Chapter 2: Burdens
Dante was a surprisingly quiet man. Although he didn't seem to mind their presence, the young women he had hired hardly interacted with him. He had interviewed several women and ultimately decided upon these three. None of them were really sure what they were supposed to do. He laid out a few ground rules: No going in what he called the “Portal Room” at all times; No guests in the facility; No going through his things; and refer anybody who came into the facility directly to him. Otherwise, he didn’t seem to care what they did.
He wasn’t entirely what they expected. Most of their interviews had been conducted over the telephone (he wanted to charm them with the allure of working in a top-secret government facility), but they had been told he had a few over video chat. He assured them, however, that the video interviews had been conducted in a similarly mysterious fashion. They were all surprised to see the shorter Hispanic man waiting for them inside of the building. It took them a little while to get used to him, but his dashing smile and warm, brown eyes eventually won them over. Although he did wear a small black mask over his eyes for some reason (“It makes me look ten years younger,” he told them). They had so many questions about him, but he often dodged around them and deflected to a different topic.
One night, one of the girls saw him rocking in an office chair, looking at some kind of book. Was it a journal? She wasn’t sure, and she knocked on the doorway to let him know she was there,
“Hey, Dante?” She said. He looked over to her, “We were thinking about ordering some takeout. You want anything?”
“Takeout?” He looked at his wrist, “At this hour? Kinda late, isn’t it, Danielle?”
She shook her head, “Stop doing that, I know you don’t wear a watch. And it’s barely nine.”
“You young people and your working digestive tracts.” He shook his head, “I’m fine, thank you.” He went back to his book and wrote something down. She didn’t move.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t stop writing, “You know the rules.”
She shrugged, “It’s always worth a shot. You’re an interesting man, Dante.” He stopped writing.
“How many people have you seen die?” There was a solemnness in his voice Danielle was not expecting. He repeated the question.
“None. How many have you seen die?”
He sighed, leaned back in his chair, and looked at the ceiling. “I lost count. It’s not a number you want to keep track of.” She was stunned. “You were the one they wanted, right?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re the one they chose to spy on me, right?” She was at a loss for words. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. I already know.” He started rocking again, “There’s something wrong with me.”
“What do you mean?”
Dante was quiet for about a minute, “We as humans don’t like killing people. It’s a basic survival instinct—after all, if members of a species enjoy killing one another, that species is not designed to last. This instinct makes it difficult for some professions—notably for the military. I believe the statistic is something like ninety percent of all shots fired on the battlefield don’t hit their targets? I’ve been wrong before, so don’t quote me on that, but the idea is that because of that instinct, soldiers deliberately miss their target. After all, despite all the propaganda and lies, it turns out that the ‘monstrous’ terrorists are actually other human beings. Fortunately for you, the same is true for them. In order to get around that, many military training programs do their best to imprint a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ mentality into their foot soldiers.
“I did very well in my time in the military as a random foot soldier because I can essentially turn that instinct off. I don’t like to do it, but I can. It’s something I learned how to do a long time ago when I needed to defend myself. Soon it was just left off, although I didn’t realize it. As far as I was aware, what I was doing was in the interests of the greatest good. It was how I atoned for the crimes I had committed. I never realized the collateral damage that I was causing with my ‘righteous’ killings. It took me time to learn the most valuable lesson that one death does not avenge another. It feels good in the short term, but what does it solve in the long term?”
“What about capital punishment? Criminals who, without a doubt, have committed heinous crimes and are put to death? Doesn’t their death avenge the death of their victims?”
“That doesn’t bring the victims back, but I wasn’t killing criminals. Not then.” He stopped rocking, “They were regular people, just doing their jobs. Sure, their uniforms bore the insignia of the people who ruined my life, but they had their own. And I robbed them of that.” He sighed and rubbed his face. “It took me a long time to realize what I was doing was wrong, and it took an even longer time to figure out how to turn that instinct back on.”
“So, what, you never turn it back off?”
“No, I do. Last time I had to was about—what, twenty, thirty years ago? They had me working up in the pacific northwest—somewhere between Washington and Oregon; I hopped between facilities there. Regardless, while I was up there I did a lot of work taking out various right-wing terrorist groups that were located in the area. Forget what the mainstream tells you about religious extremists in the Middle East and northern Africa, homegrown right-wing terrorists are, and have been, the most dangerous group threatening our national security. They invent for themselves this position where they are the only ones who can protect the nation and the Constitution, specifically the Second Amendment. It’s ridiculous. Five hundred years and this stupid nation hasn’t yet figured out how exactly the Second Amendment should work, but then it was designed that way.”
“So if right-wing terrorists are such a threat that you have no problem dealing with, why did you stop?”
“Mostly because they made me. My work was getting sloppy—I hadn’t had to do anything like that in a very long time—and well, even for a conservative government at the time, it doesn’t look good if one of their agents has supposedly gone rogue and is killing ‘law-abiding’ citizens. I guess they hadn’t done anything yet, but they were all going to end up the same way: Dead in a standoff with local or national police forces.” Dante shrugged, “I was just speeding up the process.”
“Dante, what are you?” Danielle walked into the office and sat in another chair across the room. He restarted rocking in his.
“Human.” The two sat quietly for a moment. “What do they want to know?”
