Hench

Sunshine.

Sunshine stabbing him, assaulting his eyelids, jacking him like a mugger on a cheap amphetamine high.

George groaned and rolled over.

Wrong move.

His stomach roiled, tossed as a hurricane sea, and the turbulence fought its way up his gullet and--

He made it as far as the edge of the bed before vomiting on the floor.

He stared at the mess with dreary eyes. He really should clean that up before it stained the rug. He should get up, get moving, have some breakfast.

As if in response, his stomach roiled again.

Breakfast was definitely out.

Apparently, so was moving.

Who was he kidding? This was a bachelor pad. One more stain wouldn’t matter.

He groaned again and fell asleep, right there.

~~~

He was dimly aware, as he drifted in and out of awareness, of his phone beeping at him several times through the day. His body, responding to its own imperatives, kept his mind elsewhere.

~~~

His nemesis the sun was falling from the sky when he regained consciousness hours later. Bathed in rosy twilight glow, he cautiously sat up in bed. His stomach still hurt, but it was more the memory of pain, the hurt of a muscle that has been worked too hard. He thought he might actually have an appetite now.

He’d felt fine yesterday, and he wondered if one of his coworkers might have played a practical joke on him. It would not be unheard of for someone to spike his lunch with something. Come to think of it, Pesti had eaten with him yesterday. He thought of her cell cultures and shuddered. She was always sloppy with lab safety, because she seemed to be immune to nearly everything.

He slid from bed and into the shower. He started brushing the film off his teeth and thought that, in spite of the awful day he’d had, he’d still be able to make it to work on time.

Work--

He choked on his toothpaste as he remembered that he was on day shifts this week, instead of his usual night shifts.

He’d just missed a full day of work.

Cold sweat prickled down his back as a full-on flight-or-fight adrenaline rush hit him. His boss had once told him that death--his own--was the only good excuse for missing work.

For multiple reasons, George had believed him.

He stumbled from the shower and fumbled for his phone, remembering now the series of beeps hours ago.

His hand shaking, breathing heavily, he read the string of texts his boss had sent him.

--Hey, where are you?

--You gonna make it in today? The team’s counting on you.

--George, today’s the day. Get over here.

--What are you waiting for, you bastard? Get your ass in here NOW.

--This is your last warning. You’d better be over here in five minutes, or you’ll have a lot more to worry about.

--I’m going to *&^% kill you, you &^%*# *@^! I’m going to hunt you down and

Six hours ago. Then nothing.

Today’s the day.

Oh crap. Ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapoh--

Heavy with foreboding, he found the remote and turned on the TV.

It was the top news story on all the channels. There, splashed across the screen, was footage of his office building.

Or half of it, anyways.

The side appeared to have been peeled off, and the building lay open, the floors and rooms visible in cross-section like a dollhouse.

From this angle of the aerial footage, the sub-floors were visible. He could look down and see the underground layers, the vast subterranean labs where most of the actual work had been done.

And none of his coworkers--former coworkers--could be seen. According to reports, authorities were just starting to ID the bodies.

