Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story (19 page)

17

Jason runs out of his last vial of Flack Farmaceutical’s Peak serum in October.

He does too much of Joey Vamps’ coke (hidden in the Blood Zone dimension) and almost dies. When he recovers, he breaks into Flack’s laboratory facility in Palo Alto and is arrested by local PD.

18

“This is the end of the line, Jason,” Ms. Stagger says, arms folded. After Kira’s story broke, Congress asked her to resign, and she was all too happy to do it. She is back in costume, back with the Revolutionaries, and stands before Jason in her black and gold costume. Striped Star, Eagle ’62, Psychic Navigator, Saint George, and Zafer stand around her, but she is the one delivering the news.

“Says the gods on high,” he spats back. He is seated inside a glass prison cube and the Revolutionaries stand around him in his igloo.

“You are being cut off,” Stagger continues. “You will not be given anymore of the Peak serum and the Big Brains have been ordered to stop their attempt to replicate the formula. You’re done being a hero.”

“Who are you to make this call?”

“Eat me, you little shit,” Ms. Stagger roars, pulling off her domino mask and throwing it at the glass wall of his cell.

“That’s Stars job, isn’t it?” Jason asks. “You firing her from the one thing she’s good at, too?”

Ms. Stagger hits the cell wall in front of Jason’s face so hard she shatters her hand.

19

Jason is still being kept in the Stockade inside the Fort when word reaches him that Melody Macomber’s body is found, in a ditch and drained of blood, two houses over from the home she shared with Jason Kitmore.

2015

1

“What does Domina want?” Jason asks. “I get that Joey wants his drugs back. Fine. I can give him the interdimensional coordinates.”

“You’re not giving a drug dealer his drugs back,” Mr. Monster says, flatly, and then realizes how far he’s come on the road from bad guy to good guy. “Jesus,” he mumbles, “listen to me …”

“Jason,” Nancy says, moving to put a hand on his arm, “you’re going to give them the drugs.”

“The hell he is!” Monster snaps. “Crap on my sac, I was the bad guy, remember? Why am I now the sensible one?”

Nancy looks up to the worn face of the old tough guy and doesn’t avert her eyes. She’s been working with Mr. Monster for years and knows when he can be pushed and when he needs to be pulled and when it don’t matter what you try to do because his feet have been anchored to the Earth’s core.

Lucky for her, this isn’t one of those latter times.

“You’re going to let us give Joey Vamps his drugs,” Nancy says, “because in exchange, Domina is going to give us the one thing you’d do anything to get.”

Jason’s body seizes. “No …”

“Yes,” Nancy says. “Joey Vamps and Domina Tricks have found Colbie Cross. After a decade of looking for her, you can finally save her. Wouldn’t it be nice to be an actual hero for once?”

Jason thinks it would, but he also thinks about the real reason he’s here, and just how unhappy the people who put him here are going to be if they don’t get those drugs.

Fucking space pirates and intergalactic cops …

2013

1

“Two houses down? That’s one depressing farking story, Kid.”

“Yeah, you’re bringing us down.”

“How about instead of the mopey stuff, you tell us about what it was like to assfuck the hottest princess in the goddamn universe? I shit you not, I would pay good money to see that, let alone do it.”

Jason Kitmore laughs as he looks around the kitchen of the small spaceship that has been his home for the past two months. It’s been a decade since he stopped being a superhero, though he can never really stop being Kid Rapscallion. He’s he’s back in a variation of that uniform (mostly red, with a wide vertical black stripe down the left side of his body and white highlights around that), a gift from Jula, the heralded “hottest princess in the goddamn universe” who was his wife for the better part of the last four years.

There’s the ship’s purple-skinned, Martian captain, Zenaforn Guez: middle-aged, given to wearing leather jackets stolen from Earthers, and stealing hearts wherever he goes. Zen sits opposite Jason at the white, round table, drinking fruit-flavored water.

Between them on Jason’s right is Lavinia, a red-skinned alien soldier from Jula’s home world of
Faunakyat
, who was imprisoned when it was discovered her grandmother was a Black Martian, hence the Shakespearean name. Wearing an outfit of leathers and furs from animals she’s killed, it was Lavinia that set Zen on the path he’s on. She was the lover of one of his battalion mates, and after their army abandoned them to enemy forces and that lover died, Zen and Lav found themselves exiles with no one else to turn to, and so they became pirates.

On Jason’s left is Tribold Pal, a massively tall and muscular old man of whom it was said that he would be dead, except that Death herself was afraid of him.

Two months ago, Jason was in a
Faunakyat
prison, awaiting death, when it was hit by Zen’s crew. Jason signed on with them, accepted instantly after he saved Lavinia’s life by shooting a
Faunakyat
guard before she could shoot Lav. That he’d once teamed up with Zen back in the day when he was Rapscallion’s sidekick didn't hurt, either.