She sighed, giving up the ruse, “What you’re doing with the portal, mostly. I keep telling them it’s pointless and that you won’t let me see it, but they insist that I keep trying.” He stifled a laugh. “They also want to know about you. They seem to know surprisingly little.”
“Well I have lied on nearly every government form I filled out for the past,” He stopped rocking for a few seconds, then started again, “I don’t even know how long anymore. Hell, if I didn’t write it down, I wouldn’t remember the truth about my past. The fact is, I’ve kept my past purposefully obscure. It’s easier to avoid blackmail that way.”
“So you’re not going to tell me?”
“No,” he shook his head, “Not yet.” The earnestness of his answer surprised her.
“When?”
“Eventually.”
Danielle sighed and put her head in her hands, “You’re so difficult.”
“Life wouldn’t be fun if I were easy.” He stopped rocking, thinking about his choice of words, “Or maybe it would be.” He shrugged and got back to rocking. “What do you know about the Five?”
“The five? The five what?”
“The Five. I’m sure you’ve heard of them, or at least something related to them.” He looked at her with one brow raised, “Do they not teach that in history anymore?”
“The five?” She thought about it for another minute, then her eyes lit up, “Oh! The Five! They were a group of investors, right? They owned near-equal shares in a company: ‘Fivveus Something.’ Fivveus Manufacturing? Production?”
“Fivveus Development, Inc.”
“That’s the one! They started off in biomedical research, yeah? And then they made a transition into weapons and defense contracting?” He nodded. “That’s quite a paradigm shift. How many people did they have to lay off to make that move?”
“You’d be surprised at how many they kept. They made the move by developing biological weapons first, and then they slowly transitioned into more traditional options.” He looked back up at the ceiling. “Did you know they bombed San Antonio?”
“What?! No, impossible! But there were so many military bases there at that time!”
“It sent an important message. The entire thing was staged. They framed several superheroes from back then in order to get the legislation they wanted pushed through Congress.” Danielle was incredulous. “Mmhm. Before they did it, Roy Fivveus Sr. and his family had been kidnapped by some anti-super terrorists who—through a very convoluted plan—managed to distract the most powerful supers for long enough to ‘persuade’ Roy Sr. to change his mind on them. The terrorists managed to kill his wife before the supers could rescue the Fivveus family, and that’s really what got the ball rolling. After that, Fivveus Production put most of its resources into developing the Heroic Plague, and they wanted to use it. Popular opinion was squarely with the supers though, and human rights activists were outraged that such a thing was ever made. One thing led to another, the city was bombed, and popular opinion quickly shifted. They exterminated millions of people. You think the Nazis were bad? The Five were far more successful.”
He paused and sighed quietly, “I nearly saved the Hero gene from going extinct. Imagine a genetic sequence that gave people honest-to-God superpowers. Only one person was left with the gene, and she passed it onto our son.” He rested his feet on the ground and grew pensive, “And I hoped that maybe at one point or another he’d need some money and donate some fluids, or even that he’d have a family of his own. If there were anybody alive with the gene today, they would be my descendant.”
“But he didn’t.”
Dante shook his head, “He was smart—like his father—but my son was also dense—like his father. I didn’t know him very well, but what I did know wasn’t very promising. And, well, I had access to public records. He was the world’s only super left. He probably had women throwing themselves at him. He probably had people telling him what he should do to preserve his bloodline, and,” Dante sighed, “He didn’t. And now superheroes are extinct.”
Danielle laughed quietly, “You’re just mad that you aren’t the father of superheroes.”
“Can you imagine how cool that’d be? To be the literal patriarch of all superheroes? That’d be amazing! And they’d all know who I am because I’m immortal!”
She laughed loudly, “You’re like a child!”
“I’ve been around for hundreds of years. I have to laugh at something.” He let her laugh a while longer, and then the two sat in silence again.
“What are you going to do when the portal is complete?”
“What are you going to do?” She didn’t answer. “You can go back to them if you want. You can tell them everything I’ve told you—I won’t be able to stop you. But they’ll probably treat you as a criminal once I’m done. I’m going to do my best to keep that from happening because I have this weird thing where I care about other human beings, but I’m warning you now that is probably what they’ll do. And if something does happen, and I screw up somewhere, then you need to comply with them. Paint yourself as the victim, as being held helplessly against your will, paint me as the bad guy, the madman with a mad plan—but always comply. Tell them everything, don’t hide a thing. Remember, the less you hide, the easier it will be for them to forgive you.”
“But what if they hold me as an accomplice?”
“That’s why I’m not telling you anything until it is too late to stop me. I don’t want them to use that against you, or Marie, or Katie. That’s why I let you do nearly whatever it is you want, so you don’t question anything, so you don’t know, so it can’t be used against you. There is a method to my madness, and it should work out. I can’t and never guarantee anything. Do you understand?” Danielle nodded her head. “Good.” Dante leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling again. “So were you actually going to order takeout, or was that just a ruse to try and get information from me?”
She shrugged, “A little bit of both.”
“Well, I like Chinese. Beef and broccoli with fried rice."
She nodded and started to leave the room. As she reached the door, she turned around, “What crime are you planning to commit?”
He smiled as he looked at her, “You know the rules.”