Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

  Voila! And… yes, that is a hand I see, raised to volunteer.

  Thank you very much, Paladin. You are doing humanity a great service.

  Now, if you’ll just come this way, we’ll continue the briefing. Hmmm? Yes, you can bring Reaver along if you’d like, but I do wish he would quit his incessant statements of how dangerous this is. I assure you, there are only any number of things that could go wrong.

  But Paladin hadn’t listened. Nobody had listened. Everybody had a wonderful assortment of hero scenarios in their minds. I was the only one with a shit scenario. I was outvoted (not that there was any voting) and in his no-nonsense manner Paladin had told me that the people of Pilipano needed help, and that’s what he was going to do. He was going to help them.

  In the language native to the region, Pilipano means, “lip of hell.” Make of that what you will. Back then, I tried to make a lot of it. I even wondered if the type of people who build houses (every last one of them constructed of the most inflammable items they could find) in a town called Lip Of Hell were worth saving. They were worth saving, of course, and I was only casting verbiage about, because I had a feeling in my head that the mission would be a disaster.

  I bitched all the way through the briefing.

  I bitched all the way through the walk to the transports.

  I bitched all the way during the flight.

  We landed.

  Then I got down to business, because there was nothing else to do. The nominal leader of Pilipano held a banquet for us (we didn’t have time for that) and presented us with a necklace (one for each of us, made of woven grass and carven wood) and there was a group of young women, nearby, dressed prettily, acting bashful, in fact acting exactly like a group of nervous young girls would act if they were being offered as virgin delights for the soon-to-be-saviors of Pilipano, but we didn’t have time for that either.

  Paladin said some words to the townspeople. I’m not sure what they were. They were in the local tongue. He had a talent for languages, and he’d been practicing during the short flight (it was a long distance, but we were in a Checkmate-designed plane that gobbled the miles by the hundreds and thousands) by means of an anxious translator who repeated phrases to Paladin while the both of them ignored my mentions that swimming into a volcano’s reservoir isn’t the smartest thing a man can do.

  The townspeople gave nods of delight at Paladin’s speech. They were the last words he ever spoke to anyone but me, and I don’t even know what he said.

  With his mysterious speech concluded, Greg Barrows picked me up by the shoulder grab he always used when we were departing a crowded area, or arriving at one. During actual flights he carried me in both arms… like a man carries a bride. Neither of us thought it would be seemly to do that when people were around. That’s another confessional gift to the tabloids.

  Paladin set me down on the lip of the volcano. We stared at the very mouth of hell for a time, and then… with hops and skips and short flights, we were soon next to the lava.

  “I’m going in,” he said. I didn’t try to stop him. It was too late to talk him out of it. At this point, we were committed. He took to the air, dipping his toes into the lava, hovering above it, testing it for temperature, and then slowly lowered himself within.

  “Warm,” he said. “Not too hot. I can live through this.”

  “Good. How can you move through all the magma, though? You won’t be able to see.”

  “I’m pretty good with directions, and I should be able to feel my way around. I’ll have to see what gives to my touch, what resists me, and I’ll make my way along the veins of heat within the molten rock. This can be done. I can do this.”

  I almost said a few things.

  I almost talked about the Greek god of fire and volcanoes, because Greg had sometimes pretended to be as such, not all that many years previously, and now he was sinking down into the god’s domain. It was a trespass of entirely unprecedented arrogance. Hephaestus might throw a shit fit. I could have said something about that. But I didn’t.

  I almost talked about how Stellar had spoken of how she wanted to (her word) mate with Greg. How she’d asked me for his phone number, making me think we were in high school. I could have spoken of how she’d asked about what Greg likes to do in bed… how she had said, “I should do what I can to become his competent lover,” and she seemed to be in earnest. She had called him by name. Greg Barrows. She knows everyone’s name, of course. She never spilled Greg’s identity, not (at least I believe) because of any pact of secrecy, but because she honestly doesn’t understand that not everyone knows everyone else’s name. Some types of ignorance are foreign (or, possibly, alien) to her. Anyway… I almost told Paladin of all of this, but I didn’t. He wasn’t much interested in women except for relationships, and he and Taffy were already together at the time that Stellar was asking.

  I almost, as Paladin was going down into the lava, revealed a monstrous amount of other thoughts. I suddenly wanted to say so very much. I opened my mouth but the intense heat dried my throat, and while I was swallowing, trying to recover my voice, Paladin slipped beneath the lava and he was gone.

  I stayed next to the lava for several hours. There were hideous minutes piling upon each other, adding up, with time passing, and me waiting to see if Paladin would ever come up out from the lava… if I would ever see the molten rock slide away from his eyes and drip off that stupidly broken nose of his. In the surveillance footage, taken before the helicopters were nearly caught in the eruption, I am standing still for minutes, for an hour, unmoving, waiting for my friend.

  My memory is very good. I remember almost nothing of my thoughts at the time.

