by Paul Tobin
“They did remind me,” I told Adele. “Paladin always thought the monsters were just… misplaced. Considering the way Earth has treated us,” here I gestured to myself, and tried to go speedily on, realizing I’d somehow separated myself from Earth as a whole, “he felt that if people just accepted the monsters, they could fit into society.”
“What societal role would King Kong play?” Adele asked, protecting the vodka bottle from her sister.
“Center for the Knicks,” Laura said. “Or… some sort of athlete, anyway. Maybe a soccer goalie? Hard to score on King Kong.” She stopped, a wicked smile teleported into place and her eyes lit up, but before Laura could say anything, Adele, the love of my life, cut in with, “Laura… please don’t tell any jokes about scoring on King Kong. Steve is trying to be serious.”
“I’m not trying to be serious. I just am.”
“We could help with that,” Laura said. “I’m an artist and Adele is stupid, so neither one of us is serious. We could teach you of our ways.”
I said, “Did either of you know that Greg Barrows was Paladin?”
I suppose I should have had a segue. Some sort of transition. But the question popped into my head and I wanted to know.
The room went silent except for the purring of Wiggles, the cat, on the couch next to Adele, and the screaming of the television guard as the slime cascaded down from the air duct and burnt him to the bone.
***
The car was on fire. At some point, it had exploded, and had done so with a noise like the entire Earth had been shoved into my ear. Officer Horwitz had been torn almost in half and my hand was in his stomach. I could feel the warmth of it as I planted my hand, trying to gain my feet. When I understood where my hand was, understood what had happened, his stomach and intestines felt ten times warmer than the flames.
I had been thrown from the car by the collision with the tanker truck, was resting partially in the ditch, somewhat on the road. Greg was staggering around, going nowhere, covered in blood, missing an arm. Tom, of course, was already gone.
The tanker had split open, spilled its contents. About two thousand gallons. The ditch had flooded with an incredible array of foul-smelling liquids, many of them trying to mix, and most of them not willing to do it. They skimmed over each other, sank within each other, separated like boys and girls at the start of a dance. My legs were within the chemicals. And they were chemicals. Not just liquids. They’d been separated in the tanker truck, compartmentalized, but a fault line had run its course through the tanker, and the mingling had begun. There was embryonic fluid (from sperm whales, I’ve been told) and an array of stem cell solutions (chiefly human, but other species as well, including one batch from a resurrected Tasmanian tiger, and a full array of sea life) and the whole mess was radioactive, a tanker full of chemical hell that had been bound for Nevada disposal, having been born/concocted/bombarded in the solution tanks of SRD. They’d been trying to induce mice to regrow their tails/teeth/eyes/sperm count/youth/and maybe a hundred other things.
Back at the SRD base was the first of the Supers. They weren’t human. They were rats and mice and, poetically, butterflies. A lot of people don’t know that a butterfly’s wings are entirely made of protein. When they become damaged, the butterfly looks at its wing and it screams, “FUCK!” It might say it in some lyrical butterfly language… but that’s what it means. Because a butterfly can’t regrow its wings. It can’t even heal its wings in any manner whatsoever. Butterflies look fragile because they are fragile. But a mile away, hidden beneath the supposedly long-shuttered Wennes airport, was a small SRD laboratory environment (flowers, a petite pond, heightened oxygen, a shitload of sensors) full of super-butterflies, which sounds far more appetizing than the super-rats or the super-mice and of course the super-cockroaches, including one the size of a bus that I hope never gets loose, because I just know I’ll be the one that has to fight the disgusting thing.
The tanker had rolled over. The driver (his name was Zach Chu, an aspiring retiree) had been partially thrown from the cab, which had rolled over him once or twice. Once had been enough.
Tom’s scream was still in the air. It wasn’t echoing. It was… heavy. Lingering. Like an audible fog that had gathered around the crash site.
