Chapter 5 - A Grim Proposition
A kilometer from the M4 motorway, on the outskirts of the small London suburb of West Drayton was the quiet, dreary street named Shen Way. No one knew why it had been given this extraordinary name, and why it had subsequently been kept; but it had and was soon forgotten to most. Sparsely lit by a few amber street-lights, it was littered with broken bottles and pieces of garbage. It had begun to drizzle and the water turned a murky grey as it flowed to the gutters, collecting dust and filth that had lain there since the last rainfall. Street sweepers never bothered to run their brushes down this street, knowing the only thing between this road and a dirt track was that it had sidewalks and streetlights - and even that was pushing it. The local gangs too, stayed away from Shen Way. They knew that there was nothing of value there, be it in the form of houses to break into or people to mug - no one lived here, and seldom was there a car along the short, dilapidated road.
On one side were a row of rundown, abandoned houses, whose occupants had moved down the road to a new block of apartments near the railway station. Opposite these houses sat a large industrial complex that spanned the distance from the M4 to Shen Way. But like the structures it faced the complex had been silent and empty for the past decade; when its tenants moved to newer, more up to date facilities. Though the decrepit buildings had long since been vacated - and the 'For Sale' signs blown down by wintry snowstorms - the lights outside the entrances were still on and a single security guard was still employed to keep the vandals out of the warehouses.
Yet one building had recently become occupied after being bought by a French firm that refurbished and resold these types of structures - or so the officials had said. They had sent over a delegation to work out the finer details of the deal with the complex's owners before sealing the deal and returning to Paris, where the firm was based. Within three days the funds were transferred to a British bank and a notary flew to Paris to have the ownership papers signed. The town council was promised that within a month a team of the firm's architects would arrive to begin the update process, but no such team ever arrived. Instead the firm had simply contracted out workers and emailed the plans to their foreman. Following the blueprints to the letter, they added some concrete walls and insulation; installed a decent air conditioning system and put in a few odd security cameras before locking it back up and mailing the keys to an address in Paris.
Four months later, nothing had happened, and the building once again began accumulating dirt and graffiti when the guard fell asleep at his post. But then, a week before the night in question, a large truck with the name of the Parisian firm emblazoned on its side arrived at the building and men began unloading a series of large boxes. They were quickly moved inside the building and the truck was driven away to be replaced by another within half and hour. After a full day of this the traffic stopped as abruptly as it had started; and the men who had moved the boxes into the warehouse closed the door behind them and locked the door. They had not exited the building once since that day.
And now, throughout the evening, taxis had been pulling up to the entrance to the complex - named Cato Industrial Complex after the town council member who had championed it's construction in the seventies - and letting off one or two passengers before driving back into downtown. Their passengers walked down the central road between the rusting, ramshackle warehouses and down a side street to Warehouse CT-1, the one owned by the French firm. It was in fact a puppet company owned by the World Evil Empire (also known as W.E.E.), whose leader, Gemini, had discovered the complex when he was visiting the area to pick up some new handguns for his henchmen. He had been chosen to host the villain's conference that year, and the warehouse seemed to him the perfect place to hold it. With a few million-odd dollars, he had turned an old coffee-bean storage facility into a heavily guarded, high-tech fortress. And now, as the guests began to arrive, he waited behind the five centimeter thick steel front door to greet them. Those that had already turned up killed time in the large central conference room by talking or snacking on the hors d'oeuvres that Gemini's men had set out.
The conference room had been designed to be a fortress within a fortress. All four walls and the ceiling were made of meter thick concrete, followed by a layer of soundproofing foam insulation and another half meter of concrete. Placed along the outside wall were a series of electromagnetic pulse generators, which disrupted the signals emitted by listening devices. This meant that to these devices the room was simply a large area of complete silence, since nothing was ever transmitted from that area. The villains inside sat around bored stiff, and waited for the last two of their group to arrive.
"Do we have any indication if she's even coming?" Lord Monte Fisk - better known as Monkey Fist - asked the man sitting next to him.
"No, but I've worked with her and she's usually quite punctual," Sr. Senor Senior observed, checking his watch for the time.
"Father, I was the one who worked with her," his son, Sr. Senor Junior commented, "you just sat around and di -."
