Minion

  Dedication

  For Nick and Isabella, my own little minions.

  May you someday rule the world.

  Epigraph

  “Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.”

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  Minion: A servile dependent, follower, or underling. From the Middle French word mignon, meaning “darling.”

  —From Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. My Hero

  2. The Instrument, Not the Cross-dresser

  3. A Comet Sighting

  4. Great Chain of Being

  5. The Magic Trick

  6. Six Fingers and a Helping Hand

  7. The Man Behind the Masks

  8. The Last Piece

  9. Lights, Camera, and a Whole Lot of Action

  10. Under the Stars

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I want you to know, right from the start, that I’m not evil. I’m not saying I’m Captain Fantastic, either. I just don’t want you to misinterpret everything that I’m about to tell you. Because being the bad guy is really all about intent, and I never intended to hurt anyone. If anything, it was the opposite. It’s just sometimes it’s hard to know what’s right and what’s best and why there even has to be a difference.

  There are those moments in your life, you know, when the last screw is tightened and the green light flashes and you realize that your whole worldview is a loose thread dangling from the blanket you’ve wrapped so tight around you. And somebody’s gotten ahold of that one thread and is starting to pull. And most of you wants to tug back. To stay warm. To stay safe. To keep things as they are.

  And then part of you wants to watch it unravel. Just to see how far it will go.

  My name is Michael Marion Magdalene Morn. And this is my side of the story.

  MY HERO

  When I was twelve years old, give or take, my father strapped a bomb to my chest and drove me to the First National Bank and Trust so we could steal $27,500. I know what you’re thinking: if you’re going to go through all the trouble of rigging your son with explosives and send him to rob a bank, you should set loftier goals, but my father has a policy that he only steals what he needs at the time, and at the time he needed $27,500 to finish one of his projects and to buy groceries. We were out of frozen waffles.

  Dad parked outside the BP across the street to distract himself by playing Angry Birds and eating cashews while I walked through the bulletproof doors of the gray-bricked building. Me, a pale, wispy-banged preteen, green eyed and skinny, wearing a dark-brown overcoat and an impertinent expression, walking into a bank all by myself. There was no guard at the door, but there were plenty of little black globes hanging from the ceiling. Security cameras. My heart caught in my throat, but I forced it down—Dad had told me not to worry about the cameras. They were taken care of. He had my back.

  I approached the first teller—a young woman in a navy blazer with her hair pulled into a stern bun and too much makeup masking a potentially pretty face—and opened my jacket, showing her the bomb. I could tell she was impressed by her platter-sized eyes and the choked-down, quietly-pee-your-pants scream, which came out all muffled, like a dog’s squeak toy under a couch cushion. I gave her the speech. The one I had recited at least a dozen times the night before and three more on the way over while finishing off a bag of Skittles for breakfast.

  “There’s a horrible man outside,” I said, nodding back toward the glass. “You can’t see him, but he can see you, and he says if you don’t fill this”—produce Transformers backpack, old-school cartoon, not those overstuffed Michael Bay movies—“with twenty-seven thousand five hundred dollars, he will hit the detonator and you and me will both be carried out of here in Ziploc bags.” It was a speech prepared by my father, at least most of it. I added the Ziploc bags part myself.

  And it probably would have worked. The bomb. The speech. The Ziploc line. It would have, if I had even tried, if I had bothered to get into character. Someone in my position, a kid picked up off the street, three pounds of explosives taped under his chin, a juvenile IED about to commit his first felony—you’d expect I’d be snot faced and crying, shaking uncontrollably, begging the woman to hurry or to call the police. But I just couldn’t make myself do it. I came off flat, I’m sure, as if I couldn’t care less.

  As if I wasn’t worried at all.

  Don’t get me wrong. I was. A little. I just knew more than I was letting on.

  I glanced at the teller standing next to her. A man, midforties. Receding hair. Pencil lips. Probably his second job. Or third. Formerly an accountant, or a used-car salesman. I felt sorry for him. Maybe he liked the girl with the bun. Maybe he would try to impress her by leaping over his teller station and tackling me. Maybe he’d always wanted to be a hero when he grew up.

