by Paul Tobin
The painting now had a plaque that read, “Unknown Artist: Circa 1950’s.” I thought about taking the plaque as well, but decided against it. It belonged to nobody but those who had decided to turn my house into a tourist attraction. I wasn’t exactly angry about that, and from a legal standpoint I had every right to be in the house, and every right to take what I wanted, but… there was still a part of me that was very glad that I wasn’t asking for what was mine; I was taking it.
The painting had a simple wire hanger, but one that was wound around a screw that was bolted to the wall. It would have taken a normal man a good tug to tear it loose. For me, it wasn’t much of a fight.
“This is nice,” Adele said. She was inspecting a rock in her hands, moving it around in her fingers. It was a fossil of some sort. I’ve always loved fossils. The tabloids would probably say that’s because I have a desperate desire for the past. The tabloids never let anyone love anything out of love. It’s always desperation.
The fossil was a complete ammonite. Looked to be from the Cretaceous period. It was about the size of my hand, with the shell appearing like a tightly curved ram’s horn. It was very familiar to me, and when Adele, noting my interest, handed it to me, the memory came flooding back.
It was the fossil I had found on my last (real) day in Greenway. The one I’d pocketed out at the quarry with Tom and Greg. I’d put it in my bedroom before sneaking off to the Selood Brothers Sheep Farm to see if we could find out any secret information concerning Warp living in Greenway. Instead, we’d found sheep shit and that ubiquitous date with destiny that the poets like to talk about. I hate poets, and I hate most dates with destiny. One thing about destiny is that it only ever goes on blind dates.
“We have to take that,” I told Adele. I told her what it was, and when I had found it. She nodded, eyes wide, as if it was suddenly an artifact rather than a fossil. The house abruptly became smaller to me, more oppressive, and I realized how many mental land mines were inside, waiting for me to stomp my big fat foot right on them.
“Does your sister usually take long to… do… things?” I asked Adele, losing momentum in the description.
“You mean… do I think her and Apple are done in your bedroom? Probably not. But I can roust them if you need me to. Are you okay?”
“There are a lot of memories here. They’re suddenly grabbing at me.” Adele was the only person in the world to whom I would have told that truth. No wonder I stayed away from her for nine years. Telling the truth is a difficult thing.
“Let’s get you out of here, then,” she said, understanding what I was talking about. That helped. Being who I am, being Reaver, it’s easy to think that I’m the only one with certain types of problems, as if it takes being doused in radioactive stem cells in order to want to forget the mistakes you’ve made in life, and the things you’ve lost.
We moved down the hall (not looking at Tom’s room… not looking at Tom’s room… not looking at Tom’s room) on our way to my oldest sanctuary. We didn’t reach its safety before Adele put a hand on my shoulder (it seemed stronger than Paladin’s hand had almost ever felt) and, then, without looking at me, she said, “Your list. The will. It’s like, you’re closing your life down. You better not be coming back to me just so that you can leave again, Steve Clarke. You better not be doing that.”
I stood silent.
It played out for a time.
I realized I needed to say something.
I said, “I don’t have any idea what I’m doing.” It seemed an insufficient answer, but Adele accepted it. In a few moments (that stretched out longer than Taffy’s arms) she looked up, did that smile of hers, and then stepped to my bedroom door and raised her hand as if to knock, but her smile transformed her into the exact visage of mischief, were it ever given a face.
“Should we knock first, or barge right in and scare them?” she asked.
“Shit,” I said. “I never thought I’d have to knock on my own bedroom door, but this time I think it’s best if…” That was as far as I got before Adele, without knocking, threw open the door.
Then she blushed.
And closed it.
Quickly.
And we just waited outside.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I suppose I should talk about the death of Kid Crater. It started with me in a bar, getting drunk, which is not something I do three times faster than a normal human. It actually takes me several times longer, because my healing abilities fight against the inebriates. Paladin was the first to notice that whenever I’m really drinking, whenever I’m really drinking, there is a soft green glow being emitted from my mouth.
I was at a bar in Idaho, on the outskirts of a small town named after some pioneer of some renown at some time in the past. It would have been nice to live in those frontier days, when you could put up a house and declare the surroundings to be a town and it would be named after you, rather than in today’s world where the town would be named after your corporate sponsor, so that Less Fillingsville would be twenty-five miles from Tastes Great City.
At 7:30 in the evening (I’m going to skip on how long I’d been drinking by that time) the waitress (an attractive brunette who I still hadn’t put off) carried something to me, a lump of metal, lugging it with both hands and an expression of confusion blended with a touch of anxiety. She placed it on my table (with a thud that startled those at the nearby tables… all the couples having their early dining dates and who would be gone when the serious drinkers arrived to begin their day) and then just looked to me as if I should have a comment in place for whenever a waitress (in this case one wearing a shirt that read, “Not Available, but thanks for checking!”) places a lump of twisted metal (about the size of a full-grown cat) onto my table, knocking over an empty glass (I was drinking whiskey from a glass in order to appear civilized) that falls within mere inches of the floor before I grabbed it with a speed that is three times faster than normal, making her raise an eyebrow either in regards to my speed or the fact that I’d still been able to make the grab even after running up a good sized tab.
