Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story (23 page)

“God, that’s a horrible story.”

“Now you know why people don’t want to hear about these parts. They just want the punching and the kicking and maybe a bit about the fucking. No one wants to think of Eagle ’62 holding his dick and over-filling a coffee cup with his own piss because the elevator is fucking stuck.”

10

When the pool is down to its final inch of water, I move down the steps and into the pool, leading Colbie along gently. The entire structure is made of glass with large metal bars moving through them for support.

“Today, Kid,” Joey says, getting agitated.

“Yeah, yeah,” I tell him, looking around at the city and wondering if all the players are just waiting for him to open this door before appearing and getting violent. That’s the unfortunate truth about this life — it really doesn’t matter who you are or what kind of ideals you have, most situations are solved by someone punching someone else better than they get punched in return.

Superheroes aren’t heroes.

They’re boxers.

I look at Colbie, hoping for evidence of coming out of the funk she’s in, but her eyes still look dumbly ahead.

“Kid Rapscallion,” I say in a loud, clear voice, my back to Joey up on the edge, “is the single greatest hero in the history of the world.”

“That’s pushing it,” Joey mumbles as the two duplicates come back outside.

“That’s a key, dumb ass,” I say, pointing to the end of the infinity pool, which slides open, revealing a portal into the
Blood Zone
, which looks like crimson and anthracite clouds ablaze with cracks of white lightning.

No one is looking at the
Blood Zone
, however. We all have eyes only for the bricks of cocaine, wrapped in dull plastic.

11

As I reach into the
Blood Zone
to pull the pallet out (it’s resting on hover disks, making it an easy move), I shove Colbie inside and glance over my shoulder just in time to see Hell break loose.

12

Once inside the
Blood Zone
, Colbie starts screaming. She reaches out for me and pulls me inside. The doorway closes.

13

We stay in the
Blood Zone
for what feels like days, an actual metal door in front of us. Colbie holds herself to me tightly, refusing to let go. I hold her back, stroking her hair, and telling her everything is going to be alright, even though I have no idea if it will. We’re trapped in the
Blood Zone
until someone finds a way to get us out. My key won’t work because it’s been tuned to my voice, and so we wait in the rolling storm of black and red, in a place where time is meaningless and escape is doubtful.

We won’t age in here.

We won’t need to eat.

But we might go mad.

14

As the minutes or hours or days move past, Colbie’s grip on me loosens and she starts to be the girl I knew before Rapscallion’s trial.

“It was horrible,” she says, her hands moving away from me to hug herself. “There were hundreds of versions of me, and hundreds of versions of you.”

“Yeah, Joey said some alt version of me was responsible.”

“You? No, no it was Rapscallion, Jason,” she says. “Some evil version of Francis that was collecting every version of me and every version of you he could find. We were all trapped there in glass cages, stacked right on top of one another.”

I shake my head. “How did someone like Joey Vamps find you?”

“Joey Vamps?” Colbie asks, shaking her head. “No, it wasn’t him who found me. It was the Psychic Navigator. Him and Joey are working together.”

15

The door opens and Belle Flower is standing there, offering us her hand. We gladly take it and step back into our plane of existence.

Around us there is death. I can see Tribold’s body hanging into the pool, and Jumpsuit Elvis DG’s head looks like it’s exploded as she sits on the bottom of the stairs. Bubblegunner is wrapping a bandage around Vot’s sliced open left leg.

“What happened?” I ask.

“We won,” Belle says. “Zen and Livinia have been arrested, the cocaine has been teleported up to our ship, and Psychic Navigator helped us jimmy the
Blood Zone
lock.”

“He’s working with —”

“Don’t be stupid,” Belle says. “He was working with us to find and rescue Colbie, and he hired Joey to do the actual rescue because who cares if Joey Vamps gets killed by the Rapscallion of Universe 01477?”

“I bet you care,” I tell her. “You care about everyone.”

“What will you do now?” she asks, avoiding the question.

I take a deep breath and let out a slow sigh. “No idea, Belle.”

Her face softens slightly. “Well, if you’re interested, I might be able to help with that.”

16

The first floor of the Grand Vegas contains a large arbor … aboret … contains a large room of trees and flowers. Belle has led Colbie and myself down there and when we ask what this is for, she simply says, “The boss wants to see you.”

“I have a meeting with the boss Monday morning,” I tell her.

“She wants to meet now,” Belle tells me.

So we meet now.

17

At the back of the big plant room, there is a glass wall, which leads to a deeper area of trees beyond it. A security guard lets us through, and it’s warmer in here, with thicker trees. It feels more like a jungle than an arbor … abhor …

“Arboretum,” Colbie says.

When we pass through the trees, we open into a large Serengeti-like area that stretches for miles.

“This seems larger than the casino,” Colbie remarks, looking up at a sun.

“We’ve crossed a dimensional gateway back at the glass wall,” Belle says.

A new voice speaks from behind us.

“Hello, Jason,” a rich, female voice says.

“Fred?” I ask, turning around to see the Bengal tiger I had once been brought as a gift. “You’re a … girl?” She is older and much, much larger now and walks towards us through the grass with the power of a king. “Is it really you? You’re the boss of the Grand Vegas?”

“It is one of my interests,” she says. In response, a doorway opens in the air, revealing a passage back to the CEO’s office at the Grand. “I prefer being out here, however. It is my own private reserve, located on a world in the Beshini Galaxy. But enough of me,” she says. “Let’s talk about you. The both of you. Tell me, how do you plan on spending Francis Flake’s billions?”

18

“After you both disappeared,” Fred says, leading us through the opening in the air and into her office in the Grand Vegas, “you were legally declared dead, thanks to the Vigilante Act’s provision for missing super humans. Francis left the bulk of his money and possessions, including the mansion in San Francisco, to the both of you.”

