Corrupts Absolutely?

by Peter Clines

  #

  Two ribs break, and my spleen lacerates before I can put a buffer of psionic energy between me and Ray J. The makeshift shield won’t hold long though and starts to buckle under his strength. I can’t tell if the coolness on my face is the wind rushing past or blood Ray J has squeezed from my ears, eyes, and nose. I need to end this before he kills me, so I do the one thing I’ve wanted to do since the day I first met Ray J. I kiss those wonderful, full lips of his.

  #

  I can’t bring myself to hate my father as much as I hate my mother. He didn’t carry me for nine months, love me from the inside, and then cast me aside thirteen years later ashamed, embarrassed, and horrified. He just abandoned me, his baby girl, when I needed him the most. But I have enough hate to go around. My mother’s cervical cancer is now stage two. And the tumor in my father’s prostate won’t be getting smaller any time soon.

  #

  I throw all of my psionic energy into the kiss, and for a few moments, it’s just me and him. No rage. No hatred. No fear. No intimidation. Ray J relaxes his bear hug. One humongous hand goes to the small of my back. The other goes to my ass. His mouth opens. It’s warm and moist. I press into him: mouth, breasts, crotch. I tell myself it’s to sink my tendrils deeper into his mind. Our tongues touch.

  And then the shit really hits the fan.

  Ray J stiffens. His face contorts with pain. He lets go of me and plummets back to Earth with frightening speed. I try to reach for him with my mind to stop him, to slow him, to catch him, but I can’t. I’m too fatigued. I don’t have the mental power to heal my injuries, ravage my mother’s cervix and my father’s prostate, slow my fall, and save Ray J. Besides, at this height, falling with this velocity, he’s more likely to survive.

  But everyone on the Black Hawk helicopter won’t. Ray J is lined up just right, and they don’t see him coming down. I try to direct some of the swift air flows around me, slowing my descent to Ray J as a last ditch to save Ray-Ray and Kee-Kee and the others on board, but they’re just too far in my weakened state. Ray J smashes right through the Black Hawk as it takes off for Great Lakes Naval Hospital. Bodies and medical equipment are flung end over end by the impact.

  I quickly scan the mental signatures within the hurtling debris and fireball for Kee-Kee and Ray-Ray. But there’s nothing I can do for them. They are already dead. And then the concussive wave from the explosion hits me, and the world goes black.

  #

  My bedroom is exactly as I left it five years ago: Rihanna poster to the left of my white Ikea dressing table. Nelly Furtado poster to the right. Clothes hamper overflowing next to the closet. Pajamas crumpled on the floor.

  I sit on the bed in the three a.m. darkness. I had been wrapped in a blanket cocoon of warmth and laziness the day I mind linked my mother as she was having sex with my father. Outside, my window had looked like a Christmas postcard. Everything was pristine and white. I had been drifting in and out of wakefulness while big, fat snowflakes hushed the world as they fell.

  At the time, I didn’t know what was happening. My mind had grown wide as if a small hatch in my head opened. It spread throughout the house, expanding, roving, and—

  My mother knocks on the door. Her knock hasn’t changed in the five years I’ve been gone either. It’s still tentative, cautious, apologetic.

  “I thought I heard you come in.”

  She looks old and frail in her nightgown. There are new wrinkles at her throat and scored into her face. The ones around her eyes and mouth are the pain wrinkles.

  “Hi.” I don’t know what else to say.

  “Did they kick you out?” She hovers in the doorway, hands clasped before her, not sure if she should stand there, sit at my desk, or next to me on the bed.

  “They’ve decommissioned us.”

  “For how long?”

  “Indefinitely.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “But I sent you there.”

  I pause half a heartbeat. “It’s a good place for us.”

  “TMZ said the Institute wants you and Ray J to give your performance bonuses back.”

  I frown. When did my mother start watching TMZ? “Loss of innocent life clause,” I explain.

  “They also said that you spent your bonus money on a 10,000-square-foot French Provincial home here in Lake Forest with eight bedrooms, eight baths, a tennis court, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and eleven-foot ceilings.”

