Chapter 5
Speeches. They always felt the need to give speeches.
That was the thought going through the Doctor's mind as he quickly flipped his would-be assassin over his head and sent her crashing to the floor. Before she knew what had gone wrong one forearm had the knife-hand pinned to the ground while the other forearm was on her throat cutting off her air supply. The Doctor surveyed his foe with a mixture of curiosity, annoyance, and disdain.
“Tricky little minx; you’ll be dropping the knife now.” He spat at her. He could see the fiery hatred in her eyes. She clung to the knife and he could feel her pressing harder in vain to try and get at him.
“That was not a request; merely a statement of fact. Whether voluntarily or through unconsciousness, I promise you that the knife will fall from your hand momentarily.”
The hatred was still there, but it was starting to give way to panic as her lungs started to burn and her heart continued to race. Her face was turning a scarlet that deepened with each passing second and she began to shake uncontrollably. Finally, her grip relaxed and the knife fell to the ground.
Ivan continued to look down at her and contemplated whether or not to release his grip or finish the job and eliminate the threat. The part of him that was curious won out, and he released her as he picked the blade up from the ground.
He took a few steps back and surveyed her again as she began coughing and gasping for air. The threat was over; he had won. But along with a sense of triumph and a modicum of relief, he suddenly felt very angry.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he glared at her. “How long have you been planning this for? How many nights have you sat at home and thought about that one moment when you would have me at your mercy?”
He started pacing back and forth, and the anger was flowing freely.
“I haven’t the slightest idea how the hell you managed to get in here – and believe me that yours will not be the only head to roll for that infraction – but the fact that you did so already made you 95% more effective than any of the other delusional fools who thought they were a match for me.”
Now he knelt down next to her and put his face close to hers.
“And you know what? You almost pulled it off. You happened to pick just exactly the right moment where my thoughts were elsewhere. Ordinarily I’ve got the awareness of a gazelle. I’ve long assumed, rightfully I might add, that at any given time there were at least 100 people actively plotting to kill me. But I’ll admit that you caught me completely off my game tonight. I honestly had no idea you were there. Do you know how I discovered you were there?” He looked expectantly at her. She remained silent.
He suddenly grabbed her by the collar and shouted, “When you opened your mouth and told me!!!” He let go of her shirt and she collapsed in a heap again. He got up and started pacing again.
“God, the stupidity! I mean, what is the point of sneaking up on someone to gain the element of surprise if you’re just going to broadcast your presence the very second you’re in reach. It just defies belief. Do you realize that you chose the exact, precisely worst moment to do that? Honestly, you did, and I’ll prove it to you. Had you waited until after you slit my throat there’s a good chance I would have retained consciousness for a good couple of minutes before bleeding out. Plenty of time for speeches then. But let’s say you were insistent on saying your piece before the cutting. You would have been better off shouting at me from the doorway! At least then you would have had a chance to throw the damn knife at me! But you know what upsets me more than anything else?” he asked rhetorically; “It’s the fact that someone this stupid almost succeeded in killing me!!”
As the Doctor stood ranting, Meg was staggering onto all fours and, for lack of a better plan, was crawling very slowly towards the door. As the Doctor started railing about it “being like Hitler getting assassinated by Elmer Fudd” she had almost managed to reach the door when she ran headlong into two pairs of legs that belonged to two of the Doctor’s henchmen. The Doctor turned and noticed them.
“Ah; at long last my loyal, faithful, completely worthless security detail. Either of you two gentlemen see something in here that seems a bit amiss?”
The henchmen said nothing as they picked Meg up and secured her.
“Any idea how this happened?” he inquired of them. The cold stare and colder smile bore into them. Meg was not the only one in danger now.
The henchman on the right cleared his throat. “Your excellence; we found Frank’s body by the back door. He was stabbed.”
“Ah, so the minx does know how to act after all.” Ivan stood in front of Meg and lifted her chin with his hand so he could look into her eyes. “Bet you didn’t have any speeches for him did you? No? Well, then I guess we’ve learned something today haven’t we?”
He turned to his men and said “Take her out front. Cut her head off and display it along with the rest.”
He turned to head back to his desk when he suddenly became aware of something. His pulse was racing and his temper was flaring. He was angry and triumphant, satisfied and full of disdain. In short, he was feeling more alive right now than he had in months. He turned back to his men as they began to lead Meg to her execution.
“Hold that order, gentlemen. I might have found a better use for this one.”
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Evil Genius (Part 7)
Chapter 4
As much as everyone in the world was inconvenienced by the collapse of civilization and the beginning of the rule of an evil dictator wielding the proverbial iron fist (and sometimes an actual fist), it’s probably true that the one person who’d gotten the worst of it was Megan Courtland. Not only had she suffered what certainly seemed like the apocalypse along with everybody else, she had the added misfortune of being the girlfriend of the man whose death made all of it possible.
Immediately following that fateful day in Decatur, she shared in everyone’s stunned shock. As that gave way to grief, she initially received at least a modicum of emotional support. But once the full scale of The Doctor’s plan began to be revealed, she was pretty much left to cope on her own.
