Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  Mary told me, “You will stay!” and it wasn’t until then that I realized I was moving towards the door… that I’d decided to leave. I wrenched the door completely away from its hinges, not yet adjusted to my strength. Mary jumped on me from behind, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. She slammed a syringe into my shoulder. It didn’t penetrate. Just snapped off. She cursed and began yelling for me to stay but I shrugged her away (I did this very carefully… even then… as I was beginning to understand that I now lived in a world of extremely fragile creatures) and then I was in the hallway, where several police officers and several soldiers (Fuck! Soldiers?) were running down the hall from both directions. The original guard was at my feet, trying to tackle me, to pin my legs together so that I couldn’t run. I swung my leg in a quick arc and he skidded away down the hall, bowling over the oncoming guards.

  “Who the fuck are you guys?” I screamed, but even then I was wondering the opposite, was wondering who the fuck I was, because every motion was amplified, everyone else was moving with body language that suggested great speed, fluid movements, but they were so slow… so unbelievably slow… and I ran past them, meaning to leap over the last two men as they sprawled to the hospital corridor floor, but my leap took me higher than I’d expected, so that I gouged along the ceiling and fell tumbling near an elevator. I stabbed at the elevator button with one hand, still on my knees, watching Mary come out of the room I’d been in. She was yelling orders and she was being obeyed. She was telling the others that they were on their own… that they would need to deal with me, that I wasn’t responding to her. She sounded frantic about this. And confused. And pleased.

  What the fuck was I doing trying to take the elevator?

  That thought suddenly occurred to me. The men were slow, but the elevator wasn’t a goddamn vertical bullet train or anything, and weapons were raising up to point at me and Mary was yelling for people not to fire and I was turning to head for the stairway (Where the hell was it? Why aren’t these things MARKED better?) when the first shots went off (the triggers had been pulled before Mary spoke) and a spray of bullets notched divots into the concrete walls and tore holes in my hospital gown.

  I barely felt them.

  “What the hell am I?” I screamed down the hallway at them. “What the fuck happened to me?”

  Patients were being moved from the floor, hurriedly evacuated. Doctors and nurses were running about in the slow motion that people have been stuck in, for me, since that day.

  I could see past them.

  All the way down to the end of the hall.

  It was about a hundred feet distant.

  A long hall with a window at the end.

  Mary began to say something, maybe to talk about what had happened to me, maybe to order me to calm down again, or maybe anything. She told me later that she was confused. She hadn’t been confused for a long time. She said it made her feel human. Challenged. She said it made her feel horny as hell. It was years after the hospital incident that she said all of this, and we were walking past the Eiffel Tower and she took my hand and put it on her hip… and then moved it, some, until it was not proper, at all, for me to be touching her there. We hadn’t stopped. Soon I was stripping her somewhat naked, and doing things about it. She’d called my name a few times (meaning Reaver, not Steve Clarke) but mostly she had been screaming, “Do not look! Nobody look! Nobody but Reaver can look! Nobody will look,” and so of course nobody did.

  But that was years after.

  Right then, in the hallway, I was only sixteen years old and I was scared and I knew that everything was different. And then I watched the window at the end of the hallway explode inward, and there was Greg Barrows flying down the hall, moving at speeds greater than mankind’s, moving at speeds equal to my own, and he was in a costume.

  You all know Paladin’s costume.

  The cape. The boots and gloves. The orange colors that would have looked silly on any man but Paladin. The emblem of the sword on his chest. The radiant sun behind it. I once told him that he looked like a gay templar. He had laughed and then flipped me, as far as I knew, the first legitimately super finger in the history of the world.

  In the hospital hallway, though, all I knew was that he was in costume, and that he seemed, then, to be fighting for the wrong team.

  He flew into me at full speed and we smashed back through the elevator door, tumbled some twenty feet down the shaft and onto the top of the oncoming elevator, and then he put his hand on my chest and pinned me against the wall, both of us rising slowly along with the elevator. He was staring me in the face with those famous eyes. That famous nose, twisted only slightly to one side. Paladin’s face. We all know it.