"Junior, what did we decide you had to do if you wanted to come with me to London with me?" Senior asked; a hint of annoyance noticeable in his voice.
"That I should keep quiet unless called upon," Junior recited.
"Very good son," his father commended him before turning back to Monkey Fist. "Teenagers; hopefully they'll learn some day.
"Quite," was all he received as a reply - Monkey Fist had never contemplated having children.
"So, has anyone seen her yet?" Adrena-Lynn asked, walking out of the gloom up to where they sat at a large conference table.
"Who?"
"Shego."
"No, we were just asking that same question," Monkey Fist told her as she took a seat and sipped from a glass of Coke.
"Hmm, duya know what time it is?" Duff Killigan asked from the opposite side of the table where he sat fingering a golf ball in his impatience. Every time he bounced or dropped it everyone cringed slightly, not knowing whether it had been pack with explosives or not.
"She had two minutes until lockdown," Lynn told him as she checked her face in a compact mirror.
"Ach, she's'a gonna have to run teh make it," Duff remarked.
"I think is can be safe to say she won't be attending," said Monkey Fist.
"What about Drakken? Isn't he coming too?" DNAmy asked Lord Fiske.
"It seems unlikely," he replied, running his finger along the tip of his wine glass and listened to it whine in response.
"Oh, sugarfoot! I kind of liked him - in a quirky, take-over-the-world kinda way," she admitted, taking the glass out of his reach.
"What about us Amy?" he said; hurt that she had confessed to liking someone else.
"Oh, don't you worry your pretty little monkey head Monty, you know I'll always love you," she assured him, leaning in for a kiss.
"And I you, Amy." he replied, nuzzling against her as the other villains cringed in disgust.
"Umm, could we stop with the public love here, it's making me nauseous," Sr. Senor Junior said, looking up from the issue of Rolling Stone he was reading.
"Hear, hear. Hey they've go -. I mean; hey, d'ave got punche," Frugal Lucre said, remembering halfway though his sentence that he was supposed to speak with an accent.
"Lucre, could you cut out the corny accent, we all know you don't talk like that," Lynn called from her seat, annoyed with the budget-bad-guy already.
"I know, I know," Lucre said, shaking his head in embarrassment. "It's just that being the only low budget criminal here makes me apprehensive, like this guy I knew at Smart Mart who always."
"Oh god, you've started him off on the people he works with at Smarty Mart again?" Prof. Dementor asked Lynn quietly from his seat next to her. "This is even worse that Drakken's stories of the fourth grade. At least those were funny - this is just plain depressing."
"I know," she replied, "it's like -."
Her words were cut short by the blaring of sirens, announcing the lockdown sequence's beginning. Soon loud thuds were heard all around the room, the sound of large metal barriers sliding in place behind all the exits to the building and locking in place. The timers were started, and above main entrance to the conference room a large digital clock - measuring hours, minutes and seconds - began to tick down from 48:00:00.
"Alright everybody," Gemini said as he walked in through the large metal doors on one side of the room, "you know what that means. We're locked in until Thursday evening, so I suggest you get comfortable."
"How long do we have to move in," Lucre asked excitedly from the back of the group, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder as he waited impatiently to get to his room.
"Agent Gamma will read out the room assignments," Gemini replied, motioning to a chipper looking henchman who was definitely a rising star in W.E.E. "And you will have thirty minutes un-pack your bags before a light dinner and cocktails afterwards."
"Always the gracious host," Sr. Senor Senior muttered from the back, both in compliment and contempt towards Gemini. He had wanted to host this year's conference, but lacked the experience in villainy to be deemed worthy of the honor.
"Here are the room assignments," Agent Gamma called out a bit too loudly in his enthusiasm. "Mr.'s Senor Senior and Mr. Senor Junior have suites A and B. Ms. Amy and Lord Fiske in suite C. Mr. Lucre in suite D and Mr. Killigan in suite E. Mr. Gill is in tank F, Ms. Lynn in suite G and Professor Dementor in suite H. In suite I we have Gemini and in suites J and K we have Dr. Drakken and Ms. Shego respectively.
"Strike those last two off the list," Gemini ordered him, knowing that there was no way either could gain access to the meeting now that the lockdown was in effect.
