3 Days Later-

I hadn’t been completely honest with Mary, because I’d forgotten. Technically I did have an ID, to which were tied various heavy machinery certifications, but it was a cheap fake, and pretty much any time the cops caught me I’d get more than a few laughing suggestions that I get deported.

The problem is, there was nowhere to deport me. I had spent the last 60 years in the US, and the 1975 Soviet Expatriate Act had made sure I couldn’t be shipped back there either. If you were a defector or other expatriate, the soviets at that time had declared you a non-person. I wasn’t sure if they would have applied it to me, since I hadn’t had any papers back when I grew up in Siberia, but I looked like a duck, quacked like a duck, and had a West Virginia accent.

If I ever got the attention of the feds, I might get hosed, but I rarely if ever got even a normal amount of flack. A normal person working for a supervillain was considered under duress unless they committed certain types of personal felonies, such as rape, murder, or arson, and I’d made sure that any felonies I committed were complicated and covered under the villain act. Obviously, there were people like me that exploited the hell out of the act, but the general assumption that unpowered thugs working under a supervillain that could kill them without blinking was fairly sound.

Mooks worked as mooks. Most of us were not particularly bright, myself included, and most of us considered it a job, no different from being a Janitor or getting picked up behind a local hardware store for day labor. A combination of fear and decent pay kept us running the circuit, even though most mooks knew sooner or later they would probably catch an energy blast from a hero by mistake or get knocked unconscious often enough that they’d get permanent brain damage.

I was busy running the shaft switch between lines 4r and 4p. West Virginia still uses deep coal mines, because strip mining in the hills would level entire mountains I wore a mask, of course, because all the workers did, and with the ore running through the shaft switch a thick layer of dust was pretty much par for the course.

Mining was what I did in between gigs, like a lot of the folks in South Charleston. Due to federal interference, a ton of miners were getting laid off, but the heavy equipment guys like me still had a job as long as our lines were producing.

But it couldn’t keep me fed easily. On average I had to consume about as much food as four normal people, or I started getting sick and hungry. Basically, I was trying to feed a family of four healthy, muscular, adult males, and right now I was chowing down on a sub as I kept an eye on the line switch.

“Hey Jim, don’t you ever stop eating?” Mike Runsk, my partner on the line, asked.

I shook my head and made a muscle that popped a seam in my cheap work shirt. It was hot in the mines, always hot, so a lot of us wore little but a shirt and shorts. Some of the guys even stripped down to a toolbelt, hard hat, and underwear during the summertime. Fortunately, October was cool enough that I was back in lightweight work pants.

“These guns require constant ammunition.” I joked, not giving a crap that my sandwich probably had a thin layer of coal dust on it. It was just something you dealt with down here. Still, it paid better than construction.

The thing is, I had to admit Mary was right. I was comfortable here, and it wasn’t exactly a small town, but I couldn’t keep working the same job for decades. I had moved through just about every industry there was in town, from construction to pipefitting, and janitorial, I’d even had a short stint as a junior high substitute history that I’d accidentally stumbled into.

Only Mary, who owned Mama’s, and Mickey, who also owned the building where I rented my current apartment, knew I didn’t age right. After a while in a particular job or location, your coworkers or neighbors started asking questions. Even the local cops were starting to know me just a little too well, so it might be time to move on. When you move every decade and start a new career, you almost always started at the bottom, which was why I still did the mook thing.

Mooks and minions are two different animals. A lot of the things we did were similar, but in general, when a supervillain took over a gang or something or employed a long-term group of thugs, they built a certain level of loyalty to that cowl. Minions lived the supervillain subservient life, and rarely changed teams.

Mooks on the other hand could be long-term employees but usually weren’t. They were hired muscle and knew it. Their loyalty was bought and paid for, and while they stayed quiet about their bosses, they would often go through a LOT of small and middle-time Supervillains in the course of their careers. They made more money than most minions but weren’t part of a family with fallbacks and contacts to turn to if stuff went south.

Mooks, though, had a rule. If a mask showed up, we ran. Or we surrendered, depending on if it was a cape or a cowl. None of us could take a mask, and we knew it. Minions sometimes fought back against a mask, especially if they were street-level, but mooks didn’t. We were there to look scary, wave guns around if necessary (It usually wasn’t), handle the tasks of a job, and sound the alarm when the law or a mask showed up.