Unable to fully process events as they unfolded, her coping took the form of revenge fantasies. Somehow, someway she would see to it that the Doctor died a horrible and excruciating death at her hands. The most elaborate plan she devised involved thumbtacks, a melon baller, both a Phillips and flat head screwdriver, baby oil, a welding torch, and a car battery. That one disturbed even her, although she still relished the thought of carrying it out. Eventually though, she reluctantly came to the conclusion that she’d settle for simply having the pleasure of staring down at his corpse, no matter how it got accomplished.
And that’s how it came to be that almost exactly a year to the day after Doctor Destructo vaporized the man she loved, Meg Courtland set out from what was left of her apartment complex in Washington D.C. armed with only a butcher knife and her infinite hatred. She walked solemnly but purposefully down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the rubble of the Capitol building, through the field of disembodied heads on spikes in the National Mall, and arrived at the gates to the White House. Expecting to confront an army of guards, she was shocked to discover very little resistance. Apparently most would-be assassins found the collection of heads on the Mall to be rather discouraging. There were certainly still guards, but they formed a very loose ring around the perimeter and didn’t seem particularly organized or interested in performing regular rounds. So Meg found a vacated spot, clumsily scaled the 7-foot wall, and headed towards the window of the Oval Office. If The Doctor wasn’t in the Oval Office, there really was no Plan B. In all likelihood it would have come down to an impulsive decision between smashing through the window anyway and hoping like hell to find the Doctor before anyone else found her first, and retracing her steps to try again another day. But as with everything else this night, fortune seemed to be shining on her. The Doctor was seated behind his desk; he seemed to be lost in thought and looked perhaps even a little troubled.
“Aw; butchering the human race too much work for you?” she icily thought to herself.
As determined as she was to not let this opportunity slip away, she was also determined to give herself the best chance of success as possible. There were two entrances into the Oval Office. At the moment, Ivan was facing away from one of them. If she somehow could gain access to the interior, there was at least a chance that she could sneak up behind him completely undetected. As a journalist, she had been to the White House on a number of occasions and knew the layout decently enough. There was a back entrance which was no more than 30 feet from the door to the Oval Office. She crept silently towards that entrance and flattened herself against the cool exterior of the house next to the door. From her vantage point she could still see into the Oval Office window. If it came down to it and the Doctor made a move to leave the room, she estimated that she could be across the lawn and through the window in under 5 seconds. He would probably see and would no doubt hear her approaching, and in all likelihood there would be little to no chance of success, but having already laid eyes on him the raw hatred seething in her now would never allow her to turn back now. It simply wasn’t an option.
After a few minutes, with the Doctor still seated comfortably the door opened and one of his henchman emerged. Meg waited only long enough to see his head before jamming the knife into the man’s eye with all the force her 5 foot 6, 120-pound frame could muster. The man made only a slight gurgling sound before collapsing in a heap. And with that, she was inside.
Her pulse raced, but everything else seemed to slow down as she moved methodically down the hall and across the room that bordered the Oval Office. She encountered no one else. She paused by the Office door and delicately opened it just a crack. The bastard was still at his desk, still facing the other direction, and still oblivious to the world. She opened the door just enough to barely fit through and then dropped down as low as her leg muscles would allow her. She was 12 feet away now, and closing. She took two steps and then paused. 10 feet now. She edged forward another 3 small steps. 8 feet now and the Doctor still hadn’t turned his head. Another few steps and now she could feel the fire in her quads but she ignored it. 6 feet; now 4 and her muscles were screaming at her. She covered the last few feet in one smooth motion and brought the knife up just under Ivan’s chin.
“This is for Terry, you son of a bitch!”
As much as everyone in the world was inconvenienced by the collapse of civilization and the beginning of the rule of an evil dictator wielding the proverbial iron fist (and sometimes an actual fist), it’s probably true that the one person who’d gotten the worst of it was Megan Courtland. Not only had she suffered what certainly seemed like the apocalypse along with everybody else, she had the added misfortune of being the girlfriend of the man whose death made all of it possible.
Immediately following that fateful day in Decatur, she shared in everyone’s stunned shock. As that gave way to grief, she initially received at least a modicum of emotional support. But once the full scale of The Doctor’s plan began to be revealed, she was pretty much left to cope on her own.
Unable to fully process events as they unfolded, her coping took the form of revenge fantasies. Somehow, someway she would see to it that the Doctor died a horrible and excruciating death at her hands. The most elaborate plan she devised involved thumbtacks, a melon baller, both a Phillips and flat head screwdriver, baby oil, a welding torch, and a car battery. That one disturbed even her, although she still relished the thought of carrying it out. Eventually though, she reluctantly came to the conclusion that she’d settle for simply having the pleasure of staring down at his corpse, no matter how it got accomplished.
