Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  Which is what she did. She started from the beginning, from talking about how she had considered making the call when she was taking off her clothes and getting ready for bed. And then she had decided against it and had masturbated. And then she had taken a shower. And when she was in the shower she had masturbated. Adele told me about every drop of water from the shower, about where each drop had hit, and how they had felt. It was wonderful knowledge. Wonderful.

  After the shower she had gotten into bed. She described this as well. Talking about her legs sliding into and under the covers, how the cool blankets had touched her (moist) body, and where it felt the coolest, and the warmest, and she had mused on thoughts of certain things that had occurred to her in the shower (she wouldn’t tell me what they were, which was genius on her part) and those thoughts had led to another bout of masturbation, and while she was masturbating she was looking at the phone and then she was dialing my number and, well, here we were.

  Weren’t we?

  Yes. Yes we were. And the conversation continued for almost ten minutes, including me going to my door and locking it, because sometimes Tom would come into my bedroom (high, from smoking marijuana) and tell me about visions he’d had, or visions he wished he’d had, or things that Judy had done, and while I actually enjoyed his visits at times, I was right then at that moment having phone sex, and, of course, phone sex and brothers do not mix.

  But… apparently, at least once, phone sex and sisters do.

  Adele was telling me about my fingers, how she’d taken to noticing them, how she was gauging their length and was instructing me where they should go, and at what speed they should make the trip, and she was talking about certain words she would say that would mean I should stop doing whatever I was doing, and how she would say certain things that would sound like she was telling me to stop, but that I should By No Means stop doing whatever I was doing, and then I heard her screech (I thought she’d, you know, peaked) but then she said someone else’s name, which is always a bit disappointing during sex of any kind.

  She said, “Laura!”

  I was wondering why Adele would call out her sister’s name during sex (in some ways I wasn’t against it, because, you know… I have a penis and everything) but then I heard Laura’s actual voice.

  She said, “Adele! What the hell? Are you having phone sex?”

  I heard, “No!” I heard the sound of the phone falling to the ground.

  “You were!” Laura’s voice.

  “Get out! Get out of here!” My girlfriend’s voice.

  “Who with?” Laura, again.

  “Stay the fuck away from my phone! Don’t! No! Steve! Steve! Hang up!” That was Adele’s voice again, and there was no way in hell I was going to hang up. I wanted to hear all of this.

  “Steve?” said a voice on the phone. It was Laura. I was (with a certain amount of pleasure) picturing the scene. Adele was naked; I knew that. She was probably still a little wet from the shower, and there was no way that anything that was happening was my fault, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

  Laura was one year older than Adele. She was a foot taller. Boyish hips. A small chest. High cheekbones. Dark eyes. Grinning, most of the time, in the manner of someone who already knows the punch line and is just loving spending time with the joke. She was an oddity, having black hair but prominent freckles on her face, big blotches that some of the Greenway boys (myself quite definitely included) thought were interesting and some thought were ugly. She was an oddity in another way, too, in that she didn’t give a shit about the Greenway boys; she was all about the Greenway girls.

  “Steve?” she said on the phone again. Her breath was huffing, strained, and I realized she was fighting to keep control of the phone.

  She said, “Steve! Hurry! Tell me what you guys were talking about! This is awesome! Ahhh! Adele! Quit it! I just want to know! Owww! Jesus! She bit me!” Laura was laughing and I was trying to make up my mind about saying something, because while nothing that had happened so far was my fault, if I said one word, any word at all, then it could be argued that I was complicit.

  Laura said, “Steve? You still there? Say something because… Owwww! God! Adele’s a biter, Steve! Seems like you’d best keep that in mind. Unless, maybe you like that? Hurry up and tell me the dirtiest thing you two were talking about!”

