Martin Greenberg - If I Were an Evil Overlord

But this fortune didn’t seem right and he had to read it twice:

“All special powers that you have been given by fortune cookies will be forever lost.”

Steven tossed the slip away like it was on fire, but it was too late. The feelings of being in control drained away from him like someone had pulled a plug in his shoe.

“No!” he screamed. “That’s not a fortune!”

He slammed the rest of the uneaten cookie into the wall and grabbed another one from the bag, opening it and putting half in his mouth before reading the fortune.

It said the same thing.

And so did the next one and the next one.

He opened a hundred before giving up and sitting down on a stool in disgust.

Someone had planted the entire bag with the same fortune. But who? And why? And who would have known he was going to come back here and open all these?

A moment later the phone rang. It was his aunt’s attorney again, talking some sort of gibberish about taxes and problems with the government and how there wasn’t as much money as there had seemed to be earlier, maybe none at all after all the lawyer fees and hospital costs. Steven just listened in shock, said nothing, then hung up.

The money was gone as well, right along with his powers.

He stared at the kitchen counter covered in half-opened fortune cookies. He knew, without a doubt, he had lost everything, all his dreams of ruling the world.

But how? Why had someone done this to him, taken his specialness?

Then the faces of those two sitting in the Chinese restaurant came back clearly to mind. Not everyone would follow him. Someone had known what was happening, somehow, and had changed out his real cookies with these special ones.

He needed to find out who. And why.

He dumped the entire sack of cookies out on the counter. At the bottom was a note.

Dear Fortune Cookie Tyrant,

Steven stopped reading and sat down on the stool. That was a name he had only been thinking about using after he gained world domination. No one would know it now. Something wasn’t right here.

Steven went back to reading the note.

You forgot rule #85. And sorry about the slow-acting and very painful poison in the cookies, but after what you did to the world over the last forty years, after all the people you killed and enslaved, we figured it was the least we could do.

Signed,

The Anti-Cookie Alliance.

Steven could feel the pain in his stomach starting to grow.

He swept all the cookies from the countertop, then doubled over in pain. He had been poisoned. He got to the phone and dialed 911, begged for them to hurry, told the operator that the poison was in the cookies, then hung up as another wave of pain hit him.

As it eased, his mind went back to the note. Rule 85? What did the note mean by that? And forty years? He was only twenty. He hadn’t been alive yet for forty years.

In the distance, a siren was growing louder. Help was on the way.

Then he saw the list on his bulletin board, the list of things he would do if he became an Evil Overlord. The list that he promised himself he would follow carefully.

With the pain in his gut causing him to stumble, he went to the board, pulled off the list, and slumped to the kitchen floor, his back against the wall. Outside his apartment, the sound of the siren stopped. He could see the flashing lights through the window.

Help would be here in a moment. He forced himself to take a deep breath to hold back the pain and flip the list to the right place.

Rule 85. Once I have securely established myself, all time travel devices in my realm shall be utterly destroyed.

“No!” Steven shouted as the pain shot through his body. “I didn’t get to become an evil overlord! I didn’t get to be Fortune Cookie Tyrant!”

There was a banging on the door and his name was called out.

He tried to get up, but instead fell facedown onto the tile floor.

The last words the great Fortune Cookie Tyrant muttered were, “Not fair.”

At first, I didn’t recognize the land around me. Blackened ash and burned stumps covered the earth as far as I could see. Saplings and weeds proved at least a year or two had passed since the devastation, but it was a far cry from the thick wilderness I remembered.

“I think he’s waking up.”

I started to turn around, then froze when I spotted the ruins. Crumbled bricks lay scattered to one side of a broken, six-sided foundation. In the remains of the doorway, I could see huge iron hinges bolted to the floor. The trick entrance was only one of the traps I had designed for Tarzog the Black while he tormented me with false promises to free my wife and son. I had barely eaten or slept for almost seven years as I worked to perfect his temple to Rhynoth, the Serpent God. This was my masterpiece, broken and scattered.

I rubbed grit from my eyes, then stared at my hands. The skin was pale, pulled tight around the bones like dried leather. My nails were cracked and yellow. When I poked my palm with one finger, the indentation remained for almost a minute.

I was bare-chested, dressed in rough-spun trousers and my old sandals, though the straps had been replaced with thin ropes. I pressed a sickly yellow hand against my chest. My heart was still as stone.

I had always wondered why Tarzog’s dead slaves took their resurrections so calmly. Now I understood. Whether it was a side effect of the magic or my mind’s way of rebelling against what had been done to me, I felt nothing but a strange sense of detachment. Looking at my dead body, I felt like a puppeteer staring down at a particularly gruesome marionette.

“I told you I could do it.”

The speaker was a young girl, no more than seven or eight years old. She wore a dirty blue gown and a purple half-cape with a bronze clasp in the shape of a snake. Behind her stood a slender, dark-haired woman, the sight of whom made my dead balls want to squirm up inside me and hide until she went away.

“Zariel,” I said. Tarzog’s necromancer looked far more ragged than I remembered. Gone were the night-black cloak of velvet, the silver claw rings decorating her left hand, and the low-cut leather vest. Her skin was rougher, her hair grayer, and she wore a simple traveling cloak lined with dirty rabbit fur. To tell the truth, she smelled rather ripe, and that was coming from a corpse.

“What happened?” I asked. My memories were blurred, full of gaps. Another side effect of being dead.

To my surprise, it was the little girl who answered. “This wasn’t the real temple. Daddy built the real temple about half a day’s walk from here, in the jungle.”

I stared, trying to understand. “Why would he…?”

“Prince Armand knew about Daddy’s plans to summon Rhynoth. So Daddy built this place as a trap. When Armand and his men finally got to the heart of the temple, Daddy was going to collapse the whole thing on their heads. But Armand and his men showed up early. They burned Daddy in his own temple, along with anyone they found wearing his crest.” She touched the bronze snake at her throat.

Was that how I had died? No, I would have remembered fire. Death had been quick, but quiet. I clutched my stomach, recalling the pain of my insides twisting into knots. I had a vague memory of stale raisin pudding, even worse than our usual fare. I remembered dropping my spoon… “He poisoned me!”

“Of course he did. Daddy poisoned everyone who worked on his temple. That way only he knew all the secrets.”

If he had killed me… Tarzog was too smart to let my wife or son go after that. He wouldn’t risk them coming back to avenge me. I closed my eyes and fought despair. Gradually, the rest of the girl’s words penetrated my grief.