"Yes sir. Did I miss anyone?" Gamma asked, looking around the room to see any raised hands. Just then a blast shook the building, causing glasses to fall off the table and shatter against the tiled floor from the shock. Reflexively everyone jumped up from their seats and glanced around for any sign of what had created the explosion. But upon seeing nothing, they simply stood there; unsure whether running away or staying put was safer. Their immobility cost them the few moments they could have used to escape from the series of armed men dressed in all black who entered the room from the door at the far end of the table. They quickly encircled the group, keeping their weapons trained on a specific, predetermined target as they waited motionless for some unknown command or signal. Everyone searched for an escape route, but there were simply too many men surrounding them.
Gill looked around and tensed his leg muscles, preparing to leap upwards into the rafters where he could hide and fire slime at the intruders below. But he saw that every armed man near him carried either a net or a hand- held flame thrower, and knew that if he moved he would be burnt alive. Adrena-Lynn also planned to attack the black-clothed men, but she only knew basic martial arts, and knew she couldn't dodge that many machine gun bullets.
The rest of the villains stood there in shock, and watched as a tall man dressed in a black pin-stripe suit and matching tie approached them. His hair was the same color as that of his suit, and slicked back against his skull as if it were a soldier's helmet. His eyes - brown and emotionless - looked straight ahead, focusing on empty space as he walked down the hall to the conference room. His face was drawn and gaunt, like that of an old man, though from his abundance of hair and wiry build, he could not have been more than forty-five years old. His lips were thin, tight and almost colorless, as if he were a cartoon, with a single pencil line for a mouth. Like a snake, his pink tongue whipped out every few seconds and ran briefly over his lower lip, keeping it constantly glistening with saliva. Either a nervous reaction or he simply had very dry lips, but no one dared to ask. His metal-toed leather shoes clicked against the floor as he approached the villains, who watched him warily like schoolchildren at the tiger pen in a zoo. They half expected him to leap at them and, with his bare hands, rip them to pieces. It was that look in his eyes - one which lacked any type of empathy or compassion - that made even the most hardened criminal in the room shiver. This was not a man who was simply evil because of what he did; he was evil in every aspect of his life - the embodiment of pure malevolence.
Gemini was the first to speak, his voice burning with rage: "What is the meaning of this!"
"Don't speak," the man replied, his voice cool and like his eyes, completely devoid of feeling. "Let me do the talking."
He turned to the other villains and spread his black gloved hands in a sign of welcome: "Good evening, my name is Mr. Grim and I am now running this little get together. I suggest you pay attention to what I have to say, since daydreaming will be severely punished," he motioned to the armed men around him to illustrate what the punishment would be. I am here to offer you all a part in the greatest ever evil plot imagined. But to pull something this massive off, I will need all of your assistance and expertise in the villainous arts. So, in return for your services I offer you each twenty-five billion U.S. dollars - a very handsome compensation, I think."
"I think you had better leave right now mister," DNAmy spoke up, upset by Grim's armed henchmen and his tone toward the villains. "None of us like being pushed around, especially by some amateur like you. We already have enough money, so just back off."
"If yeh try anything, I'll slice yer head off ina second," Killigan growled in consent, gripping his driver almost hard enough to snap it in half. "Leave now."
"Then I take it none of you wish to help me?" Grim asked, and received no answer, only glares of hatred. "Very well then, let me change the wording of my offer and see if you like it any better: You will help me or my guards will cut you down in a split-second. You all have fifteen seconds to sit down at the table - and if even one of you remains standing, you all die."
It took the villains a few seconds to decide between death and helping Grim. And no matter how much they hated doing it, they all ended up seated in their chairs with Grim standing at the end of the table. He smiled widely; his eyes aglow with malice as he sat down at the head of the table and waved his hand to dismiss the guards. All but four, each toting an MP-5 submachine gun and a handgun - holstered on their hip -, they kept their weapons trained on the villains as their chief again began to speak:
"Now, let me tell you my plan."
A/N: Hope you all like the story, but unfortunately there won't be any postings for a while. I've got to go on a trip and internet access is limited, so I hope you have something else to read for a while. With a bit of luck there'll be a new posting in the first week of November if I can get off my lazy ass and write something.
