Prepare to Die! (12 page)

I’ve twice stated that the girls gave their virtue, and I should correct that. There’s nothing virtuous in not experiencing what life has to offer, and it’s a slap in the face that some people count a boy having sex as a triumph, and a girl having sex as a defeat. These girls on the list, they hadn’t been defeated; they’d only lived life, and done so with pleasure.

That said, I was heartbroken to see Adele’s name on the rafter. I hadn’t put it there. Who had? The name didn’t, of course, have to refer to Adele Layton. There are other Adeles in the world. It’s an uncommon name, but not singular.

Anyway, it wasn’t fair that I felt the burn of acids inside my stomach, in my lungs and heart (and, hell yes, soul) when I saw her name there, since after the accident I had been in a coma for nearly three months (Greg was in a coma for five days and Tom, well, more on that later) and by the time I woke I wasn’t the way I had been. My own life had assuredly moved on, and hers had to, as well. It’s not like she was the one in a coma. It was fine that she had found somebody else. It was fine that she had laughed with him. It was fine that she had gone to movies with him, movies that he maybe even remembered, and it was fine if they looked for fossils together in the quarry. It was absolutely okay if she wore her green dress and they’d walked along Greenway’s sidewalks together. I had no issue with how she’d taken her panties off, sliding them down from her legs, maybe with him holding her dress up, watching Adele as she stepped away from her panties, him with a grin that wouldn’t quit, and a pen knife in his back pocket, ready to carve her name in a rafter that…

… a rafter that

… that I almost broke with a sudden clasping of my hand, crushing part of the timber in my grip, sending a crack along a rafter that had been in place for nearly one hundred and fifty years.

It wasn’t fair to feel that way. Adele had a life of her own. Myself, I was sitting alone in the rafters where only teenagers are supposed to go, and I was sitting with ten days left in my life. I’d given my word of honor to Octagon, and I meant to keep it.

I am Reaver.

A hero.

Heroes keep their word.

My brother Tom taught me how solidly that was true.

No matter how much it hurts.

I had ten days to make things right in the world. That’s not possible, of course. I’d spent years trying to make things right in the world, and I’d done some tidbits of good, but I’d only barely jostled the scales, and for several of those years I had Paladin at my side (I know there are those out there, reading this, who would say it was the other way around) and it was a time when Mistress Mary and Kid Crater and Warp were in their prime. What a golden age. Then, it had seemed possible; it had seemed that…

I found that I had left the park and was running, at three times the speed of a normal man, to Adele’s house. Her name was listed in the phone directory as having the same place of residence as back when I’d lived in Greenway. The same house. That was a relief to me. I suppose a psychiatrist would call it an anchor. Ten days from death, I wanted a solid footing in the past. I’d looked up Adele’s name on one of Checkmate’s computers, at the SRD base, with Commander Bryant typing in a password (he said the password didn’t make any real difference… that Checkmate’s computers simply used the keys to fingerprint you as you typed, and to retrieve and match a genetic sample from your skin flakes) and then turning discreetly aside while I did my research.

Adele’s parents were dead. One quick heart attack. One lingering battle against cancer.

Adele had no marriage certificate on file. Which didn’t mean she was single.

She listed her occupation as “self-employed blogger/researcher/author.” She had written a number of books on the topic of the superhumans. They had moderate sales. The subject matter was popular, but her approach (according to a brief scouring of her reviews) was too scholarly. People like the sensational.

Continuing to stalk (ahem… research) Adele’s file on the computer, I saw that her health record was enviable. There were no listed pregnancies. She had been investigated five times by the Secret Service, four times for intruding on Presidential secure zones during public appearances (each time during press conferences concerning superhumans) and once for hacking into government files in order to access documents about… Reaver.

So, that was interesting.

