Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  “He lives! Walks! Breathes!” Laser Beast exclaimed like a carnival barker, watching me rise unsteadily to my feet. It wouldn’t, of course, take me very long to regain my full health, my full power. The ghost of Tom Clarke was burning within me. I would soon be green to go.

  “We shouldn’t let him live too long,” Firehook said. “We should kill him now. Before he recovers. You know he recovers! You know that!” The last bits were yelled to Octagon, who was sat on a boulder. In my mind, Octagon was sitting in a feminine fashion, but I wasn’t sure if my eyes were registering that because it was true, or because my perceptions were now colored by the knowledge of the girl beneath the suit.

  I started laughing.

  It made them nervous.

  I liked having them nervous, but that’s not why I was laughing. Something had occurred to me. I searched around for Siren, trying to find where she was standing, using (there’s no way this statement can’t be vulgar, so I’m not even going to try) my cock like a divining rod, leading me to the source of its interest.

  Siren was leaning against a huge and raggedy boulder, a mass conglomerate of rocks that had been cemented together by eons of pressure, a unified boulder that had fallen from the quarry’s wall. She was standing in its shade. Direct sunlight can dry out skin, make it leathery. That’s something, of course, that Siren avoids.

  She asked, “Why are you laughing?” I heard Firehook grunt. I heard Laser Beast groan. The possibility of Siren’s voice is an aphrodisiac. A few actual words goes beyond that. It made its mark on me, too. I kept laughing, though.

  I said, “You remember that time that I asked you who was the better man in bed? Me or Octagon?”

  Siren’s eyes flickered nervously to Laser Beast and Firehook. So… they didn’t know. Siren then smiled (jelly… I was jelly) and answered, “You were asking the wrong question.”

  It… was… important… to quit talking to Siren. It was important to focus on other things. On staying alive. It was important to fight Laser Beast. To kill Firehook. I could do it. I was Reaver. I could beat them in impressive ways. I could show Siren what I was capable of… display myself to her so that she would…

  It… was… important to… quit… talking to Siren.

  I turned to Octagon and asked, “I thought I had two weeks? Didn’t you give me two weeks? Don’t I still have a day?”

  Octagon stood. Walked a few steps closer. The voice that came to me was masculine in nature. It was the same voice that Octagon had always used. But now I knew better. I had a feeling I knew what Octagon was going to say. Something about curiosity killing the cat.

  “That was before you started playing detective,” Octagon said. “That was back when Macabre was still alive. When Tempest ruled the skies. That was back then. There has to be some payment for what you’ve done. A debit, at least, of a few hours.”

  There was no longer a green glow from my neck. I wasn’t hunched over with the pain and the fog of whatever had been injected into me. I had to think. I had to outthink them. I had to do something unexpected. I had to surprise them. Mistress Mary had said there was some sort of schism within Eleventh Hour. It was quite possibly true that I couldn’t beat them. Not all of them, together. But maybe I wouldn’t have to. Maybe they could do it themselves. Maybe I could make them forget that I was the one who had killed Macabre. That I was the one who had killed Tempest. That I was the one who had cut off so many of their plans at the root. That I was their foil. That I was an asshole. If I could make them fight each other, focus elsewhere, forget that I was the one who…

  No.

  Come to think of it…

  I wasn’t the one who had killed Tempest.

  Octagon had done that.

  Octagon had brought the storm goddess down from the skies.

  Why?

  From some notion that my two weeks weren’t up? From some sense of honor that her word needed to be kept? Or was she just angry that Tempest was attacking her, too? But Tempest couldn’t have known that Apple was Octagon. Or… could she have? I’d presumed myself to be the target. What if it had been Octagon?

  What if… ?

  What if… ?

  What if I discarded these lines of thought?

  What if I was smart enough to understand who I was? What if I was smart enough to want to live to kiss Adele Layton a few more times? What if I didn’t want to die? Spending any more time thinking would have been falling into Octagon’s game. She was the best at that. I was the best at other things.

