by Paul Tobin
There came a time when even I (for which I hated myself) was thinking it might be best for them to pull the trigger. Paladin had gotten too close to one of the impacts and was dazed, was on the ground, on one knee and one hand, glowing, healing. A Humvee troop transport had narrowly avoided being a casualty (the kid had slammed into the base of the mountain, triggering an avalanche that advanced on the Humvee and would have swallowed it if I hadn’t gotten there first and given it a push) and I’d broken seven or eight bottles of whiskey by throwing them into the air (I guess I was hoping Kid Crater would fetch them like a dog, but I’m honestly not sure) and I had downed two other bottles myself, alone, trying to goad the kid into joining me. You’ve maybe seen the picture of me (the SRD soldier was nearly executed for releasing the photo, incidentally) standing atop one of the fallen boulders, waving one bottle of whiskey while slugging the other in nearly superhuman gulps. I admit it’s a funny photo, of sorts, if you don’t dwell on the tragedy behind it.
Only five seconds after that photo was taken, Kid Crater came down, landing right next to me, softer this time, so soft that the boulder barely cracked. He took the whiskey from my hand and told me he’d kill everyone, everyone, everyone, but that he was the worst of them all. He had to die first. Some other words followed, but there was nothing intelligible. He drank the whiskey. All of it. A whole bottle. He was seventeen years old. Not even legally able to drink alcohol, not yet. In a few minutes he was fetal at my feet, curled up and crying, nursing the empty bottle. Soon after that, he fell into a coma, and soon after that (five seconds, at most) he slid from the boulder and fell onto the ground, impacting in the usual manner, like a regular seventeen-year-old kid.
My reactions are fast enough that I could have caught him, normally, easily.
But I was awfully, awfully drunk.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I was dressed in a costume. It was not my Reaver costume, but it was a costume nonetheless. It was a ninja costume. I was dressed as a ninja and I was not completely sober. I wasn’t drunk on alcohol, and I wasn’t on any drugs (Siren once encouraged me to do shrooms, which I really didn’t want to do, but anyone would have, if they’d seen the gymnastic way she’d encouraged me) but I was, regardless, not entirely sober.
I was high on a sense of purpose. And the thrill of the illicit.
I was breaking into a house where a hero had once lived. His name had been Steve Clarke and he was sixteen years old when a tanker truck had blindsided the police car he’d been riding in, killing the drivers of both vehicles and changing Steve Clarke and Greg Barrows (also sixteen years old) and doing something different to Tom Clarke (being Steve’s older brother) and thereafter changing the Clarke household (after some time) into a tourist attraction.
My childhood home wasn’t like Disneyland or Disney World or Power Paradise… it wasn’t a theme park in that manner… it was more like the houses where Oscar Wilde had lived, or Rasputin, or any other similarly famous but also somewhat infamous characters.
Much of the house had been preserved (or reconstructed) in the manner to which it had been on the last day that Tom and I left it… or at least on the last day my parents left. The paintings were still on the walls (Mom had loved any painting with horses as the central subject, and I’d spent days at rummage sales and estate auctions uncovering and pointing out these treasures) and my old toothbrush (a commemorative G. I. Joe toothbrush) and even a bar of soap that I had supposedly, dubiously, used. Many of my old clothes were there, including the ones where Tom and I had used laundry markers to write swear words (Fuck, mostly) and “clever” sayings (You dropped something in my pants. Here, I’ll get it for you) on the interior of the shirts, so that we could wear them out of the house (Mom and Dad none the wiser) and then turn them inside-out once we were walking the streets of Greenway.
All of these things and more were still there in the house. And… added to them were the seemingly hundreds of plaques (such as “1970’s Yosemite Sam drinking glass: Once used by Steve Clarke”) and the roped-off sections (This bathroom for display only: Please use the outside facilities) and a bevy of security cameras that I was glad hadn’t been in place when I was a child, or else the world could have been subjected to an endless supply of downloadable videos of me sitting in front of my computer, downloading pornographic videos, idly masturbating to each one of them in turn, trying to decide what fetishes (Cosplay? Rear entry? Bondage? Cartoon porn? Lesbian gangbangs?) would be the soup of the day before really getting down to business.