This time he made it to the toilet before vomiting.

~~~

He spent the next twenty-four hours glued to the news, huddled on the couch, alternating schizophrenically between deep sorrow and abject terror.

The story unfolded as more and more footage became available. Reporters raced to find the videos of bystanders and add them to the news cycle. Live footage of the Anschwer-Heston Corporate LLC building changed as police tape went up and investigators from a dozen national agencies combed through the place.

There were computers there. Events had happened in a hurry. There wouldn’t have been time to wipe any data. There was a record of him in there, George knew. Surely someone would notice he hadn’t been at work when everything went down.

He could expect a knock on his door at any minute.

He’d known they’d been building up to something big. He hadn’t known what, exactly; upper management kept the details to themselves. He’d just been told to make sure his equipment was in top shape and be ready to go at a moment’s notice.

He wasn’t a complete fool. He’d known it had something to do with the Port, the huge stage that Vanelle’s team had been working on non-stop for months now. He’d heard enough to know that, when she turned it on, it would open a hole in the fabric of space-time and allow massive transport of people and gear to any point on Earth.

Or, it would tear a hole in the fabric of space-time and destroy reality. As far as he knew, it hadn’t ever been turned on before.

Today’s the day.

It was mid-day when the stations ran out of footage and started to loop. A few hours later the ExoForce team completed their debriefings, and a whole batch of new video was released to the public.

Things really changed, George thought, when the super twits started wearing GoPros to take down the super-villains.

Not that George was a super-villain. He wasn’t sure he even counted as a villain. Maybe he rated sidekick.

After he had watched all of that footage, sanitized, on the news channels, he was able to view the original, raw footage on YouTube.

There was Excalibre in his preposterous (bullet-proof, laser-proof) golden armor, bursting into the room, laser-guided micro-missiles blazing. There was the Murdilator (George knew him as Bernie), diving behind a console and not quite making it. There was OmegaStorm, channeling the electricity of the room, overloading the Port in what amounted to a catfight with Vanelle. And there was Vanelle, in all her sleek dark femme fatale glory, standing with her Port to the bitter end, the captain going down with the ship.

Vanelle definitely qualified as a super-villain. She and Extremis had built AHC together from the ground up. She’d also been sleeping with half the guys in AHC. Everyone knew, except Extremis. He also qualified as a super-villain, and no one dared tell him what his woman got up to after hours.

And there was George’s own equipment, the exo-suit that made him Mace, being blasted by Peregrine, of all people.

George ground his teeth when he saw that. He’d tangled with Peregrine before. Stupid Perry, with his ugly blue-and-gray suit. He barely qualified as a super. He had no special abilities, just a highly experimental pair of wings. Give a guy the ability to fly, and he thinks he’s a vigilante.

He wondered if Perry had even realized the suit was empty when he blasted it. Was the idiot celebrating even now, doing shots as he told the rest of the team how he took out Mace single-handedly?

And there was Pestilence, who’d taken matters into her own hands, lying on the floor of her lab without a scratch on her, sightless eyes staring at the broken ceiling. She’d died with a vial in her hand and foam on her lips.

Apparently, she wasn’t immune to everything in the lab.

And Extremis, who’d sent text messages just a short time before it all hit the fan, bound and gagged and being led away in specialized handcuffs.

Even as he grieved, that sight of Extremis simultaneously angered and terrified George. Angered, because the greatest super-villain in the city (maybe the country--maybe the world) shouldn’t be treated like a common criminal. And terrified, since his being alive meant he could talk about associates who hadn’t shown up for work that day.

George had to get out of there. He had to go to ground, somehow, get himself lost. But he lay immobilized on the couch as the news cycle continued on all the screens around him.

Eventually, basic bodily functions forced him to get up. And it was there, in the bathroom (where he had to admit that he always did his best thinking), that he was able to think beyond the footage that he had seen and realize what he hadn’t seen.

He hadn’t seen any footage that hadn’t been shot at the AHC office building.

Everyone had been called to work there that day. Everyone was in the building for the big day. Even the minor maintenance folks and general lackeys, who normally would staff AHC’s secondary storage facilities, had come to the central location.

The three secondary facilities had sat empty.

They might still be empty.

And though he had seen law enforcement at the AHC in the aftermath of the battle, most of what he had seen were safety crews, assessing the structural integrity of the building.

In a day or two, no doubt, the place would be crawling with white hats. But if he could access the computer system now, before they got to it, he could wipe all evidence of his employment.

