Prepare to Die! (15 page)

They were harder than I would have expected. Maybe only four men (and two women) on Earth could have burst them asunder in the way that I did. My shoulder hurt for a couple seconds, then quit that shit, healing already, and I found myself in a large circular room that had all the trappings of a modern arena, and of course that’s just what it was.

Three levels above me, on a circular observation balcony, were crowds of people in seats. How many of them? Hundreds. Most of them were in the dark, impossible to see with the background glare of the floodlights. A few, though, were in positions of prominence… seated in places where they could be seen, and recognized. I quickly spotted, for instance, Laser Beast and Firehook, and Stellar was there as well, the first time I’d seen her in person.

And of course there was Octagon, up above, in a throne fit for the gaudiest and least color-coordinated of kings, and he waved down at me like an old friend and said, “At last. At last. We were getting restless. But you’re here, and I’m pleased, and we’ll make a night of this meeting, and, Reaver, Steven Thaddeus Clark, I bid you welcome to my octagon.”

The surrounding doors opened and the rats came inside.

***

Adele hated rats. I just wanted to throw that in here. It’s not by any means a startling revelation. Most girls hate rats. Most people hate rats. There are those who keep rats as pets, and they say they’re very loving animals, and these people (the rat-owners) claim themselves as rat-lovers, but it’s a very different thing, a pet rat and a wild rat. Nobody loves wild rats. I’m talking about the
mangy-yellow-toothed-gnaw-on-you-alive-or-dead
type of rat. Nobody loves them. Adele and I had seen them twice. Once while biking into the quarry on what amounted to our fifth date. And once when we snuck down into the basement of Bolton High School in order to see what she looked like with her shirt off. A rat had then come out from behind a custodial cart and raced across the floor, making that noise that only the hated rats make. You never hear that noise from the pet rats. Maybe they can actually make the sound, but are smart enough not to do it, because then they’d be out on the street.

***

At the time, it wasn’t well known that Octagon played with genetics. He was a mystery then, even more so than now. These days, a folder on Octagon would have about twenty pages of real facts, meaning hardly anything at all, really. In those days, a folder on Octagon would’ve only had five pages, and wouldn’t have included how, if you were to fight him in an underground arena, you might suddenly find yourself pitted against an assortment of six-legged rats that were the size of horses.

I was glad that Adele wasn’t there.

Here’s a moment of honesty, though; I was glad to be there, myself. I was glad because I was still full of my powers, still full of myself, still believing that
good
always triumphs over
evil
instead of getting trounced by it, or more often wandering over to the other side to see what all the shouting’s about. It seemed, at the time, that an arena was a good place to prove my moral superiority. I still felt like morals, in a fight, made any difference.

“Come down here, unless you’re chicken,” I told Octagon, which is the sort of taunt that works on a three-year-old child.

“You’re serious?” he said. “Why would I do that? I go to all the trouble of luring you here, almost losing you in Pondicherry, having to wait nearly three hours so that you could accidentally run across me in Sioux Falls, and did you even know that I was the old lady that gave you directions in Muscat?”

“Yes,” I said, meaning that everybody there was treated to a front seat view of my lie, which was treated with the derision that it deserved. I decided to keep my mouth shut, because, hell… I was busy. Those rats.

They weren’t attacking right away. They’d congregated on the opposite side from me, six of them milling about each other in that overly-friendly way of rats, crawling over each other, sniffing and sniffing, which in this case sounded like horse snorts.

“We haven’t trained them to kill, yet,” Octagon said, in a sort of apology, and I gauged the distance between us and leapt at him. It was three stories. I could make it easy.

As it turns out… there was a force field. I hadn’t known that. I smashed my head into it with the full power of my leap, and was batted back down to the ground. I was dazed and the floor seemed uneven. I could hear rats snorting. I could hear the crowd laughing.

I could hear Octagon saying, “There’s a force field.”

“Fuck you,” I told him. My quips still weren’t at their best.

