Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  McKinnon was at first warm but brusquely professional, yet I knew I got my hooks in; the program I had installed to tell me when my emails were read showed my first message was returned to over and over, often late at night. The journalist recognized the bewilderment and betrayal in my writing, a feeling that could only strike home to someone who had been living with partial paralysis for twenty years.

  The journalist wanted more details, and I seemed to spook. I had to be anonymous, I explained, because I had been threatened in the hospital. I understood if this meant he couldn’t help me, I said.

  My tactic worked. McKinnon warmed, softened, lured me back. If there were other sources who could go on record, the journalist said, the piece would work. It would just take some time and digging.

  McKinnon then threw deeply personal pain on the table, and instead of the flash of guilt I expected to feel, I felt an uneasy camaraderie. We’d been through the same thing, and the journalist wanted to help me, even if our goals were different.

  There was a little part of me, the weakest part of me, that didn’t want McKinnon to proceed. That part of me hoped the leads would go nowhere and the story would fizzle out. That I wouldn’t have to retraumatize this probably decent person. That maybe I wouldn’t have to hurt anybody. It was a frail, weak part of me I was listening to less and less. I knew McKinnon’s leads would pay off, because I had already done the research myself. Once the journalist found what I had, the story would have to be written.

  McKinnon got back to me in less than a week. The email was vibrating with carefully leashed excitement. Over a dozen people willing to talk, with very little prompting, and many more confirmed they had stories but were too exhausted or afraid to talk about it. Two of them were willing to go on record.

  “Your story, however anonymous, needs to be at the heart of it,” McKinnon wrote. “Your story, and mine.”

  A FEW DAYS later, I met the journalist in a nearly abandoned diner for the interview.

  McKinnon rolled the chair back from the table crisply when I entered, a gesture filled with bright excitement—McKinnon would have stood in old-fashioned courtesy if it were possible. The journalist’s smile was thin-lipped but warm, and reached bright green eyes hidden behind dirty glasses. I’d worn my own old glasses to better assume the character of my former self, though I didn’t need them anymore (laser surgery once I had unlimited benefits plus a reconstructed optic nerve took care of that). McKinnon’s hand was pale but warm when I shook it, and I realized how cold my fingers were.

  There was already a steaming mug on the table, a handful of sugar packets and leaking creamers thrown down next to it.

  “I ordered you a coffee,” the journalist said unnecessarily. “It’s terrible.”

  “Oh?” The corner of my mouth turned up.

  “That’s why I like it here. Food’s bad enough that it’s usually dead. Lots of privacy.”

  I nodded. I gathered three sugar packets together, shook them and tore them in unison. I spent a lot of time prepping my coffee, pouring each creamer in one at a time to make sure it wasn’t curdled, stirring. I was stalling. McKinnon let me stall, patient but watchful.

  “This is probably a bad idea,” I finally said, gripping my hands around the mug. I didn’t have to pretend to be nervous.

  A somber nod. “Probably.”

  “I mean . . .” I shifted. I was wearing what felt like a costume of myself: the last, now ill-fitting set of clothes I had from my old temp days. I was covered in less makeup and more anxiety. My hair was in its former, frazzled bun. And I let all the old insecurity, all the fear and despair that once drove me, settle over my shoulders like an heirloom shawl.

  I took a deep breath. “He’s supposed to only hurt bad people. He’s a hero. If you get hurt, you’re a bad guy, right?”

  McKinnon nodded. Those green eyes never left me as the journalist reached into a jacket pocket to pull out a voice recorder. “Can I use this?”

  “Oh. I guess. Sure. Of course.”

  McKinnon placed it on the table between us. “Can you say that again.” It was a command. A little red recording light had come on, and I could see a digital readout of the rise and fall of our voices, of the sounds in the diner as they were captured.

  “What did I say?” The waveform representing my voice looked thin and warbling.

  “About Supercollider hurting people.”

  I took a deep breath. “We’re all told that we’re safe. That Supercollider only hurts the villains. That if you get hurt, you must have been doing something wrong.”

  “Were you doing anything wrong, Anna?”

  I felt tears sting my eyes. Strategically, I let them come. Not fall, but well up. I looked at him. “They told me I would just have to stand there.”

  McKinnon was still, but those green eyes gripped me, in that strange way people have when they are trying to hold you up and hold you together because they need something. I didn’t meet them.

  The pain was all there, all real, but I wasn’t afraid of it. I had enough callus built up that I didn’t think it would draw blood even if the edges were still sharp. “I wasn’t doing anything right, I can admit that. I was a hench. I did data entry and I didn’t really accomplish anything. I was just kind of getting by. And to be honest . . .” I impulsively touched my temple—the first unintentional move I made during the meeting—brushing that scar. It was becoming a nervous habit. “Sometimes I think that if something like this happened to me, then clearly I wasn’t being ‘good enough.’ I wasn’t good enough to be safe. On some level, I think for a long time I felt like I deserved it.”

  “What do you think now.”

