by Paul Tobin
“More likely you got it from that Molar son of a bitch,” Horwitz said. “He’s the only one around here with access to marijuana good enough to reach the stars, which is exactly where it sounds like you boys are tripping. Come up out of that pen. Get out here.”
“I think my nose is broke,” Greg said, holding it. There was blood coming from between his fingers, and his words were muffled and twisted. “I finkk muffh noff iff broff.”
“Might be that it is,” Horwitz said. “It won’t heal any faster in there, though. Come on, boys.”
We came out of the pen, with Horwitz helping Greg the most, but still holding him mostly by the shoulder, trying to avoid the blood on his nose, the blood on his fingers, the shit on his shoes. The three rams were up against the fence nearest us, as if they too believed they were getting out of the pen. A couple times there was one of them that made the baaa baaaa noise and of course now it sounded more like laughter. I wondered if it might have been the one that Tom had tried to ride, but I really couldn’t tell them apart. Dad would have been able to. I hoped we weren’t getting him into any trouble.
When we were assembled, Horwitz made us wait next to his car while he radioed back to headquarters, which was in Bolton, not Greenway. On the radio, sitting half out of his car, staring at us, he said, “Nothing spectacular. Just three boys trying to rile up the sheep. Yes. They’re drunk. Greg Barrows, and then the two Clarke boys. They weren’t hurting anything. Yes. Very drunk. No. I don’t see as how we need to cause any big ruckus. Barrows hurt his nose. He’s crying about it.”
That wasn’t fair. Greg wasn’t crying about. He gave a hurtful look to Horwitz, then a look to my brother and I, wanting support. We nodded in outraged sympathy.
Horwitz, still on the radio, said, “Not sure. Let me check. And… we need to know this for official? Okay then, I’ll ask.” He put down the radio and beckoned to Tom, waving him closer with that two-finger wave that officers learn in their first day of training. Tom took a step closer.
Horwitz said, “Headquarters needs to know if you’re wearing condoms when you’re scoring on Judy.” Tom’s eyes went wide.
“You know she’s related to Bolton’s chief of police, right?”
“No. Sir,” Tom said. It was about the only time I’d heard him say sir.
“No, meaning you’re not wearing a condom? Or, no, you didn’t know that?”
“I didn’t know that,” Tom said. Greg and I were looking at each other, then back to Tom. Some lights had gone on in one of the nearby buildings. A voice, in the distance, was yelling for the dogs to keep quiet. One of the light poles in the sheep pens had gone on. There were maybe fifty of them, spread out, but only the one had gone on. Horwitz was giving Tom a serious look, and his hand had strayed to his gun, unclicking the strap that held it fast in his holster.
“Holy shit,” Tom said.
“Fuck,” I said.
Horwitz looked to me, eyes narrowed, and he gestured at me with the radio in his hand, shaking it at me, the cord of it brushing along against his sideburns, but he didn’t even blink.
“And, you, Stevie Clarke,” he said. “Headquarters needs to know… you getting anywhere with that Layton girl?”
Greg hissed in a breath. I mumbled something. Tom moved protectively in front of me, even though Officer Horwitz’s hand was on the butt of his gun. I loved him for that. I loved him anyway, but I loved him for that, too.
Horwitz burst out laughing suddenly, turning around and hooking his radio back into place. “This fucker’s been off for two minutes,” he said. “God damn and Mother Mary, you two fuckers is oughtta have seen your faces!”
Tom was the first of us to laugh. He said, “You ugly fucker!” but he was laughing so hard he had to lean on the police car in order to support himself. “You ugly ugly fucker! You brilliant fucker!”
Horwitz was laughing even louder. Greg started in as well. I still didn’t see the humor in it.
Horwitz told Greg, “I was gonna brace you, too, but I heard your girlfriend has got big titties, and even an officer of the law has to respect that.”
