A moment later he ripped himself free and flipped onto his feet, gazing about angrily. Daytripper was nowhere to be seen.
“That all you got you pansy-assed little punk?” Arachnid shouted angrily.
His face was flushed with anger. He took long deep breaths, searching for the blond. Only now did the villain realize where he’d been brought.
He laughed. “Back to the scene of the crime I see, very original. Gotta say, I’m surprised this place doesn’t have an EM field or something to keep teleporters from jumping in and out whenever they want.”
“They do,” Daytripper said, smashing Arachnid’s knee with a crowbar.
“Mother fucker,” Arachnid shouted in pain, taking a swing at Daytripper, but he was already gone in a swirl of orange.
“The EM field’s good,” Daytripper shouted, hidden behind the broken swinging machine with its padded tentacles, “I’m better.”
A tool bench was pressed against the wall. Daytripper took a mallet from on top of it.
“You know it’s not too late,” Arachnid said, “For you to suck my dick.”
He flexed his fingers, making the spider tattoo on his knuckle dance.
Orange light flared behind the villain, and Daytripper swung the mallet at the back of Arachnid’s skull. He turned nimbly and caught the weapon in one hand, and with his super human strength easily ripped it from Daytripper’s grasp. Arachnid tossed the mallet aside, and punched empty air: Daytripper was gone.
He reappeared right next to Arachnid. The villain’s foot flew at Daytripper’s abdomen but the blond was gone.
“Spiders can lift thirty times their own mass,” he shouted. “All I need is a glancing blow and you’re a dead man. And I can do this all day.”
Daytripper hid behind the dudes and damsels in distress mannequins, panting. Arachnid wasn’t bluffing. He wasn’t even breathing hard. Daytripper was exhausted and covered in sweat. He had to end this, and fast.
He teleported, ready to head butt Arachnid in the groin and the villain literally swept him off his feet with one leg. Daytripper teleported away and landed on his backside behind some massive girders that boys of steel would use for their weight workouts, and then hide behind to make out with each other.
“Don’t you ever read comic books, dick-wad?” Arachnid taunted. “Spider sense, remember? You caught me by surprise in my room ‘cause I smoked a joint. A villain’s gotta have some bad habits you know. But the head’s clear now. I can feel you coming from a mile away”
Orange light flared, and Arachnid swung at Daytripper’s head. He ducked just in time, and aimed his fist at Arachnid’s abdomen. The villain was a blur of motion, somersaulting over Daytripper and landing on his feet, kicking the teleporter in the back, slamming him to the ground and knocking the wind from him. Arachnid was playing with him, like a cat with a mouse.
“This is fun,” the dark haired youth taunted, getting a good look at Daytripper’s butt in his tight little short shorts.
Daytripper turned over, and Arachnid waited for the teleporter to once again disappear. Instead he pushed himself to his feet and got ready to charge. Arachnid fired a glob of webbing that caught Daytripper’s wrist with such force he flew backwards. The webbing pinned Daytripper’s arm to the floor. He tried jerking himself free when another glob of webbing trapped his other wrist. Then two more shots of webbing pinned his ankles.
“Stay down,” Arachnid ordered, lowering himself to his knees on either side of the trapped youth, and sitting on his stomach. The villain’s fingertips suctioned onto Daytripper’s white shirt and ripped it away, baring his sweaty muscular chest.
“It’s kind of cute how you tried to take me on. But from the moment we met, I spun my little plan, and you were only too eager to be trapped in my web, not the other way around.” Arachnid suctioned his finger onto Daytripper’s nipple and pulled. The boy hissed
“I’m the spider, remember? You’re just a stupid little blond with muscles. No family. No friends. No future. What happens to the little wannabe-hero now?”
“You’re right,” Daytripper agreed, gritting his teeth as Arachnid worked the other nipple, the spider on his knuckle wriggling. “I am stupid. And since I can’t outfight you, I let you beat me. Sometimes you have to lose before you can win.”
Arachnid scoffed, but looked worried.
“You’re bluffing.”
“Not so much. I’m a teleporter, moron. All I needed was for you to touch me.”
