Hench

Sunshine.

Sunshine stabbing him, assaulting him, hijacking him like a mugger on a cheap amphetamine high.

George groaned and rolled over.

Wrong move.

His stomach roiled, tossing like 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 bleary eyes. He really should clean that up before it stained. He should get up, get moving, eat some breakfast.

His stomach churned again in response.

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 back into a fitful sleep.

***

He was dimly aware, as he drifted in and out of awareness and did laps between his bed and the bathroom, of his phone beeping at him throughout 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 lucidity hours later. Bathed in the rosy twilight glow, he cautiously sat up in bed. His stomach still hurt, but it was more the memory of pain, the ache of a muscle that had been worked too hard. The thought of food was actually appealing 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. 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 the 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, just now remembering the series of beeps hours ago.

His hand shaking, breathing heavily, he listened to the increasingly staticky string of messages from his boss.

“Hey, where are you?”

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

“George, today’s the day… Get th…uck over here.”

“What are you waiting for, you motherf…bastard! Get your stu…ass in here…NOW!”

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

“I’m going to fu…kill you, you cocks…piece of sh…! I’m going to fu…hunt you down and…”

Then nothing. For six hours.

Today’s the day.

Oh crap. Ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapoh–

Shivering with foreboding, he scrambled for the remote and turned on the TV.

It was the top news story on every channel. 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 like a dollhouse in cross-section.

With the aerial footage, the sub-floors were unmistakable, the underground layers and 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 bystanders’ videos and add them to the news cycle. Live footage of the Anschwer-Heston Corporate LLC building changed as police tape went up and officials 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 expected a knock on his door at any minute.

He’d known they’d been building up to something big. Upper management had kept the details to themselves, but he’d been told to make sure his equipment was in top shape and 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. He’d heard enough whispers to know that when she finally flipped the switch, it would open a hole in the fabric of space-time and allow massive transportation 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…

The stations ran out of footage and started to loop the next morning. And then the ExoForce team completed their debriefings, and a whole new batch of video was released to the public.

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

George wasn’t a super-villain, of course. He wasn’t sure he even counted as a villain. Maybe he rated sidekick.

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

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 supreme 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 her 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 gritted his teeth. 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 some gear, and he thinks he’s a vigilante.

He wondered if Perry had even realized the suit was empty when he had 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 fingers and foam on her lips. 

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

And there was Extremis, who’d left George messages moments before it had all gone down, 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 he was still alive, and that 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 huddled 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 into the main building for the big day. Even the general lackeys and minor maintenance folks, who would normally staff AHC’s secondary facilities, had come to the central location.

The three secondary facilities had sat empty.

They might still be empty.

And though there were plenty of law officials at the AHC in the aftermath of the battle, most of what he had seen were safety crews and first responders, assessing the building’s structural integrity and searching for survivors.

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 in his apartment. Finally, he gathered a backpack with two changes of clothing and a box of energy bars–just in case–and all the cash he had on hand, and he 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 some heavy equipment and weaponry were permanently stored there. Nothing too dangerous–nothing nuclear or chemical–which was the other reason George chose it. In multiple ways, it was the safest of the secondary sites.

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 out. A black-and-white drove by and kept going, just a 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. You’re a villain. You’ve battled supers in your exo-suit. You’re still Mace now, just without the suit.

Finally, summoning a deep breath and the last of his courage, he sprinted across the street.

His code still worked on the keypad. His handprint still 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 down to the command center.

Every noise made his skin twitch. He expected to be jumped at any second. He trembled as the elevator door closed and locked him in a too-small space, and he had to bite his lip to keep from crying as he descended. He wanted to close his eyes as he reached the bottom, 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 took three steps and collapsed into a chair, shaking and laughing hysterically as all the nervous energy left his body.

Finally, with a shuddering exhalation, 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, and usage stats told him 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 there.

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 looked 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 them 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, found a flash drive, and downloaded all the useful information. Then he 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 absolutely was, now–he would need to sound like it.

ExtreMace? Could he do the whole legacy thing? Or should he start completely fresh?

He’d have to think on it.

He’d have to lie low for a while. Relocating was imperative; getting out of the country would be ideal. And there was so much to do; he couldn’t do it alone. He was going to need help.

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

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 inquiries only, please.