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  “Who’s coming?” she asked quietly.

  “What?”

  “Before the lethal injection in the morning. Who’s coming to save you?”

  “No one, Sheryl. No one’s coming to save me.”

  She sat back, unconvinced. “You’re just going to let them execute you.”

  “Oh, you’re going to execute me. There is no them.”

  She stared. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Oh come on, Sheryl, you’re society’s seeker of truth. The watchdog all the other dogs watch. I’ve been judged by a jury of my peers. Your peers, too.”

  She tapped the tip of her pen on the pad, making tiny black dots. “Is this where you blame society for your own actions? Society made you kill those children, and now society has judged you?”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” he said. “I’m absolutely responsible for killing everyone I’ve ever killed.” He lowered his voice and looked left, then right, as if imparting a valuable secret. He leaned in toward her. “And I enjoyed it, too.”

  “Supervillains kill superheroes,” she said for something to say. “It’s in the job description.”

  “That’s not why I was given the death sentence. I mean, partly—but not really.”

  “No. So, why the children?”

  “I’ve answered already, but the more complete answer will take a little longer. How much time do we have left?”

  She glanced at her iPhone. “A little under half an hour.”

  He nodded, seemingly disappointed. “Short version it is, then.”

  Halleck

  “The Metamorphosis changed everything, Sheryl. When Hitler exploded that first A-bomb over Stalingrad in ’43, he didn’t just kill millions of Russians. The fallout in the atmosphere caused the mutation in human DNA we now call supercharging. Accelerated evolution in certain individuals. And the Powered were born.”

  Stone glanced at her iPhone. “I know this history. Everyone knows it. You’re not answering—”

  “I am answering your question!”

  The reporter pressed backward against the unmoving metal chair. The chains tittered as he composed himself.

  “My apologies, Sheryl. An impending execution can make a man … testy.” Clearing his throat, he continued. “If the U.S. hadn’t fast-tracked its own Manhattan Project, we’d all be saluting in German today. The day we bombed that Nazi super-soldier, Blitzkrieg, into dust was the real end of Hitler’s Third Reich, long before he offed himself in that bunker.

  “But then the Cold War with the Russians happened. They brought their own Powered national icon, Molotok, to the table. So the U.S. began experimenting with injecting altered Uranium isotopes first into soldiers and later into citizens, desperate to create its own weapon to counter Molotok. Remember all those movie shorts about The Patriot in his red, white, and blue tights in the ’60s? And—”

  She picked up the iPhone and turned it to face him. “Time, Halleck. You’re running out of time.”

  “Now, we have an entire race,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “a sub-race of humanity that can rule the rest with ease. Mother Nature favors a newer model from her assembly line. The chaos around us today—the random killings, the international terror, the common lack of decency between human beings. We’ve become a world of bullies driven by fear.”

  “Fear of what?”

  “Of the growing imbalance, Sheryl. Of the absolute terror of obsolescence.” He sat back and looked at nothing on the bare wall. “You’ve seen the protests in the streets. The Internet videos streaming the delight of a handful of kids as someone suffers, even dies, while they laugh into their smartphone camera. Human society is sliding as it realizes the end is nigh. The Powered were born from an act of evil. And now, after three generations of them growing and evolving and becoming ever more powerful—of being accepted into, even worshipped by society—people are finally starting to see the writing on the wall. The epigraph of the human race on the headstone of history: We did it to ourselves.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what reality you live in, Professor. But I see a team of heroes—The Eagle, Shieldwall, Lightspeed—who put themselves on the line every day to defeat petty criminals and so-called masterminds like you. It’s the Powered like you and the Legion of Anarchy—those are the ones we need to fear. Anyone who would kill innocent children—”

  “Speaking of which,” he said, injecting solemnity into his voice. “I was so sorry to hear about little Ellie a couple of years back. Your interview about it afterward was very brave. And no doubt helped that children’s hospital get back on its feet. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is a horrible—”

  “Stop talking,” she said almost too quietly to hear.

  “Having your other children must have been a great solace for you and your husband.”

  “Stop talking! Stop talking about my daughter! Stop talking about my family!”

  She stood up from the table, her calves thumping against the unyielding chair. Turning her back, she strode toward the cell door.

  Clack … clack … clack.

  “Hearing their names in your mouth makes my skin crawl,” she whispered.

  “They had to be killed,” he said simply.

  “What?” Stone stood straight, unmoving. “What did you say?”

  Halleck tapped an index finger on the table, and chain links tapped with it. “The children in the heroes’ headquarters. Because the Powered need to die. And better to kill them young, before their powers mature. Before they and their whole sub-race plants the rest of us in the graveyard.”

  She took a deep breath and turned slowly.

  “Let me see if I understand,” she said quietly. “The reason you killed those children was because—”

  “Yes?”

  “—they had superpowers.”

  “Yes.”

  Clack-clack-clack.

  Her shadow fell across him.

  “You’re insane!”

  “On the contrary, Sheryl. I’ve never been more clear-headed about anything in my entire life.”

  The door yawed open, and Murphy stepped in. “Miss Stone, please step back. For your own safety, you understand, ma’am.”

