Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  The door opened behind me. They hadn’t left me alone very long this time, which was different. Also, the entrance was behind me now, so I could no longer see the guards as they entered, but I could hear the footsteps behind me, growing closer. My heartbeat hammered in my ears, and my throat threatened to close. It seemed like the moment they would do worse had arrived.

  I made a point of sighing audibly. “This is very boring.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” The voice was unexpected, but I recognized it immediately. I found it almost impossible to remain calm and collected for the first time since my capture. Supercollider’s striking form materialized out of the gloom, his broad shoulders and narrow waist dramatically backlit by the lights in the hallway. He walked around the table and gently lowered himself into the luxurious chair across from me, the leather creaking in welcome.

  I could do nothing but stare for a moment. He looked at me with a strange mixture of curiosity and gravity on his face, his dark eyes slightly hooded. He was freshly shaven and impeccably dressed; I even caught a whiff of Tom Ford cologne dabbed on his pulse points.

  “You look dashing,” I said. “I suppose I should be honored.” I lifted one of my hands as high as I could until the shackle clanked, drawing me up short. “Forgive me for looking so terrible. The hospitality here is somewhat lacking.”

  “Again, you have my apologies,” he offered. He placed his huge hands on the table between us, in a gesture that seemed almost supplicating.

  There was a long, awkward silence. My heart still hammered in my chest; the aching rage I felt in his presence shocked me with its intensity, shot through with a healthy dose of fear and adrenaline.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this meeting?” I asked finally.

  He didn’t reply, but continued to study me. I imagined my face, my swollen lips and the deep bags under my eyes. I wondered if it was pity I saw momentarily flash across his face. I wondered if he was even capable of the emotion.

  “The authorities here,” he said finally, “they want to arrest you. Have the police find some charges, extract whatever information they can from you about Leviathan, and lock you up for as long as they legally can.”

  I’d suspected I was being held under Dovecote, and these words all but confirmed it. I hadn’t seen any obvious logos or other branding of the Draft, but the entire place practically reeked of Superheroic Affairs.

  “That’s an interesting proposition,” I remarked coolly, “considering I am legitimately employed by a private corporation and have never had so much as a jaywalking ticket in my life.”

  “So. You would lie about what you do.”

  “No, I am very proud of what I do as an information specialist. I’ve had Legal examine my file and activities with a fine-tooth comb, and I’m clean. I know what you have on me, which is exactly jack.”

  He nodded. “We are aware of your record and the challenges in holding you long-term,” he allowed.

  I turned my hands palms up. The metal shackles slithered around my wrists.

  “Well then. Don’t you owe me a phone call?”

  He got up and started to pace. The room was narrow and his strides were long, so he went back and forth quickly. It only made him seem more agitated. “You don’t understand me. You’re a problem,” he said. “I didn’t mean for you to be, but you are.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  “They think I’m paranoid.” He struck a pose for a moment, placing his hands on his hips. Heroes never could keep from showing off for very long. “They think it’s a waste of time and energy for me to follow up on every villain I encounter, every hench who gets away.”

  “I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that I ‘got away,’ but go on.”

  His stride slowed and then he stopped pacing, his eyes growing vague. “The best piece of advice I was ever given was from Doc Proton, when I was just starting out.” He had a faraway look in his eyes, staring into the middle distance. “I didn’t take it at the time. I was brash and young then. Reckless.”

  He looked back at me suddenly, as though remembering I was there. “Doc Proton told me, ‘You make your own nemesis.’ I didn’t understand it then. I thought it was one of those things a rambling old hero said to sound wise. But it’s been absolutely true. Every evil, every great power that has ever risen to challenge me, every arch-villain who’s ever been an actual threat, was someone whose path I altered. I set our enmity in motion, every time. A tiny action can cause an avalanche.”

  “Poetic,” I allowed. I’m not sure it registered. He frowned, lost in thought. He was looking past me again.

