Prepare to Die! (35 page)

Even though the rock was, of course, as hard as a rock, and even though the edge was sharp from the fresh break, it was still difficult to cut my nearly invulnerable skin. It took a good deal of my considerable strength to get the job done. Adele watched me with the sort of revulsion that a woman would give to a man strangling a dog.

But this was something that someone needed to see.

This was something that needed to be recorded.

This was a memorial.

This was something I’d never told anyone.

Not Paladin. Not Mistress Mary. Not even Siren.

My blood oozed out.

The wound trembled and began to glow with the bright green color.

The wound began to heal. To close.

Adele was trying to look away but I very much needed her to see what was happening. I couldn’t die without sharing the knowledge. Without giving the truth. It wouldn’t have been right. It would have been selfish.

I said, “Look at this.” I pointed to the green glow. Adele wasn’t looking, not much. She was trying to look, but was turning away. I suppose I would have done the same thing if she’d grabbed a knife and cut herself open. But I couldn’t let her aversion stand. She needed to look.

I yelled, “Look at this!” in a voice that was much louder than I’d meant it to be, but it was fueled by nearly a decade of bottling up the sentence.

Softer, I said, “Adele, please look.” She turned her head, and she looked at the green glow around the edges of my rapidly closing wound. She nodded, as if in affirmation that she was looking.

I said, “This green glow,” and that was as far as I got before the words stuck in me, a little. I needed to stop, to breathe. Mostly, I needed to look up and see that I was talking to Adele Layton. She made it all seem okay.

I said, “This green glow. This is Tom. This is my brother, Tom.”

***

The car was in flames. It had been twisted by impact with the tanker, crunched and shattered and compressed. I was frantically trying to push open the door, kicking at it with legs that were being washed by the chemicals pouring from the tanker truck, chemicals that were flowing in through the shattered windshield and cascading through the car, sizzling with exposure to heat and flame, and the door wouldn’t give and the door wouldn’t give and the door would
not
give because it has been caught in an accordion vise by the compression of the car. I was screaming for Tom. I guess that’s important.

I was screaming for Tom.

When the car exploded, Officer Horwitz (half dead already, with the steering column having previously punched into his chest during the collision) had been looking back to me, clinging to life, advising me on the door, not telling me anything useful, but instead saying not to roll down the window until the car had sank beneath the waves. He must have thought we had gone into the river. He must have thought we were sinking. Who knows what the hell he’d been thinking? The explosion tore him in half and he died. The explosion kicked us both clear from the car, popping it open like a sardine can and spilling the little fish onto the road.

I was dead.

Or, no… I was only dying. I was seconds from death, and not long seconds, either. They were short, impatient seconds. I was yelling Tom’s name.

Yes. That’s important.

My feelings, my thoughts, pieced together later, are that Tom, who had been in the front seat, had been the first to go under the wave of chemicals that came from the ruptured tanker truck. These chemicals began filling the car, quickly spilling out from the police car into the ditch, and during these moments Tom became the first of the children of the spill. He grew power. He grew tremendous power.

He was a healer.

Like Greg Barrows became.

Like people think I am.

But I’m not.

The green glow is Tom. My brother.

The chemicals dissolved him. They killed him. The chemicals took his mind, his life, took what he had been, and in his dying moments he heard me calling his name, and of course Tom, Tom, Tom…

… Tom was my brother.

And he came to me. Even then.

Because I was his kid brother. And Tom was a hero.

He saved me. Healed me. Even as he died.

I felt his life pour into me, into what was, then, my shattered and charred near-carcass, and I felt Tom bonding with me even as he died.

My wounds closed.

He’s been here, in me, ever since.

But his life vanished. It’s just… what’s left, the green glow, it’s not Tom, it’s only what Tom wanted in his final moments.

He wanted to protect his kid brother.

And he did.

I felt him go away.

I felt him, in a manner of speaking, stay.

The car’s explosion had cast me partially in the ditch, somewhat on the road. Greg Barrows was staggering around, going nowhere, covered in blood, missing an arm.