Orange light swirled from Daytripper’s deviant cells, coiling out from his nipple and around Arachnid’s finger. The villain tried to pull away, but it was too late. The orange light enveloped them both, and with a pop of imploding air they disappeared from the Academy of Super Heroic Excellence.
Daytripper rematerialized with his usual pyrotechnic display. He panted, staring down at three super villains in training. Their jaws gaped. He’d come back to Arachnid’s dorm and stood on the villain’s bed. Soot covered Daytripper’s white shoes, and fanned out on the bed sheet in a circle around him. Daytripper clutched Arachnid’s vest. It was smoking, and smelled of rotten eggs.
The villain was nowhere to be seen, until one looked closely. The three evil students did, and gaped at what was stuck to Daytripper’s nipple. It was Arachnid’s finger, cut off at the base of the knuckle. The skin was riddled with burns, making the spider tattoo look as if it had been squashed under a heel.
“What have you done with him?” Mesmerito demanded, tears of rage and anguish building in his eyes.
“Dropped him in a volcano,” Daytripper replied calmly. “Most of him.”
On cue, Arachnid’s finger finally unsuctioned from Daytripper’s nipple and dropped onto the bed.
“I’m going to kill you,” Mesmerito cried.
But the feline femme fatal held him back. She gazed at Daytripper with new admiration, a deep purr rising up from her throat.
“All’s fair,” she meowed.
“Are you crazy?” Mesmerito demanded, tears streaming from his eyes.
“You want to be next?” Daytripper asked coldly.
“Are you threatening us?” the football- player sized youth covered in granite asked in a rumbling voice.
“I’m not here to fight you,” Daytripper said, settling Arachnid’s steaming vest about his shoulders. He wrinkled his nose at the smell, wondering if it could be dry-cleaned.
They stared at him.
“So if you’re not here to fight us, why are you here?” the cheetah woman asked, her cat eyes glinting excitedly.
He zipped up the vest. It was too big for him, but that was ok. He knew he’d grow into it.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Daytripper asked, knowing he was going to have to change his name yet again, “I’m here to join you.”
The Meek Shall Inherit
Jamie Freeman
Jamie Freeman (jamiefreeman.net) went to college in D.C. but now resides in a blue county amid the predominantly red counties of North Florida. His short stories have appeared in a variety of anthologies including Blood Fruit, Unmasked II, I Do Too!, and Best Gay Erotica (2009, 2010 & 2012). His novellas and ebooks have been published by Dreamspinner Press, Forbidden Fiction and Untreed Reads.
Washington, D.C.
Christian States of America
The first time it happened I thought I was being Raptured.
I’d grown up in a world in which the Rapture was a real and exciting possibility. We believed there would come a day when the bodies of righteous believers would literally ascend from this earth into the Kingdom of Heaven. On the playground we practiced and prepared, standing in the hot Georgia sun looking up into the sky and waiting; we made lists of classmates who would be left behind to confront the Tribulations; we knew we would be among the chosen. And although I had renounced this partic
ular set of beliefs long ago, the first thought that raced through my mind as my body ascended into the light and heat and noise was that I was being Raptured. I was being lifted from this earth by the hand of God Almighty.
And then I woke up half an hour later curled in a fetal position behind a dumpster on L Street. The sun was starting to set and the gritty, powdery residue of incinerated bricks and mortar and concrete made everything look pale and surreal. It took me a while to realize the silence all around me was the result of hearing loss. My clothes were singed and torn; my hands and face were blood-smeared and blistered.
I staggered out of the alley into complete chaos. Dozens of ambulances, District Police cars, Cee Bee vans, military vehicles, and fire trucks clustered around an enormous, perfectly round crater that stretched across the intersection of Connecticut and L Street. Inside the crater, through gaps in the concrete and asphalt I could see the Farragut North Metro station where a Metro train was engulfed in flames and billowing noxious black smoke. There was movement everywhere. Bodies—some badly burned or waving amputated limbs—were embedded in glassy patches inside the crater or jutting from piles of rubble. Rescue workers and people in business suits clambered around the edges of the crater like insects, calling out to each other in distant, indistinct voices.
A hand grabbed my arm roughly, turning me around.
