Prepare to Die! (25 page)

“I’m glad you killed Macabre,” Apple said. “I never heard about that campsite. Never knew about that.”

“Not everything makes the news,” I said. “SRD tries to keep a clamp down on most of the bad things. Best that way. It avoids a general panic.”

Laura said, “I, for one, am panicked right now. Let’s look at this list again.” She took it from Adele’s hands and said, “Number one.
Be with Adele again
. Seriously? That’s why you came here? You dated each other for a few months, and that was a decade ago, and you… what…
miss
her?” The questions seemed serious, but Laura’s wry smile wasn’t treating them as such. Still… they actually were serious questions. No avoiding that.

I said, “Adele, I missed you.” I said it to Adele. Not to her sister.

There.

It was out.

As close to an admission of love as the picnic could handle.

It wasn’t as gutsy a move as it sounds like. If it all went to hell, I was standing at only nine days before my promised appointment with Octagon. I could make it through those nine days. Hell… I’m bulletproof.

Adele said, “I noticed you went through my bookshelves so I’m assuming you saw some of the articles I’ve written about you. Even the books. I’ve done a lot of superhero research. I mean… not just about you,” she blushed, here. “I researched a lot of others as well. Because we… we were together… because of that… people will talk to me. Anyway… I mean to say that the topic of Steve Clarke is… well, I missed you too, Steve.” A thump hit me around my chest. An internal one.

Laura and Apple had taken the appearance of children at the adults’ table. I felt bad for them. They were whispering to each other… looking at us. I hate being on display. I hate it. I was glad that Laura didn’t let the separation last for long.

“Aren’t you… aren’t you worried about us?” she asked. Her finger did a loop that included the whole group. Maybe the whole park.

“He kept away from me for a decade,” Adele said. “Of course he was worried about us. About me. That’s why he stayed away.”

I said, “That’s why I stayed away.”

“But now you’re back?” This was from Laura. “You… umm… horny or something?”

“You always put things so nice, sis,” Adele told her.

I said, “The thing is, I’m not going to stay long.” Adele made an eye flutter. I all but ignored it (outwardly) and went on with, “And then it’s not going to matter much after that.”

“Enigmatic,” Adele said. “Go on.”

“Can’t. Not yet. Secret, SRD-related confidential top secret classified information. Suffice to say, in about ten days time, nobody will bother much about my friends or family.”

“Holy shit,” Adele said. “What’s going on?”

But I kept silent. Their faces registered expectation, but I didn’t say a word. Laura was amused, thinking I was teasing about something. Apple had a look in her eye that said, maybe, possibly, she was worried. It was nice to think that someone I’d just met could be worried about me… nice to think I was that charming a figure. She looked to the note in Adele’s hands. Bit her lip. I noticed her the most because I was adamantly trying
not
to look at Adele, because Adele could have read the truth in my eyes, or at least she could have read the first couple sentences of the truth, and dragged whole story out of me afterwards. So I didn’t look at her eyes. I didn’t. I didn’t want her to know, yet, that I was dying from a disease called Octagon.

***

Kid Crater flew into the sky. Then down to the ground. Impact was registering all over the United States… maybe all over the world. He would go up. Come down. Paladin tried to calm him, flying along with him on the way up (arms around him, hugging him, trying to pull him away from his course, to get him to listen to reason) but even Greg had to bow out of Kid Crater’s downward strike… the blast into the rocky soil of the Blue Mountains in Oregon, shattering sections of the slope, crawling out from the debris, screaming that he was an idiot (for giving away his family’s identity) and that he would kill Tempest and Macabre and everyone else… everyone else… because the world was a horrible place full of sickness and evil, of hate and horror, and he was soaring up into the sky and down again and again, with SRD helicopters and airplanes nearby, including one wasp-y helicopter with a single front-mounted weapon, a pointed lance of Checkmate’s unmistakable design. God knows what that thing could have fired. It made me nervous, then, to be so close to something that could probably kill me. I’d grown comfortable with moving through a world that was ultimately harmless.

I yelled, “Whiskey store!” when Kid Crater was going up into the skies. I was holding a bottle of whiskey. Waving it about.