My brother was already gone.

***

When I finished with the story, Adele was barely breathing. There was a pause between each breath, a length of time long enough for her lungs to crawl up into her throat, kicking a bit, reminding her of an important job.

Her breaths had longs seconds in between. Then her breaths stretched for long seconds, themselves. She was looking at my arm, where I had cut myself. The wound was completely healed. The green glow was gone. Receded back within me.

Adele reached out and touched my arm where the wound had been. There was an amount of crusted blood. She flaked it away with her fingers. Some of it got beneath her fingernails. When she was done, there wasn’t anything but an unmarked arm.

She said, “Every time you fight… every time you get… hurt. Every time that happens. Every time you heal? That’s… Tom?”

“More or less.”

“You must feel so guilty.”

It felt like I’d been punched. All the tabloids. All the special reports. All the chatter going back and forth between news reporters. Every post in the comments sections of every blog. Everyone thinks they know me. Everyone thinks they have insight. Everyone thinks they can peer into my mind. But Adele was the only one to get it right.

So I started to cry. How the tabloids would have loved to snap a photo of that. Reaver, the man who had killed Tempest. The man who had killed Macabre. Crying. Like a baby.

Adele came around to my side of the picnic table. Sat beside me. Held me. There wasn’t another person in the world who could have held me right then. She talked to me about Tom, about memories of him, about the way he ran through every girl in Greenway, every girl of his age, every girl a bit older, a few girls who were much older. She mentioned, hurriedly, that he’d never made any move on her. She mentioned that he’d once punched out a couple Bolton boys (I’d never known this) who had said a few things about her ass, and what might fit in it.

Adele talked about how, one night, she and Laura had smoked some marijuana (she called it
crazy grass
) that Tom had given her in return for having helped tutor him on calculus the day before a test. The crazy grass had been good. It was the night when Laura had first brought home a girl to meet her parents, the last people in Greenway to know that she was a lesbian. The girl had gone home (Laura had fingered her in the upstairs hallway, with Adele reluctantly keeping watch on the stairs) and the two sisters had afterwards smoked the marijuana that Tom had given them, and Adele said that after a time she could see stars on the ceiling of her bedroom.

“They whispered,” she said.

I was still leaking tears. Still amazed that someone on Earth knew about Tom. About his final moments. It felt good to know that I’d given him, in some ways, an extension of his life. Or at least his memory.

Adele talked to me about that hallway finger-bang, about how Laura wanted to write the girl’s name (Sally, an old-fashioned name, though the girl in question was one of those
teenage emo-lesbians-of-the-moment
) on the rafter of the log cabin.

Adele pointed to the log cabin. I looked up at it. I could visualize the rafter. The whole thing really and truly should have been enshrined.

I asked, “Did she do it?”

“Not at first. She said that the log cabin was heterosexual. Something about
logs
equaling
penises
.”

“That’s… an interesting take.”

“I know, right? Anyway, Laura wanted to start another place. Another list. A listing of the secret pact of lesbians. But she couldn’t decide where, so in time she just wrote girls’ names on the rafter, like everybody else.”

I said, “Your name is on the rafter, in there.” I gestured to the log cabin. The statement had just kind of come out of me. I wanted to retract it immediately. I also wanted an answer.

“I wrote it there,” she said, looking at me like I was an idiot. I was, of course, but an idiot rarely knows
why
he’s an idiot, so I had to keep asking questions.

“You wrote it there?” My voice broke like I was twelve years old.

“For you. I mean, there was the one night when you, you know, you did that thing with your hand, umm, in my panties, and then you were in the hospital.”

“I remember. I mean, the panties thing. I remember the panties thing. I don’t remember being in the hospital. I remember waking up there. That’s all. There were guards. Mistress Mary. Flowers. Paladin, after a bit.”

“I brought in the flowers. I used to sit with you every day, and… this is probably the most embarrassing thing ever, but I was young and I was so horny. You could not believe how horny I was. So, I masturbated once.”

“Just once?”