  He said, “Steve. It’s me. It’s Greg. You finally woke up.”

  And then he hugged me.

  The elevator climbed steadily upward, rising to the floor where we’d been, called by my finger on the button at a time that was only seconds in the past. When we arrived, we did so with a horrible screeching, as the elevator cried out in protest against the twisted metal of the ruined door.

  It reminded me of our car accident.

  ***

  “Booty call,” Laura said into her cell phone.

  She listened for a bit, winking at Adele, nodding to me, and then said, “Lube it,” and then hung up her phone.

  “I’m gone,” she said, stowing the phone in her purse. “You kids can be alone now.”

  “Not you, apparently,” Adele answered.

  “At all,” Laura said. “Booty call is… she’s nice. Works at the grocery. A stock girl. Apple.”

  I said, “She stocks apples? Isn’t that kind of a… way over-specialized job?”

  “Her name is Apple. Or… actually it’s Ming, but we call her Apple. We’ve been seeing each other. Off and on, at least. She travels a lot, but tonight she’s home and I’m going to travel into her bed.”

  “Do you know you’re a slut?” Adele asked in the pleasant voice of siblings insulting each other. It made me miss Tom. A lot.

  “At least I get laid,” Laura said. And then she was out the door. She had never bothered to change from her pajamas, but I guess there was little point in taking the time.

  That left me alone with Adele, all except for Wiggles, but the cat most likely didn’t count, especially since Genus was in Africa, fighting against poachers, meaning the only (known) person in the world who could talk to animals was thousands of miles away.

  Adele asked, “How long are you going to be in Greenway? You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want. Okay… that came out too forward. But… you know what, that’s okay. I’m forward.”

  “You made me promise to sleep on the couch.”

  “Fuck that. You’re a superhero. You’re Reaver. You can break through walls. You can’t break through a promise?”

  “No.”

  “Then I could stay on the couch, too. I have a big couch. Did you notice how big the couch is?”

  I said, “Did you send Laura away?”

  “We’re sisters. We have mind reading. Not…” she waved her hand, flustered. “Not super-mind-reading. Damn… this is so hard. You’re not even…”

  Out of nowhere, she started to cry. Well, I suppose it was out of somewhere. I just didn’t know where, or at least didn’t understand all the complexities involved. I tried to think of something to say… something to do… some solution I could present. I would rather have been punching walls. I would rather have been fighting Octagon. Maybe even Stellar, or Firehook. Hell… even though he was my nemesis, Octagon was the nicest one of the bunch. The others…? Well, I suppose it goes without saying that super-villains are evil, but… damn.

  Anyway, I would have rather have been fighting any of them, instead of fighting a complete inability to do anything about a woman crying. About Adele crying.

  “Stay on the fucking couch, then,” she said. And she went up the stairs. I listened to her movements, the creaking boards on
the stairs, and then on the floor above. There was the sound of something being slammed against the floor. Apparently, it wasn’t slammed hard enough the first time, because it sounded again, shortly after. I heard a shower running. I heard Adele come part way down the stairs. A minute passed. She went back up the stairs. I heard her making a phone call… talking with someone… laughing twice. It was good to hear her laugh. It was a relief. I stretched out on the couch after picking through a bookcase with books on nursery rhymes and several treatises on how the Greek gods were similar to Paladin, and to me, and to all of the others of my kind. I’ve seen several books of the type and had refused (of course) several interviews on the topic. Paladin always gets to be Zeus. I’m often Charon. He’s always shining. I’m always a cautionary tale. One of the books listed Adele as a co-author. I thought about picking it up. Did. Her picture was on the back. Her hair was different. It felt like an intrusion to see her that way, at a time when I was avoiding her and her life, so I put the book back on the shelf, noticing, as I did, other books with her name on the spine and pictures of super humans on the cover. There was “Reaver: One Year at a Time” and there was “Molten: Paladin and Reaver’s Last Great Day” and there was “Warp Speed: The Trial of the World’s Fastest Man” and a few others as well. I touched a couple of their spines, fooling my fingers into thinking I was going to pick one of them up, but eventually grabbed a book about Germany’s lack of morals during the Weimar period, profusely illustrated with pictures of women (and men) who were draped in smiles and little else. Having a lack of morals looked like fun. I wondered if it was Adele’s book. It was probably Laura’s.

