Prepare to Die! (39 page)

“How’d you bring down Tempest?”

“Didn’t even distract you with talk of nice pert boobs, then?”

“Not right at this moment.”

She sighed. Opened the car door. After a bit, waiting to see if I would react, and seeing that I didn’t, she reached in for her small duffel bag (it had a Siren button stuck into its side) and waited to see if I would react to her reaching for that. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it as being problematic, but her hesitation, her glance towards me, her wary caution, put me on alert.

Still, I let her take the bag.

I’ve done smarter things.

It’s not like I’m Checkmate.

She waited for me on the sidewalk. We were only seven blocks from the gravel drive (the one between George Kuchester’s house and the “
Welcome to Greenway
!” sign) that leads down into the gravel pit. There was a row of cherry trees waiting expectantly for someone to notice them. I wondered if Adele would like some of the blossoms. I wondered how they would look in her hair. I wondered how Checkmate had brought Tempest down from out of the skies. I wondered how Apple had done that.

She said, “I studied Tempest, of course, when she was in SRD. So much to learn. She was like a Rosetta Stone to unlock the secrets of nature. Haven’t you ever wondered how her powers worked? If she was just… moving the weather around like children’s blocks, or if the weather could
understand
her somehow? Haven’t you ever just wondered that?”

“No.” It seemed important to lie.

“Liar.” It seemed inconsequential that my lie had been caught.

Apple, seeing only my blank face (we were both walking towards the quarry, with some unspoken acknowledgment involved) went on with, “And when I studied Tempest, I worked with her brain waves. Tracked them. Charted them. All the peaks. Valleys.”

“So?”

“So I knew just how to cancel those waves. I could use that knowledge to set up a valley against a peak, and a peak against a valley. Everything cancelling each other. Flattening out the line.”

“You shut off her brain?”

“Essentially. Yes.”

There were standing puddles next to the road. The air smelled of dank water. Mosquitoes were buzzing around. The day was warm. I thought of the giant cockroach in SRD labs. I would rather face a mosquito than a cockroach. Unless they were giants. Then it’s the other way around.

I said, “Apple. Do you remember when Tempest and Macabre were…”

“Are you seriously about to ask me if I remember the time that Tempest and Macabre changed the very fabric of space and extended Earth’s atmosphere to the moon?”

“Okay. I suppose it
is
something you remember.” There were mosquitoes buzzing around my eyes. One of them landed on my cheek. Tried for a taste of me. It blunted its… what are they? Stingers? Noses? I’m not sure of the term. Anyway… she (all biting mosquitoes are female, I think I’ve read) broke her blood siphon on my invulnerable flesh.

I said, “Octagon took down Tempest and Macabre, that time. Octagon did that in the same way as you took down Tempest at the grocery store.”

Apple said, “Of course.” I knew what she meant by it. But I was waiting for her to say it. I was waiting for confirmation. I shouldn’t, of course, have been waiting. Being a man who moves three times faster than anyone else can make you complacent. It’s easy to forget that moving three times faster can be cancelled out when you’re talking to someone who’s ten steps ahead. Or even eight.

Apple said, “I’m Checkmate.”

There was a buzzing near my ear.

Apple said, “I’m Octagon.”

A mosquito bit me on my neck. Something sank into my bloodstream. A nose. A stinger. Whatever. It was the first time I’d been bitten by a bug in almost a decade.

“Take some time off,” Octagon said, staring me in the eyes, pulling a laser pistol from her duffel bag. But I barely heard her.

The world was spinning and I was falling to the ground.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

L
aser Beast.

Siren.

Firehook.

Octagon.

They were all there when I woke up.

It would probably be more dramatic if I claimed that I was bound by chains of an unknown metal, unbreakable even to
one such as I
, with evil automatons and other advanced instruments of tortuous devastation surrounding me. Beams of destructive light, blades honed as to be immeasurably sharp, the cackling of a madwoman’s laughter rebounding from the stone walls, perhaps soaring outward through the lone window, the one that looks out across the battlements, over the edge of the cliff and down to the roaring surf below.

