Prepare to Die! (31 page)

Of course, Paladin’s departure from Ecuador had been taken as a sign that the old gods (which Tempest was considered) had defeated the new gods (as led by Paladin) and by the time he (now with me tagging along) returned to the jungles near Guayaquil, Tempest’s cult had grown considerably. Christian churches had been torn down, or else had their roofs removed (often with less than surgical precision) so that the goddess’s flock could be in constant communion with the sky. Tempest (I watched one of the “sermons” while in disguise) would float down from above, and she would (somewhat) talk of the importance of nature, with her pure white naked skin and flowing red hair transporting her adherents to various types of rapture. When her words were finished (the devout found them enigmatic, while in truth she was simply raving) she swept two members of her congregation up into the sky along with her, carrying them away. It was supposed that she was transporting them to heaven, to a better place, but of course the truth is that she was carrying them to a nest (made of nearly solid winds) in the clouds, a place where she would have sex with them, and then kick them out of bed. That last part was problematic for her partners, because the floor of the “bedroom” was a long ways down.

I can’t say that it probably mattered much, though. Tempest was about twenty percent lightning, and her own orgasms were nearly always fatal to her partners. Still… some went willingly. Paladin blamed me for standing by and letting her take two of her flock, but I’d told him that if you piss on an electric fence (or, more aptly, stick your dick into a electric socket) then you deserve the shock of what you get in return. He hadn’t calmed down until I told him (being only somewhat honest) that I’d had to make a hard choice of letting the two men go… or else endangering the rest of the congregation.

We’d defeated Tempest. Whisked her off into proper custody.

The battle had been fierce, and I’d punched her a few times, and Paladin had done his part… keeping her on the ground and within my range, even with lightning playing all over his body… pushing her to the earth, where I could be Reaver, doing what I do.

It hadn’t seemed like she’d aged much (I must have punched her thirty times) but some of us have elongated life spans, now, and that probably played a factor. It had certainly affected her, because she began to scream, and in her screams (witnessed by masses of her worshippers, several of whom died while trying to move closer to the site of our battle in order to help their goddess) she began to pray, and she prayed to the Christian god, the popular one, and his son Jesus, and his Virgin Mary, all of which was heresy according to her cult. Why pray to Misevályue (meaning, of course, Tempest) when she herself was praying to another god? Nobody likes a second place divinity.

Paladin healed a few of the injured before we left.

That got them started again.

***

The second time I met Tempest was very brief. I happened to be at SRD (we were studying if it was possible to reverse the effects of my punch, which it wasn’t, for those who keep track of such things) when Tempest broke free from the holding cell where we’d stashed her. It had been thought that she needed to be conscious in order to control her powers. We (even Checkmate, oddly) had been wrong about that.

She’d frozen some of the circuits that held her in stasis, dropping her free from the time field. She’d never hit the floor, only hovered (held up by winds) in the holding center, slowly recovering from the drugs. The whole base had scrambled. Full lockdown. Red alert. Lights and sirens. Two soldiers had gone into the holding cell in order to attempt to administer further drugs (it was a mix of quinine and strychnine and, I believe, prussic acid… a mixture that would have killed a thousand or more normal people) but they had been frozen in blocks of ice (they actually survived, which shows Tempest was off her game) and by the time I reached the facility there was a gaping hole in the roof, the dying remnants of Tempest’s laughter, and a cloud formation that even a porn star would have considered vulgar.

She was gone.

Escaped.

Three days after that, she was a member of Eleventh Hour.

***

The third time I met Tempest she was teamed with Macabre and they were tearing down satellites from space. We all remember this one. We all remember how Earth’s atmosphere, for an hour, expanded nearly to the moon, so that there were suddenly a quarter million miles of storms in what had been the dead of space.

I’d battled her briefly before she soared into the skies (and then into space, and then into space that became the skies) and was out of my range.

Octagon took her down that time.
Unauthorized rampage
… he’d said.
Interference with some of his key investments
, he’d said.