  A few hours after Greg went down into the lava, the volcano erupted, but it was more of a burp than a roar. Jets of lava reached into the sky, forcing the observing helicopters to retreat (Checkmate’s unmanned copter was nabbed by an arc of lava, as neatly as any kraken of legend had ever nabbed any seaman from a boat) and covering me with a splash of lava that had me hissing in agony for the five seconds it took the material to cool to a point that I found bearable, and then I soon began scraping the rock away from my costume.

  Just as I finished with that, I saw Paladin surface near the center of the molten pool.

  Then, miles away… as Greg Barrows rose to the surface of one volcano, one of the neighboring ones (a smaller one, with no nearby population, a volcano named Aara Trapano… the Left Tit of Hell) began spewing flame and ash and, finally, lava. Erupting.

  The plan had worked.

  I gave a cheer. An absolute pure shriek of joy.

  It was a joy that died when I saw that Paladin was foundering in the lava. Struggling and spent. Much of his costume had been sheared away by the molten rock, or burnt away by the heat, or destroyed by whatever else waits for a man when he’s arrogant enough to dive down into hell.

  Lava is molten rock, meaning it’s thick enough that I can run across it, if I’m moving at full speed.

  I was.

  I was running to help my friend. Running an arc along the surface of the lava, an arc that met up with Paladin at the top of the curve. I grabbed him by his hair (no time for niceties) and was surprised to find it matted with lava intermixed with the strands. That just shouldn’t be, you understand. The shimmer should have chased it away. Nothing should have been touching him.

  I dragged Greg as quickly as I could to the edge of the molten lava. His added weight was slowing me, and because of this I began to sink into the lava myself. I was ankle deep with every step. And then calf deep. Knee deep. My legs were cooking, charring, glowing a furious green that shone even over the hissing red of the molten rock. The lava was contained in a bowl of sorts… a bowl with sloped sides, perhaps ten feet high. An easy jump if my legs hadn’t been burning, or if I could have planted on something as solid as real rock… not the unreal surface of liquefied rock, in which Paladin and I were both moments from death.

  With Paladin’s healing powers it w
ould have taken the work of moments for him to be fully restored. All I had to do to save his life was to give him that moment. All I had to do was to take him from the lava.

  I clawed into the sides of the magma bowl, inching us upwards. My friend was charred in places, and in other places he was boiled meat that was pulling away from his bones. The lava had worn him down, badly, over the hours. A lesser man couldn’t have healed from such horror. A lesser man would have long since succumbed to the damage that the lava had inflicted. A lesser man wouldn’t have been Paladin, though.

  A lesser man wouldn’t have been my hero.

  “Did… did it work?” he asked. I had managed to scale a few feet up the interior of the bowl. Far enough that I could endure the heat. My lower legs, entombed in hardening rock, were reforming, healing, becoming whole again. I found that I was crying. I was very scared. Shivering with fear. I felt like the world was turning over, tumbling away, leaving me behind, and I was holding onto Greg and trying to catch something… the past or the future or anything that wouldn’t break away in my grasp.

  Climbing was very much harder than it should have been.

  “Did… it… work?” Greg asked. I’d tried to answer him the first time, but my breath and words had steamed away when I opened my mouth. I don’t know how he was managing to speak. I don’t know what rulebook he had been given that allowed him to bypass all the laws, the ones the rest of us live by. I tried to answer him, but all I could manage was a hiss. A crackle. Finally, a nod of my head.

  “Yes,” my nod said. It had worked.

  “Good enough, then,” he said.

  It was very much harder to pull him from the lava than it should have been. I was thinking, I remember this… I was thinking that the lava was trying to hold him. That it had him by the toes, the feet, the legs, and it was clenching on him. It had been angered by his intrusion, and it wanted him to pay.

  He said, “I dove inside. It was… wonderful. No man has ever seen it. Wonderful.” He slipped from my grasp. A desperate grab kept him from falling wholly back into the lava. My grab was at about one times the speed of a normal man. That was all I had in me. Every inch of my skin was glowing green.

  Paladin, half out of the lava, limp in my grasp, said, “I wish you could have seen. I wish you could have seen. I wish you could have seen the colors. And it worked. It worked. This is a good way. This is a good thing I’ve done. This is a good way to be remembered.”

  It was very much harder than it should have been to pull him from the lava. His skin was peeling away. His muscles were sloughing off. His hair was gone. There wasn’t a trace of his shimmer. He was revealed to the elements, and the elements were the worst of their kind.

  “Good enough, then,” he said again. He gave a smile. For one moment I was amazed by that smile. It had joy in it. For one moment, I believed that we were both going to make it.

  And then I realized why it was so hard to pull him away from the lava.

  Paladin was fighting me.

  I was struggling against the strongest of our kind.

  And he wanted to die.

  “Greg?” I said. It was all I had. My lungs sizzled. I must have been green on the inside, too.

  “This is going to be hard for you,” Paladin said. “But you don’t know. You don’t understand. That day. Those chemicals. Being in the accident. My arm. Healing. Being Paladin.” His words were chopped. His muscles weren’t working. He was dying in my hands and I couldn’t… pull… him… up… because he was still struggling against me. Still.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “All these years. I’ve tried not to let on. I’ve tried not to let it show. I’ve tried to keep a smile on my face. But. Since that day, Steve. Since that day. You don’t understand. It’s never quit. That day has never quit for me. Each day. Each. Day. Agony. It was agony. And it’s never quit. It still hurts.”

