Even the cancer cells are upset—but seriously, screw them. The rest of you? Hope you all kept your résumés updated.
And what does Wade Wilson get for his last selfless moment? A view of a mountain range? A field? Some porno?
Nope. Even Mr. Snuffles isn’t in my field of vision. He’s probably off licking his junk somewhere. Nothing to see here but a table edge and the flat wall behind it. Not even any color, just a white wall with silver trim.
Wish I could see him one last time. I wish I could tell him, “Earn this! Earn this, Mr. S.!” But there isn’t time. There just isn’t time.
I crash onto the cool floor. My hand registers a sharp pain, like my palm is being eaten by acid. I start to close my eyes, wondering if I’ll be able to finish closing them before everything goes black. I do. I get my eyes closed. Then I slow-count to ten.
Hey—I’m still here. I open my eyes again to see what the &*@ is going on.
No, I’m not miraculously immune. There is indeed a hole in my hand, right where the nano-catalyst touched. It’s about the size of a dime, and it is spreading, around and down, but…slowly. Because it was just one drop? The monsters all got a whole spritz. Could be a dosage issue. Or maybe it’s like that transporter thing, and the nano-catalyst is suddenly obeying different rules in order to create dramatic tension. Can’t say. All I know is, it is liquefying me, and while I may not be gone in seconds, this isn’t the time to start watching an episode of Murder, She Wrote.
Besides, Dick’s still here, and I doubt we have the same taste in TV.
I stand and point my remaining blade his way. His head’s askew, like it’s no longer properly attached, but he still has the nerve to nod at my dripping wrist.
“Your hand is gone.”
I crouch into an offensive stance. “Or…is it?” “Yeah, it is. And now your forearm’s dripping pink goo. That is so gross.”
“Look, smartass, I don’t have time to argue about who does or doesn’t have which limbs. Pretend I’m doing that Keanu Reeves thing and waving you forward with my fingers, and let’s finish this up.”
“You got it.”
We eye each other like two mortally wounded Samurai, motionless but mentally playing out all the possible moves—the strikes, the counters, the combos—second-guessing then third-guessing until it’s as if the fight’s already over, and all that’s left is to play it out.
Yes, it looks that way—but really, I make it up as I go along. He’s expecting me to go for his weak shoulder again, and I’m expecting the same. But when it comes down to it and we move, I change my mind. I swing for his neck—right where that floppy head connects to his mechanized body.
See Dick. See Dick’s head fall. Fall, head, fall.
The cyborg body hits the ground, landing in an odd cross-legged position that makes it seem quite thoughtful.
With Jane avenged, and no one left to try and conquer the world with dog-monsters, it’s over. Well, except for the monsters tromping around upstairs, but that’s someone else’s problem now. All that’s left for me is the melting. Arm’s pretty much gone, along with a fifth of my chest—beautiful muscles, oozing scars, and all.
Woozy, I slump to the floor beside Dick’s head.
Al comes out of hiding to kneel beside me. I look up at her.
“Puppies…out of…danger?”
She nods. “Want some water, or something?”
I’ve come back so often it’s tough to really believe my own death is imminent, but the look on her face worries me.
“Nah. I think I’ll just sit here, if you don’t mind.” As more of me dribbles off, I get to a place where it’s easier to chat with the dead. So I turn from away her, toward the head.
“Good fight there, Dick. We really could have been buds.”
I’m not expecting it to answer.
“I was hoping for a more physical relationship.”
I’m really not expecting it to answer in Jane’s voice.
CHAPTER 28
WISH I had an extra minute or two to wrap my much-abused brain around this startling new development, but the liquefaction’s reached my thigh. Not much longer before I wind up the Merc without a Mouth. But with my throat still intact and my eyes on the disembodied head talking in Jane’s voice, I call out, “Al?”
She’s beside me, so close it startles me. “Yeah, Wade?”
“I’ll take that water now.”
“Sure.”
Somber, she hands me what’ll probably be my last drink. Wish it had ice cubes, but there isn’t even a freaking straw. Geez, Al, the condemned on death row get a better deal. Think you could have made some effort?
