Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  They crowded closer, faces eager. I cracked my knuckles one at a time.

  “Do you guys know about the iguana?”

  Nour frowned. “The villain?”

  “No,” Jav said, “that’s the Iguanodon.”

  Darla looked like they were going to have an aneurysm. “No, but please tell me we are about to find out.”

  “He has a pet iguana.”

  “No!”

  “Yep. Her name is Shannon.”

  “Shannon the Iguana.”

  “She’s quite a lovely lady, almost five feet long. She has terrariums in both his office and quarters, though usually the office enclosure is hidden when he entertains. It took me quite a few visits before we were introduced.”

  “I just—wow.”

  “What did you do to earn the honor of an audience with Shannon?”

  The truth was I’d just delivered a sit-rep when Leviathan, out of the blue, asked if I would be up for meeting “one of his inner circle.” I said yes immediately, and expected to be briefed on an upcoming meeting or another round of travel. Instead, he touched a mechanism and a panel in one of the walls slid back, revealing a lush terrarium that was bigger than some studio apartments I’d lived in. I couldn’t contain a moment of complete delight, and from behind his visor, I could feel him beaming at me.

  I shrugged. “I’m extremely lucky.”

  I could see on their faces that my answer was entirely unsatisfying, so I launched into another story before anyone could call me on it.

  “They’re actually quite demanding to care for, and he’s incredibly busy and often gone, so she has her own staff.”

  “Naturally.”

  I paused for a moment and took my time to theatrically refill my wineglass.

  “And? Come on, Anna.”

  I swirled the wine in my glass, carefully considering its legs and bouquet.

  “This is cruel and unusual,” Darla protested.

  I grinned, took a sip, and continued, “So, a few weeks ago, there was an incident with a staff member who hadn’t worked with Shannon before. Although he’d been trained, he either hadn’t paid attention or didn’t think it would matter, because he left the heat lamps off for too long while cleaning her enclosure and she got a bit cold.”

  The team had grown completely quiet, like children around a campfire listening to a ghost story.

  “Iguanas need UVA and UVB light, and are only happy between twenty-six and thirty-five degrees Celsius. This particular attendant let her stay too cold for a couple of hours before someone caught the error. Shannon recovered, but she was sluggish for a while.”

  “What happened?” Nour breathed. “Was he . . . was he disintegrated or set on fire or something?”

  “No, no, nothing like that.” I took a long drink. “Leviathan had the attendant’s kid kidnapped.”

  “What?” Jav almost knocked over his pint glass and narrowly rescued it.

  “He has a toddler, this attendant. The child vanished from day care the next afternoon right before he was scheduled to be picked up by his mother. He was found on his doorstep a couple of hours later, unharmed, except for a very mild case of hypothermia.”

  I let them stare at me in stunned silence while I casually finished my drink. “Anything else?”

  The four of them shook their heads somberly, serious as children who believed in the boogeyman. A weirdly pleasant little surge of power crawled over me, as I realized that with my sheer proximity to Leviathan, they found me a little scarier. I wondered if I should reassure them that I found the incident deeply upsetting too, but in truth it bothered me far less than I expected. The combination of devotion and capacity for vengeance that he displayed at Shannon’s discomfort warmed some neglected corner of my heart. So instead of reassuring my team, I let their uneasiness grow.

  THE NEXT MORNING, as I was somewhat blearily walking to the office, my phone started buzzing frantically. I nearly muted it, but at the last moment saw the call I had almost dismissed was from June.

  She was crying so hard that it took me a long time to understand what she was even saying, but between the sobs and blowing her nose I was finally able to make out that she and the Meat she had always refused to admit she was dating had broken up for good.

  I tried to calm her down for nearly an hour before I accepted that this was a full-scale nuclear meltdown, and did my best-friendly duty: took two personal days (my first since I’d started), arranged for secure transportation back to the city, and headed over to her apartment.