  I was the best at being Reaver.

  Sometimes… that meant punching someone.

  Sometimes… that meant being an asshole.

  I was okay with that.

  They… are… never… ready.

  I move at three times the speed of a common man and they are never ready.

  The shit thing about Eleventh Hour is that they are all, each of them, the greatest threat. I had to abandon all hope of playing it smart, of taking out the weakest first, or the strongest first, and I had to plan on taking an enormous amount of damage and I had to plan on not having a plan.

  I went for Firehook first, because he was the closest, and because I have never forgotten the time he’d ripped out my lung (it had been during his brief team-up with Nemesis, before he’d murdered her for sleeping with Warp) and most of all, of course, like anybody else with an ounce of moral fiber, I’ve never forgotten his first appearance where he’d melted the children in the school bus.

  It doesn’t matter where I hit somebody. A punch to their jaw takes away a year of their life. A punch to their shoulder has the same effect. And a punch to the jaw of man composed of a fire hot enough to burn even me, that would be stupid.

  A punch to his nuts seemed like it might be satisfying, though.

  Turned out, it was.

  Laser Beast had just enough time to say, “He’s…” and then I was on the two of them. I punched as hard as I could into Firehook’s groin, at the same time ducking the swing from Laser Beast’s clawed hand. The clawed hand wasn’t even on the way, yet… but I knew it would be. I’ve studied how each of them fights. These were the predictable ones. I never knew how to handle Tempest or Macabre, because their powers (and minds) were too unpredictable. Firehook likes to snatch portions of an enemy’s body with his hook, though. That’s what he likes to do. And Laser Beast, despite his lasers, likes to lead with those claws. It didn’t used to be that way. These days, though, he’s more beast than laser. It helps.

  Laser Beast’s clawed hand swiped over my head. By then, Firehook was already falling, his groin a mangled mess. I hadn’t held back. I wasn’t relying on stealing a few years. I was interested in taking them all.

  The loose rocks where I’d been standing, the ones that had kicked into the air from beneath my feet with the speed of my assault, hadn’t yet fallen to the ground before I was picking up Laser Beast and hurling him towards Octagon. He, I mean she, I mean Octagon, had to duck her incoming teammate, and also divert a blast from her laser pistol that had been intended to cut me in two, but in reality barely missed slicing the beast in half. That would have been a nice bonus. A crackerjack prize.

  A roar of flame came up from below.

  Firehook, insane with pain, with rage, and with his usual insanity, was cutting loose. The billow was like a small atomic cloud, and with my perception, with the way things move three times slower to my eyes, I could see the creeping flame inching outwards from Firehook’s prone body, eating the rocks around him, turning million-year-old fossils into ash, completely dead at last, with the fire burning the rocks, charring the air, turning everything to glass or ash or into nothing at all, and with the flames clawing at my legs.

  I leapt.

  I’m good at it.

  With no time to make an intelligent decision, I had to make the quickest one. I chose to jump away from Octagon, away from the flames. These were good decisions. I chose to jump behind the nearest huge boulder. This was also wise. I chose to jump closer t
o Siren, who stood next to that boulder.

  Looking at her, you’d think this was really smart, but of course it’s not.

  The flames billowed up around me as I leapt. They were grabbing for me, eager to thwart my escape. If Firehook had kept his senses about him (not an easy task, when a superhuman has belted you in the groin hard enough to shatter your pelvis and make nasty pudding of your hopes for future generations) he could have shot me out of the air. I try not to leap very often during a fight, because once I give myself up to gravity I take away the element of my speed. Firehook couldn’t concentrate, though, and his flames were actually giving me an element of cover (two or three hissing bitches of laser beams nearly clipped me) and I landed safely (ha ha ha) next to Siren, immediately grabbing her and pulling her behind the boulder (Firehook’s flames were encroaching on the territory) and then nearly succumbing to the throb and the thrum of feeling her naked flesh. I had her by the shoulder. She was wearing a light spring dress that probably couldn’t believe its luck.

