Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales

by J. R. Rain

  Yes, there was some stress. Having creditors on your ass sucks. Not knowing if you will have enough money to get through the month sucks. Working for a pittance sucks.

  But nothing—and I mean nothing—compares to the shit I put up with now.

  I went from wild panic attacks from not making rent, to nearly daily heart attacks fighting villains. And it all started with that damn bull.

  Every superhero has an origin story. Here’s mine:

  I used to be a rodeo clown.

  Not a very good one, either, hence my inability to find steady work. Still, I would occasionally get “the call.” That’s when they’d pull one of us out of a Rolodex for when a real rodeo clown gets sick or injured. Luckily, I live in Rustic City, Arizona, arguably the rodeo capitol of the world. So, yes, on any given day or night there is a rodeo in town.

  So, the moment I would get the call, it was a mad rush to get the makeup on. Once done, I’d be out the door and hauling ass in my old Hyundai. Mad clown in a clunker. More than once, I’d been pulled over. Don’t let anyone fool you. Clowns don’t make everyone happy, especially cops. And kids. More often than not, as I waited at a red light, drumming my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, I would look over at the car next to me and see a kid hysterically crying and pointing at me. Mothers and fathers would give me bad looks. I would shrug, point to my sad clown face, and sigh.

  It was on such a night, having first earned another speeding ticket and making twin boys cry (and maybe even their mother), that I went from a mere Carl Gray, part-time rodeo clown, to Carl Gray, full-time superhero.

  As most things in my life, this last clown-hurrah was in no way a smooth sail. I had been gored nearly a half a dozen times—all to the delight of the crowd—when the freak storm hit. In a flash, rain and hail pelted the outdoor stands and arena. Patrons went dashing for shelter. I would have gone dashing for shelter, too, except for one thing; I was in the middle of the arena with one very angry bull. A big and aggressive S.O.B we called El Diablo.

  The Devil.

  The bull rider had lasted all of 1.8 seconds on the snorting, furious beast before he went flying ass over feet through the air. He wasn’t the first—nor would’ve been the last, for that matter. Riding El Diablo was like riding anger itself… if anger had four legs, a tail, and two horns.

  Anyway, I stepped out into the middle of the arena and did my best to distract the brute when the skies opened up. And El Diable charged. Charged me, for the sake of clarification.

  Which reminds me of an old joke: How do you stop a bull from charging? Take away his credit card.

  I wish. I scrambled to get out of his way. Scrambled and, sadly, slipped. Remember the rain? I swore and clawed at the dirt, trying like hell to find my feet when two things happened simultaneously: El Diablo lowered his head… and lightning struck.

  Both at the exact same time.

  That’s all I remember.

  I awoke days later at the Rustic City Hospital.

  I came to slowly, aware that, as usual, I was alone. Not even a friend sitting by my side to see if I would pull through. Well, I pulled through all right. Maybe too well.

  As I lay there in the intensive care unit, blinking and trying to assess just how bad the damage was, I came to one conclusion:

  I was doing very well indeed.

  Nothing seemed to be broken. In fact, nothing about me seemed injured in any way. According to the nurse on duty who swung by to check on me, I had been in a three-day coma with a massive head wound. Apparently, the bull had done its best to trample me into oblivion. Except…

  Well, except the exact opposite happened.

  The nurse was impressed. Terrified too, judging by her quaver as she fiddled with the dials on the machines recording stats that showed I was, “R-right as rain, p… pardon the pun.”

  As bedside manners go, hers left something—quite a lot of something—to be desired.

  So, what did happen, you say? Why the bull. It had literally disappeared off the face of the earth.

  No shit.

  Well, I have an opinion about that. In fact, so do a lot of people. I’m kind of a celebrity these days. Go figure.

  Anyway, the bull didn’t disappear off the face of the earth. No. Thanks to that freakish lightning strike, I’m fairly certain the bull and I became one.