The shotgun from Horwitz’s squad car was on the road ten feet from me. I began crawling for it, heaving myself out of the muck of the ditch, believing that if I could reach the shotgun I could make everything better. I’m aware that this makes no sense. I was not aware of it at the time.
Greg fell into the flooded ditch beside me. Just… toppled and fell in. I watched him go under. Watched the heavy liquid seal the breach. I was aware that he would drown. I was panicked and knew that I needed to do something about it. The shotgun. The shotgun would solve it all.
There were fires. There were sirens. There was a scent that it is not within me to describe. There was the sound of rotors. Of screeching tires. Of machines spraying foam all about the crash site… with a shoop shoop shoop chant. There were an array of men in yellow suits, fully encased, like bright yellow ill-fitting anthropomorphic condoms, moving among us, scooping remains into bags, taking the shotgun (NO!) away from me and holding me down, shining lights into my eyes, a breathing tube down my throat, hoses washing away my blood in a trough made of what, at the time, seemed to be sturdy garbage bags.
“This one’s alive!” an electronic voice, emerging from within a yellow condom, said to everyone in the area. Other living condoms gathered around me, touching, prodding, looking into my eyes, slapping my cheeks, screaming, “Stay with us! Stay here, cowboy!”
I thought of Greg Barrows. We’d never pretended to be cowboys. It was always pirates. Gods. Gladiators. I began to feel sleepy. More slaps on my cheeks. More demands and admonitions to “Stay here, cowboy! C’mon, you bastard! Stay here!”
The lights were in my eyes. The slaps were on my cheeks. The tube was going farther and farther down my throat.
And Paladin came out from the ditch.
***
“Paladin was Greg Barrows?” Adele asked. “I thought he died in the accident. There was… there was a body, right?” On the television, a scaled creature was rising from the ocean’s depths. Two girls on the beach, wearing bikinis, rubbing lotion on their arms, looked up and screamed. Then they were washed away in a burst of atomic fire from the creature’s eyes. Greg and I had watched the same movie. He’d joked that the girls should have used a higher SPF level of sun tan lotion. Then he’d felt bad about saying such a thing.
“The body was a plant,” I said. “They wanted to keep Greg’s identity secret. He did, too. The corpse was a boy from Michigan. That’s all I know about him. They had him on ice. An experimental cadaver.”
Adele said, “An experimental cadaver.” She made it sound like a horrible thing. I suppose it is. Worthy of its own monster movie.
“A boy from Michigan,” Laura said. She frowned. I knew what she meant. Not much of a memorial.
I said, “Greg came out of the ditch with all his powers already in place. He was screaming, and alive. His arm was back. I thought I was hallucinating. He already had the shimmer.” Most people know of the shimmer around Paladin. It wasn’t a force field, like a lot of people think; it was just some sort of… non-stick surface. Nothing could touch him. I mean, almost anything could touch him, but it would then just slide away.
“What did… how…?” Adele asked. She shook her head. I understood her confusion. Hell... I’d been that confusion.
“They had coil guns,” I said. “They brought coil guns to the accident scene. Checkmate wasn’t with SRD at the time, but they’d hired him to design the guns. They needed him because… there was a cockroach problem.” The sisters didn’t know about the giant cockroach in the SRD sub-levels. I waited for them to ask what I meant, but they didn’t. I suppose finding out that one of your childhood friends hadn’t died in an accident, the way you’d been told, that he’d become Paladin, that he’d die
d the way Paladin died, meant that talking about cockroaches was something that could wait.
I said, “Everything from the ditch just… shimmered away from him, and Greg was hovering in the air, naked. I really did think I was hallucinating. I think everybody thought they were hallucinating. But… hallucinating or not, a soldier is trained to fire on what they don’t understand, to react first and decide later, and that’s what they did.”