  I was looking down at him. He was only at the end of my arm, but it was so very far away.

  He said, “It’s never quit hurting, Steve. It’s never quit.”

  I could remember him, at times, being distant. Whenever that happened, I (and let’s face it, everyone else) thought he was thinking thoughts that were probably above mine, pondering philosophies on a very-possibly-might-be divine scale. Looking into his eyes, then, with me suspended just above the lava, I realized he’d only been trying to hold back the pain. Every day. Every time.

  “I saved an entire city, Steve,” he told me. “Good enough.”

  There was too much heat. I couldn’t speak.

  “Let me go,” he said.

  Greg Barrows was twenty-five years old. He was my hero. He was my friend. He was the one who had taught me that being a hero isn’t always about doing a wonderful thing. Sometimes it’s about doing a horrible thing. Sometimes it’s not about doing what you want. It’s always about doing the right thing.

  I opened my hand. I sometimes wish I’d saved him. I sometimes wish that I would have been a different type of hero. But I’ve always felt I did the right thing.

  Paladin was Greg Barrows.

  Greg Barrows was Paladin.

  I was the only one to hear his last words, spoken as he sank beneath the lava and into the lips and mouth of hell.

  Greg said, “Good enough.”

  ***

  I wasn’t surprised that Adele was crying when I finished telling her what had happened in the volcano. I wasn’t surprised that I was crying, either. The world at large had only known that Paladin succumbed to the volcano, meaning the true story of his death was new to Adele, so it was understandable why she would be so overcome with emotion. And me, from my side, the true story of Paladin’s death is something my very reliable memory has replayed for me every day since it happened. It hits a little harder each time.

  After the crying was done, we gathered ourselves and walked from the park, hardly looking at each other, not speaking, feeling (at least from my side) like we were at the end result of a very shameful encounter. We’d walked only a quarter of a block before, without looking at me, Adele said, “It’s not your fault.” The words more or less swirled around me… no different than the pollen in the air, moving aside with the wind of my passing. Then, only a moment later, she said it again, but this time she was looking at me. Adele was looking at me. It made a world of difference.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. Her eyes were honest. Her eyes were earnest. Her eyes were Adele’s.

  It made a difference.

  I nodded.

  It felt like some weight slid away from me with the nod. Some weight that had been anchored with claws. Some weight that had been chased away by Adele’s eyes. Not all, of course, of the weight was gone. But there had been progress. For the first time in years.

  We were only a half block into our walk, but I felt like we’d stepped ten thousand miles forward. A hell of a leap.

  A block into our walk, she asked, “Your list? It… on it you say that you might want to shut down SRD. Why is that?”

  “I’m not… sure anymore.” A half block ago I would have described SRD as a sewer pipe. You can point a sewer pipe in any direction, but it’s still just shit that comes out of it.

  I said, “I’m not sure how much good they do. But I know how much bad they do. Tempest, for one.”

  “And you for another. And Paladin. And Checkmate is moving the world forward. You read about his ozone restoration project?”

  “Yes.” I was in an argument I felt like I could lose. I was mentally crossing off an item on my list. Adele was changing my perception of the world, and my list would have to change with it.

  She said, “Fighting SRD is like failing an enthusiastic student because they miss a few questions on a quiz.”

  “You just think that up?”

  “It’s from one of my books.”

  “Oh.”

  Adele said, “And… your list. The last item. It just says… fight. What are you wanting to fight?” We were a block and a half into o
ur walk. Not far, really, but already into the hard questions.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” I told her.

  “Not yourself. Don’t fight yourself. Nobody wins those fights. Don’t fight against anything. Fight for something.”

  “That from your books, too?” It came out a little sarcastic. More than I meant. I really wanted to know.

  “From Paladin. A week before he died. When he was talking at Bolton Elementary.”

  “Oh.”

  I was thinking of Greg talking to all those kids. All those kids. Talking about the fight. The good fight. Even while he was in agony. How could I have missed his agony all throughout the years? It wasn’t until he was in the lava… until I was looking for it… that I could see it in his eyes. He’d hid it for so long. Heroic.

  I was thinking of the swirl of the lava. Lava always looks reluctant. Grudgingly forced to flow. As if the rock cannot believe the twists and turns of its life and its fate. Blundering along. Burning things.

  Just under three blocks into our walk, Adele took my hand. A half block later she lifted my hand, somewhat, staring at it, as if searching it for some sort of clue. To what? I didn’t know. She was holding my right hand. She wasn’t holding the hand that had let Paladin slide into the lava. There weren’t any marks on it of any kind, despite all the damages it has sustained over the years. It always heals. It never changes. It lets me handle that chore.

  “What are you looking for?” I finally asked. Her eyes jerked up to mine, as if I’d caught her in some sort of criminal act.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Some sort of… difference, I suppose.” Her hand grabbed tighter on mine. I felt like I should let her go. I felt like I should have never told her what happened to Paladin. I felt like I should tell her everything. I felt like there was nothing else to tell.

  I said, “A difference?”