The Machinist Part One: Malevolence (3 page)

The building
was like a fortress from a science fiction movie, a tower made of countless pillboxes and strangely angled palisades in asymmetric stacks.  The few windows on it were no larger than a few inches wide.  It was a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture.  Nicholas McHenry, finally a free man, raised his one good arm and gave the building his best middle finger.

Chapter
Two

WOOOSH!

The air conditioner in the bus blasted in his face.  Why it was running in the dead of winter was beyond McHenry’s comprehension.  Sitting in the frigid bus for nine hours gave him a lot of time to think about this, and also about his future.  By the time he saw the distant sunrise over New York City’s skyline he’d made up his mind:

His only option was to get back out there
, to be a
supervillain
again.

H
e didn’t have anywhere to stay, and he was too proud to shack up at a YMCA.  As a convicted felon—a superpowered one, no less—his chances of finding a steady paycheck were slim.  And he’d already been offered a leg up by the Network.

T
he bus pulled into the Port Authority as McHenry figured out what his next step would be.  He settled on heading towards “The Hood,” an old Brotherhood dive in the East Village.  He hoped it was still there, but if not, the Fortress was a good alternative: only a few blocks away from the bar, the section formerly known as Stuy Town had been entrenched with villains since long before McHenry had been locked up.  It probably still was.  There were over fifty buildings there, and one in three residents had powers, were armed to the teeth, or both.

McHenry
had the money for a cab but decided to take the forty-or-so-block hike anyway.  He needed to see how the city had changed in his absence.   To get a feel for her again.  With his good arm, he pushed his way through the crowded bus terminal and started walking.

As he navigated
the sea of tourists, businessmen, hot dog vendors, and degenerates, McHenry made note of a few things: Gone, it seemed, were pagers.  Cellphones had gotten significantly smaller, which was not surprising.  Televisions he saw in shop windows had gotten bigger, thinner, and clearer.  Movies had gotten stupider. 

There wasn’t a single phone boot
h in sight.  McHenry chuckled as he wondered where the heroes where changing clothes these days.

I
t also appeared that the psychiatric hospitals had emptied their wards into the streets; a man in a suit was talking loudly to himself as he walked, gesturing as if he were talking to some invisible person.  No one else seemed to take any notice.  McHenry looked around and realized that this man wasn’t unique: dozens of New Yorkers walked around, flapping their mouths at no one in particular.

A thought crossed his mind: Maybe one of
McHenry’s villainous brethren had released some kind of neurotoxin, and this was the start of some scheme to hold the city hostage.

Shit
.

Shit
.

H
e wanted to get back in the game, sure, but he didn’t want to get caught up in the middle of somebody
else
’s Big Plan.  He blinked and activated his HUD, setting it to scan the air for toxins, gases, anything he could think of.  The HUD reported no biological or viral
anything
, aside from the usual Manhattan air pollution.  Interestingly, though, it recognized hundreds—no, thousands—of tiny devices transmitting on low-band radio frequencies.  Although they were poorly encrypted by McHenry’s standards, there appeared to be no malicious nature to them.  What he was more suspicious of, actually, was the fact that they were demonstrating compatibility with his systems.  He resisted the urge to connect to something calling itself “Tommy’s uPad.”

It didn’t take long for him to figure out what was going on; a woman carrying on a conversation with an unseen partner started poking at her ear saying, “Hello?  Hello?  Susan?” 
She fiddled with her hair, extracted an earpiece then repeatedly jabbed her finger against a power button on it.  She cursed the whole time.

Of course
, he thought to himself. 
They’re wireless headsets for phones.

And
based on the pings he was getting, the phones must have some kind of wireless data transmission protocol now as well.  McHenry made a mental note find a computer with a secure modem line later so he could investigate further.

***

It wasn’t even fifteen blocks before McHenry saw his first superhero since leaving Blackiron Penitentiary.

The first one he’d seen
in person, that is.  The televisions scattered all over the city were broadcasting news and celebrity gossip about the capes-and-spandex crowd.  Newly-divorced, forty-year-old hero Silver Streak was dating a heroine half his age from Wisconsin.  Was Stargazer gay?  And so on.

A motorcycle weaved through traffic on Broadway.  The
bike’s passenger held on to the rider with one arm while twisting backwards to fire a handgun into the air.  Seconds after the bike sped past McHenry’s position, a hero flew by only a dozen feet above the traffic.

From what
McHenry could see, the hero wore a blue bodysuit, yellow gloves and cape, and was muscled like a wrestler.  There was a stylized yellow star on the flier’s chest.  The few bullets that came close to the hero as he rocketed through the air were deflected by a translucent golden force field.

T
he hero closed in and snatched the driver and the gunner off of the bike, leaving it to careen into the back of a delivery truck.  Both vehicles exploded, but the hero didn’t take notice.  He flew off holding the two badly bruised thugs by their shirt collars, one in each hand.

The delivery truck
’s driver came running out of a building yelling to high Heaven about insurance, and did anyone get the name of the hero so he could file a report with his company?

“Typical.”
McHenry shook his head and muttered.  At least the heroes were still as irresponsible as he’d remembered. They never cleaned anything up unless there were cameras rolling. He kept going.

***

Half an hour later, McHenry found himself making his way down East 13th Street.  A man his age should’ve been dead on his feet at this point in the jaunt, but his augmented adrenal gland and pain suppression system had kicked in several blocks earlier.  He quietly commended himself for having the foresight to invent those when he was a younger man.

Cars chugged by in the opposite direction.  A
passing bus bore the image of the freshly re-elected President standing shoulder to shoulder with the superhero called Rampart.  The hero’s costume was primarily red, including the retro-style jacket with a row of buttons down one side of his chest.  Everything but his glowing orange eyes, mouth, and chin were covered by a yellow cowl that stretched from his matching cape.  Rampart and the President smiled as the hero gave the camera a yellow-gloved thumbs-up.  Bold text at the bottom of the advert read, “The President and the Titans of Liberty: Keeping America Safe!”

