by Paul Tobin
I told the voice, “Yeah. I know.”
I told Laser Beast, “Take some time off!”
And then I punched him in the face.
I didn’t hold back.
My fist sank a foot deep into the rocky quarry floor.
There was a moment of silence except for the heaving of my breath, and whatever whispers were coming from my mouth. What I was saying, I have no idea. The moment lasted for one second. Maybe two. I was glowing green from scores of puncture wounds caused by the lasers. It probably looked like polka dots.
I heard someone scream out, “Yes!”
I heard someone, someone enthusiastic, yell, “Reaver!”
There was a huge burst of applause.
Looking up, I could see the edges of the quarry, the tops of the rock walls, were lined with hundreds of people. The citizens of Greenway. I immediately thought of Octagon’s arena… how he (I mean she, dammit) had set me up as some sort of modern gladiatorial entertainment, and now she was doing it again. She had, apparently, ordered one of her underlings to gather the citizens of Greenway, for Mistress Mary was among them, was moving through them, running to and fro, carrying a bullhorn, exhorting them to do as she wished (which they were all doing, without question) and of course Mistress Mary was now a member of Eleventh Hour. Maybe she even had a badge. A secret handshake. A clock that only went to eleven. That sort of thing.
The bitch used to be one of us.
Now, in Mistress Mary’s post-good-guy era, I could see her up there, and with a combination of my very good ears (not superhuman, just good) and the simple fact that she was yelling through a bullhorn, I could hear what she was saying to the people of my hometown.
She was saying, “Don’t get too close to the edge! You could fall!” This was just good advice; I couldn’t blame her for that. The walls were forty or fifty feet tall in some areas, and the rocks were shale, crumbling, and the edges weren’t the wisest places to stand.
She was saying, “Applaud! Applaud! This is the apex! You’ll never see a better show!” At least I was supposedly a good show. Give me a bit more of a chance and I’ll whittle Eleventh Hour down a couple more notches. Just… give me half a chance.
Mistress Mary was yelling, “This is good versus evil, Greenway! Choose your side!” Yeah. Piss on that. Piss on you, Mistress Mary, telling people that they had a choice. You’re the only one who had a choice. You chose Eleventh Hour, and everyone falls in line, because your voice is…
Mistress Mary said, “Reaver is a hero. Remember your heroes! Remember the fight! Every morning! Every day! Remember the heroes! If you always remember the heroes, you always remember what you can be!”
Now how the hell was that supposed to help Eleventh Hour?
Mistress Mary said, “Do you love him? Do you love him? Answer me!”
And they did answer. I saw Frank O’Neill and his Channel Five camera crew, reporting. And there was Gus Ferkins. There was the girl who sold me crab cakes at the convenience store, and even Grace Shanahan, the crab cake maker. Greta and Felix Barrows, Greg’s parents, were standing with their adopted daughter, Chase. Next to them was Judy, who had once been my brother Tom’s handjob queen, and who now stood with the family she’d created after he was gone. There was Tim Grady, the mailman who always joked about the obvious packages of sex toys he’d delivered throughout the years. I saw the Gorner twins, still looking the same, not only identical but as if they hadn’t aged. Slightly bigger breasts, that was all, on both of them, of course. I saw John Molar. I wondered if he still had a driver’s license… how many stop signs he’d run throughout the years… how many people had been forced to leap out of his way. I saw Brett Turle, who used to come over to our house to play cards with my parents, up until the day he told my mother (he had, by then, drank near to a bottle of wine) that she had “by far the most sweetest of asses that he probably shouldn’t ought to touch.” And I saw Laura Layton. And I saw Adele. It was only an hour ago that she had kissed me on the lips in what had been, still, the greatest revelation of my day.
She was standing with all of Greenway.
They were all saying that they loved me.
They were all applauding.
There was so much noise that I couldn’t hear any one voice in particular. The clapping hands became a single flock of noises, gathered into one.
Then…
“No,” I heard.
It was a single voice.
Someone didn’t love me.
