Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology (15 page)

I took in a deep breath and blew it out. Opaque shapes hung in the pale light. There were slits at the top of my lead container. The slits were so miniscule I couldn’t fit my fingers through them even if I melted into water and slid up the walls. The slits led to a narrow tube that filtered in light from the surface. I turned my hands over and back again, over and over, contemplating the scars from wounds that never hurt to begin with. I had seen my own blood smeared over top of my skin like it was a personalized blanket. Endorsed by Fable.

This was the waiting room. I was used to standing here in my nine-inch combat boots and tight leather pants. I had a black and red corset on; it pushed my plastic chest so sky high it was almost tumbling out of the top. I squared my shoulders as the footsteps began methodically marching down the hallway. My orange-red hair was a mess of knots and curls that trickled toward my lower back, my face still covered in prepubescent freckles that hadn’t faded in centuries.

Nothing about me ever faded.

I was everlasting.

I was never-ending.

I was immortal.

The creaks and groans began to sound as the gears shifted and the ten-foot-thick lead door slid out of the way. A flash of blue hit my shoulder care of the stun gun Hattie Alexander was holding. I let the electricity run through my body and instinctively dropped on one knee in a crouch. Jonathan Cray came around me from behind with the thickest adamantium chains I had ever seen. Jonathan made quick work of the bolts and forced me to stand. I felt his labored breathing on the back of my neck and for a brief second I thought about a backwards
headbutt
, but didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.

Hattie smiled at me, her stun gun still pointed in my face. She was a pretty woman, in her late forties now and showing the signs of laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. She had that blood-red, auburn wavy hair thing going for her, and was wearing the standard issue one-piece. She dressed up the black jumper with a butterfly-designed belt that only made her mid-section look fatter than it was. I always said, “Don’t flaunt it if you don’t got it,” but maybe they stopped airing those commercials.

“Ready for your big performance, Fable?” Hattie asked, her high-pitched voice practically sawing my brain in half.

I kept my black eyes cold on hers and nodded. Jonathan nudged me forward, and that was when I realized he had already hooked up my feet. Same unbreakable material, nothing but the best for Fable Ketterling.

Jonathan had grown since I last saw him. He was taller and his fair hair was creating stubble on his firm jaw line. I was a five-foot nothing and he was a six-foot something. My head barely reached his chest, and behind his uniform I heard the
thump
thump
thump
of his heart. Underneath that death trap of a fashion statement he had golden-brown skin from the heat of the deadly sun, and scorch marks burned into the edges of his fingers. I tried not to blush when his right hand covered my pale spaghetti arm to guide me.

We walked down the long, dimly-lit tunnel in silence, the chains rattling with every step I took. I was numb to the process, numb to the cool air filtering through the underground manicured caverns. People in Temperance didn’t let anything grow or form by accident. The things they did were deliberate. They had to be, after all that had happened and the consequences that followed.

They turned the corner, the same corner I had turned thirteen hundred and thirteen times since I had been born. If we were still counting using the old calendars, it would be 3333AD and I would be thirteen hundred and twenty-eight years old.

I was the only one counting my age anymore.

I didn’t look a day over fifteen.

They ushered me down another hallway which went from the clay structures to the embroidered Turkish rugs that lavishly stretched across the mahogany-plated hallways. There were all sorts of gold-framed mirrors and glass lights lining the walls. They were pretty with their
rose-colored
light bulbs and intricate artwork. I admired the brass they were made from, and tried not to think about bucking against Jonathan and knocking them off the walls, causing the pretty carpet to catch fire.

We reached the double doors at the end of the hall after what seemed like hours of trekking up a gradual incline. The room I was ushered into was oval, and stretched out like an accordion. Hattie’s footsteps clicked along the white linoleum tile as she crossed the room, fluttering like a bird and screaming at the actual teenage girls that were perched on a white settee in the center of the room. They scurried behind a screen as I was led over to one of the four marble pillars, the chains fitting around it to secure me in place. Jonathan stepped away and I watched the muscles in his back contract underneath the one-piece. He wasn’t going to stay for the girl time.

Hattie clapped her hands together and the girls stopped giggling and came out from behind the screen. Both of them had handfuls of fluffy fabric. One of them was Asian, but they didn’t use that term anymore. They preferred to call them Eastern Earthly. The other was Western Earthly; or “White” as I would have called it back when I was actually a fifteen-year-old girl in 2020AD.

The Eastern Earthly girl had coal-black eyes and straight black hair with bangs that covered her eyebrows. She might have been beautiful if she wasn’t in the black one-piece like everyone else. Western Earthly girl was about the same, but the blonde version with blue eyes. They blinked at me in rapid succession, either trying to get over the shock of my fame, or the shock of the reason I was famous.

I wasn’t going to hurt them.

But it looked like I was going to, didn’t it? Jonathan was an idiot chaining me up to a pillar and leaving me here like live bait.

“Ursula, Eden,” Hattie called, a sharp tone in her voice. Her eyes were like daggers and the girls disappeared from my sight into one of the side rooms.

Hattie sauntered over to me and I could smell the perfume she had applied since I’d last seen her. She took a handful of my hair and sniffed it. I could tell her it smelled like metal and sewage and garbage, but she scrunched up her nose and snapped her fingers. The girls came back, their hands empty this time.

“Draw Ms. Ketterling a bath,” Hattie ordered.