I yelled, “Whiskey store!” when Kid Crater was coming down onto a ridge, sending boulders the size of mini-vans dancing down the slope. One rolled close enough to me that I could have reached out and touched it as it passed. I didn’t. It might have broken the bottle I was holding.

I yelled, “Whiskey store!” as Kid Crater was climbing out of the rubble. This was the best time to approach him, before he’d built up any momentum. Paladin was trying to hold him (and was glowing that healing glow of his… but he couldn’t heal the type of sickness that had driven its claws into Kid Crater) but the kid was taking to the skies again, and I threw the bottle after him, hoping he’d grab it, but it just arced into the sky, four or five hundred feet into the air, then came down a quarter mile distant, making a slight puff of near-disintegration when it landed. By then I’d raced to our liquor cache (we’d been prepared for Kid Crater’s sorrows, but not as prepared as we’d hoped) at three times the speed of a normal man, and I was holding up a bottle of whiskey in each hand, shaking them at the blurs in the sky and screaming, “Whiskey bottle! Whiskey bottle,” and probably sounding like some pet-owner trying to call home an errant dog. It wasn’t an apt analogy, but it wasn’t so far away from one, either.

This went on for five, ten minutes. Maybe a half hour. The SRD were growing increasingly unsettled, knowing that they could have (could they have?) taken down Kid Crater right then… put a Checkmate-designed bullet in his forehead… and called it good. If they did this, they were assholes. If they didn’t do this, then what kind of assholes would they be if Kid Crater got it in his head (after he’d been so long in SRD’s gun sights) to whisk over to Seattle and start making craters
there
, all over the city, instead of on the side of a mountain?

There came a time when even I (for which I hated myself) was thinking it might be best for them to pull the trigger. Paladin had gotten too close to one of the impacts and was dazed, was on the ground, on one knee and one hand, glowing, healing. A Humvee troop transport had narrowly avoided being a casualty (the kid had slammed into the base of the mountain, triggering an avalanche that advanced on the Humvee and would have swallowed it if I hadn’t gotten there first and given it a push) and I’d broken seven or eight bottles of whiskey by throwing them into the air (I guess I was hoping Kid Crater would fetch them like a dog, but I’m honestly not sure) and I had downed two other bottles myself, alone, trying to goad the kid into joining me. You’ve maybe seen the picture of me (the SRD soldier was nearly executed for releasing the photo, incidentally) standing atop one of the fallen boulders, waving one bottle of whiskey while slugging the other in nearly superhuman gulps. I admit it’s a funny photo, of sorts, if you don’t dwell on the tragedy behind it.

Only five seconds after that photo was taken, Kid Crater came down, landing right next to me, softer this time, so soft that the boulder barely cracked. He took the whiskey from my hand and told me he’d kill everyone, everyone, everyone, but that he was the worst of them all. He had to die first. Some other words followed, but there was nothing intelligible. He drank the whiskey. All of it. A whole bottle. He was seventeen years old. Not even legally able to drink alcohol, not yet. In a few minutes he was fetal at my feet, curled up and crying, nursing the empty bottle. Soon after that, he fell into a coma, and soon after that (five seconds, at most) he slid from the boulder and fell onto the ground, impacting in the usual manner, like a regular seventeen-year-old kid.

My reactions are fast enough that I could have caught him, normally, easily.

But I was awfully, awfully drunk.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
was dressed in a costume. It was not my Reaver costume, but it was a costume nonetheless. It was a ninja costume. I was dressed as a ninja and I was not completely sober. I wasn’t drunk on alcohol, and I wasn’t on any drugs (Siren once encouraged me to do shrooms, which I really didn’t want to do, but anyone would have, if they’d seen the gymnastic way she’d encouraged me) but I was, regardless, not entirely sober.

I was high on a sense of purpose. And the thrill of the illicit.

I was breaking into a house where a hero had once lived. His name had been Steve Clarke and he was sixteen years old when a tanker truck had blindsided the police car he’d been riding in, killing the drivers of both vehicles and changing Steve Clarke and Greg Barrows (also sixteen years old) and doing something different to Tom Clarke (being Steve’s older brother) and thereafter changing the Clarke household (after some time) into a tourist attraction.

My childhood home wasn’t like Disneyland or Disney World or Power Paradise… it wasn’t a theme park in that manner… it was more like the houses where Oscar Wilde had lived, or Rasputin, or any other similarly famous but also somewhat infamous characters.

