by Paris, Sevan
I look at Pink. Really look at her for the first time since meeting her. Her haunted eyes, the surprising moment of sincerity, both tell me she knows exactly what she is talking about.
The rebar splashes into a puddle next to my feet.
You’re just not going to be satisfied until we’re dead, are you?
I walk to the wall, slap my back against it and slide down into the puddle, breathing heavily. Pink meanders up next to me.
The hatch leading to the cell block opens and, with a couple of metallic splish-splashes, in walks Deathbot. The orange uniform was apparently burned away completely, and his nanites have completed the purple and black costume, along with cape and disco-style collar. Some sparking from an open wound in his shoulder and in his torso tell me he may be in rough shape like me.
He takes in everything and then looks at us. “Would now not be a good time to depart?”
He has a point. I thumb the headset back on. “Casa, you there?”
“WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THERE?!”
“Guess that’s a yes …”
“I’ve been hearing sonic booms, weapons fire—”
“Are the police on the way?”
“Should the police be on the way?”
“Yes. Or the rest of HEROES. Or both.”
“…. We’ve won, haven’t we?”
“Are you going to answer my question?”
“No, nobody’s on the way. And I suspect they’re not going to be on the way until somebody inside the prison makes it to a phone.”
I look at Pink. “What did you do with the rest of the personnel?”
“Didn’t have to do anything. Liberty initiated a code red, sending all of them into the tunnels under the prison. Only HEROES are supposed to be up here. Cell phone signals won’t be worth jack either, so we have some time.”
“You sure all of them are down there?”
“Yes, human, we are sure.”
Subtle.
“What about Matchstick and Multiplicity?” How did you beat them?”
“I am Deathbot. They are not.”
“I’ll fill you in later,” Pink says. “We gotta mosey.”
I move a little bit. God, it really hurts. “I can’t fly anywhere for about fifteen minutes. Casa, we used The Brain on Liberty. It worked pretty well. I’m surprised you didn’t think of it. Being the genius that you are and all.”
“Of course I thought of it. Remember the part where I told you I would feed you the plan bit by bit?”
The full realization of Casa’s plan hits me: He’d wanted to use The Brain against Liberty all along. But we needed something to bait him out. Something like a robot zombie rigged with silent alarms that went straight to Liberty. “Oh.”
“Damn right ‘oh.’ I’m amazed you’re still alive.”
You get used to it, M says.
“I was going to tell you to do it before you disconnected the transmission. Something I can’t wait to hear the reason behind.”
“Save that for a later time,” Deathbot says. “For now, there is the matter of payment.” I think I hear his arm cannon power up.
“And there is still the matter of that video file. And the person that sent you after me.”
“The person is an information broker named Tibus Maul. He resides on a space station thirty light years from here.”
“And that’s it?”
“What more did you expect?”
“Oh, I don’t know, what’s his favorite movie? Does he have any hobbies? And, oh yeah, why the hell is he after me?”
“I do not know, nor did I care to ask. Furthermore, the arrangement took place between him and Liberty. The only conversation I have on record with Liberty is the one you quoted earlier, ever so dramatically.”
He’s calling YOU dramatic?
Deathbot reaches into a compartment in his upper leg and retrieves a small piece of purple plastic with a microchip and a silver tip. He tosses it to me. “That will interface with most of your primitive technology. It has the coordinates to Maul’s location as well as the video you requested. Now, where is Deathbot’s payment?”
“You want payment.” I point. “There it is.”
Deathbot’s glowing green eyes follow my finger to Liberty. “Surely, you jest.”
I stand and hope I don’t wince. “Think about it. How much do you think the Zyborg Empire would pay for a neutered and gift wrapped Liberty? He’s defeated them how many times?”
Deathbot stands there for a moment, looking at us. The rain falls through one of the many holes in the roof and hisses in the green flame. “Agreed.”
“Hold on. I want a guarantee that you’re never going to set foot on Earth again.”
Deathbot taps a couple of buttons in his wrist. “As soon as my ship arrives from orbit, you will not see me … until I’m ready for you to see me.”
“Not good enough.”
Deathbot laughs. “You are in no position to dictate further terms. You are welcome to prove me wrong.”
I slowly walk to him. Not because I’m trying to be dramatic, but because I hurt like hell. “You step foot on this planet again, Deathbot, it will be the last step you ever take. You are welcome to prove me wrong.”
Epilogue
“… Did you find him, Earthling?”
“Do you care to rephrase your tone, Deathbot?”
“Did you find my bounty, Liberty?”
“I did, but Sentinel got a little trigger happy and I had to do damage control. The kid got away.”
“I hope that you sufficiently dealt with it, and him, for your sake.”
“Let me make something clear to you which should already be painfully obvious. This kid beat the hell out of you this morning. I beat the hell out of the kid just a moment ago. That means I can, in turn, beat the hell out of you. The only reason I haven’t yet is because it’s easier for me to just give him to you, so you’ll keep your little nanites under control and then leave my planet.”