“There were soldiers?” Adele asked. I nodded. At the time I’d thought that all of the men in their hazard suits were emergency personnel, medics, scientists, that sort of thing. But when Paladin (he was still only Greg, I suppose, though the point could be argued) rose up out of the ditch I found out that some of the others were soldiers. Some of them had the coil guns… weapons that emit solid strands of electricity (the science of this has been explained to me, and it hurt my head, and I honestly chose to forget the specifics in regards to my sanity) that come out from the gun in a coiled helix pattern, wrapping around their targets, holding them like the world’s strongest rope that just happens to be emitting enough electricity to stun a belligerent mastodon.
One soldier had fired on Greg, wrapping him within the coils, then pulling him away from the ditch. I don’t think Greg had noticed it yet. Then another soldier fired. And another, and another, and they were yelling in fear that he wasn’t going down and I was ripping the breathing tube from my mouth. I staggered to my feet and began tossing the men around, tearing open their suits and darting among them, trying to reach Greg and feeling… charged… and a soldier fired on me with a coil gun and it hurt. It hurt so bad.
Then Paladin landed next to me. I’ve been confused here… not really sure what to call the man who came out of the ditch… not sure if he was Greg Barrows or Paladin. This I do know, though… the man who landed next to me, by that time he was Paladin.
He was wrapped in so many of the coil gun emissions that he looked like the offspring of a mummy and a star. His hand came out and he touched me and all my pain went away. It was the most peaceful thing I’d ever felt. It was a non-sexual orgasm. A full focus of my being.
I said, “Greg? Did we crash?”
And then I passed out.
***
“Greg Barrows. Paladin,” Adele said. She was putting popcorn into her mouth but forgetting to chew. Just… putting pieces into her mouth. Like a chipmunk storing food in its cheeks.
“Somebody needs to tell his parents,” Laura said. “They have a right to know.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I answered. “There’s nobody that should tell them except me.”
“That’s why you came back?” Adele asked. She was chewing. The words were garbled. Her eyes were clear.
“One of the main reasons,” I said. “It’s… complicated. There are a lot of things I need to do, and I need to do them pretty soon.”
“You went to the hospital,” Adele said. “Back then. You went to the hospital.” She didn’t seem to be talking to me. Just about me. She was still chewing. I’m not sure there was any popcorn in her mouth anymore.
“What else are you going to do?” Laura said, and then before I could answer she stood. She glared at me. She looked down at herself and made sure that her pajama tops were buttoned. That’s how I knew she was serious. Women have a certain look they give when a man is either in trouble, or is about to be told to change course. Laura Layton had the look. She had my hand in hers. She led me away from Adele, who was watching us, wondering what Laura was doing, who was standing up from the couch to come along with us, was sitting back down when her sister held up her hand and told her to stay.
Laura took me to the stairs. We went up them, making the same sorts of footsteps as when I’d been in the kitchen, when she’d been walking down the stairs, when I’d been afraid she was a man who was coming down from Adele’s bed. It hurt to even think about such things. I retreated away from the thoughts and delved into the confusion of what Laura was doing. I wondered if she was seducing me… if she was taking me up to her room. There were framed paintings on the stairwell. Small originals. Small oil paintings of various monsters wearing glasses. More of Laura’s work. She was a lesbian. She was Adele’s sister. She couldn’t possibly be taking me up the stairs to seduce me. Her face was angry, but that meant nothing. Anger is one of sex’s best friends.
When we reached the top of the stairs she turned to me and asked, “What else are you going to do? Why else did you come to Greenway? You’re going to talk to Greg’s parents, right? You’re going to tell them about Paladin? Who else are you going to talk to? What else are you going to tell someone?” It all came out of her in a whisper that seemed loud, because she was closer and closer to my face. She wasn’t whispering into my ear. It was straight into my face.
I said, “I…”
That’s all I could say before Laura said, “Don’t be a shit, Reaver. My sister loves you.”
I almost fell down the stairs.
***
After the accident with the tanker truck, I woke up in the Bolton hospital with an armed guard in riot gear next to my bed. There was a petite brunette wearing a red body suit bending over me, looking me in the eyes. She didn’t look like a nurse, a doctor, an orderly, or a guard of any type. She looked like the front page of a fetish website.
