Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  I tell them that that I don’t understand my own feelings. I tell them that sometimes it feels terrible. I tell them that sometimes it feels great.

  They tell me that every time I punch someone, that person loses roughly a year of their life.

  Cell degeneration.

  If you were going to live to be a hundred, and I punch you, then you’re down to ninety-nine. If I get really mad at you (and I admit that I do have problems with my temper) then I might not stop punching with the first punch. Or the second. The third. And so on.

  Ninety-nine years of life on the wall.

  Punch one down.

  Pass it around.

  Ninety-eight years of life on the wall.

  The man screamed when I punched him the second time. His scream seemed to wake Gloria from her beaten daze. Outside, the other woman was staggering across the parking lot. She’d walked through the stream of gas and was making footprints. I should have gone out to make her stop. I should have been helping Gloria. I should have been calling the police. But I wanted to punch the man with the mustache some more. I really wanted to do that.

  “What’s happening?” Gloria said. It took her several stutters to get that much out. She was holding herself up on the counter, no more than a yard away from a man with two less years of life. Gloria’s hand was next to an empty display box for beef jerky. She moved that hand up, passed it through the space where the cash register had been, again and again, like a blind person searching for it. If she really had gone blind, I wasn’t finished punching.

  “You were pistol-whipped,” I told Gloria. “I interrupted the robbery. You’ll be fine. Can you see?”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “I’m…”

  “Oh god,” she said.

  “Right,” I told her. “Call the police. Tell them the three men who escaped from Athens Penitentiary are here, that they’re under custody, that you need an ambulance. I suppose they do, too.”

  “Okay,” she said. She was moving back from the counter. I noticed that she was closer to the bald man than she was to me, perceiving me to be the more dreadful threat, even over a man who had beat her with the butt end of a Glock.

  I’m accustomed to reactions like that.

  “Tell the police that Reaver is here,” I added, going out the door. I signaled the bald man to follow along with me. He did. He didn’t want to. But he did.

  He had to shuffle-hop on his one good leg. It looked like it hurt.

  ***

  Outside, the Aryan Brother, Bigger, was flicking a plastic lighter. He got the flame going and then stumbled towards the stream of gas, which was now drying in the sun. His plan encapsulated everything wrong about humanity: things had gone wrong for him, so now he wanted to screw it up for everyone. It made me sick.

  He saw me coming. He was closer to the gas, by far, than I was. He smiled.

  I was faster than him.

  No surprise, there, of course. I’m not as fast as some others I know, but I’m maybe three times faster than a normal human, and Bigger barely bent over in preparation for touching the flame to the gas before I had him in my hands again. I snuffed out the flame and wrenched the lighter from his grasp, taking one of his fingers along with me in my haste. Clumsy me. I felt horrible about it.

  I tucked the lighter into Bigger’s mouth and then punched him in the jaw. He staggered backward, spilling lighter fluid and pieces of plastic from his mouth, and a year older than he was before I struck.

  I hit him again, thinking of what he’d been doing to the woman in the car, how his fists had been coming up and down, up and down. I have a very good memory. It might be one of my powers. It might just be that I have a good memory. Either way, I could play out his assault in my head, and I knew that after I’d pulled into the parking lot, after I had turned off my music, I had either seen or heard him hit the woman fourteen times.

  Fourteen.

  My fist hit him a third time.

  He yelled, “Oh shit! No! Reaver! I’m just… NO! Don’t do it!”

  I hit him a fourth time. Four years of his life were now gone. It was cruel. I hate being cruel. But I hate being forced into being cruel even more. I think that’s what feeds me, at times. Feeds me the wrong way, I mean. I get mad at myself for being cruel. And then I get even madder at people who make me that way. Paladin once told me I was strong enough that nobody could make me do anything; if I didn’t want to be cruel, I didn’t have to be. I wish that I could aspire to beliefs like that. I wish I could. I don’t even remember what I told him. Most probably something about there being a reason that I was called Reaver and he was called Paladin. That sort of thing, it doesn’t just happen.