“Ring the bell!” Firehook demanded, and he spat some fire down at me (coming from his mouth and eyes at the same time) which I didn’t even bother to dodge because, first of all, I was beneath a force field and, second of all, I’m pretty much immune to flames.

The force field cheated.

The flames did, too.

The flames burnt like holy blistering hell, seeping into my arm.

I screamed.

Octagon rang some sort of bell (I wasn’t looking… was desperately trying to wipe the flames away on the sandy floor of the arena) and when the bell went off the rats all suddenly became very focused on me… intently focused on me… murderously focused on me.

Octagon said, “I outright lied to you. The rats are trained to kill.”

The first rat was on me before I knew it, moving faster than I’d expected, bounding to me in two driving leaps with an impact that sent me on my ass. The rat’s teeth clicked into place around my neck. My skin proved too strong for the rat to break through or else I would have died in that first instant. I would have died wondering why the forces of justice (I still believed in them, actively) had decided that a moral man should fall in battle to a six-legged rat. Then, even though the rat couldn’t break my skin, it began to be clear that it could still kill me, could strangle me not with fingers, but with teeth. I began to feel light-headed, heavy in my body, and I knew that it was time to stop playing with the pets.

I punched the rat. Three times in the head. It fell away from me. Dead.

Here’s a hint for future madmen: if you’re going to attack me with genetically altered creatures, do it with turtles or something. The average life span of a rat is two or three years. To me, that means two or three punches, tops. There’s a reason I’m called Reaver.

I heaved the dead rat at the others, leapt across the arena and took advantage of its impact, fists flying, not really caring which rat I hit, only needing to land a few punches. More of the pests dropped dead. Experimentally, I picked one up and heaved it at Octagon, but it struck the force field and exploded like a piñata of vile bones and blood, showering me with the refuse of the dead, which sizzled when Firehook’s next blast came down from above, glancing off my back, sending me rolling on the ground in agony. The last two rats pounced on me, with one clamping on my neck and the other shaking my leg like a dog worrying on a… well… on a rat. It wrenched me from the other’s grasp and then died as I kicked out at it (I snapped its neck… my kicks don’t steal the years in the manner of my fists) and then I rolled beneath it and picked it up, hefting it around my shoulders like the world’s very worst fur stole.

The next blast of flame hit the rat.

“He’s cheating!” I heard Firehook yell out. Even Octagon had to laugh at that one.

The last rat was keeping back, intelligent enough to know that it was overmatched. Firehook tried to goad it into battle by sending spats of flame behind its ass, and Octagon was ringing and ringing a bell, but nothing was happening. I was covered in rat gore and rat carcass. I had a third-degree burn on one arm, and another on my back. I was grinning like a madman and might well have been one. The rat kept its distance. My burns (glowing a soft green) went from second degree, to first degree, to being slight rashes, to being gone. I wished I could have said the same about the smell of the rats, but it didn’t keep me grinning.

“Your rodents are dead,” I told Octagon. “Now… try to ring
my
bell.”

***

Firehook was an arsonist. A super-arsonist, truth be told. He looked like James Dean, if Dean’s head and hands were on fire, all the time, constantly, sizzling and cracking. It would have made going to the bathroom uncomfortable, except he was immune to fire and flame and heat and, I guess, dandruff.

He set things on fire. He couldn’t help himself. He didn’t want to help himself. His first public appearance was when he, on a motorcycle, stopped a busload of students, grades six through nine, outside of Decatur, Illinois. He negotiated with the bus driver at first, and later with police, saying that one student and one student only could leave the bus before he turned it, and everything in it, to ash. The bus driver, Honestia Yoder, an ex-Amish woman, begged on actual bended knees that Firehook would let everyone go, and she was still in the middle of the begging when she suddenly burst into flames, like it was spontaneous human combustion, though of course there wasn’t anyone who believed that was true. The police (only four officers managed to reach the scene before the deadline) opened fire on him, but the bullets melted away before they could reach him. One officer went into for a running tackle, and Firehook made his hook (a flaming whip, in one hand, with a large fiery hook on the end of it) and plucked the officer’s head from his shoulders. Another officer tried to run him down with his police car, but the engine stalled, understandably, when it was turned to slag. Firehook let the officer live because he wanted someone to narrate the footage he figured (it was true) was being recorded from inside the police car.

