Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  I landed on a car dealership, rebounding off the neon “Quincy’s Cars” sign (Super Deals for a Super Town) and fell onto the roof of a display station wagon from the 1970’s, put in place as a cautionary tale of what you might end up driving if you went anywhere but Quincy’s. I smashed through the windshield, crushed part of the hood and would have rolled away if the steering wheel hadn’t grown tentacles and pulled me into the driver’s seat. Glass had gotten into my left eye… chunks of glass as big as gravel, and I struggled with sight while trying to fend off a car that had been given life by a madman.

  “Road trip! Road trip!” the demon yelled in my ear, appearing in the back of the car. “Daddy! Let’s go on a road trip!” It leapt over the back seat and started trying, as far as I could tell, to reach down my throat and fish around in my stomach. Its arm was furred and barbed and began choking me. I was aware that Macabre was outside the car, standing in front, directing the chaos with waves of his hand, but I needed the glass out of my eyes and the demon out of my throat before I could deal with anything else. I didn’t want to be the first recorded person in the history of the world to choke to death on a demon’s arm.

  The car began rolling forward.

  “Seriously,” Macabre called out. “Two weeks? I wouldn’t have given you two minutes. How much does someone like you need to prepare to die? Who gives a shit if your hair is combed or you’re wearing proper funerary underwear? So what if you leave behind a few unpaid parking tickets? Does this shit seriously mean anything to you?

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, with his head growing so large it was the size of a horse, of an elephant, a building, and was looking into the car like someone peering into a dollhouse. “I’ll tell you what, after you’re dead, I’ll reanimate you as a zombie, and then you can go around and pay those parking fines. Do that last load of laundry. Eat a few brains.”

  The car was speeding forward.

  Macabre was perched on the hood, staring in at me. The steering wheel’s tentacles were trying to go up my nose. The demon’s entire arm was down my throat, plunged down to his shoulder so that his face was against mine, nuzzling like a cat, like Wiggles, like Adele’s cat… a cat that was probably not thinking of me, right then, because cats don’t give a shit. But women do. Adele would care if I died. Beyond that concern, I’d been given two weeks, and I was feeling cheated.

  I grabbed the demon and ripped it in half, digging my hands into its face and parting it, ripping with a sudden wrench that opened the creature from head to crotch, like a zipper, only bloodier. The bowler hat toppled from the torn head and vanished from existence. The arm down my throat gave a spasm, the hand still clutching at my lungs, but I pulled it out (I remembered the breathing tube at the hospital, and wished to hell that Paladin was on his way to me again, ready to give me an explanation, once more, for how life had turned out, and to give me another hug) and I slammed the dead demon’s arm onto the car seat, then thought better of that and picked it up and tossed it as hard as I could at Macabre.

  It caught him in the chest. Knocked him off the car. The steering wheel’s tentacles flailed briefly, devoid of direction, and the glass finally fell out of my eyes. Things were going my way, suddenly.

  Except, now that I could see, I could see that the way we were going was straight to hell. Literally. The car was travelling at a good pace, faster than the old station wagon had ever been able to achieve back when it was powered by gas instead of magic. And we were headed right for a Grand Canyon-sized chasm from which the fires of hell and the stench of sulfur were erupting. Winged demons were circling overhead, poking each other with pitchforks because I guess they had nothing better to do. Demons are like tattoo artists that sit around together all day. Somebody’s going to get a shitty tattoo. Somebody’s going to get a pitchfork in the dick.

  “Road trip!” Macabre laughed. He was in the back seat, now, laughing that laugh of his (it sounds like a clown’s, but played at the wrong speed, and injected with cayenne peppers) and as soon as I saw him I planted my feet on the dash and pushed as hard as I could, ripping the front seat from its mooring and sinking my right foot into the glove box, and slamming backwards into the madman.

  I think it broke a few of his ribs.

  “We’re here!” I told him, maybe thinking that I was a father pretending to have reached the destination (though I didn’t want to reach our intended destination at all) or maybe trying to make some statement of being at the end of the fight, or maybe not thinking at all. Thinking is way overrated in a fight. Just… act.