  “Here?” she said, putting a question (and so very much more) into her voice. “You want to have sex here? Now?” I hadn’t wanted to. Before. Hadn’t been thinking of it (a lie) and had only wanted to save her life. Now, though, I had saved her life, right? Shouldn’t there be a reward?

  I was reaching beneath her dress when a laser beam pierced the entire boulder and nearly my head as well. It startled me into sanity (not all the way into it, but within yelling range, I’d say) and I remembered that I was in a fight.

  So I moved my hand from where it had been touching Siren (my hand argued about this in an almost perceptible voice, and I’d swear the intimate area where I’d been touching Siren complained about the loss of my fingers in an entirely audible voice) and I braced for some super heroics, and I picked up the boulder.

  It wasn’t that difficult. Couldn’t have weighed more than twenty thousand pounds. Well within my range.

  It wasn’t a wieldy weight, though, and so I wobbled a bit as I moved forward, and I took a laser to my shoulder and worried about the next few shots, because I wasn’t exactly moving at full speed. Luckily, behind every good man (and even behind me) there is a good woman, or in this case a beautiful one, which is largely regarded as the same thing.

  Siren called out, “Darling. The lasers are nearly hitting me.” That was the end of the lasers. No more incoming shots. That gave me time to waddle forward (Siren was moving along with me, whispering into my ear, telling me how big and strong I was, and how her little body was trembling) with the flames soaring up and around and over the boulder, turning it red hot, igniting my uncovered legs, and at one point a fire hook lashed around my foot (Siren jumped over it with a little “Whoop!” of surprise that sounded so sexually adorable that I nearly came in my pants and dropped the boulder in pleasure) and a huge chunk of my foot was snatched away, forcing me to slow myself even further, but I made progress, and I made progress, and I made progress, until I finally nearly stumbled on Firehook’s leg, giving me a clear idea where he was.

  Which is exactly where I dropped the big rock.

  By then, by that time, due to the deprivations of the flames and all the incoming blasts, the boulder had probably lost five thousand pounds. Not a bad weight loss program.

  In this case, though, that still left fifteen thousand pounds of weight, which was more than enough to squash a man who well deserved to be treated like a bug. I had no regrets about snuffing out his flame… none past how the method of his execution meant that I hadn’t had a chance to see his expression when the rock was coming down.

  When the rock hit, the shudder of the impact knocked Siren off balance. The surrounding flames left us with a WHUFFF of an explosion and Siren’s dress fluttered as she began to tumble with an unconcerned look… the expression of a woman who knew that men were put on Earth to catch her when she falls.

  I did.

  I lost a couple seconds doing it.

  I lost even more seconds having done it.

  She nuzzled against me with a smile of gratitude and asked if there was anything she could do in return. Her face was alluringly lit by the green glow that was coming from my legs, from where they’d been exposed to the flames. I was lowering my lips to hers (and picturing images that would have sent a Satanic porn star to confessional) when Laser Beast leapt onto me from behind.

  He bit at my neck. Maybe he’d been driven mad by how I’d just killed his friend (I assumed Firehook and he were friends, since they were teammates and since people like them have no one else in their lives, no one to be close to, no one to pass them beers and to tell vulgar jokes) or maybe he’d transformed, finally, to nothing about lasers and all about the beast. It’s even quite possible that the animal in him had seen my lips about to touch Siren’s own lips (a moment he had STOLEN from me) and was defending his territory. Siren, of course, is no one’s territory… but we all have our dreams.

  “Free-grack KILL you!” Laser Beast said. I couldn’t entirely understand him. There were more words, or more attempts at words, or something. His teeth were grating on my neck (not strong enough to penetrate) and I was idly wondering if I would turn into a werewolf if he did manage to sink his teeth into me (of course I knew that such stories were myths, but I’d often had lunch with personages of a far more mythological bent) and about half of me was trying to kill him because I needed to pay more attention to Octagon (where the hell was she and what was she doing?) and the rest of me was paying attention to Siren… because I knew (oh hell yes) exactly where she was and what the two of us should be doing.

