Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology

by Eric S. Brown

  Hattie clapped her hands together and the girls stopped giggling and came out from behind the screen. Both of them had handfuls of fluffy fabric. One of them was Asian, but they didn’t use that term anymore. They preferred to call them Eastern Earthly. The other was Western Earthly; or “White” as I would have called it back when I was actually a fifteen-year-old girl in 2020AD.

  The Eastern Earthly girl had coal-black eyes and straight black hair with bangs that covered her eyebrows. She might have been beautiful if she wasn’t in the black one-piece like everyone else. Western Earthly girl was about the same, but the blonde version with blue eyes. They blinked at me in rapid succession, either trying to get over the shock of my fame, or the shock of the reason I was famous.

  I wasn’t going to hurt them.

  But it looked like I was going to, didn’t it? Jonathan was an idiot chaining me up to a pillar and leaving me here like live bait.

  “Ursula, Eden,” Hattie called, a sharp tone in her voice. Her eyes were like daggers and the girls disappeared from my sight into one of the side rooms.

  Hattie sauntered over to me and I could smell the perfume she had applied since I’d last seen her. She took a handful of my hair and sniffed it. I could tell her it smelled like metal and sewage and garbage, but she scrunched up her nose and snapped her fingers. The girls came back, their hands empty this time.

  “Draw Ms. Ketterling a bath,” Hattie ordered.

  I waited while Ursula and Eden disappeared, and then the sound of running water wafted through the spacious room.

  Hattie was inspecting every inch of my body, looking me up and down, pausing at the hem of my leather pants and frowning at my breasts. I hoped she wasn’t thinking about another breast augmentation, and if she was, I hoped her mind was on reduction. Before the bombs began dropping I had a modest A-cup, but since all the fame and heroism, I had to have some minor adjustments made.

  “How do you feel about flame-resistant spandex?” she asked, a finger on her lips.

  I raised my eyebrows. “I have flame-resistant skin,” I said dryly.

  “Yes, but some of the parents complained about you being naked after the flame-throwers last year.”

  I groaned. Always nice to know the flame-throwers were out for the fifth year in a row. “Then I have no objections as long as it doesn’t itch.”

  Hattie nodded. “Great, and we wanted to give you a cape.”

  “Is the F-16 team back this year?” I asked.

  Hattie laughed. “Yes, but we don’t want to do that much bodily damage.” She glanced at my hands, the ones with all the scars on them. I grimaced. “We can ditch the cape, but we’re not going to have you looking like a condom again.”

  Great, always loved getting pulled around by my hair. Steam billowed out of the adjoining room and crawled across the ceiling.

  “What’s the theme this year?” I asked, feigning interest.

  Hattie’s heels clicked along the floor as she frowned at the door and went to check on Ursula and Eden. She pushed the door open and more steam billowed out, making her wave her hand in front of her face.

  “It’s boiling,” Ursula or Eden said. I hadn’t heard either of them speak yet and so I couldn’t be sure, but the voice wasn’t Hattie’s. Hattie ducked into the room for a moment, the steam still circling her in wisps as she emerged and moved toward me. She didn’t look at me as she unchained me from the pillar, but didn’t set me free from the chains. I rattled like jingle bells as I crossed the floor and entered the steam. Both Ursula and Eden were on either side of the lavish tub. There were stairs leading to it, a perfect seashell sunken into the porcelain, and funny-looking soaps in the shape of ducks and seashells on the side of the bath. They were right: it was bubbling like it was hot as hell in there.

  I wasn’t nervous as Hattie removed my clothes. I boldly took the stairs, chains and all, and lowered myself into the boiling water. My skin reddened and my cheeks flushed. I couldn’t feel the heat. Not in the way I used to, at least. I was still curious about the theme and with my hands bobbing on the surface I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “The theme?” I asked.

  Hattie looked unpleasant. She glared at Ursula and Eden and both of them ran out of the room like she had dangled a scorpion in front of their faces. She folded her hands together and gave me that this-is-all-for-the-best expression I hated. “You know how the kids are these days. They want to remember the old Fable Ketterling.”

