container of strawberry ice cream to cleanse my palate after too many cheeseballs.

  “What’s the first step?” Nour asked.

  I licked the spoon, considering. “We need to know what happened between them, because it’s clearly more than the usual strain between a hero and a kick.”

  “We know they fucked,” Jav said.

  “Yeah, but we need terrible details. We need timelines. We need receipts. Then the path to ruin will become clear.”

  We dug in.

  The heroes had done a pretty piss-poor job of covering their tracks, to be honest. It would have been adequate for anyone who was willfully turning a blind eye to the situation, like their teammates, or law enforcement, or any of their more obtuse associates and handlers. But anyone who decided to go looking, like we did, would have been able to string together the dinner reservations under badly chosen assumed names and hotel bookings in the city where they both maintained apartments, to figure things out.

  They had gotten together while Glassblower was still trying to work things out with his now ex-wife (good for her; Debra seemed like a nice lady who had no time for all of this bullshit), a couple of years earlier when Tardigrade was still Blast Furnace and very much his sidekick. They got into the habit
of subterfuge and never really shook it. Even after Glassblower’s marriage definitively ended, they kept sneaking around out of habit. (Or maybe they got off on it? I’m not here to kink-shame.)

  Eventually, it was the former Blast Furnace who called it quits. She made a bid to become a full member of their middle-tier superhero team and Glassblower actually blocked her, pulling the standard “you aren’t ready” reticent-mentor bullshit. What it was really about was that things had hit the rocks; he wanted to get more serious, and public, about their relationship and she had turned him down. He tried to put her in her place, and she not only left the team to strike out on her own but changed her name, distancing herself from him even further.

  What began to emerge as we followed the pattern of their relationship, gleaned from hastily assembled press releases about her departure and some screenshots from Glassblower’s more erratic social media posts, was that he took the break very, very badly. His teammates were struggling, and increasingly failing, to cover up his behavior.

  It didn’t take a lot of digging before the team was once again clustered around a monitor, this time Nour’s, while we watched the surveillance footage she’d found of an incident at Prime Tower. The terribly named high-rise held the offices of more than one superhero team, including the Alliance of Justice, of which Glassblower was still a member and Tardigrade had left.

  Apparently, about a month earlier, she’d teamed up with her old associates to help foil the perfectly nice armored car robbery Escape Velocity was trying to pull off, and the team had called a meeting to see if they should try and invite her back to work under the Alliance banner again. Glassblower decided to take the high road, by which I mean show up to the meeting stinking drunk and cause such a scene that his teammates escorted him from the building. A security camera captured footage of the disgraced hero sobbing in the lobby while his former teammate—and, by all reports, best friend—Lambda Lad stood by helplessly.

  “This is better than HBO,” I said, passing around some leftover Valentine’s Day candy I had stored in my desk.

  “Oh, this isn’t even the best part,” Nour said. She queued up a second security video, this time from outside the fetish club Oil & Leather.