Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  The video began.

  In it, a man dressed as me (as Reaver, I mean) was in combat with a woman dressed as Stellar. I was glad it wasn’t one of the films with Taffy. Those always made me feel like I (who had nothing to do with their making, of course) had done something very wrong. This film was Stellar, though, and it was a reasonable likeness. She’d been cast well. Laser beams were coming from her eyes, but I (the actor, I mean) was standing tall against them, laughing them off. In reality, the beams that come from her eyes aren’t very much like lasers (more like a concentrated stream of agitated protons) and they hurt like hell. Also, I am not as tall as the actor who was portraying me, while Stellar is taller than the actress who was playing her part.

  The two actors were fighting in a motel bedroom setting. That part was close to reality. Stellar and I have certainly done that. We’d fought three times after the Kid Crater incident (which I never really blamed her for, because I was too busy blaming myself) and two of the fights had gone to carnal encounters, and the third had led to me being deposited from space again. I was hoping the porno actors would reenact that at some point, though with special effects, because that shit hurts.

  “Take some clothes off!” the Reaver-actor said. He slapped Stellar on her ass, and her cape flew away from her as if by magic.

  “Take some clothes off!” the Reaver-actor repeated, giving “Stellar” a kick (a good and powerful one, too) in her butt. More of her clothing magically disappeared.

  I told Laura, “First of all… my kicks and my slaps don’t do the thing with the years. They don’t. Second, why are you showing me this?”

  “Because they’re funny! I love them! Adele watches them, too. I mean, she watched some of them because of her superhuman studies, but I think she, you know, watches them, too. There are like, hundreds of them on the internet. Thousands, maybe. Some of them are live action, like this one, but most of them are animated. Did you know about this?”

  “Did I know that people create literally thousands of porn videos centered around me? No. I was completely unaware.”

  Apple, backing the car into a parking spot, parallel parking at a level that was (in my honest opinion) nearly superhuman, said, “I think he means yes. In fact, I think he means duh.”

  Laura said, “No sass from my girlfriend, please.”

  Apple said, “I’m your girlfriend?” On the laptop computer, in the video, a woman (a woman?) dressed as Macabre had run into the scene, waving a magic wand and yelling, “Presto! Presto! Stellar lost her dress, oh!” More girls began appearing, popping into the scene as if by magic (or, in this case, by means of not very convincing special effects) and swarming Reaver, trying to… I’m not sure… defeat him somehow? He fought back by means of a method that did not include his pants. I closed the laptop.

  “Can I talk to you about Adele?” I asked Laura.

  “Yes,” she said. Hopeful. But wary. “Remember my warning, though. If you hurt her, I’ll hurt you. I’ll… I don’t know… find some way to contact Octagon and hire him to do it.”

  “The first night I was here, Adele said she was an alcoholic. Or had been. Is she okay now? What happened?”

  “Shit. I hate being serious. Look… she took your break-up hard.”

  “We never officially broke up.”

  “I hope you didn’t mean that in your defense, because it means you’re even more of a dick.”

  “You guys want to be alone for this?” Apple asked. She’d turned off the car and was reaching for the door handle, ready to step out if we asked her to, but obviously very much not wanting to leave.

  “I accidentally called you my girlfriend,” Laura said. “So now it’s official or something and I’ll have to change all my online statuses.”

  “Does that mean I can stay?” Apple asked. The two of them looked to me. I shrugged.

  “Adele drank because of me?” I asked.

  “A little. Somewhat. Mostly,” Laura answered. She was stowing her laptop in a duffel bag, avoiding my eyes. Usually she likes to look me right in the eyes. Confrontational. I was happy she wasn’t doing it. I was sad, too.

  “She went to the hospital, a lot, when you were in the coma. Then… when you were transferred, she asked around, a lot, about where you’d gone. But you were secret, then, for a year at least.”

  “The training.”

  “Sure. Adele started dating a boy, then punched him when he tried to kiss her. I said she should date girls so they wouldn’t remind her of you. But, nothing worked for her.”