  I hit Bigger a fifth time. And a sixth.

  It was, as I said, cruel. But at the same time I was pulling my punches. I could have killed the man with a single blow. I could have done that. But he had hit the woman fourteen times, and he needed to take fourteen blows.

  I spaced them out. And I made him count them.

  I suppose making him count them was cruel.

  ***

  Afterwards, when the police had arrived, and I’d given three autographs (two police officers, and then a young woman, a paramedic, of the type obviously attracted to danger, and who had mentioned she was single, and free later, and had then whispered something in a voice too low to be heard) I thought briefly about shoplifting some of the caramel crab cakes from the store. Surely I’d earned them, right? But as usual I could hear my moral voice telling me how that wasn’t true. For the record, my moral voice always sounds like Paladin. Even now.

  I should add that I didn’t honestly consider taking any caramel crab cakes, even though I’d been thinking of them for a hundred miles. It’s the curse of being the type of person I am, with the things that I can do, that I can’t joke about anything anymore without someone thinking I’m serious. A normal man, he can say, “I’d like to murder my boss, and then toss that blonde secretary over my shoulder,” and people always think he’s just blowing off steam. But, me? A statement like that would panic my boss, and the blonde would probably be worried, too. Probably.

  Before the police arrived I’d cleaned up the spilled gas to the best of my ability. I didn’t have any special way to do it, just grabbed a hose and sprayed the area down. The blonde (her name was Doria Grables) helped me do it, turning on the water while I held the hose. She was astonished that I wasn’t doing it in some extraordinary way.

  “Can’t you fly or something?” she asked. I told her that I couldn’t, but didn’t ask how she thought flying would help anyway. Once I was sure the gas station wasn’t an inch away from a fire or an explosion, I did what I could for the two women. The man who had been in the car, peeking up now and then, pulled away from the convenience store, slowly, as if his car itself was dazed, picking up more speed once he’d made it to the highway, and then more and more speed, barreling away. I thought about stopping him. He was a witness. At the same time, I could understand him not wanting to stay around. I didn’t want to, either. All I wanted was to take a piss. Anyway, I let him go.

  Doria was nervous as I looked over her wounds. Most people are frightened of me touching them. It’s not my touch, though, that drains the years. Only my punch. I told Doria that it was a special power, that it only works when I’m specifically willing it to happen, that it needs to recharge first, so that I couldn’t do it right then anyway. It wasn’t exactly true. Okay, it’s completely false. It’s not something I do consciously. I don’t have to will it into existence. If I punch something, it decays. Whether I want it to or not. But, it only happens when I punch. A touch doesn’t cause the effect.

  And it certainly doesn’t need to recharge. I can do it all day long. And I have, before.

  Doria had a split lip, a couple broken teeth, a split on her cheeks, a lot of bruises. She was still in shock, so the pain wasn’t as bad as it was going to be. I took some bandages and a first aid kit from the Minute Marvels store, and a bottl
e of rum as well. I’m not sure why I didn’t consider it to be shoplifting, but I didn’t, and I still don’t. Gloria, the clerk, watched me take the alcohol, but she didn’t say anything. She was talking on her phone. Possibly to a boyfriend. Telling someone she was okay. It looked more accurate than it had ten minutes ago. She’d washed her face and scalp. There wasn’t much blood anymore. She was a brunette, with short hair and a few splattered freckles. A long sleek nose. The phone was tucked between her shoulder and her ear. It made her left breast rise up. I felt bad for looking. She nodded at the rum, letting me know it was okay.

  I got both women drunk before their pain set in, and bandaged Doria as best as I could, first disinfecting the wound on her cheek. It made her hiss. She looked into my eyes the whole time, scared, but… I think… wanting me to know that she trusted me. Even so, she said the thing that I knew she would say.

