Prepare to Die! (29 page)

I said, “You didn’t come to fight me? So, why did you come here? Just to shoot holes in one of my good shirts?” It was a brand new button-down shirt. A blue one. Adele and I had gone shopping for clothes. She’d bought a new dress. Some new shoes. Some underwear she mentioned felt good against her skin. The underwear had been more to the level of lingerie. I’m not sure where the dividing line between
female underwear
and
lingerie
stands, but her purchases were certainly closer to the latter. Myself, I’d bought two dress shirts. It seemed like that would be enough to get me through the rest of my life.

“I’m just a calendar,” Mistress Mary said. “Or, rather, I’m here to enforce the calendar. I’m going to be in town in case other members of Eleventh Hour come here, wanting to kill you. Kill you before it’s time, I mean.”

“Octagon sent you? He’s concerned about other members of Eleventh Hour going against his promise? Is there some sort of schism in your team?”

“There’s some sort of schism.”

She began walking away, yelling loudly, loud enough to be heard for blocks, that there was no reason to be nervous about Mistress Mary being in town. People began appearing from houses. Coming out from locked doors. From closed storefronts. After all, there wasn’t any reason to be nervous anymore.

“Why did you bring the gun?” I asked Mary.

She said, “I like them, now.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
pple was a competent and confident driver. Laura was a pestilent passenger. The two of them were taking me (according to their claim) to the best coffee shop in town. I was, against all my better instincts, about to do an interview. I hate interviews.

“Why isn’t Adele here?” I asked Laura. Adele had said she was coming along. Laura smiled at my question, narrowed her eyes, then decided I might not be getting the full effect of her narrowed eyes with her glasses in the way, and so she moved her glasses down a bit on her nose so that I could bask in the questionable glory of her amusement.

“Suddenly can’t live without her?”

“Suddenly wondering why I’m stuck in the middle of the jungle, with all the wild beasts, and my safari guide has vanished.”

“He’s calling us wild beasts, I think,” Apple said, sliding into a turning lane, avoiding a bicyclist who was weaving through traffic in seemingly unpredictable patterns, but she had guessed his intentions perfectly. She was way ahead of him.

“We’re all wild beasts at heart,” Laura said. “The interesting ones, anyway. Now, Steve, look at
this
. I send these videos to Adele all the time, but she never looks at them. Or, I mean, at least she never talks about looking at them. She blushes when I talk to her about them. Sometimes I wonder if…”

“Show him the videos,” Apple said. “You’re being a tease.”

“That’s the first time anybody’s ever called me that.”

“That’s the first time a
girl
has ever called you that,” I said. There was a moment of silence in the car, then both of them burst out laughing.

“Suuuh… lammmed,” Laura said. “Slammed!” She high-fived me in shared amusement, then handed me her laptop computer. It was decorated with stickers from an SRD-themed gift store (unauthorized, but allowed) that was in the new town square. There were photo-stickers of Paladin, and Mistress Mary, and a couple of me, and one of my, “
Take some time off
!” slogan, but mostly there were stickers of Siren, and Siren, and Siren, and Siren.

“Don’t you dare tell me about sleeping with her,” Laura said, tapping on one of the Siren stickers. “I mean, I know you did, but don’t soil her with any of your penis-oriented stories.” I couldn’t tell if she was serious, and, anyway, she was hitting “play” on a video.

The video began.

In it, a man dressed as me (as Reaver, I mean) was in combat with a woman dressed as Stellar. I was glad it wasn’t one of the films with Taffy. Those always made me feel like I (who had nothing to do with their making, of course) had done something very wrong. This film was Stellar, though, and it was a reasonable likeness. She’d been cast well. Laser beams were coming from her eyes, but I (the actor, I mean) was standing tall against them, laughing them off. In reality, the beams that come from her eyes aren’t very much like lasers (more like a concentrated stream of agitated protons) and they hurt like hell. Also, I am not as tall as the actor who was portraying me, while Stellar is taller than the actress who was playing her part.

The two actors were fighting in a motel bedroom setting. That part was close to reality. Stellar and I have certainly done that. We’d fought three times after the Kid Crater incident (which I never really blamed her for, because I was too busy blaming myself) and two of the fights had gone to carnal encounters, and the third had led to me being deposited from space again. I was hoping the porno actors would reenact that at some point, though with special effects, because that shit hurts.

“Take some clothes off!” the Reaver-actor said. He slapped Stellar on her ass, and her cape flew away from her as if by magic.

