Prepare to Die! (33 page)

I scurried across the parking lot, searching for some plan, for some goddamn big ladder, for any way to reach the Bitch Above. By then the hails were coming down on me, chunks of ice that were the size of golf balls, then footballs, then beach balls, and finally just goddamn boulders, all of them smashing into me and leaving smears of a green glow wherever they hit. It was nine stages above irritating and one stage below fatal, and with all the ice accumulating on the ground I couldn’t get my goddamn footing, couldn’t set my feet beneath me, just kept skidding around the parking lot amongst all the fallen cars. The Super Eight Grocery Emporium sign, the one that stretches all the way up, thirty feet in the air, the one with a billboard at the top of a huge metal pole, the one with a giant molded basket of fruit, it caught a wash of boulder-sized hail and was torn to pieces. The pole crumpled near the bottom, tipped over. I barely dodged the chop of its descent.

It made a fine spear, once I’d shucked off the remains of the billboard. I thought of all the Olympic athletes I’ve seen, the ones doing that spear toss, the spears that always come down near the judges who (in my opinion) are never paying quite enough attention to the sharpened projectiles zooming down from the skies. I thought of all the adventure movies I’ve seen, the ones with the brave white explorers in Africa, trespassing the arrogant hell out of vast territories, with their pith-helmeted long-legged
white goddess
women, and the tribesmen running from the trees, and some blue-eyed actor who grew up in Hollywood and never so much as threw a tin can or a baseball is suddenly a better marksman with a spear than the tribesmen who’ve been pinning snakes to trees from two hundred feet away. I thought of all the times that Greg Barrows and I had played in the creek, or in the quarry, and I’d been a pirate (not known for their spear-hurling techniques) but Greg had been a god, and gods quite often toss lightning bolts (hell, Tempest was certainly playing at the game) and so Greg would find anything that could act as a stand-in for a spear, for anything he could pronounce as a lightning bolt, and he’d be Thor, or he’d be Zeus, and he’d be hurling sticks and weeds while yelling, “BOOM! I smite you!”

I didn’t feel the need to yell it. I just whispered it. No one was going to hear me over all the rest of the chaos, anyway. There was no reason to yell.

But I still felt it needed to be said.

I said, “Boom. I smite you.”

Then I hurled that monstrous metal billboard shaft as hard as I could, aiming for the mass of white (Tempest’s naked skin) beneath the flowing red (that hair… that beautiful hair) and nearly falling forward flat on my face with the strength of the toss, just like one of those Olympic athletes. Just like the ones who end up on the podiums, putting the gold around their necks.

But I missed.

Not really my fault.

Olympic athletes don’t have to throw their spears into winds that are, what… category fifty hurricane/tornado combination packs? Tempest saw the incoming spear, had time to laugh about it (her winds were slowing the spear’s ascent into a lounging sort of distracted amble) and lightning began playing all over its surface, as if she had chosen to destroy my weapon in that manner, but then she thought better of it (which is amazing, because it was hard to believe she was thinking at all by that point… hard to comprehend that she wasn’t just a woman-shaped conglomeration of instinct and hate and batshit insanity) and the metal shaft turned about in the air, still limned by the lightning, now being sharpened by winds that were powerful enough to shape steel.

Looking up at it, it felt like my body should start glowing green just in anticipation of the oncoming hit.

Tempest was laughing, laughing, laughing.

Lightning was hitting all around me, chewing up the parking lot, drawing a target around me. It was too bright to see much of anything. Too bright to run. The noises were driving me to my knees and I thought about praying, I really did. I thought about praying.

Couldn’t think of who to pray to, though. The Christian god was never much of my flavor. Buddha doesn’t, to my knowledge, do much in the way of answering prayers. Greg was dead (no one can deny he’s a legitimate contender for future divinity) and besides, I’d seen him urinate, and once you’ve seen a god urinate he really doesn’t seem viable for any prayer-answering legitimacy.

