by Paul Tobin
My own parents, by that time, had been moved. I know where they are. Not even Siren or Mistress Mary could convince me to reveal their location. I don’t go there. I haven’t seen them in years. I send cards to certain people, who send those cards to certain other people, who do the same, the same, the same, until they reach their destination. I am told that the castle is very nice. I am told they live well. My mother is active in the community. After one more year of residency, Dad can run for political office… can finally be a mayor, like he’s always dreamed. Mom helps the staff with the gardens. My father had an affair with two of the maids (a horrible thing, of which I am somewhat horribly proud) and my mother forgave him, because what else could she do? Where else would she go?
Two years after Greg and I undertook our mission to Tanganyika, a group of would-be villains named Neo-Spartacus (they patterned themselves after imperial Roman soldiers, so their name wasn’t very historically accurate) publicly executed my high school football coach, Levi Graters. This was their way of calling me out. Of challenging me. It worked. Warp and I (this was before the trials, of course) sped to the site of the killing, and then we made sure the cameras were still rolling and we did a few things (you can’t spend your whole life being proud of the things you do) and afterwards nobody has ever bothered anybody from my days in Greenway again.
But that was later, and Tanganyika was then, and Greg was holding me around the waist as he flew (I can’t fly, so in the early days, during our team-ups, he always carried me, thereby providing fuel for a cock-driven online maelstrom of homo-erotic fanfics) and Paladin’s vision (nobody could ever understand Paladin’s vision, not even him… he could… see evil?) soon spotted three of the PT boats even amidst the vastness of one of the world’s very largest lakes.
He dropped me aboard one of the pirate’s boats and flew on to the others, telling me that the Children of the Spill (meaning, the two of us, of course) were about to prove their worth. I wasn’t in the mood to prove my worth. I was in the mood to be Reaver.
There were ten men on my boat… and before even I could react, there were eight. One of the men jumped off the boat (taking his chances in a fight against a lake of nearly 90,000 square miles, rather than one man with two fists) and another was shredded into the water by a burst from a .50 mm machine gun, the spray of which also caught me and nearly flung me into the waters, but I managed to grab onto a railing and stay on the boat, grinning like a madman (any or all of them, take your pick) as the machine gun fire washed over my body.
I pulled myself back onto the deck and started punching. This was a time before I was too deep into the guilt of how I steal years away (I’m still only in shallow waters, there, I admit) and we had seen all the briefing photos and reports of what these men had done. We had met, at an impromptu lakeside briefing, a child, an orphan, who was able to describe one of the massacres. He had told us what the warlord (self-deemed as Colonel Bapoto) had done to his sister and their mother, how they died, in other words, and this boy (of eight or nine years) had spoken in a measured and emotionless voice that it was clear he would use for the rest of his life.
So… no… I wasn’t worried about punching these men. Not at all.
I felt like I had been born to punch them.
I was a man who had sparred with lions.
And one by one they, fell. Some of them dropped to their knees and they prayed and some of them (two more, past the initial one) leapt from the boat (I would have let them all drown, but Paladin later fished a dog-paddling survivor from the waters) and the others died and I wasn’t sorry for that. I wasn’t sorry for anything until Colonel Bapoto himself came up from below, and he held a woman hostage (she was in such horrible shape that I wasn’t even sure she was alive… wasn’t sure if Bapoto was holding a corpse hostage) and before he even made any demands he put a gun to her head and he fired, tearing away part of her jaw.
She was very beautiful, in the places that were left unmarked.
Bapoto’s death was not quick, but it was quicker than I wanted. I knew that there was a deadline involved. I had exactly one Paladin worth of time… defined by how long it would take my childhood friend Greg Barrows to convince two PT boats full of horrendous men to convert to the side of good. This is not a great span of time. Only a few minutes. By the time Paladin came floating down from above, Bapoto was in pieces. I’d taken his hands. His eyelids. His nose. His genitalia. I’d killed him and thrown him into the water so that Greg wouldn’t see what I’d done.
When Paladin came down from the heavens (not just the sky, dammit) he landed near the stricken woman and held her in his hands. He did the glow… the one that’s been seen everywhere. It doesn’t translate well onto television. Not the light. Or the warmth. And, let me just say… there was always some sort of singing. Not a human singing. But… nature itself singing. It was as close to tangible poetry as can exist, and after the glow faded (moments… only moments) the African woman was entirely whole… completely healed. Paladin even dipped her in the waters of Lake Tanganyika, washing her clean.
I myself stayed bloody.
***
“He couldn’t tell us,” Felix Barrows said. “My own son couldn’t tell us he was alive.”
“Because he loved you. Don’t think of it in any other way. It tore him apart. But it kept him whole, too, knowing that he was fighting for a reason, for people like you, so that other people could be with their sons. He took that burden on himself.” Practicing this speech, I’d thought about throwing in some sort of mention of Greg being on the cross, but there was enough of that talk going around that none of it needed to come from me.