“The honor of the badge!” Tom laughed. Greg didn’t know what to make of other people laughing at his girlfriend’s big titties, but he smiled because we weren’t getting shot. His face finally made me laugh, just as Conroy Selood, one of the sheep farm’s owners, came walking out with a flashlight and a border collie. He asked us what the hell was going on and Horwitz told him about catching us in the sheep pens. Conroy just looked at us for a long time, and then mentioned… to Tom and I… that our father worked there.
He added, “Sheep are so damned dumb. You didn’t hurt any of them, did you?”
Tom said, “I tried to ride one. Didn’t work. You have any super-powered sheep?”
Conroy said, “Boys. You’re drunk. Officer… just take ’em home, if you would.”
Horwitz asked us, “You walk out here? Ride bikes? Steal a car? Ride any sheep?”
I said, “Walked.” We had thought it would be stealthier.
Horwitz told us, “In the car, boys. In the car.” We all three of us started for the car but Horwitz stopped us before we’d even really started.
“Not with those shoes, boys. Not a chance.”
So we all had to take off our shoes, and Tom even his pants, and we left them crumpled against the fence at the Selood Brothers Sheep Farm and rode about halfway back to Greenway (it was less than two miles) with Greg and I in the back seat of a patrol car (which smelled of disinfectant) and Tom up front, noting, but not quite complaining about, the cold leather seats, since he was only in his underwear.
Greg was the only one to really see the tanker truck.
I mean, before the accident.
***
Horwitz was steering with one hand, staring back to me, not believing that I’d dated for two months without getting any pussy (that’s real pussy, son, not just kissing a girl that has one) off of Adele Layton.
Tom was fiddling with Horwitz’s handgun, for which Horwitz had given him permission after stripping the gun of its magazine and even firing off one round into the night sky, making sure the weapon was empty.
I was making excuses that would have sounded like poetry to a girl, but like bullshit to a man, and right then I was a man among men (though that was, obviously, being questioned) and wondering if I should make a more ardent move on Adele. I was even considering if it was too late at night, that very night, for tapping on her window and seeing about making some progress. The negatives to this were that it was very late at night, and that her ground floor window was directly beneath her parents’ second floor window. Also, I smelled like sheep shit.
The positives were that I might get some pussy. And, anyway… didn’t women like the smell of shit? Wasn’t there something primal about it? Some sort of pheromone in place? I’d read that somewhere. I’d read a lot of things, online.
We were going through the intersection just out of town, the one near the derelict house we all called the Scooby-Doo house, abandoned by the Wright family a half century ago and said to be inhabited by ghosts. The place is just past the old airplane hangers from the Wennes airport, a recreational airport that shut down in the air traffic controller strike of 1981, and just never reopened. The airplane hangars were barely visible from the road. We didn’t much glance in their direction, though I can remember seeing a light near one hangar, which I thought was odd. Greg started to yell something. We were halfway through the intersection and that was as far as we were going to get.
A tanker truck appeared in front of us. For me, in that split second, it was just a flash of white, an apparition in the road. It was a septic service truck, or at least it was disguised as one. That type of truck is sometimes known as a bowser, and they typically carry about 3000 gallons of liquid. This one wasn’t quite full. It held a little over two thousand gallons.
We were doing almost a hundred miles per hour when we slammed into the side and cracked that bitch open. Horwitz had been tryin
g (successfully) to impress us with the power of his squad car. He died instantly on impact.
Tom, Greg and I… we all did something else.
CHAPTER FIVE
I sat in the corner of the old log cabin in the park at Greenway, Oregon. Or, more precisely, I sat in the corner of the rafters, there in the historical log cabin (comprised of one room only) situated at the northwest corner of Charles Park, which is in Greenway, Oregon.
Where once I’d had to wedge my shoes into the corner and lift myself up, scrambling up the logs in order to climb up to the rafters, this time I easily leapt the ten feet, landing nimbly on the third rafter, making barely any sound. Time does change things.