Tempest and Macabre had suddenly fallen from the sky as if a switch had been thrown. I’d have given my left nut to know how Octagon accomplished that. Even if I hadn’t known for sure, being who I am, that my left nut would grow back… I’d have served it up on plate to knock Tempest out of the sky.

***

The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh times I met Tempest had all been battles. All of them. Most of them with Eleventh Hour involved. We had each survived the battles, though that particular statistic was dicey from both sides. In fact, it could be argued that the seventh time had been fatal, for me, since it was only by delaying my death, by convincing Octagon to give me a chance to prepare to die, that I’d been allowed to walk away.

***

The eighth time I met Tempest she was hovering above the parking lot at the Super Eight Grocery Emporium, watching Laura Layton and Apple, her girlfriend, taking groceries from my hands and putting them in the back seat. The three of us, below, looked up and saw the woman hovering in the winds above, and then cars all around us were being sucked into the skies by the tornadoes.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
t’s never been made public why Paladin and I had our falling out. The truth of the matter is that it has a lot to do with the creature that the media liked to call Devil Mole. If you remember, the Mole had been one of Octagon’s genetic experiments, and had grown beyond what Octagon had planned. Word was (this was from Siren, who was dating Octagon at the time, and sleeping with me at the time) that the Mole had grown into nearly human form. I’d originally (before I fought him) pictured some sort of were-mole (which sounded terrifying and hilarious, both) but in reality, when I finally encountered the creature it was more along the lines of a teenage boy with extensive boils.

What happened (again, according to Siren, who, it must be remembered, never lies to a man) is that Octagon had created the creature, trying to turn the animals of Earth into beings we could all converse with. For what purposes I wasn’t sure. An animal army? A vegetarian crusade? Skilled and unobtrusive spies? I have no idea. Octagon’s brain operates at levels I don’t understand. His reasons are his own.

What Octagon hadn’t planned upon was that Devil Mole’s abilities to converse went far beyond speech; Octagon had created a telepathic creature… one that could link his conversations directly, mind to mind, and could even control another’s thoughts to some extent, and to know what people were thinking, and so on and so forth. We’re talking about extensive mental abilities, here.

A hundred thousand moles gathered beneath the lab where Octagon was keeping Devil Mole. This was before the public was aware of his existence. This was before he’d shut down New York, and before the mass destruction in St. Petersburg, or the animal uprisings in Africa and, well… everywhere.

This gathering of moles was even, of course, before Octagon discovered Devil Mole’s plan. Discovered them a little too late, as it proved. Siren has told me of Devil Mole’s escape… the battle with several of Octagon’s other genetic manipulations… the griffins (the ones later dubbed the
Flying Tigers
) and the giant insects and all the others. Siren said (she was difficult to pay attention to, at the time, because she was writing some of the key words on her naked body) that one hallway… the one down which Devil Mole made his escape, was littered a yard deep in thousands of bumblebees the size of a man’s fist. That image has always stuck with me, partially because that’s a lot of bumblebees, and also because, telling me of all this, Siren wrote the word
bumblebee
on her stomach, with an arrow pointing down.

Devil Mole announced himself to the world, shortly after… maybe a week after his escape. By then half the burrowing animals of the entire world were under his control, or at least on his side. My SRD psychiatrist (we all of us, us superhumans, have our own individual SRD psychiatrist, and I’m not sure if that should make the public feel better, or very much worse) told me that I should understand that all of the moles and voles and earthworms and groundhogs were going to see this as their first ever religion, their first ever god, and to think in those terms when I was dealing with them.

I said, “Are you really going to tell me how to best go about debating theology with an earthworm? That’s really why I’m here today? To learn how to best facilitate a groundhog’s conversations about its personal beliefs?” My psychiatrist (Eleanor Rackham was/is her name… that’s a freebie for the tabloids) had said something else, but by that time I wasn’t listening anymore; I was only waiting for a moment to tell her that we were through talking. We were. I haven’t spoken to her since. The whole thing was ridiculous.

Most of what happened above the ground is known. Most of what happened below the ground is not. Paladin and I were chosen (and chose ourselves) to go down into the tunnels. Warp guarded the entrances and exits for the first few hours, until he had one of his incidents, and then it was Dark Mercy (grabbing all the headlines) and Tattoo. This was, of course, before Tattoo’s disappearance.