  “I was foolish in the beginning and let my enemies rise and become worthy foes. It took too long for me to recognize them as threats, and eliminate them. Leviathan is my greatest failure.” He paused, and something very dark moved behind his eyes, while I imagined how utterly furious Leviathan would be to overhear that. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. “Over time, and more near-defeats and close calls than I’d care to admit, I have come to understand that there is no benefit to letting your opposition thrive, to allow a sapling to mature into an oak.”

  I sucked in a breath. Supercollider had not only just validated my theory that superheroes were in fact terrible for the world, but proved I had not been thinking big enough. Not only were heroes responsible for all of the damage and injury they caused, they were even responsible for creating the villains they fought.

  He looked at me then with a deep sadness. It chilled me more than the threat of any torture.

  “When I saw you in the hospital, I knew what I’d done. I should have acted even earlier. But once again, my mercy allowed another evil to germinate.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” My bravado was failing, and my voice shook.

  “I knew, but I let you recuperate. I let you turn further toward the darkness and begin to amass power against the forces of good. I hoped against hope that I was mistaken, but you have risen in the shadow of my weakness and hesitation.”

  Whenever I thought he’d finally reached the depths of his own jaw-dropping grandiosity, he managed to keep digging. A braver version of myself, one with fewer survival instincts, wanted to slowly clap (had my hands been free). I wanted to roll my eyes. But I knew his speech was leading somewhere terrible, so every insult died in my mouth.

  “I’m not nearly that important,” I managed.

  His lip curled. “I’ve seen your work firsthand, in the field.”

  “I hate fieldwork. I vastly prefer my desk job.”

  “And from that humble seat you are destroying the lives of heroes and allowing evil to flourish.”

  “Oh, do go on.”

  He started to pace again. “Getting my hands back on the Electric Eel reminded me of you,” he muttered, flexing his fingers. I hadn’t heard he’d been taken in, and wished I had the capacity to enjoy the news. “After his capture, I happened to have a conversation with two promising young heroes. They spoke about you—one more warmly than the other—about your composure, your strength. They spoke of peace and alliance, but I saw what you were trying to do: sow the seeds of discord within that heroic family.”

  I stayed silent this time. For all his apparent empty-headed handsomeness he was occasionally brighter than most people might expect.

  “You know what you did. What you’re doing.” His voice was blank.

  I stared hard at the table between us.

  “It matters not.” He stopped pacing and towered over me. “I will no longer give in to my weakness in this regard. I have seen the signs and I know I need to trust my instincts. I have made an enemy and I must stop that adversary before she can rise against me.”

  “So, what’s your plan,” I said quietly. “Kill me? Old Yeller me out back and hope no one digs too deep when they landscape the yard?”

  “No!” He looked at me, horrified. “No, of course not; we’re heroes!”

  I squinted up at him, disgusted.

  �
��I know you might not understand,” he said, sorrowfully, it seemed, “because you are still but a pawn. Do you play?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “In chess, a pawn is the feeblest piece, and the most vulnerable—the most expendable. It’s easy to ignore a pawn, to take it for granted while you concern yourself with the more powerful pieces. However, a pawn is also the one and only piece that, if left unchecked for too long, can become a queen.”

  I stared at him. “I am aware of what chess is.”

  “I’m afraid that I’m going to have to remove you from the board.”

  He walked away from me and I began to shiver, more violently this time. He pressed the intercom button by the door and summoned my two jailers back into the room. They stomped in obediently.

  “I want you to make her comfortable,” he ordered, “and I mean that. She needs to be well rested and stable for the procedure tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir,” the two men said in unison, significantly cowed.

  I felt like I was moving underwater as they unlocked my restraints and guided me to my feet. They were surprisingly gentle now. They led me to a cell and nudged me inside. There was a cot with an actual mattress on it, a toilet and sink, as well as a thin, stained but clean blanket. I wrapped it around me like a cloak. I curled up on the cot and tried in vain to be very still.

