Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  The half-motorcycle caught Laser Beast in his forehead and he tumbled over backwards, triggering one of his lasers (this time from his eyes) as he went over, sending a beam far into the skies and then, as he continued his sprawl, cutting a line into the Bedelman’s Auction Warehouse building.

  That’s when the lightning hit me.

  The skies had been pure blue.

  That meant that Tempest was around, and that meant that things were bad for me, because with Macabre, Tempest and Laser Beast, that likely meant that the whole of Eleventh Hour was in on the action. I hadn’t played it smart, and I’d walked into a trap, and if Siren was there, I was in trouble.

  Hell, even without Siren, I was in a bad way. Tempest’s lightning smashed me down into the street and kept at me, not flashing away like normal lightning, but still working on me like a drill. The lightning ignited the gas that was on me, but of course the gas was burning at a far lower temperature than the lightning, so it wasn’t anything more than a colorful special effect at that point.

  Because I’m largely invulnerable, most people think that I can’t be hurt. That isn’t true. It was agony, the kind of pain that turns off your brain. I was screaming, bleeding from the ears, half naked because my costume isn’t as durable as I am. I hoped it wouldn’t peel away and show my damn crotch. I’ve seen enough of that type of online video. I’ve saved countless people, the nation, the whole damn world, but sometimes it seems all anyone ever wants to record for posterity is me with my dick hanging out.

  I crawled along the street, digging my fingers into the asphalt, like climbing a horizontal mountain, albeit one that was melting from the heat of the ongoing lightning. Finally, I reached a manhole cover, meaning to pull it up, duck inside the sewers, maybe catch my breath. There was a crowd across the street, gathering, filming, gawking. I don’t know how many films I’ve seen of bystanders being killed in situations like this. A fight between the powered is like a locomotive on fire, one that’s not restricted to any train tracks, and with a temper, and a bloodthirst. Even so, people still stand around, gaping in awe, literally struck dumb.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” I screamed at them. About half of them flinched. Even in the midst of it all, even in the midst of one of This Great Nation’s Heroes (I had a goddamn Presidential certificate) being murdered right in front of their eyes, even with four dead already on the street, there were gasps that I’d cursed in public.

  Paladin had never done that.

  The manhole cover transformed into a giant hairy eyeball. Macabre at work. The eyeball blinked at me and then scuttled away on nine furry legs. Macabre himself came rising out of the open manhole, levitating through a sea of fog. He dresses like an old vaudeville act. Carries a cane. Wears a monocle. I tried to grab his legs but my hand went straight through him. An illusion, then. Always with the damn illusions. Except when they’re not.

  The lightning vanished. I was bleeding, bad, from where it had been worrying at me. The wound soon closed, but I knew it would be at least a few days before it really healed. I staggered to my feet, trying to keep on the move, presenting a difficult target, plowing through a sudden wall of ice, shattering it and sending fragments flying all about. Two car alarms were added to the din. There were police on bullhorns screaming for people to evacuate, and one officer screaming, to me, that Laser Beast was back on his feet. There was a crater in the middle of the street from where Macabre had summoned a demon of some sort, some huge red muscled creature with ram horns that had torn out the side of the jewelry exchange and started dropping display cabinets into a huge leather sack hanging at its side. Diamonds and rubies were littering the street, with small creatures running about, gathering them up, rat-like things with vacuum cleaner mouths, compliments of Macabre, I assumed, or… worse… one of Octagon’s genetic experiments.

  Octagon.

  If Siren was around, I was in trouble. But if Octagon was around, I was dead.

  Nobody knows if Octagon has powers. It never matters. Somehow, the bastard can always pull the right move at the right time, always a step ahead, and since he has the full powers of Eleventh Hour at his command it matters little if he can talk to animals, or lift a car, or shoot flames from his ass. He wears that entirely black suit, face and all, and a matching cowl, and… I don’t know… it must be made of a black hole or something, a void of some sort, because he can reach inside, reach inside anywhere, and pull out of one of his tricks, his traps, his little engines of destruction.