  It was late in the afternoon when I finally arrived. I stepped in through the door and faltered, not because the walk up the stairs had been difficult, but because her place was trashed. Pictures had been smashed, as well as some dishes, and there was broken glass sprayed across the carpet. One of her aromatherapy pillows was split open and dried lavender had spilled out. June was sitting on her couch, the one I had lived on for months, surrounded by tissues.

  “Jesus Christ, are you all right?” I stumbled over to her, keeping my shoes on for safety, and glass crunched under my feet. I fell down next to her and grabbed her hands, trying to get a good look at her face, scanning for injury.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine, fuck.”

  “You’re not fine. What the hell happened?”

  Her chin trembled. “We fought, like, all night. It was so bad. We threw things, at the end.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I shouldn’t have looked at his phone.”

  “Ah shit.”

  “I know.”

  “Has /r/relationships taught you nothing.”

  “I know! But I did and he was a fucking liar and I told him so, and then—”

  “Right.”

  “Fuck.”

  I shifted. “He left this morning?”

  “Yeah. He broke a picture and I threw my mug at him and everything smashed and he left.”

  “Oh, babe.”

  “It was so fucking stupid. I knew what the fuck was up, but I had to look and then once I looked I had to do something about it because I couldn’t tell myself I didn’t know.” She sniffed hard. “And now there’s all this everywhere and I can’t clean it up because then I’m cleaning up after a fight and there’s glass—”

  “Have you been sitting here the whole time?”

  “I have to pee so bad.”

  I struggled up and went to find the vacuum in the closet. Behind me, I could hear her start to cry again.

  I cleaned the glass and crockery chips out of the rug and off the hardwood floor, going over the same spots until I was certain there were no slivers left, and then she dragged herself up and into the bathroom. When I heard the shower running, I started the coffeemaker.

  She spent the evening napping and crying, and eventually laughing while I enumerated everything that was wrong with her ex in excruciating detail.

  “I couldn’t tell if he had a picture of himself holding a fish, smoking a cigar, or posing with a car on Tinder, but then I realized: he has all three.”

  “It was a motorcycle.” She was wheezing.

  “Of course it was.” I took a sip of the rosé I was drinking out of a teacup. “He looks like a handsome, scared turtle.”

  I paused after that to let her breathe.

  I slept in June’s bed with her like we were little girls having a slumber party, whispering to each other in the dark even though there was no one to catch us and tell us to go to sleep. I spent the day with her, helping her put her apartment fully back together and finding everything that her ex had left or reminded her too much of him and putting it in a box. I texted him later and arranged for him to come pick it up, and supervised as he collected it from the front hallway. He was smart enough not to say a word to me.

  I was prepared to take another day, but June insisted that she was all right, that I had done enough. Once she was under an afghan in her now immaculate living room, I ordered us some takeout and told her that after we ate, I’d call for a ride back,
and be at my desk the next morning. I settled on the couch after I’d placed the order; June lay back and put her feet in my lap.

  “Should we look at Tinder?”

  She made a face. “Like that’s what I need right now.”

  “Not to talk to any of them.”

  “Oh. Oh.” She fumbled for her phone in the folds of the afghan and loaded the app, already giggling.

  She swiped through a few profiles and then flipped her phone around, showing me a picture of a man’s unpleasant face.

  “He looks like a wet baguette.”

  She cackled and found me another one. “He looks like Animatronic Abe Lincoln out for a night on the town.”

  “He looks like he has no sheets on his bare floor mattress bed.”

  “He looks like he has a collection of swords.”

  “He looks like a sentient boiled bagel.”

  “He looks like one of those stunted asparagus that never sees the sun.”

  “He looks like his shirt came from a bank’s hot dog fundraiser.”

  “He looks like two different dudes glued together.”

  “He looks like a seagull that smelled a fart.”