“Just once at the hospital.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. And then afterwards I was thinking of how your hand had felt, thinking of that time, and I know boys like to look at sex as some kind of stupid triumph.”

“Yeah. We do that.”

Adele said, “So what I did was I took my dad’s pocket knife from his nightstand, and I snuck out here.” She gestured to the log cabin. “And I carved my name on the rafter. In tribute. For you.”

I thought about that. I thought about all the medals I’d received in the last decade. The commendations. The honorary titles. The actual titles. The Certificates of Saving the Whole Damn World. They all paled in comparison to Adele’s gesture. So, yes… we boys look at sex as some sort of stupid triumph.

I said, “Thank you.” I honest to god was almost crying again.

Adele said, “And… I guess… this leads me back into talking about your list.” Her tone was evasive. The mood was cold again. The talk of names carved into rafters, it seemed, was going to be a momentary ray of warmth. I nodded, trying to look serious, attentive, but all I could think of was the humor (the very… warm… humor) of the young Adele balanced on the rafter, carving her own name.

“Your list,” she said. “It talks about being with me again.”

“It does.” I noticed how the wind was playing at her hair. Moving strands of it. Why had I been, earlier, so focused on how the wind had been fluttering the edges of the wax paper? What a ridiculous focus. Adele’s hair was… it seemed like a wind that moved through Adele’s hair was far more likely to be intelligent than any wind that was batting away at something as mundane as wax paper.

Adele said, “You’ve been… I mean, I read things. I study reports. You’ve been with Mistress Mary. Stellar. A list of models. I mean a huge line of models. That girl that was in all those romantic comedies. Even with Siren.” I nodded at this, slowly, and with no other movement. It seemed very unwise to acknowledge what she was saying, just then, but far stupider to disavow what was known the world over. Still… still, beyond my nod, I kept almost motionless. And quiet. I didn’t even want the wind to notice me.

Adele, fingers working against each other, eyes focused on the picnic table, said, “This… coming back to me. It’s not… just some part of some other list, is it? The girl that got away? One last checkmark? Unfinished business? A way to…?”

“I’ve loved you since before our first date. Since before I was riding around on the top of that car, in my underwear. After the accident, I stayed away because I loved you and thought it was the right thing to do… didn’t want to put you in any danger. But I loved you then. I love you now.”

It was a fair amount of words that I spoke. I babbled some of them. Fumbled about. But I didn’t choke on any of the words. Not one.

Adele said, “I love you, too.”

We let it stand there, for a bit.

It was strong enough to stand on its own.

***

Adele had the last of the caramel crab cakes and the wax paper did indeed blow off the picnic table. She screamed, “I’ll get it!” and raced after it. I could have gotten it much easier, much faster, but watching Adele dashing around was beyond any pleasure I could have hoped for, and the wax paper dipped and swirled in the wind, extending my enjoyment. She chased after it, trying to chew her crab cake at the same time, laughing, spilling crumbs from her mouth. A young boy (five or six) left his mother’s side to help Adele, never merely reaching for the wax paper, instead trying to stomp on it with both feet, nearly causing several collisions with Adele, the two of them laughing at the elusive paper. The boy’s mother (they had a picnic spot of their own, and a
bored-of-course
cat on a leash, and a badminton set with no net) watched them for a few seconds, then changed her gaze (and her smile) onto me, still sitting at the picnic table.

Her smile vanished.

She recognized me.

I watched her mental process as she ticked off all the possible meanings/considerations/ramifications of having a picnic in the same park with Reaver. In time (an eternity, of course, as these things often are) she gave a slight nod to me, and then one to herself, in decision. The smile came back. She returned to watching her son (he had retrieved the paper and was handing it to Adele as if it were a holy relic) and did not pack up their belongings. She stayed in place.

A triumph, for me, there.

I watched Adele returning to my table. She swerved towards a trashcan at one point, obviously intent on throwing away the wax paper, but she changed her direction the moment she realized that she couldn’t throw away the paper without damaging the young boy’s heroics.