Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  “No,” I choked out. “I’m okay.”

  “Okay, ma’am. I think you can deactivate the weapon,” he said gently.

  “What? Oh.” I realized that Glassblower’s body was still jerking from the effects of electricity, and that I was still pressing the button so hard my thumb ached. I forced my hand off the button, and the taser powered down. The prongs detached and their trailing wires immediately retracted into my cane with a surprisingly kinetic swoop.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” He started to return to the violence in front of him, but before he could I reached for his arm and he turned his attention back.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you do me a favor and just help me sit a moment?” I asked.

  “Oh, of course.” He led me over to the curb and lowered me into a sitting position, surprisingly gently.

  I was too agitated to say thank you.

  While two of the tactical squad quickly assessed Glassblower, and a third radioed in evac for Denial’s injured Meat, he went in search of a bottle of water for me. A few feet away, I could see still-smoking scorch marks in the asphalt from where the hero had ripped up chunks of the street. I put my head between my knees.

  By the time I could lift my head without feeling like I was going to puke or pass out, everyone around me was clearing out in earnest. Two of Denial’s Meat were in bad shape. The man whose feet had been pinned to the sidewalk by melted glass had been freed; one of our cold squad had managed to cool it relatively quickly and then carefully broken him out. He was still badly burned, even through his protective boots, and couldn’t walk unassisted. But it was the man who had taken a chunk of burning asphalt to the face who was far worse off. I had a hard time even looking at him wheezing and gurgling.

  The one uninjured heavy who had come with Denial shook her head as she watched her fallen colleagues get taken away. After handing me the bottle of water, our tactical-squad member walked over to her and punched her on the shoulder gently.

  “Hey,” he said, “you’re too good for them.” He gestured vaguely. Denial and Defense Mechanism had fled as soon as there was an opening, leaving the Meat they’d brought with them to their fate, in typical villain fashion.

  The Meat frowned a bit, taking her abandonment in stride but clearly annoyed. “Nice of you to say.”

  “I mean it. Hey, I recognize you. You train at Pig Iron, right?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Thought so. Power lifting?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Here.” The tactical-squad guy handed the Meat one of our business cards. “We’re hiring.”

  “Thanks.”

  “See you.”

  It was like the meet-cute scene in a rom-com directed by Gareth Evans. Downright heartwarming. I swallowed some lukewarm water and screwed the cap back on with difficulty.

  Melinda came out of the alley then, looking back and forth anxiously as she made her way over to the curb where I was sitting. “We have to go, Anna. The police scanner says we have less than three minutes before law enforcement arrives.”

  I nodded. She helped me stand; my head swam, but I steadied myself quickly, getting my legs and my cane under me.

  Nearby, two of our tactical squad were guarding Glassblower, who was just starting to moan on the pavement. One noticed me standing and turned to face me.

  “What do we do with him?”

  “Leave him and get out of here. Let everyone find him in the middle of this mess.” I gestured to the smoking ruins around us—the glass and torn-up streets. A stop sign had been ripped out of the ground, partially melted, and then thrown, javelin-like; it had speared a mailbox.

  I turned toward the two injured Meat, who were being ineffectively helped by their colleagues. “Them too.”

  “What?” Keller was suddenly behind my shoulder. “We have medical evac on the way.”

  I shook my head. “Have them intercept the ambulances, or collect them from the hospital.”

  “Fuck, why?”

  “I want there to be a chance someone gets a glimpse of what he’s done to them. Press might get here before things are cleaned up, and there are going to be rubberneckers here any second.”

  He looked like he was about to object, but couldn’t quite get his thoughts together. Then, far off in the distance, I heard the unmistakable keening of sirens.

  “Move it, everyone,” Keller snarled, and he and his Meat hustled to their vehicle. The last survivor of Denial’s squad hesitated a moment, then jogged after them and boldly hopped into their transport van. I liked her, I decided.