Bracing myself, I address the fallen head. “Jane…is that really you? Am I hallucinating?”
The lips beneath the mask crinkle into a smile. “It’s really me, Wade, it really is.”
Didn’t realize how desert-dry my mouth was until I fill it with water. Instead of swallowing, I do a spit take all over the head. It wriggles and tries to shake off the water. Not being a dog, it can’t.
“Hey! This mask isn’t waterproof! And it’s not like I can towel off!”
“Pardon me for a spontaneous expression of surprise! Jane, what-the-freaking-what are you doing in Dick’s head?”
“It’s not his head, it’s…ours.”
I throw the cup. It bounces on her forehead. “Like that explains it.”
“Oh, Wade! I wanted to tell you from the beginning, I did, but I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t?” I turn away. “Or didn’t want to?”
She opens and closes her mouth, using her chin to wriggle closer. “Please don’t be like that. I was afraid if you knew the truth, you’d hate me. I couldn’t bear it if you hated me.”
I can’t help it. I twist back toward her. It’s not that I want to, but I can’t control my melting body very well. It just sort of twists that way.
“Hate you? Babe, I don’t even know what you are.” Al leans down between us. “Get a room, you two. Or at least a bucket.”
“Some privacy, okay?”
Al harrumphs, but gives us space. Hip dribbling off, I search Jane’s pleading eyes.
“All I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth.”
“Can’t you guess? You of all people?” As she speaks, her voice changes. It gets deeper, less flirtatious. “You know what it’s like to have a psychological disorder, don’t you?” I realize I’m talking to Dick. “A beehive mind that’s always talking to itself?”
Oh! Oh! I get it!
They’re a split personality!
Quiet, quiet! Let the readers put it together, will you?
My left buttock is half gone. I’m starting to list. “So…Dick is Jane? Jane is Dick? Does Spot know? Is that why Spot runs?”
One moment, Dick’s talking: “You could say we’re luckier than you. At least we have two android bodies to reflect our different gender identities.”
The next, it’s Jane: “Or…you might say we’re not as lucky, since we’re just a head now.”
To keep from falling over, I use my only arm to grab the table. “Can we speed this up?”
“Wade…can you still love me?”
“Honestly, Jane, it depends—it depends on a lot of things. How’d you get like this? What’s it got to do with the dog-monsters? And most importantly, is your female robot body completely anatomically correct?”
Another voice, neither Dick nor Jane, interjects. “I can answer that first question.”
I told you guys to keep quiet!
Wasn’t us.
Yeah, check the real world for once, will you?
“Uh…over here, Wade?”
I try to face the newcomer, but what’s left of me does another twisty thing, and I end up looking half at a puddle of myself and half at a brand-new corridor that seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Standing in it, with a shiny cadre of grim S.H.I.E.L.D. agents posing behind her, is a sight for my sore and soon-to-be-melting eyes.
“Preston! And look, you brought an exit with you!”
She nods. “Once I had the mobile interface up, I found a tunnel that let us in from an acre away, avoiding the monsters upstairs—all from my smartphone. The OS here is a better find than the gene-splicing equipment. You don’t look so good, as usual, Wade. Don’t know why I ever expect different anymore.”
“If I’d known you were coming, I’d have tried to stay in one piece. But to what do I owe the pleasure?”
Her face twists. “Your fight with Dick in New York attracted attention. Forensics did an analysis of Dick’s blood samples, pulled from the barbed wire in the alley. I raced over here as soon the results were confirmed. I…wanted to tell you in person.”
“You’ve ID’d our mysterious perpetrators? You know who Dick and Jane is…uh…are?”
Traces of confusion join the overall trepidation on her face. “I’m going to go with sort of. After the preliminary results, I thought the samples had to be contaminated, so I requisitioned a more complete diagnostic. The lab boys found a few markers to distinguish the genome from…”
Left buttock’s gone now, and all I’m hearing is blah-blah-blah.
“Em, I’m already half-assed here. Can I have the short version?”