In truth, though, I wasn’t bound at all. I was just sprawled in the loose rocks of Greenway’s quarry. My neck throbbed where the mosquito (I had no illusions that it had actually been a mosquito) had bitten my neck. My neck had a soft green glow, barely visible from the edges of my vision. My left cheek was against the quarry floor. Perhaps two feet from me was a fossilized snail of some kind. A pair of fossilized leaves. Ten feet past these remnants of the ancient world was Laser Beast, down on his haunches, grinning at me. Firehook was standing next to him, with drops of fire slipping down from his fingers, sizzling onto the rocky surface, creating tiny pools of molten rock.

I couldn’t see Siren, but I could feel her nearby. It wasn’t exactly morning, but I was lying on morning wood.

And, past Firehook, past Laser Beast… there was Octagon in the black costume with the male shape, a shape I now knew to be as much a lie as Checkmate’s armor. I wondered if the rest of Eleventh Hour knew that Octagon was the girl from the grocery store. I wondered if they knew that. I wondered if I had the strength to stand up. It didn’t feel like I did, but I wasn’t doing anything else, so I gave it a try.

“He lives! Walks! Breathes!” Laser Beast exclaimed like a carnival barker, watching me rise unsteadily to my feet. It wouldn’t, of course, take me very long to regain my full health, my full power. The ghost of Tom Clarke was burning within me. I would soon be green to go.

“We shouldn’t let him live too long,” Firehook said. “We should kill him now. Before he recovers. You know he recovers! You know that!” The last bits were yelled to Octagon, who was sat on a boulder. In my mind, Octagon was sitting in a feminine fashion, but I wasn’t sure if my eyes were registering that because it was true, or because my perceptions were now colored by the knowledge of the girl beneath the suit.

I started laughing.

It made them nervous.

I liked having them nervous, but that’s not why I was laughing. Something had occurred to me. I searched around for Siren, trying to find where she was standing, using (there’s no way this statement can’t be vulgar, so I’m not even going to try) my cock like a divining rod, leading me to the source of its interest.

Siren was leaning against a huge and raggedy boulder, a mass conglomerate of rocks that had been cemented together by eons of pressure, a unified boulder that had fallen from the quarry’s wall. She was standing in its shade. Direct sunlight can dry out skin, make it leathery. That’s something, of course, that Siren avoids.

She asked, “Why are you laughing?” I heard Firehook grunt. I heard Laser Beast groan. The possibility of Siren’s voice is an aphrodisiac. A few actual words goes beyond that. It made its mark on me, too. I kept laughing, though.

I said, “You remember that time that I asked you who was the better man in bed? Me or Octagon?”

Siren’s eyes flickered nervously to Laser Beast and Firehook. So… they didn’t know. Siren then smiled (jelly… I was jelly) and answered, “You were asking the wrong question.”

It… was… important… to quit talking to Siren. It was important to focus on other things. On staying alive. It was important to fight Laser Beast. To kill Firehook. I could do it. I was Reaver. I could beat them in impressive ways. I could show Siren what I was capable of… display myself to her so that she would…

It… was… important to… quit… talking to Siren.

I turned to Octagon and asked, “I thought I had two weeks? Didn’t you give me two weeks? Don’t I still have a day?”

Octagon stood. Walked a few steps closer. The voice that came to me was masculine in nature. It was the same voice that Octagon had always used. But now I knew better. I had a feeling I knew what Octagon was going to say. Something about curiosity killing the cat.

“That was before you started playing detective,” Octagon said. “That was back when Macabre was still alive. When Tempest ruled the skies. That was back then. There has to be some payment for what you’ve done. A debit, at least, of a few hours.”

There was no longer a green glow from my neck. I wasn’t hunched over with the pain and the fog of whatever had been injected into me. I had to think. I had to outthink them. I had to do something unexpected. I had to surprise them. Mistress Mary had said there was some sort of schism within Eleventh Hour. It was quite possibly true that I couldn’t beat them. Not all of them, together. But maybe I wouldn’t have to. Maybe they could do it themselves. Maybe I could make them forget that I was the one who had killed Macabre. That I was the one who had killed Tempest. That I was the one who had cut off so many of their plans at the root. That I was their foil. That I was an asshole. If I could make them fight each other, focus elsewhere, forget that I was the one who…

No.

Come to think of it…

I wasn’t the one who had killed Tempest.

Octagon had done that.

Octagon had brought the storm goddess down from the skies.

Why?

From some notion that my two weeks weren’t up? From some sense of honor that her word needed to be kept? Or was she just angry that Tempest was attacking her, too? But Tempest couldn’t have known that Apple was Octagon. Or… could she have? I’d presumed myself to be the target. What if it had been Octagon?

