Martin Greenberg - If I Were an Evil Overlord

Carol dug her feet in. She was wearing her prettiest shoes-all black and shiny (but no heels. Mommy says little girls can’t wear heels)-and they scraped on that gray floor, leaving black marks. Mommy yelled at her, and Carol hunched even harder, because the place smelled bad, like doctors or that school she went to for three days, and Mommy said the smell was just air-conditioning, but they had air-conditioning at home and it didn’t smell like this. At home, it smelled like the Jones’ dog when he got wet. Here it smelled cold and metal and-wrong.

Carol hated it, but Mommy didn’t care. She said, “Just three months,” then took Carol to this room with all the stuff where she was supposed to play with Lord Kafir, and that’s when Mommy said she’d be right outside.

So Mommy lied-and Carol hated liars.

And now all she wanted was a nap, and nobody was listening because Mommy was a liar and nobody was in that room. Carol was gonna scream and pound things if they didn’t let her nap really soon. She wanted her blankie. She wanted her bed.

She wanted to be let out of this room.

She didn’t care how many cookies they gave her for getting stuff right. She hated it here.

“Hate it,” she said, pounding on the keyboard of the computer they had in here. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.”

Each time she said “hate,” her fist hit the keyboard. It jumped and made a squoogy sound. She kinda liked that sound. It was better than the stupid baby music they played in here or the dumb TV shows that she’d never seen before.

She wanted her movies. She wanted her big screen. She wanted her blankie and her bed.

She wanted a nap.

She pounded again, and Mommy opened the door.

“Honey, you’re supposed to be looking at the pretty pictures.”

She was leaning in and her cheeks was pink. If her hands wasn’t grabbing the door, they’d be twirling her hair, and she might even be chewing on it.

“I don’t like the pictures,” Carol said.

“Honey-”

“I wanna go home.”

“Tonight, honey.”

“Now,” Carol said.

“Honey, we’re here to work for Lord Kafir.”

“Don’t like him.” Carol crossed her arms.

“You’re not supposed to like him.”

“He’s s’posed to play with me.”

“No, honey, you’re supposed to play with his toys.”

“A computer’s not a toy.” Carol was just repeating what Mommy had told her over and over.

“No, dear, but the programs are. You’re supposed to look at them and-”

“The bad guy always wins,” Carol said. She hated it here. She wanted to see Simba or Belle or her friends on the TV. Or maybe go back to that kindergarten that Mommy hated because they said Carol was average. She didn’t know what average was ’cept Mommy didn’t like it. Mommy made it sound bad.

Until that day when she was looking at the want ads like she did (Honey, don’t mess with the paper. Mommy needs to read the want ads) and then she looked up at Carol with that goofy frowny look and whispered, ‘’Average five-year-old…”

“What?” Mommy asked.

“In the games,” Carol said. “The bad guy always wins.”

Mommy slid into the room and closed the door. “The bad guy’s supposed to win, honey.”

“No, he’s not!” Carol shouted. “He gets blowed up or his parrot leaves him or the other lions eat him or he gets runned over by a big truck or his spaceship crashes. The good guys win.”

Mommy shushed her and made up-and-down quiet motions with her hands. “Lord Kafir’s a good guy.”

“I’m not talkin ’bout him!” Carol was still shouting. Shouting felt good when you couldn’t have a nap. “On the computer. The bad guys always win. It’s a stupid game. I hate that game.”

“Maybe you could do the numbers for a while, then, honey.”

“The numbers, you hit the right button and they make stupid words. Nobody thinks I know letters but I do.” Carol learned her ABCs a long time ago. “What’s D-E-A-T-H-R-A-Y?”

“Candy,” Mommy said. Her voice sounded funny.

Carol frowned. That didn’t sound right.

“What’s I-R-A-Q?”

Mommy grabbed her hair and twirled it. “Chocolate.”

“What’s W-H-I-T-E-H-O-U-S-E?” Carol asked.

“That’s in there?” Mommy’s face got all red.

“What’s W-O-R-L-D-D-O-M-I-N-A-T-I-O-N?” Carol asked.

“D… D… O…” Mommy was frowning now too. “Oh. Oh!”

“See?” Carol said. “Stupid words. I hate stupid words and dumb numbers. And games where the bad guy wins. I want to go home, Mommy.”

“Um, sure,” Mommy said. She looked at the door, then at Carol. “Later. We’ll go later.”

“Now,” Carol said.

Mommy shook her head. “Carol, honey, you know we can’t leave until five.”

“I wanna nap!” Carol shouted, then felt her own cheeks get hot. She never asked for a nap before. “And a cookie. And my cuddly dog and my pillow. I wanna go away. I hate it here, Mommy. I hate it.”

“We have to keep coming, honey. We promised.”

“No.” Carol said and swung her chair around so she was looking at the computer.

It was blinking bright red. It never did that before.

“Mommy, look.” Carol pointed at the big red word.

Mommy looked behind her like she thought somebody might come in the room. “Honey, I’m not supposed to see this-”

“What’s that say?”

Mommy looked. Then Mommy grabbed Carol real tight, and ran for the door. She got it open, but all those mittens with guns and helmets were outside, with guns pointed.

Mommy stopped. “Please let us go. Please.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the man with the biggest gun said. “You have to wait for Ms. Hanaday.”

“We can’t wait for Ms. Hanaday,” Mommy said. “My daughter punched the computer. Now it’s counting down to a self-destruct.”

Carol squirmed. She watched Star Trek . She knew what a self-destruct was. “We gots to go,” she whispered.

Mommy just squeezed her tighter.

“We gots to go!” Carol shouted.

Mommy nodded.

The guards kept their guns on them.

“A self-destruct?” one of them whispered.

Another guard elbowed him. “She’s the average five-year-old. She finds the holes before we implement the program.”

“Huh?” the first guard asked.

“Y’know, how they always say that the plan’s so bad an average five-year-old could figure out how to get around it? She’s the average-”

“Enough!” Mommy said. “I don’t care if it is fake. I’m not going to take that risk.”

Carol squirmed. She wanted to kick, but Mommy hated it when she kicked. Sometimes Carol got in trouble for kicking Mommy. Not always. Sometimes Mommy forgot to yell at her. But right now, Mommy was stressed. She’d yell.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the first guard said. “We can’t let you go until Ms. Hanaday gets here.”

“And she is!” a lady’s voice said from far away. Carol peered around Mommy, and sure enough, there was that Ms. Hanaday, in her high heels and her black suit and wearing her glasses halfway down her nose even though she wasn’t as old as Mommy was.

“I wanna go,” Carol whispered.

“I know, honey,” Mommy said, but she wasn’t listening. She was just talking like she did when Carol was bugging her. But she did set Carol down, only she kept ahold of Carol’s hand so Carol couldn’t run away.

Ms. Hanaday was holding a bag. Her heels made clicky noises on the hard gray floor. It was colder out here than it was in that room. Carol shivered. She wanted a jacket. She wanted her blankie. She wanted a nap.

“I wanna go home,” she said again.

One of the guards looked at her real nice-like. He was somebody’s daddy, she just knew it. Maybe if she acted just a little cuter…