  I’d decided that I’d best remain silent, and was continuing on that course of action when I heard a knocking sound from the phone (at first I thought maybe Adele was tossing her sister repeatedly against the wall) and then the sound of Adele’s mother, the Layton girls’ mother, yelling for the two of them to keep it the goddamn hell down. Almost immediately, my phone went dead. I figured it meant that Adele had won the fight. I listened to the dial tone, and it was one of the sweetest things I’d ever heard. I was more excited about being alive that I’d ever been, before.

  I put the phone by my bed and sat looking at the ceiling, waiting. I was patient. I was impatient. I was alive, all the way.

  Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang again.

  Adele said, “Laura is gone. My door is locked. I’m wearing my panties. Go ahead and talk me out of them.”

  ***

  The sheep were restless, but what were they going to do about it? Sheep are sheep and we moved through the vast flock of them with relative ease, only somewhat bothered by how our shoes were getting layered in sheep shit. It wasn’t the shit itself that was bothersome; we grew up in the country and some occasional horse/cow/sheep/dog shit was no big deal. It was like stepping on a dead branch, kind of.

  The difference between stepping on a dead branch and a clump of fresh shit is that the branch doesn’t adhere to your shoes and come along for the rest of the ride. We were going to have to sneak into the buildings, into the offices, into the secret lairs (we were drunk and had settled on a belief that the farm held government secrets of vast import) and it was going to be harder to do that while leaving an easily traceable line of shit-ridden footprints. We took to wiping our shoes on the sheep themselves. Their wool-covered sides were perfect for such a solution, and they were to blame anyway.

  We were wearing entirely white outfits.

  It had been the biggest debate of the outing. Should we wear black (as demanded by our presumed ninja ancestry) or white, which was more suitable for sneaking through sixteen hundred sheep? We’d finally settled on white, though I myself was only in a white button shirt with white shoes, and then dark gray pants. I didn’t have any white pants. They seemed feminine to me.

  “Any one of these sheep could be superhuman,” Tom said as we moved through the flock.

  “None of them are human,” I noted. “So… they can’t be superhuman.”

  “You know what I mean. Warp was born here. In this sheep farm. There has to be some other experiments. Some reason. Sheep must be easy to experiment upon, to breed and create superpowers, to perfect the techniques.” We’d all reached the point where we accepted what Tom was saying was true. We were young and we had been drinking all day. Because of this, we were picturing sheep with super-strength, with flight capabilities, with wool like Medusa’s snakes, with singular eyes that could fire lasers, or triple eyes that could see the future. We saw no evidence of any of this, but we were certain these sheep, the ones we had so far encountered, were simply waiting for the experiments, and that we would find the end results of the experiments further on.

  The sheep were making their baaa baaaa noises, and a couple dogs were sounding in the distance, stuck in their own pens for the night, agitated at their charges for not keeping their goddamned mouths shut. We weren’t too worried about the dogs. We didn’t have a reason that we weren’t too worried about the dogs. We just weren’t. We were full of optimism in every respect.

  “Getting anywhere with Adele?” Tom asked me. He was pushing a stubborn ewe out of his way so that he could climb a wooden fence into the next pen, steadying himself on a light pole, one that had gone dark for the night, so that t
he sheep could slumber. We had decided to go through the pens because the roads were probably lined with security cameras and likely mined as well. I should again point out that we were young and had been drinking all day. In fact, I’ll just go ahead and admit that Tom had run across some marijuana (John Molar had given it to him in regards for how we hadn’t reported him running the stop sign and knocking me flat) and we’d smoked a good deal of that, enough that I was, at the time, wondering if the sheep were actually making sense, speaking in a language that only I could understand, telling me the secrets of the ovine. In such a mental state, believing that a sheep farm has buried land mines along their incoming road isn’t such a large leap at all. It’s more of a stumbling sprawl, mentally speaking.

  The night was wide open and dark. The stars were ancient jewels. I wondered how long it would take Warp to run to one of the stars. I wondered how long it would take him to shear the sheep. If he worked at the farm, he could put everyone out of work. Dad included. I worried about that.