“But don’t think for a single minute that I won’t bag your ass right here. I figure civilian casualties will be around twenty percent. By the time we cover it up, it’ll be more like five percent. I’ve dealt with worse; Prose has dealt with worse. It’ll recover and I’ll have even more support for the Wertham Act. Long story short: killing you will leave me a huge mess to clean up, but it’s a mess I can turn to my advantage if I need to.”
“Well … I shall assist you in looking for him.”
“No. I’ve got enough to worry about keeping those other idiots under control. I don’t need to worry about holding your hand too …”
“Hey, HEROES, here’s a QuickTime of your favorite Superhero, Galaxy. What you just heard was a recording taken by Deathbot the night Silver Sentinel blew a hole through my shoulder. And then I sent him into space. Remember that, Sentinel? I do. It was awesome.”
“Anyway, I’m sending you this thing for two reasons. Reason number one: You may not have realized just how much of a douche your pal Liberty was. Even though he told me to register that night, he never had any plans for letting me. He was just gonna hand me over to Deathbot first chance he got. And if you guys didn’t know about this, it means that if any of you had caught up with Deathbot first, you idiots (Liberty’s words, not mine) probably would’ve ended up just as bad as me.”
“Reason number two: If you guys come after me, Pink, or any unregistered Super simply because they’re unregistered, this ditty goes viral. There’s bound to be an investigation. If you guys were involved, you’ll be implicated. If you guys weren’t involved, you’ll be implicated. If you manage to take me out quick and dirty—y’know, by sneaking up on me or something, I’ve got friends that will viral this thing for me and they’ve got friends and so on.”
“I’m sure you think I might be lying. And you might be right. But there’s only one way to find out. So please—try me.”
***
Try me, Gabriel? Try me? Was that absolutely necessary?
&
nbsp; I close the door behind me and lock the deadbolt. Liberty’s beer is still on the coffee table.
“Nope. But it sure felt good.” It’s unlike Mom to leave stuff out like this. I grab the beer bottle and walk into the kitchen, flicking on the light.
Oh, it felt good. Okay. Remind me to ask you if it ‘feels good’ whenever Thinkor lobotomizes us. Or Silver Sentinel blasts another hole through us. Or when Liberty somehow finds a way off the Zyborg home world and back into our tortured lives.
“Casa said this was a good plan. And, it’s not the best, but it’s all we got right now. It seems too perfect to work, but …” I drop the beer bottle into the garbage with a sharp plink. “What we were doing wasn’t working either.”
Mom waves at me through the window, from the back porch. M told me she was back there as we flew home, and he healed the last of my hurt.
I open the back door and the crisp, winter air rushes me along with a dachshund pawing at my feet and pumping its tail back and forth. “Hey, Petey.” I kneel and scratch behind Petey’s ear.
I still can’t believe you kept that blasted canine. You know what it represents to me.
He collapses onto his side and rolls onto his back, exposing a belly begging to be rubbed. “That’s why I love it.”
Mom sets her glass of red wine on the wooden patio table. “Because he lets you rub his belly?”
“Yeah, I try to do this to the girls at school, but they always get upset.”
Mom laughs. It’s a good, honest laugh that I haven’t heard much over the past few years. Which is why it’s going to make what I’m about to do—what I’m about to say—so much harder. I sit next to her. “How was your day?”
That’s how you’re going to start telling her about me?
“Good. Really good. I was hoping to hear from Jacob today, but I guess all that stuff at The Bend kept him busy.” She takes another sip of wine.
I suddenly become engrossed in a loose stitch on my blue jeans. “Mom, there’s something I have to … that I need to say.”
She puts her hand on my knee. “Okay, but me first. I’ve been wanting to tell you this all day.”
“Okay.”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry. For not really being there the way I should have since your father died. I was resentful. Not at you of course, but at … everything. I felt that I couldn’t ever have anything good in life, you know? It seems like … ever since I was a child, everything that I’ve ever liked or loved has been taken—ripped away from me.” She looks at the bare trees in the backyard, but she’s not really looking at them. “I can remember, with absolute clarity, the four most happiest days in my life. Day one: your father proposed to me. Day two: Jack was born. Day three: the doctor said your father’s cancer had gone into remission. And day four: the adoption agency called to say you were born healthy and that we could come pick you up.”
“And all of those things, except the last one, have been taken from me.” She finishes her wine. The moon reflects off a tear streaming down her left cheek.
I put my hand on top of hers. Petey clumsily jumps in her lap and puts both of his front paws on top of our hands. Mom and I don’t talk about Dad and Jack much. I was only six when both of them died, so I don’t have a lot of memories to share. But just listening is always enough.
Mom wipes away the tears, and places the empty wine glass back on the table. “You’re still here, but you’re going to college and—” she laughs—“God, as selfish as this is, it feels like I’m losing you too. Not in the same way, but I won’t see you as much. Even less than I’m already seeing you.”
“Well, I’m still going to be here. I’m still going to be here a lot.”