I stared dumbly into the blue eyes of a lantern-jawed Cee Bee, his crimson uniform smudged with dirt and blood and white ash. His lips moved, stopped, and then moved again.
“I think I lost my hearing,” I said, touching my ear.
His eyebrows knitted for a second and then he pointed to me and pointed down the street away from the crater. Then he disappeared, scrabbling down the inside of the crater. I stumbled south toward Farragut Square and sat on the warm concrete in front of a darkened office building.
I held my head in my hands, looking down at nothing, trying to regain my equilibrium. My eyes strayed to my shoes, following the dusty contours and lighting upon a single drop of baked red blood. And then it all came back to me in a flash: pale afternoon light, heat shimmering on the pavement and me hurrying north on Connecticut, hearing the horrible screams, and then running around the corner into a pack of them. Cee Bees standing in a ring, bloodied boots and two women—one clearly dead, draped across the other woman’s lap like the Pieta—and the wailing, the unearthly, tragic voice that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
“Move along, faggot. Just a couple of Levitican offenders. Nothing to see here.”
“What’s going on?”
He looked at me in surprise and then he was right on top of me, grabbing my shoulder with one hand and slamming his fist into my midsection. I stumbled and there was a gunshot. The mournful wailing stopped and I saw the woman’s body flop backward, heard the dull impact of her head against asphalt, and then I felt something inside me burst. The Cee Bees started to surround me, moving in predatory circles. I felt nauseated, started to retch, but then, instead of throwing up, I felt heat and light exploding out of me. My body rose off the ground, spinning slowly, and then exploding like a supernova. Everything went white and the world switched off.
And then I woke up next to the crater in deafened silence.
Starbucks is crowded for a Thursday afternoon. The plate glass windows are vibrating from the sound of shelling north of the city where U.S. troops are pounding the suburbs around Friendship Heights and Chevy Chase with long-range, laser-guided British-built Bluebird warheads. It’s been a couple of days since the birds fell here in the District, but we can hear the constant rumbling thunder of Chinese-built J-10s flying low over the city, the red cross and white stars on a field of blue clearly visible from street level. We’ve grown so accustomed to the noise we rarely look up as our protectors shoot down Bluebirds or chase straying F-22 Raptors back into U.S. airspace.
Despite the intermittent bombing and our proximity to the front, the city seems unhurried, unruffled. The streets are crowded but not chaotic, and the first cold snap after a summer of record high temperatures has left me smiling and rejuvenated.
I know there are refugees fleeing the relentless advance of the U.S. Infantry, clogging the northern arteries in and out of the city, but they are being diverted to staging camps in Anacostia Park and for the moment we can forget the horror of their flight. The newscasters are upbeat and optimistic, assuring us that our good Christian brothers and sisters will be whisked south for new lives in Richmond or Norfolk. There’s one particular video that gets a lot of play featuring orderly processions of wealthy, well-dressed Christian Americans laughing and joking as they board luxury touring coaches.
On a day like today, I almost want to believe them.
But it’s hard to know what to believe. While the media paint pretty, reassuring pictures, the stories passed clandestinely lips to ears are horrific tales of butchery and barbarism. People can’t process it anymore. Or they look away, the conflicting narratives so muddied that nobody can successfully parse the twisted convergence of reality and propaganda.
The one truth we have all come to understand is that most of us are no safer here in the city of wolves than we would be at the front.
My teaching partner Sarah has a sister, Rebekah, who used to live in Somerset, Maryland. A couple of weeks ago, a squad of Cee Bees—members of the President’s elite Christian Brotherhood, charged with enforcing the Executive Orders known as the Levitican Code—arrived at her door in the middle of the night, dragging her and her girlfriend into the street in their nightgowns and lining them up with some of their neighbors. They stood in the street while a pair of crimson-uniformed Cee Bees patrolled the line, berating them for their sins against the Lord and then yanking people out of formation, seemingly at random, and beating them until they were bloody or unconscious. One of them grabbed Rebekah by the hair, calling her a “filthy dyke” and throwing her to the ground. He and his buddy stomped on her ribs and kicked her repeatedly in the face, neck and legs. She screamed and tried to crawl away, but eventually she let her instincts tuck her into a tight ball of blood and bruises and fear. Rebekah’s girlfriend, who had been restrained by a couple of her neighbors, finally broke free and launched herself at one of the Cee Bees, clawing at his eyes with her fingers. He grappled with her, wheeling in circles, his gruff laughter transforming into an angry snarl as her fingernails dug into the vitreous fluid of his eye. He finally shook her loose, throwing her to the ground and standing over her sobbing form. Tracks of blood slid down his face like demonic tears as he pulled his sidearm and slowly, methodically put four bullets through her head. Rebekah only survived because the other Cee Bee dragged his buddy away, telling him he needed to get to a hospital and they could come back and finish off the gender traitors later. Rebekah fled. Sarah’s been hiding her, sharing her rations and praying nobody thinks to come looking for her.
