“Would Laverne know the reason behind all of this?” I asked, not really believing I had asked that question. Laverne was Lady Luck herself, one of the most powerful of all the gods. Patty and Screamer and I had saved her once, but that doesn’t mean lowly superheroes like me and Patty and Screamer can bother her at every whim. But I was hoping that Stan might ask Burt, the God of Casino Operations; and if he didn’t know, maybe Burt would ask Lady Luck.
“I don’t know if she does or not,” Stan said. “You meeting the rest of your team at The Diner?”
I nodded. “The Smoke is busy in Canada, but Screamer will be there.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Stan said. “I’ll meet you at The Diner as soon as I get some information. You know, you two worry me sometimes, screwing with things you shouldn’t screw with.”
Both of us nodded at that. What could we say?
He vanished, letting us slip back into normal time as he did. Around us the movement and the noise filled the air again, slamming around us like a stream moving around rocks.
“Sorry to get you into this,” Patty said, looking worried as we turned and headed for the parking garage.
“Any excuse to spend time with you is great by me.”
She laughed. “Silly, you never need an excuse, you know that.”
For a moment I actually forgot that we were going up against an Undertaker, Death himself, to try to save Death’s daughter.
THREE
Fifteen minutes later I told the problem to Screamer, a superhero with the power to read other people’s minds and transfer thoughts.
We were sitting at a large table in The Diner, a hole-in-the-wall little restaurant decorated with pretend 1960s stuff. It was on a side street downtown, and a woman named Madge was our normal waitress. She always wore her uniform three sizes too small, and it was a chore to not stare when she had to pick anything up.
If you did stare, you ended up having nightmares for a week about exploding humans. Or at least I always did.
We had started going to The Diner when the team first formed and we had to fight the Slots of Saturn. And for every mission since, we met here to talk and plan and drink the fantastic milkshakes.
Madge had just set down our milkshakes when Screamer said he was very worried about even thinking of going up against an Undertaker. “Superheroes can live a long time, but we do die. We can be killed.”
That was a thought I didn’t want to think about at all.
Suddenly the sounds from the street stopped, and Madge froze in mid-stride back toward the lunch counter in the back.
A moment later Laverne showed up with a thin man dressed only in a loud-colored bathing suit and a white towel. I had no idea who he was, but he wasn’t looking happy.
Stan appeared a moment later, smiled a sheepish grin, and sat down without a word at a nearby table to watch the fireworks.
“You know, Laverne,” the man said, “I could have gotten at least two more waves in before sunset.”
“Sorry, Dan,” Laverne said, shaking her head.
Dan’s bathing suit changed to a dark, silk business suit with his tie perfectly in place and a blue shirt under it that seemed like it belonged on a surfer.
Then Laverne said, “But after the month is over, you’re going to have a lot of time to surf all you want.”
Dan smiled, and an image of a skeleton face sort of flashed over his face. “You got that right.”
All three of us at the table had slid back away from the front edge where Laverne and Dan were pulling up chairs and talking. I had zero doubt I was about to meet the most feared Undertaker of them all, Mortuary Dan.
Dan sat down and then glanced at us, nodding. “I see, Laverne, that you have your top superhero team together here, minus one. What can I do to help?”
Laverne glanced at the milkshake in front of Patty.
Patty nodded that it was all right for Laverne to take a drink and slid it to Lady Luck. After a sip, Laverne smiled, then turned to Dan with a serious expression. “You need to talk to your daughter.”
“Why?” Dan asked. “I’m going to see her in just under four hours.”
Wow, this guy was cold, even for Death.
“She doesn’t know what’s going to happen,” Laverne said.
“That’s silly,” Dan said, taking Screamer’s untouched milkshake and sipping it. “Wow! These are darned fine milkshakes. I can see why you guys meet here.”
I think I nodded, but damned if I was going to say anything.
“She doesn’t know, Dan,” Laverne said, again sipping on the milkshake. “All she knows are the rumors handed down over centuries. You know she’s the first kid of any Undertaker since the Dark Ages.”
Dan nodded and made a large dent in the milkshake. “Yeah, those were tough times. It’s been easier since.”
The four of us just sat and listened to the two major gods talk and drink our milkshakes. As superheroes, what else could we do?
“She thinks she’s going to die,” Laverne said.
“Technically, she is,” Dan said, slurping the milkshake and somehow managing to not get any on his silk suit.
“She contacted Poker Boy and his team to try to figure out a way to stop it.”
Dan set the milkshake glass down hard, then turned and looked me directly in the eye. His face seemed to flash back and forth between skin and skeleton, and it had to be the most frightening thing I had ever seen. “What do you say to her?”
I sputtered, then dug down and managed to apply some calming skills from my years playing poker and said, “We told her we would find out what was happening.”
He looked at me for a moment, than shook his head. “You don’t know either, do you?”
Laverne laughed. “Dan, remember how long it has been since any of you had a kid. None of the younger superheroes or gods know anything more than the tradition of Undertakers killing their children.”
He looked at Laverne, then back at me and my team. “So you are telling me, Lisa doesn’t know what’s going to happen in a few hours?”