And that’s how it came to be that almost exactly a year to the day after Doctor Destructo vaporized the man she loved, Meg Courtland set out from what was left of her apartment complex in Washington D.C. armed with only a butcher knife and her infinite hatred. She walked solemnly but purposefully down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the rubble of the Capitol building, through the field of disembodied heads on spikes in the National Mall, and arrived at the gates to the White House. Expecting to confront an army of guards, she was shocked to discover very little resistance. Apparently most would-be assassins found the collection of heads on the Mall to be rather discouraging. There were certainly still guards, but they formed a very loose ring around the perimeter and didn’t seem particularly organized or interested in performing regular rounds. So Meg found a vacated spot, clumsily scaled the 7-foot wall, and headed towards the window of the Oval Office. If The Doctor wasn’t in the Oval Office, there really was no Plan B. In all likelihood it would have come down to an impulsive decision between smashing through the window anyway and hoping like hell to find the Doctor before anyone else found her first, and retracing her steps to try again another day. But as with everything else this night, fortune seemed to be shining on her. The Doctor was seated behind his desk; he seemed to be lost in thought and looked perhaps even a little troubled.
“Aw; butchering the human race too much work for you?” she icily thought to herself.
As determined as she was to not let this opportunity slip away, she was also determined to give herself the best chance of success as possible. There were two entrances into the Oval Office. At the moment, Ivan was facing away from one of them. If she somehow could gain access to the interior, there was at least a chance that she could sneak up behind him completely undetected. As a journalist, she had been to the White House on a number of occasions and knew the layout decently enough. There was a back entrance which was no more than 30 feet from the door to the Oval Office. She crept silently towards that entrance and flattened herself against the cool exterior of the house next to the door. From her vantage point she could still see into the Oval Office window. If it came down to it and the Doctor made a move to leave the room, she estimated that she could be across the lawn and through the window in under 5 seconds. He would probably see and would no doubt hear her approaching, and in all likelihood there would be little to no chance of success, but having already laid eyes on him the raw hatred seething in her now would never allow her to turn back now. It simply wasn’t an option.
After a few minutes, with the Doctor still seated comfortably the door opened and one of his henchman emerged. Meg waited only long enough to see his head before jamming the knife into the man’s eye with all the force her 5 foot 6, 120-pound frame could muster. The man made only a slight gurgling sound before collapsing in a heap. And with that, she was inside.
Her pulse raced, but everything else seemed to slow down as she moved methodically down the hall and across the room that bordered the Oval Office. She encountered no one else. She paused by the Office door and delicately opened it just a crack. The bastard was still at his desk, still facing the other direction, and still oblivious to the world. She opened the door just enough to barely fit through and then dropped down as low as her leg muscles would allow her. She was 12 feet away now, and closing. She took two steps and then paused. 10 feet now. She edged forward another 3 small steps. 8 feet now and the Doctor still hadn’t turned his head. Another few steps and now she could feel the fire in her quads but she ignored it. 6 feet; now 4 and her muscles were screaming at her. She covered the last few feet in one smooth motion and brought the knife up just under Ivan’s chin.
“This is for Terry, you son of a bitch!”
Friday, May 13, 2011
Evil Genius (Part 6)
Chapter 2
Had the greater U.S. population not been distracted by their fixation on blaming the local authorities, they could have simply stayed home, tuned into C-SPAN (one of the few stations still broadcasting) and gotten all the information that they needed. They would have been watching when, the day after Los Angeles was incinerated, the Doctor arrived in Washington, D.C. They would have seen him walk into the U.S. Capitol building, open up his jacket, and reveal that the large trigger button in the middle of his chest was wired directly to his heart. The second his heart stopped beating, all 98 (really 38) remaining nuclear weapons would be triggered instantly.
He demanded the floor on the Senate. When he met some initial resistance, he calmly pulled out his cell phone, punched in a few numbers, and a few seconds later Syracuse, NY became a crater. That was the last resistance he encountered.
A sea of ghostly pale faces belonging to men and women who just days earlier believed themselves to be among the most powerful people in the world stared silently as he strode down the aisle of the Senate floor and stood behind the podium. He faced his captive audience, turning slowly from side to side, taking it all in. He could not be more pleased with how things had progressed so far. When he was ready, he looked dead into the nearest camera and flashed his blood-curdling smile. Although he couldn’t see it, he could feel the faces of millions of viewers across the world being drained of color as they looked on in horror. Finally, he spoke.
“My soon to be loyal subjects. I’ve come before you today to tell you that it’s over. Everything you have known as true in your pointless and meaningless existence is now irrelevant. That’s the bad news. And for all of you, that’s the only news. The good news is for me and me alone, and it is that mine is the only will that matters. My desires are commandments; my whims your new laws. But I like to keep things simple, so we will start with just one rule: please me or die. We will begin this new era with a simple task. Every elected official in this country is now unemployed. To eliminate any and all reminders of your former regime all national, state, and local assembly houses will be burned to the ground by midnight tonight. But if any town should fail to complete this task, fear not. I will accomplish it myself by relocating one of my remaining nuclear devices to beneath any house still standing. This will also have the unfortunate side effect, from your perspective at least, of rendering the entire city and most of the county it resides in, to radioactive ash. Some of you may not be familiar with the fine art of arson, so I believe a little demonstration is in order. The room I currently stand in will be set ablaze in precisely 30 seconds. I would advise all of my newly unemployed friends before me to vacate the premises immediately if they value their lives. To those of you watching at home, you may enjoy the show until the cameras burn and the video feed cuts out. Rest assured that you will be hearing from me again shortly. I’ve enjoyed our time together today.”