“Well?” she said.
“Well… what?” I asked. “Why are giving me a clump of metal? Is this some local initiation rite I should know about?”
“A woman said to give it to you. She’s outside. Said you’d know what to do with it.” That was confusing to me. What woman gives out clumps of metal? I inspected the twisted mass closer. It looked to be engine parts, swirled and smashed and mushed together, as if by someone of great strength.
And there was a piece of paper caught in the middle of it, with one edge sticking out, so that the only way to read the note was to twist all the metal aside and…
I picked up the mass of metal and began twisting it, ripping off some bits of metal, peeling others back. Watching me do this, the waitress’s entire body shuddered, like she was resetting the whole works, and she had to lean on the table for support. She’d known that I was Reaver (my face is memorable, and the media keeps it on news reports, television specials, the front page of newspapers, and on every conceivable website) but here was the evidence right in front of her.
She said, “Shit. You… Reaver… you’re…”
I said, “I know. I’m strong.” Bending the metal took little effort. The difficulty was in twisting the metal in ways that wouldn’t tear the paper.
The waitress said, “My name. Do you want my name?” I already knew her name. It was Erica. I also knew what she really meant. That’s how some women (and some men) react when they see me do something at a superhuman level. It makes some people (not even exactly a minority) go weak in the knees, and in their morals.
Ignoring the waitress, I took the paper from the peeled-open onion shell of the engine parts. The note was handwritten with penmanship that was feminine, but not flowery. It read, “Outside. We will talk. You and I. This time, I promise I will not drop you from the sky.” It wasn’t signed, but…
Stellar.
I told the w
aitress, “Close the bar. Keep everyone inside. There’s going to be a fight.”
“A… fight?”
“Yes. The woman who gave this to you… what did she look like?”
“Tall. She was wearing a hoodie. I couldn’t see much of her face. Definitely not from around here, though. Weird thing was, she knew my name, but…”
“It was Stellar. Keep everybody inside. I’ll lead her away from here.”
With that said, and with people at the nearby tables standing in fear or excitement, I raced for the door, still carrying Stellar’s note for some reason, as if I felt I’d have to present it to her in order to validate my invite.
Outside, it was just a parking lot, surrounded by trees. There were cars. Mostly trucks. Mostly dusty. There was a highway running past. There were two dogs that were tied up to a water faucet that came out from the wall of the bar. There were two women talking about plans to get the local school system to provide better lunches. There was a boy trying to climb a tree, trying to hug around its base and shimmy upwards. There was a posting area for local events… all the dances and rummage sales and farmer’s markets and certified yoga instructors. There were birds singing. It didn’t seem at all like a super-villain setting.
Until the hoodie came floating down from above.
I looked up. Should have looked up in the first place. Not doing so was as dumb as how people are never ready, no matter how many times they’ve fought me, for how I can move at three times normal speed.
Stellar was maybe a hundred feet in the air. The sun was behind her. Shining. Glowing. I had a moment to wonder if she was really from the stars… if Sol itself was just a relatively close waypoint for her. I had a moment to note that the two women were looking where I was looking, were trying to understand what was happening, to comprehend what they were seeing, to grasp what was about to happen. One of the women (late thirties, a dress long enough out of style that it was due to come back into fashion, a button nose on an otherwise unphotogenic face) reacted even before I did… yelling for the tree-climbing boy (Johnny! Jonathan!) to come back, to come back at once.
And then Stellar swept down and had me underneath my arms, clasped in her arms, was shifting her body slightly, arcing her direction away from the ground, away from Shaner’s House of Food and Spirits, and up into the sky. The note fell away from my fingers. Fluttered off into the wind. We were travelling at a good speed. Faster than Paladin had ever carried me. I wasn’t struggling. I wasn’t fighting back. I could have punched Stellar. I could have done something. I ached to do something. But I waited. I waited because she was taking me over the woods. Taking me to where we could fight without any collateral damage, or at least human collateral damage, meaning that biding my time was a smart thing to do. It was, in fact, about the last smart thing I would do for the next hour.
Because Stellar took me into the woods.
There was a clearing. A creek engaged in a churning escape from its mountainous point of origin. There were large amounts of flowers being excited about the sunny day.
Stellar placed me lightly (relatively… I only bounced twice) on the ground.
She landed nearby.
And started taking off her clothes.
This wasn’t something I expected. There was no preliminary. Nothing with her giving me that smile that women give when they’ve decided to kick at whatever fences are keeping track of their boundaries.
Stellar is a tall woman. She has that Nordic appearance that makes it seem like she must be from Earth, but there’s a vastness to her character (not an expansive vastness, but rather that she’s always seemingly light years away) that tends to make me believe her extra-terrestrial claims are valid.