  “Shit,” I said. I’d screwed up Adele’s life, apparently. Could I have saved her with a phone call? An email? I’d always been too afraid. I can remember thinking the only reasons for my fears were that my enemies would use her against me. Or that they would simply kill her. I can remember not at all thinking that I was a coward.

  Laura said, “She started drinking in college. Not like she was partying. Just drinking. Alone, mostly. There were a couple one-night stands. One-week stands. That sort of thing. You probably don’t want to hear about them.”

  “I don’t.”

  “She bought a Reaver costume at a Halloween store. Kept it in her room. She said… and you can’t ever tell her I told you this… that she wanted boys to try it on, see if sex would work for her that way.”

  “Didn’t Steve just say he didn’t want to hear things like this?” Apple asked. Laura leaned over and gave her the sort of kiss that means, “be a good girl and keep quiet.”

  Laura told me, “It never worked for her. I mean, she never tried it. She was actually trying to forget you, but… hey… were you trying to forget her? Seriously. Tell me the fucking truth.”

  “Yeah, I was. But… not because I wanted to forget her. I just… at first I wanted to come back like a hero, like a superhero, and I was biding my time… caught up in some asshole power fantasy, and then afterwards, after some things happened, I just didn’t want her to get mixed up in all this.” I made a vague gesture with my fist, waving it a bit. Laura understood what I meant.

  “Fuck,” she said. “That really sounded like the truth.” She went silent for a bit and then added, “Thank you.”

  “If you guys don’t want me to stay…?” Apple said. She was reaching for the door again, but, again… doing it slowly. Laura leaned in and gave her another kiss, making it stand as her answer. Apple smiled, nodded, moved her hand away from the door. A middle-aged man, strolling by, walking with a hot dog in one hand, carrying it like a baton he would pass off to the next hungry man, caught a glimpse of the two girls kissing. From his viewpoint, from him looking into a car and seeing two beautiful women kissing, and a man in the backseat, he probably thought things were going better for me than they actually were.

  Laura said, “So, Steve, if you were trying to forget Adele, you probably had the easier time of it. You didn’t have to put up with her on the news, day after day, saving people from burning buildings, or kicking a bank robber’s ass, or dating some incredibly beautiful woman, or fighting magicians, or battling mysterious men in black… you didn’t have to have her pushed into your face a hundred times a day.” Laura’s eyes gleamed at that last bit, and her serious mood wavered, but she stabilized and remained serious. I felt guilty about it.

  Laura said, “So… failed relationships. No life direction. My sister was drinking. She drank a lot. Way too much. I was really worried. I wrote you a whole bunch of times, but you never answered.”

  “I never knew you wrote.” The words came out hard. I wasn’t feeling well. Apple met my eyes and I wanted to change places with her. I wanted to be the one that could have stepped out of the car. I hadn’t known that Laura had written me. I never look at letters, emails, videos, any of that stuff.

  Laura said, “I know that, now. I knew it then, too. But I was desperate to save my sister and I finally realized that she was never going to kick her Steve Clarke addiction, so I told her… why not get her fix anyway she could? So she started writing articles about y
ou, and then the others, you know, the others, and pretty soon she was a world-leading superhuman researcher. And she’s happy, now. So don’t you fuck it up.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “None of us knows shit, Steve Clarke. None of us knows shit. If there’s one thing I do know, though, it’s this: Adele isn’t fooling. She does love you. And it’s not some sick Reaver fantasy thing. She knew you long before that, and I was the one who endured her nights of really sappy talk about the two of you. So don’t think she’s playing around. She loves you.”

  “I can’t think of anything more wonderful,” I said. And I meant it.

  What I didn’t add, what I didn’t say, was that I only had three more days to live. Two days in Greenway. One day of travel in order to keep my promise to Octagon… to meet him and Eleventh Hour wherever he wanted us to meet. So, yes, it was the most wonderful thing in the world to hear that Adele Layton loved me.