He dithered for another two hours. It was risky, of course. But so was remaining here. In the end he gathered a backpack with two changes of clothes and a box of energy bars--just in case--and all the cash he had on hand, and set out on foot.

He didn’t want to hail a cab--he didn’t want anyone to remember him--and so common sense dictated his location. The warehouse near the docks was only three miles from his apartment. It was mostly a receiving location, a place to temporarily stash whatever exotica came in on the ships, but there was some heavy equipment and weaponry permanently stored there. Nothing too dangerous--nothing nuclear or chemical--which was the other reason George chose it. It was the safest of the secondary sites, in more ways than one.

An hour later he was walking the pier, just another pedestrian on an evening stroll, and watching the warehouse out of the corner of his eye. When no one was looking, he ducked into an alcove and set up surveillance. For two hours he sat in the night, getting colder and wetter in the ever-present fog, and saw no signs of life. No one came or went. No lights shone inside or outside. A black-and-white drove by and kept on going, on routine patrol.

It seemed safe. There was only one way to find out. And yet, George couldn’t make himself take that last step, couldn’t make himself cross to the building and let himself in.

You’re being silly, he told himself. You’re Mace, the villain. You’ve battled supers in your exo-suit. You’re still Mace, just without the suit.

Finally, summoning the last of his courage, he crossed the street.

His code still worked on the keypad. His handprint still registered to let him into the building.

The door closed behind him and he breathed heavily in the darkness.

Using his phone as a flashlight, he made his way to the back corner of the warehouse, to the storage locker that was actually an elevator, and down into the command center.

He expected to be jumped the whole way. Every noise made his skin twitch. And he had to bite his lip to keep from crying as the elevator descended. He wanted to close his eyes as the door started to open, but he didn’t dare.

The door slid to reveal a dimly illuminated console bank, humming with computer energy, and devoid of all other signs of life.

He collapsed into the chair, shaking and laughing hysterically as all the nervous energy left his body.

Finally he turned to the keyboard in front of him. He’d been a computer geek, once; he knew his way around this system. All of the security was up front; once he’d gotten in the database’s front door, it was all laid out in front of him.

He was about to go into employment records when another thought occurred to him.

Security cams let him see all outside activity. Internally, no one else was logged onto the system. So he wasn’t about to be interrupted unexpectedly.

He might as well snoop around a little.

God, they had everything on here.

Weapons inventory. Equipment acquisitions. Technical specs. Blueprints. Plans for the Port, and even more exotic experimental machinery. Detailed personnel files for hundreds of people--not only official employees, but unofficial as well: crooked cops, judges, politicians. Financial records.

George gasped audibly when he saw the bottom line, what Extremis and Vanelle had been worth.

He wondered what a super-villain’s will would look like. Those two had no children. Extremis would almost certainly receive a fair trial, and then the death penalty. The state would almost certainly confiscate all the zeroes George saw in front of him.

Unless somebody else confiscated it first.

A little computer magic, a little code legerdemain, and a Swiss bank account not traceable to George grew considerably fatter.

And as he started to wipe his personnel file, the best idea he’d yet had occurred to him.

No one else was coming to lay claim to any of this. The money was more than enough to start over. To build a new exo-suit. To equip it with the exotic weapons whose blueprints he had just looked over.

He would be AHC’s heir. He would build the Anti-Hero Coalition to be bigger and better than it had been before.

And this time, he’d be on the lookout. He’d be careful. No one would stop him: not Peregrine, not OmegaStorm, not Excalibre or any other super.

He dug around and inevitably found a flash drive. Computer geeks were always leaving them laying around. He downloaded all the useful information, then wiped the entire database.

It all rested with him now.

He’d need a new name. Mace had been a good sidekick name, simple and easy. But it was time to step up his game. If he was going to be a super-villain--and he undoubtedly was, now--he would need to sound like it.

Maybe ExtreMace? Could he do the whole legacy thing?

He’d have to think on it.

Of course, he couldn’t do it alone. There was so much to do; he was going to need some help.

He opened a document on the now empty computer, and began drafting a replica of the want-ad that he had answered, somewhat bemusedly, three years ago.

HENCHMEN NEEDED

Super-villain seeks henchmen/women to assist in plans for world domination. Job loyalty an absolute must. Mechanical skills a plus. Long-term job security unknown, but extreme potential payoff. Paranormal skills/abilities not required, but preferable. Serious enquiries only, please.