A kilometer from the M4 motorway, on the outskirts of the small London suburb of West Drayton was the quiet, dreary street named Shen Way. No one knew why it had been given this extraordinary name, and why it had subsequently been kept; but it had and was soon forgotten to most. Sparsely lit by a few amber street-lights, it was littered with broken bottles and pieces of garbage. It had begun to drizzle and the water turned a murky grey as it flowed to the gutters, collecting dust and filth that had lain there since the last rainfall. Street sweepers never bothered to run their brushes down this street, knowing the only thing between this road and a dirt track was that it had sidewalks and streetlights - and even that was pushing it. The local gangs too, stayed away from Shen Way. They knew that there was nothing of value there, be it in the form of houses to break into or people to mug - no one lived here, and seldom was there a car along the short, dilapidated road.
On one side were a row of rundown, abandoned houses, whose occupants had moved down the road to a new block of apartments near the railway station. Opposite these houses sat a large industrial complex that spanned the distance from the M4 to Shen Way. But like the structures it faced the complex had been silent and empty for the past decade; when its tenants moved to newer, more up to date facilities. Though the decrepit buildings had long since been vacated - and the 'For Sale' signs blown down by wintry snowstorms - the lights outside the entrances were still on and a single security guard was still employed to keep the vandals out of the warehouses.
Yet one building had recently become occupied after being bought by a French firm that refurbished and resold these types of structures - or so the officials had said. They had sent over a delegation to work out the finer details of the deal with the complex's owners before sealing the deal and returning to Paris, where the firm was based. Within three days the funds were transferred to a British bank and a notary flew to Paris to have the ownership papers signed. The town council was promised that within a month a team of the firm's architects would arrive to begin the update process, but no such team ever arrived. Instead the firm had simply contracted out workers and emailed the plans to their foreman. Following the blueprints to the letter, they added some concrete walls and insulation; installed a decent air conditioning system and put in a few odd security cameras before locking it back up and mailing the keys to an address in Paris.
Four months later, nothing had happened, and the building once again began accumulating dirt and graffiti when the guard fell asleep at his post. But then, a week before the night in question, a large truck with the name of the Parisian firm emblazoned on its side arrived at the building and men began unloading a series of large boxes. They were quickly moved inside the building and the truck was driven away to be replaced by another within half and hour. After a full day of this the traffic stopped as abruptly as it had started; and the men who had moved the boxes into the warehouse closed the door behind them and locked the door. They had not exited the building once since that day.
And now, throughout the evening, taxis had been pulling up to the entrance to the complex - named Cato Industrial Complex after the town council member who had championed it's construction in the seventies - and letting off one or two passengers before driving back into downtown. Their passengers walked down the central road between the rusting, ramshackle warehouses and down a side street to Warehouse CT-1, the one owned by the French firm. It was in fact a puppet company owned by the World Evil Empire (also known as W.E.E.), whose leader, Gemini, had discovered the complex when he was visiting the area to pick up some new handguns for his henchmen. He had been chosen to host the villain's conference that year, and the warehouse seemed to him the perfect place to hold it. With a few million-odd dollars, he had turned an old coffee-bean storage facility into a heavily guarded, high-tech fortress. And now, as the guests began to arrive, he waited behind the five centimeter thick steel front door to greet them. Those that had already turned up killed time in the large central conference room by talking or snacking on the hors d'oeuvres that Gemini's men had set out.
The conference room had been designed to be a fortress within a fortress. All four walls and the ceiling were made of meter thick concrete, followed by a layer of soundproofing foam insulation and another half meter of concrete. Placed along the outside wall were a series of electromagnetic pulse generators, which disrupted the signals emitted by listening devices. This meant that to these devices the room was simply a large area of complete silence, since nothing was ever transmitted from that area. The villains inside sat around bored stiff, and waited for the last two of their group to arrive.
"Do we have any indication if she's even coming?" Lord Monte Fisk - better known as Monkey Fist - asked the man sitting next to him.
"No, but I've worked with her and she's usually quite punctual," Sr. Senor Senior observed, checking his watch for the time.
"Father, I was the one who worked with her," his son, Sr. Senor Junior commented, "you just sat around and di -."