“We could have lived somewhere else. Somewhere safe. Where are your parents? What happened to them?” It was known, worldwide, that my parents were alive. That solitary fact was the extent of the worldwide knowledge. I ignored Felix’s questions.
I said, “Could you have kept away from contacting him? From trying to? Fuck… don’t even answer. Even if you could have, it doesn’t make any difference. Greg had to go cold turkey. If he started by telling you he was alive, he would have wanted to tell you something more, to talk to you more. You can’t take off a girl’s panties without wanting to get her on her back.” That last bit came out before I could stop it. There hadn’t been any such analogies when I was planning what to tell Greta and Felix Barrows. Chase, still on the stairway, ducked further out of sight. Only her hair was showing. Just her hair and one ear. I had no doubt she was texting friends. I had no doubt her classmates were gathering outside, accumulating like zombies in the yard, or around the car where Adele was waiting.
The problem was, I was having problems myself. It was a conversation I’d had again and again and again. Ten or fifteen times in the mirror and then, throughout the years before, a hundred times with Greg Barrows himself playing the other side, and once (in one of the very few instances where Paladin was a son of a bitch and a bastard and an asshole, all together) telling me that the desire to visit his parents, combined with how he knew he needed to stay away from them, had so overwhelmed him that he’d gone and visited my parents. I hadn’t even known that he knew where they were. He asked if I wanted him to tell me all about the visit and it was all I could do not to punch him. I kicked him, instead. He hadn’t fought back (probably a lucky thing for me) but had instead nearly, almost, just about cried.
All in all, while Greta and Felix were talking from an aspect of a half hour of shock, I was talking from nearly a decade of accumulated and argumentative weight. I suppose I was a little angry. I suppose I felt they were right. Nothing about the whole situation was fair. Mistress Mary had once told me (not ordered me, just told me) not to ever worry about how our lives were unfair… to just keep on doing what we needed to do. She told me that she could go out, into the world, and order every last person to tell her the truth… asking each person if their own lives were fair. There wouldn’t have been too many positive answers. True enough.
“I think tha
t’s enough for now,” I told the parents of Greg Barrows.
“I wish you’d have told us this years ago,” Felix said. He was angry.
“I wish you’d never told us at all,” Greta said. “Why would you do this to us?”
“Call me if you want me to tell you anything more,” I answered, acutely aware that I would be causing arguments between the two of them. But what the hell else could I do? A hero doesn’t fight to make things comfortable. He fights to make things right.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Tell me what all this is about,” Adele said. There was a certain part of her voice that reminded me of Mistress Mary. A central command center to her tone.
“You’re on a date, sis,” Laura interjected. “Not an interrogation. Save the handcuffs and paddleboards for later. Let me know if you need to borrow any… oh shit!” The last part was yelped, as if she’d been pinched. I figured it was because she’d been pinched.
Adele was, as her sister had said, on a date. A double date, in fact. The last double date I’d been on had been with me and Mistress Mary, and Paladin and Taffy. Back then, Mistress Mary and I were pretending to have a relationship that wasn’t based on sex. That had lasted until she ordered me to tell the truth if I loved her or not, and while her compulsion power didn’t work on me, it seemed the right thing to do to tell the truth, so I had (the answer was, “not in the slightest") and we’d broken up. I soon returned to serial dating, or continued it, or whatever. Paladin did not serial date. It was only Taffy for him. A lot has been said (in the press, and in myriad porno “tribute” movies) that Taffy was the perfect woman with the way she could bend herself into any shape, twist and stretch herself even into another person, stretch her arms (or, as the porno films always highlighted, stretch whatever) until they were five feet long, or fifty, or a hundred. Paladin didn’t love her for the sexual possibilities, though (not that it wasn’t a factor… Paladin’s libido was as human as the next guy’s) but because she was a lovely person. Even if her laugh could stretch a mile wide.
Paladin is dead, now, of course. Taffy is still in mourning. And I was done with serial dating.
This new double date was myself and Adele, and Laura and Apple, the girl from the grocery store, who was willing to pinch Laura when she got out of line, and who turned about to be a tad under five feet tall and have more energy than almost anyone I’ve ever met, up to and maybe even including Stellar, who claimed to be able to fly to the stars and possibly wasn’t lying.
The park was large and included a lake where turtles sat on logs and there were several expansive and uneven lawns where dogs ran free and people tossed Frisbees and the local burlesque circus practiced how to walk on cords suspended between trees, or on stilts, or in clown shoes, or on the stomachs of two women bent into positions that were considered impossible by most people’s standards. There seemed to be little difference between these people (especially one woman who could kiss her own ass) and some of the powereds I’ve known. Maybe we were just in different circuses. I often felt that way.