“There’s no way to sugarcoat this, but…” The perceptive agent finally notices my puddle. “Wade, are you melting? I’m just so used to seeing you in pieces…You are melting!” She puts her hands to her hips. “You broke the ADD, didn’t you? You broke the damned ADD! I warned you, I said to be careful, but no—”
“Em, the news?”
She blinks. “Right. Dick, Jane—whatever that head calls itself— it’s you. A complete genetic match.”
A dark ache rises from the depths of my being. Could be the result of all these emotional shocks, but slowly turning to goo probably has something to do with it, too. “Nooooo! I don’t believe it! I won’t believe it! It’s like Luke finding out Leia is his sister, only worse.”
Jane coos at me. “She’s lying, Wade. Don’t believe her. She’s jealous. They’re all jealous of us. Look at them with their sad little lives, and then look at us—me a head, you melting. No, wait. Bad example. What does it matter? What does anything matter if we’re in love?”
Before the sultry voice can take me into an adolescent hallucination, Blind Al slaps me. “For pity’s sake! You don’t have to believe anyone. Just take the mask off like I told you in the first place!”
Fear creeps into Jane’s voice. “Wade, don’t.”
My body trembles. Or maybe sheds is a better word. “Why, Jane? What have you got to hide?”
“Nothing…I just haven’t had a chance to do my hair or anything…”
“Quit with the lame gender stereotypes and hold still, toots.”
I snag the bottom of the fabric. When I try to slip it off, the head just rolls around. I hold it down with my last leg, but it winds up rolling sideways.
“Al, hold the neck stump for me a sec, will you?”
“You hold the freaking stump. I’ll pull the mask.”
“Fine.”
When I grab her neck, Jane giggles. “Ooo! Cold fingers!”
I’d promised myself that no matter what she looked like, I wouldn’t be disappointed. But as the mask comes free with a moist plop, another fantasy ends.
Jane tries to make the best of it, offering me a wide smile. “Hiya, hiya, hiya!”
But we both know it’s over—or at least it can never be what it was, whatever that was. Bottom line, if I had a little less body, it’d be like staring at a mirror. As it is, it’s more like staring at my own head.
“Sigh. At least the pieces are finally falling together here.” I look up and get a face full of plaster. “Or is that debris from the monsters crashing around?”
Blind Al clicks her teeth. “Oh, it’s the monsters, all right. This mess makes about as much sense as going to a crack house for vitamins.”
“Sheesh, Al. I’m dying here. You ever going to let that go? I didn’t know it was a crack house when I dropped you off to shop, okay? But yeah, you’re right. There’s still the question of who managed to grow a genetic duplicate of my head, plus the whole swallowing-and-talking-without-lungs thing. Jane, you got anything on all that?”
The voice gets deeper again. “Dick.”
“I don’t want to talk to you. Put Jane on.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s too upset. But I can give you the backstory. Do you remember Bob, Agent of Hydra?”
Careful readers will recall that I mentioned Bob back in Chapter 3.
“Wow! Is he in there, too? Gee, this is like a series finale where they bring back all the old cast members who haven’t moved on to better careers.” I knock on the head. “Bob? Hello? Get on out here, you wacky bastard, while I can still beat the crap out of you!”
“You don’t understand. You are our biological father—but Bob was, in a sense, our creator.”
“You sure he’s not in there?” I knock on the skull again. Knockknock. “Oh, Bob!”
The Dick head wobbles. “Ow. Please stop that.”
“Only if you say, ‘Who’s there?’ Come on, I’ll start again.”
Knock. Knock.
“Sigh. Who’s—”
“Interrupting Deadpool.”
Dick gets all pouty. No sense of humor. “You want the damn backstory or not?”
I nod. He clears his throat—another questionable effort for a disembodied head—and begins a tale of most astonishing suspense. A journey, if you will, into mystery…
Focus BLURS as DREAMY MUSIC rises.