I order a coffee—black and bitter because I don’t have enough points on my ration card for sugar or cream—and find a seat near the window.
I glance up at the flat screen TV over the counter and watch a story that’s been unfolding over the past few hours. The terrorist insurgent known as “the Inheritor” caused an enormous explosion near the 19th Street entrance to the DuPont Metro station late yesterday afternoon. The explosion, which killed two dozen Cee Bee cadets conducting an anti-terrorism training operation in an adjacent office complex, left an enormous semi-spherical hole in the sidewalk, street, and surrounding buildings. Video footage of the scene shows rescue workers excavating the edges of the perfectly round crater, searching for survivors.
I can’t hear the voiceover, but the relentless crawl of words along the bottom of the screen tells the story: $10M reward for capture of the Inheritor. Yesterday’s death toll rises to 113. President Bush saddened by Wednesday’s losses, prays for families of the dead, vows swift vengeance. Eyewitnesses describe a booming voice sh
outing “The meek shall inherit.” This is the ninth bombing attributed to the Inheritor in the past year. The Inheritor’s official death toll reaches 1,206.
The scenes at the crater are replaced by footage of a slab of angry muscle in Cee Bee dress reds speaking from the sandbagged steps of the Capitol. Behind him a dozen Cee Bee foot soldiers stand at attention. He’s wearing the three gold crosses of a deacon—the equivalent of a colonel in the army—and he’s angry, fists pounding the podium, straight, blond hair flopping in his red face. There’s a quick jump cut, the volume ramps up, and the story wraps with a clip of Vigilance Roberts, the President’s Chief of Staff, also pounding on a podium—this time in the White House Press Room—and shouting. “The Bible tells us, ‘He will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries!’ And let me tell you something, gentlemen: His will shall be done!” His face is purple with rage; his eyes are wide, black, and glistening with lupine intensity. And then he is gone, replaced by a pair of vacuous studio anchors who banter about Metro Transit delays as a lead-in to an Old Navy commercial featuring boys in khakis and girls in cheery summer print dresses dancing to an old Carpenters song.
I sip coffee and open the binder in my lap. The title, printed neatly across the top of each page reads, Jericho and the Conquest of Canaan: Lessons for Twenty-First Century Statecraft. The text beneath the ludicrous title is a recent biography of Pier Paolo Pasolini e-published by Princeton University press and downloaded by a friend on a free-chip Blackberry. It’s on the proscribed list, of course, and grounds for immediate arrest, but it reminds me of my past and Pasolini’s angry politics suit my mood.
Long before the Wars I studied film at American University, earning a degree in Literature and Film Studies. My father liked to tell his cronies I’d earned my degree in Lies and Flim-flam Studies. There was only room in his life for one book, one set of stories. I went to A.U. to spite him, walking away from his money, and only managing to enroll and stay alive through the generosity of my indulgent, wealthy grandmother, Margeaux. She always loved me, rescuing me from my father’s house at least once a month after my mother died, whisking me away to the theater or to dinner or, more often, to the movies. She took an unseemly pleasure in thwarting my father’s wishes by taking me to movies my father warned his flock were the work of the devil’s own hands. She introduced me to Hitchcock, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Fellini, Cassavettes, Lynch—the more subversive the better. And when the time came, she rescued me from four years of puritanical religious indoctrination at my father’s alma mater, Liberty University, where I would have earned a degree in Biblical Studies, Church Ministries, or Apocalyptic Pre-History.
The Lavender Menace Page 5