by Paul Tobin
Someone.
I froze into position, listening, feeling like the footsteps on the stairway had somehow meshed with my heartbeat.
Adele saw that I went white and tried to divine what was going through my head. It must have been hard for her. The Steve Clarke she’d known, the one she could predict, was years in the past, and had been human. I was something else. At least a little.
“Oh,” she said, fluttering, looking back to the stairway (it was in another room, so that when the footsteps ended their creator would soon appear in a living room filled with bright throw pillows, well-tended plants, a long slithering couch suitable for entertaining, etc.) and then to me, then back again, as if piecing together the puzzle of my sudden fear. She actually made it. Maybe she could still predict me. Maybe I was still Steve Clarke. Anyway, Adele understood.
“It’s just… no… it’s not anyone,” she said. Which was, of course, stupid. It was someone.
“I mean,” she said. “It’s… not.” She stared at me. Her lips were pursed. Her brow furrowed. Her fists shook. She looked like a little girl. Acted that way.
“Goddamn you, Steve Clarke,” she suddenly blurted. “I’m single!”
My heart felt like it ripped free. Shit… maybe it really had. I heal at a good rate. Maybe my heart had actually torn loose. Maybe it fell into my stomach. Doused itself in acid. It felt like it had. Maybe it had fallen away and a new heart had formed.
“That’s…” I said, starting to say something (god knows what… my tongue was another thing that felt like it had ripped free) but at that moment a person came around the corner of the living room, moved some hair out of her sleepy eyes, stretched (providing a nice view, because she was very pretty, and wearing sweat pants, and nothing else) and then flopped onto the long sinuous couch. The cat jumped up onto her lap and she began to pet it, scolding it for always being hungry.
She said, “Wiggles, if I fed you every time you begged, you’d be the fattest fucking cat in the history of…”
She looked up and saw me.
She was Adele’s sister, Laura.
Adele said, “Sis. We have company.” Laura gaped at me, then glanced all around the house, quickly, as if gauging if other visitors might be lurking.
Finally, returning her gaze to Adele (she was now avoiding looking at me) she said, “I… thought the voices were the tee-vee, but… they’re not.”
I said, “Hi, Laura.”
“Do I know you?” she asked, squinting. I leaned farther away from the table, letting her get a better look at me, wondering if she knew she was topless. She hadn’t done anything about it.
Adele said, “Laura… it’s…”
“Oh my fucking GOD!” Laura shouted. “Steve? You’re here? You came here? Are you two back together?”
“Sis!” Adele screamed. “What the fuck? Could you… not? We haven’t seen each other for years!”
“We’re not back together,” I said. It was what I thought Adele wanted me to say, but I caught a glance from her, and I could see that it had hurt her. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve seen men fly into space… I’ve seen a man survive an atom bomb… I’ve seen a woman walk through a wall like a ghost… I’ve seen Paladin heal wounds that were clearly fatal… I’ve seen buildings come alive at the whim of a mad magician… I’ve seen a man pick up a cement truck and beat another man to death with it… I’ve seen a woman bathing, happily, in a wall of lightning thicker than steel… but I’ve never seen anything as unexpected as the hurt in Adele’s eyes.
“Where’s my glasses? Where’s my glasses?” Laura screamed, scrambling up from the couch. The cat (Wiggles, apparently) clawed onto her sweat pants, surprised by the sudden tumult. She swept him away with a wave of her hand (he tumbled to the floor and then walked away, unperturbed, because cats are never perturbed) and she darted up the stairs, was gone only long enough for Adele (in the guise of the long-suffering sister) to shrug her shoulders at me, and then Laura sped back down the stairs wearing her glasses, though she was still topless.
“Steve!” she said. She nearly flew into the kitchen and she pulled me (I was frankly in a bit of shock) to a standing position, and she hugged me so tight that it nearly hurt, and I’m a man that can withstand some muscle.
“Laura,” Adele said, somehow magically combining a sigh with a shout. “Put. A. Shirt. On.”