  Understandable. But there aren’t any heroes left in New Liberty, and I’m pretty sure if Captain Bald Spot had superpowers, he wouldn’t be here cashing checks and wearing that stupid-looking paisley tie.

  I watched him twitch, his wrinkle-wreathed eyes darting back and forth from me to another man—the bank manager, I figured, a much younger guy, skinny like me and better dressed, cluelessly staring at his computer across the room.

  This wasn’t going as well as I had hoped.

  I turned back to the young woman and whispered, “The bad man outside told me that I only have three minutes.”

  Actually the last thing my father had really said to me was to watch for traffic. “Look both ways.” Because that’s what you worry about when you are going to rob a bank. Still, it’s nice that he worries.

  The teller blinked at me. Maybe she was in shock. Or maybe somehow she realized that the explosives sitting above my heart were just Lincoln Logs rolled in Reynolds Wrap, with wires and a pulsing LED light attached with electrical tape. Either way, she wasn’t moving. The bag sat empty on the counter between us. The accountant/car salesman/bank teller next to her made a little move, a twitch of the arm, no doubt reaching under the counter and triggering the silent alarm.

  Now I really did only have three minutes.

  “Listen, lady,” I said, pushing the bag a little closer to her. “It’s okay. No one is going to blame you. You aren’t going to get fired over this. Insurance will cover it. And even if not, this job isn’t worth it, am I right? You don’t really even want to be a bank teller for the rest of your life anyway, and you certainly don’t want to explode. So just toss the money in the sack, and I’ll go.”

  I said it in the same even tone I said everything else, except this time I looked square into her eyes, tractor-beam style. Locked on. Sucked in. She looked back into mine, and I saw the little black dots of her pupils blow up big and glassy like a stuffed bear’s.

  This time I had her. It was a last resort, but I knew when I walked in there that I might have to use the gift God gave me. The bank teller nodded and then knelt down to access the safe under her cash drawer, taking the bag with her.

  “You’re not going to say anything, are you?” I asked Captain Chrome Dome, giving him the same penetrating stare. It took a moment longer, but eventually he went all glassy-eyed too, and shook his head.

  “Come to think of it, you won’t really even remember what I look like,” I added coolly.

  The man put his finger to his lips. Mum’s the word. The woman in the blue blazer handed me my bag and smiled too. I zipped it up and slung it over my shoulder.

  “You shouldn’t wear so much mascara,” I said. “Your eyes a
re pretty enough.”

  Fifteen seconds later I left the bank with my backpack full of cash and crossed the street to the gas station where our little white Civic was parked, taking care to look both ways. Dad was hunched over his tablet.

  “We should go,” I said, buckling in.

  “Almost finished,” he said. His tongue stuck out of his mouth like a curious turtle, and his big orange caterpillar eyebrows were crowding the bridge of his nose. There were cashew crumbles down the front of his Hawaiian shirt. My dad had never been to Hawaii, but he found the shirts cheap at the Goodwill and had a closet full of them. Wore one each day. His green eyes dashed across the screen.

  “Seriously, I think it’s time to go,” I said a little more sternly.

  “I’ve almost got it,” he mumbled. I could hear the sirens now. Several blocks away still, but it’s not as if we were driving a Lamborghini. The Civic was eight years old and ran mostly on good intentions. It was our only getaway car. I drummed my fingers impatiently on the dash. I could have tried to make eye contact, insisted. Insisted that we go. But I had a rule against using my power on my own father. Instead I hummed.

  “There it is!” he said triumphantly. “Take that, you lousy pigs! Hah!” He thrust a fist in the air and then turned the screen so I could see he had three-starred another level.

  “I’m proud of you,” I said. “Now can we please get a move on?”

  “Sure,” he said. He started the car and pulled slowly out into the street, headed away from the bank. Away from the sirens. Away from at least thirty years in prison for him and several years of juvie for me, and that was being generous given the things we’d done.