She unhooked her cape, first. For a second I envisioned her as some sort of matador, using her cape to lure me (in the role of the lumbering bovine) closer, so that I might be repeatedly stabbed. Instead of waving the cape about, however, she simply dropped it atop a group of checkermallow flowers, then ran a few fingers through her short blonde hair, smiled for a tenth of a second (what the hell was she up to?) and began peeling off her skintight body suit. Beneath it, her body was colored much the same… stars on a field of black, as if her body were formed of the universe itself.
And she did have big tits.
Though I’m a small breast man myself.
It took me all the time that she was undressing before I was able to come up with, “What the hell are you doing?’
“I dropped you from space.”
“Is this some sort of erotic apology?”
“Somewhat. We should breed. We are the dominant species.”
“I’m human.”
“Humans cannot survive being dropped from space.” She was moving closer. I wasn’t moving away. I was already making a wrong decision. It’s the defense of a drunken man to say he was drunk, but of course you make that decision to become drunk, so you’re culpable all the same.
I wasn’t really all that drunk, anyway.
We said some more words. I said the right words, but didn’t live up to them… just kept making good words and bad decisions. Suffice to say that I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to run my hand along a torso that seemed almost as if were the universe itself. For the record, it felt almost exactly like a woman, but one that would have burned my fingers if I hadn’t been, as she said, a man who could be dropped from space.
I had her cape tied around her eyes and was making her hold flowers in her teeth, braced on all fours, me working behind her, when Kid Crater landed in the clearing.
I found out later (investigating the incident, talking with Erica, the waitress from Shaner’s House of Food and Spirits) that Kid Crater had come to find me, to meet me where I had said I would be, and he received the news of how Stellar had carried me off, how the nefarious and evil woman named Stellar had swept me into the woods, and he had flown off to my rescue.
And he found me.
He didn’t land softly. Just wasn’t his style. He crashed into the ground, creating a cavity that forever changed the course of the creek. He stood up from the landing, glared at me with an expression of hate, dripping mud and water, and then took to the skies so quickly so that for one moment there was an afterimage of him in place, a three-dimensional shadow shaped in the form of the mud his speed has left behind.
“The boy is angry,” Stellar said. She grunted it out. We were still doing what she’d brought me there to do.
“Shit,” I said.
Kid Crater curved through the sky and then slammed into the ground again, this time with a trajectory that sliced through an assortment of ancient white pines on his descent, shearing them into wooden debris and tens of thousands of sliver-like leaves creating a shussssshhh sound in the air, a whisper beneath the booming of the trees that were being flung about. One of the trees bounced and rolled against Stellar and me… knocking us apart, and then all the pine needles landed around us, coming down like a swarm of locusts.
“What the hell?” I yelled at the kid, but I should have already known what the hell. The mystery was on my side. The mystery was why someone who was supposed to wear a white hat wasn’t currently wearing any pants, and was (only moments before) having sex with someone who wore a black hat (meaning that in a metaphorical sense… as the only black that Stellar was currently wearing was the deep space coloration of her torso) and was known to associate with those who had viciously killed the entire family of Kid Crater, my friend and my sidekick.
So, yeah. What the hell?
Stellar, mad, grabbed the trunk of one of the fallen trees, shearing the branches from along its length with beams of energy from her eyes, creating a barren trunk that she used as a giant club, swatting Kid Crater from the sky just as he was soaring back up to the clouds. If the blow had been struck when he wasn’t in flight, when his invulnerability wasn’t fully charged, it would have killed him outright. As it was, he fell heavily to the ground, cursing, and calling out the names of each of h
is family members, again and again.
Stellar was on him in moments, rearing back for a punch that would have killed him, but I… moving three times faster than a normal man, had her by her arm, still thinking I could settle them down, that I could defuse the situation, still dumb enough to believe that I could calm down a boy who had lost his entire family and had then found his mentor having sex with one of the enemy, and I was likewise still thinking that I could talk common sense into Stellar, whose mind wasn’t well-hinged at the best of times, let alone when she was enraged and horny, both.
I tossed her to the ground.
Turned to Kid Crater.
He flew into me. I don’t mean that as an overly enthusiastic description of what he did. He didn’t just start fighting me; he flew into me. And when he was flying, he was the strongest of any of us.
He had me by my throat, using my head to take us through the trees, all the white pines and the Douglas fir and the white larches… all of them just brittle things to Kid Crater when he was in flight, but not so brittle from my perspective, since he was using my face to batter through them, to reduce them to explosions of flying wooden shards, with me trying to twist free and remembering (a hard task, with trees exploding on my face) that I couldn’t hit him (no, no, no, no, no… don’t hit him) but at the same time wondering if I should hit him, if I should strike him again and again until he was old enough to understand the situation, to calm down.
But of course that’s not how my power works. People don’t mature when I hit them. They just get older.
And, anyway… I was older than Kid Crater, and my maturity wasn’t doing much more than telling me that Kid Crater was the one in the right.