“I was a wreck,” Jason admits. “Twenty-years old and at the end of the line as a superhero. I couldn’t get any drugs to make me strong and I couldn’t get any drugs to take me back down. Not that I stopped doing coke, mind you.”

“Well,” Zen laughs, “you’re a better crook now than you were then, and we appreciate you being on the
Temperance
.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Jason says, and four pirates clinked glasses of fruit water together and drank heartily.

2

The
Temperance
is a small, agile spaceship a few generations old, and Jason’s quarters are small but adequate. The room is done in green metal that has restorative capabilities. Flora-infused steel, is what Jason is told and while he doesn’t know exactly how that works, he doesn’t need to.

His bed is a hammock, tucked into an open section of the left-side of the room. A full two steps away is the right side of his quarters, where a musty, puke-yellow couch sits. He sleeps there some nights.

There is another reason why he was welcomed aboard Zen’s ship: he’s a recovering addict.

“No booze, no drugs on my ship,” Zen told him. “You get zero do-overs. Screw up once, and we’ll leave you on whatever planet we’re on.”

“And if we’re not on a planet?”

“We ain’t got an escape pod, but we do have an escape pod hatch.”

“Got it.”

3

There is just enough room in the center of his room for Jason to do push-ups, and so he does as many push-ups as he can, day after day. Any free moment, he’s getting a workout in. Tribold is an expert on the body, and has Jason on a very strict diet that leaves his body in “a happy place.” It works, in part, Jason thinks, because of his body and mind’s desire to find addictions; he’s just replaced the unhealthy addictions of cocaine and sex with the healthy addictions of diet and exercise.

There is a knock on his open door, and Jason looks up from the ground to see the large man dressed in a white lab coat looking down at him. “I’ve been going through your medicals,” Tribold says, tossing Jason a computer tablet once the human has moved from the prone position to his knees.

Jason looks at the chart on the tablet’s screen and sees a bunch of lines going up and down. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“It means you’re doing fine,” Tribold explains with a chuckle, “but your body is still detoxing from the abuse it took a decade ago. I can see where the Big Brains ran into trouble with you. The original Peak solution that Rapscallion injected you with to elevate your physical abilities functions as an accumulative depressant. Was Rapscallion taking this drug?”

“He was.”

“For how long?”

“For almost twenty years,” Jason explains, handing the tablet back. “He went the first few years just as a normal dude in tights, but as the ‘80s rolled on and the superhuman game turned darker, he began taking Peak, tweaking the formula over the years. Well, his scientists tweaked the formula, not him. He was just the money man and the guinea pig.”

“That could go a long way in explaining his depression,” Tribold says, scratching his gray beard. “Did he spend long periods of time on his own?”

Jason nods. “Yeah, he did, come right down to it,” he says, rising to his feet. “When I was first adopted, I don’t even think the guy knew my name for the first year I was living there. He was always down in his basement, working on secret projects.”

“What about after Sandra died?” Tribold asks, tucking the computer tablet under his arm.

“That’s when he first injected me with Peak,” Jason says. “Soon after, he started training me, but even then the sessions were … well, they weren’t on schedule, that’s for sure. He might want to work out at 6 in the morning one day and 6 at night, the next. When Sandra was alive, I was home-schooled by about 20 or 30 tutors, but Francis had no patience for that, so he sent me to public school.”

“Sounds like he was an obsessive-depressive,” Tribold says, frowning. “Must have been tough on both of you.”

Jason shrugs. “That was a long time ago.”

Tribold shakes his head. “With addicts, Kid, a long time ago is never a long time ago.”

4

“There is no love lost in the universe for the Loshow K,” Zen says as the crew of four gather around him in the cargo hold, suited up and ready for action. “After the Revolutionaries stopped them out by Mars back in 2001, the home world descended into chaos. The warrior class that had pushed for the invasion was thrown out of power, but neither the religious, labor, or financial classes have firmly seized power.”

“You’re saying the Lowshonga is ripe for the picking,” Lavinia smiles.

Zen smiles.

5

Jason wears his Kid Rapscallion uniform but the other three pirates on the
Temperance
call him either Jason or Kid.

“Rapscallion’s a pretty stupid name for a hero,” Livinia teased him upon hearing it, “and adding ‘Kid’ to the front of it doesn’t make it better.”

“Pssh,” Jason had laughed, “you try finding a codename on Earth that hasn’t been used or hasn’t been trademarked. If an actual cape didn’t grab it, those damn comic book companies did. I knew a guy who called himself ‘Cancha’ because even though it roughy translated into English as ‘corn nut,’ he thought it sounded cool.”