  Until then, I’d kept my eyes lowered, giving only flickering eye contact. But now I looked right at McKinnon, steady. I could see more than a serious, focused face: elevated heart rate, excitement blooming at every pulse point. There was a crackle across the journalist’s scalp, a lovely blue ozone light.

  “I don’t think anyone deserves this. Not even villains.”

  McKinnon sat back a little. “So it’s not that you came to realize that what happened to you shouldn’t have, because you were a decent, ordinary person.”

  I shook my head. “No. Even if I was everything I was afraid I was. Even if I was terrible. It still never should have happened.”

  “You don’t seem terrible.”

  “You haven’t spoken to any of my exes.”

  The journalist cracked a smile.

  I grinned back. “I’m no less terrible than any of us. Say, oh, a receptionist for Black Hat. Or whoever sets up the AV equipment for Gangrene. Or the PA who brings Leviathan his coffee in the morning.” (His name is Dennis.)

  “Say you did deserve it, though.”

  “Did I deserve a spiral fracture, years of physio, losing my livelihood? Did I deserve the intimidation that followed?” I let real anguish creep into my voice. “Isn’t it more monstrous if the answer is everyone thinks I deserved whatever came to me?”

  “I don’t think that.” McKinnon was quietly angry now, angry about his own injury. Doc Proton, Supercollider’s mentor, had left the journalist with spinal trauma when McKinnon was a photographer in his early twenties. Starstruck and hungry, McKinnon ran toward the screams to take photos of a great superhero triumph. Doc Proton used a lamppost like a javelin to stop Lady Sonorous (it was a different time) from taking off in her supercar. Doc left the scene with the villain in handcuffs.

  He also left that young photographer with T1–T3 fractures.

  “I know you don’t,” I said quietly. “But I think a lot of people do. And I think the people who don’t bat an eye when things like this happen to citizens or henches are the same people who think it’s perfectly fine for the Claxon to nail Harpy to the side of an apartment building.”

  “That’s not—the same thing.” McKinnon’s brow furrowed.

  “It’s definitely not. I can’t cause microfractures in your bones or neurological disruptions by screaming at you
. I definitely haven’t used it to shatter an actor’s teeth.” I took a long drink from my horrible coffee. “But even if I had, I don’t think nonlethal crucifixion is exactly an appropriate response.”

  “Right.”

  “My point is just, if we’re willing to tolerate that, who is going to care about a temp worker’s spiral fracture?”

  Or a photographer’s spinal injury. I let that unspoken sentence hang. The journalist’s experience had been similar to mine; Supercollider had learned so much of his manner and affect and approach from his old hero. Proton was vaguely apologetic, but once he was satisfied that the young photographer he’d catastrophically injured wasn’t a threat (with no aspirations to villainy), the hero forgot about McKinnon entirely.

  The journalist was quiet for a while, jotting down a few notes despite recording everything I was saying. “How are you getting on now?” McKinnon’s voice was a little absent as the piece started to take shape.

  I smiled a little. “Better. I found work. I finally feel like I am being appreciated.”

  HE CALLED THE piece “Collision Course.”

  McKinnon told several stories. The journalist spoke to a former cop who was disillusioned with the endless, senseless hero worship displayed by his colleagues. He had to go on permanent medical leave when a superheated beam passed a little too close to him and melted his sidearm to his hip. There was the story of a young woman who had the misfortune of being taken on a single date by a lowest-tier hero; her endless kidnappings and eventual assault were treated as rote, expected, unremarkable. I haunted the piece like a ghost, too frightened to reveal my name, but giving just enough tragic detail of my encounter with the Greatest of Heroes and serving as the impetus for the story to be written. But it was the depth and poignancy in how McKinnon’s own trauma was exposed, and the way that the world accepted that young photographer’s devastating injury as necessary collateral damage, that warmed the cockles of my blackening heart. The journalist exorcised demons on the page, dragged out every wound. It was affecting. It was devastating. And even though he was barely mentioned at all, it roasted Supercollider alive.

  By the time I got to my desk, Jav had printed out the article, placed it in a real-life physical frame, and set it up next to my keyboard. He was beaming at me, his teeth starkly white against his lips.

  “You’re so romantically analog,” I said. I felt heat rising to my face.

  “You’re trending,” Darla called over their shoulder, their attention darting between the various social media feeds across three monitors.

  “I hope not. I was promised anonymity.”

  They gave a half grunt of a laugh. “It’s trending.”

  I perched on the desk next to them. “What did you use?”

  “#mycollision. Got people talking about the ways heroes have fucked up their lives. Used a couple of the influencer accounts and it took off.” They scrolled. “Some of these are fucking heartbreaking.”

  Darla slowed down a little so I could see the stories that were filling up the hashtag. A budding restaurateur whose business was physically demolished by an errant eye laser. A makeup artist blinded by psionics. A parade of mortified flesh: burned, crushed, frozen, liquefied. Buildings people saved years or decades to afford reduced to rubble by a hero blundering through. The endless reams of psychological damage. A litany of heroes leaving trauma blossoming in their wake. It was harrowing and grotesque. It was better than I expected. I could see the cost climbing higher.