Rampart
was a relatively fresh face in the hero world, but even McHenry knew of him from the television in Blackiron’s cafeteria.  Someone of that level of prestige was hard to miss, even by someone cut off from the rest of the world for fifteen years.  Rampart had come onto the scene a few years back and quickly made a reputation for himself in New York State’s local hero union as not only an indestructible, flying powerhouse but also as a brilliant strategist.  When the Titans’ founding member, a World War II veteran called American Eagle—a patriotic hero bearing a similar set of powers—finally passed away, it was no surprise that Rampart took his place as the leader of the most prestigious of superhero teams.  The Titans of Liberty tended to replace members in terms of their “niche,” so they always had a powerhouse, a sorcerer, a technologist, and so on: Rampart blew all other comers out of the competition during the tryouts for the spot.

McHenry hocked a gob of spit at the bus
on principle, but missed.

As he bore down on the corner of
1st and 13th, he started to pick up the pace.  He rounded the turn and saw the half-mile-tall metal walls of The Fortress two blocks away.

A streak of smoke soared into the air from behind the parapets, traced by bolts of purple plasma and gunfire.  McHenry let his augmented vision take effect and he zoomed in on the streak: It was a hero, his uniform torn and his cape burning, making a hasty exit from
the Fortress.  He must have been a new one, trying to make a name for himself--Even fifteen years ago being a hero in Stuy Town was a death sentence. It hadn’t changed.  McHenry smiled to himself.

The smile faded the moment he turned to his left to push in the door of The Hood and saw a strange new logo on it. 
Artemis Coffee
said green lettering that hovered over the stylized image of a woman firing a bow into the air.  He looked up and through the glass door to where the dirtiest, most dangerous bar in the city once stood, and saw it was occupied by twenty-somethings in badly fitting clothes gabbing away on cellphones or hunched over laptops.  Every one of them had a paper coffee cup either in their hands or in their vicinity.

Then he looked to the counter. 
Wedged in the small space between the cash register and shelves of gourmet gyros and brownies, stood Ivan Stanislav—a fellow villain simply called The Butcher in his heyday, before he retired to take over as the proprietor of The Hood.  It was unmistakably him—You don’t forget the face of the man who had killed fourteen heroes in his time.  But with his bulky frame, thick mustache, Spetsnaz tattoo and facial scars Stanislav looked almost comical in a green apron.

McHenry contemplated this for a moment before pushing the door in all the way and stepping inside.  If the Brotherhood had changed its name, this coffee shop could still be a front business.  It was certainly less suspicious, if you didn’t take the infamous
hero-murderer manning the register into account.

“What is like?” Asked
Stanislav without looking up from what he was doing.

“A job,” McHenry replied
tersely.

“Not hiring,”
Stanislav started to say before looking up.  “Try—Mac!  Is you!”

The huge man reached over the register to embrace McHenry in a bear hug. 
McHenry’s heart skipped a beat—the Butcher was capable of snapping a car in half over his knee.  Some nick-nacks fell to the floor with a crash.  Stanislav released the smaller man as he felt the confused stares of his customers on him.

“Of course, anything for old friend.”  He gestured.  “Come to back.”

McHenry walked around the counter and followed him into the back room, his pulse still racing.

“How long gone, ten years?”
Stanislav inquired.

“Fifteen,” replied McHenry.

“Fifteen years, is shame!”  A stack of cardboard boxes crinkled under the larger man’s weight as he leaned back on them.  “You missed very much.”

“We had the news.”

“Ah … not miss so much, then.”

“I
...,” McHenry started, pausing to contemplate his words before he spoke.  “Are you still … in?”

“Oh, yes!”
Stanislav laughed.  “Coffee shop chain,
much
better cover--Is global, you know?  Excellent money laundering scheme!”

McHenry nodded.  That was actually pretty brilliant.  But there was more. 
Stanislav kept going: “Side-benefit, too: Heroes come in after patrols, bitch about day.  We hear everything.  All plans.  All girlfriends’ names.  Everything, none suspect.”

“Amazing,” McHenry chuckled
and then looked Stanislav squarely in the eyes.  “I need a favor.”

“Anything.”

“Someone told me the Network would give me the hookup.”

Stanislav
nodded.  “What is you need?”

“Somewhere to sleep.  Some gear.  I’m getting back in.”

“I can do.”

Stanislav
punched the box between his legs, tearing into it.  He retracted his hand with something in it, which he then tossed over to McHenry.  McHenry caught the little plastic-wrapped rectangle with his good hand.

“Have brownie,” said
Stanislav.  “I make call.”

The moment
Stanislav stepped out the back door of the shop McHenry tore open the packaging and chomped down on the brownie.  After fifteen years of prison food, he was in Heaven.

Stanislav
was back in a minute or two, and gave McHenry an address four blocks south.  He sent him on his way with a paper cup of hot cocoa and a plastic bag full of individually-wrapped brownies.  They were devoured before McHenry even got near his destination.

The entire building was plastered in demolition notices that hadn’t yet been enforced, and McHenry didn’t see
any other people as he made his way up the creaking stairs, but he heard some yelling as he passed a middle floor.  He made his way up to the top floor as per Stanislav’s directions.

He came to the door of the apartment in question, and saw a key sticking out of the lock.

McHenry pushed the door open, pocketed the key and stepped inside.  There was no furniture in the apartment.  A bare mattress was laid out on the hardwood floor next to a radiator.  He bent down, put the cup on the floor.

He blinked and once again his vision turned
grayscale.  Data points appeared in his frame of view.