  “Reaver!” cried the officer with the bullhorn. “Right behind you! Laser Beast!” I swung around, fists at the ready, to see that Laser Beast was only five feet distant, with his chest glowing. A spear of light shot out and clipped my shoulder. He’s so damn hard to second-guess. The lasers can come from anywhere.

  Impact spun me to the street. I ripped up a chunk of pavement and tossed it blind. I admit I was panicked. There’s only so much that I can withstand. Only so many wounds I can heal. If I could have flown, I’d have taken to the air, and I would have kept going, and everyone else be damned. They should have been gone, anyway.

  The pavement hit Laser Beast in his… lower stomach. Okay… maybe a bit lower than his stomach. I hit the bastard in the balls and he doubled over and I scrambled to him and punched him in the jaw, trying to break his goddamn neck.

  “Take some time off!” I yelled. The crowd let out a gasp of pleasure. There was even a round of applause. They’d heard me say my catchphrase.

  “Damn it!” Laser Beast yelled, knowing that whatever he was, he was one year less of it. His flanks shivered. Back then, he used to dress fairly normal. Pants. Sweaters. Nothing tailored. He always smelled, though. Like a cesspool. These days, he looks like a sadistic werewolf in Victorian clothes and he smells like a sweaty flower. There are fan sites about him. The ladies love him. He’s killed hundreds.

  What a goddamn world.

  ***

  Forgive this interlude. I feel that knowing some background is important. You need to know a man’s foundation if you’re going to read a story about how it got kicked out from under him.

  I grew up in Greenway, Oregon, which has a population of less than one thousand people, and half of them are insane, and the other half are trying hard to catch up. The town’s primary export (at the time, you understand) was wool, that being because of the Selood Brother’s Sheep Farm, which employed twenty-seven members of Greenway’s vast workforce, and sixteen hundred of Greenway’s sheep. My father was in charge of the sheepdogs, charged with making sure they were well fed, well exercised, and well adjusted. The last bit is a joke, because sheepdogs are not well adjusted; they have the biggest cases of OCD in the animal kingdom.

  Dad would bring the dogs home with him at times, meaning one dog or the other, never the whole kennel. The dog-of-the-moment would rush around the house, barking, trying to get me and Mom and Dad and Tom (my brother) and Judy (Tom’s girlfriend) all into the same room. Tom and I would purposefully stray, just to freak out the dogs. Tom always wanted to give one of the dogs some marijuana brownies, just to see if the dogs would mellow out. I never let him, because it could have cost Dad his job, and real jobs were scarce in Greenway.

  The town had a small park with a tennis court and some picnic benches. The Masons held a book sale there every summer. Greenway itself held a fair. There was an old log cabin that was on the historic register, empty except for anyone participating in the local custom of girls getting finger-banged as their first sexual experience. There was a succession of names up on one rafter. A list of the inducted. You had to wedge your shoes into the corner and lift yourself up, using the logs like a ladder, clawing for purchase, in order to clamber up to the rafters. Once you’d made it, it was the third rafter from the wall. The list was carved into the wood, forever enshrined by sticky fingers working with penknives. April and Beth. Lossie. Roberta. Daisy. Ginny. Clio. Georgie. Britney. Paula. Terri. Nora. A few more. The list was long. That cabin damn well belonged on the historic re
gister. It had earned its place.

  There were some streets in Greenway. There were some houses. There were two taverns. Two craft stores. The Selood Yarn Emporium. There was a quarry where a few important dinosaur fossils had been excavated. There was… no… that’s about it. That’s really all Greenway had to offer.

  At least that’s what we thought at the time.

  ***

  Laser Beast was furious that I’d punched him. Enraged. Growling and snarling and snapping at my arm. It was actually to my benefit. His teeth weren’t anywhere strong enough to cut through my arm. It was the lasers I had to worry about.

  “Laser Beast! Stand away from him!”

  It was Macabre’s voice, with him obviously wanting to take a shot at me, do some of his magic shit, but cock-blocked because of Laser Beast being all over me. It was to my benefit to keep the Victorian werewolf pissed off.