  At least, if these horns and my now famous tail have anything to do with it.

  Yes, I now sport a longish tail that actually ends in a fluffy little ball.

  Not as cute as it might seem. That fluffy little ball itches like hell and has a nasty habit of getting caught in stupid elevators and stupid sliding glass doors.

  Stupid, stupid bull.

  Anyway, it wasn’t long after my release from the hospital when the horns appeared. Within hours of being back at my apartment, the first bumps showed up above my temples. Another hour after that, two black, sharp horns tore through my skin to curve up and out, blossoming above my head like something out of the devil’s own garden.

  Yeah, I was freaked, man. Freaked.

  I studied myself in the mirror. Pale faced and sick to my stomach as I ran my hands up along the thick horns, tentatively touching their tips with my own fingertips.

  “This isn’t happening,” I said over and over (and sometimes still to this day).

  The horns were firmly attached to my skull, as if screwed in. As if they’d always been there. Worse, as if they would always be there.

  Stupid, freakish horns.

  And as I paced in my small apartment while the cousin of that freak rainstorm, which had brought the even freakier lightning strike, pummeled the good town of Rustic City, I felt something appear in my pants.

  No, not that something. Hell, I wish it had been that.

  No, this something appeared on the other end. The rear end. Yes, I’m talking about the damn tail with the furry little ball. That damn furry ball that itches so damn much.

  There it was, curled in my boxers like a sleeping snake. Except it wasn’t a snake. And it was attached to me. Right there at the base of my spine.

  A tail.

  A goddamn tail.

  I had been so worried about the horns that I hadn’t noticed the appearance of the tail.

  Go figure.

  No, I didn’t have many friends in those days. Truth is, I don’t have many friends now. In fact, I might even have more enemies than friends.

  It’s the way of superheroes.

  Anyway, with the appearance of the horns and tail, I called the only person I could think of—a fellow rodeo clown named Gerald. He and I had worked many years together. We weren’t actually friends, but we had shared a beer or two. Now, thirty minutes later and sporting a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon under one arm, Gerald, sans the clown makeup, appeared at my door.

  And nearly dropped the Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  Nearly. It would have taken a lot more than horns and a tail to make Gerald lose his grip on his beer.

  Instead, he cowboyed-up through the shock and was soon sitting across from me in the living room. My ass was still sore from the new tail and, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure exactly how to sit with it, so I stood and paced. Gerald kept drinking until the shock wore off.

  “Jesus,” he said again, for perhaps the tenth time.

  “Yup.”

  He motioned to my horns. “Those things real?”

  I lowered my head and gave him a good look.

  “They look real.” He drank a lot more beer. “You have anything to say about all this?”

  “Damn strange,” I said.

  Gerald nodded. “Yup.”

  It went on like this for another ten minutes as he examined my tail, running his hands along it, getting dangerously close to my backside.

  “I don’t feel right looking too closely,” he said.

  “Jesus, it’s just a tail, Gerald,” I snapped.

  “Yeah, but it’s attached to your ass. Your shockingly hairy ass.”

  I shook my he
ad and continued pacing, my tail whipping about the small apartment. Once or twice the furry end smacked Gerald in the head. He said “hey” but kept on drinking.

  “Well, it stands to reason…” Gerald finally said, after perhaps his eighth beer.

  “What stands to reason?”

  I had been pacing and panicking and wishing like hell I would wake up from whatever nightmare I was in the middle of. No such luck.

  “Well, the bull that was about to hit you done disappeared.”

  “So Tanya said.” Tanya the nurse.

  “Well, she mighta heard what some saw.” He shrugged. “Most were just scattering for cover.”

  “What did you see, Gerald?”

  He took another swig of beer. “Just when the lightning struck, I thought you were done for, Carl.”

  Truth was, so did I.

  Gerald went on. “But when the lightning struck something strange happened. You ended up on the far side of the arena, and the bull…”

  “Yes?”