And with that he walked slowly down from the podium and back up the aisle. Everyone in the room was frozen. Was he really about to burn down the Capitol building? When he reached the door he paused and uttered just two syllables. He didn’t even turn around when he said them.
“Tick. Tock.”
And then he was gone.
The Senators just continued to stare at one another, but seconds later all the doors to the Senate floor flew open and a swarm of Molotov cocktails and makeshift explosive devices exploded into the chamber. This was enough to shake everyone from their daze and disbelief. Screams echoed through the room as smoke began to darken the air and everyone made a mad dash for the exits. Those who made it out alive did so just in time to turn around, look up, and see the dome of the Capitol collapse in on itself.
The delusions were now all over and the blame game was at an end. Suddenly, there was tremendous clarity on exactly who was to blame, who was in charge, and just how much trouble everybody was in.
Chapter 3
The next day the Doctor and a team of his closest henchmen paid a visit to the White House to relieve the President personally but at this point it really was just a formality. The President had fled in Air Force One during the night as thousands of amateur arsonists across the country sought to fulfill the Doctor’s orders. The Doctor found the house largely deserted, but that was just fine with him. He’d find and kill the President later of course, for denying him the pleasure of seeing him officially cede all power over to him in person. He’d also been hoping for some high quality groveling, and maybe even some tears. But still, the goal for the day had been to capture and move into the White House and it had been accomplished so all was still going to plan. The fact that it had been done with minimal bloodshed (they’d found a few pesky Secret Service agents still milling about and taken care of them) was regrettable but not catastrophic. He needed to keep reminding himself that there would still be plenty more time for massacres in the days ahead. One cannot commit genocide every day. One needs to rest up from time to time.
He threw open the doors to the Oval Office and couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of satisfaction. He walked easily behind the desk and sat in the plush leather reclining chair.
“Now,” he thought, “we can really begin.”
And begin he did. Since that day he had been more or less the undisputed ruler of the planet. Once he had officially gained access to the US military and, along with it, its nuclear arsenal, he was able to practice his own special brand of Destructo diplomacy(3). It’s amazing how smooth negotiations can go when you don’t have to worry about pesky things like “good faith” and you have the threat of nuclear annihilation to dangle over the opposition’s head like a guillotine. His terms were simple: do whatever I ask, whenever I ask and live, maybe. Oh sure, there were the few odd countries who decided that The Doctor was bluffing and refused. He quickly proved them wrong. In the end, it took less than a year for him to be recognized, unequivocally and without exception, as the sole ruler of the world.
The Doctor looked back on those early days fondly. For the first few months he filled his days simply wandering around and making people bow to him. Oh sure he had to decapitate the odd prideful individual who refused but that wasn’t viewed as much of a chore. Hell, that was half the fun! One of his first orders of business was some major renovations to the White House. The front lawn had been transformed into a giant man-made lagoon that was filled with blood. Rumors, which he not only didn’t dispel but actively encouraged, were that he had filled the lagoon by slaughtering people. In fact, the “volunteers” who gave their blood were actually treated quite well. It wasn’t a question of proper treatment, it was simply a question of mathematics. Killing a person and draining them yields you 10 pints one time. But keep them alive and relatively healthy and you can get a pint per week out of them for as long as you need it. He affectionately (in as much as he was capable of such an emotion) referred to them as “my blood cows.” Once completed he surrounded the lagoon with tiki torches because, well, nothing complements a blood-filled lagoon quite like tiki torches.
But the piece de resistance, the thing that really tied the rehab together thematically, was the entrance. Gone were the stately columns of the foyer. In their place was a 50-foot façade of a giant skull, with flames in the eye sockets and the entrance through the mouth.
Most nights those early days, he fell asleep laughing. A cold and mechanical laugh that sent chills down the spines of anyone within earshot. For a long time, he was content. Completely and utterly content.
And then, very slowly, something started to change. So slowly in fact, that he was able to deny its existence for quite some time. But eventually he had to face it head on. Here was the thing he hadn’t been prepared for. It came to him in an odd way. He suddenly had a very vivid image of the last scene of the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Mr. Wonka tells Charlie “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything that he always wanted.” Charlie asks “what happened?” and Wonka’s reply is “He lived happily ever after.”
Only now The Doctor knew the real answer to that, and he was filled with bile at the thought. So much so that he wished Gene Wilder hadn’t been killed in the LA nuclear blast so he could hunt him down and kill him again.
What happens to the man who suddenly gets everything he ever wanted?
He ends up being bored out of his fucking mind.
Ironically, at just the moment that this thought finally crystallized in his head, Doctor Destructo stopped being bored. Because at just that moment he suddenly found a very sharp knife pressed against his throat.
(3) - Patent Pending
Had the greater U.S. population not been distracted by their fixation on blaming the local authorities, they could have simply stayed home, tuned into C-SPAN (one of the few stations still broadcasting) and gotten all the information that they needed. They would have been watching when, the day after Los Angeles was incinerated, the Doctor arrived in Washington, D.C. They would have seen him walk into the U.S. Capitol building, open up his jacket, and reveal that the large trigger button in the middle of his chest was wired directly to his heart. The second his heart stopped beating, all 98 (really 38) remaining nuclear weapons would be triggered instantly.