She said, “My name is Mary. You are awake.” She didn’t make it sound like a question. She made it sound like an order.
“Greg?” I asked.
“Elsewhere. He is fine. The truth of this is a secret. You will not tell anyone else. You will tell me how you feel.”
“Groggy. But… good. We crashed?”
“You did,” she said. “There was a tanker truck. I’m afraid the driver passed away. As did the policeman. You were bathed in certain chemicals. I can provide you with a list, if you wish.”
“Why would I want that?” She nodded at me as if I had said something very smart (making me shine with pride, because I wanted very much to please her) and then she tensed when I moved the blankets away from my legs and sat up on the bed. The guard was armed with something that looked like it had been designed for a 1950’s science fiction movie. He trained it on me.
“Are you attacking?” Mary asked.
“Attacking?” I said.
“He is not attacking,” she told the guard. “You will resume your post outside the room.” He left immediately, nodding, backing away, like a child being excused from adult proceedings, or perhaps the other way around.
“Your muscles may be stiff,” Mary told me as I stood.
“No,” I said. I wasn’t stiff at all. It felt like… it felt better than it ever had. My muscles didn’t feel like muscles; they felt like potential.
“Odd,” she said. “You will tell me again how you feel.” She reached out and touched my arm. She felt warm. More than that… she felt like… she felt alive. My senses were shining on overload. Everything was information. Everything was accessible. I felt like I was being given secrets.
“I feel like seeing you naked,” I said, not believing that it came from my mouth. It hadn’t at all blurted out. It had been pulled. This was the first time that I’d ever met Mistress Mary (and I didn’t, at the time, know that I was meeting her) and I had no idea how her powers worked.
Instead of looking shocked, or amused, or anything else at all, she completely ignored the content of my words and said, “No. Physically. You will tell me how you feel. You will tell me what you remember from the crash. You will do this.”
I did.
***
Mary asked if I’d been sleeping the whole time. If I’d had any dreams. This is the question where it all began to go wrong.
I said, “Nothing. And what do you mean about the whole time? How long have I been out? Just… a day, right? A few hours?” I could already see in her eyes that I’d been out for longer than a few hours, or even a day.
“The accident was one month ago,” she said. “I can understand if you…” I wasn’t
listening to her anymore. I was grabbing the television remote from the visitor’s chair (noticing some flowers on the table, curious about the card) and flicking on the television, turning to a news channel, not paying any attention to the story the newscasters were discussing (for the record, they were debating if Warp had done the right thing in the Livington Serial Killer case) and only keying in on the date stamp that was running along below.
A month had gone by.
I was a month in the future.
Like magic.
“Calm down,” Mary said.
“A month?” I said. “Where’s Tom? Where’s my brother?” I was shouting.
“You will calm down,” Mary said.
“What happened to me?” I asked. “What’s going on? Who are you people? Where’s my goddamn brother? Why do I have a guard? Why is there an armed guard?” I was not calming down. I could see a crease of worry on Mary’s face.
“You will calm down,” she said. Much louder, this time. It was the first time she’d raised her voice. The armed guard came running back into the room and trained his weapon on me. It irritated me. I went to move the gun aside, but I moved faster than I’d expected. Three times faster. Stumbling with my unexpected speed, I ran into his gun, knocking him aside. He thudded heavily into the wall and I scrambled back to my feet, having myself fallen over a tray cart. Syringes were all over the floor. Mary was reaching for one. I kicked them quickly aside. Too quickly. I fell again. I was aware that things, the other things, were not happening slowly. It was me. I was faster. Something about me had changed. I remembered Warp, and the way the world had become after he appeared, and I remembered Greg coming up from the ditch and I realized I hadn’t been hallucinating. After the accident, something had happened to Greg. Something had changed him. And me too. Something had changed me.
The guard on the floor was dazed, but talking into a headpiece, chanting, “Scramble! Scramble! Subject out of control! Scramble! Scramble! Scramble!”