  Then, Melinda was hustling me away too, helping me into the slip car and then all but running around to the driver’s side. As we took off, weaving and bobbing through the narrow backstreets, making less noise than a bicycle, I couldn’t stop smiling. I turned my cane over in my hands, feeling the weight of it.

  “Did that go the way you wanted?” Melinda asked, once we were a safe distance away and she relaxed her grip on the steering wheel a little.

  “Better, honestly. Though I didn’t like leaving them,” I said, a little awkwardly and too loud.

  “The Meat?”

  “The other henches, yeah.”

  “Like you said, though: we didn’t leave them, evac is going to get them.”

  “Yeah. It just feels like we’re leaving them.” Guilt bored into my chest, as I imagined the long minutes of terror those handful of henches were experiencing in lonely ambulances before our teams could intercept them.

  Minutes I’d experienced myself.

  “I promise, we aren’t. We’re just making Glasshole back there look worse.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Anna, we’re the bad guys.”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re inconsiderate dicks.”

  “We’ll take care of them, I promise. No hench left behind.”

  I was quiet a long moment.

  “Hey,” she said. “We’re better than them. We’re going to be better than all of them. I promise.”

  “I know what it’s like to be hurt and left behind and I don’t want to do that to anyone else.” I leaned back. “But I need everyone to see what the damage these assholes do really looks like.”

  I saw a bit of movement out of my peripheral vision; I think she nodded. I felt a little more subdued, but then I looked down at my cane, remembered the feeling of tasing Glassblower, and a smile crept across my face again. Despite myself, I chuckled.

  “IT WASN’T QUITE a cackle per se,” I admitted a few days later, a glass of white wine in my hand. “But it was definitely an evil laugh.”

  Greg raised a glass of cider. “To Anna’s first evil laugh!”

  I grinned and bashed my daintier glass into his pint too hard. Darla, Nour, Jav, and Melinda all brought their glasses together with ours, clinking and shouting. Our celebration that night was twofold: the Glassblower mission had gone better than any of us could have possibly hoped for, and after a few weeks of prodding, I had managed to get Greg hired on in IT. He was positively beaming, over the moon to be able to set his impossible freelance schedule aside for something a little more reasonable. I hadn’t seen him in months, and he looked exhausted under all his new-job excitement; he was thinner and his complexion was worse. I was looking forward to getting him some decent rest and catered lunches and clearer skin.

  “Anna, you fucking crushed it,” Jav said. My face went red, but I resisted the urge to demur and just thanked him. I knew I had crushed it, and I was proud; I tried to let that sink in.

  “We took,” he continued, “a hero’s carefully guarded secret and made it a full-blown public catastrophe.”

  “He’s never going to work again,” Nour predicted.

  “It’s a disaster,” I agreed, gleeful. Someone had got some video of Glassblower throwing liquid sidewalk directly into that Meat’s eyes; the café owner, whose establishment was utterly trashed, decided to sue instead of appeal to Superheroic Insurance. Glassblower’s team was doing ever
ything they could to distance themselves from him, completely throwing the hero under the bus. Tardigrade released an official statement condemning him, and an even more vicious Instagram story. I was particularly moved by her saying that she’d “spit on him, but he’d enjoy it too much.”

  “So are we going to keep doing this?” Jav was eager.

  I looked at him reassuringly. “We’re just getting started,” I said, and the table laughed.

  Molly turned toward our laughter and grinned; they were dancing like a wet noodle on the dance floor nearby. I’d asked them, and the few techs who had worked on the new upgrades to my cane, to come out so I could buy them a drink in thanks; they were mostly keeping to themselves, but shyly accepted my effusiveness and a round of cocktails.

  We had decided to meet at the on-campus canteen, a kind of trash-polka disaster of a bar that was apparently called Dr. Willicker’s Holistic Wonder Bar but which everyone referred to affectionately as the Hole. My team deserved their well-earned drinks, and I figured our gathering was the best way for Greg to start to get a sense of the interoffice culture and feel like he belonged a little more.

