A Super Villain in Repose
A Super Villain in Repose
by
Kyle Rader
“Stop right there, you fiendish doer of evil!”
Yeah, that was an actual sentence uttered by an actual adult. I wish I was joking about that, but it went viral thirty minutes after some little diarrhea squirt posted it online.
The heist had gone so smoothly up until that point, too. Security at the Museum of History was a joke, as I expected. Most modern buildings aren’t built to withstand a guy bashing against the outside walls with a fucking bus he picked up.
Odd that they would overlook something so obvious.
I used the confusion to my advantage, walking past the survivors and trying not to snicker as they crawled through the rubble amidst sparking wires and asbestos dust seeking their loved ones. Yes, I failed at that, but fortunately, I kept my suit’s external mic off so no one heard my callous disregard for the dead.
I was a super-villain, after all. Not an asshole.
The goal of the day’s sojourn was in the main exhibition hall, which was laid out in such a way that I half-expected the mighty Kong to be waiting, all chained up and bummed that he got captured because thoughts of Fay Wray poon clouded his monkey mind.
They really went all out for what was the crowning jewel in their exhibit arsenal: Famous Penises of the World.
Pickled and mummified carrots of flesh jutted out towards me from all sides. The comically over-sized John Dillinger was partnered up with the comedic legend Milton Berle in one display case. Their zombie reproductive organs were harnessed to wax effigies, on loan from Madame Tussaud’s’. The look on each sculpture’s faces was one of quiet resignation, as if having their bits on display years after their deaths was something long anticipated.
Of course, one would only expect the best for the foreskin of Elvis. Big floodlights, red curtains and carpets, you know the drill. I mean, you wouldn’t just slap the thing down on a Lazy Susan. He was the King!
It rested in a fancy crystal case, surrounded on all sides by a laser system that would instantly drop it into a vault one hundred meters below the surface of the earth if anyone tried to screw with it.
Once again, a guy wearing a multi-billion dollar war suit didn’t enter into their plans.
I grabbed a barely conscious visitor from the floor and hurled him through the base of the display. The precious bounty skidded from its one way trip to the land of the Mole People and landed safely on the floor outside of the secure zone.
The visitor was not so fortunate. He had all but liquefied upon impact, leaving behind bloody nuggets of himself. It looked like the set of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 15: We like Money.
I grabbed my prize and was on my way out when fucking Dudley Do-Right showed up. In the comics, the bad guy always had someone cool to fight. Spider-Man had Doctor Octopus. Superman had Lex Luthor. Hell, even Captain Crunch had the damn Soggies.
I got a kid wearing a compression shirt-short combo and runny mascara.
“I am the Obsidian Shade Man and I have come to end your reign of terror, Prince of Crime!”
Yeah, Prince of Crime. I know.
I didn’t name myself. Anderson Cooper gave it to me after the time I robbed Wrigley Field while singing ‘Purple Rain’ and once the Coop speaks, you are stuck.
The guy was surrounded by a team of Flip-Cam-wielding Hipsters. “Make sure you get my flaring nostrils in the shot, Tad.” he whispered to one of them before continuing his lecture against villainy, one he clearly practiced a thousand times over in his parent’s basement.
“It’s all over, evil-doer. Hand over the precious artifact before I come over there and kick you square in your man-pussy!”
You don’t have a long and illustrious career such as mine without having to occasionally deal with some nut who thinks he can throw on a mask and speak in a gruff voice and instantly become Batman. I averaged about four or five a year.
To show me he meant business, Obsidian-Redundant Name took out a cattle prod and some kind of pointy stick that appeared to have remnants of dog poo on it. My suit was designed to withstand a direct hit from a Daisy Cutter, but for some reason he thought he could take me down with his ‘Tools of Justice’.
I opened up my external mic and said, “Okay, okay, kid. Just put down the dog-doo stick of doom before you kill us all.”
“It’s the Spear of Fear, asshole! And I am going to shove it straight up your metallic anus!”
And with that, the battle was joined.