  Throwback stuff, exactly what I wanted. I opened my mouth to protest, but she put a hand up to silence me. The old Fable Ketterling was a hero, she was a saint. She signed autographs until her hands were numb and posed for pictures with every little kid that came her way. She appeared at not only the big Temperance Day, but at all the major festivals throughout the year. She traveled to the suburbs and shook hands with the sheriffs and members of parliament. That Fable Ketterling was a dare-devil—sky-diving without parachutes and setting herself on fire, and letting herself be ravaged by feral Tigers. That Fable Ketterling was a superhero.

  “They want a superhero,” Hattie said firmly.

  I looked away, not willing to let her see me cry. Things weren’t the same anymore and I regretted all the years I took my immortality for granted. Hattie would never understand. She was a child compared to my years, and if I wanted to I could have pulled her into the tub and boiled her alive. I didn’t though. I stared at the beige-tiled walls and squeezed my eyes shut, pretending they were watery from the steam.

  “Collin will have a panic attack,” I whispered, gulping back more tears.

  “Collin doesn’t have any say anymore. Jonathan took over for him after what happened three years ago.”

  I pursed my lips. Collin Cray hated me from the first day he saw me, and every Cray before him hated me, too, over fifty generations of them raising their voices against me. He was by far one of the most influential members of parliament. His ancestor was one of the eight that originally founded Temperance and gave the entire human race refuge from the nuclear bombs that tore apart everything anyone had ever known.

  I was the last one left from that grim reality. We used to live in Argentina. My parents owned a lucrative mining company based out of Ontario, Canada. We were knee-deep in rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires—you name it, we mined it. I had started working for them when I was twelve. I knew how to harness up and spelunk through the caves like the best of them. I knew my way around the rain forest and I was pretty handy with a knife. When the sirens went off and the bombs began dropping they rocked the entire planet to its core. Storms erupted all over the world and because of the velocity of the blasts, the entire planet tilted on its axis. The United States and Canada became the North Pole, and Asia, the South Pole. Nuclear waste destroyed the rest and what didn’t kill people immediately killed them slowly, a poison made of isotopes that deteriorated a person over time. There wasn’t a cure.

  I had been in the middle of a diamond mine when the blasts hit and I was cut from my rope. My parents weren’t as lucky. They were on the surface when the blasts hit and the radiation washed over the land. Later, somehow still alive, they found me in the caves, bloody and bruised. Together, we made our way through the underground systems in Argentina, all the way to the shores. We built a boat and crossed around the same time Cray, Chung, Withers, Grim, Brighton, Jenkins and Alexander did. We were the first ones to discover Temperance, all the credit going to my parents and the others who arrived with them.

  And what we found shocked the world. It was a city, carved out of stone and marble and brass and iron. There was oil thawing in the open-faced iron pipes that stretched atop the thick stone walls. The city was big. It seemed like it never ended. It was an empire like Rome, hidden two hundred feet under permafrost, and completely inaccessible to the human race until 2020AD.

  As the first teenager of Temperance I took my chances exploring the various caves and passageways, looking for buried or hidden treasure. Then I came upon it. The clay
stone sidewalk curled downwards, like a spiral staircase, down and down and down, the sun becoming a memory behind me as I descended. I ended up in a courtyard, decaying brown vines hanging on the walls and orange leaves crunching under my feet. I was at a dead end; all I could see above me was a pinch of the clear blue sky.

  I hadn’t been exposed to the radiation and so when I approached the simple fountain in the center of the courtyard I thought nothing of it. I ran my hands in the cool trickling waters and pressed my fingers to my mouth. That was all it took: one drop sliding down my throat and my entire body convulsed. I had an epileptic fit. There were screams from the spiral sidewalk as my insides congealed, my entire matter and energy shifting and changing. Footsteps found me, arms circled me, and I heard my father whisper something comforting in my ear.

