to the mansion’s trap grid,” Rosa ordered.
Murgathol handed them over. Rosa chuckled to herself as she checked her watch.
“So what now?” Murgathol trembled slightly.
“Now, you work for me, Mr. Murgathol,” Rosa snapped as she pulled a small vial of clear liquid from her coat.
“What is that?”
“Poison. It takes a few hours to kick in. You won’t feel any symptoms to slow you down. So you’ll have plenty of time to grab some tools, cut your way to the jewels, and then pile them at my feet. Come through and you’ll get the antidote and a hefty check when you sign everything over to me. Try anything else and my people will kill you, your wife, and your three lovely daughters. Any questions?”
“No ma’am,” Murgathol replied as he took the poison and nervously swallowed it down.
VILLAIN-OF-THE-YEAR
Swallowing a valium, I stood backstage and watched five tuxedoed minions finish mopping up White Toast’s fresh blood from the stage. The chart-topping teen rockers were on their way to Paris when their private jet was hijacked and diverted to this undisclosed location. The five-boy band was selected to provide musical entertainment for the 97th Annual Villain Awards. While they had to go before a packed house of super villains – at gunpoint, no less – they played their little hearts out.
But instead of applause, they were booed and subsequently gunned down before a brief intermission. Apparently, the tradition was to select the most sugary-sweet pop stars on the charts, force them to play, and then kill them off when they were done. I asked someone backstage why Britney Spears hadn’t been shot to death during her musical prime. Someone backstage told me she secretly ran a drug cartel out of Malibu. And, per the Villain Award by-laws, she couldn’t be killed because she was both quite evil and a card-carrying member in three of the five major super villain unions.
If I lived through this (and I doubted it), I’d have to murder my agent for securing this gig. Ever since my teen idol days, my career’s simply sat like a floater in an unflushed toilet. My made-for-TV movies and stand-up tours tanked. Any “grown-up” sitcoms I auditioned for didn’t want me. The best I could do was host those crappy “funniest home video/silly prank” shows. It paid the bills, kept my dealer/ex-wife happy, and left me in a third-rate sort of stardom.
Still, I felt cheated by life.
One of the backstage guys took away my martini glass, tossed me a breath mint, and signaled me to head out in thirty seconds. On stage, one of the minions tossed the drummer’s right ear into a bucket and bowed before the returning crowd’s hearty applause. As he left the stage, the canned music played and I returned to the stage with a small stack of white cue cards and sealed envelopes.
After having a comedic moment of silence for White Toast (which actually drew some laughs), I continued with the show. I passed out awards for Best Diabolical Monologue, Best Prison Escape, Best World Domination Scheme, Most Unique WMD, and Most Promising Henchperson. Like the Emmy Awards, the trophies were identical to each other. Unlike the Emmy Awards, these gold trophies were made in the likeness of blind Lady Justice … wrapped up in chains and hanging from a noose with a bullet hole in her forehead. Her sword and scales were still in her hands, albeit futilely.
Maybe it was the valium kicking in, but I was starting to have fun. The winners were all pretty gracious. And Nosferata Girl made people cry with her acceptance speech for Most Promising Henchperson.
Well, there was just one award left.
I ran it down for anyone in the audience who didn’t know what it symbolized. Villain-Of-The-Year went to the villain/villainess who performed the most dastardly criminal acts imaginable. The nominees were selected not just on the number of innocent civilians killed. Scheme sophistication, number of super heroes wasted, and overall criminal popularity were taken into account.
Like any film awards, politics also came into play.
There were backstage rumors that billions of dollars were being flung at the six-member Selection Committee. After all, whoever won Villain-Of-The-Year had a ton of street cred in the criminal underworld. It was like being the Godfather/Godmother of global crime for a year. Five possible nominees had already been killed over this thing. Every detail was carefully selected — even the trophy was different. While shaped like the others, it was made of pure platinum, covered with mystical glyphs, and would give the winner massive good fortune for the next 365 days.
Without further ado, I went over the three (surviving) finalists for this year’s Villain-Of-The-Year.
The first nominee was Lady/Killer, who was a finalist for the last six years in a row. The homicidal vixen had a serious hard-on for winning this award. The only problem was that everyone hated her. Unlike most super villains, she had no code. Even the most vile, cannibalistic, genocidal bad guys had a code of some kind (or so I was told): but not Lady/Killer. Her peculiar brand of madness resulted in her killing more super villains than super heroes. That kind of slaughter did not go over well with the Selection Committee.
Still, she kept making the finalist list. And this year, the psycho bitch had definitely done some impressive stuff. She set off bombs in every maternity ward in Florida (her home state) on New Year’s Eve, right at the stroke of midnight, resulting in a high-four-digit body count.
Seeing as she could naturally release pheromones capable of turning anyone (male/female) into a potential love slave, Lady/Killer seduced the Secretary-General of the U.N. and secretly filmed their four-day fling. I hear the six-set DVD was more popular than Paris Hilton’s sex tapes. His heart exploded during Disc #5. And she didn’t even notice until halfway through Disc #6.
But what put her into serious contention was when the Heroic Nine cornered her during a Federal Reserve Bank heist in New York, this past summer. A super-large HD screen came down behind me and showed security footage of the encounter. The Heroic Nine mistakenly thought she was just a psycho-genius with pheromones. Each of the nine-member hero squad had a stylish gas mask on when they swooped in. After they beat up her minions, Lady/Killer surrendered with a sweet little smile.
It should’ve been just another easy takedown for the world’s mightiest super team.
But, as they moved in to cuff her, she “Hulked” out and sprouted an extra 200 pounds of muscle. Apparently, Lady/Killer had just gotten her DNA “tweaked” to the point where she could safely bench eighty-one tons and skinny-dip in an erupting volcano without a scratch. Their strong guy had enough time to look shocked before she ripped his lungs out one-by-one. She then turned on the other eight heroes, ignored their attacks, and beat seven of them to death with her bare hands.
The last surviving member of the team, Psi-Lad, huddled in a corner with tears in his eyes. I explained that the poor fool had tried to get into Lady/Killer’s head and psionically stun her. Unfortunately for the telepath, walking through Lady/Killer’s mind was like walking through a minefield. In the end, something ruptured in his brain, blood came out of his nose, and the glorified sidekick died giggling.
The screen then switched to real-time and showed Lady/Killer in her balcony seat, in a lovely black-and-white gown. Six of her henchmen holstered their machine pistols long enough to join the audience in a round of applause. At present, the lovely forty-something villainess was normal-sized and easy on the eyes. After blowing a kiss to the cameras, she made a muscle with her skinny right arm and smiled her perfect runway smile.