He demanded the floor on the Senate. When he met some initial resistance, he calmly pulled out his cell phone, punched in a few numbers, and a few seconds later Syracuse, NY became a crater. That was the last resistance he encountered.
A sea of ghostly pale faces belonging to men and women who just days earlier believed themselves to be among the most powerful people in the world stared silently as he strode down the aisle of the Senate floor and stood behind the podium. He faced his captive audience, turning slowly from side to side, taking it all in. He could not be more pleased with how things had progressed so far. When he was ready, he looked dead into the nearest camera and flashed his blood-curdling smile. Although he couldn’t see it, he could feel the faces of millions of viewers across the world being drained of color as they looked on in horror. Finally, he spoke.
“My soon to be loyal subjects. I’ve come before you today to tell you that it’s over. Everything you have known as true in your pointless and meaningless existence is now irrelevant. That’s the bad news. And for all of you, that’s the only news. The good news is for me and me alone, and it is that mine is the only will that matters. My desires are commandments; my whims your new laws. But I like to keep things simple, so we will start with just one rule: please me or die. We will begin this new era with a simple task. Every elected official in this country is now unemployed. To eliminate any and all reminders of your former regime all national, state, and local assembly houses will be burned to the ground by midnight tonight. But if any town should fail to complete this task, fear not. I will accomplish it myself by relocating one of my remaining nuclear devices to beneath any house still standing. This will also have the unfortunate side effect, from your perspective at least, of rendering the entire city and most of the county it resides in, to radioactive ash. Some of you may not be familiar with the fine art of arson, so I believe a little demonstration is in order. The room I currently stand in will be set ablaze in precisely 30 seconds. I would advise all of my newly unemployed friends before me to vacate the premises immediately if they value their lives. To those of you watching at home, you may enjoy the show until the cameras burn and the video feed cuts out. Rest assured that you will be hearing from me again shortly. I’ve enjoyed our time together today.”
And with that he walked slowly down from the podium and back up the aisle. Everyone in the room was frozen. Was he really about to burn down the Capitol building? When he reached the door he paused and uttered just two syllables. He didn’t even turn around when he said them.
“Tick. Tock.”
And then he was gone.
The Senators just continued to stare at one another, but seconds later all the doors to the Senate floor flew open and a swarm of Molotov cocktails and makeshift explosive devices exploded into the chamber. This was enough to shake everyone from their daze and disbelief. Screams echoed through the room as smoke began to darken the air and everyone made a mad dash for the exits. Those who made it out alive did so just in time to turn around, look up, and see the dome of the Capitol collapse in on itself.
The delusions were now all over and the blame game was at an end. Suddenly, there was tremendous clarity on exactly who was to blame, who was in charge, and just how much trouble everybody was in.
Chapter 3
The next day the Doctor and a team of his closest henchmen paid a visit to the White House to relieve the President personally but at this point it really was just a formality. The President had fled in Air Force One during the night as thousands of amateur arsonists across the country sought to fulfill the Doctor’s orders. The Doctor found the house largely deserted, but that was just fine with him. He’d find and kill the President later of course, for denying him the pleasure of seeing him officially cede all power over to him in person. He’d also been hoping for some high quality groveling, and maybe even some tears. But still, the goal for the day had been to capture and move into the White House and it had been accomplished so all was still going to plan. The fact that it had been done with minimal bloodshed (they’d found a few pesky Secret Service agents still milling about and taken care of them) was regrettable but not catastrophic. He needed to keep reminding himself that there would still be plenty more time for massacres in the days ahead. One cannot commit genocide every day. One needs to rest up from time to time.
He threw open the doors to the Oval Office and couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of satisfaction. He walked easily behind the desk and sat in the plush leather reclining chair.
“Now,” he thought, “we can really begin.”
And begin he did. Since that day he had been more or less the undisputed ruler of the planet. Once he had officially gained access to the US military and, along with it, its nuclear arsenal, he was able to practice his own special brand of Destructo diplomacy(3). It’s amazing how smooth negotiations can go when you don’t have to worry about pesky things like “good faith” and you have the threat of nuclear annihilation to dangle over the opposition’s head like a guillotine. His terms were simple: do whatever I ask, whenever I ask and live, maybe. Oh sure, there were the few odd countries who decided that The Doctor was bluffing and refused. He quickly proved them wrong. In the end, it took less than a year for him to be recognized, unequivocally and without exception, as the sole ruler of the world.
The Doctor looked back on those early days fondly. For the first few months he filled his days simply wandering around and making people bow to him. Oh sure he had to decapitate the odd prideful individual who refused but that wasn’t viewed as much of a chore. Hell, that was half the fun! One of his first orders of business was some major renovations to the White House. The front lawn had been transformed into a giant man-made lagoon that was filled with blood. Rumors, which he not only didn’t dispel but actively encouraged, were that he had filled the lagoon by slaughtering people. In fact, the “volunteers” who gave their blood were actually treated quite well. It wasn’t a question of proper treatment, it was simply a question of mathematics. Killing a person and draining them yields you 10 pints one time. But keep them alive and relatively healthy and you can get a pint per week out of them for as long as you need it. He affectionately (in as much as he was capable of such an emotion) referred to them as “my blood cows.” Once completed he surrounded the lagoon with tiki torches because, well, nothing complements a blood-filled lagoon quite like tiki torches.