  Tom said, “Steve. Numbnuts. Chucklefuck. I asked you a question. Getting anywhere with Adele?” He meant, of course, was I getting laid? It was a private question, and I could feel even the sheep waiting for an answer. I felt like I could ruin Adele’s reputation if I said the wrong thing in front of 1602 witnesses, counting Tom, Greg, and the sheep. I felt like I could ruin my own reputation if I told the truth. I decided my reputation was of lesser importance. A girl has one chance at a reputation. A man’s chances are infinite.

  “We’re just kissing,” I said. “Sometimes a little more.”

  “You don’t get to be vague,” Tom said. He leapt off the fence and down into the other pen, but his focus was on me and he landed partially on a milling sheep and went thudding to the ground. He stood up. Wiped off. The sheep were all running away from their fence-leaping aggressors. There were maybe three hundred of them in the pen. They made a noise like one hundred horses.

  “Hand in panties,” I said. “Mouth on nipple.”

  “After three months?” he said. He’d been watching the retreat of the sheep, but he turned back around to face me.

  “Two months,” I said.

  Greg said, “Still makes you a pussy.” I could see in his eyes that he didn’t believe that, but we were both in the habit of saying things that we thought Tom would like to hear. Greg’s own girlfriend lived out of town, and despite how she had three times verified her existence by visiting Greenway, Tom and I still pretended that she didn’t exist, that she was a lie Greg had created to hide the fact that he was gay. She was real, though, and her name was Katherine, and she wanted the whole name pronounced. She didn’t want to be just Kathy. She said it made her sound too friendly. I hadn’t known what to think of a girl that didn’t want to be thought of as friendly. Her hair was long and blonde and she had blue eyes and very large breasts. Even then, when I was fifteen, I knew she would have trouble later in life. Back problems. Lechers. Tom had told me that Greg and Katherine hadn’t progressed past the handjob level, despite how she wouldn’t have minded something more, or a great deal more. He didn’t tell me how he knew that. Tom had also said that Katherine’s areolas were huge, twice the size of normal. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew that, either.

  We were coming up on the last of the pens. It had three rams in it, young ones, and Tom decided we should name the three of them after each of us, and then have them fight to the death. That set us to thinking for a long time, the three of us sitting on the top of the fence, watching the three sheep, talking about what in the hell could ever induce sheep to fight to the death.

  “We could get them liquored up,” Tom suggested. “Then tell them the others have been spreading rumors about them.”

  “That might work,” Greg said.

  “What kind of rumors?” I asked.

  “Whoa. Yeah,” Greg said. “Hadn’t thought of that. What kind of rumor would make a sheep mad?”

  Tom said, “Maybe that they give bad wool. Or that their mothers appeared in some sort of strange porno film.”

  “Dang,” Greg said. “Harsh.” One of the rams lifted his head to regard us. We pretended that he’d heard us talking about his mother. We waited for any of its powers (we were still high, and still positive that the sheep had powers) to manifest. Nothing happened. It just quit looking at us. I wondered if sheep thought that we, all of us humans, had super-powers. We can think almost for ourselves, and we can ride bicycles and change our underwear and, in the animal kingdom, an opposable thumb is more wondrous than the power of flight.

  “How about you guys?” Tom said.

  “How about… what?” I asked.

  “What could make you fight?”

  Greg said, “About anything. Injustice. I think maybe I’d like to be a lawyer. Do some good in the world.”

  Tom said, “Lawyers don’t do good in the world. They just do the world, period.”

  “I’d fight for Adele,” I said.

  Tom said, “Damn? Really? But you haven’t even gotten any pussy yet!” Two of the rams looked up. I wondered what the key word had been.

  I told Tom, “I guess you’d fight for pussy.” He smiled at me, not needing to answer, then jumped down off the fence and grabbed one of the rams by its horns. It didn’t like it, and tried to pull away. The dogs were barking again. Still in the distance. But closer. Their pens were right up near the buildings. We weren’t far off.