The tunnels alternated between rough hewn (and barely passable) tubes, to stone corridors that might have been manmade before Devil Mole was ever around, but mostly it was natural systems of caves and caverns.

And Paladin and I fought every inch of the way through. Thousands of animals. Not just the burrowing ones. Other things. Darker ones that maybe Octagon had created, or maybe they came from somewhere else. That was one of Devil Mole’s big messages:
not everything comes from human intervention
. When you tally up the score sheet, in fact, most things don’t.

I was using a Checkmate-designed flashlight (of some metal that even I could barely dent) and Paladin was good all by himself, because that shimmer of his emits a glow that’s bright enough to make do.

There was so much blood that my flashlight was in need of constant cleaning, and all of the caves and caverns and corridors were tinged red by its light, and green by the glow of my wounds. Paladin, of course, remained as pure as when we’d been jackass enough to enter the tunnels. Nothing stuck to that shimmer of his. Nothing.

I was sliding on the uneven surfaces. At no previous time in my life had I ever considered how damn slippery blood could be. Half the time, down there in the tunnels, I couldn’t get any goddamn traction.

Paladin wasn’t having any such problems. He was floating through the corridors of stone. Flying, even beneath the Earth’s surface. There were several times that I lost my footing and only Paladin’s outstretched hand kept me from sliding down some forsaken offshoot tunnel to
who-the-fuck-knows
what fate.

I was lost.

He knew which was to go.

It was that vision of his. He knew which direction had the worst of it… where the nastiest of the evil was at… where the worst of the problems were lying in wait. So… that’s the direction we went.

It took days, weeks, years, it seemed, before we reached Devil Mole in what amounted to his underground lair. I was shocked, later, to find out we’d only been down in the tunnels for six hours. I couldn’t believe it. Literally couldn’t believe it. There’s a video, I’ve seen it, where I’m making a jackass of myself by calling a reporter a liar. He’d said we’d only been gone for six hours. I couldn’t believe it.

The media has taken some of my words, the ones relating to what we saw down there, into meaning that we found Devil Mole atop a throne made of thousands of bones. That’s not true at all. That’s making it all sound too
human
. There wasn’t any throne. There wasn’t any culture. I’ve seen tabloid depictions of the underground chamber that made it seem as if Devil Mole’s lair was the throne room of some baron or count or a princeling aspiring to the crown. In reality, it was dank, and earthy, and bloody, and caked with feces. It’s true about the bones, though. There were thousands of bones. Most of them were human, as far as I could tell. Most of them accounted for the hundreds of
missing person
reports that had come in from all over the globe. Paladin has recounted that all of the bones were stripped bare… that there was no flesh, no stench… just bones.

Paladin was wrong about this.

Paladin always had such focus. From the moment he saw Devil Mole, that was all he saw. He didn’t see the side rooms… the adjoining chambers, where there were hundreds of bodies strewn all over the floor, impaled on stalagmites or hanging from stalactites, even fused into them, somehow, as if some of the citizens of New York (in particular, the block that had been pulled under on that dark night of October 3
^rd
) had been in the caverns for tens of thousands of years. It didn’t make any sense. Nothing we saw made any sense. Maybe I hallucinated. It could be argued that I’d gone a little mad by that time. In fact, it can’t be argued that I hadn’t.

And there was a stench.

There was a horrible stench.

Devil Mole was not sitting on a throne made of bones. He was scurrying over a huge pile of them, and his words were thrusting into our minds.

The rats, the moles, the groundhogs and a thousand permutations of monsters related to these creatures, they all fought our entrance into that cavern. Even the lichens were against us, somehow, whispering things to us, warning us away, screeching that we would be killed, that it would be our blood, in the end, that stained the walls. Soon, the screams of the earthworms and the lichens turned from taunts into a chanting sort of pleading. This happened, of course, at a time when it became clear that Paladin and I could not be stopped. That we could, at best, only be injured, and we were both of us men who could heal from any wound.