  He also pressed a button on a little black box about five inches square that had been sitting in one of the drink holders between us. I instinctively held my breath.

  Like all my father’s little black boxes, this one had three buttons. Green, white, and red. Green to activate, white to deactivate, and red . . . you never press the red one—I learned that the hard way. Also like all his little black boxes, it had a sticky label telling you what it did. This one was called the Scrambler, and if it worked, it meant Dad had just fried every security camera in a three-block radius. There would be no footage of me entering or leaving the bank. No trace of our white Honda sitting in the gas station. Only the bank employees would be able to offer the cops a lead, and I was confident they wouldn’t remember much. The box vibrated a little and then went dead. Exhale.

  As we pulled away, I glanced out my window and up at the sky. I’m not sure what I expected to see. A helicopter maybe. Some schmuck in cape and tights. But the sky was crystal blue and beautiful and as empty as the pretty bank teller’s safe.

  “How’d it go?” Dad asked as we merged onto the interstate.

  “Exactly as planned,” I said, finally removing the fake explosives from my chest and tossing them in the backseat next to the backpack full of cash. He could have made a real bomb, of course, but we both knew it was only a prop. The hope was for me not to have to use my powers, but if I did, the wires and blinking lights would add to my natural charm, make me even more persuasive. “You should have seen the look on her face when I opened the jacket. She was seriously freaked.”

  Dad reached over and ruffled my hair. It was a habit, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was kind of annoying.

  “See?” he said. “People will believe just about anything.”

  Yes, I thought to myself. They certainly will.

  It was the first serious crime I ever committed, robbing that bank. Unless you count aiding and abetting, which I had probably been doing for two years before that. I’m not exactly sure what abetting means, but I would microwave my father hot dogs while he was downstairs fidgeting with his inventions, and I once told him that a high-powered laser he had constructed was “freakin’ awesome” as it burned a pancake-sized hole in our ceiling. So if encouraging is the same thing as abetting, then I was an avid abettor.

  That was before I started going down there myself. Before he let me help with the boxes. Then I became an aider. And then an accomplice. I’m only thirteen years old, and I’ve already accompliced a lot with my life.

  No doubt you are thinking that any father who would duct tape a toy bomb to his son and make him rob a bank isn’t exactly Hallmark-card material. I guess you’re right. The professor isn’t your typical dad. He doesn’t do backyard barbecues and baseball games. He never coached soccer or took me camping. He doesn’t ask me to fetch him beers, and he doesn’t pretend to suck at sports sometimes so I will win. He sucks at sports for real, so I always win. But make no mistake: he is a hero.

  He saved me, after all.

  I grew up in the St. Mary of the Woods School for Wayward Boys. When I say school I really mean detention facility, and when I say wayward I pretty much mean abandoned, though I also mean delinquent, deranged, and sometimes downright criminal. St. Mary’s was a tossed salad of juvenile dysfunction. There were boys who were there because they liked to light things on fire. Boys who liked to steal from their parents. Boys who stole things from their parents so they could light them on fire. There was even a boy, Charlie “Chuck It All” Chamberlain, who once took a twelve-pack of glass Coke bottles to the top of the I-80 overpass and started catapulting them at the cars below, causing an eight-car pileup and an instant invitation into St. Mary’s open arms.

  And then there were boys like me who didn’t have a mother or father to steal from. Who were a little afraid of fire. Who never really had a home outside St. Mary’s. We were the “perms.” Permanent residents. Mary’s Kids. We didn’t have a home to go back to, but at least we were destined to inherit the earth. Or so we were told.

  That’s right. I was an orphan, just like every little freckled-girl and every farmer-boy hero in a fantasy book. Just picture it: swaddled infant, abandoned on the church doorstep in the pouring rain, poor overwrought mother stealing away into the night, shedding a solitary tear that you can tell isn’t a raindrop by the way she wipes it with the sleeve of her torn coat, looking back, just once, her face half illuminated by the pale moon before she turns into a shadow and disappears around the corner.