  And it was also very much the worst.

  ***

  The interview in the coffee shop went quickly and efficiently and wasn’t all that much of a pain. This is largely because I forbade Frank O’Neill (Channel Five’s long-time “On the Spot” reporter) to ask any questions having to do with me being Reaver, or any of my exploits in battlefields, or beds, or combinations of the two. This frustrated him, and I admit that I enjoyed his frustration. I’d spent some time in the early days (the early days of me being Reaver, before I began to refuse all interviews) being battered by reporters’ questions of morality in terms of who I was fighting, and why I was fighting, and how I felt when I was fighting (especially in the moment that I had just punched someone) and why I always (in truth, after a time, very rarely) felt so much superior to everyone else. Paladin had looked upon such interviews as not only a necessary part of being superhuman (he claimed that the more familiar people were with us, the more accepting they would be) and, besides that, he enjoyed talking with people. With anyone. I enjoy talking to people. But not with anyone.

  This current interview kept mostly within the bounds I’d established. Laura and Apple sat at one booth over, after promising to control themselves and not disrupt the proceedings. They kept their word by staying behind the camera, but watching (with the sound off) another of Laura’s beloved superhuman porno parodies, occasionally holding up her laptop so that I could see what they were watching at any given time. This meant that, on the nightly news, with the camera trained on me, it might seem as if I was looking off into the distance, pondering some question that Frank O’Neill had posed, thinking (with my inscrutable and arguably inhuman mind) on thoughts beyond the ken of the common man, but in reality I was trying not frown at a cartoon video of myself and Leviathan (seriously? Leviathan? The size difference alone would… hell… never mind) engaged in carnal activities, or trying not to look interested when Laura and Adele held up the computer together, in tandem, giving me a thumbs-up as the video depicted a mass scene of myself (an actor, of course) in bed (on a bed that was, for some reason, on a rooftop) having sex with five women that were dressed as Siren, as Mistress Mary, as Dark Mercy, as Stellar, and a female version of Warp. Perhaps my most uncomfortable moment was when, as I was presumed to be thinking of how I felt about Greenway’s sudden growth, Laura was signaling for my attention, holding her hands approximately ten inches apart, flicking her eyes towards the laptop computer and the (extremely well and perhaps overly endowed) Reaver actor, and mouthing the word, “Really?”

  Despite these interruptions, the interview went well.

  What were some of my favorite memories of Greenway? Searching for fossils with my friends. Standing together, one night, with Greg Barrows atop the Mighty Convenient convenience store, throwing rocks down into the parking lot until Tom (who was working that night) came out to investigate, and then Greg and I had tried to pee down onto my brother, which I admitted was gross, and juvenile, and all that, but I noted in my defense that Tom had, the night before, given my parents a complete list (gleaned from my computer’s history) of what I’d been masturbating to recently. There was a voice in my head telling me not to say such things (and that voice was Paladin’s, as it normally was) but I figured what the hell… I wouldn’t be alive much longer anyway. Might as well have some fun and tell the truth for a change.

  Would I ever think of living in Greenway, again? Of course I would think about it. There’s something about being home that makes a man think in terms of progress. You go away, and you move at your own pace. You develop. You whittle yourself away until you think you’ve created the person you want to be. And then, out there on your own, you grow comfortable. There’s something about coming home that makes a person take a good hard look at that comfort. Sometimes that jumpstarts another growing process. Sometimes it ditches everything.

  Did I have any pets? Kid Crater used to have an eagle that followed him around. Just for a couple weeks. Damndest thing. Sure there are pictures of it, somewhere. He named the eagle Tiny Dynamite. Hell of a name for an eagle. Myself, though… no. No pets.

  Had I visited my house again? Of course. Hadn’t gone in, though. Wouldn’t mind it. I’m sure there are a lot of memories, inside. (There had been no reports of a break-in, and I wasn’t about to spill any beans during a coffee shop interview.)