  I watched him carefully; he’d barely stopped smiling all night, perching in his chair like an excitable bird. I hoped I’d made the right decision, bringing him on—I hoped I hadn’t fucked him over. He caught me looking and smiled at me.

  I looked down at my phone in embarrassment, and saw a message from June.

  How’s the fuckery

  Good

  Sure

  Let me have this

  Why should I?

  I squinted at the screen. Something about this tone was off, too sour even for her.

  Are you pissed at me?

  No.

  Dude

  You were on the news again

  The fuck I was

  I know it was you. That Glassblower thing.

  Oh. Of course it was me

  I don’t like seeing you on the fucking news

  Okay this is absurd. “See me on the news” can’t mean “see anything I ever do reported somewhere”

  It just freaks me out when something shows up in my feed and I know it’s you

  Well. I’m sorry. But if I do my job it’s going to keep happening

  You gonna keep doing this job?

  Yeah it’s great

  She was quiet for a moment, and then sent me a selfie. Her hair was up in a wrap and her face was scrunched up, her brow drawn down into an exaggerated you’re-out-of-your-goddamn-mind frown. I never realized how much I had missed June’s face until I saw her and got all emotional about her pursed lips and merciless eyebrows. It made my heart ache.

  If it was possible to blurt via text, I did.

  You should come visit me

  Fuck no. Getting in that place is a nightmare

  I guess the guest pass isn’t the easiest thing

  It’s a fucking suppository

  We have ones you can swallow now

  Oh yeah?

  I’ll make sure they get you the older model

  Asshole

  Exactly

  This is why you have no other friends

  A hand waved in front of my face, seeking my attention, and I looked up, startled.

  “Hey, Anna.” Darla, slurring a little, drew me back to the main conversation happening around me. I put my phone facedown on the table and let June swear at me unanswered. “Do you think Glassblower’s team’ll take him back?”

  I grinned. “No, he’s done. They’re getting as far away from him as possible.”

  Jav nodded. “Way too much shit on his cape now.”

  “Yeah, they’re throwing him to the wolves.”

  “Sad.” Darla’s performative regretful face was hilarious, a stretched parody of a commedia dell’arte mask.

  “Tragic,” Nour agreed faux-mournfully.

  “I wonder what’ll happen to him,” I said, not idly. “Some heroes just can’t survive on their own, and he hasn’t worked solo in a decade and a half.”

  Greg’s face lit up. “Anna, I got a question about teams.”

  “Fire away.”

  “How come we don’t have any?”

  Jav frowned a little and gestured around the room, leaping in before I could answer. “What do you mean? There are, like, people from five teams right here. There’s I&I, R&D—”

  “No, no, I mean, like, supervillains,” Greg explained. “Heroes have teams and, like, group activities and whatever. Why don’t, like, the villains do that?”

  Nour furrowed her brow. “We have teams. There’s the Dark Confederacy and the Untouchables—”

  Greg shook his head. “No, those are shitty ones.”

  I took a long drink, and then finally answered. “You mean, why don’t the real villains have teams?”

  “Yeah, like, why doesn’t Leviathan have a team? It would be so cool!” Greg was beginning to geek out, voice rising and hands gesturing. “Evil buddies to pull missions with and—”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “But he could and—”

  “Villains—real villains—aren’t really big on group work.”

  “It just seems to me like—”

  “Try and imagine it with me. Villains working with their peers. What are you picturing, dinner parties? Lunch and learns? Coworking spaces?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I mean, they need peers. Look at us right now. Maybe villains need that too.”

  “Do you know the last time Leviathan took any time off, or even left the compound?”

  “Uh . . .” Greg floundered.

  I knew I was being intense, but something had gripped me. I leaned forward. “Neither do I. He lives here. He lives this. He wears armor that’s as much dark sorcery as chitin every moment he’s awake. He doesn’t go out. He doesn’t unwind. His idea of relaxation is developing a new heat ray that melts human flesh more efficiently.”