“I should,” she answered. Her freckles had never faded. Nine years and they were standing strong. In fact, they’d spread onto her chest. All over her chest. Maybe they’d been there before, I guess… but I’d never had the pleasure of an introduction.
Laura sat at the table with us (still topless, but now moving the vase and its gladiolas in front of her) and looked me in my eyes, waving me closer, glancing to Adele in a furtive manner, as if we were about to share something she didn’t want her sister to hear.
“Get her to make you pancakes,” Laura said. “She makes them round. I mean, like, precision round. Also, she likes foreign movies. She hasn’t had a boyfriend for six years. Hasn’t gotten laid in seven.”
Adele said, “Holy fuck! What did you just tell him? Fuck!” She got up from the table, stalked to the fridge, grabbed a beer, looked at it, put it (unopened) in the sink and sat back down. Laura smiled at her.
Laura, putting her hand on my forearm, said, “She likes hiking. Hike with her. If you know anything… anything… in French, say it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a weather report. Oh… and romance novels make her horny.”
“Don’t tell him that!” Adele said. Wiggles, the cat, was on the kitchen’s boundary line, trying to decide if it should come closer. It sat, considering.
“She likes to go to live music, but, guess what? We live in Greenway. The pickings are lean. Of course, it’s bigger here, now. But… fuck all that… the people here aren’t musical. It’s not a music town. Take her out dancing in Bolton. Do that. Hey… do you dance three times faster?”
She turned to Adele and asked it again. “Sis. Does he dance three times faster?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. God, Laura, put a shirt on. Please? For me?”
“It doesn’t matter if Steve sees my tits,” Laura said. “For fuck’s sake, I’m a lesbian.”
“How does that make any difference?” Adele asked, and I did too, at the exact same time, and the cat came farther into the kitchen and I, against all expectations, was actually happy to be sitting in a kitchen in Greenway, Oregon.
Home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Octagon ran between the buildings. At rooftop level. Twenty stories above the street. As if there was some invisible pathway. I even put out a foot, testing the air as I was watching him dart across the open space between the buildings, but there wasn’t anything solid. Just… air. I wondered how he was doing it. Flying through the air is just flying, but running across the air is cheating.
He reached the opposite building and turned, apparently ready to gloat or taunt, but by that time I had moved back from the building’s edge, had built up some momentum, running as fast as I could, and I had leapt into space.
“Shit!” Octagon yelled, because I was an incoming mortar shell. I was a beautiful barrage. I was a meteor. A comet. A human bullet that was…
… not going to make it.
I fell short of my mark and crashed through the sliding glass door of a balcony one floor below, shattering the glass and sending it into a living room where Mark Blickens was having a threesome. I found out his name later and sent him a card in apology. I didn’t catch his name right then because I was busily tumbling across his floor, smashing through a small bookshelf (it had a collection of framed mini-paintings of characters from cereal boxes) and a guitar stand and then into the back of the couch with enough of an impact that a blonde woman (god, she was pretty) went flying from between the legs of another woman and crashed into Mark’s own legs. He’d been standing only a few feet off, naked, ithyphallic as can ever be, filming the event on his cell phone.
Some of
you have probably seen the footage online.
If so, you’ve seen me stand up and say, “Fuck! Sorry! I… holy shit. Oh, Christ, I really am sorry!” You’ve seen me look at the brunette on the couch long enough to ascertain that her bondage was consensual, and then you’ve seen me get the hell out of there, repeating sorry again and again.
But you haven’t seen me, on the balcony, leap up onto the roof. Octagon was running away by then, but I’m three times faster than him, and though he had a good lead I was quickly closing the gap, darting past lawn chairs on the rooftops, past coolers that had been strewn about, past all the empty beer cans, a bong that had been placed atop an old packing crate, ducking clotheslines (Octagon ran straight into one of them, and the towels and the line itself burst into flames, for some reason) and leaping over alleyways, hoping that Octagon wouldn’t run out into space again, eventually wrenching a brick from a stray pile (workman had been repairing a chimney) and thinking about throwing it at him, thinking about my days in Little League, about my work as a first baseman, about how Greg had been a pitcher, about how he’d thrown that baseball through a tire swing for hours on end, hardly ever missing, and I knew that he’d be able to peg Octagon with a brick, easy, even on the run. But at the time he was battling Tempest (this was, for those who are constructing timelines, during her waveringly successful attempt to install herself as a goddess in Ecuador) and I was six thousand miles away in Marseille, trying to capture a madman.