"Junior, what did we decide you had to do if you wanted to come with me to London with me?" Senior asked; a hint of annoyance noticeable in his voice.
"That I should keep quiet unless called upon," Junior recited.
"Very good son," his father commended him before turning back to Monkey Fist. "Teenagers; hopefully they'll learn some day.
"Quite," was all he received as a reply - Monkey Fist had never contemplated having children.
"So, has anyone seen her yet?" Adrena-Lynn asked, walking out of the gloom up to where they sat at a large conference table.
"Who?"
"Shego."
"No, we were just asking that same question," Monkey Fist told her as she took a seat and sipped from a glass of Coke.
"Hmm, duya know what time it is?" Duff Killigan asked from the opposite side of the table where he sat fingering a golf ball in his impatience. Every time he bounced or dropped it everyone cringed slightly, not knowing whether it had been pack with explosives or not.
"She had two minutes until lockdown," Lynn told him as she checked her face in a compact mirror.
"Ach, she's'a gonna have to run teh make it," Duff remarked.
"I think is can be safe to say she won't be attending," said Monkey Fist.
"What about Drakken? Isn't he coming too?" DNAmy asked Lord Fiske.
"It seems unlikely," he replied, running his finger along the tip of his wine glass and listened to it whine in response.
"Oh, sugarfoot! I kind of liked him - in a quirky, take-over-the-world kinda way," she admitted, taking the glass out of his reach.
"What about us Amy?" he said; hurt that she had confessed to liking someone else.
"Oh, don't you worry your pretty little monkey head Monty, you know I'll always love you," she assured him, leaning in for a kiss.
"And I you, Amy." he replied, nuzzling against her as the other villains cringed in disgust.
"Umm, could we stop with the public love here, it's making me nauseous," Sr. Senor Junior said, looking up from the issue of Rolling Stone he was reading.
"Hear, hear. Hey they've go -. I mean; hey, d'ave got punche," Frugal Lucre said, remembering halfway though his sentence that he was supposed to speak with an accent.
"Lucre, could you cut out the corny accent, we all know you don't talk like that," Lynn called from her seat, annoyed with the budget-bad-guy already.
"I know, I know," Lucre said, shaking his head in embarrassment. "It's just that being the only low budget criminal here makes me apprehensive, like this guy I knew at Smart Mart who always."
"Oh god, you've started him off on the people he works with at Smarty Mart again?" Prof. Dementor asked Lynn quietly from his seat next to her. "This is even worse that Drakken's stories of the fourth grade. At least those were funny - this is just plain depressing."
"I know," she replied, "it's like -."
Her words were cut short by the blaring of sirens, announcing the lockdown sequence's beginning. Soon loud thuds were heard all around the room, the sound of large metal barriers sliding in place behind all the exits to the building and locking in place. The timers were started, and above main entrance to the conference room a large digital clock - measuring hours, minutes and seconds - began to tick down from 48:00:00.
"Alright everybody," Gemini said as he walked in through the large metal doors on one side of the room, "you know what that means. We're locked in until Thursday evening, so I suggest you get comfortable."
"How long do we have to move in," Lucre asked excitedly from the back of the group, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder as he waited impatiently to get to his room.
"Agent Gamma will read out the room assignments," Gemini replied, motioning to a chipper looking henchman who was definitely a rising star in W.E.E. "And you will have thirty minutes un-pack your bags before a light dinner and cocktails afterwards."
"Always the gracious host," Sr. Senor Senior muttered from the back, both in compliment and contempt towards Gemini. He had wanted to host this year's conference, but lacked the experience in villainy to be deemed worthy of the honor.
"Here are the room assignments," Agent Gamma called out a bit too loudly in his enthusiasm. "Mr.'s Senor Senior and Mr. Senor Junior have suites A and B. Ms. Amy and Lord Fiske in suite C. Mr. Lucre in suite D and Mr. Killigan in suite E. Mr. Gill is in tank F, Ms. Lynn in suite G and Professor Dementor in suite H. In suite I we have Gemini and in suites J and K we have Dr. Drakken and Ms. Shego respectively.
"Strike those last two off the list," Gemini ordered him, knowing that there was no way either could gain access to the meeting now that the lockdown was in effect.