  “The bull was gone. And…”

  “And what?”

  He shook his head and looked away. “Nothing.”

  I roared. A great roar. So loud, my little apartment shook… and the popcorned ceiling actually popped. “Tell me!”

  Quaking with real fear, Gerald said, “Okay, okay. Just relax, Carl. Well, there was something else.”

  “What, goddammit?”

  “It wasn’t really lightning that came down from the heavens.”

  I blinked. “Then what was it?”

  “Well, it was a kind of lightning. But it was mostly in the shape of, well, a man. A giant, lightning-shaped man. Then again, I might have been drunk at the time. In fact, I’m sure I was drunk.”

  I thought about that as Gerald drank the rest of the case of beer. I thought about that even more as Gerald slept it off. I thought about all of it and more as I paced my small apartment, occasionally slapping the snoozing Gerald in the face and knocking over every goddamn lamp in the joint with my tail.

  I spent that night in agony.

  While Gerald slept off the Pabst, my body literally—and I mean literally—morphed into something bigger and greater than it was before.

  Perhaps even greater than anyone’s had been before, ever.

  Why this happened to me, I don’t know. What exactly had happened to me, I still don’t know. No one knows. I’ve had some of the finest scientific minds study me. Hell, one mad scientist had even put me in lockdown, determined to replicate me into an army of me. Except, of course, I had broken out and destroyed his island fortress… but that’s a story for another time.

  Anyway, by the following morning, I had gone through a complete—and painful—metamorphosis. Yes, the horns and tail had been weird enough, but by the time old Gerald awoke from his beer-induced slumber, he might have thought he had awoken to his nightmare.

  Nope, pal. This one is all mine.

  For standing before him, naked if not for the stiff fur that covered my body from head to toe, still breathing heavily and sweating from the growing pains of the previous night, was the creature—and some even go as far as to call me a superhero, now known as The Bull.

  Me. Carl, the part-time rodeo clown.

  “I’ve got to go,” Gerald said.

  I never saw him again, although he went on to write a book about our friendship. Fiction, mostly. I should sue his ass. Do superheroes do that?

  To say my life changed radically from that moment on is an understatement. I couldn’t go very far without having people either follow me or run in fear. Didn’t take the press long to figure out the mother of all freaks was living in Rustic City either. Hell, TMZ has staked out a permanent spot in the parking lot just opposite my apartment.

  Yes, the press coverage alone is dizzying. As my publicity soared, and as the medical establishment did their damn best to come to grips with what had happened to me, two things became evident:

  One is that the world actually needs me. It seemed almost overnight my services came to be in demand. From saving whole families in fires (my thick bullish hide is impervious to flames) to stopping bank robberies (for some reason, the heretofore reasonable number per capita shoot up like an S.O.B. in Rustic City).

  Two—with my own strange transformation, there also appeared another type of monster. Evil geniuses. You know, those homicidal madmen bent on literally destroying the world. Some have speculated that the universe needed an answer to the influx of coming evil. A sort of superhero yin to the evil yang. Apparently, I was the yin.

  Why a bull? I don’t know. Hell, I can think of countless other critters that might have been more useful, but I am what I am.

  What can I say?

  I am The Bull, with my great strength and quick temper. Don’t get me started on seeing the color red. The Bull, with my razor-sharp horns that can literally tear through anything. The Bull, with my tail that I’ve mastered as a useful whip. The Bull, with my thick hide that is protecting me from bullets and knives and everything else in-between. No, I can’t fly, but I can charge, quickly.

  Comics have been made about me, and even movies. I have a Facebook page that numbers in the hundreds of millions of fans. Even more than Vin Diesel.

  Go figure.

  Many laugh at me, some admire, most fear me.

  I would fear me, too. A giant of a man. Half-man, half-animal. A freak of nature. There is nowhere for me to hide, and so I didn’t bother hiding. In fact, I never bothered moving. I like my one-bedroom apartment. I like my Pabst Blue Ribbon even more. It just takes a hell of a lot more of the stuff to get me drunk.