  “You got a sister?” I yelled into his ear. “I’m asking because I’d like to take a swing at her. Knock a few years off her life by pounding away at her. You know what I’m saying?” Without a doubt, this fight would end up online. I wondered if my words would be audible over the swirls of the localized storm (Tempest was whipping up a miniature hurricane between the city streets, all of it centralized on me, but not yet strong enough to put me down) and the howls of the werewolf and the screaming bullhorns and the screech of tires and so on and so on. All the usual audio chaos.

  “You don’t have to answer,” I told Laser Beast. “Just give me her address. I’ll pop over and put one in her oven. If you don’t have a sister, I’ll see what your mom has to offer. She’s hot, right? I mean, werewolf hot?” He was clawing at my stomach, trying to rip me open, but it wasn’t working. He had a claw clamped on my back, though, just right where the lightning had struck, and that hurt. It hurt pretty bad.

  “I don’t even know if you’re married,” I told the werewolf. “Maybe you have a wife? She get lonely when…?” but at the moment I felt his chest heat up and I knew that he was about to fire a laser, which would have cut me in two. I smashed my elbow into his chin and twisted him face-first down onto the street. The laser blast sank into the under city, probably scaring the hell out of the armies of rats and hobos, all those scattered alligators in the sewers, and likely a mad scientist laboratory or two.

  I scrambled away from Laser Beast, wary of him firing more of those damn lasers, and was immediately smashed between two vehicles (an emergency ambulance and a taxicab) that Macabre had given life, and had also given rage, with their horns and sirens screaming as they pounded me from opposite sides like linebackers sandwiching a wide receiver. The metal curved and crushed around me, smashing and twisting around my flesh, and I was thrown through the ambulance’s engine block, through its cab, passing through the rear of the vehicle (briefly aware of the presence, and deaths, of the two emergency paramedics and the policewoman they’d been attending) and then down onto the street behind them. The taxicab had fared better in the collision, and it stood up on insectoid legs, turned around, settled to the street with its legs transforming to wheels once more, and then it roared into me again. It had only taken a second, or less. The taxi driver was lolling to one side behind the wheel, looking a whole lot of the way to the wrong side of death. The wipers were going, strangely, as if a car that was being guided by a magician still had need of a clean windshield in the driving rain of the growing hurricane.

  I was actually grateful to Tempest. It looked like it was me against the whole of Eleventh Hour, and that meant the harder it was to find me, and the more that I could hide in the storm, the better for me.

  Someone bumped into my side and I almost tore his head off. It was a random bystander, a young man possibly twenty years old, holding a camera phone and recording me, screaming about how awesome it was to be right there, RIGHT THERE, in the action. Then the hurricane reached its full strength and Tempest cut it free, with me and the guy swept up into the sky, buffeted by the winds. Street debris went along for the ride, gathered by the swirling updraft, newspapers and bits of rubble, a small flock of pigeons, some newspaper boxes. I grabbed the guy and hugged him close, trying to protect him from the worst of the damage. Lightning flashed down past us. I couldn’t see straight and couldn’t think straight, either. It was chaos.

  I watched a Chevy Nova rise reluctantly into the air, like it couldn’t believe it was happening, like it was disgusted by having to participate. It soon accelerated, caught in a stronger updraft, and collided into the side of building, smashing through a window twenty stories in the air, missing me and my friend by only a few feet as we sailed higher and higher into the sky.

  “How’s it feel to be right here?” I yelled at him, but I think he was unconscious. It was hard to breathe; the air was moving too fast for normal lungs to compete.

  Ice began forming in the wind. At first it was sleet, then hail, then ice daggers and finally chunks of ice the size of a man. The sleet didn’t feel too bad. The hail was like bullets. The ice daggers were like bullets that had been sharpened to a point. A block of ice roughly the size of a CEO’s desk caught me in my side and punted me through a window. I fell to the floor of a hallway foyer that opened into a business suite. The man I’d been carrying was gone. I had no memory of just when we were separated. I felt bad about him, but damn fine about my lucky break. Inside the building, I could catch my breath. Inside the building, I could…

  “Hello, Reaver.”