  I give a sullen shrug with one shoulder, feeling like I’m thirteen again. “They pay us well.”

  “And Stella said in her column that Ray J’s father was a crackhead, but Ray J is a good boy. He’d been paying his father’s rent and car note all of these years.”

  I nod. “He’s the nicest, angriest boy I know if that makes sense. He’s just misunderstood. Stella is the only one in the media who has tried to look past his rage and my psionic abilities and understand us for who we are.”

  We fall silent and look at each other. My mother wants to say something to me, but I make a conscious effort not to read her mind. It’s more of a strain than anything I’ve ever done with my abilities.

  Finally, she says, “I saw coverage of the funeral on Channel 5.”

  I don’t trust my voice not to hitch and crack, so I don’t say anything. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ray-Ray’s coffin as the cemetery groundskeepers shoveled dirt onto it. It was so small and perfect and white down there in the grave next to Kee-Kee.

  My mother sits next to me on the bed, puts a hand on my knee—still hesitant, still tentative—and then gathers me in her embrace.

  “Oh, my Aieesha,” she whispers, and I lose it. I sob and heave and snot on her bony shoulder until I’m too tired to cry anymore.

  I never liked my real name. It seemed so stupid to me. I know it represents the duality of my multiculturalism—a combination of the Japanese word for “love” and a ghetto suffix my mother thought I needed just in case people couldn’t tell I was half-black from my skin color—but I hated it because I hated my mother and father.

  And now, to hear my mother say my name with such love and sorrow and hurt after not being able to sleep for a week because I keep dreaming of Ray-Ray’s little broken body cartwheeling through the air has utterly destroyed me in a way no psionic strike could.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper to her.

  “For what?”

  I’m too much of a coward to say, “For hating you and giving you and Daddy cancer.” So instead, I say, “For everything.”

  But I’m not too spiteful anymore. I can’t continue to allow their cancer cells to run rampant, so I release my mother’s cervix and my father’s prostate. My mother gasps, and her eyes go wide. The two slender, pointed tendrils that retract from their bodies back to my mind are black and viscous.

  My mother looks at me for a long moment. Again, she wants to say something to me. But again, she takes me into her arms, guiding my head to her shoulder, stroking my curly-curly hair.

  I guess you can go home again.

  Past Imperfect: A Scorpion Story

  Warren Stockholm

  “Herr Kurt, we should do an editorial on superheroes,” Benny Herzog suggested, popping his head into my private office.

  I looked up from the proof copy of the latest edition of The Inquisitor, Benny all fuzzy because I was wearing my reading glasses, and said, “Superheroes? Why?”

  Benny stepped fully into the room, the milk-glassed insert door with my name on it hitting him on the rump as it closed behind him, cutting off the frantic sounds of my secretary Olga’s typing and the other clattering office noises of the bullpen at eight o’clock on a Monday morning. There were days when I propped the door open with my rubber plant just to let it all in. There’s something very soothing about the noises of a busy and successful newspaper office. But this morning, I’d needed some privacy or I was never going to get the issues worked out of the l
atest edition. I’d had a long, busy night and no sleep.

  Benny held up several grainy photostats, delivered via one of my correspondents in the city. I could just make out a humanoid figure hanging suspended over a busy line of traffic. If I hadn’t known it to be impossible, I’d have said the figure in the photostats was flying. Benny smiled broadly, showing off his nicotine-stained grin, the grin that always said money shot. “It looks like Steeltown finally has one. Its very own superhero.”

  So that’s how it started. A little adventure that nearly cost me my life, not that such things were unusual, considering my history and line of work. There are people out there who dislike me, who want to kill me. I take great offense to that. This city is American through and through from its tallest spires to its lowliest slums. This city is not Germany under the iron fist of the Reich. This is not the America held hostage for almost sixty years by the Axis Powers. Germany nearly destroyed a third of the world before it was brought low by the most embarrassing of circumstances: financial depression. People do not live in fear here. They have freedom. And when someone—anyone—threatens that freedom, when they threaten me, they answer to the Scorpion.

  Steeltown is his territory. His city. And here, there be monsters.