I waited while Ursula and Eden disappeared, and then the sound of running water wafted through the spacious room.

Hattie was inspecting every inch of my body, looking me up and down, pausing at the hem of my leather pants and frowning at my breasts. I hoped she wasn’t thinking about another breast augmentation, and if she was, I hoped her mind was on reduction. Before the bombs began dropping I had a modest A-cup, but since all the fame and heroism, I had to have some minor adjustments made.

“How do you feel about flame-resistant spandex?” she asked, a finger on her lips.

I
raised
my
eyebrows.
“I
have
flame-resistant
skin,”
I
said
dryly.

“Yes, but some of the parents complained about you being naked after the flame-throwers last year.”

I groaned. Always nice to know the flame-throwers were out for the fifth year in a row. “Then I have no objections as long as it doesn’t itch.”

Hattie nodded. “Great, and we wanted to give you a cape.”

“Is the F-16 team back this year?” I asked.

Hattie laughed. “Yes, but we don’t want to do that much bodily damage.” She glanced at my hands, the ones with all the scars on them. I grimaced. “We can ditch the cape, but we’re not going to have you looking like a condom again.”

Great, always loved getting pulled around by my hair. Steam billowed out of the adjoining room and crawled across the ceiling.

“What’s the theme this year?” I asked, feigning interest.

Hattie’s heels clicked along the floor as she frowned at the door and went to check on Ursula and Eden. She pushed the door open and more steam billowed out, making her wave her hand in front of her face.

“It’s boiling,” Ursula or Eden said. I hadn’t heard either of them speak yet and so I couldn’t be sure, but the voice wasn’t Hattie’s. Hattie ducked into the room for a moment, the steam still circling her in wisps as she emerged and moved toward me. She didn’t look at me as she unchained me from the pillar, but didn’t set me free from the chains. I rattled like jingle bells as I crossed the floor and entered the steam. Both Ursula and Eden were on either side of the lavish tub. There were stairs leading to it, a perfect seashell sunken into the porcelain, and funny-looking soaps in the shape of ducks and seashells on the side of the bath. They were right: it was bubbling like it was hot as hell in there.

I wasn’t nervous as Hattie removed my clothes. I boldly took the stairs, chains and all, and lowered myself into the boiling water. My skin reddened and my cheeks flushed. I couldn’t feel the heat. Not in the way I used to, at least. I was still curious about the theme and with my hands bobbing on the surface I narrowed my eyes at her.

“The theme?” I asked.

Hattie looked unpleasant. She glared at Ursula and Eden and both of them ran out of the room like she had dangled a scorpion in front of their faces. She folded her hands together and gave me that this-is-all-for-the-best expression I hated. “You know how the kids are these days. They want to remember the old Fable
Ketterling
.”

Throwback stuff, exactly what I wanted. I opened my mouth to protest, but she put a hand up to silence me. The old Fable Ketterling was a hero, she was a saint. She signed autographs until her hands were numb and posed for pictures with every little kid that came her way. She appeared at not only the big Temperance Day, but at all the major festivals throughout the year. She traveled to the suburbs and shook hands with the sheriffs and members of parliament. That Fable Ketterling was a dare-devil—sky-diving without parachutes and setting herself on fire, and letting herself be ravaged by feral Tigers. That Fable Ketterling was a superhero.

“They want a superhero,” Hattie said firmly.

I looked away, not willing to let her see me cry. Things weren’t the same anymore and I regretted all the years I took my immortality for granted. Hattie would never understand. She was a child compared to my years, and if I wanted to I could have pulled her into the tub and boiled her alive. I didn’t though. I stared at the beige-tiled walls and squeezed my eyes shut, pretending they were watery from the steam.

“Collin will have a panic attack,” I whispered, gulping back more tears.

“Collin doesn’t have any say anymore. Jonathan took over for him after what happened three years ago.”

I pursed my lips. Collin Cray hated me from the first day he saw me, and every Cray before him hated me, too, over fifty generations of them raising their voices against me. He was by far one of the most influential members of parliament. His ancestor was one of the eight that originally founded Temperance and gave the entire human race refuge from the nuclear bombs that tore apart everything anyone had ever known.

I was the last one left from that grim reality. We used to live in Argentina. My parents owned a lucrative mining company based out of Ontario, Canada. We were knee-deep in rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires—you name it, we mined it. I had started working for them when I was twelve. I knew how to harness up and spelunk through the caves like the best of them. I knew my way around the rain forest and I was pretty handy with a knife. When the sirens went off and the bombs began dropping they rocked the entire planet to its core. Storms erupted all over the world and because of the velocity of the blasts, the entire planet tilted on its axis. The United States and Canada became the North Pole, and Asia, the South Pole. Nuclear waste destroyed the rest and what didn’t kill people immediately killed them slowly, a poison made of isotopes that deteriorated a person over time. There wasn’t a cure.

I had been in the middle of a diamond mine when the blasts hit and I was cut from my rope. My parents weren’t as lucky. They were on the surface when the blasts hit and the radiation washed over the land. Later, somehow still alive, they found me in the caves, bloody and bruised. Together, we made our way through the underground systems in Argentina, all the way to the shores. We built a boat and crossed around the same time Cray, Chung, Withers, Grim, Brighton, Jenkins and Alexander did. We were the first ones to discover Temperance, all the credit going to my parents and the others who arrived with them.