Origins of a D-List Supervillain (9 page)

“You’re reading my mind!” I accused.

“No,” she answered. “I am a receiving empath. My gift does not reach into your thoughts, but it does provide me insight to your attitudes and motivations. Better luck next year.”

I could tell the rest of the vote was going to be a formality, but that’s when the lights went out and the alarms began ringing.

All six of us stared at each other, wondering what to do for about thirty seconds.

The Big Voice activated and said,
“There is an attempted breakout underway in the lower levels. This is not a drill!”

A guard in a regular uniform opened the door and addressed the parole board members, “Let’s get you out of here!”

“Is the situation serious?” The chairperson asked.

She was answered by a low rumbling, which shook the floor, at which point they dropped everything and ran to the door.

“What about me?” I protested, not wanting to die.

The guard gave me a dismissive look and said, “You sit your ass back down and stay here! Someone will come and get you eventually. All right everyone, remain calm, follow me, and I will get you to your transport in the courtyard.”

The guard lingered long enough to lock the door before hustling the important people down the corridor. With little else to do, I stood and went to the window amidst the alarms. An eight man squad wearing Pummeler suits equipped with fifty caliber machine guns pounded their way across the concrete below, heading for the elevator staging area.

There was a second explosion that sounded louder this time and I wondered how badly out of control the situation was going to get. I walked over to the table and wondered if I should flip it over to make a barricade...and rifle through all the things the board members left behind.

It’s not like I’m already not in prison! Why the hell not?

The empath’s purse had her cellphone in it. I thought about calling someone, but didn’t know who or if I’d get a signal.

My parents? Nah! They don’t even like my letters. Bobby? Maybe, but he’d just laugh at this whole mess, plus he only gave me a postal box address to contact him.

I’d settled on calling Joey, but then saw that she’d password protected her phone and set it aside. There was also a half-full pack of chewing gum, which was nice, and three twenties and two ones. I had no use for them, but I took them anyway. At my current salary of a dollar twenty-five per hour in the laundry room, this was more than I earned in a week.

Walking back to the window, I saw my parole board climbing into a van when a blur shot by them. Blinking rapidly, I tried to follow the shape’s progress as it careened around the prison yard. It hopped on the back of one of the Pummeler suits and did a number that reminded me of the Tasmanian Devil from the old cartoons and left a bleeding man in a disabled suit sprawled on the ground.

That must be Maxine Velocity! She’s like the fifth fastest person on the planet.

I picked my brain for what I could remember from Ultradipshit’s ATAI. She couldn’t break the sound barrier and she topped out around six hundred miles per hour, but more importantly, she was the niece of General Devious. Devious was one of the big kahunas of the supervillain world. Someone said Maxine was up on the heavy hitters’ level and if she was out, I wondered how many others might be as well.

A flash of lightning struck another Pummeler and sent him into a cybernetic seizure. That caused the fifty cal to sweep right across the van, riddling it with bullets. I cringed and turned away, hoping that some of the people I was just sitting across from might still be alive.

That hope was dashed when the fuel tank exploded.

Sure, they weren’t going to set me free, but they didn’t deserve that! Why the hell didn’t the guards take them to a safe room or something? Idiots!

The energy reformed into E.M. Pulsive, who looked like he’d found a new way to escape today. He waved other villains onward and I started backing away from the window as energy weapons from the towers began firing down on the main yard as everything went pear-shaped down there.

It’s a mass breakout. Looks like the highest security level has been breached.

If the bullets and the explosion hadn’t killed the occupants of the van, the rain of death punishing the courtyard left no doubt to their fate as a dozen of the most dangerous villains in the world fought for their freedom.

For two or three of them, it was the only taste of freedom they’d get. Eddie and Maxine started taking out the turrets, but the prison exacted its price in blood. One of them was ringed with flames when a plasma bolt slammed into him and he exploded in a brilliant blast that left me rubbing my eyes.

