Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  Octagon, unseen, said, “I am in charge.”

  Firehook, unseen, though I could feel his location from his radiating heat, said, “Maybe you being in charge, maybe that’s bullshit.”

  Then I heard Firehook scream. Why? How? I wanted to look. It would have been dumb to look, dumb to stand up and see what was happening, foolish to give myself away before I was completely returned to normal.

  I stood up.

  I’m called Reaver. Not Genius.

  “You kids arguing?” I asked. Octagon’s head snapped up. His face, behind the void of his mask, registered shock and confusion. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it in just the same way that I’d sensed Firehook’s heat.

  Octagon was holding what seemed to be a ball bearing to Firehook’s chest, maybe the same type of metal marble that he’d thrown at me during our rooftop chase. Firehook was unconscious, slumped over, fallen over backwards, supported only by Octagon’s hand in the middle of his back. It looked like a Virgin Mary painting. Or a romance novel cover.

  The man destined to be my arch-nemesis was staring at me.

  “You… lived?” Octagon said.

  “I did. I always will.” I tried to sound menacing. It worked. My throat was still raw from almost being melted away. But… I was back. I was whole again. I was exhausted, though… not having ever before known that healing took so much out of me. Too much healing could kill me. That was the first time I ever understood how that was true, and I was only a few minutes away from a refresher course.

  For then, though, for that moment, I was whole. Even my hair was pushing back out, returning to how it had been before Firehook’s attack. I felt a hand going through my hair and turned to find a woman there… the one who’d been talking by my side, and she was beautiful, some French-African mix, with full lips and small breasts and hair the color of my own, which she proved by holding handfuls of our hair together, comparing them, merging them.

  “God. You’re so beautiful,” she said. Her eyes traveled up and down the length of me, stopping here and there, always pleased. By then I was almost completely restored, with only a few spotted patches of the green glow remaining. Of course I was naked. My costume had been largely burnt away, and what hadn’t been incinerated had fallen away. I didn’t feel shy. I wasn’t in the mood for being shy. The woman’s voice had been nice. It had some music in it. Some primal melody from Africa, mixed with the sensuality of France. She even had some of her groin in her voice. I’m sure the meaning of that is clear.

  I pushed her over the arena’s edge and heard her scream for thirty feet of rapidly declining travel, then the scream was gone, abruptly cut off. Replaced by angry moans. Pained curses.

  I turned back to Octagon and he let Firehook fall to the steps. Firehook’s flames had been extinguished. He looked like any other normal douche that was about to have his head stomped on like a grape. I took a step forward.

  I suppose you note that I’d made a moral decision. It’s true. I had. There are people who I consider too dangerous to live, and I’ve always been a bit simplistic in my problem solving.

  “This night has not gone as I had planned?” Octagon said, making a question out of it from sheer disbelief. This changed my focus from Firehook (whose head was then only six feet away from a terminal date with the bottom of my boot) to him. This change of focus, this loss of concentration on the most important facets around me, wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done, and I should’ve learned my lesson when I’d been distracted earlier. But… I’d been burned before, and was about to get burned again.

  I told Octagon, “Your night is only going to get worse. But don’t worry… you’re about to get some time off.” It was the first time I’d ever uttered what is now my catchphrase, and it was only a fetal version of it. Octagon did nothing to acknowledge the perfection of my quip.

  He just said, “Stellar. Clean up this mess.”

  And then she had me from behind, her arms under mine, holding me, embracing me, flying upwards, crashing up through the arena, up through the subterranean passageways, up through the building, through a series of ceilings, again and again, then up above the city, high above the city, high above the clouds, high above the Earth, and finally into the fringes of space.

  ***

  Stellar’s first appearance took place on a rainy Saturday in March. She is a tall woman. Nordic in appearance. Short blonde hair. She has large enough breasts that they have their own fan club. I don’t mean that she has a fan club centered around her breasts; I mean that her breasts have an online fan club. The fact that this is true, this churning devotion combined with the type of criminal that Stellar is, says a lot about men. Mistress Mary once said as much to me in a superior way, as if it makes women better than men. I pointed out the multitude of websites devoted to Laser Beast. The wealth of Octagon-related erotic fan fiction. Macabre’s dalliances with movie star actresses. The amount of fan mail that serial killers receive in prison. Mary shut up.

  Stellar’s costume involves a cape and some of what most people would consider lingerie worn over a skintight black body suit. She has stars on a field of black. Her arms often glow with energy and I’m not sure I’ve even seen her on the ground. From certain angles it might seem like she was standing, but if you look close, there’s always an inch or two of separation.

  She came to us, as far as anyone knows, from the stars. Most scientists believe she’s from Earth, though. It’s just too much of a coincidence that she looks so human. Linguists have done endless studies on her vocal patterns, trying to find a dialect, but the electrical hum of her voice (it’s not robotic, just… charged with energy) and the fact that whenever she speaks, anywhere, at any time, everyone hears her voice in their own native tongue, makes assigning an origin impossible.

  She leaves no fingerprints, skin flakes, or secretions of any kind. There are theories that she is a tangible ghost. Those are up in the air. There are theories that she has no physical form. Those are false. I can well attest to her physical form.