So I just waited for the big steel spear to come down from the sky, and I wondered what the newspapers would say about my failure, and about my death, and I wondered how that goddamn laugh of Tempest’s could sneak through all the roaring winds and dodge all the lightning and overcome the crashing of the thunder to reach my ears. It was cheating. It was cheating, is what it was. That’s how normal people, everyday people, common people, real people, that’s how they look at us superhumans. As cheaters.

Something happened.

Even before anything visually changed, I could
feel
that something was changing. The way you wake up in the middle of the night, sure that you heard a noise, sure that
Something of Import
is lurking in the shadows, or peering just out from behind Destiny’s ass, running a hand up and down the back of her leg.

Tempest’s laugh was cut off in midstream.

The lightning quit crashing all around.

The very air seemed charred, but breathable. I took the first breath possible in almost three minutes.

The clouds weren’t rolling and roiling anymore, at least not as bad. They seemed like
nature in its fury
, which is far less than
nature in its fury about being fucked with by man
.

I had time to look up in the skies and wonder what was happening.

And then Tempest fell down from above.

She was falling limp. Maybe she was dead already. The winds weren’t doing anything but getting out of her way. As if they’d never been friends.

Her body hit with a satisfying (or awful, or awfully satisfying) whump… the sound of a sack of wet potatoes being hit by a brick.

Without thinking, without checking on the fallen woman, without even knowing that I was doing it, I picked up a car and brought it down on Tempest, and while she’s a woman who can command the skies, she’s just a human specimen, physically, and humans don’t do well when a superhuman smashes a few thousand pounds of twisted metal onto their helpless bodies.

So… I got my red smear in the parking lot after all.

It didn’t feel wrong.

It didn’t feel right either.

It didn’t feel much of anything but over.

“You killed her!” Mistress Mary said. She was becoming visible next to me. Laura was with her, colors and form being filled in by the second, leaving invisibility and intangibility behind.

I said, “I’m… I’m not sure if I did. She fell from the sky. Tempest fell from the sky.” We both looked up to the sky. The tornadoes had vanished. The storm was fading away. Winking from existence. Pulling a curtain of blue sky over its misdeeds. The sunlight felt warm.

“You didn’t do anything?” Mistress Mary’s eyes narrowed, nearly closed. I felt the twitch again, the twitch to tell her everything, to do exactly as she says. It was easy, this time. I didn’t even try to fight it. I was telling the truth.

“Tried to do something. Couldn’t. I mean, I got her with the car, but only after she was down.” Mary seemed as if she was going to say something else, but Laura grabbed me by the arm, pulling at me, pulling me nowhere in particular, pulling in one direction and then another, frantic, saying, “Apple! Where’s Apple? What happened to Apple?”

The search for Apple didn’t take very long, or it took forever, depending on perspective. I hated myself for doing it, or not that I was doing it, but that I was being forced to look for someone I cared about under ruined cars, hefting them up, seeing what was beneath, was sensing another loss, was sensing that Laura Layton was in her own “Kid Crater” moment. People began slowly coming out of the grocery store, customers and Apple’s co-workers, many of these people falling to their knees and praying, some of them snapping photos with their phones, several of them simply running off… heading away from the scene. There were sirens, oncoming, no more than a few blocks away. People were chattering on their cell phones, saying, “
I’m alive! It’s okay! I’m alive
!” or, “
Reaver’s here! He killed Tempest! Fucking squashed her!
” or, “
Shit, man! You should have… oh shit! Shit
!” and further variations of all these messages, many of them ending with statements that could be translated as,
“You had better be ready for some rough sex, because I made it through this alive and my groin is going to prove it
!” Because that’s what survivors do; they fuck. They live.

Laura was running amongst all these people, cursing each one of them for not knowing where Apple was… cursing each one for not
being
Apple, and she ran off in one direction, and I went in another, and there was a lump in my throat when I finally found Laura’s girlfriend, when I finally saw Apple, because how could I tell the sister of the woman I loved that her girlfriend was sprawled, unmoving, on the parking lot’s surface, was white, was covered in shards of ice from one of the boulders of hail that had come down from above… how could I tell Laura that her girlfriend wasn’t alive, that she had been killed by…

“Reaver?” Apple said, stirring, looking my way. “R-Reaver?”