“Take some clothes off!” the Reaver-actor repeated, giving “Stellar” a kick (a good and powerful one, too) in her butt. More of her clothing magically disappeared.

I told Laura, “First of all… my kicks and my slaps don’t do the thing with the years. They don’t. Second, why are you showing me this?”

“Because they’re funny! I
love
them! Adele watches them, too. I mean, she watched some of them because of her superhuman studies, but I think she, you know,
watches
them, too. There are like, hundreds of them on the internet. Thousands, maybe. Some of them are live action, like this one, but most of them are animated. Did you know about this?”

“Did I know that people create literally thousands of porn videos centered around me? No. I was completely unaware.”

Apple, backing the car into a parking spot, parallel parking at a level that was (in my honest opinion) nearly superhuman, said, “I think he means
yes
. In fact, I think he means
duh
.”

Laura said, “No sass from my girlfriend, please.”

Apple said, “I’m your girlfriend?” On the laptop computer, in the video, a woman (a woman?) dressed as Macabre had run into the scene, waving a magic wand and yelling, “Presto! Presto! Stellar lost her dress, oh!” More girls began appearing, popping into the scene as if by magic (or, in this case, by means of not very convincing special effects) and swarming Reaver, trying to… I’m not sure… defeat him somehow? He fought back by means of a method that did not include his pants. I closed the laptop.

“Can I talk to you about Adele?” I asked Laura.

“Yes,” she said. Hopeful. But wary. “Remember my warning, though. If you hurt her, I’ll hurt you. I’ll… I don’t know… find some way to contact Octagon and hire him to do it.”

“The first night I was here, Adele said she was an alcoholic. Or had been. Is she okay now? What happened?”

“Shit. I hate being serious. Look… she took your break-up hard.”

“We never officially broke up.”

“I hope you didn’t mean that in your defense, because it means you’re even more of a dick.”

“You guys want to be alone for this?” Apple asked. She’d turned off the car and was reaching for the door handle, ready to step out if we asked her to, but obviously very much not wanting to leave.

“I accidentally called you my girlfriend,” Laura said. “So now it’s official or something and I’ll have to change all my online statuses.”

“Does that mean I can stay?” Apple asked. The two of them looked to me. I shrugged.

“Adele drank because of me?” I asked.

“A little. Somewhat. Mostly,” Laura answered. She was stowing her laptop in a duffel bag, avoiding my eyes. Usually she likes to look me right in the eyes. Confrontational. I was happy she wasn’t doing it. I was sad, too.

“She went to the hospital, a lot, when you were in the coma. Then… when you were transferred, she asked around, a lot, about where you’d gone. But you were secret, then, for a year at least.”

“The training.”

“Sure. Adele started dating a boy, then punched him when he tried to kiss her. I said she should date girls so they wouldn’t remind her of you. But, nothing worked for her.”

“Shit,” I said. I’d screwed up Adele’s life, apparently. Could I have saved her with a phone call? An email? I’d always been too afraid. I can remember thinking the only reasons for my fears were that my enemies would use her against me. Or that they would simply kill her. I can remember not at all thinking that I was a coward.

Laura said, “She started drinking in college. Not like she was partying. Just drinking. Alone, mostly. There were a couple one-night stands. One-week stands. That sort of thing. You probably don’t want to hear about them.”

“I don’t.”

“She bought a Reaver costume at a Halloween store. Kept it in her room. She said… and you can’t ever tell her I told you this… that she wanted boys to try it on, see if sex would work for her that way.”

“Didn’t Steve just say he didn’t want to hear things like this?” Apple asked. Laura leaned over and gave her the sort of kiss that means, “
be a good girl and keep quiet
.”

Laura told me, “It never worked for her. I mean, she never tried it. She was actually trying to forget you, but… hey… were you trying to forget her? Seriously. Tell me the fucking truth.”

“Yeah, I was. But… not because I wanted to forget her. I just… at first I wanted to come back like a hero, like a superhero, and I was biding my time… caught up in some asshole power fantasy, and then afterwards, after some things happened, I just didn’t want her to get mixed up in all this.” I made a vague gesture with my fist, waving it a bit. Laura understood what I meant.

“Fuck,” she said. “That really sounded like the truth.” She went silent for a bit and then added, “Thank you.”

“If you guys don’t want me to stay…?” Apple said. She was reaching for the door again, but, again… doing it slowly. Laura leaned in and gave her another kiss, making it stand as her answer. Apple smiled, nodded, moved her hand away from the door. A middle-aged man, strolling by, walking with a hot dog in one hand, carrying it like a baton he would pass off to the next hungry man, caught a glimpse of the two girls kissing. From his viewpoint, from him looking into a car and seeing two beautiful women kissing, and a man in the backseat, he probably thought things were going better for me than they actually were.