I threw the brick at his back.
But he ducked as it came closer, as if he had eyes on the back of his head. He doesn’t, as far as I know, but I’ve noted that he often knows what’s happening all around him, anywhere, in a 360 circle, so there’s something strange going on.
Anyway, the brick missed him and scuffed off the top of the roof and then went over the edge. I stopped pursuit long enough to glance to the street (my nuts tightened, as I could just picture the brick zeroing in on some baby carriage) and watched the brick smash into the sidewalk next to some late-night revelers, who shouted in surprise and then held three wine bottles high, giving the fragmented brick a hearty round of hurrahs, celebrating it in some way that could only make sense to a drunk.
And then I was after Octagon again.
I’d trailed him for over a week, using SRD surveillance and tracking reports, always a step behind, spending my time in Kinshasa, Muscat, Pondicherry, Banda Aceh, Topeka, Sioux Falls, and then Marseille. Octagon had involved himself in a myriad of activities in these places, encompassing a wide swath of morality. He’d sold illegal weaponry (even some black market knockoffs from Checkmate’s original designs, which Paladin and I later recovered) and he’d tried to install a dictator and he’d eliminated a slavery ring and he’d provided aid and comfort in the aftermath of a tsunami. He’d slept with, as far as I could tell, every pretty woman in all of the cities, and there were rumors that he’d skipped across the gender lines on a couple of instances. There were certainly a few willing men waiting with their toes on that line. More than a few. This was still a couple years before his rumored affair with Tattoo (obviously, since Tattoo disappeared during the time of their rumored liaisons, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since) and it was still almost three years before he and Siren were shacking up together, whenever she wasn’t shacking up (ahem) somewhere else.
I should have been noticing where I was going, of course. Octagon is a criminal mastermind, and while it’s easy to be called a criminal, it takes some effort and planning to be called a mastermind, and Octagon’s name is forever linked with the word. He looked back to me, saw that I was catching up, swore, and pulled something from that damn void of his costume, a small metal ball that he tossed over his shoulder in my direction.
It landed near me. It didn’t roll the way that it should have. Just… landed. Stayed put. I frantically ducked and twisted and did all sorts of things, wondering what the hell was about to happen, wondering what fiendish mechanism the son-of-a-bitch had unleashed on me. I even thought about leaping over the edge of the roof, taking my chances on the fall (I wasn’t, then, aware of how durable I really am) or maybe tearing a hole into the rooftop and dropping down below. A few seconds passed, me caught in place, staring at that big metal marble, before I realized it wasn’t going to do anything. Anything at all. By then, Octagon was four rooftops over, going through a doorway that led down into the building, which was a church of some kind.
I raced across a rooftop, leapt across an alleyway, did that again, and again, and hurled myself onto the church, smashing through a stained glass window depicting a shepherd. I admit that I did that on purpose. My powers were still relatively new and I was still full of myself, fucking thrilled to be in costume, leaning towards anything dramatic, and my ego-cock and my real cock were both as hard as they could be.
“Jesus!” Octagon yelled as I came smashing through, sending stained glass fragments into the darkness, over the walkway, down onto the pews of the darkened church, several stories below.
“Not Jesus,” I said. “It’s Reaver.” I couldn’t resist.
Octagon was running along a circular balcony that looked down upon the church’s worship area, forty feet below. He gauged the distance between us, gauged how long it would take me to recover from my entrance (I was slipping on glass fragments) and calculated that I’d have my hands on his ass in about two seconds if he kept running along the walkway. So he jumped.
I jumped, too.
But he’d jumped before I did, and I don’t fall three times faster than a man, so he hit the ground first, landing lightly on the back of a pew, and so softly that it was left undisturbed. He started to run towards the front of the church and then I hit ground floor as well, smashing into a pew and crushing it, snapping it in half, sending wooden fragments and prayer booklets scattering about.