  The table had grown suddenly quiet around me. Everyone’s anxiety made me self-conscious, and made me pump the brakes on my full-on rant.

  “I don’t think you can win if you’re not broken.” I stared into my glass for a moment before looking back up. “That’s why Leviathan’s a real threat. He carries around all the ‘evil’ he needs.” I paused. A thought congealed. “I think . . . I think that’s how you have to be if you’re going to stand a chance.”

  There was a beat of uneasy silence.

  “Christ, Anna, sometimes you sound like one of them,” Jav said.

  I suddenly felt a bit awkward, and almost apologized. But I caught myself, and instead said, “Thank you,” curtly, then flagged down a server to order some wings.

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to get used to the sound of Leviathan’s office. “Sound” wasn’t even accurate, it was more like a reverberation, a kind of noise that was felt more than heard. It came from the uncanny juddering of all of the equipment and devices, visible and otherwise, embedded in every conceivable surface of the space. It made me uncomfortably conscious of my body in an almost abject way. I could feel each tooth anchored in my jaw, wrapped in my gums; was keenly aware of the curve of my sternum and arch of my ribs.

  More than that, being in that space made me more aware of the lingering ache in my leg, though over the months I had healed about as well as I was ever going to. The doctors who worked on Leviathan’s compound were good, and had a lot of experience treating catastrophic injuries caused by vigilantes with superpowers; a simple compound fracture was an easy fix as far as they were concerned. I’d done a great deal of aggressive physiotherapy while I was healing, and kept my muscles from stiffening and atrophying too badly. In time, I could get around without my cane, quite comfortably most days. I limped only if I had to walk a significant distance, it was cold or rainy, or I was very tired. I hardly noticed my injury until those rare moments I was in Leviathan’s office, when suddenly the frailty of my physical body was thrown into sharp relief by all the noise.

  I leaned a little more heavily on my cane for co
mfort; I’d come to enjoy the feeling of security it imparted. After the encounter with Glassblower, I’d had it additionally weaponized, and there was even a tiny circuitry panel with some communication capabilities now. The cane made me feel both more balanced and more protected.

  I had both of my hands resting on top of the handle as Leviathan moved his plated fingers across the touch screen display embedded in his desk, searching through some of my most recent memos and files.

  “Not bad,” he allowed, and I felt a curl of warmth catch in my chest. Praise wasn’t something Leviathan doled out generously. “Not bad at all.”

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  He went quiet for another little stretch of time, and I let my gaze wander around his office. It landed, as it often did, on a mask. It rested in a special nook behind his desk that was custom built for it, lit gently from above and displayed on a matte black mannequin head. The mask itself was also black, though with the slightest bit of gloss, and one edge, near the left eyehole, showed some damage. He’d told me once that it had belonged to his mentor, Entropy; his tone indicated he would tolerate no further questions on the subject, and I respected his unspoken order.

  Finally, he spoke again. “When I told you to make a space for yourself, I expected a great deal, but still you have surprised me.” His eyes were down, darting between documents. “What has it been, nearly a year?”

  “It very soon will be.”

  Leviathan nodded. “And in that time, you have become someone who helps dictate and guide our operations.” He finally looked up. “You have ruined Glassblower. It’s a success I would like to see repeated. Do you feel that you have the resources and cooperation you require to adequately accomplish your directives?”

  “Yes, I do now,” I said. “To be honest, Keller and Enforcement were initially resistant, but after the success of the Glassblower operation, they’ve grown considerably more amiable.”

  Leviathan nodded. “Keller is a military man—slow to change, but also able to recognize competence and strategic initiative.”

  I nodded. To his credit, Keller had come to show me a great deal more grudging respect in recent weeks, willing to give my suggestions and requirements consistently more time, attention, and manpower.