  No, I don’t have a Bat Signal, but I do have Skype.

  You can Skype me, too. I’m always ready to help. Just let me finish my beer first.

  I am The Bull.

  Go figure.

  dam Carr has a problem.

  It’s his heart. He’s sure of it. Except, of course, his doctors can’t find anything wrong with him or his heart.

  Nothing at all.

  This troubles Adam, as he’s certain the problem is getting progressively worse. In fact, as he leaves his cardiologist’s office now, stepping out into the blazing hot Corona sunshine, Adam is certain that someone is playing a very sick joke on him. Perhaps even God.

  As he stands there, letting his body adjust from the air conditioned comfort of the specialist’s office to the extreme heat of this outpost southern California city, Adam finds thinking difficult.

  After all, it’s damn hard to concentrate when his own heart pounds in his ears.

  He takes in a gulp of sizzling air, and lifts his face to the sun, and listens to his heart beating so loudly that he’s certain anyone within twenty feet can hear it.

  Except, of course, no one can hear it.

  Only him.

  And it is totally freaking him out.

  Thump, thump, thump…

  And so it goes.

  He’s had three experts check him out, and subsequently three experts tell him there’s nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all. This last expert even went so far as to suggest that Adam go see a psychologist.

  “It’s in your head, I think,” said the doctor, looking down at a clipboard.

  “No, it’s in my chest, doc. I can hear it. Pounding.”

  “Your heart is beating normally, Mr. Carr. I’m sorry, there’s just nothing I can do for you. You are, in fact, in perfect health.”

  And so it goes.

  Now Adam finds himself standing in the heat and the sunlight, listening to his heart, and knowing without a doubt that he’s very much not in perfect health.

  Something is wrong. Very wrong.

  Adam first noticed the louder-than-normal beating two weeks ago. He’d been in bed with his girlfriend. They’d had a particularly vigorous lovemaking session and he’d been out of breath, reveling in his manliness. His heart, as one would expect, had been hammering away in his chest. Loud and persistent. Hell, he could feel it rocking his entire body. At
the time, Adam had grinned. After all, his hammering heart was evidence of a job well done.

  And so he had lain back, smiling.

  That should have been the end of it. Except for one problem… his heart continued thudding in his chest.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  Louder and louder.

  “What the hell?” He’d sat up and asked his sleeping girlfriend if she could hear his heart, and she rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Now nervous, Adam had gotten out of bed and paced the small bedroom, listening. Yes, his heart was as loud as ever. He was sure of it. He felt his chest. His heart didn’t seem to be beating any faster. He counted the beats per minute and did a quick internet search for average heart rates. His heart rate was average. Sixty beats per minute. Nothing to worry about, right?

  Then why was it pounding so damn loud in his ears?

  Why indeed?

  He didn’t know, and now two weeks later, neither did his doctors. Yes, Adam was officially worried. Who wouldn’t be?

  A psychologist, Dr. Mann had suggested.

  Hell, maybe he was going crazy.

  Adam Carr didn’t know, but one thing was for certain, he was burning up out here in the sun.

  Discouraged, he heads to his car and gets in even as his heart begins to pound louder still.

  Traffic is heavy.

  Worse, drivers seem to rush about particularly crazily this afternoon. A result of a full moon or something? Except, does a full moon excuse count in the middle of the day? After all, it is night somewhere in the world, right? He doesn’t know much about astronomy. And, really, he doesn’t much care.

  No, all he cares is about is getting to the bottom of his beating heart.

  Or rather, his unusually loud beating heart.

  “I mean,” he says to his empty Toyota Prius, “what the hell is that all about? “As he’s taken to doing these past few weeks, he drives with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on his chest. Of course, he probably shouldn’t be driving. He’s too distracted. Too weirded out.