“No,” she said. It was a woman’s voice. Not from anyone who was ringing the heights of the Greenway quarry. No. It was coming from just behind me.
The voice said, “No. I have to tell the truth. I don’t love you.”
It was Siren.
She was moving closer. Slinking closer. The air hummed around her and my senses were flaring. I could feel the healing charging within me; I could feel it racing into overdrive, believing there was new damage to heal, wounds that needed to be closed, physical threats that needed to be addressed, but my senses were confused because there was no threat, no new wounds, nothing but an ocean of restless desire. An ache. A twist.
“This isn’t how it goes,” Siren said.
“You die here, today,” she told me.
“Octagon promised me,” she whispered. She was up against my ear. I wasn’t sure how. She was still several feet away. How could she be so close to my ear?
“Nobody breaks a promise to me,” Siren said. Some part of her nibbled at my ear. It might have been her mouth. I wasn’t sure. It might just have been something in the fog. There wasn’t a fog. I felt there was a fog. I was in a sauna. I was on a throne.
“Octagon promised me,” Siren said. “She promised when I was taking a bite of that… apple.” Siren’s eyes were looking into mine. There wasn’t a fog. There was only her eyes. Her lips quivered with our shared knowledge of Octagon’s identity. I quivered in time. I am quite nearly immune to temperatures. I was burning. I was freezing. I needed Siren for warmth. I needed Siren to plunge me deeper into her fire.
“Didn’t you promise me something?” Siren said. She was holding my arm. Her skin was against mine. She was pressed up against me. She was a sun. She was a galaxy.
“Didn’t you promise that you would die?” Siren said. It was true. I had given my promise. I couldn’t lie to her. I knew, now, why Siren never lied. Any lie would be disrobed. Siren was all about exposure. Siren was the truth. Siren was the gut feeling. The intuition. The heart. The soul. Her breast was against me. Her nipple was a thickened dart. It was made of hardened steam.
“Steve Clarke,” Siren said. “Are you breaking the rules? Aren’t you being the wrong kind of naughty? Are you going back on your word? How would you feel, Reaver, if I went back on mine?” Every… single… move that she made was a promise. It was unthinkable that she could be playing unfair. That she would withdraw what she was offering. We should share the truth. We should bask in it. We should embrace it. We should take it down with us. Siren’s fingers were tugging at me. They were on my own fingers. They were on my leg. They were on my cheek. In my hair. Along my arm. Across my eyes. Tapping on my chest. Siren’s fingers never moved. They were at her sides. They were all over and across me. They were everywhere.
“Let’s seal this promise with a kiss,” Siren said. Some parts of her moved against me. They were insistent. Demanding.
“Kiss me your promise, dead man,” Siren said. Her lips were radiant. Solar. Ten thousand suns. Soft as air. Her tongue was just within, was hiding, but peeking, ready to surrender. Ready to be taken.
I lied, earlier.
A tiny giant of a lie.
I said that the voices of Greenway’s residents had all blended together. That they were a conglomerate roar without one single mark of individuality. That’s almost true. That’s completely a lie.
I could hear Adele.
Plainly.
Plainly telling me the truth that she loved me.
So…
&
nbsp; I told Siren, “Take some time off.”
My blow struck her on her cheek. I admit I was holding back. I admit I wasn’t trying to hurt her. It wasn’t a deathblow. Not even a staggering blow. Or even a particularly hard blow at all. But what it was… it was a punch.
It was a year of beauty.
Siren knew this.
And she screamed.
She ran.
She ran, I knew, because there is only so much beauty in the world, and only so much beauty in a girl, but there seems to be an infinite number of punches, and I had punches that could incrementally strip down Siren’s beauty until she would be forced to look in the mirror and admit that she was no longer the fairest of them all.
So she ran.
She ran while she was still easily the most beautiful woman in the world.