  She cast her wide eyes at the door. But she didn’t move.

  “Now, Miss Stone,” Murphy said with a little of the prisoner-will-comply in his voice. “And please resume your seat.”

  She nodded and stepped away to sit down again.

  Murphy swung the heavy door closed.

  “Let’s get back to why I’m here,” she said with forced calm. “To summarize—”

  “Tick-tock-tick....”

  “You organized the Legion of Anarchy to attack TJHQ to murder innocent children—”

  “—not so innocent—”

  “—to prevent the extinction of mankind as we know it?”

  He took a moment. “It does sound a bit arrogant, when you say it like that. I’d say: I’m one soldier in a shadow war no one really acknowledges because they’re too afraid of being so afraid.”

  Her reporter’s face had displaced the mother’s again. “Oh … do elaborate.” She turned the recorder more squarely toward him.

  “Society sees the Powered as some great cosmic cage match, Good versus Evil. Hero or villain, who they are as individuals—how what they do aligns with who they are—is turned up to eleven, to put it in terms my former students might appreciate. Driven by an amplified sense of morality, heroes are heroic—they rescue victims from crimes and cats from trees. Villains are despotic—augmented ambition drives their lusts for money and power and whatever else society says they can’t have. But do you see where that leads, Sheryl? Ultimately, and with finality?”

  “The top story on the evening news?”

  He curled his lip as if smelling something unpleasant. “The extinction of humanity, my dear. Of you and all you love and all that we, as a race, could ever be.”

  She blinked, and in her eyes, he read the singular th
read of her racing thoughts: Insane.

  “Oh, and you missed my clue earlier.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

  “Clue? What clue?”

  “I’m not Powered.”

  That stopped her short. “You’re not … you have no superpowers?”

  “Beyond my boyish charm? Not a one.”

  Her eyes scoured his face for the telltale signs of an obvious lie. “But it’s always been assumed that when you organized the Legion, when you planned those robberies across Europe, when you assaulted TJHQ … that it was your enhanced intellect that allowed you to—”

  “God given, mother improved.” He tapped his temple. “And absolutely, one-hundred percent, Grade-A homo sapien.” Leaning forward, he gave her a sly look. “Call me crazy if you like, but I’m no hypocrite.”

  Stone

  “If that’s true,” she said, “then why ally yourself with the Legion? If you hate the Powered so much, why lead them for so many years?”

  “Weapons in a war, Sheryl,” Halleck said. “That’s all they ever were to me. Means to an end. All those robberies you mentioned? Funding for the cause.”

  “So, you claim that, all along, from day one, you planned to kill those children? And everything you did with the Legion all those years was aimed at doing that?”

  “No,” he allowed, tracing the flaking paint on the table. “When Team Justice brought them all into their headquarters after the Child Separation Act began to be enforced, that’s when I saw my opportunity. And see, there’s my point. Even the U.S. government finally acknowledged the danger posed by the Powered—the very sub-race it had helped create—when it signed that legislation into law. Ordering genetic testing on kids when they get their first round of shots and taking those with latent Power markers in their genetic code from their parents … and you call me cruel?”

  “Like the president said, the new law was to protect both the children and their parents from harm, from accidents when—”

  “He gives great speeches, doesn’t he? It’s amazing how one can make shit smell like roses with just the right words sprinkled on top. You’re a reporter, Sheryl, look beneath the surface.” He placed his elbows on the table and joined his hands together. “Fear of extinction. That was the real motive for the law.”

  She shook her head to clear it.

  “Even Team Justice saw it,” he continued. “That’s why, in the dead of night, they took those kids from the government’s processing center and brought them to the Headquarters in the first place. And in the ten years since all that happened, the tensions have only gotten worse. Humanity is eating itself up with violence. Some of the heroes have even given up, retired, seeped into the cracks of society to try and live a normal life. As if they could! And all they fought so hard to preserve? Crumbling from within … and pulling everything built on top of it down with it.”

  She slammed her fist down in front of him. “Because of what you did!” Her voice thrummed along the ringing metal of the table top. Murphy lumbered outside the door, but it remained shut. “Because of your brutal act of murdering all those children!”

  Halleck dragged the chains to rest a palm against his chest. The other reached out to cover her clenched fist with his massive hand. “Moi? You give me too much credit—”

  She jerked her hand away, a look of disgust on her face. “All those children; Viking and Scarlet Specter; years of conflict since then, with fingers pointing in every direction.” She could feel the anger welling into fury behind tears, tears she refused to spill in front of him. “It all started with your one act of ultimate evil: killing those children! You created this moral black hole that no one seems to know how to get out of. It’s like we all know, as a species, that we’re headed for a cliff and—”

  “—don’t know how to prevent the fall?” Like before, he seemed to stare at her through the dark, distant tunnel of his own mind. “Yes, that’s exactly it, Sheryl. The ultimate existential crisis of the human race. But my one act, senseless as you call it, has pushed society over the cliff? Hitler’s going to be so jealous when I tell him.”

  Her heart was beating too fast. Her breathing rasped in her chest. Her ears burned hot with rage.