Laura said, “So, Steve, if you were trying to forget Adele, you probably had the easier time of it. You didn’t have to put up with her on the news, day after day, saving people from burning buildings, or kicking a bank robber’s ass, or dating some incredibly beautiful woman, or fighting magicians, or battling mysterious men in black… you didn’t have to have her pushed into your face a hundred times a day.” Laura’s eyes gleamed at that last bit, and her serious mood wavered, but she stabilized and remained serious. I felt guilty about it.

Laura said, “So… failed relationships. No life direction. My sister was drinking. She drank a lot. Way too much. I was really worried. I wrote you a whole bunch of times, but you never answered.”

“I never knew you wrote.” The words came out hard. I wasn’t feeling well. Apple met my eyes and I wanted to change places with her. I wanted to be the one that could have stepped out of the car. I hadn’t known that Laura had written me. I never look at letters, emails, videos, any of that stuff.

Laura said, “I know that, now. I knew it then, too. But I was desperate to save my sister and I finally realized that she was never going to kick her Steve Clarke addiction, so I told her… why not get her fix anyway she could? So she started writing articles about you, and then the others, you know, the
others
, and pretty soon she was a world-leading superhuman researcher. And she’s happy, now. So don’t you fuck it up.”

“I don’t know…”

“None of us knows shit, Steve Clarke. None of us knows
shit
. If there’s one thing I do know, though, it’s this: Adele isn’t fooling. She does love you. And it’s not some sick
Reaver
fantasy thing. She knew you long before that, and I was the one who endured her nights of
really
sappy talk about the two of you. So don’t think she’s playing around. She
loves
you.”

“I can’t think of anything more wonderful,” I said. And I meant it.

What I didn’t add, what I didn’t say, was that I only had three more days to live. Two days in Greenway. One day of travel in order to keep my promise to Octagon… to meet him and Eleventh Hour wherever he wanted us to meet. So, yes, it was the most wonderful thing in the world to hear that Adele Layton loved me.

And it was also very much the worst.

***

The interview in the coffee shop went quickly and efficiently and wasn’t all that much of a pain. This is largely because I forbade Frank O’Neill (Channel Five’s long-time “
On the Spot
” reporter) to ask any questions having to do with me being Reaver, or any of my exploits in battlefields, or beds, or combinations of the two. This frustrated him, and I admit that I enjoyed his frustration. I’d spent some time in the early days (the early days of me being Reaver, before I began to refuse all interviews) being battered by reporters’ questions of morality in terms of who I was fighting, and why I was fighting, and how I
felt
when I was fighting (especially in the moment that I had just punched someone) and why I always (in truth, after a time, very rarely) felt so much superior to everyone else. Paladin had looked upon such interviews as not only a necessary part of being superhuman (he claimed that the more familiar people were with us, the more accepting they would be) and, besides that, he enjoyed talking with people. With anyone. I enjoy talking to people. But not with anyone.

This current interview kept mostly within the bounds I’d established. Laura and Apple sat at one booth over, after promising to control themselves and not disrupt the proceedings. They kept their word by staying behind the camera, but watching (with the sound off) another of Laura’s beloved superhuman porno parodies, occasionally holding up her laptop so that I could see what they were watching at any given time. This meant that, on the nightly news, with the camera trained on me, it might seem as if I was looking off into the distance, pondering some question that Frank O’Neill had posed, thinking (with my inscrutable and arguably inhuman mind) on thoughts beyond the ken of the common man, but in reality I was trying not frown at a cartoon video of myself and Leviathan (seriously? Leviathan? The size difference alone would… hell… never mind) engaged in carnal activities, or trying not to look interested when Laura and Adele held up the computer together, in tandem, giving me a thumbs-up as the video depicted a mass scene of myself (an actor, of course) in bed (on a bed that was, for some reason, on a rooftop) having sex with five women that were dressed as Siren, as Mistress Mary, as Dark Mercy, as Stellar, and a female version of Warp. Perhaps my most uncomfortable moment was when, as I was presumed to be thinking of how I felt about Greenway’s sudden growth, Laura was signaling for my attention, holding her hands approximately ten inches apart, flicking her eyes towards the laptop computer and the (extremely well and perhaps overly endowed) Reaver actor, and mouthing the word, “Really?”