She ran while there was still easily enough of her that the act of watching her run away (I’m mostly talking about watching her ass, but also the lithe form of her legs, and the mesmerization of her hair, and a thousand other visual targets my entire body found inviting) nearly put me to my knees. As it was, though there were certainly other things that should have been on my mind, I watched as Siren sped across the quarry, and out along the long drive, a run of perhaps a minute in length, which was time well spent. I even considered gathering each and every one of the stones that she had stepped on. They had become treasures.
When she was gone, when my eyes couldn’t see her anymore, I finally registered the sight of something else.
Octagon was standing beside me.
There was a silver tube in her hand and for one second (this isn’t too surprising, since I’d just been seeing and was still thinking of Siren) I thought Octagon was holding a vibrator.
She touched it to me.
The resulting discharge (electrical, or atomic, or nuclear… I wasn’t sure) flung me seventy feet across the quarry to impact into a side wall, tucking me nearly two feet deep into the loose rocks with the shale exploding into fragments and dust as the hero with the embarrassing bulge in his pants suddenly remembered that he was in a fight.
I slid to the quarry floor, a cascade of loose rocks tumbling around me. Octagon was nowhere in sight. She had moved from where she’d been standing. Where was she? Where was…
She was right next to me, and she touched the silver tube to my side (just under my left arm as I was trying to ward her off) and the explosion sent me tumbling and sprawling along the quarry floor like a particularly well-thrown rock skipping across the surface of a lake.
I came to rest.
My eyes snapped up.
Octagon was nowhere in sight.
I’m not used to that. I’ve grown accustomed to being the one in the fight who’s the fastest, who has the edge in being able to decide what happens next, because the first move is always mine.
This is why I hate Octagon.
He cheats.
He cheats so much that it took me years to find out that, properly, it’s she cheats.
She cheats.
When I finally found her, this time, she was standing in the air, just above me. I’d visually circled the quarry with a 360 swivel but I hadn’t looked up. Had forgotten that Octagon can simply stand in midair.
Because she cheats.
She touched the not-vibrator to me on my shoulder and the resulting impact simply slammed me straight down into a newly created crater, one that wasn’t very large and wasn’t worthy of all that much notice, unless you happened to be the object that had caused the crater, that had channeled and absorbed all the impact. In that case, the crater seemed enormous and it hurt like shit.
A shockwave rode out across the quarry floor, picking up dust and small bits of rocks, raining horizontal pebbles in a cloud of dust that scaled half the height of the quarry walls.
“God damn you and your silver vibrator!” I yelled at Octagon.
“My… what?” she said, looking at the silver tube. She was standing thirty feet away. I hadn’t seen her move.
“Oh,” she said. “I see what you mean. Hah! I never really thought of that before! It really does look like a vibrator!” Even with all that I knew, it was hard to picture Apple beneath the black body suit, beneath the… what...? The black-suited exoskeleton? And her voice was Octagon’s, not Apple’s. Her voice sounded like the worst of a man, an arrogant arms dealer, an oil baron, a spoiled Ivy League degenerate, an enemy.
The crowd above was chanting my name. Not only chanting Reaver, but also Steve Clarke. It gave me some strength. I scuffed my way out of the small crater. Thought about charging Octagon. She wasn’t where I’d just been looking, though. She was fifty feet in another direction. I wondered how she was doing it. I also wondered how I would solve it. I wondered how I would put her down.
“Hear that?” I said, gesturing to the crowds above. “That’s my name! They’re chanting my name! Bet you didn’t think that would happen when you plotted out this day in that fucking mind of yours! Bet you didn’t think I could kill Laser Beast! Bet you didn’t think I’d smash Firehook like an evil little bug! Bet you didn’t think I could stand up to Siren, did you? Well, fuck you! Fuck you! You hear that?” I gestured to the crowd again. I was ranting. A bit. But I was also vying for position and trying to figure out exactly how Octagon was moving. I was looking for a tell. I was looking for a clue to exactly what she was holding in her hands. I was looking for a way to cheat.
Fighting is all about cheating.