But the piece de resistance, the thing that really tied the rehab together thematically, was the entrance. Gone were the stately columns of the foyer. In their place was a 50-foot façade of a giant skull, with flames in the eye sockets and the entrance through the mouth.
Most nights those early days, he fell asleep laughing. A cold and mechanical laugh that sent chills down the spines of anyone within earshot. For a long time, he was content. Completely and utterly content.
And then, very slowly, something started to change. So slowly in fact, that he was able to deny its existence for quite some time. But eventually he had to face it head on. Here was the thing he hadn’t been prepared for. It came to him in an odd way. He suddenly had a very vivid image of the last scene of the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Mr. Wonka tells Charlie “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything that he always wanted.” Charlie asks “what happened?” and Wonka’s reply is “He lived happily ever after.”
Only now The Doctor knew the real answer to that, and he was filled with bile at the thought. So much so that he wished Gene Wilder hadn’t been killed in the LA nuclear blast so he could hunt him down and kill him again.
What happens to the man who suddenly gets everything he ever wanted?
He ends up being bored out of his fucking mind.
Ironically, at just the moment that this thought finally crystallized in his head, Doctor Destructo stopped being bored. Because at just that moment he suddenly found a very sharp knife pressed against his throat.
(3) - Patent Pending
Friday, May 06, 2011
Evil Genius (Part 5)
Author's note: This section, and subsequent sections, contain a couple footnotes. Superscripts and footnotes are not something the blogosphere handles well (or at least I don't know how to use them) so where applicable you'll just see a regular number in parentheses and then the note will be at the end of the post. Just didn't want to confuse anyone. On with the show!
Part 2: The Aftermath
Chapter 1
Ivan was not prepared for this, and the shock of that alone was almost enough to knock him over. He was never unprepared. Never. If there was one thing he had been known for since his youth it was his deliberate, meticulous, almost obsessive-compulsive attention-to-detail planning (some would argue that there was no ‘almost’ about it). The very idea that there was a contingency that he hadn’t planned for kept him awake night after night. He simply couldn’t sleep until he had convinced the rest of his mind that he truly had every angle covered. But now as he leaned back in his reclining leather office chair that sat behind the blood-splattered desk of the White House’s oval office, he reflected back on the events of the previous 6 months and wondered how he had possibly failed to account for this.
After vanquishing Captain Invincible(1) everything had pretty much fallen into place just as he had planned. He quickly revealed to the world, via an internet video that was quickly picked up by the major networks, that his nuclear surprise in the U.S. heartland was by no means a solitary phenomenon. He divulged that he had over 100 other nuclear weapons at his disposal, all strategically hidden beneath major population centers throughout the world. In truth he had only about 40, and about half of those were not exactly positioned amidst large urban throngs (unless one considers Fruitland, Idaho to be a burgeoning metropolis). Nevertheless, no one was in a position to dispute his claim and, following a brief demonstration, an accurate inventory became the furthest thing from people’s minds. He had always had a particular disdain for L.A. and the greater Southern California area. Not necessarily for the shallowness and greed that it represented; he was actually a big fan of that aspect. It’s just that he’d always hated the motivations of a group of people who, it seemed, wished to spend as much of their time as humanly possible standing around getting cooked by the sun. He decided that it was really just a tremendous service to increase their ultraviolet radiation exposure by a few thousand orders of magnitude. Sure, they might all be cadavers and piles of ash, but man did they have a nice healthy tan!
After incinerating the city, he quickly discovered that although the capital of the U.S. might be listed as Washington D.C., almost everything that mattered to most of the general population occurred on studio lots and in recording studios in the City of Angels. Even after the death of Captain Invincible, there were a lot of people that found it surprisingly easy to ignore him. They considered his presence a problem for the politicians or possibly the army, if it came to that. The most important thing was that it certainly wasn’t their concern. After all, they had families to feed, bills to pay, and sports to watch. They couldn’t be expected to drop everything and worry about the health of the country and the world every time a super villain got his hands on a few dozen nuclear warheads. When every news show in the country was broadcasting his video, a lot of people simply changed the channel or headed out to the movies. But once that mushroom cloud ballooned over LA, everything changed. Once people realized that the one movie they had waited for all summer was now in fact never going to be released, all future episodes of Lost were just that, and that Us Weekly had just lost its entire subject matter, everyone found it suddenly very hard to be distracted.
So naturally they did the thing that, as Americans, came most naturally to them. They started blaming people. Namely, anyone and everyone that would listen, or at least pretend to. With tremendous efficiency the blame recipient would then waste no time in calmly explaining that they had in fact done all that they could and it was in reality someone else’s fault because either a) it really didn’t fall under their jurisdiction or b) someone else had not provided the support that was desperately needed at the critical hour. This process was repeated ad nauseam until it reached a high enough level where the individual being blamed was sufficiently insulated from public outcry that they could safely proclaim that it wasn’t at all their fault, and anyone who thought it was could go straight to hell. At which point the proceedings would begin again with another low-level blame target, and round and round it went in that phenomenon of modern civilization whereby a problem gets tremendous exposure followed by seemingly endless debate and in the end absolutely nothing is accomplished.