  “I wonder,” said Halleck almost wistfully. “Would little Ellie have developed powers? Was, perhaps, the SIDS that stole her from you a mercy in the end?”

  She raised her eyes to meet his. And this time, it was her stare that was distant. Her eyes that were empty and devoid of human caring.

  “If any man—”

  “Yes? Don’t stop now, Sheryl. You’re almost there.”

  “If any man deserves to have manufactured poison injected into his veins … to feel his lungs betray him, inch by inch, as he takes in less and less air … to see the blackness of oblivion encircle his vision, closing in with the final darkness of the grave—it’s you, Harold Halleck.”

  “My, oh my … reading books all those years in college? Time well spent, Sheryl. Time well spent!”

  She began to gather her things.

  “Out of time already?”

  “You are,” she said, reveling in that reality to come. “In about nine hours or so, I believe.”

  “Ouch. Outrageous fortune, indeed.”

  “Guard!”

  “Wait, Sheryl, before you go....”

  The door creaked open. Murphy loomed in the archway. She spared Halleck a final look of contempt.

  “You will write the story?”

  Halleck

  “Oh, you bet your ass I’ll write the story. Everything you’ve said—I want the world to know all about the monster it’s putting to death. And how absolutely justified your end is. Maybe that closure—just maybe it’ll help begin to heal all that’s happened since.”

  He affected a sympathetic smile. “Alas, I’ll have to miss your broadcast. And I so look forward to them. I’ll bet CNN, FOX, MSNBC—I bet they all pick it up.”

  She glanced at Murphy, who shrugged as if to say, I quit trying to figure out his particular brand of crazy a long time ago.

  The chain dragged across the table again as he raised one arm. Stone stared at his proffered hand.

  “I always shake hands with my partners,” he said. “And you, my dear, are my partner in truth today.”

  With a final, disbelieving look, she left him hanging. Murphy barely avoided being shoved aside as she exited.

  “You’re going to have such a career ahead of you, Sheryl!” Halleck called after her. “You’ll be the most important commentator the world has ever known! Believe in yourself and the rest of the world will believe in you, too!”

  The door moaned shut. The tumblers secured it to the wall.

  “So, there it is, then,” he said to no one as Murphy’s boots escorted her high heels away. “The final piece is in place. Let’s see if the lesson plan takes hold, Professor.”

  Some people learn by reading, some by watching, some by listening. Some learn interactively, by doing.

  When Sheryl’s story runs, everyone will read it. Everyone will watch. Everyone will listen.

  The twenty-four hour news cycle would pick it up and run it over and over and over again: the last, sick musings of the most notorious supervillain of all time.

  The Child Killer. Professor Death.

  The broadcast would be like a flare shot into a cloudy sky, a beacon fire lit to signal the final assault in a war that all had known, had feared, was coming. And seeing it over and over and over again—programmed by the repetition—so many would do.

  People would take to the streets. Billions of humans—all those who adored him; all those who abhorred him. They’d find one another and fight one another. Heroes and villains alike would fall beneath the scurrying ant mound the Earth was about to become.

  And once the Powered were gone—a new, stronger, uncontaminated human race could emerge from the ashes of the old. And, with luck, supercharging would itself become extinct, like an ancient virus entombed, buried with its dead hosts.

&n
bsp; Halleck took a moment to visualize the future he’d never see, where bloody chaos had cleansed the world with red fire. The wolf’s smile spreading across his lips drooped with a lopsided, sadistic kind of sadness.

  Too bad I won’t be around to enjoy the show.

  A Word From Chris Pourteau

  I hope you enjoyed reading “Supervillainy 101. An Introduction to Anarchy” as much as I enjoyed writing it. I’ve been a comic book geek for as long as I could read (1977 and 1978 seem to have been my big years, if my boxful of comics is any indication). I seeded some Easter eggs for readers in my story as a nod to what those comics meant to me growing up.

  Comics opened my imagination to the possibilities of what can be while firmly grounding me (via their multi-paneled morality plays) in what heroes should be. Without those comic books growing up—my favorites were Batman and Spider-Man—I doubt I’d be a writer today; or, even, a lover of reading.

  If you’d like to let me know what you think of “Supervillainy 101. An Introduction to Anarchy” or if you just want to say howdy, feel free to email me at [email protected]. If you’d like to find out more about me or read more of my stuff, sign up for my monthly newsletter. I promise not to spam, and I’ll send you free stuff.

  To give you a sense of my eclectic writing habits, my first novel, Shadows Burned In (a family saga, near-future, psychological thriller), won the 2015 eLite Book Award Gold Medal for Literary Fiction. In 2015, I edited and produced the collection Tails of the Apocalypse, which contains short stories set in different apocalyptic scenarios and feature animals as main characters. My own contribution, “Unconditional”—which was well-received when it was published on its own earlier that year and more or less generated the idea for Tails as a result—is part of the collection. You can check out my catalog of fiction on Amazon.

  TICK TOCK

  BY CHRISTOPHER J. VALIN

  TICK TOCK

  A RAPTORVERSE STORY

  BY CHRISTOPHER J. VALIN