  The whole car came to life, growing tendrils from the dash and the seats and the windows and grabbing at me, trying to stab through my flesh (sorry… too tough for you) and emitting acids (it burnt like hell, but what seemed to be a real and actual hell was only about three blocks away by then, so I could put up with a skin rash) and soon screaming at me (sound is one hell of a weapon, because it nails you through and through) and not one bit of it stopped me from pinning Macabre beneath my knee, the two of us in the cramped back seat (I’m not going to say anything at all about lovers, here) and me succumbing to media pressure, to the way people want me to be, saying the things that people love to hear, even though nobody else was around.

  “Take some time off!” I told Macabre, and I punched him in the face. I punched him. And I punched him. And I punched him.

  Again and again.

  And again.

  Because he was too dangerous to let up on.

  Because he had threatened Adele.

  I punched him.

  Again and again.

  The station wagon rolled to a stop only thirty feet before the lip of the dropoff, but it didn’t matter much. The Grand Canyon of Sulfur, the Lake of Fire, Hell… at least Macabre’s version of it… was fading. Slipping away from existence.

  I’d probably punched Macabre twenty or thirty times. Nineteen to twenty-nine of those blows hadn’t made any difference. I’d snapped his neck and shattered his skull on the very first punch.

  I had to rip myself free of the twisted car. I tore myself free and staggered onto the streets of the small town of Greenway. By then I was in the spotlights of the SRD helicopters, coming down from above.

  ***

  Wiggles, the cat, stood atop the kitchen table. He wavered back and forth as I tip-toed across the porch and through the kitchen, with him thinking about running, thinking about coming closer to me, obviously wondering where the hell he and I stood in the new-world post-magician order, but only ultimately mewling once before wandering off, padding up the stairs. I wished that I had Mistress Mary’s powers, her ability to go to ghost form, float through walls, turn invisible, that kind of shit. Instead, I was going to have to go upstairs and check on Adele, and I would make accidental noise and almost for sure wake her up. After clearing the battle site with the SRD I’d even thought about not coming back at all, about avoiding this encounter, but between knowing that I would worry that Macabre got to her after all, and knowing she would worry if she woke up in a house without me, I’d opened her front door and gone inside.

  I’m one of the strongest heroes there are… but I still struggled with the weight of that door.

  I pretended to study the paintings on the stairway. I made noises enough that Adele, if she heard me, could have come out of her room and asked me what I was doing, and I could have then said something about the paintings and nothing at all about sneaking into a woman’s bedroom at almost five in the morning.

  I coughed.

  I shuffled.

  I even faked a sneeze and talked out loud to myself about the paintings on the wall (“Dracula looks less menacing with glasses, I believe,” and, “A mummy in spectacles looks more studious!) but all that happened is that Wiggles came out of a small bathroom and looked at me like I was insane. Maybe he was a super cat with amazing powers of deduction, or maybe it was just that patently obvious.

  There were four doors in the upstairs hall. One of them, the small bathro
om, was wide open. The other three were all partially open, as if to invite someone to take a finger (one that could push into solid steel) and test their strength by moving the door an inch or two inward. One of the doors was Laura’s (and I did wonder what her room looked like, what sort of toys might by laying in view) and one was Adele’s (I knew which one, because I knew she’d taken her parents’ old room) and the last was a mystery. I thought briefly about solving that mystery, but knew it would have only been delaying (avoiding) what I had to do, and also would be that much more of a chance to make some sort of damning noise.

  I pushed Adele’s bedroom door open, using Wiggles (who wondered what the hell was going on) by holding him around the stomach and pushing his head at the bottom of the door, hoping it would just appear (from the other side) that the cat was coming into the room. It was something that a sixteen-year-old would have thought of, and because of that I was proud.