What if… ?

What if… ?

What if I discarded these lines of thought?

What if I was smart enough to understand who I was? What if I was smart enough to want to live to kiss Adele Layton a few more times? What if I didn’t want to die? Spending any more time
thinking
would have been falling into Octagon’s game. She was the best at that. I was the best at other things.

I was the best at being Reaver.

Sometimes… that meant punching someone.

Sometimes… that meant being an asshole.

I was okay with that.

They… are… never… ready.

I move at three times the speed of a common man and they are never ready.

The shit thing about Eleventh Hour is that they are all, each of them, the greatest threat. I had to abandon all hope of playing it smart, of taking out the weakest first, or the strongest first, and I had to plan on taking an enormous amount of damage and I had to plan on not having a plan.

I went for Firehook first, because he was the closest, and because I have never forgotten the time he’d ripped out my lung (it had been during his brief team-up with Nemesis, before he’d murdered her for sleeping with Warp) and most of all, of course, like anybody else with an ounce of moral fiber, I’ve never forgotten his first appearance where he’d melted the children in the school bus.

It doesn’t matter where I hit somebody. A punch to their jaw takes away a year of their life. A punch to their shoulder has the same effect. And a punch to the jaw of man composed of a fire hot enough to burn even me, that would be stupid.

A punch to his nuts seemed like it might be satisfying, though.

Turned out, it was.

Laser Beast had just enough time to say, “He’s…” and then I was on the two of them. I punched as hard as I could into Firehook’s groin, at the same time ducking the swing from Laser Beast’s clawed hand. The clawed hand wasn’t even on the way, yet… but I knew it would be. I’ve studied how each of them fights. These were the predictable ones. I never knew how to handle Tempest or Macabre, because their powers (and minds) were too unpredictable. Firehook likes to snatch portions of an enemy’s body with his hook, though. That’s what he likes to do. And Laser Beast, despite his lasers, likes to lead with those claws. It didn’t used to be that way. These days, though, he’s more
beast
than
laser
. It helps.

Laser Beast’s clawed hand swiped over my head. By then, Firehook was already falling, his groin a mangled mess. I hadn’t held back. I wasn’t relying on stealing a few years. I was interested in taking them all.

The loose rocks where I’d been standing, the ones that had kicked into the air from beneath my feet with the speed of my assault, hadn’t yet fallen to the ground before I was picking up Laser Beast and hurling him towards Octagon. He, I mean she, I mean Octagon, had to duck her incoming teammate, and also divert a blast from her laser pistol that had been intended to cut me in two, but in reality barely missed slicing the beast in half. That would have been a nice bonus. A crackerjack prize.

A roar of flame came up from below.

Firehook, insane with pain, with rage, and with his usual insanity, was cutting loose. The billow was like a small atomic cloud, and with my perception, with the way things move three times slower to my eyes, I could see the creeping flame inching outwards from Firehook’s prone body, eating the rocks around him, turning million-year-old fossils into ash, completely dead at last, with the fire burning the rocks, charring the air, turning everything to glass or ash or into nothing at all, and with the flames clawing at my legs.

I leapt.

I’m good at it.

With no time to make an intelligent decision, I had to make the quickest one. I chose to jump away from Octagon, away from the flames. These were good decisions. I chose to jump behind the nearest huge boulder. This was also wise. I chose to jump closer to Siren, who stood next to that boulder.

Looking at her, you’d think this was really smart, but of course it’s not.

The flames billowed up around me as I leapt. They were grabbing for me, eager to thwart my escape. If Firehook had kept his senses about him (not an easy task, when a superhuman has belted you in the groin hard enough to shatter your pelvis and make nasty pudding of your hopes for future generations) he could have shot me out of the air. I try not to leap very often during a fight, because once I give myself up to gravity I take away the element of my speed. Firehook couldn’t concentrate, though, and his flames were actually giving me an element of cover (two or three hissing bitches of laser beams nearly clipped me) and I landed safely (ha ha ha) next to Siren, immediately grabbing her and pulling her behind the boulder (Firehook’s flames were encroaching on the territory) and then nearly succumbing to the throb and the thrum of feeling her naked flesh. I had her by the shoulder. She was wearing a light spring dress that probably couldn’t believe its luck.