People first began to blame the Soviet Union for not taking better care of their weapons arsenal. After all, most of the world’s nuclear weapons that were presently unaccounted for originated with them. This had shades of actual logic, and in fact it was right here at the start that the general population was closest to blaming the right people, at least in terms of actual responsibility. However, given that the Soviet Union had been disbanded for the better part of 20 years, this left everyone a little less than satisfied. Given the choice, people find it far more preferable to yell at someone that at least has the capability of yelling back. This is not at all out of a sense of nobility that it is not right to attack those that cannot defend themselves, but instead probably arises from a rudimentary understanding that those no longer in existence cannot be sued, voted out of office, or lynched. It would be a bit like the citizens of Atlanta still screaming at General Sherman for burning their town to the ground during the Civil War. Given that many citizens of Atlanta still actually do scream at General Sherman to not burn their town to the ground, it would probably be in the best interest of the greater Georgian population to reread this paragraph.
After the Soviet Union scapegoat turned into a dead end, the next target became the Decatur power plant that Dr. Destructo had infiltrated and where Captain Invincible had met his doom(2). First the head of security was paraded out to answer questions of how the Doctor had managed to infiltrate what undoubtedly should have been top notch security. The head of security responded that he was merely an administrator at the plant and that the job of plant security had actually been fully transferred to municipal law enforcement several years ago. Then the local Chief of police came out to say that due to budget cuts they had been unable to upgrade security equipment since approximately 1986 and had even had to let their best trained and consequently highest paid guards go in favor of mainly 18-year-old high school dropouts that had somehow managed to pass a GED equivalency exam.
Next the mayor came out to answer questions about why the budget had been cut so severely, and he responded that it had been on referendums that the citizens of Decatur themselves had proposed and voted for. Since most of the residents of Decatur had been incinerated, this was not at all a popular response. The fact that it was the truth did not dissuade those offering a dissenting opinion. Many accused the mayor of dancing on the graves of those dearly departed and of being a corrupt good-old boy (he was 27), who had no education (he had a B.S. in Psychology from Southern Illinois and a Law Degree from Northwestern), and anyway he was the one responsible for what referendums ended up on the ballot (he wasn’t). However, sensing a dead end here (at least until the next election), the metaphorical angry mob of less-than-ethical journalists and blame-mongerers went off to find a way to tie the state legislature and, hopefully, the governor into the disaster.
At the same time that this was going on in Decatur, all across the country people wanted to know what their local government was going to do to make sure that this catastrophe didn’t happen there. How good was the security? What progress had been made on finding out if there was a nuclear warhead under their town? Was marshall law being declared? Did all citizens have the right to arm themselves? When was Bravo going to be back on the air? This line of questions followed the Decatur blame model as well, until finally communities in every state across the country were ready to bring their grievances to their state capitals and Washington D.C.
But by that time, there was no state or national Representatives to hear them. Dr. Destructo had disbanded them.
(1) - When you have been the cause of death of a super-hero, and especially one you consider to be your arch-enemy, the appropriate terminology is always “vanquish”. Only if one wishes to trivialize his importance is it acceptable to use “dispatch”. This is not advised, however, if his death has been achieved only after multiple attempts, as it has the undesired effect of making you appear weak.
(2) - In this context, “met his doom” is also acceptable
Part 2: The Aftermath
Chapter 1
Ivan was not prepared for this, and the shock of that alone was almost enough to knock him over. He was never unprepared. Never. If there was one thing he had been known for since his youth it was his deliberate, meticulous, almost obsessive-compulsive attention-to-detail planning (some would argue that there was no ‘almost’ about it). The very idea that there was a contingency that he hadn’t planned for kept him awake night after night. He simply couldn’t sleep until he had convinced the rest of his mind that he truly had every angle covered. But now as he leaned back in his reclining leather office chair that sat behind the blood-splattered desk of the White House’s oval office, he reflected back on the events of the previous 6 months and wondered how he had possibly failed to account for this.
After vanquishing Captain Invincible(1) everything had pretty much fallen into place just as he had planned. He quickly revealed to the world, via an internet video that was quickly picked up by the major networks, that his nuclear surprise in the U.S. heartland was by no means a solitary phenomenon. He divulged that he had over 100 other nuclear weapons at his disposal, all strategically hidden beneath major population centers throughout the world. In truth he had only about 40, and about half of those were not exactly positioned amidst large urban throngs (unless one considers Fruitland, Idaho to be a burgeoning metropolis). Nevertheless, no one was in a position to dispute his claim and, following a brief demonstration, an accurate inventory became the furthest thing from people’s minds. He had always had a particular disdain for L.A. and the greater Southern California area. Not necessarily for the shallowness and greed that it represented; he was actually a big fan of that aspect. It’s just that he’d always hated the motivations of a group of people who, it seemed, wished to spend as much of their time as humanly possible standing around getting cooked by the sun. He decided that it was really just a tremendous service to increase their ultraviolet radiation exposure by a few thousand orders of magnitude. Sure, they might all be cadavers and piles of ash, but man did they have a nice healthy tan!