“On the contrary,” Octagon said. “So far, everything has gone exactly as I planned.” She was behind me again. She was cheating. The silver tube touched my ass and I was sent spinning into the air, cartwheeling into the skies, cursing in agony (and some humiliation… smacked in the ass in front of my hometown crowd) and trying to get my feet back under me before I landed. Didn’t make it. Crumpled to the ground on my shoulders and then sprang up (three times normal speed, damn it!) flinging rocks towards the spot where Octagon had been. But she wasn’t there anymore.
“I wasn’t exactly sure how you would take out Laser Beast,” Octagon said. She was rising from the ground in front of me, intangible. I kicked through her face, but she was a ghost, and the lack of expected contact overbalanced me and I fell, and the ghost that I could not touch proceeded to touch me with the silver tube.
“Here’s that vibrator,” she said. The explosion sent me skimming along the rocky quarry surface, glowing a bit greener with each tumble.
The people above us, the residents of Greenway, began picking up rocks, hurling them down from above, aiming for Octagon. Most of them didn’t have very good aim. Most of them didn’t come close. A few reached the target. None of them did any damage. Some of them simply passed through Octagon. Others bounced off, breaking into pieces with the contact. She glanced up at the crowds. She laughed. It was a manly laugh. I wondered what the real laugh sounded like. I tried to remember Apple’s giggle when Laura pinched her, or when I’d told the worst and best of my vulgar jokes, or any of the other times when I’d listened to her laughing while believing that she was my friend.
“Looks like you have a lot of people on your side,” Octagon said, gesturing to all those above. “Looks like you have a fan club.”
I started to say something (undoubtedly a cock-fueled taunt of some kind) but she disappeared, winked out of view. This time, I was ready for her. This time I knew she would appear directly behind me. I spun around as fast as I could (and I am by no means slow) but she wasn’t there. My fist whooshed through nothing but empty air. I probably looked like an idiot. Greenway should have been throwing rocks at me.
I leapt.
I leapt because if she wasn’t in front of me, and if she wasn’t behind me, that meant that Octagon had gotten a step ahead of me and had known what I would do, meaning she was probably going to come out of the ground, meaning that I needed to…
She was in midair.
Right where the arc of my leap was leading me. She was waiting. She had time to give me a
bright wave before she met my oncoming (helplessly flailing) body with an outstretched silver vibrator.
I was being sex-toyed to death.
“Fuck you!” I yelled. I was to the height of the crowd at the quarry walls. They were watching me being systematically killed, my healing abilities overwhelmed. I wasn’t even putting on a very good show.
The silver tube touched me on my fist (I was trying to punch something, either it or Octagon) and the impact slammed me down to the quarry. I bounced. Three times.
On the third bounce, I found Octagon waiting for me, her intangible head peeking up from the ground.
She said, “Insects. Some new ones.”
I said, “What the fuck are you…?” and at that point the cockroaches came boiling up from below. Maybe ten of them. Then a hundred. A thousand. The quarry floor was soon teeming with them. They were a chittering carpet, with clicking wings. I was jumping as often as I could, not going for height, but instead only trying to stay off the quarry floor, to jump as often as possible, to avoid the cockroaches much in the way that a “dancing” Russian bear avoids the hot plate upon which it has been chained.
The cockroaches that got onto me, the ones that did heroic leaps of their own, they were biting into me, munching their way into my flesh, chewing on legs that could endure a hailstorm of bullets.
The pain overwhelmed me.
Children in the crowd were screaming and crying at what they were watching.
The gathered adults of Greenway were doing the same.
Mistress Mary was ordering them to watch.
The pain finally brought me to my knees, brought me down to the surface of the quarry, and the cockroaches (up close, with them crawling for my face, I could see that they were green, a dull green, with teeth and lips and tongues rather than mandibles, making them infinitely worse) began swarming me, biting and chewing and burrowing and I was screaming and then…
… they were gone.
Octagon was standing over me.
She said, “I made them susceptible to oxygen. Twenty seconds of exposure and they dissipate. Can’t have the little bastards getting loose, breeding, you know.”