“Freeze!” I yelled out, angrily watching the bastard leaving me behind again, and not having anything more quip-like to yell. Octagon didn’t freeze. Instead, he moved a device on the wall (I couldn’t see what he’d moved, or what button he’d pressed) and then a section of the wall moved slightly outwards, a secret door in a church (I loved that… I truly did) and he slipped through and disappeared down some stone steps before I could reach him.
The doorway slid shut.
I fumbled for some seconds, with the wall, pressing my hands here and there, trying to trigger whatever mechanism Octagon had engaged. There didn’t seem to be anything. No torch sconces. No statues. No buttons. No nothing of any kind. Just a blank wall. It took me almost a minute of fumbling, of being intricately aware of how Octagon was getting away (and childishly aware that Mistress Mary would scold me for letting him escape, and even more annoyed that Paladin would forgive me for the mistake) and then I suddenly realized that I wasn’t a police officer or a detective looking for the hidden switch… no… I was Reaver. A superhero.
So I tore the wall down, plunging my hands into the wood (which was lined by thick steel on the opposite side) and wrenching it from the wall. A whole section came loose and I tossed it aside (more property damage, and in a church, forgive me) and then I was running down several flights of stairs that seemed to have been erected by an architect who specialized in monster movies from the 1940’s, or cautionary tales from the 1640’s.
I’m not sure how many steps I went down. It seemed like thousands, but might only have been hundreds. I’m not sure how many decisions I had to make. There was always another offshoot, other stairway to take, corridors that branched off, sets of open doorways with nothing but darkness in some, torches in others, electric lights in a few, and a couple of them lit by what seemed to be luminous lichens. Always, though, there was the sound of footsteps, or the click of a latch, a hushed exhalation of breath or a soft moan of pain, that made the decision for me. In time, I met the end of a hallway, or the seeming end of a hallway, but there was an illumination coming from behind the stones (the walls had been steel at times, or glass, or wood, or rough stone, or bare earth
, or finely cut marble) in the outline of a door, suggesting the stones were false, or could at least be moved aside, and I moved them aside by the simple expedient of running into them at full speed with a lowered shoulder.
They were harder than I would have expected. Maybe only four men (and two women) on Earth could have burst them asunder in the way that I did. My shoulder hurt for a couple seconds, then quit that shit, healing already, and I found myself in a large circular room that had all the trappings of a modern arena, and of course that’s just what it was.
Three levels above me, on a circular observation balcony, were crowds of people in seats. How many of them? Hundreds. Most of them were in the dark, impossible to see with the background glare of the floodlights. A few, though, were in positions of prominence… seated in places where they could be seen, and recognized. I quickly spotted, for instance, Laser Beast and Firehook, and Stellar was there as well, the first time I’d seen her in person.
And of course there was Octagon, up above, in a throne fit for the gaudiest and least color-coordinated of kings, and he waved down at me like an old friend and said, “At last. At last. We were getting restless. But you’re here, and I’m pleased, and we’ll make a night of this meeting, and, Reaver, Steven Thaddeus Clark, I bid you welcome to my octagon.”
The surrounding doors opened and the rats came inside.
***
Adele hated rats. I just wanted to throw that in here. It’s not by any means a startling revelation. Most girls hate rats. Most people hate rats. There are those who keep rats as pets, and they say they’re very loving animals, and these people (the rat-owners) claim themselves as rat-lovers, but it’s a very different thing, a pet rat and a wild rat. Nobody loves wild rats. I’m talking about the mangy-yellow-toothed-gnaw-on-you-alive-or-dead type of rat. Nobody loves them. Adele and I had seen them twice. Once while biking into the quarry on what amounted to our fifth date. And once when we snuck down into the basement of Bolton High School in order to see what she looked like with her shirt off. A rat had then come out from behind a custodial cart and raced across the floor, making that noise that only the hated rats make. You never hear that noise from the pet rats. Maybe they can actually make the sound, but are smart enough not to do it, because then they’d be out on the street.