What it hadn’t changed was the list of girls that had given their all (and by all, I mean a bit of their virtue) in order to earn their place on a very special roster. Or at least time hadn’t erased that list. There had indeed been changes. There were a few more inductees, which pleased me. There was still April. Beth. Lossie. Roberta. Daisy. Ginny. Clio. Georgie. Britney. Paula. Terri. Nora. A few others that I remembered. Past that was Clementine (a name I can’t read without humming that old miner’s song) and Colleen and Annie and Petra (it must have been the Gorner twin, but the incident would have hardly been her first experience), Gladiola and Wendy and Adele and Libby and Fran and a whole host of others. With the Greenway population explosion, the roster had increased exponentially, so much so that I sniffed the air, trying to scent the hundred or so girls who had given that finger-length piece of their virtue here in the log cabin, because surely the smell of teenage sex must have permanently bonded with the oaken logs. Nothing, though. It just smelled like wood.
I’ve twice stated that the girls gave their virtue, and I should correct that. There’s nothing virtuous in not experiencing what life has to offer, and it’s a slap in the face that some people count a boy having sex as a triumph, and a girl having sex as a defeat. These girls on the list, they hadn’t been defeated; they’d only lived life, and done so with pleasure.
That said, I was heartbroken to see Adele’s name on the rafter. I hadn’t put it there. Who had? The name didn’t, of course, have to refer to Adele Layton. There are other Adeles in the world. It’s an uncommon name, but not singular.
Anyway, it wasn’t fair that I felt the burn of acids inside my stomach, in my lungs and heart (and, hell yes, soul) when I saw her name there, since after the accident I had been in a coma for nearly three months (Greg was in a coma for five days and Tom, well, more on that later) and by the time I woke I wasn’t the way I had been. My own life had assuredly moved on, and hers had to, as well. It’s not like she was the one in a coma. It was fine that she had found somebody else. It was fine that she had laughed with him. It was fine that she had gone to movies with him, movies that he maybe even remembered, and it was fine if they looked for fossils together in the quarry. It was absolutely okay if she wore her green dress and they’d walked along Greenway’s sidewalks together. I had no issue with how she’d taken her panties off, sliding them down from her legs, maybe with him holding her dress up, watching Adele as she stepped away from her panties, him with a grin that wouldn’t quit, and a pen knife in his back pocket, ready to carve her name in a rafter that…
… a rafter that
… that I almost broke with a sudden clasping of my hand, crushing part of the timber in my grip, sending a crack along a rafter that had been in place for nearly one hundred and fifty years.
It wasn’t fair to feel that way. Adele had a life of her own. Myself, I was sitting alone in the rafters where only teenagers are supposed to go, and I was sitting with ten days left in my life. I’d given my word of honor to Octagon, and I meant to keep it.
I am Reaver.
A hero.
Heroes keep their word.
My brother Tom taught me how solidly that was true.
No matter how much it hurts.
I had ten days to make things right in the world. That’s not possible, of course. I’d spent years trying to make things right in the world, and I’d done some tidbits of good, but I’d only barely jostled the scales, and for several of those years I had Paladin at my side (I know there are those out there, reading this, who would say it was the other way around) and it was a time when Mistress Mary and Kid Crater and Warp were in their prime. What a golden age. Then, it had seemed possible; it had seemed that…
I found that I had left the park and was running, at three times the speed of a normal man, to Adele’s house. Her name was listed in the phone directory as having the same place of residence as back when I’d lived in Greenway. The same house. That was a relief to me. I suppose a psychiatrist would call it an anchor. Ten days from death, I wanted a solid footing in the past. I’d looked up Adele’s name on one of Checkmate’s computers, at the SRD base, with Commander Bryant typing in a password (he said the password didn’t make any real difference… that Checkmate’s computers simply used the keys to fingerprint you as you typed, and to retrieve and match a genetic sample from your skin flakes) and then turning discreetly aside while I did my research.
Adele’s parents were dead. One quick heart attack. One lingering battle against cancer.
Adele had no marriage certificate on file. Which didn’t mean she was single.