After incinerating the city, he quickly discovered that although the capital of the U.S. might be listed as Washington D.C., almost everything that mattered to most of the general population occurred on studio lots and in recording studios in the City of Angels. Even after the death of Captain Invincible, there were a lot of people that found it surprisingly easy to ignore him. They considered his presence a problem for the politicians or possibly the army, if it came to that. The most important thing was that it certainly wasn’t their concern. After all, they had families to feed, bills to pay, and sports to watch. They couldn’t be expected to drop everything and worry about the health of the country and the world every time a super villain got his hands on a few dozen nuclear warheads. When every news show in the country was broadcasting his video, a lot of people simply changed the channel or headed out to the movies. But once that mushroom cloud ballooned over LA, everything changed. Once people realized that the one movie they had waited for all summer was now in fact never going to be released, all future episodes of Lost were just that, and that Us Weekly had just lost its entire subject matter, everyone found it suddenly very hard to be distracted.
So naturally they did the thing that, as Americans, came most naturally to them. They started blaming people. Namely, anyone and everyone that would listen, or at least pretend to. With tremendous efficiency the blame recipient would then waste no time in calmly explaining that they had in fact done all that they could and it was in reality someone else’s fault because either a) it really didn’t fall under their jurisdiction or b) someone else had not provided the support that was desperately needed at the critical hour. This process was repeated ad nauseam until it reached a high enough level where the individual being blamed was sufficiently insulated from public outcry that they could safely proclaim that it wasn’t at all their fault, and anyone who thought it was could go straight to hell. At which point the proceedings would begin again with another low-level blame target, and round and round it went in that phenomenon of modern civilization whereby a problem gets tremendous exposure followed by seemingly endless debate and in the end absolutely nothing is accomplished.
People first began to blame the Soviet Union for not taking better care of their weapons arsenal. After all, most of the world’s nuclear weapons that were presently unaccounted for originated with them. This had shades of actual logic, and in fact it was right here at the start that the general population was closest to blaming the right people, at least in terms of actual responsibility. However, given that the Soviet Union had been disbanded for the better part of 20 years, this left everyone a little less than satisfied. Given the choice, people find it far more preferable to yell at someone that at least has the capability of yelling back. This is not at all out of a sense of nobility that it is not right to attack those that cannot defend themselves, but instead probably arises from a rudimentary understanding that those no longer in existence cannot be sued, voted out of office, or lynched. It would be a bit like the citizens of Atlanta still screaming at General Sherman for burning their town to the ground during the Civil War. Given that many citizens of Atlanta still actually do scream at General Sherman to not burn their town to the ground, it would probably be in the best interest of the greater Georgian population to reread this paragraph.
After the Soviet Union scapegoat turned into a dead end, the next target became the Decatur power plant that Dr. Destructo had infiltrated and where Captain Invincible had met his doom(2). First the head of security was paraded out to answer questions of how the Doctor had managed to infiltrate what undoubtedly should have been top notch security. The head of security responded that he was merely an administrator at the plant and that the job of plant security had actually been fully transferred to municipal law enforcement several years ago. Then the local Chief of police came out to say that due to budget cuts they had been unable to upgrade security equipment since approximately 1986 and had even had to let their best trained and consequently highest paid guards go in favor of mainly 18-year-old high school dropouts that had somehow managed to pass a GED equivalency exam.
Next the mayor came out to answer questions about why the budget had been cut so severely, and he responded that it had been on referendums that the citizens of Decatur themselves had proposed and voted for. Since most of the residents of Decatur had been incinerated, this was not at all a popular response. The fact that it was the truth did not dissuade those offering a dissenting opinion. Many accused the mayor of dancing on the graves of those dearly departed and of being a corrupt good-old boy (he was 27), who had no education (he had a B.S. in Psychology from Southern Illinois and a Law Degree from Northwestern), and anyway he was the one responsible for what referendums ended up on the ballot (he wasn’t). However, sensing a dead end here (at least until the next election), the metaphorical angry mob of less-than-ethical journalists and blame-mongerers went off to find a way to tie the state legislature and, hopefully, the governor into the disaster.
At the same time that this was going on in Decatur, all across the country people wanted to know what their local government was going to do to make sure that this catastrophe didn’t happen there. How good was the security? What progress had been made on finding out if there was a nuclear warhead under their town? Was marshall law being declared? Did all citizens have the right to arm themselves? When was Bravo going to be back on the air? This line of questions followed the Decatur blame model as well, until finally communities in every state across the country were ready to bring their grievances to their state capitals and Washington D.C.
But by that time, there was no state or national Representatives to hear them. Dr. Destructo had disbanded them.
(1) - When you have been the cause of death of a super-hero, and especially one you consider to be your arch-enemy, the appropriate terminology is always “vanquish”. Only if one wishes to trivialize his importance is it acceptable to use “dispatch”. This is not advised, however, if his death has been achieved only after multiple attempts, as it has the undesired effect of making you appear weak.
(2) - In this context, “met his doom” is also acceptable
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