  I MUST HAVE fallen asleep at some point, the chalky weight of exhaustion winning out even over the fear, because I woke with a start to the sound of the door banging open. The two guards who stomped in didn’t allow me the opportunity to fight. Still confused by sleep and aching everywhere, I’d barely managed to lift my head when they seized my arms and held me still. A third man had come in behind them, wearing scrubs, and while I squawked in protest he came up and injected something into the meat of my thigh.

  In a few minutes I went limp, and they cautiously let me go. “We can take it from here,” the man in scrubs was saying, quite distantly.

  “You sure? One of our guys still can’t see.”

  “We have it handled. She’ll be on a sedative drip soon.”

  They said a few more things but I couldn’t focus on it anymore; it was like they were speaking in another room and I had cheap foam earplugs in. I tried very weakly to lift myself up on my elbows to hear better, but couldn’t get the strength together. I heard boots moving away, and then the man in scrubs was pulling me into a sitting position, posing me like a limp, person-size doll.

  The next few hours were a haze of movement and preparations I barely participated in. The drugs replaced my blood with molasses, the electric crackle of my synapses with guitar distortion. I was aware that I should panic. I thought calmly about fighting or tearing out my IVs, but the ideas were very far away, and the necessary effort to do so buried in fog. The only thing that seemed solid in my head was a deep, chemical calm.

  Now and again, the smallest bubble of curiosity would pop to the surface, seemingly the only emotion I still had access to. I was given new IV lines, which left me even weaker, pushed me even more deeply into myself. I was strapped to a hospital bed, but not flat on my back. Instead, I was secured on my side, my head tilted slightly upright.

  Then I was in a room that seemed impossibly, hellishly bright. My eyelids were taped down, but white light shone right through them. There was a strange pain when someone injected local anesthetic into my scalp. It went in shockingly wet and sharp, like liquid glass, my nerves sending out one last distress signal before going quiet. I observed this with an academic kind of detachment.

  The next thing I was aware of was a very loud buzzing beside my left ear. I couldn’t feel anything other than a bit of pressure on my skin, but I could hear.

  “Have you started?” I inquired. I was startled that I could muster the effort. My speech was slow, the words rounded off, and talking was laborious.

  “Not quite,” a male voice replied, calm and serene. “We had to shave your head first, just a bit, before we can make the incision.”

  The buzzing ceased. I smelled something that reminded me of a public swimming pool—the stench of chlorine—which I eventually recognized as iodine.

  “Shouldn’t I be unconscious?” I wondered aloud. No one replied.

  I couldn’t tell how many people were in the room with me, exactly. I tried to follow steps on the floor, voices, and the clattering of instruments on metal trays. There were some shuffling sounds and lowered voices; the surgical team held a brief conference. Everything was muffled, but I could just make out the words.

  “This is not a complete slash ’n’ burn and we’re not dealing with powers; we’re here to blunt and disarm. Minimal sensory damage and stay away from the speech centers.”

  I wanted to be scared, but my brain had misplaced the capacity for that emotion.

  I was aware of them hovering over me. There was an odd feeling of pressure on my head again, and a tugging sensation. Then came another loud, mechanical noise, which made my face vibrate, my teeth rattle. There was the oddest, most unpleasant smell, which reminded me of being in a dentist’s office and having a rotten tooth worked on.

  “Ow,” I said.

  They stopped. “Does that hurt?”

  “No,” I admitted, “but it seemed appropriate.”

  “Keep going,” someone else snarled, firing up the saw again.

  After a few more moments of my entire consciousness being taken up by a noise that vibrated through my skeleton, everything stopped all at once. There was an instant of quiet, of soft voices and machines beeping and a bit of terrible scraping inside my head.

  Then, one of the doctors hissed something and drew away from me. There were several loud noises outside the door, bangs and yelling, and the scraping noise stopped abruptly. There was a louder sound, almost an explosion, and a tray of metal instruments clattered noisily to the floor. The members of the medical team were soon screaming, first in indignation, then in terror.

  Something cool and smooth touched my hand. It felt like fingers, but hard and with too many joints.

