The Mad Ophelias: Chapter 14
⧗ Sometime in the future.
Previously on TMO: Ophelia took a chance on trust and revealed her history—and very interesting inheritance—to SlyDevil. And now Wil’s interview with MadHatter continues…
WIL WONDERS WHAT Lucy would think if she were watching that last bit about men being ‘biologically geared for predation and domination.’ Would she agree?
Had he given her any reason not to?
At first, no, not in Los Angeles, where, if anything, he was following her lead. She’d invited him to move in with her—she had a two-bedroom in a nice area by Silver Lake—and cleared out the closet in the room they’d share so he felt more at home. Gave him advice on how to shake up his reading list without attracting undue Corps attention. Even when he called her in a panic after he found an envelope with white powder on the doorstep, she kept her cool, told him to go outside and just wait for the police. Not like it’s anthrax—too hard to get a hold of. Told him a few corny jokes that did help him calm down. Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.
But if he’s honest with himself, wasn’t that part of the reason he made the executive decision to take the job in Seattle? To assert himself—his competence—and yes, dominance? Was that why she gradually retracted into herself and became the ghost of the person he’d fallen in love with? Was he to blame?
Just last night, he got into an argument with her about cheese wrappers. Do you think you could actually get them in the trash can instead of right in front of the trash can?
But the trash can is overflowing, she’d said.
Yes, and the dumpster is right outside.
I don’t feel safe.
You never feel safe. All I ask is that the trash goes in the trash can. We don’t want to attract mice.
We’ve never seen mice. Mice aren’t attracted to wrappers.
But they’re attracted to cheese.
There wasn’t any cheese in the wrapper.
But the smell—
I’ve never even seen any droppings.
And so on, and so on, and so on. He seethed for the rest of the night, engrossed in his computer, his research for that damn book, and when he crawled into bed at midnight, he was surprised she was still up. She wrapped her arms around him and lightly kissed his neck.
But he just shut his eyes. “I have an early class tomorrow morning.” He sensed her hurt, disappointment, and felt her shift to the other side. It gratified him in a spiteful way. I showed her.
But that, of course, could well be the last thing she ever hears from him. I have an early class in the morning. What a legacy.
They should inscribe it on his tombstone.
WHIPPET GLANCES UP from her laptop. “We’re starting to get media inquiries through our DMs. And something…well, there’s something you should look at.”
MadHatter arches an eyebrow.
“On the laptop,” insists Whippet.
MadHatter sighs. She turns off her mic and unclips it from the lanyard around her neck, then gets up and crosses over to the rolling table with its array of equipment. Leans over Whippet’s shoulder to peer at the laptop screen.
Is his mic still on? The red light on the camera holds steady—doesn’t look like it’s been turned off either.
Wil stretches his wrists, shifts position, and examines the room again. There’s one vent he can see covered by a metal grating, too high to reach, so the door is the only way in and out. MadHatter’s folding chair, like his, is aluminum and plastic—some of her red paint has rubbed off on its back, making it look like it’s smudged with blood. He imagines he could pick it up and charge PitBull, maybe render her AR-15 useless, but then he sees the black edge of a holster is working its way up her waist—something small for close quarters, a pistol or a knife maybe.
The studio light? He could swing it like a bat, knock PitBull unconscious…conceivably. He seriously doubts Whippet would use her knife unless she felt directly threatened. MadHatter doesn’t seem armed—no telltale bulge in any of her camo pants pockets—but she could have something slipped in her boot. Are there others outside? Have to be, right?
He needs to find out. PitBull’s obviously got a short fuse.
“So,” Wil says in MadHatter’s general direction, keeping his eyes squarely on PitBull. “Was blowing up GENWORKS a revolutionary act or terrorism?”
PitBull lifts her chin.
“Obviously, I know nothing at all about it because it had nothing to do with the Mad Ophelias,” says MadHatter. “That’s what all the official news channels say. And they always tell the truth. Why, what do you think?”
He gingerly feels the base of his pinky finger. Sprained or broken. “Given their research into artificial wombs, seems like it’d be an obvious target. Although officially it was all theoretical.”