  I set the proof aside and started going over the photostats one by one. If forgeries of some kind, they were so damned good even I couldn’t find the wires and special effects using my special magnifying monocular.

  I was still examining them, Benny hovering excitedly at my elbow, when Olga tapped on my door. She had the morning edition of The World, my number one newspaper competitor in the city.

  The World is run by real estate mogul Farnon Pendrick, who owns more properties in Steeltown than anyone else, myself included. The World is merely a hobby of his, or so he’s been known to state in public. But then, seven years ago, when I’d finally made The Inquisitor the number one paper in town, I’d learned through various channels that Farnon was pouring nearly all his assets into The World. The price of a wounded ego, I suppose. It had since become a white elephant that Farnon couldn’t let go. Call it a cold war if you will—or maybe Farnon is just a poor loser—but I have to keep an eye on him every minute. As such, one of Olga’s duties is to fetch me The World the moment it hits the newsstands.

  “Your paper, sir,” Olga said cheerily, depositing it on my desk. It was an inside joke between us that she gives me the world every day. But today, I wasn’t laughing.

  I glanced at Farnon’s paper, looked back at the photostat I was trying to authenticate, then looked back at the paper. A very similar photograph graced the front page of The World, a man in dark blue, skin-tight body armor and an honest-to-God cape was apparently flying free-style over Jump Bridge, only a few miles from this very building. I dropped the monocular to my desktop and grabbed up the paper. Farnon had gotten the drop on me today.

  I was both angry and impressed. Yes, it’s possible to be both. I disliked Farnon, but I also admired his chutzpah at running such an absurd story. So for the next two weeks, I had my best correspondents in the city covering the many sightings of the vigilante who called himself Morningstar.

  The reason I say vigilante is that he seemed to be bent on insinuating himself into the nightly activities of Steeltown. The chump had the misguided belief that by preventing crimes from happening, it somehow made him a hero worth celebrating. I had my doubts. I had long ago lost my faith in God, government, and superheroes. I was a big boy now, my youth and ignorance far behind me—long since buried in a prisoner-of-war trench in Nazi Germany. No one did anything without expecting something in return. It went against human nature.

  The truth would come out. In time.

  All I had to do…all the Scorpion had to do…was watch and wait.

  #

  For the next two weeks, I had my people watch and report on Morningstar’s many nocturnal activities though I didn’t print any of his stories. Or, if I did, I cut Morningstar’s part in the fiasco out. Farnon did the same thing anytime there was a Scorpion sighting. It was a longtime joke between us. Only The Inquisitor reported on Scorpion activity. The World, up until a few days ago, reported so-called “real” news—car wrecks, gangbangings, murders, rapes, and the occasional terrorist act.

  I’m nothing if not a patient man. I waited and watched. It was little things at first. Morningstar was sighted stopping a pair of youths from assaulting a cab driver. Later that same day, he collared a purse-snatcher. Small beans, crimes almost laughable in their insignificance. Then again, those were the types of crimes that the Scorpion had cut his teeth on. If anything, it seemed Morningstar was more of a showman than a hero. He certainly enjoyed being photographed as he went about his nightly duties committing acts of Boy Scout heroism. The Scorpion, on the other hand, usually took pains to avoid publicity—unless he knew that publicity would raise readership of my paper. In that way, he and I often work together.

  Two weeks to the date of the first sighting, I got my chance to talk to Farnon. We were part of the same gentleman’s club, and we did our teeing on Lakeside Greens. We met up on Saturdays twice a month, but I had missed the last game. I had been recovering from a slug I’d taken in the shoulder when the Scorpion put one of mobbie Gil “Black Fingers” Blackman’s lackeys through a plate glass window. He’d gone over the edge backwards, pulling his manstopper as he did so. He was an amazingly accurate shot up until the moment he died, splashed across the fresh concrete outside Gil’s new high-rise apartment complex.

  “Hallo there, old boy. You’re looking fit as usual,” Farnon said as he came up the hill, towing a valet, two security personnel, and his teeing partner and fourth wife Belinda, a bottle blonde who was young enough to be his granddaughter. Farnon greeted me the same way every time. He hated me, but he was a gentleman about it and preferred to launch his assaults at me in true passive-aggressive editorial style.