If a mook talked, seriously beat up or shot up a bystander, or fought a mask, their lives were done. If they lived through it, they would be lucky if they ever worked, or walked, again. Sure, if one of those unpowered idiot vigilantes showed up, we were more than welcome to strongly encourage a change of career, but that was self-defense. Even if you are on a job cutting a hole in a safe or something, some dude showing up and trying to hit you with a baseball bat was fair game for hospital time.

Mooks considered themselves the crème de la crème of the unpowered flunky set. Yeah, sidekicks had more respect, but most of those except for the bootlicker types were still bonafide masks.

The masks were a weird set. Most of them were fine with playing the game, but every once in a while you ran into the supervillain who was a real psychopathic serial killer, or a cape that had a stick up his ass about crime and thought that jaywalking was an excuse to put someone in a grave.

But in general, both sides usually followed the rules. Banks, places that handled money or wealth were fair game, as were universities, tech companies, and all the fun places supervillains were known to hit to get their toys and cash.

Museums were off-limits. You could rob one, but you did NOT get into a fight around irreplaceable antiques. People got kinda funny when you accidentally torched a Van Gogh, even if, in my opinion, that improved most of his art.

But you stayed away from hospitals (except for the research kind) churches, and places where kids hang out. Kids don’t know enough to stay out of a mask fight, and the smart villain kept them out of it. Hurting a kid meant that a cape wouldn’t try to ‘arrest you’ and you’d more likely end up with an ax buried in your skull, and rightfully so.

I think the word for ‘the show’ was something like Kayfabe… a tradition from professional wrestling and before that, exhibition matches. You know, where you would have good guys and bad guys that would prank each other and show all sorts of rivalry on screen, the heels, and the faces, and then go out and have beers afterward. The kayfabe mask game was not quite as pleasant, since mostly the fights weren’t rigged, but in a bigger city, I couldn’t guarantee that it wasn’t. Here in Charleston, the supers were low-powered, the fights were small, and the goal of most villains was to collect a nice nest egg before doing a year in lockup and then retrieving your stash and living comfortably.

Razor Blade Smile was actually a pretty big deal out here. He usually hung out on the east coast, but I guess he was laying low, which was why the big-ticket hero, Nighthawk, showed up.

After a couple of hours of switching lines, the intercom chimed and the horn blew letting us know it was knock-off time. Ten years ago, when I first started this job, the chimes were an option… the mines were full, and anyone that wanted to put in overtime was welcome to it. But with the change in opinion and people trying their hardest to make ‘renewable’ energy work (It didn’t), There wasn’t enough money to spare for a lot of workers, let alone overtime.

As I took a shower and grabbed some clean clothes from my locker, Roger, one of the site foremen, poked his head in and pointed at me.

I quickly got dressed and headed toward him. “Man, when are you going to get a cellphone? Mickey just called on the trailer line. He said it’s important. I am getting tired of being your goddamned receptionist.”

I shrugged. Roger was one of those people they couldn’t fire. He was in middle management, and I had never seen him do anything more useful than being a receptionist and screaming about overtime.

I entered the trailer and picked up the handset on the desk. “Hey Mickey, how’s tricks?”

His voice replied, “Dude. I think we might have sent the wrong message with your ad. I’ll order us a 3 pack of pizzas. I am your agent, right? 15%? I think this shit just blew up. Meet me at my office?”

He actually had a small office in the basement of the building where I lived, which he almost never used except to store tools and stuff for being building super.

“Umm… okay? What do you mean by blew up?”

I could actually hear the grin in his voice. “Nope, you have gotta be here to get the full impact, man. Seriously, though, some of this might set you up for a long time, if you have an open mind.”

“Right. Be right over.” And I hung up the phone, ignoring Roger’s glare. I wondered what he meant by an open mind.

Whoah, Mickey hadn’t been kidding. He was scrolling through the comments on the ad on his screen-thing while I started putting away the second big 18-inch Antonio’s deep dish meat monger’s pizza.