6

They hit a religious outpost on a small island on Lowshonga’s second biggest ocean. Jason is not religious, but feels slightly bad about hitting a church until Zen shows him evidence that this particular caste tortures the island’s indigenous population if they don’t convert.

Their haul does not include much in the way of currency, but it does include a collection of orange berries that Lavinia likes in her fruit water.

These are very weird pirates, Jason thinks, and wouldn’t change his time with them for anything.

7

The
Temperance
lands on Gratify, a planet, Jason learns, that looks as if it is built on the principles of Las Vegas.

“Anything you could ever want is here,” Zen says, clasping Jason on the back.

“I don’t get it,” the human says, shaking his head. “If we’re all addicts of something or other, why take us to a planet where we can indulge in whatever we want?”

“It’s a test,” the captain says. “It ensures everyone on board my ship has their addictions in control.”

“Harsh.”

“It’s also a release,” Livinia adds as the
Temperance’s
rear ramp descends. “Zen doesn’t allow alcohol on board the ship because I’m an alcoholic, but your addiction is with powder, so if you want to get loaded up on drink, now’s your chance to do it.”

Jason blinks. “Really?”

“We’re not choir boys, Kid,” Zen laughs.

“Erm, my addictions …” he says, turning to Tribold.

“Ha! Relax, Kid,” the large man laughs, slapping Jason on the back. “Wet your whistle all you want. Just keep your nose clean and you can get back on the ship. Zen doesn’t consider sex addiction to be an actual addiction. Probably because of all the holes he fills.”

8

There is the urge, of course, to indulge in his vices, but Jason knows every step he takes away from where he is now is a step closer to making a bad decision. He’s 31 now, a far cry from the kid he was back in Vegas, which seems several lifetimes ago now.

If there’s a name for the city they landed in, he doesn’t know it. The whole planet actually seems to operate like a giant city, so he wonders if they’ve even bothered to give them names. The wide streets are crowded with festive visitors and the skyscrapers are high; from the ground, it reminds Jason of Tokyo, or at least the dystopian Tokyo seen in sci-fi movies. It’s raining, but no one seems to care, and so he doesn’t care, either.

He glances down every alleyway he passes, keeping score in his head of how many sex acts he witnesses versus people vomiting up whatever they had overloaded their stomachs with. Down one alley, he sees a man slapping a woman around, and the old hero part of him kicks in (or is it just plain decency rising to the surface?) and he moves towards them to stop the assault.

“No,” a woman’s voice from above him says, and Jason looks up into the machine guns of six security guards. “You want to rape a robot, go get your own inside.” The guard tosses him a plastic card that reads:

“Taboo Fuxx: Do To a Robot What You Can’t Do To a Living Being.”

“Ten percent off with that card,” the guard says, making a show of turning on the laser pointer and sticking it in Jason’s eye. “Have a nice night. Move along.”

Jason gives one last look down the alley and wants to see more proof that what he’s witnessing is a man assaulting a robot, and wants to argue that even if it is, he’s known a good number of robots over the years who would not appreciate being sexually assaulted in an alleyway, but the victim starts yelling how much she likes it, how she needed to be raped, and he walks away, wanting to vomit.

Images of Duplication Girl come into his mind and he wonders again how responsible he is for her murder. He was an ass to her, of course, and he has long recognized this, but does pushing someone sexually make him culpable of what happened to the original DG? Aren’t people in relationships all over the world trying to get their lovers to do this or that? Where’s the line between acceptable and unacceptable?

It’s not like any of the duplicates every said no to him.

But that’s a rationalization of his treatment towards Deege and he knows it.

9

He wants to go back to the ship and sleep but one of Zen’s rules is that they all have to spend two full days on Gratify. “You must prove that you can resist temptation,” he had said, “not that you can simply avoid it.”

There are no clocks on Gratify that he can see, but there is an ebb and flow to the intensity of the crowds. The streets grow more crowded, the hedonism more intense. Jason starts to feel increasingly claustrophobic, and part of him thinks that if 20-year old Kid Rapscallion had come here, he might never have left.

An intersection ahead of him, there is a mountain of blue powder from which anyone can walk up and snort away. Jason feels his mouth run dry and his muscles tighten. He craves the rush cocaine brings him, even though he doesn’t know what this powder actually does.

It doesn’t really matter what it does, he realizes. He wants it. A woman stumbles over to the powder mountain that towers over her and takes a big scoop into her hand and sticks her nose in it, snorting loudly. When her head comes up, it’s covered in powder and the look on her face is so euphoric that Jason can feel his dick start to stir.

His tongue licks his lips repeatedly. The woman pulls off her shirt and opens her arms, begging, “Who wants to fuck me in this pile of pixie dust?”