Commander Bryant had told me that I should ask Adele, myself, in person, if I wanted to know any more. He told me a personal story about stalking a girl online, a girl he’d met in a bar, and by the time he’d slept with her (he clearly wanted to tell me all the details of the encounter, which had happened in a bunker, a quarter mile below the holding pen where Warp is stored these days) she was so frightened by all the intimate knowledge he knew about her, all the things she’d never told him, that it hadn’t progressed to any real intimacy, just the fake variety that computers foster.

I’d told Bryant, “I thought you were turned around. Not looking.” For once, I’d meant to use the Reaver voice, the one that scares people. He’d only smiled. I suppose that’s fitting, as he’s the man who, every day, goes and talks to Mindworm, down in the cells, asking him to release his hold on the citizens of Farewell, New Mexico, a town of 2700 people that have been caught in Mindworm’s dreams for over seven years. If a man can talk with Mindworm, he’s not going to shit himself because I use my nasty voice.

So I’d turned back to the computers (Checkmate’s computers were made of glass, or maybe diamonds, and, according to Bryant, a handful of quarks) and I (knowing full well that Bryant was right) intruded even further into Adele’s life, accessing the SRD satellite surveillance photos of her house, taken over the past couple of years, showing her house (there was a new porch addition) and, in three of the photos, Adele herself, walking outside the house, going inside the house, and, in the last of them, spilling groceries as she took two bags from her car.

And now, a few hours later, after sulking like a spoiled teenager in the log cabin rafters, I was standing in the street in front of Adele’s house.

It would have taken a normal man ten seconds to make it to her front door, and to knock.

It would have taken me one third as long.

Instead, I took out my phone, took a deep breath, took a look up into the sky (where I assumed that at least one of the SRD satellites was tracking me) and I dialed a number.

Adele’s number.

I felt worse than when Firehook had once torn out my left lung.

I felt worse than when Laser Beast had once (on purpose, that fucker) shot a hole through my balls.

I felt about the same as when, right after the tanker truck accident, I’d woken up (briefly, and for the last time in months) on the highway, wreckage all around me, and I could see what had happened to Officer Horwitz, and to Greg, and (only somewhat) to Tom.

I felt like I could hear Adele’s phone ringing, in the house.

I watched her move past the window on the 2
^nd
floor (she’d apparently taken her parents’ old room) and then, after six rings, I heard her, in the phone, saying, “Hello?”

And I felt it.

CHAPTER SIX

T
he majority of people who read this aren’t going to care about my relationship with Adele. My memories and thoughts concerning the boys and girls in the bright-colored underwear is what they’re going to find fascinating. I was once offered an embarrassing amount of cash to make a pornographic film with Siren, who had (according to a producer who was later found dead with all his fingers missing) agreed to the film as long as it would air on primetime television. One network had said they wouldn’t consider doing so under any circumstances. Three others had said there were, possibly, some circumstances that could be considered.

I’d turned the offer down.

I turned it down just like I’d turned down all the merchandising deals. I’d declined most public appearances (Paladin always seemed able to talk me into them) and various requests for my sperm to be used to fertilize loving couples and even (I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider this, at least from an amusement standpoint) one group of fifty-six (yes, fifty-six) Ukrainian lesbians who had formed a warrior cult and lived in caves. Warp (this was before his breakdown) ran over to check out the premises and said the caves were actually very nice. Like modern homes.

There isn’t an awards show I haven’t been asked to host. Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, the Nobel prizes, La Liga soccer championships, and so on and so on.

Ugly as I am, I’m one of the beautiful people, and the citizens of the world want to know about beautiful people, demanding to know about any battles with villains, any demeaning secrets about heroes, mystic rites that supposedly exist to allow them (meaning every housewife, weekend sportsman, trailer-park resident, Wal-Mart employee, roadie, carny, frat boy, sorority girl, news anchor, etc. etc.) to become one of us, to soar through the skies and heave cars aside.

People want to know how many times I’ve been shot (even I don’t know that) and how many times I’ve been dropped from space (twice: fuck you, Stellar) and how many women I’ve slept with (it’s a fair number, and some of the names pop up again in the list of those who have shot me, or dropped me from space) and, of course, people want to know about my punch, and the year of life it smashes aside.