“She believes she’s going to die, sir,” I said. “She’s terrified.”
Dan slammed his fist on the table, rocking all the milkshake glasses. If we hadn’t been between time and frozen, that would have brought Madge running.
Dan’s face went to complete skeleton, then he pushed his chair back and stood. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted her mother to raise her.”
I desperately wanted to ask who Lisa’s mother was, but smartly kept my mouth shut. When Death himself was pissed off, making him even angrier wasn’t a good plan toward a long life.
Mortuary Dan paced for a moment, and even Laverne let him go, drinking the rest of Patty’s milkshake with a slight smile on her face.
Finally Dan stopped and turned back to the table. “Anyone have any ideas what I should do?”
I didn’t have a clue what the problem was, other than the legend that he had to kill his daughter in a few hours – and he didn’t seem to be denying that at all.
I glanced at Patty. Her face was white and she was leaning back toward me. Screamer just seemed stunned.
Stan, in the other booth, had his God of Poker face on, and I couldn’t even begin to get a read on what he was thinking or feeling.
“You need to talk to your daughter,” Laverne said softly. “Before midnight. She needs to know and understand what’s going to happen.”
“Oh,” Dan said, clearly disgusted as he started to pace again. “She’s going to be so scared of me now, she won’t listen. And she needs to know.”
“Yes, she does,” Laverne said, her voice softer and more compassionate than I had ever heard from Lady Luck.
I wanted to raise my hand like a kid in class and ask just what the adults in the room were talking about, but again my common sense got the best of me and I kept my mouth shut.
Dan kept pacing, clearly thinking, and after a moment Laverne looked over at me and Patty and Screamer. “I
think Dan needs your help,” she said.
Okay, at that moment you could have knocked me down with a slight breeze. Lady Luck just told us that Death needed our help.
Dan stopped and stared at the table, clearly as puzzled as I was, which made me feel only a slight bit better.
“Can you four,” Laverne asked, nodding to us and Stan, “get Lisa and bring her here and help her father tell her what is going to happen tonight? She needs to be kept calm. Very calm.”
Laverne just stared at me and Patty. After a moment we both nodded, starting to understand what we needed to do.
“And she needs to learn vast amounts of information from her father in a very short time.” She glanced at Screamer who just turned white at the idea.
“I see where you are going, Laverne,” Dan said, stepping back to the table and looking at me and my team. “Would you help me help my daughter through the transition?”
I couldn’t take it any longer, I had to ask something, so I asked the most pressing question of the thousands I had spinning in my mind.
“What transition?”
“At midnight,” Dan said, “Lisa will change from being a mere mortal to being an immortal god. An Undertaker. I’m retiring to surf in Hawaii. She’s taking my spot, the first female Undertaker. I start her training at midnight tonight.”
FOUR
In my few short years of being a superhero, I had never been so scared of an assignment. Somehow the three of us, with Stan’s help, needed to link up a god, Death himself, and his daughter in an out-of-time link so that he could have the time to talk to her. And we needed to help her understand what was coming, and that it was all right that she was going to die.
Or sort of die, anyway.
If we screwed this up, none of us might live to see the end of the year.
If that long.
I had a hunch Mortuary Dan wouldn’t think twice about just moving us on to the next place, wherever or whatever that was.
Stan gave me and Patty a lift to pick up Lisa.
When we appeared in her suite, she was still dressed in the same red, white, and blue outfit and was sitting on the couch. Clearly she had been sitting there since she arrived.
When she saw us, she jumped and rolled up over the back of the couch to get it between her and us.
I glanced at Patty. “She doesn’t know anything at all about gods and superheroes, does she?”
“Not much I discovered,” Patty said.
“How did you do that?” Lisa asked.
“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” I said, glancing at Stan, who just shrugged. “We’ve got some good news for you,” I continued, as Patty and I started working to calm her down with all the calming powers we had between us.
“You do?” she asked, clearly relaxing and even starting to smile, forgetting that we had just appeared out of nowhere in front of her.
“You’re not going to die at midnight,” I said, fibbing a little. She actually wasn’t going to die. She just wasn’t going to be mortal anymore.
A slight detail.
“But there’s one condition,” Patty said. “You need to talk to your dad. And your dad wants us there with you for support.”
Lisa started shaking her head back and forth and I could feel the panic starting to gain intensity.
I dug deep and Patty and I joined hands and hit her with every calming power we had. And I have to say, that was considerable. We could have put a bull moose to sleep.
Lisa calmed some.
“It’s only to talk,” I said. “He needs to tell you where the rumor is coming from and why it exists. He said your mother should have taught you all of this.”
“All she said was that my daddy is an Undertaker – the Grim Reaper.”
“Well, he sort of is,” I said. “And a pretty fine surfer, from what I gather.”
“My father surfs?” Lisa asked, calming even more under the intense push of calming powers from me and Patty.
“Eleven months a year that’s about all he does,” Patty said, smiling.
Lisa finally stopped shaking her head and stared first at me, then at Stan. “Who exactly are you people?”