If you could even call it that, I guess. Personally, I’d call it the saddest ten seconds of humanity’s history. A bellow that sounded like the mighty grunt of a blue whale climaxing emanated from Obsidian What-His-Face. He ran straight at me, slowing down about five yards into his death charge to allow his overweight camera crew the chance to catch up to him. The air around the cattle prod sizzled. The dog feces flaked off the stick, ready to ruin my suit’s finish.
I did what any normal person would have done when confronted with such a dire situation.
I capitulated.
I fished the detached hoodie of Elvis’ Big Hunk O’ Love out of the glass case and tossed it gently to the upholder of everything good and decent. It fluttered as free as a wind sock until it smacked the Obsidian Douche right over the eyes. It cemented to his mascara for one magical moment before tumbling down his face, clinging to his lip like a Wacky Wall Crawler.
Even after several decades since its removal, the King’s foreskin retained much of its elasticity.
I thought it would’ve had the consistency of an old Slim Jim that had rolled under a car seat.
“Oh, Gross! You’ve got Elvis’ dick in your mouth, Holden!” A pudgy hipster camera guy said, barely containing his laughter.
“Shut it, Atticus! My name is the Obsidian Shade Man! Get it right!” Holden (I mean, of course that was his name) peeled the thin sliced dick-flesh from his lip and held it out to his crew, expecting someone to come and retrieve it. “Eww! It tastes like gym class!”
It was at this point that I decided that I needed to end it and leave. After all, how would it have looked if the great ‘Prince of Crime’ was apprehended because he was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe?
Fear permeated the Phony’s eyes as I approached, seeping deep down into him until I could smell the urine saturating the front side of his shorts. ‘Terror pee. It’s been a while’, I thought as I gently removed the dead phallic skin from his hand. His lips quivered in protest, but the fight had fled from him as the urea had fled his bladder.
I was going to let the deluded little shit go. He would have been free to live out a life filled with diabetic-inducing levels of Mountain Dew and clot-causing gaming sessions.
But, he had to go and find his spine.
“Someday, somewhere, you are going to meet a bad end, you insatiable ass-sniffing prick!” he screamed as I walked away.
One of the joys of having an indestructible suit of armor was that I could move fast. Real fast. If you hopped a cheetah up on high-grade meth and then placed said tweaking feline into an Evel Knievel-style rocket car that was also strapped to Top Gun, you would’ve been about half as fast as I was in the suit.
I turned on my heel and had my foot buried in the crook of The Obsidian Hipster’s pants–into the area I assumed a man-pussy was located–before he realized his error. The pathetic little turd was dead a full eight seconds before his brain registered the fact that I punted him into the lower stratosphere.
I heard later on that he crash landed somewhere in Pennsylvania and took out an entire family during a bris, but I never had the chance to confirm it.
Another great thing about a super-suit was the rocket boots. The ladies always dropped them for the rocket boots. I took two steps and leapt into the air, letting the propulsion system take over and sent me skyward, leaving Holden Obsidian Douche-Nozzle’s corpse and his puking movie crew far behind.
The flight back from a caper–yeah, I called it a caper–always made me feel rather melancholy. The suit did most of the real flying which left me with nothing but time to think. Inevitably, my thoughts would betray my intellect and return to past wounds and horrible situations like a recovered heroin addict crawling back into the alley for just one more fix.
That day’s offering from the cinema of painful psychological trauma was the time when General Generic Army Name slipped ipecac into my morning coffee on the day we field-tested the suit.
It was a simple test. All the Johnny Hayseed pilot had to do was load his lantern-jawed ass into the prototype and run the forty yard dash. The ipecac took affect the second the starting gun sounded. I covered my colleagues in necklaces of the half-digested Moon-Over-My-Hammy I ate for breakfast. Little did anyone know, whenever the hick was around someone vomiting, it triggered violent spewing of his own.
The sound hit Johnny mid-stride, causing him to lose focus and trip. Any idiot with a basic knowledge of the laws of physics knows that you cannot simply stop an object moving at nearly two hundred miles an hour without serious repercussions. In this case, the Communist redistribution of energy turned the poor pilot into a human wasteland.
His last words echoed in my brain as I descended to my secret lair.