“Are you saying the Republic constructed a two-story research facility in the middle of a rural Nebraska cornfield with a full security detail to work on some ho-hum science with, I don’t know, beakers? Really?”
He tries to wiggle the pinky and winces at the stabbing pain. “It doesn’t seem logical, no. Some say it was well past the theoretical and they were conducting human trials. To boost the population of god-fearing, loyal members of The Republic.”
“So let’s say, completely theoretically, that they were conducting experiments on women. Can you imagine what it would mean if men could reproduce without us? If they didn’t need us at all?”
“But aren’t you saying that? That men are obsolete? That you don’t need us?”
“Motherfucker,” PitBull spits.
MadHatter raises her hand and PitBull clenches her jaw but doesn’t move. “Well, let’s look at history. What happens to people that men, particularly white men, don’t need? Should we ask the Mayans? The Comanche? The South Africans?”
MadHatter touches the laptop screen and says softly to Whippet, “That must be her.”
PitBull glares.
He leans back in his chair and stretches out a leg. “So the Mad Ophelias are responsible.”
“Again, I don’t know,” says MadHatter. “If it were the work of my sisters, I would applaud them. It was obscene.”
“Kind of a cowardly way to go about it, though,” says Wil, keeping his eyes on PitBull. “Several women were killed, if I remember correctly.”
“Gender traitors,” says PitBull.
“So women killing women is okay, but men killing women is bad? Isn’t that hypocritical?”
PitBull quickly strides toward him, gripping the rifle like there’s nothing she’d rather do than beat the shit out of him with it, but he keeps to his chair, pressing his hands on his knees, his own chin raised, daring her to strike him.
“Don’t be so pedestrian, my sister,” says MadHatter. “We have work to do.”
PitBull’s nostrils flare, but she stops short. “I want my piece when it’s done.”
“We’ve discussed this,” says MadHatter, no room in her tone for dissent.
Which piece? Penis probably. But all PitBull does is give his chair leg a kick before turning to go back to the door.
MadHatter and Whippet are still on the other side of the table, and PitBull’s back is slightly turned.
He knows this is a bad idea—he’d never been one for fights in school, preferring to talk his way out instead—but he also knows this might be his only shot.
He jumps up, grabs his chair at the same time, swings it at PitBull, aiming for her head but hitting her broad shoulders. She spins around and shoves him backward into the rolling table, knocking into MadHatter and Whippet, but he finds his footing and just brute force charges her, ignoring the wave of pain in his back. Three rounds of gunfire go off—deafening pops, the whiz of bullets ricocheting off concrete—and he tries to muscle his way to the door, heart thumping. It opens just as he reaches it and he gets a glimpse of another Mad Ophelia—brown-skinned, wearing full camouflage and a gas mask, eyes clearly startled—and behind her is a short set of crumbling stairs and nothing beyond but a vast, empty darkness.
Then there’s a sharp crack and a searing pain at the back of his head—
“HELP ME!” he screams, “SOMEBODY HELP ME!”
—and he’s yanked hard backward by his collar, crashes to the hard cement floor, feels a boot kick his ribs—agony and a crack as one splinters—and looks up to find the butt of PitBull’s rifle rushing toward his face—it lands on his nose, fuck that hurts—and blood gushes back into his throat, so much he starts to choke.
MadHatter kneels by his head and waves a hand for PitBull to stop, and she does.
“Damn,” says MadHatter. “You’re making this way harder than it has to be, professor.”
He hears the door shut. And he knows that there is no one, and nothing, outside that door who can or will help him. He’s on his own. Completely.
Wil lifts himself up enough so he can spit some of the blood out of his mouth. One tooth is loose. “What do you want?”
She puts both hands on his shoulders and looks at him kindly. “Don’t worry yourself about that. Just sit in the chair. Ask the questions. Pretend you’re defending your thesis.”
He closes his eyes. “Defend my thesis.”
“See…that’s why I chose you. You do your research. But before I say anything about what we want, we must speak to men in a language they understand. To demonstrate that we’re serious.”
She leans in close to his ear and whispers, “And we are very, very serious.”
THEY PUT THE live stream on hold while Whippet cleans him up a bit, wiping the blood away from his face, letting him swish and spit the blood from his mouth. After that, she wraps a bandage around his chest and gives him a cold pack for his nose.