That might have been Fiery Doom,
I thought while trying to focus. I tried looking for a body, but there was only a twenty foot diameter crater where the man had once been.

When a plasma bolt hit and dissolved part of the window ten feet away from me, I revisited my “turn the table over and cower like a scared little girl” idea from before.
Like the four inches of wood would really make a difference!

Even so, it was much better than standing there waiting to be a casualty, and I put myself to work.

Pushing the table over into the corner of the room, I formed a crude little barricade and huddled behind it while Armageddon’s warm up band was playing just outside.

It was there, in my pathetic little fortification, that I looked at the paperwork I’d pushed off the table. There before me was my parole paperwork. The chairperson had been passing it to the rest of the board when all hell broke loose. Three of the five had signed it already while I’d been in the pissing match with the empath and then I noticed the most important sentence I’d ever see, right above the signature block.

Parole has or has not been granted for the prisoner at this time. (Circle one and line out the other)

It wasn’t filled out! She must have been waiting for everyone to sign it first.

A delightfully evil thought occurred to me,
I’m just a circle, a line, and two forged signatures away from freedom.

I dug around in the empath’s purse and found her driver’s license and a pen. After a couple of practice tries on the one dollar bills, I taken earlier, I made my best effort at her name, but that still left me one name short and I had no idea who the last guy was. That’s when I began a frantic search of everything on the floor in hopes of finding some clue of the man’s name and I completely ignored the ongoing apocalypse that no longer concerned me.

My efforts were rewarded when I stumbled on a sign in sheet. Three government employees can’t even talk in the hallway without someone calling it a meeting and producing an attendance sheet.

Saved by procedures! Halle-fricken-lujah!

• • •

It was four hours before someone came and got me and eight more before they had power and a way to get me back to my cell via the damaged main shaft. When the guard said something about rescheduling my hearing, I told them that they were finishing up with me when the breakout occurred. He seemed suspicious, but said he’d take the papers to the acting warden, which didn’t sound great if you were the regular warden.

Guess I’ll just cross my fingers and wait and see what happens.

“What happened out there, mate?” Kenneth asked when I finally returned to the cell, sweet cell, only to find that it smelled like an outhouse. I recalled that the maintenance crews on the way down said that the plumbing, along with the power, lights and just about everything else on the maximum security level was destroyed. Several of the prisoners in the hallway had been drafted into hazmat suit wearing pooper scoopers, and Gunk was being hailed as the hero
du jour
for plugging up the shitters and stopping all the crap from reaching the lowest point in the prison.

On a related note, we’d need new toilets, amongst many other things.

“It was crazy, man! The max security level broke out like nobody’s business. I think a bunch of them made it beyond the gates.”

“Bloody hell, did you see any of them get out?”

“The guards were pretty tight-lipped, but I heard a few of them saying that Maxine Velocity, E.M. Pulsive, The Sea Otter, and Captain Caligula got away for sure. Fiery Doom and Whistlin’ Dick were both killed and there are at least six more that aren’t accounted for.”

Kenneth smiled broadly and said, “Good on them, then.”

“I wonder if we’ll ever hear how they did it.” I commented.

“I’m sure we’ll never know, mate,” he said and I knew something was amiss.

Kenneth didn’t have many tells. He was about as straight a shooter as one could find on this floor full of minor league supervillains. That said, when he was nervous about something he had a tendency to call me “mate” instead of Calvin. He’d done it twice since I’d walked back in.

I let it slide and told him about making parole. He was suitably impressed and gave me a calculating look that said he didn’t quite believe me either.

That night when, all of us bottom feeders had cleaned up “all the shit we could take,” I sat in bed and stared up at the same ceiling I’d looked at every night since I’d arrived, trying to put my finger on what was bothering me. They’d set up port-a-potties in the rec room and a few other spots for us to use. We’d been issued some empty plastic bottles to pee in during the night.

“I wouldn’t make any of your little guys until after they get all this fixed,” I whispered down to my cellmate.

“Good advice,” he replied. “I already have it covered. Night.”