“I am known as Poker Boy. I am at the rank of superhero in the Gambling Gods universe, which basically means I do a lot of the chores the gods don’t want to do.”
She nodded, so I went on.
“This is Patty, also known as Front Desk Girl. She is a superhero working for the Gods of Hospitality.”
I pointed at Stan. “This is my direct boss, Stan, the God of Poker. It is our boss, Lady Luck, known as Laverne, who convinced your father that he needed to talk to you and help you understand this different world before anything could happen tonight.”
“But I still might die tonight?” Lisa said, the panic starting to build again even against the onslaught of calming that Patty and I were directing toward her.
“Oh, trust me,” I said, “at ten minutes after midnight tonight, you’ll be talking to me just fine. And you could talk to me any time you wanted after that. I promise.”
“As do I,” Patty said, nodding. “You just need to have a conversation with your father first, to understand everything that’s going on.”
Lisa clearly calmed with our promise. Then she laughed. “My mom hated what my dad did for a living, and never wanted him to come around. And she said his world was full of nutcakes. If I believe who you say you are, I guess she was right.”
“Oh, trust me,” I said, “as a person fairly new to this world as well, it’s crazier than you can even imagine.”
Lisa smiled and took a deep breath. “All right, let’s go see my father.”
A moment later the four of us were standing in The Diner.
Both Dan and Laverne were halfway through two more milkshakes, sitting in the booth with Screamer sitting in the middle looking slightly panicked. Madge was moving around, shaking her head as she sometimes did when she had to wait on us.
Mortuary Dan stood, his human face staying firmly in place, and stepped toward his daughter. “Hi, Lisa. It’s wonderful to see you again. You’ve become a beautiful woman.”
Lisa smiled and stepped into the hug of Death. “Hi, Daddy.”
FIVE
We let Lisa and her father talk.
After a few minutes, Dan turned to all of us, with Madge standing right there beside the table. “We need to start all this. Lisa has a lot to learn about her old man. Madge, would you put up the closed sign and keep those milkshakes coming for all of us? To do this right, we’re going to need the energy.”
Madge nodded. “I’ll be glad to, Dan. Lisa, what kind do you like?”
“Chocolate,” Lisa said.
“You got it, dear,” Madge said, turning to close the front door as Patty and Screamer and I stared.
“Madge is a superhero in Food and Beverage,” Laverne said, clearly trying not to laugh. “I thought you all knew that.”
I shook my head and glanced around at Stan, who just smiled and shrugged. He had known, just hadn’t bothered to tell any of the rest of us.
Laverne took one more long drink from her milkshake, then stood. “I’ll be back a little later.”
She vanished leaving us all alone with Mortuary Dan and his daughter.
Dan pointed to the spot where Screamer sat in the back of the booth. “Poker Boy, you and Patty sit back there. Lisa, you sit on one side of the booth, I’ll sit facing you so we can talk directly, and Screamer, you sit on a chair at the head of the booth so you can touch both of us.”
Dan glanced over at Stan. “Keep us out of time for about forty-five minutes the first time. We’ll adjust from there. And help everyone with energy when needed.”
Stan nodded.
I thought my heart was going to pound out of my chest. In the back of the restaurant Madge had the milkshake blenders going full speed, filling the restaurant with the whining sound. It didn’t begin to cover the sound of my heart.
I could feel Lisa suddenly
starting to get upset again, so Patty and I both sent calming powers at her as we slid into position, our legs touching for extra support.
I don’t know how we could calm anyone down, as worried as we were ourselves, but for some reason our calming powers weren’t hooked to how we were feeling. Luckily.
“What’s going to happen?” Lisa asked, clearly afraid to take her position in the booth.
“Screamer here is going to hook our thoughts up so I can help you learn faster all the things your mother didn’t teach you over the last twenty-plus years. And that way you can get to know me, the real me.”
“You can do that?” Lisa asked, staring at Screamer.
“I can,” he said, turning to face where she stood. “It’s my power. You can trust me, it will be painless. Odd and a little confusing at times, but painless, I promise you. It will be exactly as your dad said, and the connection will help you learn very quickly what is a rumor and what is the truth.”
“And I will be very careful to ease you into all of this,” Dan said.
I was very glad he said that. I couldn’t imagine suddenly knowing all at once all the things I had learned in my short five years being a superhero. But Lisa had no choice. She had to learn a lot and very quickly. There was only three hours to go until midnight.
“Ready, daughter?” Dan asked, smiling, and not showing his skeleton face at all.
Patty and I hit her with as much calming as we dared, and Lisa nodded. Then she slowly slid into position beside me in the booth.
I scooted closer to Patty to make sure I wasn’t touching Lisa. Last thing I wanted to do was be included in the conversation they would have in their heads while Screamer held them together. But if I touched her, I would be automatically included, just as if Patty touched Dan on the other side.
The booth suddenly felt very, very small.
“I guess so,” Lisa said.
Dan glanced at us and nodded, then nodded to Screamer.
Patty and I ramped up every bit of calming we could as Stan dropped us between time, killing all the sound in the restaurant and from the streets.
Smith's Monthly #15 Page 2