FADE TO: INT. WEAPON X LAB/DAY/ESTABLISHING SHOT. The music quiets as the image sharpens, its dreamy tones replaced by the harsh crackle and hum of insidious machinery. Think Frankenstein, w/digital flourishes.
Oversaturated color gives everything a subtle, ghostly aura: the ceiling lights, the sleek machinery, but especially the figure eagerly hunched over a Scanning Transmission Electron Holography Microscope (STEHM).
Close on the figure. It’s sad-sack BOB, his dingy HYDRA UNIFORM half-covered with a slightly cleaner lab coat. What he sees puts a grin on his face.
BOB
This is one sweet OS! I’ll have a monster army in no time!
(raises head)
Then they’ll want me back!
Wait. Hold it. That’s a screenplay. Besides, Bob doesn’t talk like that. Sorry. We’re going to put it all in quotes now. Again, Dick somehow clears his throat.
“Fired from the evil terrorist organization known as Hydra, after years of abuse, Bob—the man who was once your biggest fan—arrived at a crossroads. Who was he, really? What was his purpose? Was there anything he could hope for in life beyond quiet desperation and occasionally pretending to be a pirate?
“As if in answer to the questions vexing his soul, one night, on a long, lonely walk along the northern tip of Long Island, he found this hidden lab. At last, he thought: Here was a way to get back in Hydra’s good graces—even negotiate the dental plan his wife Allison longed for! Suddenly, Bob, Agent of Hydra, felt transformed, more alive than he did that time the press mistook the H on his costume for ‘Hero.’
“But simply leading Hydra here wouldn’t be enough. He had to prove his value as more than a lackey—prove, if you will, his agency as an agent. Aided by the elegantly simple and incredibly intuitive OS, he was able to scrape some of your DNA from one of the many souvenirs he’d collected over the years. With it, he planned to create an unstoppable army of mouthy mercs, but…” Dick pauses. “…all he got was this lousy head.”
He goes silent, lost in a shame spiral. When the head opens its mouth again, the voice has once again grown soft and feminine. “No, Dick, we’re not just a lousy head! We’re a good head, a great head! Remember how you suggested splicing in DNA from other species to make the clones more stable?”
Dick sniffs. “Well…you thought of that, really…”
Jane rolls their eyes. “You’re
being modest. Whoever thought of it, you told Bob. He’d never have listened to a woman. It was only thanks to you he started to respect my voice.”
I can hear the pleased smirk in Dick’s voice. “Maybe, but you have your ways, strong lady. To continue, the computer modeling indicated canine DNA would make the clones more viable, but at the same time too domesticated. It was only when Jane found the mutagenetic patterns stolen from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Howling Commando program that Bob’s dream was realized.”
Jane tsks. “Almost realized. Isn’t it just like a man to create a life-form with a puppy-larval stage that’ll become monster soldiers programmed to obey his every whim, but then have someone else care for them until they mature?”
Dick frowns. “That is so sexist. I’d never—”
“Please! You not only did that—you did worse! Did you think all that sweet talk would have me so dizzy in love that I’d forget what came next? Shall I continue? Ahem. Now that it was in Bob’s interests for us to have arms and legs so we could supervise the kennel, he used the really fantastic equipment here to give us not one, but two prosthetic bodies—one for each persona. Relying on his friendship with you, he assumed we’d be grateful.”
Dick chuckles. “Yeah, but clones don’t have the same emotional history as the original. Once I secretly added that URL, Jane and I made the puppies. Then we killed him.”
“You killed Bob?” I do another spit take, but I don’t have any water, so it’s probably my throat going gooey. “I mean, it’s not like I never thought of doing it myself, but…”
“Oh, there’s a DNA sample in the databanks here. Clone him if you feel bad about it, but he’ll be a Chihuahua for a while. If you’ll let me finish…once we had all these puppies, I realized I was allergic. I was sneezing my head off 24/7. A really bad reaction, I swear. I wanted out, but Jane…”
“I adored them! Loved each and every one!”
“And one day, while Jane was, you know, out, I uh…shipped them all off to those pet stores, making all the arrangements online. It was easy.”
Paws Page 20