I hadn’t been to the house in almost a decade. Now I was back.
To steal something.
And I wasn’t alone.
Adele was likewise dressed as a ninja. In the terms of Halloween costumes, she would have been known as “sexy ninja.” This wasn’t so much because her costume was a mixture of black lingeries and a frilly mask (though it was, somewhat) but because a sexy woman looks sexy in pretty much any damn thing she slides into. Also, illicit activities make women look sexy whenever they slide into one of those.
Laura was dressed as a topless pirate, having stripped away her fluffy/frilly pirate shirt in the car when we’d parked the car four blocks away. She was… distracting. She did not look anything like how I would expect an historical pirate to appear. Historically, pirates were almost exclusively men, and they were almost exclusively not of immaculate grooming habits. Laura was wearing an eyepatch (with a hole cut out of it, so she could see) beneath her glasses, and she had pirate trousers, and boots, and a belt and sword. Apple was with us, and had used colored markers to draw a parrot onto Laura’s shoulder. It was a reasonable illustration… once it had been explained.
Apple herself was dressed as Cleopatra, a woman that had ruled one empire and nearly usurped another, and she was complete with a rubber asp, which Laura kept calling a rubber ass.
We were a gang of sodden thieves. Myself… I was drunk on the thrill of what we were doing. The women were likewise drunk on the adventure, with Laura and Apple being additionally drunk in the more usual manner.
Because of who I am, I have access to some extremely sophisticated equipment. I rarely use it. Being fast and strong and invulnerable tends to be a good plan, so that’s what I go with, right up front. This time, though, I used a nifty Checkmate-invented device to override the security system, the whole damn set-up, and create a loop that would replay the previous night’s data feed. Meaning… we could go in and raise hell and everything would be fine.
“You girls wanna see my room?” I asked. If the sixteen-year-old me could have seen this part, the part with me luring Adele, and a topless pirate, and Cleopatra into his room, he would have thought everything was worth it. That is… if he hadn’t seen some of the other parts. The parts with Kid Crater. And Greg. And Tom, of course.
“Would it be vulgar if I asked to have sex on Reaver’s bed?” Laura asked.
“Sex with who?” Adele answered.
“You’re complicating this,” Laura said. She was moving down the short hallway on the first floor. The house’s caretakers had put the display table (with fresh flowers, Mom’s collection of interesting beach rocks, some old mail) on the wrong side. We always had it on the right hand side, because if we had it on the left hand side then the sheepdogs (whenever Dad brought any of them home from the Selood Brothers Farm) would inevitably scamper from the kitchen, run into the hallway, and blindly impact the vase and the table. I wondered if the house’s current caretakers still brought in those sheepdogs. They would have done wonders at keeping the flow of the tourists in line.
“We just need to find something we can steal,” I said. “We shouldn’t stay long.”
“I’m a pirate,” Laura said. “I steal innocence.”
“Nobody here has any of that,” I said. “Except Adele.”
“Hmm. And that particular booty is clearly marked as yours.”
“Watch it, sis,” Adele said. “And keep it down.” I noted that Adele hadn’t actually disagreed with
Laura’s statement. It made me think of the next few days. Of what might happen. It made me happy. It made me sad.
I tried not to look at Tom’s room when we walked upstairs. The door was open, and I could see the posters on the wall. I couldn’t help but look to see if the world map was still there. It was. There were still thumbtacks on all the places he’d wanted to visit. Sorry, Tom.
Beyond the glance at the map, I moved on. Apple and Laura started to go into the room, but Adele gestured them back, whispering, “Tom’s room,” in a voice that I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did, of course. I gave them no hint that I had heard them (I have a good poker face) and we moved on down the hall.
