Prepare to Die! (22 page)

“Chase,” she said. “Go to your room.”

“Awww, shit,” the child said. Neither of the parents even flinched at the language. They both just looked at me. Wondering.

When Chastity was gone, I began. I told them about the day of the crash, with me and Tom and Greg and Officer Horwitz, and what had happened just a short distance from the Wennes Airport. I explained to them just why all of our shoes had been left behind at the Selood Brother’s sheep farm. I told them how we had never really seen the tanker truck (Greg actually had, but I thought a small lie was for the best, here) before it struck us.

They listened to all of this. There was little that they hadn’t already known. Just bits and pieces of new information, new insights of the son they’d once had. The two of them appreciated, I could tell, these new tidbits… though at the same time they were also irritated that I was stirring up the memories that had been allowed to drift away in exchange for a dulling of the pain.

But… we were about to move into new territory. I was about to blindside them with a truck they couldn’t possibly see coming.

“Greg didn’t die in the accident,” I told them. Their eyes said they were curious. They wondered what I could mean. Of course he had died in the car accident. Anything else I was about to tell them (I could read all of this in their eyes and their postures) was no more than a matter of semantics.

“The body… the one at the funeral… it was a plant. Part of a cover-up.” With this, I was the only one in the room still breathing, and I wasn’t doing much of it myself.

“Greg was bathed in the same chemicals that made me into Reaver.” I tapped my chest, in case they didn’t know who I was speaking about. I held up my fist in case they didn’t know exactly
what
I speaking about. Greta was now breathing in hurried little gasps, like a goldfish in a shallow bowl. Felix was straightening up with one long breath, forgetting to exhale. Chastity was peering down from the stairwell, only her forehead, her eyes, and a flush of her curly red hair was visible. I should have stopped the story and made her go back upstairs, but the story was a juggernaut that had spent years building momentum, and there was nothing I could do.

“Your son was Paladin,” I told them.

***

It was Paladin who first took me to the SRD facilities. We were in the back of an armored car, and he encouraged me to test my strength by having me push my finger into the sides of the vehicle. I did this while two armed guards pretended that it was none of their business, and pretended that they weren’t driven nearly to nausea by the sight of something that every atom in their bodies insisted was wrong.

My finger sank into that reinforced steel. It wasn’t even very hard to do. I admit that I felt somewhat sickened by it, too, that first time. I also admit that my dick got a little bit hard.

“Fuck,” I told Paladin. He was grinning.

I dug my fingers into the side of the armored car and pulled out a bit of metal. It took some effort, but only some. The metal was like taffy. Resistant, but manageable. I rolled a bit of the metal around in my fingers until I had a rough sphere about an inch in diameter. I flicked it against the wall. It rebounded around the vehicle’s interior walls with sharp reports and then smacked me in the jaw. It was a lucky thing that I was the one to be hit. The two guards wouldn’t have seen any humor in being shot that way.

I turned back to the wall. Stuck my finger in it again. I couldn’t believe that it could be done. Couldn’t believe that Greg was a superhero. It all had to be a joke.

“You keep finger-banging that wall,” Paladin said, “and we’re going to have to turn this vehicle around and drive to the park. Let you write an armored car’s name on a certain rafter.”

After he said that (I think the tabloids would shriek if they knew how off-color some of Paladin’s jokes could be) the two guards announced we were almost at the SRD labs. I didn’t know what they meant. Paladin had to explain it to me.

He told me about the man-made tunnels and caverns beneath the Wennes Airport. He told me about how, during the Cold War, we (meaning… America) had been trying to develop super-powers. Mind reading. Invulnerability. Super Strength. Flight. Laser eyes. All of that stuff. Even weirder powers… such as what Mistress Mary could do… powers that meant everyone would obey any order she gave them. We were getting nowhere on the project when the Russian regime faltered, and the Berlin Wall fell, and everybody seemed to think it was possible that the world was just going to shake hands and call it good.