  I had to stop for a while until she could breathe again; she was laughing so hard she was making little wheezing hiccups, and tears streamed down her face. Making her laugh was a particular kind of joy I had never found anywhere else; even now, as she was more despairing than I ever remembered seeing her, I still held that power. She wrapped her hand around my upper arm to steady herself, taking deep, calming breaths, only to erupt in peals of warm laughter again. I became aware of a deep ache in my chest. For months and months I’d only heard her voice on very occasional video calls; much more often, our only contact was text on a screen. Ever since that press conference, I’d put something else above her at every turn: the Injury Report over her comfort, my new job over our relationship. I hadn’t treated her, and her laugh, like anything precious to me, and it suddenly hit me what a terrible mistake that had been. Tucked up with her on the couch, whispering and giggling and close again, I resolved not to let another pit open up between us.

  I decided to stay another night.

  4

  THE DOOR SHRIEKED OPEN, AND I JERKED AWAKE. THE HINGES had rusted and the door fit badly in the frame, making it both loud and difficult to open. I assumed it was a deliberate theatrical choice. It still startled me; I must have dozed off despite my best efforts to stay alert.

  I slowly turned my face to the door, squinting against the too-bright fluorescent lights.

  I could just make out the looming silhouettes of two men in the entranceway. I could feel the contempt even before I saw their faces. I noticed neither of them had their truncheons at the ready, though. They’d left the weapons clipped safely to their belts. Interesting.

  I shifted so I was sitting slightly more upright, rolling my neck back and forth slowly to work out the terrible stiffness I’d earned from my doubtlessly very short nap. I was shackled to a metal chair in the center of a bare room, with a concrete floor pitted with several drains. It was almost disappointing that there was fluorescent drop lighting rather than a single bulb.

  I stank, and the skin on my legs itched and stung. My wardens had left me restrained so long I’d pissed myself, which I was pretending didn’t make me want to scream. They seemed to enjoy allowing me to wallow in my own filth for as long as possible. There was a bit of blood at the corner of my mouth, the taste of sharp copper when I moved my tongue over the inside of my cheeks, and a nasty headache was marshaling its forces against me.

  All things considered, they could have done worse.

  “Someone wants to speak to you,” said one of my guards. He was a stout man with a close-cropped dark beard and wide-set eyes. He spoke with great reluctance, as though he deeply disagreed with whatever orders he’d been given. “Get cleaned up.”

  The second man strode forward. I thought I recognized his tightly curled red hair and round shoulders as those of one of my very first interrogators, one of the three who first bound me in this room when I arrived, but it was hard to keep track. He unlocked the shackles on my wrists; I’d been pulling against them to keep myself from falling asleep, and there were livid marks in my skin. It was hard to stand at first after so much time tied to a chair. My feet had gone numb, and when I put weight back on my legs a painful rush of pins and needles washed over them. All the blood in my body seemed to shift and my vision swam. I swayed and grabbed on to the chair for fear of falling.

  The first guard unbuckled his truncheon. “Quit playing.”

  I straightened with as much sodden dignity as I could. “Just wanted to make you feel like you were doing a good job. Shall we? I don’t want to be late to the ball.”

  His lip curled and he prodded me forward with the black, hardened piece of fiberglass in his hand. I was marched a short way down the hall to an empty group shower. They left the shackles on my feet, making undressing a struggle; I ended up tearing my stockings to get the disgusting material off my body. The guards stood uncomfortably close as I washed under a pitiful, shuddering spray of icy water, then threw a sandpapery towel in my face when I stepped out of it. They were trying to project an air of obvious disgust, as I awkwardly pulled on the hospital gown laid out for me.

  “That hurt?” The second guard poked painfully at the one genuine wound that had been inflicted upon me so far: when I had been taken, my captors had immediately dug the subdermal implant out of my upper arm. Every one of Leviathan’s employees had a tracking device and emergency beacon somewhere on their body. They’d located mine with a quick scan and dug it out with what seemed like a small, incredibly sharp melon baller. The hole punched in my flesh was no longer bleeding, but puckered and threatening some sort of infection.