  Except that’s not me. I wasn’t left on the church doorstep. I was actually dumped at a White Castle. The counter jockey working the night shift found me in a corner booth with an envelope full of twenties and a mangled onion ring. I was a quiet baby: it was a half hour before he even noticed I was there, apparently.

  That’s it. The whole origin story. Child of the White Castle. Home for belly bombers and abandoned babes. The cops made inquiries. Tracked down customers through credit cards. The teenager working the register was a half zombie and not much help. The state set out to reunite me with my family, but in the meantime, St. Mary’s came for me. They took me and the four hundred in cash as a donation. A nameless kid with a polka-dot onesie and a wet diaper and a deep-rooted aversion to onions that wouldn’t surface until years later.

  Not that I ever ate onion rings. I was served three meals a day in the main hall of St. Mary’s dormitory, all the normal food groups with a side of bless us, O Lords, and an extra helping of trespass-forgive-us-ness. The teachers at St. Mary’s were incredibly sweet, providing comfort in a whisper or a hug . . . until you turned six or seven. Then, for some reason, they assumed you had been possessed by the evil spirit and did everything they could to drive it out of you.

  Luckily for me, I had discovered my power by that point. In fact, by the time I was seven, I had learned how to get most anything I wanted.

  Except the thing I wanted most.

  Right. That’s the other thing you should know about me. I’m not exactly normal. I mean, nobody’s normal. But I’m, like, extra-not-normal. I’ve got this little thing I can do. Kind of a mental magic trick. A little abracadabra.

  I can make you do my bidding.

  Dad calls it “suggestive hypnosis” or a “mild form of telepathic manipulation,” but I think “do my bidd
ing” sounds more dark lord of the Sith. It’s not easy. It requires intense concentration, a kind of hypermental focus where I guess I unlock some part of my brain that everyone else keeps shut tight. Tapping my chi or whatnot. And eye contact—that’s a must. The key, really. Without that, I’m just another whiny kid pouting to get my way. There are other tricks, subtle nuances, all learned over time. Don’t blink. Use a polite but firm tone. No questions—never give them the chance to say no. Insist, but don’t be overly bossy. And always keep your cool. If your attention slips, the spell is broken and you’ve lost them.

  It’s okay if you don’t believe me. Just look into my eyes and I’ll convince you.

  My power just came to me, gradual, like how fingernails grow. It wasn’t a radioactive blast or a nuclear bug bite. I wasn’t sucked into a black hole. Didn’t fall into a toilet transporting me to an alternate dimension where I learned I was actually a demigod sent to the planet earth or any load of bull like that. I know those things happen sometimes—I’m not an idiot. I watch the news. I read the headlines. But they didn’t happen to me. In fact, I had probably been using my power for years without even knowing it. It just took a while to recognize what was really going on, to understand why, every now and then, people seemed to do exactly what I wanted them to.

  I know what you are thinking. Lame, right? It’s no laser beams from the eyes. I can’t fly, or turn my body to fire, or flip a tank. I don’t have a cybernetic arm or a rocket pack, though I know where I could have one built. But a little bit of mind control is nothing to sniff at. It came in especially handy at St. Mary’s.

  “I think I should get a double portion of pudding today, Sister Margaret.”

  “You don’t really need me to make my bed this morning, Father Matthew.”

  “We aren’t the boys you’re looking for.”

  Once I learned how to control it, I could get away with almost anything. And no one ever suspected. At least, almost no one. Once Father Gabe, who oversaw most of the home’s academics, told me I had a silver tongue. I said thank you, and that I really admired his Friar Tuck haircut. He said it wasn’t a compliment, adding that the Devil used the same gift when he tempted Eve and that I should be careful. He tossed some proverbs at me. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pack of Juicy Fruit that I had convinced Charlie Madison to give me. I looked into Father Gabe’s eyes and told him he should have a piece and stop worrying so much. He left, chewing happily.