  Belinda Pendrick smiled insouciantly at me, her golf slacks indecently tight. The one and only time we’d been alone, Belinda had climbed into my lap and tried to dry hump me. Since then, Farnon only let her out of his sight fully chaperoned by one of his heavies. The guy standing on Farnon’s left was for his security. The one on the right, nervously picking his nose, was there to keep Belinda out of trouble. I smiled and kissed Belinda’s hand.

  Farnon did not reciprocate the gesture with my own teeing partner, Suzaku. Despite being the most stunning thing on the green in her flowing white kimono full of flocking red cranes, her hair bound up in a bounty of small braids and her face painted as exquisitely as a fine porcelain doll, Farnon treated my Suzaku as if he might catch a communicable disease. Farnon believed in the science of eugenics. He thought it scandalous that I should be keeping a Geisha. That was another point we disagreed on.

  Suzaku was my sensei, not my Geisha.

  We’d only just teed off when he said, “I know what you’re thinking, old thing, and you’re completely off base, as usual.”

  “What am I thinking, old thing?” I asked as we hefted our bags and started down the hill where our balls waited. Well, I hefted my bag. Ironically, Farnon had his wife carry his. I figured she’d done something wrong and was being punished.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t hire him, the chap with the cape. Awful melodramatic, wouldn’t you agree?” Farnon wrinkled up his tanned face like a Pekinese.

  “Yet you insist on running stories on him.”

  “I’m considering it an experiment.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to see if this theory of yours is right, if all this vigilante humbug is capable of selling papers.”

  “Paper not selling, old thing?” I raised my eyebrows at Farnon, but he wouldn’t answer me.

  Belinda sashayed past us, giggling.

  Later that evening, as I prepared for bed, I told Suzaku, “I’m not entirely certain old Farnon’s behind it.”

  I stood in the lavishly tiled, Byzantine-inspired b
athroom off my bedroom, peeling off the Scorpion’s bloody clothes bit by bit while trying not to stare at myself in the mirror. It had become something of a ritual. Obviously, I needed the mirror to shave in the morning, but I resented it bitterly and avoided it when possible. The man in the glass was tall and gaunt, almost stoop-shouldered tonight. He looked sallow and unwell and sported dark, haunted rings under his pale, gray eyes. I did not like my eyes of late, the way they flickered uncertainly around a room like silver bugs. The way they never rested—never looked rested—anymore. It made me want to put the Scorpion’s veiled fedora back on.

  After the hat and long leather coat had come off, I went to work on the bloodstained gauntlets and various bits of body armor. I pared the Scorpion down until he was only Herr Kurt Reinhardt again, a man, a German ex-patriot, and a newspaper mogul, someone most people in the city figured was dirty but only in terms of sex and money. They did not know about the blood. No one knew about the blood except Suzaku.

  It had been a rough night. The brother of Black Finger’s dead mob lackey had called a challenge, threatening to blow the top portion off a bank building if the Scorpion didn’t arrive and turn himself over for execution. The Scorpion had arrived on time but not in the manner the man, a nervous little fellow, had expected. Instead of walking into the trap, the Scorpion had rappelled down the side of the building and shot out the plate-glass office window. The glass had shattered and knifed into the man. He’d been little more than a bloody heap by the time the Scorpion had put a mercy bullet in his brain.

  Dressed only in my trousers, I pulled the band from my hair so it fell in long, tired strands against my cheeks and the back of my neck. Even my hair hurt tonight.

  I went out into the adjacent room, where Suzaku had prepared my bed. She stood by my bedside with a collection of small pots of creams she herself had made from ingredients she did not divulge to anyone. On nights like these, she applied those creams to my shredded muscles and ligaments then went about the distasteful work of sewing up any wounds that had not healed of their own accord. They would be manageable in the morning, I knew, the Frankenstein stitches all gone. But whether this is due to Suzaku’s exotic salves or my own inner queer clone anatomy, I’ve never discovered.