  I heard music, upstairs. Jazz. Not the new stuff. Classic. I heard Adele talking on the phone again and walked very quietly to the stairs (I am very good at this… as it’s a skill a man develops when he has to sneak up on someone like Stellar) and heard her say only one line (Well… can’t you buckle a strap-on and talk at the same time?) before I became embarrassed over how poorly I was acting as a guest. I went back to the couch. Stretched out. I heard a few cars go by. Something that sounded like a firework. I heard the hum of the refrigerator. Two drunks (one male, one ambiguity) walked past on the sidewalk, loudly singing about a horse with no name. I heard a clock. Then another. I heard Wiggles, mewling in complaint, just outside the door. I opened the door and let her back in, wondering how she’d gotten out, and only then noticing the cat door. She could have come in at any time.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked. “You had an open door.” The cat purred at me, rubbing its head against my shoulder.

  “I get it,” I told the cat. “You just wanted me to let you in. Makes you feel wanted.”

  It was only afterwards, laying on the couch, after the fight, that I realized I was smarter about cats than I was about women.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At almost three in the morning, something came in through the cat door. I was awake (I sleep very little… my body naturally heals even exhaustion/drowsiness) and looking at the cat at the time, because it was on my chest, staring at me, as if confused by my continued attention.

  When I heard the cat door flap open, Wiggles looked quickly in that direction, hissed in anger, then sped off into the kitchen. A moment later he came rushing back, hissing in fear, and raced beneath the couch.

  A small demon walked into the room. A demon. Two feet tall. Muscled. Flickering with small flames. Cat-like, but on its hind legs, wearing clothes, standing straight, walking easily and confidently. Seeing me, it doffed a bowler hat, taking its head with it. Blood welled out and pooled on the floor.

  “Two weeks?” the demon said. “How can I possibly wait?” The words were strained, as if the demon’s throat was not built for human speech. The organs were being twisted, destroyed. The demon’s head was back on its body, but situated poorly, so that it faced the wrong direction. The eyes were dead. Blood was coming from its nose.

  I said, “Macabre.”

  “Just so,” the demon said. “And… impatient. Octagon gave you two weeks, but I am not Octagon. Do you want to come outside, or should I visit the woman upstairs and…?” By then I was moving as quickly as I could without making any noises that would alarm Adele. I was going through the kitchen. The porch. I was opening the outside door, wondering if I would ever make it back again… if I would ever have a chance for Adele to open the door for me, to smile and welcome me into her house. The chances of it weren’t good.

  Macabre.

  Damn it.

  Macabre.

  ***

  There was a trail of bread loaves leading off down the street. Not crumbs, but loaves. They were animated, dancing, jiggling, spinning in place. As I passed each of them by, the previous ones would fall upon each other in a cannibalistic frenzy… devouring themselves while chanting, “Brains. Brains. Loaves of brains.”

  The trail, at first, led down the middle of the street. At one point it went through a car, with a loaf in the back seat. I walked around the car, trying to pick up the trail on the other side, but it was deemed as cheating. The loaves disappeared. The trail was gone.

  “Fuck,” I said. “Really?” Then I went back to the other side of the car (the singular bread loaf was still waiting in the back seat) and opened the car door and got inside. The car moved forward some twenty feet while I was crawling through the back seat. I put my hand into something sticky in a child’s safety seat, then opened the door on the other side.

  I crawled out of the car, and the trail forward had reappeared. A dog ran out from a yard and began barking at the bread loaves.