  “Anna, can you hear me?” The voice was impossible, but unmistakable. Leviathan’s hand closed over my wrist.

  “What’s happening?” I wasn’t sure I actually produced the words, but I tried.

  “Medical!” Leviathan’s voice was a typhoon. “Get her out of here immediately.”

  There were hands all over me then, unhooking some devices and attaching new ones, detaching me from one IV bag and hooking in another.

  “No more drugs,” I tried to say.

  Someone squeezed my shoulder. “You don’t want to be here for this.”

  There was a roar like the ocean crashing down on me, and then nothing.

  “ANNA.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Anna? Anna?”

  “Fuck.”

  “Get him.” I heard hurried footsteps, a door opening and closing. “Anna, can you understand me?” The voice speaking to me was closer now, low and insistent, but still gentle.

  “Sure.”

  “Great. Keep talking.”

  “No.” I felt like someone was sitting on my chest and my limbs were lead; it was almost impossible to open my eyes. My head felt stuffed with bandages.

  “I know it’s hard, but I need you to interact with me as much as possible, okay?”

  I groaned.

  “Can you move your hands?”

  I flexed my fingers. I felt the tightness of surgical tape tugging the skin at the backs of my hands.

  “Wonderful.”

  “Toes too,” I said, wiggling them. “That hurt a little,” I admitted.

  “You’re missing three toenails,” she informed me.

  “That’s too bad. What’s your name?”

  “Oh, Susan. I’m Susan, from Medical.”

  “Hi, Susan.” I feebly lifted my hand; she laughed softly and shook it.

  “She’s speaking?” Leviathan’s voice was like a light being flipped on inside a murky room; I awoke a little more fully.

  �
��Yes,” Susan and I spoke at the same time, and she gave a nervous laugh. “She seems very aware and articulate,” she reported.

  “Auditor, do you know who I am?” I couldn’t place the quality in his voice. It was one I’d never heard from him before. It was warmer, more liquid.

  “Yes, Sir. Am I home?”

  I couldn’t explain how, but I felt his affirmative. “We extracted you successfully. You’re where you should be.”

  A deep sense of safety settled over me. I let the first tendrils of sleep begin to coil around me.

  “There was some . . . damage; we’ve had to repair you.”

  The comfort dissipated rapidly. “Repair?”

  “Yes. It was complicated. Hearing you speak is a great reassurance.”

  Panic started to filter in. I tried to open my eyes and wake up more fully, but found only blankness. “Why can’t I see?”

  His hand was on my shoulder again, and I found it impossible to stay afraid while he maintained that contact. “It’s temporary. I promise. Sleep now.”

  That command was a great relief. All of the questions I held, even the meaning of the ominous word “repair,” were not nearly as important as doing exactly what he asked. I breathed in deeply and let my mind fall back into a deep, safe interior darkness.

  AT FIRST, I couldn’t do much but sleep. I often dreamed about being disassembled. Six spiderlike robot arms roamed over my body, eating away chunks, clipping or slicing or evaporating pieces away to carry off and repurpose. My flesh was not messy and did not leak as they worked, though, but stayed serenely, smoothly pink. My bones, when they started to show, looked like mother-of-pearl. While my brain manufactured these images, I was actually being put back together.

  Piecing together what happened, how I had been rescued and returned to the compound, was slow, hard work. At first, staying awake for even a few moments was a struggle, and even after I was conscious for longer stretches of time, focusing on and retaining any information was a colossal effort. But I kept asking questions—of Susan and the rest of the medical team, of Greg and Vesper and Melinda and Keller, when they were allowed to see me, and even from Leviathan himself on the few occasions he appeared by my bedside. I asked them to tell me the stories, and wove the little pieces into a narrative in my head. It became a kind of talisman, an ever-growing bedtime story that I repeated to myself, over and over. I couldn’t see those first few weeks in recovery, so I nurtured this story and watched it play out inside my head in ever-richer detail.