I was near Bethel, Alaska, tracking credible reports of a Bigfoot sighting, assigned to determine if it was another appearance of a
super
.

Paladin was meeting with a group of military officers in North Korea, the only man they would agree to meet.

Warp, who would have been our best hope for reaching the scene in time, was in a coma, having previously ingested cocaine snorted off the stomachs of fifty Taiwanese hookers, accomplishing the feat in 2.4 seconds. As an indicator of his mental state during those years, I could add that it was well off his best time.

Mistress Mary was in Saudi Arabia, snuffing out a terrorist cell.

None of the others were anywhere near enough to Illinois to be of any good. It wasn’t even close. Firehook’s deadline was only five minutes. Five minutes to choose one student who, in a busload of forty-three, would be the only survivor. The students themselves chose who would live. Nobody, of course, knows how it was done.

Thirty seconds before the deadline, Lennie Grakes stepped out of the bus. She was a ninth grader. Red-haired. Lanky. Three days earlier she had won a contest to stand in front of several congressmen and talk about the environment. She was said to be an excellent speaker. After the Firehook incident, she refused all interviews, absolutely too distraught to even think of talking. She, in fact, never spoke another word, slitting her wrists two days after the incident. She was found naked, with flames drawn all over her body in red marker. She’d been crying and didn’t leave a note. A note wasn’t needed, of course.

Once she stepped from that bus, the metal began to twist and droop, victim of Firehook’s will as he superheated the metal, only the metal, hardly any flames at all, just small ones flickering around a white-hot bus that collapsed inward on the students.

Firehook, getting back on his motorcycle, said, “There. A busload of kids. Just wanted to establish what kind of man I am.”

There was pursuit, for an hour or so, but none of them survived.

***

All in all, when the rats were dead, and when Firehook said, “Fuck this,” and leapt over the side of the seating area, jumping down into the arena with me, landing on a rat, getting goo on his shoes and turning the rat to ash in childish retaliation, I had no reason to go easy on him. The man who managed to put that asshole down would be a national hero. An international hero. A man who pulled out Firehook’s eyes and spat down into his brain would be doing the right thing.

“Ladies and gentlemen and whores,” he shouted to the crowd, holding his hands on high, addressing them, turning so that they could all see him, as if a man with burning hands and a flaming head wouldn’t draw their attention. There were answering titters from the crowd. A pair of panties came fluttering down. A following round of applause at that. Octagon’s voice came down to us, telling Firehook that his actions were unsanctioned. Firehook, with that, created a big flaming hand, with one big flaming middle finger. He picked up the fallen panties, inspected them for a second, then put them in his back pocket and raised his hands once more.

He said, “Ladies and gentlemen and… especially, the whores. You’re about to see a man die. You’re about to see Reaver meet the end of his years. Too late, I know, but better late than never.”

He stopped to look at me. I was using the time to look over the arena. The sandy floor. The walls. The force field above me. I was wishing I could see some of the faces, those above me, better, because I wanted to remember everyone, and discuss the day with them later.

“Ladies. Whores,” he said. “You know this shit excites you. So get ready for what happens afterwards. About half of you aren’t going to walk right after tonight.”

I’d seen what I needed of the sandy floor, the walls, the force field, and I’d definitely seen enough of Firehook, so I went into action.

About three times faster than he expected.

I’d backed myself up against one of the stone walls and I elbowed it suddenly, shaking the foundations of the entire arena. Cocktail glasses rained down from above, and a stone the size of my torso broke free of the wall. I nabbed that out of the air and heaved it at Firehook. He had the reflexes to get some flame on it, but couldn’t melt it away before it took him in the stomach, lifted him into the air, and sent him flying back towards the opposite wall. If he hadn’t hit the pile of rats, by chance, that would have been the end of him.