“OH GOD HELP ME! I PUKED IN MY EYES!!!”
Being welcomed home to my domicile by the melodious harmonies of domestic abuse and gunshots was a necessary evil I had grown accustomed to. Living in the human wasteland of the ghetto afforded me the kind of anonymity that hollowing out an iceberg or living in the Legion of Doom swamp-skull thing could never provide.
The logistics alone were a nightmare. You’d have to hire hundreds of people and then either pay them far out the ass to keep their mouths shut or massacre them all when the job was done.
Half of the building was cracked out of its mind and the other half knew that the guy who owned the entire seventeenth floor was a man not to be trifled with. Not that I let any of the animals actually see me, of course. The suit’s cloaking device refracted enough light so the pipe-heads thought they were seeing an angel or a ghost.
After the eighth addict dove out the fire escape window thinking he could hitch-hike a ride to the Pearly Gates, I installed a fucking sky-light.
I landed with laser-guided precision, making no more noise than a feather as it floated to the ground. The suit’s power source was self-sustaining, so recharging it was never an issue. You could live in the deepest, dankest pit in the world, but the second you started causing rolling blackouts, someone was going to come calling.
When the military contracted me to build the suit, they wanted something that was light and compact, but could still turn a soldier into an unstoppable wrecking machine of doom. ‘Build us something like Iron Man’, the Brass said to me. ‘We like the Iron Man’
Of course they did. He was shiny and made a lot of things go ‘Boom!’
My suit was not as sexy, but it was more practical. Nano-technology and layers upon layers of liquid body armor removed the need for a clunky metallic exo-skeleton. All the wearer had to do was to sling a harness around their waist and press a button. The nanites did the rest.
I clicked the button and the suit retracted back into the harness. One downside was the lubrication that the tiny robots excreted in order to protect the wearer’s skin from getting damaged.
Yes, I designed a suit where billions of microscopic machines shit on me.
While I wore the suit, it gave me the physical appearance of Michelangelo’s David. Unfortunately, the second I took it off my flabby pale torso returned, unfolding and covering my bits and pieces in a canopy of blubber.
Despite my genius, I could not figure out a way to stop Father Time from turning my once taught, lean frame into a car accident made of flesh.
As a rule, super geniuses such as myself don’t clean. I mean, my mind worked faster than ninety percent of the populations’ so there was no way I could be bothered to actually clean, so my place gave the slums of Calcutta a run for their money in the squalor department.
I tossed the King’s foreskin–that slab of dead skin that a young man paid for with his life–onto a stack of cash that I robbed from some bank in some town at some point in my career and hit the shower.
I could not recall the exact reason why I even bothered to steal some mush-mouth hillbilly’s cock-hood in the first place. At this stage in my career, the ‘whys’ had largely been replaced by the apathetic ‘why-nots’?
I hung the harness of the suit around the actual masterpiece by my second favorite Ninja Turtle–which I stole back in ‘eighty-seven or so–and hopped in the shower. I couldn’t recall why I decided to keep ol’ David in the can.
Or why I had dressed him in a Big Bird costume for that matter.
I got out of the shower just as all the machine shit clogged the drain. I snatched a dirty towel–in desperate need of either a wash or an exorcism—from around the feet of Big David Bird and proceeded to floss-dry my crotch as I waddled into the kitchen, seeking both sustenance and a pair of underwear.
Precious gems and more stacks of unused cash lined the counter-space of the half-kitchen. Well, kitchenette, if you wanted to argue semantics. The only pair of underwear I could find were even nastier than the scabby towel that I had just used to put a fine sheen on the old nut-sack. I didn’t give the petrified skid-marks a second thought as I shimmed myself into the tighty-whiteys.
Tossing the soiled towel on top of a pilfered Van Gogh–pretty sure it was ‘Poppy Flowers’–I set about my second task for the evening, food. The tiny kitchen only had enough room for a wanna-be fridge that would send even the most frugal of liberal arts students into an uproar. An over-stuffed bag filled with diamonds lay on-top of the sorry looking appliance; its corpulent shape regurgitated the precious stones when I opened the door, scattering them across the discolored linoleum.