"Yes sir. Did I miss anyone?" Gamma asked, looking around the room to see any raised hands. Just then a blast shook the building, causing glasses to fall off the table and shatter against the tiled floor from the shock. Reflexively everyone jumped up from their seats and glanced around for any sign of what had created the explosion. But upon seeing nothing, they simply stood there; unsure whether running away or staying put was safer. Their immobility cost them the few moments they could have used to escape from the series of armed men dressed in all black who entered the room from the door at the far end of the table. They quickly encircled the group, keeping their weapons trained on a specific, predetermined target as they waited motionless for some unknown command or signal. Everyone searched for an escape route, but there were simply too many men surrounding them.
Gill looked around and tensed his leg muscles, preparing to leap upwards into the rafters where he could hide and fire slime at the intruders below. But he saw that every armed man near him carried either a net or a hand- held flame thrower, and knew that if he moved he would be burnt alive. Adrena-Lynn also planned to attack the black-clothed men, but she only knew basic martial arts, and knew she couldn't dodge that many machine gun bullets.
The rest of the villains stood there in shock, and watched as a tall man dressed in a black pin-stripe suit and matching tie approached them. His hair was the same color as that of his suit, and slicked back against his skull as if it were a soldier's helmet. His eyes - brown and emotionless - looked straight ahead, focusing on empty space as he walked down the hall to the conference room. His face was drawn and gaunt, like that of an old man, though from his abundance of hair and wiry build, he could not have been more than forty-five years old. His lips were thin, tight and almost colorless, as if he were a cartoon, with a single pencil line for a mouth. Like a snake, his pink tongue whipped out every few seconds and ran briefly over his lower lip, keeping it constantly glistening with saliva. Either a nervous reaction or he simply had very dry lips, but no one dared to ask. His metal-toed leather shoes clicked against the floor as he approached the villains, who watched him warily like schoolchildren at the tiger pen in a zoo. They half expected him to leap at them and, with his bare hands, rip them to pieces. It was that look in his eyes - one which lacked any type of empathy or compassion - that made even the most hardened criminal in the room shiver. This was not a man who was simply evil because of what he did; he was evil in every aspect of his life - the embodiment of pure malevolence.
Gemini was the first to speak, his voice burning with rage: "What is the meaning of this!"
"Don't speak," the man replied, his voice cool and like his eyes, completely devoid of feeling. "Let me do the talking."
He turned to the other villains and spread his black gloved hands in a sign of welcome: "Good evening, my name is Mr. Grim and I am now running this little get together. I suggest you pay attention to what I have to say, since daydreaming will be severely punished," he motioned to the armed men around him to illustrate what the punishment would be. I am here to offer you all a part in the greatest ever evil plot imagined. But to pull something this massive off, I will need all of your assistance and expertise in the villainous arts. So, in return for your services I offer you each twenty-five billion U.S. dollars - a very handsome compensation, I think."
"I think you had better leave right now mister," DNAmy spoke up, upset by Grim's armed henchmen and his tone toward the villains. "None of us like being pushed around, especially by some amateur like you. We already have enough money, so just back off."
"If yeh try anything, I'll slice yer head off ina second," Killigan growled in consent, gripping his driver almost hard enough to snap it in half. "Leave now."
"Then I take it none of you wish to help me?" Grim asked, and received no answer, only glares of hatred. "Very well then, let me change the wording of my offer and see if you like it any better: You will help me or my guards will cut you down in a split-second. You all have fifteen seconds to sit down at the table - and if even one of you remains standing, you all die."
It took the villains a few seconds to decide between death and helping Grim. And no matter how much they hated doing it, they all ended up seated in their chairs with Grim standing at the end of the table. He smiled widely; his eyes aglow with malice as he sat down at the head of the table and waved his hand to dismiss the guards. All but four, each toting an MP-5 submachine gun and a handgun - holstered on their hip -, they kept their weapons trained on the villains as their chief again began to speak:
"Now, let me tell you my plan."
A/N: Hope you all like the story, but unfortunately there won't be any postings for a while. I've got to go on a trip and internet access is limited, so I hope you have something else to read for a while. With a bit of luck there'll be a new posting in the first week of November if I can get off my lazy ass and write something.