  What did I think of Greenway’s changes? Too soon to tell. I was just getting used to them. Lot of houses, though. There sure were a lot of houses.

  Favorite sport? Soccer. Or… women’s beach volleyball. Soccer for the beauty of the game. Women’s beach volleyball for the beauty of the players.

  Okay then, speaking of beautiful women… was I single?

  As he asked this, Frank O’Neill leaned closer, his eyes narrowed. I could feel the camera zeroing in on my face.

  It’s funny, with all the things that I do and that I’ve done, with having battled individuals who have leveled city blocks, with me having once single-handedly overthrown the dictator of a small nation, with me being a man who’s climbed into the core of a nuclear reactor in order to perform a mechanical operation and avert a complete meltdown, with my longtime battle against the Mexican drug war, with how I’ve used a barrage of punches to slide an array of superhumans incrementally closer to death, with me being the man who walked into a combined flamethrower and automatic weapon barrage, on live television, to rescue Senator Blykes when he was being held by the Sol Gone Anti-Advent Society, with me having been friends and partners with a man who was the clear and current front-runner for the Jesus of the Modern Age … with all of this and a hundred (maybe a thousand) other such peculiarities and incidents… reporters always seem to think the hardest-hitting question they can level at me is, “Getting any lately?”

  I don’t think my answer would’ve been any different if Laura Layton hadn’t been sitting one table over. If her head hadn’t snapped up and her eyes hadn’t trained on me. If she hadn’t closed her laptop (so quickly that she nearly caught Apple’s fingers) in order to focus all of her attention on me. I don’t think, I honestly don’t, that my answer would have been any different if Adele’s sister hadn’t been there to catch my eyes with hers and silently demand that I tell the truth. I don’t think my answer would have been anything different than the one that went out over the airwaves to a waiting world, not two hours later.

  “I’m in love, Frank,” I said. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The winds, as we began our drive home, were strong. We were going first to the Super Eight Grocery Emporium, where Apple worked, a store with eight… eight… EIGHT ways to save, a message that was drilled into my head when I was a kid by means of a constant barrage of commercial ditties played during every prime time television show.

  Apple parked in one of the first available parking spots, thankfully not one of those people who will spend fifteen minutes driving around in order to save themselves fifteen seconds of walking time. Laura mentioned that sometimes carrying groceries to the car can be annoying,
because they get so heavy, but since Reaver was with them, they wouldn’t have to worry about that.

  “How much can you lift, anyway?” she asked.

  “In terms of groceries?”

  “Yes. Of course. Olympic athletes are always lifting crates of watermelons and bags of rice. No, idiot… pounds. How many pounds can you lift?”

  “I’ve never really measured it precisely.” This was a lie. SRD had made me measure everything precisely. One day, on my best day, I’d managed to lift the equivalent of a bit over thirty-two thousand pounds. That’s a lot of watermelon.

  Apple reached over and felt my bicep, pretended to be thinking, and said, “According to my gypsy upbringing and incredible mental acumen, I’d estimate Steve can lift… oh… thirty-three thousand pounds.”

  “Close,” I said. I tried to remember if the data had ever been published. Of course it had. There’s little about me that hasn’t been published.

  “Are you really a gypsy?” Laura asked. “And… why’s it so cold? Let me check if I have a sweater.” She rooted around in a couple bags in the back seat of her car, paper bags full of clothes, shoes, toiletries, etc. I wondered why she had them in her car. After some thought, I came to the obvious answer.

  “Sweater!” she said, pulling a blue cardigan from the bag. It had the design of an iconic sun embroidered on one side of the chest. It reminded me a little bit of Paladin’s design. My mind leaps there a little too often.

  “You need something, too?” Laura asked Apple, who shivered a bit, frowned, glancing to the sky and then around the parking lot before saying, “It is cold, isn’t it?” The two of them fished through the bags, came up with another sweater, one that was a bit too big for Apple… though it only made her look adorable, in the manner of a petite woman in larger clothes.