She listed her occupation as “self-employed blogger/researcher/author.” She had written a number of books on the topic of the superhumans. They had moderate sales. The subject matter was popular, but her approach (according to a brief scouring of her reviews) was too scholarly. People like the sensational.
Continuing to stalk (ahem… research) Adele’s file on the computer, I saw that her health record was enviable. There were no listed pregnancies. She had been investigated five times by the Secret Service, four times for intruding on Presidential secure zones during public appearances (each time during press conferences concerning superhumans) and once for hacking into government files in order to access documents about… Reaver.
So, that was interesting.
Commander Bryant had told me that I should ask Adele, myself, in person, if I wanted to know any more. He told me a personal story about stalking a girl online, a girl he’d met in a bar, and by the time he’d slept with her (he clearly wanted to tell me all the details of the encounter, which had happened in a bunker, a quarter mile below the holding pen where Warp is stored these days) she was so frightened by all the intimate knowledge he knew about her, all the things she’d never told him, that it hadn’t progressed to any real intimacy, just the fake variety that computers foster.
I’d told Bryant, “I thought you were turned around. Not looking.” For once, I’d meant to use the Reaver voice, the one that scares people. He’d only smiled. I suppose that’s fitting, as he’s the man who, every day, goes and talks to Mindworm, down in the cells, asking him to release his hold on the citizens of Farewell, New Mexico, a town of 2700 people that have been caught in Mindworm’s dreams for over seven years. If a man can talk with Mindworm, he’s not going to shit himself because I use my nasty voice.
So I’d turned back to the computers (Checkmate’s computers were made of glass, or maybe diamonds, and, according to Bryant, a handful of quarks) and I (knowing full well that Bryant was right) intruded even further into Adele’s life, accessing the SRD satellite surveillance photos of her house, taken over the past couple of years, showing her house (there was a new porch addition) and, in three of the photos, Adele herself, walking outside the house, going inside the house, and, in the last of them, spilling groceries as she took two bags from her car.
And now, a few hours later, after sulking like a spoiled teenager in the log cabin rafters, I was standing in the street in front of Adele’s house.
It would have taken a normal man ten seconds to make it to her front door, and to knock.
It would have taken me one third as long.
Instead, I took out my phone, took a deep breath, took a look up into the sky (where I assumed that at least one of the
SRD satellites was tracking me) and I dialed a number.
Adele’s number.
I felt worse than when Firehook had once torn out my left lung.
I felt worse than when Laser Beast had once (on purpose, that fucker) shot a hole through my balls.
I felt about the same as when, right after the tanker truck accident, I’d woken up (briefly, and for the last time in months) on the highway, wreckage all around me, and I could see what had happened to Officer Horwitz, and to Greg, and (only somewhat) to Tom.
I felt like I could hear Adele’s phone ringing, in the house.
I watched her move past the window on the 2nd floor (she’d apparently taken her parents’ old room) and then, after six rings, I heard her, in the phone, saying, “Hello?”
And I felt it.
CHAPTER SIX
The majority of people who read this aren’t going to care about my relationship with Adele. My memories and thoughts concerning the boys and girls in the bright-colored underwear is what they’re going to find fascinating. I was once offered an embarrassing amount of cash to make a pornographic film with Siren, who had (according to a producer who was later found dead with all his fingers missing) agreed to the film as long as it would air on primetime television. One network had said they wouldn’t consider doing so under any circumstances. Three others had said there were, possibly, some circumstances that could be considered.
I’d turned the offer down.
I turned it down just like I’d turned down all the merchandising deals. I’d declined most public appearances (Paladin always seemed able to talk me into them) and various requests for my sperm to be used to fertilize loving couples and even (I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider this, at least from an amusement standpoint) one group of fifty-six (yes, fifty-six) Ukrainian lesbians who had formed a warrior cult and lived in caves. Warp (this was before his breakdown) ran over to check out the premises and said the caves were actually very nice. Like modern homes.