  The door swung far enough in that I could see most of Adele’s room, but not her bed. I thought of how the room had once belonged to her parents, how it was possible she’d been conceived in this very room. I pushed the door farther open. There was a slight resistance. The door was pushing something along on the floor. It panicked me. It could have been anything. It wasn’t all that heavy, but Macabre had been in the house, and that meant there wasn’t anything to rule out. Horrors rushed through my head, and I felt nauseous.

  I peered around the door.

  It was a book.

  It was a book titled, “Reaver.” One of the many unauthorized biographies with my picture on the cover. Adele was the author. Did that explain the slam I’d earlier heard? Probably. I could picture Adele mad at me, slamming the book onto the floor. Maybe the resulting noise hadn’t been loud enough to suit her. Maybe it had landed so she couldn’t see my face. Or maybe so she could. Either way, I could picture her picking the book back up, slamming it down again.

  I didn’t have to picture her in bed because there she was. The night was warm enough that she didn’t have much in the way of covers. Just one loyal sheet and one straying blanket. She was dressed in a silken negligee that was doing its usual lackadaisical job of covering up a woman. Wiggles had moved into the middle of the room. Bored.

  Adele was sleeping. Breathing. I really hadn’t expected it any other way. Macabre would have bragged about it, taunted me, if he’d hurt her.

  Finding that Adele was okay… that was all I needed, so I turned to go, but she turned over in bed. Her eyes were open. Not wide open. Just drowsy open.

  She said, “Steve?” She almost fell back asleep during this monumental speech.

  “Yes. I was just…” I felt like I’d had some excuses in case I ran into this situation, but I couldn’t remember a single one of the damn things.

  “Are you seducing me?”

  It was another question where it felt like I should have a definite answer at the ready, but I was caught empty again. I was wishing I’d had a chance to read a whole book about her, the way she’d apparently been reading about me.

  “I was just… leaving.” This was the best I could come up with. Not romantic. Not witty. Not particularly anything. Legions of my baser fans would have been disappointed. I was the man that had slept with Mistress Mary. With the possibly alien Stellar. With two Oscar winners. With a woman married to a head of state (not claiming that was a good idea, here) and so many famous models that it had taken the Vogue article three consecutive issues to bring the matter to a close, and even then they’d published an online addendum.

  I was… in fact… the man that had once made Siren, in public, remark that she hadn’t been bored. And now I felt like a rookie again. It felt… amazing in a way. Mistress Mary had once told me that there’s nothing more soothing than being humbled. Mistress Mary, of course, is goddamn crazy… but sane people say crazy things at times, so there’s no reason the water can’t flow both ways.

  “Leaving?” Adele mumbled. “You mean leaving the house?”

  “Just going downstairs.”

  “If you’re not getting into my bed, why did you come up here?”

  “Can I tell you in the morning?” There are few things more awkward than coming into an old lover’s bedroom to check if a man that you yourself have just beaten to death has killed her.

  “Sleep in the corner,” Adele ordered. She tossed a pillow on the floor and mumbled about blankets in the closet. She said a bulletproof man shouldn’t have any trouble with being comfortable on a hardwood floor. She said to be quiet and not make any noise. She then thought better of that and told me that noises were fine. I’m not sure she even realized she was awake… that she wasn’t dreaming.

  In less than a minute, she began a soft, repetitive, wonderful snore.

  I sat in the corner for an hour or so. Just watching her sleep. Her phone (on her nightstand, next to a copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology) beeped once, and a text message from Laura (The Apple is tasty! She wants to meet Steve. Did he roughly sex you?) appeared. It glowed softly for fifteen seconds, then the phone went dark.

  In time, I snuck back downstairs to my couch. I slept a little bit. I waited for morning. I thought about Macabre being dead. About what the public and the media would say. I thought about how Octagon would take it. How would this affect my two-week grace period? Had I cheated by fighting back? Had I negated the bargain? I thought about such things.

  And I thought about that message on Adele’s phone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Octagon cut into a tiny little television broadcast in Italy, and it was soon (as I’m sure he planned and knew) all over the Mediterranean, and from there it spread out until it had made all of the world’s major news channels, and all of the minor ones, a million different websites, mentions on a billion different blogs. Whenever Octagon so much as takes a piss, it goes viral.

