The Machinist Part One: Malevolence Read Online Free Page A

each hand.
    The delivery truck ’s driver came running out of a building yelling to high Heaven about insurance, and did anyone get the name of the hero so he could file a report with his company?
    “Typical.” McHenry shook his head and muttered.  At least the heroes were still as irresponsible as he’d remembered. They never cleaned anything up unless there were cameras rolling. He kept going.
    ***
    Half an hour later, McHenry found himself making his way down East 13th Street.  A man his age should’ve been dead on his feet at this point in the jaunt, but his augmented adrenal gland and pain suppression system had kicked in several blocks earlier.  He quietly commended himself for having the foresight to invent those when he was a younger man.
    Cars chugged by in the opposite direction.  A passing bus bore the image of the freshly re-elected President standing shoulder to shoulder with the superhero called Rampart.  The hero’s costume was primarily red, including the retro-style jacket with a row of buttons down one side of his chest.  Everything but his glowing orange eyes, mouth, and chin were covered by a yellow cowl that stretched from his matching cape.  Rampart and the President smiled as the hero gave the camera a yellow-gloved thumbs-up.  Bold text at the bottom of the advert read, “The President and the Titans of Liberty: Keeping America Safe!”
    Rampart was a relatively fresh face in the hero world, but even McHenry knew of him from the television in Blackiron’s cafeteria.  Someone of that level of prestige was hard to miss, even by someone cut off from the rest of the world for fifteen years.  Rampart had come onto the scene a few years back and quickly made a reputation for himself in New York State’s local hero union as not only an indestructible, flying powerhouse but also as a brilliant strategist.  When the Titans’ founding member, a World War II veteran called American Eagle—a patriotic hero bearing a similar set of powers—finally passed away, it was no surprise that Rampart took his place as the leader of the most prestigious of superhero teams.  The Titans of Liberty tended to replace members in terms of their “niche,” so they always had a powerhouse, a sorcerer, a technologist, and so on: Rampart blew all other comers out of the competition during the tryouts for the spot.
    McHenry hocked a gob of spit at the bus on principle, but missed.
    As he bore down on the corner of 1st and 13th, he started to pick up the pace.  He rounded the turn and saw the half-mile-tall metal walls of The Fortress two blocks away.
    A streak of smoke soared into the air from behind the parapets, traced by bolts of purple plasma and gunfire.  McHenry let his augmented vision take effect and he zoomed in on the streak: It was a hero, his uniform torn and his cape burning, making a hasty exit from the Fortress.  He must have been a new one, trying to make a name for himself--Even fifteen years ago being a hero in Stuy Town was a death sentence. It hadn’t changed.  McHenry smiled to himself.
    The smile faded the moment he turned to his left to push in the door of The Hood and saw a strange new logo on it.  Artemis Coffee said green lettering that hovered over the stylized image of a woman firing a bow into the air.  He looked up and through the glass door to where the dirtiest, most dangerous bar in the city once stood, and saw it was occupied by twenty-somethings in badly fitting clothes gabbing away on cellphones or hunched over laptops.  Every one of them had a paper coffee cup either in their hands or in their vicinity.
    Then he looked to the counter.  Wedged in the small space between the cash register and shelves of gourmet gyros and brownies, stood Ivan Stanislav—a fellow villain simply called The Butcher in his heyday, before he retired to take over as the proprietor of The Hood.  It was unmistakably him—You don’t forget the face of the man who had killed fourteen heroes