  Stellar has never spoken of any incident, any memory, previous to her appearance on that rainy day in March when she landed in the streets of Creely, a small town in Australia, and demanded to be taken to Earth’s leader.

  An incident had ensued, building up from her being laughed at (“Take me to your leader” will get you that) and she soon lost her temper and tossed a car through a building. The laughter had stopped. By then I was already en route, notified by SRD, held in Warp’s arms as he raced across the Pacific, taking us to the scene.

  In the footage of Stellar’s first appearance, a man begins to shoot at her and, after some seconds (she didn’t seem to notice at first) she turns to him and tells him, “Jacob, do not shoot at me.” He must have wondered how she knew his name. This was, of course, before it was clear that she knows everyone’s name. Everyone.

  There was little more to the Creely incident. She fired a beam of energy from her eyes, obliterating a house (it had been abandoned anyway, as Creely was on the decline) and then asked each and everyone who had assembled (there were less than fifty) to let “the leader” know that she needed to talk. She called all of the witnesses by name.

  By the time Warp and I arrived there was nothing of Stellar left except a contrail, of sorts, from when she had gone back into the air, soared up past Earth’s atmosphere, peered in through a porthole of the space station for some moments (sending one astronaut into permanent counseling) and soon after landed on the moon. She stayed on the moon for several weeks, standing almost motionless, brought to focus in some of SRD’s most dramatic photography.

  She came back once during this time, hovering in downtown London and saying that she understood, now, that Earth has no leader, nor any laws that concerned her.

  Hundreds of her fan sites were already up by that point.

  ***

  And now Stellar had me in space.

  I’d like to talk about the majesty of the view, about how all of humanity’s v
arious incarnations seem meaningless when viewed from space, about how the boundless wealth of the open universe reduces a man to his humblest elements. I’d only like to talk about that. I can’t, though. Instead, I was fighting for breath, and knowing I was screwed, because I only had one ride home, and that was Stellar, and she was trying to kill me.

  “You are Steve Clarke,” she told me.

  “Yes,” I tried to say, but failed. Her voice worked in space. Mine didn’t. She plays by entirely different rules.

  “Octagon has been my friend,” she said.

  I was cold beyond imagining (weather rarely affects me) and scared out of my wits and trying to remember that it’s not proper to hit a woman. But if I had done so, at the moment when Stellar first grabbed me, if I had simply turned and struck her (three times faster than she might have expected) I might not have taken the ride up through the building, up through the clouds, and up past Earth’s universal fence line. The time for being a gentleman had passed, and the time had passed badly.

  I punched her. I put everything I had into it, and the blow rocked her. It nearly put her away. She gave me a look that clearly expressed how she couldn’t believe she had been hurt, how someone had possessed the muscle to knock her around. Her look was the second clearest expression of disbelief in the universe. Mine was first. Mine was first because the power of my blow had separated Stellar and I, and that separation had sent me aimlessly spinning back towards Earth, which was itself spinning below me. We were both spinning. The only one flying straight was Stellar, who zoomed along with me at my side, looking me in the face (she was just out of reach, and there was nothing I could do about it) and then turning and flying away.

  She said, “Have fun, Reaver.” Then she was gone.

  I began to enter an argumentative atmosphere.

  It didn’t want me around.

  It was burning me. Licking me with flames. Then whipping me with flames. My speed was faster and faster. I tried to surf against the resistance, slow myself down, and I was screaming and then I blacked out and lost some time (and about forty thousand feet of altitude during my blackout) and then I could see a forest below (it turned out to be in Virginia, a long ways from my French point of departure) and it came closer and closer and closer and then I crashed through a few branches, broke a few tree trunks, shattered most of my limbs, traumatized a good number of squirrels and embedded myself almost four feet into the soil of the Shenandoah National Park.

  There was blood dripping down onto me from the branches I’d crashed through.

  There was blood spreading out from me. Seeping into the loam.

  There was a good deal of forest silence. A hush.

  There were air force jets overhead.

  There was a dark and broken forest, suffused by a localized green glow.

  In three hours time, there was Paladin, at my side.

  The first time I’d seen him in months.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I spent the night in Adele’s house, not really having anywhere else to go. My parents’ house had long since been turned into a museum of sorts, a tribute residence to so many of my exploits. It was largely unchanged since the days when I’d lived there, except for one section that had been rebuilt (destroyed by the Nothing Really Anti-Matters terrorist organization before Checkmate had arranged the security measures) and a plethora of plaques (citing my achievements) and threadbare carpeting that had endured the footsteps of over a thousand visitors a week.

  I’d planned to stay in a hotel and watch some cheap horror movie or some such, but Adele talked me out of it by saying I could do that at her house, making me promise to stay down on the couch, and letting me know that Laura would probably still be walking around topless and, hell… that was something to see, wasn’t it? She gave me a look of whimsy, knowing that she’d trapped me because if I left after that it would have been an admission that Laura’s breasts weren’t beautiful, and that would have hurt her and besides I don’t like lying.