“I think people might have misinterpreted the ad,” he said as another nude… with the head obscured, picture scrolled past. Don’t get me wrong, her body was spectacular, as was the lightning sparkling between her hands, although the caption of ‘I will abuse you’ didn’t get me going.

The third nude was… uhh… I am pretty sure that the guy’s body was fake or something because no healthy male human had tackle that almost hit his knees.

“My mind isn’t that open,” I said between bites. “And neither is my butt.”. In over a hundred years I’d never been tempted to play the outfield, and this picture wasn’t going to encourage me to change that policy. “I can see why he wants someone that can take some punishment, though.”

Our old ad had been a lot simpler. ‘West Virginia Mook. Short-term work. Invulnerable, willing to take one for the team, silence guaranteed’ without a picture. It had occasionally gotten the occasional kinky fisherman, but nothing like this.

There were like… over 200 responses, and more were ticking in!

I sighed. “Can we strip off the ones that require me to play sex toy or wear a gimp suit?” I asked him, and he nodded, clicking through them and putting them in the recycling bin. “Except for that one,” I added, as a particularly comely young lady wearing a mask was looking for an escort that was unkillable to help take off the flack of one too many interested male admirers. She was based out of Cleveland and playing bodyguard and beard was not too far out of my wheelhouse.

Sure, she was a cowl, but as long as ‘random abuse’ wasn’t included in the deal, I would be more than happy to spook around and growl at would-be fans. Most young cowl females liked to throw a little orange juice into their milk of human kindness, but it was a detail that could be hammered out.

Honestly, it might not be too bad. I was a little worried though about making a social Gaff. I knew that the term ‘negro’ was now considered an insult, and its alternative was always an insult, and I think ‘colored’ had joined the train of socially inappropriate terminology inside the last half-decade, but I had no idea what the correct terminology was now. Was ‘black’ acceptable? Or was it African-American? Or something else new?

“Hey, what is it now? Black? Afro-American?”

“Person of color.”

I nodded, “Okay, would her being a person of color with a white beard cause social problems?”

“A white beard?”

“Yeah, you know, the cover boyfriend to keep things looking pristine if she’s into girls or sheep or something.”

He shook his head, “Nope, actually, I think the reason she’s looking is that she is not into girls. Nowadays a cape or a cowl can get a huge social boost by coming out of the closet, and public sympathy is an amazingly powerful weapon if a supervillain can get it. Having a white public boyfriend might also be a way for her to add to her social credit, because people will be like, ‘Hey, she likes stealing art, but at least she’s not a bigot’.”

I chuckled, “So the job is to be her whiteface. If it pays well, I can do it.”

Mickey nodded, “Yeah, most of this list thinks you are a man whore. A big part of it is responses thinking you are looking for a paid date. I am definitely going to have to change the ad.”

“This one bothers me though.” He showed me a simple response that said “We will be in touch” from something called the Initiative.

I shrugged, “Looks like a typical supervillain group response. You know how they love to be cryptic and vaguely threatening? They probably need someone to fill a suit to boost up their perceived power for a bit, and when they get a full roster, I get ‘killed off’ to increase loyalty and sympathy or something. I have done it before.”

I smiled, “Umm… how do we work out contact and stuff?” Usually, we just PM’ed a response and a place to meet anonymously to kick out the details, but some of these folks were talking about California, Seattle, Chicago, and even one guy from Japan. I doubted very much I’d be able to body double for a Japanese guy, so it might be a more traditional mook job.

I wasn’t about to fly across the country in hopes of getting a job. I couldn’t even come close to affording that. I wasn’t in the big leagues, and I didn’t want to be in the big leagues. In the really big leagues, mooks stopped being an option, the bigs needed minions, most of whom were low-level cowls and wouldn’t be protected from official backlash.

He grinned a little, “That’s easy. With this many offers, we can actually be picky for once. I will cut and paste a ‘let’s find a place in Charlotte to meet and discuss options’. We are looking for a real paycheck here, so if they cannot do it or get a flunky to do it for them, then they cannot afford our new and improved pricing structure, right?”

This was getting a little out of hand, but if worse came to worst, I could drop out someplace and hide for a while. Again, I had done it before, that was how I wound up in Charleston.