My key hadn’t fit in the front door. I hadn’t thought that it would, after so many years, but faced with the realization of the failure (I’d had to make sure not to twist the key too strongly, because breaking locks and/or keys is child’s play for a man of my strength) I’d become momentarily maudlin (it changed the years that I had carried the key away from being utilitarian into some sort of desperate grasping for the past) and then suddenly happy… because when your key doesn’t fit in a door, then it feels more like stealing, and I very much wanted to steal.
“This is on your list, right?” Laura asked. “Going through your old house, stealing things? Nice!” She was moving through my bedroom doorway along with me, pressing into my room. Because she was topless, because she was squeezing through a narrow space, and because she was Laura, and because she was a pirate, her breasts moved against me. It made me feel like I’d done something wrong (it’s often terrible, the training that men go through in life… the hoops through which nurture forces us to jump, even when nature thinks everything is fine, just fine) and I quickly (at three times normal human speed) looked to Adele. She just rolled her eyes. She’d lived a long time with her sister. Apparently, this wasn’t anything new.
There wasn’t much that was new in my room, either. My bed was still there. It was the same bed, because it had the same scratches where I had put in the initials of all the girls in town that I’d wanted to date. It was a code that nobody else could have cracked, not even Checkmate himself. Sure, “AL” (the largest letters) might be linked with Adele Layton, and “LL” might refer to Laura Layton (sorry about that, future Adele) but how could “TTG” be linked with anyone? What girl had “RHT” for her initials? The answers (Ticket Taker Girl & Red Haired Tourist) were known only to myself. I wondered if Adele had written about these coded mysteries in any of her blogs, articles, or books. I couldn’t possibly ask, though, without giving away all the codes, including GTO (Gorner Twins, Obviously) and that damning LL, so I just ignored my (seemingly ancient) bedpost scratchings and fondly ran my fingers along a set of Sherlock Holmes novels, editions from the 1950’s that had been my grandfather’s. They were still on my bookshelf, still the same books (my grandfather’s name, Roger, was written with faded letters on each of their spines) but now arranged with several books that hadn’t been mine. Books on science. Medicine. Philosophy.
“Some of these books aren’t mine,” I told the three women in my childhood bedroom.
“I know,” Adele said. “I was the first one to spot it. Of course, I’d been here before.” Laura started to say something, but Adele continued, drowning her out with, “And then when I came back, a few years ago, I saw that there were different books. Nobody is willing to admit it, but I think it’s because you were supposed to be a shining light, retroactively superhuman and superhero, so SRD planted books that made it look like you were a whole hell of a lot more studious than the average teen boy.”
“I was studious, but it was for war stories and how to get girls into bed. Which reminds me…” I trailed off (it was probably a poor moment to trail off, in that situation) and went into my closet. There used to be a folder in there that had a collection of photographs (torn out from the worst/best of my Uncle Buzz’s selections of decidedly odd porno magazines) and a paperback copy of Teenage Time Hero, an “Erotica House” publication concerning a boy who learned how to stop time, and who then went on to save the world from a nuclear holocaust, meanwhile stripping a good number of girls naked and waking them up from their time freezes when he already had them in compromising positions. The women (sometimes in groups) were always happier about it than I suspected most women would be, but I did love that book. Tom had given it to me. I’d kept it tucked beneath the winter blankets and the board games in my closet.
It was gone. The folder was gone. Was it more of SRD’s intervention? It might have been, but at the same time my parents might have done something with the folder and the book; they’d had plenty of time when I was laid up in the hospital, and then afterwards while I was training at SRD.
“Looking for something?” Adele asked.
“Old perverted things. A folder. A book. Somebody threw them out.”
“Damn,” Laura said. “We never get to hold onto the perversions of our youth. That’s what’s truly perverted.”
Adele said, “It would have been weird to break into your old home and steal your teenage porno stash, anyway. Don’t you want to take something of value? I mean, personal value?”
“You’ve never been a teenage boy. That book had immense personal value. But… what I really want is some of my parents’ pictures. A horse painting, maybe. Some old photographs. By the way, you look sexy as a ninja.”
“Thanks. I feel sensuously sneaky. Should we go to your parents’ room?”