“Night,” I answered.
I’ll miss the way he always makes them dive into the toilets if, they do let me out of here.

The second that thought crossed my mind, everything fell into place in my own little Keyser Söze moment. In my mind, I heard him say how he was caught fighting solo against the East Coast version of The Guardians and how it takes six weeks of dedicated work to grow a proper horde. Then there was a mental montage of him disposing of the little bits of moss he’d been able to make each day, which finished with him mentioning his father’s plumbing business.

Well, I’ll be damned! He’d been stockpiling moss in the pipes for a year now. I wonder how much they paid him to spring all these people. He’s been hinting that he intends to get out of the game when he makes parole. People only do that if they’re beaten down or they hit the jackpot. Damn, they must have paid him a small fortune!

The most badass prison in the world was just punked by a D-List Supervillain and then again by me if the warden buys off on the paperwork. Nice!

Chapter Five

Of Better Guns and High Performance Vibrators

“I was starting to wonder if you were going to show,” I said to the hulking frame standing outside my cheap hotel room.

“Cal Stringel,” Hillbilly Bobby said. “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you for another year or two. Just got back into town and couldn’t believe my eyes when I got your letter. So, how you been?”

Shrugging, I replied, “Down to my last thirty bucks. How are things?”

I didn’t bother to mention that things were pretty dire. I’d actually looked up the nearest homeless shelters and had spent yesterday in one of those temp places where people waited around to see if anyone needed a person for a crappy minimum wage job. The whole
paroled felon
thing hadn’t really been working for me, yet, but perhaps that was about to change.

Things couldn’t have gotten much worse than my oh-so brief stopover in Nebraska. Mom refused to see me and Dad gave me five hundred bucks to get the hell out of Dodge. Yeah, I took his money, which was kind of the idea behind stopping there. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, but that money helped get me here.

“Well, grab your stuff and let’s get you out of this flea trap. Did you check in with the parole office?”

“Some dumbass named Leonard.”

“That’s one of my cousins, Cal. Second or maybe third, hell, I can never get that shit straight,” he said.

“Oh, sorry, man,” I said, verbally backpedaling as fast as I could.

“Nah, Lenny’s a tool and a kissass to boot. I can’t stand the little wuss either, but he’s real easy to fool so he’s got his uses. For instance, he thinks I was on a charter fishing boat this weekend out in the Gulf.”

“I’m guessing you weren’t,” I said.

“Someone needed a little muscle to convince a guy who owed him money to pay up—easy dough. Guy pissed his pants when I crushed a brick in my hand and he ponied up. I didn’t even have to break any bones. It was actually kinda disappointing.”

Nodding my head, I started flinging my meager belongings back into my duffel bags and made a mental note to not get on Bobby’s bad side—ever. Out in the parking lot, the strongman waited in his full-sized Dodge pickup while I checked out of this fleabag motel.

The truck looked new and I began to wonder how much crime really did pay. Tossing my bags into the bed, I climbed into the passenger seat and said, “So, what does Lenny think you’re doing to earn an honest living?”

Bobby laughed and replied, “Of course, I’m on the straight and narrow these days. Five nights a week, I’m a bouncer at Floozies.”

“Floozies?”

“Titty bar,” he said, as if it explained everything.

Oddly enough, it did.

“I’ll put in a word with Chubby and get you on the payroll. You’re a little too scrawny for bouncing, but maybe you can DJ, work the bar, or mop up.”

“How much does he pay?”

“Nothing,” Bobby answered. “I pay him, and he pays me most of the money I gave him right back. C’mon Cal, you worked in a laundry at the prison, only we ain’t washin’ no clothes anymore. You’re on the outside now and it’s time to get down to business.”

The hulking brute driving gave me his best “you’re so smart, but you’re so dumb” look that made me feel like an idiot. Bobby used the bar to launder his ill-gotten money. His scheme was practical and simplistic, which made me realize that I still had much to learn about being a supervillain.