People do not want to know about how I was heaving in something close to fear (it was more like being uncomfortable, but a superhuman size of uncomfortable, a feeling which all regular people need to face, anyway, at times) when I was holding the phone to my cheek, and how my cell phone felt as heavy as the boulder (twice the size of the trailer it had destroyed) that I lifted in order to free Joshua Williams, who had survived an avalanche by the expedient of falling into a hole that had been prepared for installation of a new septic tank.

Adele, on the phone, said, “Hello?”

I said, “Yes,” which was nonsensical.

She said, “Steve?”

I said, “Hello.” I was getting things backward. If Mindworm hadn’t been in his cerebral holding carriage, I would have suspected he was at work.

Adele said, “I was told that you were in town. I’m… I’m… happy. Steve. I’m happy. Where are you?”

“Standing outside the log cabin,” I answered. “In Charles Park.” I don’t know why I lied. I mean, I lied because I was panicked, but I don’t know why I was panicked. It was Adele. On the phone. That’s why I was panicked. I knew that, of course.

“Do you want me to come there?” she asked.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.” She was going to ask why not. I needed to have an answer ready. I was backing away from her house, hunkering down behind a Smart Car that was barely big enough to hide me. I found myself wishing for Tom. He would have kicked me into view. I needed that kick.

“Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?” Adele asked. She came to the window, parted the curtain, looking out.

“A fight,” I said.

“A fight?”

“With Eleventh Hour. It… didn’t go well. I’m beat up pretty bad. Don’t think you want to see me like this.”

“Steve,” she said. “I just want to see you.”

She didn’t make it sound tearful, or pleading, or false, the way old lovers will sometimes do. Any one of those might have made it easier.

I didn’t say anything.

She was still standing between the parted curtains, but she’d turned off the lights in the room, probably so she could see outside better.

“Are you hiding behind the Smart Car?” she asked. Damn. Damn it to hell. I stood up.

“There you are,” she said. There was a catch in her voice I would have given anything to understand.

“How’d you know?”

“That’s where I would have hidden. Listen, my downstairs door is locked. I’m going to go unlock it. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

I started walking towards the house.

***

Octagon announced his presence to the world, as everyone knows, when he stormed the Churchill, the secret (well, secret at the time) British nuclear submarine then off the coast of Portugal taking part in an underwater mapping exercise.

Octagon appeared in Captain Wilmer Bosley’s quarters (beaming a live video feed that piggybacked onto television waves worldwide) and boldly strode throughout the craft (which was then nearly six hundred meters below the surface) disabling the crew members with a device that radiated a disrupting charge (attuned to the human brain, rendering all within the field of effect unconscious within seconds) in a circle that could pass through the bulkheads, and was nearly seventy feet in diameter, which is an epic measurement in an underwater craft.

He robbed them.

That’s all Octagon did.

He mugged each and every one of the unconscious crewmembers.

Their wallets. Their rings. Any money they had in their pockets.

A worldwide live broadcast of the oddest mass mugging on record.

He said, “I am Octagon. My eight arms reach everywhere. You have ceased to be safe.”

The rings, and all the personal photos from the crewmember’s wallets, were later found floating inside a hard rubber balloon (with an attached air horn that was sounding in bursts) about the size of a beach ball, floating in the Thames.

The world wanted to know how Octagon had gotten into (and subsequently, off) the Churchill at such a depth. The world was also curious about how Octagon had, for the time he was aboard (two hours, after the crewmen were rendered inert) managed to pilot and maintain the ship’s course completely by himself. The world wanted to know what Octagon’s suit was made of… how he could reach into the black void of his costume and bring out all sorts of devices. The world wanted to know this.

The world wanted to know about Octagon.

So they sent me after him.

***

The first time the American public became aware of Macabre it was because he’d robbed the First United National Bank in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, later claiming he had chosen this site because of their name. First. United. National. F. U. N. Fun.