“How do you know all this?” Colbie asks.

“Does that mean we’re still broke?” I ask.

Fred smiles. “Jason, your will — which you no doubt had made out when you were high — left all of your possessions to me, and I am only too happy now to give them back to you.”

19

“What will you do?” Belle asks as we stand on the roof.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “Colbie and I need to have a talk about what comes next.”

“You’ll stay with her?”

“She’s functioning, but she’s got a long way to go before she’s healthy, again.”

“Jason,” Belle says, giving me a small smile, “you did good. You didn’t do a whole lot,” she adds quickly, mischievously, “but you did good. Zen and Livinia are headed to jail and all that cocaine will go to a world that feeds on it. Plus, thanks to what you’ve told us, there are ORION-led investigations underway on Faunakyat.” She pauses. “I’m sorry about Jula.”

“Yeah,” I say, shaking my head. “Look, Belle, I’m sorry —”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Yes, I do,” I insist. “I was a jerk back then. I’m not much better now but I won’t waste this opportunity to do something good after squandering away the chance I had to do something back when I was wearing a costume.”

Belle is quiet for a moment. “I wish I could believe that,” she says in a low voice. “I will be rooting for you to succeed. This world … after 9/11, everyone got scared, I think, and I’m not convinced it’s in a much better place now, but there are still heroes out there, and new heroes trying to find their way. Just promise me,” she says, “you won’t try to be one of them.”

“Consider tonight my official retirement,” I tell her, and mostly mean it.

2015

1

“What’s Jason’s full name?” Mr. Monster asks Nancy as they stand in her kitchen.

“Jason Archibald Kitmore,” Nancy says. “Why?”

Her answer comes in the form of a doorway to the
Blood Zone
opening across the door of the refrigerator. Monster and Nancy look inside to see a stack of cash strewn about the bottom of a glass box.

Nancy reaches in to pull out a few stacks of thousand dollar bills. “This must be what he meant …” She looks to Mr. Monster. “The last phone call he made to me. The voicemail he left said he’d left something here. I guess this is it. Are you supposed to bring it back to him?”

Mr. Monster shakes his head. “He wants you and Ro’meo and Cory to have it,” he says, and exits the kitchen to stand guard outside of the house.

2

Six months later, Jason and Colbie stand together in front of Flack Mansion, and watch a black, government SUV pull into the long driveway. The vehicle comes to a stop and the rear door opens, allowing an athletic woman in a dark business suit to step out.

“Jason,” the woman says with a smile. “Colbie.”

“Captain Foggen,” Jason says, shaking her hand.

The blonde woman looks back to the SUV. “You can come out now, Lyra.”

Jason and Colbie watch a small, yellow and green skinned girl hop down from the back seat.

“Hello, Lyra,” Colbie says, taking a knee in front of the seven-year old. “My name is Miss Cross, but you can call me Colbie. I hear you have some pretty amazing abilities. Well, me and Mr. Kitmore here are gonna teach you how to use them. Welcome to Impster Academy.”

THANK YOU

To all the readers who have bought and/or read one of my novels for the first time, and to all the readers who have been here for the long haul, thanks again for making it this far.

Writing USED TO BE has been an amazing experience, right up there with THE HAUNTING OF KRAKEN MOOR, my Victorian horror novel written entirely as a journal, and “The Pretty Girl with the Ugly Name,” a short story I wrote for a
Psychopomp
collection, which will be included in an anthology released in the back end of 2015. Stay tuned to
spacebuggypress.com
for details.

I wrote this novel in under two months. As all writers know, sometimes stories fly from your brain to the screen and sometimes they take years to come together. USED TO BE was one of the quick ones. I love writing in present tense every now and then. It’s a good changeup from the normal straight-ahead narratives of GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC, ADVENTURES OF THE FIVE, and STUFFED ANIMALS FOR HIRE.

Michael Stipe once said that he hated silly love songs, but in admitting he hated it, took up the challenge of writing a good one. Or maybe he never said it. The important thing is that I think he said it and think it’s a good strategy. I’m tired of dark superhero stories, so naturally, I wrote a dark superhero story. I tried to do to those stories of strung out, over-sexed, violent, skeletons-in-the-closet superheroes what those stories had originally done to the shinier and happier costumed people of yesteryear. I tried to get behind the behavior, as it were, and give you another layer of the story. I tried not just to rely on shock (the “Take what Stan and Jack did and crap all over it” method of storytelling) but to use the shocking behavior as the foundation and then go to work on that.

When I realized I was writing about the ugly side of superheroes here, I did get the idea that I might like to write a “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” set of superhero stories, and this would certainly be the Ugly. A story on Belle Flower might be the Good and Mr. Monster, the Bad. Or I’ll choose new characters. Or I’ll never actually write those novels. The whims of being a contract-less writer has taught me I’m rubbish at long-term planning.

USED TO BE was written in one of the biggest creative rushes I’ve experienced. I don’t know what it says that this happened during a very down professional time, but I do know I am very proud of the novels I wrote during this six-month period. Expect to see SPOOKY LEMON, a mystery novel about a real woman who used to solve fake mysteries on a Saturday morning kids show with a talking parrot taking most of the credit, before the end of 2015. My second STUFFED ANIMALS FOR HIRE kids novel will be out in July, as will the fourth installment of my weird western series, GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC, entitled AMERICAN VALKYRIE.

Any feedback can be sent to
[email protected]
and, as always, if you enjoy a book, the best thing you can do for an author to help spread the word is leave a review at your bookseller of choice.

All the best,

Mark Bousquet

Winchendon, Massachusetts

June 5, 2015