  Ahh.

  Ahh, shit.

  It was Octagon. He was walking down the hall, heading towards me, and I could barely stand and I knew that being smashed through the window was no longer my lucky break. It was all part of Octagon’s plan. The son of a bitch is always ten steps ahead, working the angles. When I’d gotten the call, when I’d heard the screaming voice on the phone, when I’d traced the call, when I’d found the ransom note, when I talked to the parents, when I’d told them I’d do everything I could to find their son, when I’d followed the trail to the Bedelman’s Auction Warehouse, when I’d gone inside, when I’d seen the rows of sarcophagi, when Macabre had come out of one of them… it had all been planned.

  “Octagon,” I said, by way of a greeting. I tried to make my voice sound grim, like I was dangerous, but I didn’t at all feel that way. I tried for a smile and said, “You looking for a fight?”

  “I’m looking at the results of one. It looks like a mess.”

  “You should see the other guys.”

  “I will,” he said. “Tonight. There is a gathering. We will discuss the unfortunate death of Reaver. There’s not many of your side left, you know. You’re effectively the last.” It’s true. Paladin is gone. Kid Crater was murdered. Mistress Mary is missing.

  Octagon was moving down the hall, coming closer and closer, being hard to see, as usual. Something about his ebony costume sucks in light, bends it, refracts it, does all sorts of horrible things to it. Poor ol’ light, innocent as a virgin, and Octagon’s suit gives it rough play. It isn’t right.

  The walls seemed to bulge, retract, breathe, as he passed. He was reaching into his costume, pulling out flower petals, spreading them around. He was reaching into his legs and pulling out helium balloons, setting them free.

  “Celebrate the end of an era,” he told me. “It’s a party. The game is over!”

  “Fuck you,” I said, and I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall and tossed it at his head. He’d forgotten how quick I am. They always do. If things get bad, in a fight, I play it slow for a time, let them get used to it, then suddenly speed things up. It catches people off guard, like a batter who’s been eyeing fastballs in the low 80’s suddenly having to deal with one at around 240.

  He warded the blow with his left arm. It broke. The fire extinguisher clipped his head and he went down.

  “Fuck!” he said. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He was dazed. He sounded almost feminine. My body was covered in green lines, green patches, healing me, and I felt better than ever. I felt like I was at
the end of the crossroads. I felt lucky that I was inside a building where nobody was going to be filming me, where I could limp to the fallen Octagon and hit him one hundred times. Unless he was immortal, he was about to have a problem.

  “Take some time off,” I said. I still hadn’t reached him. Just wanted him to know what was happening. I think he was trying to reach for something in his leg, something deep in the void of his costume, but he was dazed and his hand was only slapping at the carpet next to his leg.

  “Take some time off,” I said. Even if there were cameras, even if this was going to be filmed, even if this would lead to a passage of anti-power legislation, even if I went to prison, it would still be worth it.

  “Take some time off,” I said. I realized I’d gone a bit crazy, saying my catchphrase like a mantra, like a cretin talks about tinfoil and the moon. I still hadn’t hit Octagon. Still hadn’t quite reached him. There was blood on the carpet beneath his head. His arm was crooked. It would be wrong to say I had an erection. But you’d get half credit.

  “Take some time...”

  “Reaver.”

  It wasn’t his voice. It was a woman’s voice from… from… from the door that was opening down the hall, from the woman who was strutting out of the room, from the woman who was adjusting her costume as if it had, only moments before, been in disarray, or off.

  Which was probably true.

  “Hello, Siren,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  She wasn’t cursing me.

  It was more of an invitation.

  I was pinned into place by the oldest of desires, or at least the best of the oldest of desires. That’s how Siren is. That’s her thing. Her voice, her body, her aroma, it’s everything that triggers sex. I’ve known people who didn’t get stiff, or wet, when Siren was nearby… but it’s rare enough to warrant a comment.