But… the project hadn’t stopped. It had veered into genetic research. Into stem cells. Into pushing the limits of aging past ninety years, a hundred years, two hundred years, five hundred years and more. Now that the world was at peace, everyone wanted to live forever, and they wanted to do it in bodies that were youthful and beautiful, with dicks that would stand up and breasts that wouldn’t hang down. And… in exploring these new avenues… SRD stumbled back onto their initial path.

The first of the success stories was Warp. Well, he was the first human. There was a rat in SRD that nobody could catch, because the damn thing was intangible. It’s still there, right on the front doorstep, a reminder to be careful during research. It’s not alive anymore. The fucker (if it wasn’t a rat, I’d call it “
the poor thing
”) starved to death, unable to eat any food, and had eventually dropped dead. It was still intangible, though. And it was immune to decay. It has been there (and is still there) in place. At first it had been covered by a table, but after a while it was uncovered and received a plaque that read, “
Think of Marty before making your next move
.” Apparently the rat had been named Marty. Nobody could remember giving it a name, but there it was on the plaque.

After Marty it was the insects. Most of them were born in the furnace room, a room that could be sealed off and brought to over two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, a precaution against crafting some super bug that would escape the lab and hit the streets, impregnating all the natives with its
super bug
penis, causing mankind to succumb to grasshoppers or ladybugs or chiggers.

And the SRD cockroaches. Those damn cockroaches, of course. The giant one didn’t have a name. Nobody wanted to name that damn thing. It was just referred to with swear words, or as
Subject Seven
or
that big damn cockroach
. Nobody could believe it was still alive. Something that big, it should be dead. It was keeping on with keeping on, though, and laughing at everyone who predicted, day after day, that it would die. Well… not laughing, but chittering. The noise was like… like… like the sound of getting kneed in the balls played backwards on a scratchy tape. Something like that, anyway.

The tanker truck accident, the one that had killed its driver, that had killed Officer Horwitz, that had done what it did to Tom, it had also bathed Greg Barrows and me in waste waters (mostly waste
chemicals
) from a variety of experiments. A mulligan’s stew of various radioactive waters and peculiar chemicals had doused us. We changed.

Now, SRD wanted to make us heroes. To have us stand fast against the darkest forces. To shine a light into the void.
Blah blah blah
.
Etc
.
Etc
.
Etc
.

It didn’t take much to convince me.

I was young. I was being told I was invulnerable. I was stronger than anyone (at that time) but Paladin. I was three times faster than almost anyone else around. I was told I could wear a costume. I was told there would be pussy involved.

I was going to be a hero.

***

You have to train to be a hero. A lot. That shit sucks.

Weeks went by.

I sparred with an assortment of volunteers. Martial artists. Body builders. Soldiers.

Tests were run. On me, during the sparring sessions. And on my volunteer opponents, afterwards.

The extent of my powers began to be clear. Including the thing with the punch.

I was no longer allowed to spar with volunteers.

I sparred with lions and learned the language of the apes and the creatures of the jungle, as created by Edgar Rice Burroughs for his
Tarzan
adventures. I wasn’t actually assigned to learn the language, but Jesus Christ… of course I did.

I was young and I was sparring with lions.

***

Felix Barrows asked me, “Why did they keep Paladin’s… why did they keep
my son’s
identity a secret, but
yours
was known from the start?”

“The SRD wanted to keep everything secret.
Everything
. But the accident itself was too hard to cover up, and it provided an easy reason for Greg to be missing.”

“But you…” Greta said. “Why not you?” I noticed she wasn’t offering me lemonade or biscuits any more. It could have been that she was too deep into the story, or it could have been that I was no longer a welcome guest. It was too bad. My throat was dry. It would have been easy to reach out and grab the pitcher of lemonade, pour me some. Easy for some people. But… me? Right then, I honestly admit I didn’t have the guts.