  “What would you fight for?” Tom asked the ram. He was looking it in the face and I was hoping it would butt him, but not too bad. If it knocked him out, we’d have to carry him home, and that was a long ways to carry someone with shit on his shoes.

  “Baaaaa,” the ram said. Or at least that’s what Tom pretended it to say, holding its lips open, using his hold on the ram’s horns to bob its head up and down. The other two rams looked over at this, interested, annoyed, but still just sheep in the end.

  And that’s when the flashlight lit up on us.

  Scared holy hell out of us.

  Came from nowhere.

  Came from only ten feet away.

  Greg shrieked like a girl (I’m real sorry to use that expression, because it sounds demeaning not only to girls, but also to the man who would become Paladin, but the truth is what it is, and Greg Barrows shrieked like a girl) and he jumped down off the fence he’d been sitting on, down into the pen with Tom, and he immediately turned and tried to run, meaning he ran full into the fence he should have remembered was there, since he’d just jumped off the thing.

  I froze into place.

  Tom jumped on the ram’s back, straddled it like a horse, and started yelling, “Giddy-Yap! Giddy-Yap! Ride, you beautiful bitch! Away we ride!”

  I was still frozen in place, trying to see where the light was coming from, but it kept shining in my face whenever I looked at it, blinding me. In my mind I was thinking that if the sheep farm had given birth to someone like Warp, to someone who wasn’t merely human anymore, a place where Nazi horrors were assuredly in place, where alien artifacts were twisting the minds of men, where Mayan gods were holding sway over the destiny of mankind (we really had smoked quite a bit of marijuana that night, quite a prodigious amount) then we’d should have known that the premises would have incredibly sophisticated security, such as what appeared to be a sentient beam of light, drawing out my soul.

  Again, the marijuana.

  “Ride, bitch! Ride!” Tom was yelling to the ram. Instead of galloping away, carrying Tom over the fences with great bounding leaps, the ram settled heavily to the ground and sent him sprawling.

  “Tom Clarke,” the voice behind the oncoming flashlight said. “That you? Sounds like it’s you. What you doing with that sheep, boy?”

  “Not sex,” Tom said. “Definitely not.”

  “Thank god for that,” Officer Horwitz told him, clicking off his flashlight, climbing halfway into the pen, regarding the three of us.

  Tom was simply dusting himself off, unperturbed at the turn of events, because
he was unshakeable. A rock. I was a rock, too, but only because I was frozen into place, still, trying to understand how a beam of light had transformed into a man. I thought of Star Trek teleportation, mostly. Greg was holding his bleeding nose, which was broken, having snapped sideways when he ran into the fence.

  Yes. He broke that nose when he ran into the fence. I know how many of you have wondered how Paladin, the healer, could have a broken nose. The truth is that it happened before he got his powers, so it was set in stone before he could do much about it. The truth is that Paladin’s broken nose had nothing to do with any supervillains (like he would sometimes claim) or any meteors (which was kind of an official story) and instead it was from how, when he was sixteen years old, he’d ran face first into the side of a sheep pen at the Selood Brothers Sheep Farm.

  My mind, at the time, a bit late, was suddenly realizing that there were no aliens involved in the night, no superhumans, just Greenway’s only law enforcement, Officer Horwitz, who was grinning at the three of us and shaking his head, trying not to laugh, and laughing all at the same time.

  “You boys is drunk, ain’tcha?” he said.

  Tom said, “We boys is drunk.”

  “That marijuana I smell?” Horwitz asked. He made the words sound resigned, like a father who understands a boy has got to grow up in his own way, and make his own mistakes.

  “The sheep,” Tom said.

  “Pardon?” Horwitz asked. Mike Horwitz was country beefy, which is different than city beefy. Being country beefy means you have some girth to you, born of nights of deep-bottomed stew pots and days of walking long miles and moving occasional trees or rocks or confused bovines. City beefy means nights of greasy-bottomed fast food bags, and days of riding elevators, and being a confused bovine.

  “The sheep gave us marijuana,” Tom said. “They are our guides to the celestial.”