  “Quiet,” I told the dog, because Macabre kills things for sport, or whim, or because he feels better when he kills. Who knows? The point is that he’s a madman, and a madman thinks it’s keen to kill man’s best friend.

  The dog was a cocker spaniel. It looked at me and then to the trail of bread loaves, trying so hard to understand. I hurried past before the dog could get into any trouble. I hurried past while worrying that Macabre was only drawing me away from Adele’s house so that he could do… something… there. There was a lump in my throat. There was a lump in my chest, my brain, everywhere. All I could do was follow the trail.

  The demon trotted past me, eating a sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly. He held it up to me, half eaten, and asked, “Last meal?” I shook my head and kept following the trail.

  The trail went over houses (I had to climb them, and follow the trail precisely) and the trail went through backyards (dogs would bark, cats would either run away, or pretend to not care, or honestly not care) and the trail went up into a tree that I had to climb, and then went past a woman’s third floor window, and then vanished for nearly a minute, leaving me, maybe humanity’s greatest remaining hero (meaning there weren’t many of us left) crouching on a branch, praying for the resumption of a trail of bread loaves while a woman (I determined her age, but it’s best to leave it indeterminate) was not ten feet away, naked, reclined on a bean bag, with her laptop computer recording a webcam show that involved her lower body, and her fingers, and three items normally considered as food. The cat demon was slowly climbing the outside wall, inch by inch, and was no more than a foot from her window when the trail of bread loaves reappeared. I moved on, hoping the demon would come with me, and it did.

  The trail led straight through three different houses, an office building, a bakery (Tarts… closed for several hours, by that time) and in each of these places I moved through as quietly as I possible, picking locks when I had to (I’m good at this… because the skill is necessary in my line of work) and wondering what my picture would look like if I was arrested for breaking and entering. I wondered if Macabre was just trying to humiliate me. I wondered if Macabre was truly going against Octagon and his two-week grace period. If so, I wondered if Macabre was forgetting what had happened to the last member of Eleventh Hour who had gone against Octagon. Brambles, the man who could control plant life, had only been a member of Eleventh Hour for one week before his p
ublic rebellion (during the Louvre incident) and had been found only three hours later, in stasis, frozen in time, at least physically, because his eyes were alive and terrified and moving back and forth. His mouth was shaped into a scream, but hasn’t moved at all since that time. It’s been fifteen months now, more or less. I personally can’t sit still for two minutes.

  The trail of bread loaves led up to the top of Greenway’s original water tower. I climbed the ladder, and as soon as I put my hands on the rungs all of the bread loaves (floating above) succumbed suddenly to gravity, falling down, showering me with bread, bouncing off my shoulders and head. Macabre has a low watermark of amusement.

  I found him on the top of the water tower, hovering in place, with the small demon racing about the edge of the tower. It was sixty feet down. The demon didn’t seem concerned. I’m not sure it’s technically possible for Macabre to fall, and of course I’ve fallen from somewhat more impressive heights.

  I said, “Octagon gave me two weeks.”

  “Two weeks is…”

  Macabre had threatened Adele. I wasn’t in a talking mood. My speed (always… always… always) took my opponent by surprise, and I leapt for Macabre’s throat. A shield (glimmering like glass, radiant as car headlights, shaped like a Roman’s tower shield) appeared in the air a foot in front of him, just before I hit, absorbing almost all of the impact, but I managed to break a fist through and grab Macabre by his arm. I yanked as hard as I could, pulling him forward into the shield and nearly knocking him unconscious. The demon leapt onto my shoulders and tried to bite my face, but my skin was too hard for its teeth to break through. I couldn’t see for shit, though, and it stalled me long enough for the dazed Macabre to mumble some words, and then suddenly the water tower developed a blowhole, like a whale’s, right beneath me, and an abrupt spout hurled me far into the air. I twisted about during my flight, trying to maintain a sight line on Macabre, because the damn thing about the son of a bitch is that you never know what he’s going to do next.