  We watched monster movies. Creatures of the deep that had arisen, angered over man’s interference in the silent depths. Abominations thawed from eons-old glaciers. Technologically advanced monsters from outer space that demanded minerals, obedience, mates. Adele and I were on the couch. There was a large throw pillow between us. Laura, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of us, constantly adjusting her glasses, would occasionally pull the pillow from between us, and then either Adele or I would wrest it from her and return it in place, staring at the television screen the whole time. It was a wonderful night for thinking of monsters.

  Laura (forced into wearing pajama tops) told Adele and I (as a wolf-creature was discarding a scream-laden carriage over the side of a mountain pass) that fear and lust were identical twins, and that if you wanted to make a good impression on a date, never go to a romantic movie. Always create an atmosphere of tension.

  “Tingles and shivers,” she said. “Gets ’em every time.”

  “Some people don’t need to get ’em every time,” Adele answered, reaching over her sister’s shoulders to button Laura’s pajamas, a job that well needed tending.

  “Some people are monsters, then,” Laura said. “That kind of celibacy terrifies me.” Turning to me, she said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Steve, but I want to ask a question of Reaver.”

  I said, “Okay. We’re more or less the same person, you know.”

  “Of course. But, I’m the same person too. Doesn’t mean I can’t be a different person at the same time.”

  Adele gaped in mock (well-practiced) astonishment at her sister and said, “We shouldn’t have had vodka and ice cream and popcorn. This was not a good idea.” She was holding out a vodka bottle (forbidden to drink any herself, and merely chaperoning it away from her sister and myself) that had a piece of popcorn perched at the top, threatening to tumble within.

  Ignoring her sister, Laura asked me, “This fear thing, Reaver… what scares you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Too personal?” Laura asked. “You can always tell me to shut up.”

  Adele said, “Laura, shut up.”

  “See?” her sister said. “Adele tells me to shut up all the time. Doesn’t hurt my feelings.”

  “Kid Crater,” I said. “That’s what scares me.”

  Both girls went silent. I knew that I’d been supposed to say things about idiosyncratic fears (such as ostriches, or clouds that look like clowns, or aggressively topless lesbian sisters) or the usual suspects (death, and those letters from the IRS) but I had leapt into the realm of the real, which isn’t something that most people see coming. The thing is, after Paladin had pulled me up from the Virginia forest, after he had held my broken form as he soared away into the clouds (giving me, then, shivering flashbacks, because my last trip through the clouds had been a round-trip excursion into space) and outraced fighter jets (piloted by sullen men whose favorite toy now looked to be outdated), he had sat with me for three weeks in a Minnesota cabin on one of that state’s famous ten thousand lakes, talking about our lives in the past (as Greg Barrows and Steve Clarke) and our current lives (as Paladin and Reaver) and we’d gone fishing and we’d gone bloodless hunting (merely touching a checklist of animals and birds on their rumps or tail feathers) and we’d discussed how to be heroes, how to best go about the task, and in the second week we’d met Kid Crater. I was the first to meet him. Paladin was holding a press conference at the time (he’d flown to Washington in order to allay any fears that he’d retired) and Kid Crater had discovered the Minnesota cabin and had walked in unannounced, finding me in the middle of the kitchen without any pants, checking on my healing process, me holding my balls to one side, inspecting them to see if there were any remaining hints of green. It had been embarrassing as all hell for both of us, but after he’d joined the team (it was never really a team) and after he became my unofficial sidekick (neither of us were fond of that word, but there it was) we would joke about me and my self-inspection, with hi
m singing a version of that old Jerry Lee Lewis song, except changing it to “Goodness Gracious! Green Balls of Fire!”

  “Green Balls of Fire?” Adele laughed. She was balancing popcorn on her nose.

  “Because I glow green when I…”

  “I got it. I got it,” she said.

  “Were they… okay?” Laura asked. “Machine still works?”

  “We’re getting sidetracked,” I said. “I meant to talk about the days before Kid Crater showed up. With me and Paladin and the monster movies. We watched a ton of them. Celluloid gems.”

  It was true. A thousand classics. A thousand monsters. And, I don’t know how the game began, but Paladin and I began discussing the movies… about how we would personally deal with each of the monsters, with each giant clawed hand that was wrapped around a fully-stocked family sedan, each vampire that had mesmerized a semi-compliant fraulein, each alien robot and its cosmically destructive capabilities. Paladin’s first stage was always trying to understand where things had gone off track, if there had been some miscommunication, some wrong that could be righted, some bit of folly that could be readdressed. I went right the hell past that stage. Things like that were something that could be considered once the beast had bled out.

  “These movies… they reminded you?” Adele asked. She was gesturing to the television. It was wall-mounted, sequestered among a group of paintings (Laura was quite possibly going to be a success as an artist, which clearly confused her) of monster movies with the principal characters reversed, so that a villager was terrifying groups of vampires, and a giant Tokyo businessman was breathing fire on a city populated by lizards. On the television screen right then was a slime creature advancing on an inattentive guard, sliding out from an air duct, which are always sources of terror and assault in the movies.