  “I wouldn’t mind some antiseptic, actually,” I said. I attempted to sound conversational, but my voice was ugly and dry.

  My hair was dripping wet and cold around my ears, and I had to fight to keep my teeth from chattering. I was taken to a different interrogation room down a long, empty hallway. My bare feet were very quiet on the damp concrete, in contrast to the Vibram-soled combat boots stomping on either side of me. There was a metal chair riveted to the floor, but unlike in the previous room I’d been held in, this wasn’t the only object in the space. Here, there was also a spartan steel table, affixed to the floor with bolts, and a very deep, comfortable-looking leather wingback.

  “That’s sweet of you,” I said, making the barest of moves toward the fancy chair. “Thinking of my comfort—”

  The guards took the opportunity to pounce on me, throwing me unceremoniously into the metal chair; I landed hip-first and couldn’t stifle a hiss of pain at the jarring impact. “It might’ve hurt less if you’d shut the fuck up,” the short one said. They shackled me again—hands and feet—and slammed out of the room.

  The lights were a bit dimmer and it was slightly warmer; I was shivering less severely, anyway, which was something. I flexed my fingers and toes, trying to keep the circulation going as much as possible, and did the only thing I could do under the circumstances: I waited.

  It was difficult to keep track of time. I knew that I had been held for more than one day and less than three, but that was about all I could calculate. My absence would have been noticed by now, I decided. Even stripped of my tracking beacon, they would know something had gone wrong when I didn’t return. I had no idea what sort of a response it would raise, if any. Henching, even for a villain as powerful as Leviathan, was a job with significant risks, and I knew that I had taken those on freely. After my experience with the Electric Eel, however different my current situation seemed, I had to assume I was on my own.

  I wasn’t alone for very long before my mind returned to its favorite topic of the last twenty-four to seventy-two hours: my abduction. I kept turning those moments over and over, trying to find things I had done wrong. I knew that this was my traumatized brain trying to protect itself, to learn
what mistakes I’d made so they wouldn’t happen again. It didn’t matter how often I told myself I couldn’t have changed things.

  The delivery driver called me, seeming confused about where to drop off the Thai I’d ordered. After a couple of attempts at instructions, I told June not to get up from her nest on the couch and made my way downstairs, cane in hand. Once I poked my head out of her low-rise, I saw a man standing outside, away from the streetlight, looking confused. I called out and took a few steps toward him.

  As soon as I was next to it, the side door of the dirty white van parked by the curb slid open. The delivery driver charged forward and tackled me, and two men inside the van grabbed my arms. Their faces were covered with ski masks, but their eyes were visible. I yowled and squeezed a hidden trigger in my cane, managing to hit one full in the face with a blast of Inferno-grade, foam-based pepper spray. He squealed in agony and fell back into the van, but the other two managed to wrestle me in. My cane was ripped from my hands and thrown into the street. While one goon held me down, the one I pepper-sprayed fell to the floor next to me, drooling and heaving as we drove away.

  I fought. I bit the remaining assailant hard enough that I tasted blood and raked my nails across whatever exposed flesh I could find. After cursing in pain, he stuck a knee in my back and stabbed a hypodermic needle into my thigh. My mind became unmoored after that, and the fight in me slowly bled away.

  When I came to, I was shackled to a chair. I spent most of my time for the next couple of days alternately being interrogated and enduring hours of sensory deprivation in the dark, cold room. Their tactics weren’t terribly inventive or even that brutal; they were clearly hoping to scare and unhinge me, rather than do any permanent damage. Leviathan provided resistance to interrogation training (part of his new employee orientation package), and I found I was shockingly well prepared for this. All the banging, screaming, and extremely theatrical violence employed was textbook, to the point of being predictable. I was exhausted and wanted to tear my skin off in disgust, but I was aware they could be doing a lot worse.