My chest heaved. Apple was moving. She was… she was… I ran to her at something that must have been four times the speed of a normal man.

I brushed the ice away from her. There was a bruise on her cheek. Another along her arm. The boulder must have barely creased her. We had gone one or two inches from tragedy. In the business that I’m in, we call that a triumph.

I held Apple in my arms and yelled, “Laura! She’s here! I found her! She’s okay!” I could hear Laura’s answering calls from in the distance, her yelling my name, and yelling Apple’s, hidden by piles of discarded cars. In time, in only seconds, Laura appeared, wild-eyed, grinning, running for me. Well, in truth she wasn’t running for me at all. She was running for Apple. But she was looking at me.

She was looking at me like I was a hero.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A
dele was standing in her yard. We’d had to take a taxi home (there hadn’t been any such thing as taxis when I was living in Greenway) because I’d thrown Laura’s car at a weather goddess (it had missed, and had then been subjected to tornadoes and lightning and the underrated and overwhelming deprivations of gravity) but luckily Laura hadn’t scolded me at all. She’d only told me she would have traded fifteen or twenty or a hundred cars, or anything at all, to be able to sit next to Apple (they weren’t sitting next to each other, they were stacked) in the taxi, coming home. Apple had laughed off everything, saying that it was too bad about the groceries (she’d taken especial care when selecting the oranges, claiming it was a skill she’d developed when training with orange-picking monks in Tibet) and then, anyway, such things as being hit by avian icebergs were the kinds of things a girl has to expect when becoming friends with one of the
Children of the Spill
.

After Tempest was down (let’s face it… squashed dead like a bug) Laura and Apple were treated to a display of how invasive SRD’s “Aftermath Investigators” can be, and then we had called several people, quite a few people, to let them know that we were okay. Laura had called her fellow artists (and had hurriedly discussed a new series of paintings based on the day’s events) and Apple had called a number of relatives (her own co-workers had been, of course, on site) and between the two of them the number of phone calls had been in the upper teens, or maybe even the low twenties.

I made one phone call.

I called Adele.

I’d said, “You probably saw some bad weather.”

“Are you okay? Is Laura okay? Are you okay? Is my sister okay? What… where… are you okay? Steve fucking Clarke are you okay?” There were more words and the same questions and I was trying to cut in, but, I wasn’t trying very hard, because I was enjoying the sound of her voice and feeling, for some reason, like I had
saved
it. Like I had saved
her
. I was feeling very much like a hero. Between Laura’s grin (while she came running for Apple, slipping on the ice and falling once, but never changing the focus of her eyes or the breadth of her grin) and the relief in Adele’s voice, I was feeling absolutely like a hero. So I didn’t cut in, at first, because I wanted to feel that way as long as possible. I wanted to be a hero forever.

When my silence began to make me feel as much a jerk as a hero, I’d calmed Adele down (
I’m fine, Laura’s fine, and we have one very slightly bruised Apple
) and she had listened to the details, asked a few questions (out of concern) and then a few more questions (out of, I think, research for one of her books or articles) and we had discussed theories of
why
Tempest had fallen from the sky (SRD investigators, had, at Apple’s suggestion, embraced a theory that the weather goddess had been so enraged that she had burnt herself out like a light bulb) and finally Adele asked me how long it had been before Laura spoiled the news about the surprise party. I told her it hadn’t been long at all, and she’d told me how that was longer than she would have expected.

By the time the taxi dropped us off at the Layton sisters’ residence, Adele was waiting in the yard, and was full of information (some true, some false) on the fight. She’d been checking the internet, and during the short time (it had taken only thirty minutes) I’d been being debriefed by SRD, and then the taxi ride home, the internet had provided a thousand different versions of the fight, an equal number of memorials for Tempest, a multitude of flame wars in various comments sections, articles about how Ecuador was in mourning, and the news of the fight had even made the weather sites, where meteorologists were debating if the size of the hail that had pummeled me could be counted as
official
hail, thereby breaking all previous records for the largest hail ever recorded.