I didn’t give a damn about the rocks. I was far too concerned with saving my frozen burrito from freezer-burn than I was about whether or not the rats and roaches would make off with some bling that I stole on a whim one night after watching that DiCaprio movie where he spent nearly three hours not boning Jennifer Connelly.
I was naturally impulsive at my core. It was the only explanation that I could come up with as to why I turned to a life of villainy. As the processed meat and bean icicle that comprised my dinner spun in the microwave, my mind wandered back to the first conscious decision I made on the road to being the Prince of Crime.
Development of the suit neared completion. Despite turning every other test subject into human pulled pork, I had convinced the powers-that-be that the prototype would soon be ready for mass production. The prevailing attitude in the air was a mixture of genuine excitement for such a technological break-through and one of childish greed. The Brass had several targets in mind that they could not wait to unleash a battalion of suit-wearing grunts on.
It was so bad that most of the military guys walked around in hunched stoops, shoving their hands in their pockets in order to camouflage their raging erections.
I remembered standing in front of a snack machine–patiently waiting for my Baby Ruth to come tumbling down from its steel-coil prison–when I overheard the Brass talking about how this would be the greatest achievement in the history of the United States military, and that once the suit cleared the final safety tests, they were going to bury me in the deepest, coldest research base they had and no one would ever know about my genius.
I didn’t react straight away. Not really. I retrieved my afternoon snack and walked back to my lab, letting the amalgamation of peanuts and nougat carry me away to a place where I was appreciated. A magical realm where diabetes was cured with common aspirin and I had a full head of hair and could receive oral pleasure at the press of a button.
The wondrous day-dreams of On-Demand blowjobs and a full quaff vanished into the land of make-believe as I swallowed the last bite of my candy bar, leaving me with the harsh reality of being stuck studying why the ice at the South Pole was so darned icy.
It was at this time that I looked down and saw all the bodies.
In my sugar-induced state of semi-consciousness, I put on the suit and wiped out everyone in the building. Years and years of wedgies, spiked coffee and of finding the feces of varying animals in my desk each morning caused my little outburst. To this day, I have no recollection of actually doing the deed. Of course, I have killed thousands since then and I can barely recall those either.
Some have questioned why they didn’t just get another genius to build another suit to come after me. They tried and failed. The nanites I designed only responded to my specific DNA code and besides, no one in world could figure out how to get them to be both self-sustaining and self-replicating. If they had a quarter of the intellect as I, they would have realized it was a simple matter of getting them to use the excess sugar in my blood-stream as a power source.
I finally got some use out of my type-two diabetes.
A pleasant ‘Ding’ signaled both the end of my day-dreaming and the beginning of my feast of deliciousness.
I hoisted the ‘El Terrible and the Infinite Spiciness’ brand burrito over my head and twirled with it like we were in our own avant-garde production of ‘Swan Lake’. I felt the music swell in my spirit as we waltzed past stolen moon rocks, the collective life savings of an entire town and other items considered priceless, to my throne, a recliner I rescued from a dumpster.
Sure, my throne smelled like human waste and rats had used it as a nest, but a quick trip to the Smithsonian and it was as good as new.
Who knew that Fonzie’s Jacket would make for such a good slipcover?
Despite another successful pilfering under my belt, the tasty meal before me was the only thing in life that gave me any real happiness.
It was all so perfect.
Yet, there was one factor that I had failed to plan for.
Despite all my genius.
Despite being the most dangerous man in the history of the world.
I still failed to heed the warning label on the package.
It stated–in two distinct languages, no less– ‘WARNING! Contents are HOT, HOT, HOT! Allow cooling for several minutes before enjoying.’
Biting into that burrito felt like I swallowed a spoonful of the sun. The steam alone scalded the roof of my mouth and when I inhaled to scream, it traveled into my lungs and slow-cooked me from the inside out.
Processed bread, beans, and chipped beef tumbled from my mouth as I tried to squelch the inferno. I bounded out of chair and rushed as fast as my shuffling legs could carry me to the bathroom. To the suit. The nanites would be able to heal the sizable blisters that had formed on my tongue and cheeks in a matter of minutes.