  “It’s… too bad about Paladin,” she said. I nodded. He’d had healing powers. He wouldn’t have had to disinfect any wounds or wrap any bandages. His touch would have been enough. There were people, I knew, who had prayed to him back when he was alive. Quite a few of them were still at it.

  I said, “It’s too bad,” meaning it to end the conversation. It did. Gloria, the clerk, asked if she could help with Doria, or with what she called the bad guys. She wanted to know if we should tie them up.

  “Maybe some duct tape?” she asked. “It’s not like we have handcuffs here. I mean, there’s mine, but…”

  “Why do you have handcuffs?”

  “Sex things,” she said. She didn’t seem embarrassed. I liked her for that. I told her that we didn’t need to worry about the convicts. Bigger and the Colonel were drained from what I’d done to them. The other man, in the cornfield, would be out for hours. There wasn’t a thimble full of fight left in any of them. There were sirens in the distance, definitely coming closer, this time. The residents of Athens Penitentiary would soon be heading home.

  Doria helped Gloria with her bandages, and then vice versa. They fell to giggling about their rhyming names, maybe succumbing a bit to the rum, maybe falling a bit to madness, mostly working out their relief that everything had turned out, more or less, okay.

  “Are you two good for a couple minutes?” I asked.

  “I think so,” Gloria said. “Why?”

  “Because I have to piss. I have to piss so damn bad.”

  “You do that?” Doria asked. She was amazed.

  “I do that.”

  “There’s a key behind the register,” Gloria said. “It’s on a paddle. Can’t miss it. Or, should I get it for you?”

  “I’ll find it,” I told her. I did. It had been knocked off its hook and was atop a pile of empty cigarette cartons that had been broken down after their contents went on display. There must have been a hundred boxes. It made me think of Paladin’s anti-smoking campaign. Tobacco sales had dipped nearly twenty-three percent. After his death, sales had steadily risen back up to previous levels. A sad kind of tribute.

  The bathroom had one stall, one sink, several smells, one under-utilized wastebasket and a novel’s worth of graffiti on the walls. One notable piece of graffiti was a rough but recognizable drawing of Siren, with arrows pointing out her female attributes, coarsely labeled. A column of comments had been added by successive wits.

  “I’d tap that!” was followed by, “Who wouldn’t tap that, genius?” After that was, “Somebody insane,” which was followed by, “Nobody is THAT insane.” Following that was, “Pussy. Pussy. Pussy.” Next in line was, “Fine. You get the pussy. I’ll concentrate on her boobs.” Below that was, “This is Siren, speaking. Sorry guys, I’m not sleeping with ANY of you.” It wasn’t at all in her handwriting. Not even close. After that pretender’s line was, “Who said we were all GUYS?”

  An assortment of cocks had been drawn over the illustration. A vast and varied selection of cocks. Siren was in her old costume, the one from before Paladin’s death, but it was hard to notice that beneath all the floating male genitalia.

  I thought about adding a line of my own to the text, but decided that it would have been crass (I’m not sure what I would have written, but it definitely would have been crass) and besides that I didn’t have a marker.

  By then my piss was ended. I washed my hands, my face, and I looked at my fists, my eyes. From outside, I could hear the sounds of police cars and ambulances screeching to a halt. I started to leave the bathroom and then remembered I hadn’t flushed. I turned around and did that, taking one last look at Siren.

  When I walked outside, the police were there. They deferred to me, which is always troublesome, because since I have no official standing it makes me go through the routine of softly letting them know that I’d prefer they take charge of the scene, which is always taken as if I’m being humble.

  I explained what had happened, what I’d witnessed, what I’d done. Gloria and Doria’s stories were the same as mine, as were those of the three convicts, because that type of a man will lie before a judge, but not ever me. There has been internet chatter that my type of person, the powered, exude some sort of mind control that makes normal people tell the truth, or stand aside in deference, or jump into bed with one of us. For the record, for the nine millionth time on the record, that’s not true. Normal people tell me the truth because they’re scared of me, and they stand aside for much the same reason, because it’s more comfortable to do so. And the bed thing… that’s a fear, too, but a little fear is good in bed, and most people know that.