  It hurt like hell, until nothing hurt anymore.

  And then the first Cray I had ever met walked into the courtyard and gasped. He called it the Fountain of Youth. He didn’t hesitate to drink from it, and the others followed, drunk with the passion and romanticism of it. I lay on the ground immobilized by the buzzing sounds of the earth, a sound like everything was alive and vibrant and fresh.

  Hattie snapped in front of my face and I realized the bath was ice cold. I nodded to her as I pushed myself up, still clad in chains, and accepted the towel around my shoulders. We went back into the spacious room and I caught a first glimpse of my costume for the thirteen-hundredth-and-thirteenth annual Temperance Day.

  Blood-red embroidered shiny spandex stretched haphazardly across the mannequin. It was split at the shoulder, showing off skin before continuing down to the finger loop. There were silver symbols embroidered on it, from the new language developed by our linguists. While most of the people who migrated to Temperance spoke English, after over a thousand years, the language was archaic and overused. Instead they switched to a series of symbols. The language was intricate and I didn’t speak it. My handlers spoke it, but not in my presence. I was, after all, the most ancient thing in their fair city. Hattie spoke English to me out of respect and Jonathan Cray did it to remind me of what I am.

  The costume was comprised of a red bodysuit with the embroidered symbols of hope, peace, bravery, and survival fused into it. There were never any wars in Temperance, but then, there weren’t any flights to Paris either.

  There wasn’t a Paris anymore.

  Attached to the bodysuit, which reminded me of a gymnastics unitard, were matching leggings, incredibly high stilettos, and a detachable skirt, the invertible kind that could display me in the traditional Fable the Immortal colors. This was something I would have worn circa 2075AD, during the reign of Gregory Cray.

  Hattie put her hands on my shoulders. “Do you like it?” she asked.

  I coughed, rattling the chains, and said nothing.

  She sauntered over to it and thoughtfully put her fingers on the collar. “I thought it would bring back fond memories.”

  I cringed away from Ursula and Eden as they casually flanked me, fussing over the chains, removing them from my hands and feet. I could have killed them in three seconds, snap, snap, snap, leave them lying on the floor. But even naked I didn’t touch them. Hattie moved away from the mannequin as Ursula, I think—the Eastern Earthly one—took the bodysuit off it and began fitting me onto it. Eden pulled the skirt around my waist; it was shiny and frilly in a spandex kind of way. I stepped into the leggings and they scrunched along my shins.

  I put my feet into the stilettos and let the girls attach the straps to my ankles, keeping my gaze hard on Hattie. She thought it would remind me of Forest. Those, seemingly, were the memories she wanted to bring up. The worst part was that it wasn’t even the Fountain of Youth that made him special; it was purely his birthright. Forest was psychic, and he knew me in ways that nobody else had ever tried to know me. I let him get close to me for a good fifty years before the radiation poisoning took him away just like it took everyone away.

  I was willing to do things on Temperance Day with Forest watching that the people had never dreamed of watching me do. I locked myself in crates and broke free, buried myself in liquid rock and escaped, locked myself in an iron maiden and let my blood run into the sandy arena floor. I did it because of his curiosity, because unlike the others he could read my mind and I wanted to challenge him. He had a way of living inside my head and then bringing me things from my childhood that I missed, like ice cream. He once created something that was close, but not as creamy. I loved him and hated him for it because it only reminded me again of where I was and what happened to me, something I wanted to forget. But Forest was fascinated with me, and because of that I went straight to the macabre. During those Temperance Days he lived in pain, seeing what I saw, feeling what I didn’t feel. I put him through a lot, and he didn’t waver, not once. He still loved me until the day he died.

  “Is it fireproof?” I asked, trying to stay off the topic of Forest.

  Hattie nodded and took my clammy pinkish hand. “Only the best for Fable,” she whispered, leading me back toward the tunnels.