Only, I never made it.
The foreskin of the King’s Big Boss Man that I had stolen mere hours earlier had one final performance left in it. Deeming its final resting place to be unworthy of regal blood, the stinky, sticky slab performed a little Shake, Rattle and Roll and slid off the mini-mountain of cash and onto the floor.
With the interior of my mouth being a volcano, I neglected to notice it and proceeded to step directly on the last line of defense between the world and Lisa Marie. My feet, unsteady enough on their own, ceded the victory to the Presley penile piece and I found myself flying without my suit for the first time.
My head collided against the floor upon touchdown. I felt my jaws snap shut. One of my back molars shattered from the impact; the tiny shards of enamel rubbed against the garden of blisters, puncturing several, which only added to the rainbow of flavor I was experiencing.
I spat out a fair amount of blood as I peeled the King off my bare heel. I gave the “precious relic” a final look of contempt before hurling it onto King Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus, where it clung to the lower lip, making the likeness of the long-dead scion of Egypt appear to be sticking its tongue out at me.
It was at that moment I noticed a second nub of flesh lying on the ground next to me.
The tip of my tongue.
Jalapeño red blood drained out of my mouth until I was kneeling in a puddle of the stuff. Bits of my teeth floated along a makeshift lazy river into the cracks in the floorboards. I tried to stem the tide by clamping my mouth shut, but that only served to fill my mouth up with the brackish gore.
I retched up a mouthful; the force of the blood-vomit pushed the hunk of my tongue deeper into the kitchen, the very opposite direction of the suit.
I gasped a cry of shocked anger that sounded like Frankenstein’s monster having an orgasm and ran after my missing tri-tip. I almost snatched it up, too. But as I walked close to it, my foot shot out and kicked it underneath a radiator.
The Frankenstein climaxes came with more urgency as I began to feel light-headed. My pasty flab had not seen that much color since I decided to steal and eat the world’s largest pizza a few years’ backs. I was determined not to let the burned mouth, broken teeth and blood loss ruin the planned activities I had for the evening.
For the second time that evening, I failed to plan for the uncertainties.
If I had, I would have realized that the floor was on a slight angle. I would have known that my blood rolled down after my fleshy nub and forming a tiny pond. I would have also noticed that the fresh pool of blood was directly between me and the fire escape window.
My foot found the sanguine slick and then, all the genius in my brain couldn’t have saved me. I went head-first through the window. Shards of glass tattooed their way into my exposed torso as we tumbled down to meet the floor of the concrete jungle for our rendezvous.
I’d like to say that I didn’t scream on the way down, but that would be a lie. You would be surprised at how high of a pitch you can emanate with half a tongue.
I know I was.
They found me the next morning. Most of my spinal column was turned into jelly upon impact. All of my loot–the spoils of a life-time of doing things for no real reason except for because it felt good–was returned to their proper owners.
Disinfected first, of course. The cops took one look at the state of the place and declared it a level-one hot zone.
My suit–my true gift to human-kind–went straight back to the Brass. It was to be poked and prodded over like a passed-out sorority girl during Rush Week by inferior minds, desperate to unlock my genius. All the while I was to be shoved into a cheap pine box and placed in an unmarked grave in Potter’s Field.
Death, as it turned out, was not exactly as advertised. There wasn’t any ascent through a tunnel of light. No St. Peter judging if I was worthy to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
A cramped waiting room with out of date magazines and a broken water machine were all that awaited me.
My mind—and my stomach–wandered back to the uneaten burrito that I had left behind. I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was part of my penance after a lifetime of misdeeds. Or, maybe it was what happens to spirits who die on empty stomachs. I wondered what became of it once they discovered my apartment. Did someone eat it? Or did they just toss it in the trash along with all of the stolen Andy Warhols?
It’s such a shame, I thought as I flipped through the article about Marlon Wayans’ top ten favorite movies for the seventy-ninth time, waiting for someone to come through the door and tell me what was next. That was going to be such a good burrito, too.
Kile the WonderBoy!! 