  Officer Lieber was six feet tall. A little gone to gut. Dark hair. A slight line of a dust tan exposed when he took off his hat and asked me, “So. You hit them?”

  “The one with the broken leg, yes. Twice. And then the big man. They called him Bigger. I hit him fourteen times.”

  “Jesus. Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen. Yes.”

  Officer Lieber was silent for a time, puzzling it through. There has been legislation, never passed, but bandied about by certain political figures who wanted to score a few more votes right before elections, that would make it illegal for me to hit anyone. That was probably going through his head, but Doria was only a few feet away, telling her story, showing her bruises, her cuts, and the blood, and Officer Lieber wasn’t deaf. He’d already heard Gloria’s story.

  “Fourteen,” he said. I don’t think he meant me to hear it.

  “Yes. Fourteen years of his life, gone.” It was best to have it out in the open.

  “You’ve saved the world, a couple times, I hear.” It was his way of saying that he wasn’t going to make an issue of anything. His hand came out in a friendly way, going to pat me on my shoulder. Just before contact he suddenly realized what he was doing, and nearly stopped. Instead, he slowed way down and touched my upper arm gingerly, like he was afraid I would break, though of course he was more scared of the other way around.

  When nothing happened, he smiled and laughed and the convicts were taken away. Just before Bigger was in the squad car, he bucked away two of his escorts like an enraged horse, knocking one man to the ground and slamming another against the side of the car. Both his hands were wrapped in bloodstained bandages, handcuffed behind him. There were white marks on his skin, even over the tattoos, where I had struck him. It looked like he was trying to escape, but he wasn’t; he just wanted one last word.

  “Fuck you, Reaver!” he yelled at me. “Fuck the fuck out of you!” The officers had him by the arms and were pinning him down against the car, kicking his legs wide, slamming their elbows into his back. They were wearing plastic gloves, avoiding his blood. He was twisting and screaming.

  “Fuck you, Reaver!” he screamed. “Fuck you! You’ll get yours!”

  “Yes I will,” I told him. “In two weeks.” He didn’t know what to say to that. To him, it was nonsensical, and he had to stop to think, and that stopped him cold. Nobody else asked me what I meant by my comment. The police thrust Bigger into the back of the patrol car, hooking a collar arou
nd his neck and attaching it to circle of metal in the back of the seat. Bigger could barely move. He was still staring at me when the door closed on him.

  “Sorry about that,” Officer Lieber told me, as if something had been his fault. He asked if he could buy me anything and I said yes—some bottled water and some caramel crab cakes. He seemed surprised that I would take him up on the offer. Surprised and pleased. There was a piece of rebar, left behind by a construction crew that had put up a storage shed, and Lieber asked me to twist it into his daughter’s name, Beth. Instead, I twisted it into a “B.” It wasn’t long enough to do anything more.

  He said, “This is perfect. Perfect. She’s a big fan of… you types. Have time to stop in for a dinner?’

  “Love to, but I have to keep going.”

  “Where are you headed?” he asked, and I almost told him the whole story, but instead I just checked myself and said, “Greenway, Oregon. For a visit.”

  It was true.

  I was going home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My costume was shredded as I was flung through the wall, outside the building, and into the street, compliments of a giant black hand that Macabre had conjured from nothing. The bricks burst around me, the sidewalk cracked, and a taxicab, fleeing the scene, caught my hip as I bounced along the pavement and booted me into the side of a panel truck. I barely got to my feet before Laser Beast leapt from a third-story window, shattering the glass as he smashed through, with one of his damn lasers cutting through a light pole and bisecting a parked motorcycle that was only a couple feet behind me. While he was recovering from his landing I picked up the rear half of the motorcycle and threw it at him, accidentally dousing myself with gas when I reared back for the throw.