“I know. But it won’t be in the same way. And, I … it upset me. I’m not ready. So I think I pulled away from you even more. And maybe if I had been there more for you, all of this stuff you went through with your anxiety problems never would have happened.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Neither do you.”
“Mom … I—it’s fine. You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Well, I’m not finished. I also wanted to say that … since I’ve been with Jacob, I’ve been very happy. And even though part of me is expecting it to end, expecting the other shoe to drop right on my face, I’m still glad we’re together. I’m not glad that it took our being together to make me realize I had so much to apologize for.” She sniffs. “Now, what did you want to say?”
I think about me. I think about M. I think about all the Superhero craziness that is my life on a day to day basis. I think about the boyfriend that my mom is so glad that she found and how he is one of the cruelest people that I’ve ever known. I think about how he’s in the back of a spaceship right now headed to the Zyborg home world. I think about how ready I was to tell her all of this tonight and then I say the only possible thing I could think to say at that moment: “I’m glad you’re happy.”
***
I close the door to my room and look up at the pink mist, vaguely shaped like a tweenage girl, floating high above my bed.
“So, did you tell all?” Pink says.
He didn’t even tell some.
I sit on the bed. “No. I couldn’t. She’s … it’s complicated. I just couldn’t.”
“Mom, I’m a Superhero, your boyfriend’s a jerk that wants to kill me. What’s complicated about that?”
Right?
I sigh and open the window. “Let me worry about it. You wanted to hang around to see how it went, and I just told you, so … out you go.”
“Uh—no.”
“What do you mean ‘uh—no.’ ?”
She floats down to me and I resist the urge to fan her away. “It’s almost one. As in A.M. I’m not leaving now. Where am I supposed to go?”
“You don’t—” and then it hits me. I’m such an idiot. Pink may appear like a tweenage girl, but she has to be pushing twenty years old by now. She’s been living in HEROES tower since her “condition” started. She probably doesn’t have anywhere else to go. “Okay, fine you can stay here tonight and—wait, do you even sleep?”
“Forget this. I’m out of here.”
“Why didn’t you try to possess me at Casa’s?” I say hurriedly.
That stops her suddenly, with wide eyes.
“It’s because you tried and couldn’t, right? And I don’t remember it, so it must have been when I was asleep.”
” …. I tried the night I went after Villainous,” she says with tired eyes. “I thought it would be the best way—the quickest way—to find out what you were capable of. I couldn’t do it for whatever reason, so I used Captain Strong instead.”
“Do you know why you couldn’t?”
“There are three types of people that I can’t possess: people with a very specific type of telepathic block, cyborg brains, and … people that are already possessed.”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to add me to the list—for whatever reason.”
If she can’t take control of a person already under some sort of outside control, it stands to reason my original hypothesis was correct: My being your host protects you from the wrath of the Pink Witch.
I rub my forehead.
“Gabe, I’m not a nice person. I’ve never pretended to be, and I’m not apologizing. But … know that I am trying to be … something better than what I am. It’s just going to take some time.” She drifts to the window.
“No.” I shut the window. “You can’t. Leave I mean. You have nowhere to go, and I want you to stay. Stay and feel guilty. It’s what a person … trying to be better would do.”
“So it has nothing to do with you feeling guilty about blackmailing me?”
“…. Why should I feel guilty about doing the right thing? Besides—eye for an eye and all that.”
She looks at the window and then at me, raising her head slightly. “Fine. I’ll stay. But I’m not going to feel guilty. It’s not who I am.”
“Fin
e.”
“Fine.” She floats back up to the ceiling. “Just leave the ceiling fan off.”
“I’ll leave it off, but just because I normally would anyway.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” I’m about to take off my pants—stop, and then get under the covers first. My pants plop to the floor a few seconds later.
“Gabe … do you think HEROES is going to back off?”
“Casa seemed to think it would work.”
“Dodge questions much?”
“Okay, I don’t know.”
“They can’t have everybody thinking they can just get away with the stuff that you did today,” she says.
“With the stuff that we did.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Look, we won today, okay? Let’s just leave it at that for a while.”
Don’t be so sure, Gabe. We still need to talk to this Maul person, which presents another set of problems. We can make the trip to the coordinates Deathbot provided easily enough, but The Council will be able to track us shortly after leaving the protection of Earth’s atmosphere.
“Let’s just leave it at that …”
I close my eyes and sleep takes me before I realize I’m took.
I wake up and look at the alarm clock: It’s three A.M. I roll over to find a better position.
And Pink is laying next to me, eyes closed.
She settled in right after you fell asleep. I find it baffling: with the nature of her body, one would think she would be just as comfortable in the air as on a bed.
I look at her closely. Her features have shifted. She no longer looks like a tweenage girl, but instead like a woman in her late teens or early twenties.
Holy crap—she makes herself appear as a kid on purpose.
“There’s nothing baffling about being lonely, M,” I whisper. “Even if you do it to yourself.”
I stare at her until I fall back asleep.
SUPERHEROES IN PROSE WILL RETURN MAY 29TH WITH VOLUME FIVE: MAGICK WITH A “K.”