“Can Laura and I stay here?” Apple asked. She was spread out on my bed. A pretty Cleopatra was on my bed. She was tugging a pirate to her side.
“No!” Adele answered for me. She could see exactly why her sister and her somewhat-of-a-date wanted to stay, for a bit, in my room.
“Don’t destroy my childhood dreams,” I told Adele, tugging her from the room. I think if I would have done anything else, my childhood self would have ejected himself from the past and soared into the future to give me a well-deserved bitch slap. That bedpost wasn’t covered with initials for nothing. As I pulled Adele from the room (I closed the door, because it would have just been weird, otherwise, or at least it would have been tipping the scales to the much-too-weird, otherwise) I resolved to sometime return (I had a short few days for a window of opportunity) to carve a “:P” behind the “LL” on the bedpost (meaning Laura Layton: Pirate) and then add on an “AQN,” meaning Apple, Queen of the Nile.
Adele and I, two ninjas who were now alone, crept into my parents’ bedroom. It was much as I remembered it. The queen-sized bed. The dresser drawers. The exercise bike. The small table where Dad liked to read the morning paper and have his breakfast on days when my mom was out of town working on video shoots. She’d been the aide to a videographer specializing in political commercials. She hadn’t been political herself. She’d once told me that, having met so many politicians, she’d come to a conclusion that they were all just bundles of shit packed in boxes of arrogance.
There weren’t as many personal items in my parents’ bedroom. There weren’t any personal photos at all. I suppose I should have expected that. They’d had time to pack what they wanted, in those initial few weeks of my becoming Reaver, when I was first training at SRD, and before they had moved to the Mysterious Place That They Moved To. They would have taken anything that meant a lot to them, although I’d heard they’d been instructed to destroy any pictures of me. There was no way they could take the chance of someone looking at their family pictures and saying, “How adorable. Your son looks just like a young Steve Clarke, which makes you his parents, which means I should call Octagon right now, or maybe the tabloids, and either way I guess you’re royally fucked. And… oh! Steve looks so adorable in those short pants!” Likewise, they’d taken every photo of themselves or the rest of the family. Couldn’t have anybody touring this house and saying, “What a nice photo of that couple, who are, incidentally, dead ringers for that couple I saw in XXXXXX.”
Paladin had mentioned to me, several time
s, that it was lucky, for him, that he’d run into the accident at the sheep farm, busting his nose right before coming into his powers, because that one thing… that one slight disfiguration, was enough that people never really connected the two faces. Well, in his case, it was that one thing, and the fact that nobody could believe Paladin had ever been human, or, better put, couldn’t believe that there was a time when he hadn’t been superhuman. In my own case, people wanted to believe in scandals, in things that would strip me down to size… to make me level with the masses. Or below. Anyway… the photos were gone.
Besides all the photos, my parents’ clothes were gone, which was fine by me, because there are probably men who would want examples of their dad’s undershorts or their mother’s lingerie as a memento, but I don’t number myself among that ilk.
“Here’s a good painting,” Adele the Ninja said. The painting was one of a horse munching on meadow grass. A mountain in the background. A setting sun. Bright colors. I looked for anything menacing (Mom had told me that the painters of such subjects, the professional ones, would often get bored and therefore subversive) but there were no clouds formed into suspect shapes, or open barn doors from where glowing red eyes were peering from the darkness, or any groups of flowers that had been slyly arranged to form any vulgar words or body parts. I couldn’t remember the painting from when I’d lived there, though. The thought of Mom finding it at a garage sale, spotting it all by herself, buying it while I was laid up in the hospital or punching a lion and thereby stealing a year of its life, that was heart-rending for me.
I said, “No. Another one. I can’t remember that one.” My eyes were already on a simple painting of a peasant woman holding up a bouquet of flowers so that a horse (only its head and front shoulders were depicted) could nibble away at the petals and stems. It was a painting that my mother had loved. She’d wondered about the story. Had the woman picked the flowers for the horse, or had someone given the flowers to her, and she’d afterwards decided to feed them to the horse? If that latter… why?