  So I wasn’t paying much attention to Laser Beast and I did not feel it when his lasers began to warm up. I’d stupidly (listen… everyone is stupid in a fight) assumed that he’d gone so bestial that I didn’t have to worry about the lasers, so it took me by ludicrous surprise when the lasers began emitting from his arms (wrapped around my chest from behind) and his stomach (pressed against my back) and even his teeth, which hadn’t been able to bite their way into my neck, so they just blew open a hole and kicked in the doors.

  Lasers pierced me from every angle.

  The world went swim-y.

  I dropped to one knee.

  Then two knees.

  The rocks all around me were being showered by a mad mess of laser beams, ones shooting across the quarry, shooting into the sky, shooting wildly, shooting most definitely into and through me. Siren had taken a few steps back and was simply watching, glowing with some sort of force field, protected from the barrage by means of either her own personal powers, or perhaps some technological marvel that had been constructed and given to her by the girl from the grocery store. To be honest, I’ve never really understood Siren’s powers… the ones besides her appearance and her raw (cosmic, galactic, thrusting) sexuality, because I (and everyone else) have just never been able to pay much attention, otherwise.

  She seemed pleased to have a good view of my death, though.

  And I was certainly dying. The wounds were trying to heal, but… there… were… so many holes being shot through my body. Blood was spurting from my neck and unidentifiable somethings were sliding out from my stomach (the laser that hit my midsection was a good god-damned two inches in diameter) and my spine had been severed, meaning I was flopping to one side.

  Siren was clapping.

  It was, even then, sensuous.

  My hand was clenching. Opening. Clenching. Opening. It was my left hand. The one that had let Paladin fall into the lava. It had done the right thing, then. I was sure that it had. My dying thoughts were that it had done the right thing. My dying thoughts were that I shouldn’t have kissed Adele. It wasn’t fair. My dying thoughts were that I should have kissed Adele so much more often. My dying thoughts were that it was strange how I could no longer control my hand… that some quirk of my brain was making it open, clench, open, clench. My dying thoughts were that there was suddenly something in the way of my fingers, something that had slid into my grasp, blocking my clench
. It made me angry. All I wanted to do was open and clench. Open and clench. Open and clench. Something was taking even that away, and it was all that I had.

  I spared enough notice to see that Laser Beast’s leg, wrapped around my waist as he clung to me from behind, with the two of us flailing all over the quarry floor in Greenway, Oregon, had fallen into my grasp when my hand had, at one point, opened.

  I clenched.

  My grasp was just below his calf muscle on his left leg. My grasp was on the muscle and blood and bone beneath a fine pair of sharkskin pants. My grasp can squeeze steel like putty. Sharkskin pants are nice, but they don’t protect a leg for shit when it’s caught in a superhuman vise.

  Laser Beast’s scream was partly a howl, and it was right in my ear, and as he fell away from me I meant to turn and continue my attack, but I wasn’t ready yet. Not quite. The green spectre of Tom Clarke was still doing its job, healing me. Laser Beast’s leg would never heal… not unless I lost the fight… not unless Octagon could give Laser Beast that fucking potion that’s distilled from the protective instinct of my dead brother. I wasn’t about to let that happen. I crawled. I crawled to Laser Beast (I’m already healing, you son of a bitch… and how are YOU doing?) and I brought a fist down on his injured leg (bam… a year… and how’s THAT feel?) and I inched forward and slammed a fist down on his chest (that’s two years of Laser Beast the universe would be spared) and then I was at his face (I’d managed to clamber up onto my knees, and my spine was reforming, providing me support, and clamoring for some justice and a lot of revenge) and I had one moment where the voice of morality, the one that sometimes whispers in my ear, the one that always sounds like Paladin, was telling me that Laser Beast wasn’t one of the invulnerable ones… that if I punched him, he’d die.