  No camera can capture him very well. The strange qualities of his black costume are too indefinable for any electronic eyes… too elusive for any eyes at all, really. On screen, he takes a curious flat quality… as if he is a shadow.

  “Last night there was a mistake,” he said. “Some of you might already know that Macabre, a member of my team, Eleventh Hour, sought out and battled Reaver. The battle did not go well for the magician. He is now dead.”

  In the broadcast, Octagon pauses here. He seems to be lost in thought. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he’s lost in drama. Villains are like that. Although, truth be told, villains are only like that because villains are people, and everyone gets caught up in drama.

  “Congratulations to Reaver on this victory,” Octagon said. There is another pause. In this instance, I knew what the pause meant. I was one of the few who would. The others were Stellar, Laser Beast, and Siren. The surviving members of Eleventh Hour. They would know that Octagon’s congratulations meant that Macabre had been condemned and ostracized, even as a corpse, for going against the bargain between myself and Octagon.

  “This, of course, leaves a hole in Eleventh Hour. But, please, no applicants need file. No resumes need be sent. The void in Eleventh Hour has, I believe, been most adequately filled.” Here, he gestured to someone off screen. You’ve all seen this, of course, and it’s old news now, but none of us could claim that we were, then, ready for what happened next.

  Mistress Mary walked into view.

  Her hair was somewhat longer than the last time I’d seen her.

  Octagon’s hand was on her shoulder.

  And she was smiling.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Felix and Greta Barrows were both fifty-eight years old. They had been childhood sweethearts… meeting in the seventh grade (Felix was from Greenway and Greta from Lausanne, Switzerland, by way of Bolton) and (years later) forming a book-reading club together. Greg had told me that the book club had boasted, at one time, of twelve members, but eventually it dwindled to nine, to five, to four, and finally just to two… and after one book club meeting (Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince & Other Tales) Greta had asked Felix if she real
ly needed to go home that night, or if he would like her to stay, and on the following day Felix had proposed. Greg was born eleven months after. Felix was an architect who had received offers from big concerns in big cities, but had stayed in Greenway because (according to his son, Greg) he was afraid of any other life but his simple one with Greta. Greta was a children’s book artist, drawing fuzzy bears, and old witches and monsters, and (whenever she had the chance) pictures of Greg into the backgrounds. I called ahead and told them that I wanted to talk with them. They were happy to hear from me. We hadn’t spoken hardly at all since the night they believed their son had died in a car accident, and I was going into their house to tell them Greg hadn’t been dead for twelve years… but instead only three years. That he had, in fact, been Paladin. The greatest hero of them all. I didn’t think it would make them happy.

  Adele opened my car door for me, not because she was acting the gentleman, but because I’d been sitting in the driver’s seat for too long, frozen in place outside the Barrows residence, wondering what to say. Mostly I had come to a resolution that there’s never any reason to practice a speech in front of a mirror, because the words stay in the mirror, not in your mouth.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?” Adele asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. I don’t want to go.”

  “I love an honest woman,” I said, walking up the sidewalk to the house, trying to pretend that I hadn’t, in the broadest sense of the conversation, just told Adele Layton that I loved her. To her credit (and a little to my disappointment, I admit) she had nothing to say in answer beyond a statement that she would wait in the car.

  The house was split level with an attached garage, a huge yard and a lurking tree of the type that always appears it is only waiting for one strong wind in order to betray the house and family. There was a forty-foot span from sidewalk to front door, but the walk had been artistically complicated by winding paving stones and gardening plots, so much so that there should have been a minotaur to act as a guide. The bottom of the house was red brick. The top was wooden, and white. Greta Barrows was peering at me from a ground floor picture window that was partially obscured by a mesh of willow branches. She waved. There was a child standing next to her. A girl. Maybe seven or eight years old. Curly red hair and great big eyes. Nobody had warned me there would be a kid around. I wasn’t sure if it would make it easier or harder. I wasn’t sure of anything.