It’s unnerving that they were so prepared. What else is in the first aid kit? A defibrillator?
The monitors all show the same cheesy BE RIGHT BACK still image featuring a vintage 1950s hostess in pearls and a flared skirt—she holds a tray with what looks like a rounded jelly of aspic featuring sliced wieners and pineapple. Cocktails with paper umbrellas are balanced precariously at the top of the tray.
He could write an entire dissertation about that image.
MadHatter stepped out into the hallway—he thinks it’s a hallway—probably to check on the troops (unless there’s only one other Mad Ophelia out there, unlikely), while PitBull guards the door, giving him a go ahead and try it so I can shoot you this time stare.
Wil clears his throat. “I don’t suppose there’s a bathroom nearby.”
Whippet sits back on her heels. Her face is inscrutable.
“It’s just I had that espresso,” Wil continues. “Then the water…”
“You can piss your pants for all I care,” says PitBull. “Shit in them too.”
Whippet doesn’t respond and instead rifles through the first aid kit and pulls out a scalpel. Then she grabs one of the empty water bottles and starts to cut the top off with it.
“No fucking way,” says PitBull. “He just—”
“If he tries anything again, you can shoot him. Which is what you want anyway,” says Whippet. “So really, I’m doing you a favor.”
“Like hell you are,” grumbles PitBull. But she lets the AR-15 relax a little.
Whippet’s eyes flick to his, and he catches just a hint of humor, maybe even something like camaraderie there. It’s the kind of look he’d share with a female colleague when a man said something completely ignorant, back when his female colleagues didn’t hate him.
“You’ll have to make do with this and the corner,” says Whippet, handing him the empty bottle and nodding toward the back of the room. “But it’s no joke, she really will shoot you.”
He swallows. Not exactly the privacy he was hoping for, but it’s a better option than pissing his pants.
“I am duly warned. Thank you.”
Now Whippet won’t meet his eye, as if his thanks immediately severed the connection.
He hobbles over to the corner to relieve himself. Tries to focus on anything other than the inordinately loud sound of him unzipping his pants, then his pee as it streams into the water bottle.
A stuffed doe’s head hangs on the wall, glass eyes dusty. The remains of a moldering cobweb under its chin. Arachnids. Arachne. She defamed the gods and then hung herself in shame. Athena turned Arachne into a spider, and the rope she hung herself with into a cobweb. It’s the kind of thing he’d tell Lucy, and then she’d probably say, Maybe it’s just a damn spiderweb Wil. Why can’t you just let things be what they are? If his life were a myth, this would be perfect justice. Cue the gorgons.
He finishes his business, zips up his fly, and for lack of anywhere better to put it, places the half bottle now filled with his pee in the corner on the cement floor.
He turns and finds Whippet waiting expectantly. She grabs him by the elbow and leads him back to his chair. It takes him a minute to get seated, with a flinch he can’t hide that PitBull seems to enjoy.
Whippet pulls out some zip ties and binds his ankles to the chair. “I’m going to leave your hands because I think you understand how pointless trying anything would be.”
“I do,” says Wil.
“You’re not a bad man, but you’re not the smartest man either,” says Whippet. “Might want to just follow the script from here on out.”
“And will I survive this if I do?”
“That’s the general idea,” says Whippet, but her tone gives her away.
Fuck.
Just then, the door opens, and MadHatter strides in. Whippet jumps to her feet and quickly crosses back over to the laptop.
“Patched up I see,” says MadHatter. “Are we ready to continue?”
“We are,” says Whippet.
Not a question for him, apparently.
“And how’s our next exploit going?”
Whippet peers at the screen, her face cast in blueish light. “It’s live now.”
“Well,” says MadHatter cheerfully. “Let’s get it on the monitors so our friend here can see what kind of ‘misandry’ we’re up to now.”
She grins at Wil. “I’m very curious to get your take.”
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© 2026 J. Lincoln Fenn. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction published as a serialized novel on Substack. No part of this work may be reproduced, reposted, or distributed in any form without the author’s prior written permission. First publication rights reserved by the author.
Nice one. Thank you.