Apple had brought us several fruits from the grocery store where she worked. There were no apples among them. She told us she was resistant to becoming a cliché. She brought sandwiches and a few other things. Some wines. Some cheeses. She had good taste. She had an invoice that she presented to me, telling me that she figured there was no way I wasn’t at least a millionaire, and therefore the most qualified to pay for the picnic. It embarrassed Adele, but nobody else. From my side, it was just plain truth, and from Laura’s side, her date’s impertinence was clearly a sensual draw. I idly wondered if Laura shut down Apple’s impertinence in bed, or if she let it gallop freely about the mattress. I had to quit wondering about it because being a superhuman doesn’t mean you’re not human, with a human’s physical reactions, reactions that the love of your life might notice. And by “might” notice, I mean that she would, because Fate is depraved in her humors.
“What… brings you to town?” Adele asked, mostly rephrasing her question, hoping to sneak it around her sister. I didn’t mind. I found it amusing. We’d already talked about art (van Gogh won in an imagined knife battle against Toulouse Lautrec, but we all admitted that Henri was victorious in the end, when Edwin went back to his yellow house and Gaugin, and Henri returned to the Moulin Rouge and the whores) and we’d talked about politics (Why don’t any of the supers run for office? Why don’t I?) and we talked about sex (the other conversations had been only interludes within this topic) and all along, at every step, we had avoided the question of, “Why has Reaver returned to Greenway?” And the thing was… I’d slept in Adele’s house, on Adele’s couch, and she had a right to know. It felt… odd to be beholden to someone. Being who I am, I normally feel like I’m responsible for everyone on Earth… that I need to step in and save each life and every dream. I’d thought I’d felt responsible, anyway… but it wasn’t until I was with Adele again that I felt the truth of that. Not that I was responsible for Adele… but that I had responsibility. A difference, there.
So I took the note from my pocket.
And I let Adele unfold it.
Laura whispered to Apple how they were maybe about to witness (as Adele’s very nervous fingers worked the well-worn note) a marriage proposal. That terrified me. I hadn’t thought it could look like that and I considered whisking (at three times normal speed) the note from Adele’s hands, but then I thought about how that would look (on the heels of the cursed Laura’s not-very-whispered comment) and so I paused for too long (I pause at one times normal human speed) because I wanted to see what Adele’s reaction to her sister’s words would be, and then suddenly the note was open and they were gathering around. And reading.
1: Be with Adele again.
2: Take Adele on a date. (pay)
3: Talk to Greg’s parents.
4: See my house. (steal something?)
5: Talk with Judy.
6: Prepare will (Adele, Greg’s parents, Judy?, monument to Dad & Mom, Kid Crater Scholarship)
7: Visit SRD (shut them down?)
8: Fight.
They read through the note out loud. One line item at a time. I waited for the comments. They sure as hell were going to have them.
Everyone looked to Adele. Somehow, it had been determined that she had the right to be first to speak.
Accurate, but…
Hell.
“Let’s start easy, hero,” she said. “Item six. Tell us about Kid Crater.”
Easy, she said.
Easy.
***
The boy could fly. He was fourteen years old and he could fly. And he could land like a feather. Or… if he wanted to… he could land like a meteor that ripped through anything that wasn’t metal or rock, and he could even rip through about ten feet of that. Leaving a crater.
After he found me in the Minnesota cabin, back when I was recovering from my arena encounter with Octagon and Firehook and Stellar, I took him under my wing. I didn’t mean to. I meant to send him on his way, but I started talking about what Firehook had done to me (the nova-level blast that had erased my features for a time) and I told him about what Stellar had done to me (discarding me from space) and the kid said it all probably made me want to kill Firehook and screw the hell out of Stellar, and for those pinpoints of wisdom (the tabloids will love this) I gave the fourteen-year-old the rest of my bottle of whiskey and grabbed another one for myself. By the time Paladin returned from his Washington press conference I had one new friend and much less whiskey.
In my defense, I’d talked Kid Crater out of flying to town and stealing from a whiskey store (he always, after our time in Minnesota, referred to liquor stores as whiskey stores) so I had that going for me, but other than that, Paladin wasn’t sure the life of hero was a wise idea for the kid, and the argument (it grew heated) continued until I pointed out that he (meaning Greg) and I hadn’t been much older when we strapped on our own badges. I meant hypothetical badges… not real ones… until we received th
e congressional ones, a brand new type of badge, six months later, after the first Mindworm incident.
Paladin admitted that this was true, and Kid Crater was allowed to stay, so everything else that happened afterwards was my fault.
“Big shoulders,” Apple told me, interrupting my talk. Laura gave her a pinch. It seemed they’d already developed a precise methodology for dealing with each other’s transgressions.
“Let the man talk,” Laura said. “Do you even know how hard it must be for a man to admit a failing during a picnic with three sexually alluring women?”
I said, “Ouch.”
Adele said, “It wasn’t a failing. Don’t make it sound like he failed.” I appreciated her defense (though it was somewhat ludicrous, because she was defending something I hadn’t yet admitted) and did my best to level Apple with a machismo stare that could have leveled Octagon himself, but it didn’t seem to faze her. I suppose she knew she could hide behind Laura, if it came to that, and I was clearly no match for Adele’s sister.
I said, “Kid Crater had two brothers. Two sisters.”