Much of the house had been preserved (or reconstructed) in the manner to which it had been on the last day that Tom and I left it… or at least on the last day my parents left. The paintings were still on the walls (Mom had loved any painting with horses as the central subject, and I’d spent days at rummage sales and estate auctions uncovering and pointing out these treasures) and my old toothbrush (a commemorative G. I. Joe toothbrush) and even a bar of soap that I had supposedly, dubiously, used. Many of my old clothes were there, including the ones where Tom and I had used laundry markers to write swear words (
Fuck
, mostly) and “clever” sayings (
You dropped something in my pants. Here, I’ll get it for you
) on the interior of the shirts, so that we could wear them out of the house (Mom and Dad none the wiser) and then turn them inside-out once we were walking the streets of Greenway.

All of these things and more were still there in the house. And… added to them were the seemingly hundreds of plaques (such as “
1970’s Yosemite Sam drinking glass: Once used by Steve Clarke”
) and the roped-off sections (
This bathroom for display only: Please use the outside facilities
) and a bevy of security cameras that I was glad hadn’t been in place when I was a child, or else the world could have been subjected to an endless supply of downloadable videos of me sitting in front of my computer, downloading pornographic videos, idly masturbating to each one of them in turn, trying to decide what fetishes (Cosplay? Rear entry? Bondage? Cartoon porn? Lesbian gangbangs?) would be the soup of the day before really getting down to business.

I hadn’t been to the house in almost a decade. Now I was back.

To steal something.

And I wasn’t alone.

Adele was likewise dressed as a ninja. In the terms of Halloween costumes, she would have been known as “
sexy ninja
.” This wasn’t so much because her costume was a mixture of black lingeries and a frilly mask (though it was, somewhat) but because a sexy woman looks sexy in pretty much any damn thing she slides into. Also, illicit activities make women look sexy whenever they slide into one of
those
.

Laura was dressed as a topless pirate, having stripped away her fluffy/frilly pirate shirt in the car when we’d parked the car four blocks away. She was… distracting. She did not look anything like how I would expect an historical pirate to appear. Historically, pirates were almost exclusively men, and they were almost exclusively not of immaculate grooming habits. Laura was wearing an eyepatch (with a hole cut out of it, so she could see) beneath her glasses, and she had pirate trousers, and boots, and a belt and sword. Apple was with us, and had used colored markers to draw a parrot onto Laura’s shoulder. It was a reasonable illustration… once it had been explained.

Apple herself was dressed as Cleopatra, a woman that had ruled one empire and nearly usurped another, and she was complete with a rubber asp, which Laura kept calling a rubber ass.

We were a gang of sodden thieves. Myself… I was drunk on the thrill of what we were doing. The women were likewise drunk on the adventure, with Laura and Apple being additionally drunk in the more usual manner.   

Because of who I am, I have access to some extremely sophisticated equipment. I rarely use it. Being fast and strong and invulnerable tends to be a good plan, so that’s what I go with, right up front. This time, though, I used a nifty Checkmate-invented device to override the security system, the whole damn set-up, and create a loop that would replay the previous night’s data feed. Meaning… we could go in and raise hell and everything would be fine.

“You girls wanna see my room?” I asked. If the sixteen-year-old me could have seen this part, the part with me luring Adele, and a topless pirate, and Cleopatra into his room, he would have thought everything was worth it. That is… if he hadn’t seen some of the other parts. The parts with Kid Crater. And Greg. And Tom, of course.

“Would it be vulgar if I asked to have sex on Reaver’s bed?” Laura asked.

“Sex with who?” Adele answered.

“You’re complicating this,” Laura said. She was moving down the short hallway on the first floor. The house’s caretakers had put the display table (with fresh flowers, Mom’s collection of interesting beach rocks, some old mail) on the wrong side. We always had it on the right hand side, because if we had it on the left hand side then the sheepdogs (whenever Dad brought any of them home from the Selood Brothers Farm) would inevitably scamper from the kitchen, run into the hallway, and blindly impact the vase and the table. I wondered if the house’s current caretakers still brought in those sheepdogs. They would have done wonders at keeping the flow of the tourists in line.