“My powers were dormant for a bit. They didn’t… uhh… manifest at first, the way Greg’s did. They still thought I was normal, so they put me in the hospital. I was supposed to wake up, to tell the story of the accident, cementing Greg’s cover, and then go on with my life. Instead, I stayed in that coma, and then I did start to test positive for powers, a couple weeks in. By then it was too late. They had to keep me there, but they sent in Mistress Mary to tell me to shut up when…”

“That’s not what I meant,” Greta said. She was using the voice of a woman who would not be offering me lemonade at any point in the near future. She was using the voice of a woman who was defending the memory of a son who had been dead for nine years… until this conversation had begun, when she discovered he’d only been dead for three.

She said, “I meant… why didn’t
you
tell us the truth before now?”

“Greg?” Felix Barrows said. He was sitting on the couch, in his favorite well-worn spot, but it was plain that he felt he was floating away… lost in the world. We both looked at him, Greta and I (perhaps the last team-up we would ever have) and he finally snapped back to attention. He wiped away sweat that wasn’t there… or maybe he was just trying to dig down deep to the well… deal with it at the source. He cleared his throat a few times. Obvious practice runs for something he was finding hard to say.

“The hell with
you
,” he finally said, to me. “Why didn’t
my own boy
tell me he was alive?”

***

In one of our very first adventures, Paladin and I were flying across Lake Tanganyika, searching for pirates. A local warlord had somehow acquired a small fleet of PT boats and was terrorizing fishing villages and shipping vessels, doing the sorts of things that these people do, the raping and the pillaging. Paladin and I were sanctioned to find the warlord and his PT boats and make an example of them.

“I wish I could tell my parents,” he said.

“You wish you could tell your parents that you’re in Africa, hunting down psychopaths that you’ve been asked to kill?”

“I wish that I could tell them I’m alive.”

“And I wish that I could tell my parents it was okay to go home.” It had become an ongoing debate between the two of us, a debate concerning which of us had the short end of the straw as regards to our parents. Greg couldn’t tell his parents that he was alive because then, sooner or later, everybody would know. And “
everybody
” includes people who would use his family against him. He was arguably the most powerful man in creation, but all of that went to hell if he refused to take action, if he excused himself from a confrontation because Laser Beast (just for instance) had his mother tied up in some room, tearing off her clothes piece by piece, warming up lasers that would emit from the fleshy bits beneath his spiked pieces of fashionable genital wear. I’m not just making up this example. It was told to the both of us as we sat in an SRD briefing room, and a public relations expert/assassin (apparently the jobs were connected?) explained what could happen if the public became aware of Paladin’s true identity. There were even charts, illustrated scenarios, photo manipulations of Laser Beast and Greta, Greg’s mother, with one of them having the time of his life, and the other having the last moment of her life. Greg nearly needed to be restrained when the “
this could happen
” photos were shown to him. It was lucky for the “expert” that Greg didn’t need to be restrained, because there was nobody around who could do it. Not even me.

My own parents, by that time, had been moved. I know where they are. Not even Siren or Mistress Mary could convince me to reveal their location. I don’t go there. I haven’t seen them in years. I send cards to certain people, who send those cards to certain other people, who do the same, the same, the same, until they reach their destination. I am told that the castle is very nice. I am told they live well. My mother is active in the community. After one more year of residency, Dad can run for political office… can finally be a mayor, like he’s always dreamed. Mom helps the staff with the gardens. My father had an affair with two of the maids (a horrible thing, of which I am somewhat horribly proud) and my mother forgave him, because what else could she do? Where else would she go?

Two years after Greg and I undertook our mission to Tanganyika, a group of would-be villains named Neo-Spartacus (they patterned themselves after imperial Roman soldiers, so their name wasn’t very historically accurate) publicly executed my high school football coach, Levi Graters. This was their way of calling me out. Of challenging me. It worked. Warp and I (this was before the trials, of course) sped to the site of the killing, and then we made sure the cameras were still rolling and we did a few things (you can’t spend your whole life being proud of the things you do) and afterwards nobody has ever bothered anybody from my days in Greenway again.