  It didn’t take long to wind through the opulent corridors and step into the pit. The pit was an atrium underneath the arena. Above me were thousands of stomping feet and clapping hands. They were so loud they made the ground vibrate. I clenched my small fist, looking at the triangle of fabric that stretched across it to my middle finger where it tapered off, looping around my finger like a ring.

  I peered through the grates in front of me, but the arena was nothing but a sandy spot of white in the blistering afternoon sun. The show was about to begin. Hattie squeezed my shoulders and I smelled her perfume as she leaned into my ear.

  “Be a good girl and die Fable,” she whispered.

  I squared my shoulders and resisted the urge to elbow her in the stomach, swivel and grab her head, snap her neck. Five seconds, it would take me five seconds to kill her.

  I watched as the ancestors of the eight founding families trickled into the center of the arena from another entrance. They were the only ones dressed in regal military uniforms, all brass buttons and tassels and stripes. They each wore crew-style hats and polyester slacks. They formed a line and began the salutes to the people piled in the stands. Jonathan Cray was among them, in his finest, and against my will my mouth watered. I didn’t like any of the ancestors of the founding families, not even the man that was supposed to be my great-to-the-power-of-infinity grandson. That was Milo Ketterling. He was only twenty-two and he had taken over for my last grandson, Rab Ketterling, only two years ago. Rab was sitting in the stands along with the rest of the Ketterlings, the Crays, the Chungs and the others. They were all waiting for me, their everlasting symbol of hope, to step into the arena.

  It wasn’t time yet.

  “Welcome!” Jonathan Cray boomed once the salutes were over.

  I gritted my teeth, awaiting the rest of the speech I had heard thirteen-hundred-and-thirteen times over. The speech I could recite by heart.

  He broke away from the line of other founders with his hands spread wide, palms facing the crowd. “For centuries we have preserved the human race in Temperance. For centuries we have remained a peaceful civilization, never giving in to the wars that brought us here. For centuries we have tried, tested and hoped that the waters would give us everlasting life. Here, on this thirteen-hundredth-and-thirteenth annual Temperance Day, we celebrate the day we found the Fountain of Youth.” He paused as the crowd erupted into insane cheers, the clapping and stomping reaching a roaring pitch.

  I wrung my hands out, shifted back and forth on my stilettos, and shook out my wavy orange-red hair. I looked up only to find Jonathan’s eyes boring into my mine. He was supposed to be looking at the crowd, but he was looking at me.

  “On this day, thirteen-hundred-and-thirteen years ago, we drank from the Fountain of Youth. We drank, but it didn’t spare all our lives.” He tore his gaze away from me and began speaking to the crowd, his face tilted toward the sun, absorbing the deadly ra
ys of ultraviolet light.

  “The Fountain spared only one, one who is immortal, one who is impervious to death, and one who has existed long before even our ancestors had existed.”

  I drummed my fingers on the shimmery fabric, waiting for the gates to open, trying to find some clues about what the plan was for this year, what their big spectacle would be.

  “Fable Ketterling,” Jonathan said, the crowd erupting into applause. He put his hands up and it died down immediately. “And we know Fable’s story. She was in the diamond mines when the nuclear bombs hit. She was spared from the radiation that runs through the veins of each and every one of us. Radiation that we thought would wear off after generations. Unfortunately,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “the Fountain of Youth still has no affect.”

  There was a roar throughout the crowds as Jonathan Cray shattered their hope for the thirteen-hundredth-and-thirteenth time. I cringed at the angry stomps and booing.

  “And so without further adieu I give you our superhero, Fable the Immortal!” Jonathan said, his arm outstretched toward me.

  The kinks in the grate began clicking as it slid out of the way. He smiled at me and I smiled at him. I boldly walked out into the arena, the sun hitting my face with a burning heat that no longer bothered me or caused an ounce of perspiration to bead on my forehead. The people in the stands were drenched in it, hawkers running between the stands with drums of water to fill their canteens. I put my spandex-clad hand in his and he raised it up, turning me around so that everyone could get a good look at me.