  “I should run all of these numbers,” I said absently.

  “Do it later. What’s next?” Darla’s voice was excited, hungry.

  I focused back on them. “I want to see where this goes.” I shifted to my feet. “I want to see what gets picked up where. What comes out in the next wave of think pieces. I want this to simmer for a couple of weeks.”

  They nodded. I felt their ripple of disappointment. “So we track it?”

  “For now. Keep an eye out for the testimonials. I want to know who has the most gutting stories, who gets interviewed because of what they tweeted, who decides to write all the ‘it happened to me too’ follow-ups. I want to know who is out for blood.”

  Darla made a noise; I knew what I said registered, but their attention was already laser-focused on the feeds cascading down the screens; I left them alone.

  I put Javier to work recording instances of the hashtag and its evolutions and permutations, all the types of damage and loss people mentioned (physical, economic, emotional) as well as mentions of Supercollider specifically. Many of the terrible run-ins people had with heroes involved other caped idiots, but his name was coming up a fair amount. I wanted to know what these stories had in common, what the themes were. I wanted to see if there was a pattern to how he hurt people. I wanted to know the cost.

  WITH JAV AND DARLA running with their tasks, I turned my attention back to Quantum. Over the next hours and days, I searched tirelessly for any mention of her, any stories of heroic negligence and dismemberment and destruction that she figured in, peripherally or prominently.

  For someone at the right hand of such a force of destruction, Quantum Entanglement showed up remarkably little. The most physical injury she could be considered responsible for was when someone suffered burns when one of her force field bubbles didn’t extend quite far enough to shield them, but it was a stretch. Now and again, she was mentioned as being responsible for property damage, but those reports were rare and the damage not really extensive.

  But there was a phrase that began to turn up repeatedly, something that chilled me every time I read it: “She just stood there.” When she showed up in the accounts of trauma and terror, she was never the cause, never the one raining blows or pulling down buildings. She was simply standing aside, watching horror taking place around her. She was absent, an eerily silent bystander.

  It haunted me. I wanted to know what happened to her. I needed to know how someone who could change matter around them had been reduced to someone who stood by. I knew whatever had happened would be her undoing; and I suspected that, if I could dig deep enough, I could break the shell she had become.

  I kept the larger plot around Quantum close to my chest, but as I read the stories and analyzed the sentiment reports, I knew what I needed was some good, old-fashioned scheming. I decided to let Jav, Darla, and Tamara in on things, and invited Vesper for good measure (for all his generosity he could be delightfully cruel when he set his mind to it). The five of us took over a conference room, I brought a terrible amount of candy, and we set about methodically ruining our teeth and her life.

  “Everybody loves adultery.”

  “Do you think that’s the first thing we should go for?”

  “It’s a real crowd-pleaser.”

  “It’s true. Seems cliché, though.”

  “It’s cliché because it works.”

  “I am not disputing that, I just want to make sure we’re leading strong.”

  “I think it’s all in how we frame it. Make it interesting.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Like, how Supercollider can’t satisfy her.”

  “Exactly. I like that.”

  “What could be wrong with him?”

  “What could be wrong with her?”

  “Is it her depravity or his dysfunction? I like leaving it open.”

  “Who should break it?”

  “Is there any way we can arrange for someone she’s seen to come forward?”

  “Who is the most pissed off?”

  “Thing is, she’s pretty classy about it. Not a lot of bad feelings.”

  “Hmm. What about lingering sadness. What might have been. Can we coax out an ego who wants to weave a sultry, melancholy narrative or some bullshit?”

  “Seems more likely. There’s a former supe who’s a cardiologist now—he’s dropped some heavy hints and has an ego the size of the moon. It was a long time ago, though. She usually goes for lawyers, cops—anyone who doesn’t like to talk.”

  “She�
��s good at this.”

  “Strategic, for sure.”

  “Okay, here’s the thing. Whoever talks has to think they’re doing the right thing.”

  “Right. Right. Okay. What if—what if we do it in stages?”

  “Explain.”

  “We start off just looking for people who know Quantum well. We want to do a piece on her because she appears so infrequently in the #mycollision and #collisiondamage tags. About how not all heroes are like that.”

  “Oh, that’s good. We see who comes out of the woodwork.”

  “Yeah. I wager a few white knights who should keep their mouths shut about ever having known her swoop in to be all ‘Quantum and I have a special connection and I can confirm she’s blah, blah, blah not the worst.’”

  “And then we zero in on those.”

  “The ones who already want to talk. Maybe we get one to do a more in-depth interview. But they’re going to talk, they’re going to talk too much, and soon enough someone is going to straight up admit they fucked her for a while, thinking they’re being all gallant in exposing it or just to get some of that light shone on them a little longer.”

  “What are the odds he winds up dead, whoever he is.”

  “High.”

  “She doesn’t seem like the murdering type.”

  “Her handlers, though.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Also, Supercollider has some real sharks on his team.”

  “Wanna bet on it?”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  “Ten bucks. If he survives six months after he admits he fucked her, I win.”