My eyes are green. Just a normal green. Not the healing kind. My hair is black. I sometimes consider dyeing it back to blonde, the way it was before the accident, but it would be vain, and faking a hair color in an attempt to pretend to be real… that was beyond even my own level of melancholy.
I tried to see how the years had changed me, but my thoughts grew philosophical so I turned them off. Snapped them shut. I thought about Adele instead.
Adele, if she would see me, would be nine years older than the last time we’d met. Her hair might be different. Her smile might have grown colder. It might have even grown brighter. I’m not sure how I’d feel about that last possibility. I mean, I’d be happy, of course. She’d be my age, thirty-one, but it seemed inconceivable that she would be as old.
She might have a husband.
She might have children.
She would definitely have a life.
I should have called.
***
Bigger tried to run, of course, but I grabbed the Glock from his hand and crushed it in my grip, catching two of his fingers at the same time. The metal wrapped around them and one of the bullets triggered, trying to shoot from a barrel that was now a condensed lump of metal. There was a small and dramatic explosion. The smell of cordite. Blood. They always seem natural together.
The skinny convict with the leg wound, the one who had been pumping gas, the one they’d called the Colonel, dragged the woman from her car and tossed her onto the pavement. He slammed the door shut and brought the car, a 2009 Prius, into life. Bigger had fallen to the ground and was screaming, with Hitler’s face tensing on the side of his neck. The bald man with the mustache was pounding on the passenger side of the car even as it was backing up, staring at me and begging for the Colonel to open the door. My first thought was to disable the car by driving a fist down through the engine, but I decided against that. It was the woman’s car. No sense in destroying her property. But… she wouldn’t mind a window, I was thinking.
I drove a fist through the driver’s window and pulled the Colonel from behind the wheel. He clutched to the wheel for safety, not unlike how the woman had done, but of course I’m a lot stronger than Bigger, and the Colonel’s shoulder joints were yanked free, and his grip fell away with his fingers still clawing for purchase. He came out through the window, scratching along the glass and screaming a woman’s name. It was Sarah. I tossed him away, with him sailing fifty-some feet over into the cornfield to slam into the side of a cow. The cow went sprawling over. I hadn’t meant to do that. I was happy when the cow got back to its feet and the bovines stared at me for a second, trying to digest some thoughts, but that’s not what cows are for, and so the whole group of them did their lumpy gallop away across the field, leaving the still form of the Colonel behind.
The car tried to keep going, but I reached inside and turned off the ignition. The last man was still trying to scramble into the passenger door, so I nudged the car a bit in his direction and the impact sent him stumbling. I jumped over the car and landed on his leg. It snapped.
“Reaver!” he screamed, looking up at me.
I didn’t say anything. Just kept looking at him.
“You’re Reaver!” he said. It took him a scream to get it out. He was terrified. And, with good reason. If he knew who I was, he knew what I could do. A broken leg was the least of his worries. I picked him up by that orange Athens Penitentiary jumpsuit and walked towards the convenience store, carrying him like luggage.
“Don’t… don’t hit me,” he pleaded.
“I have to piss really bad,” is all I told him. He could translate that however he wanted. I hadn’t decided if I was going to hit him or not, anyway. A lot depended on what I found inside.
What we found inside was a nineteen-year-old clerk named Gloria, which I could read from a nametag that was stained with her blood. She was down, behind the counter, and the store register had been smashed onto the floor. A safe had taken several bullets, but had remained impassive and resolute despite the barrage. I checked for a pulse on Gloria. It was there. I’d left the convict on the counter, sitting on the edge like a man fishing from a dock, after warning him he better not move.
“What happened to her?” I asked him, nodding towards Gloria. She was bleeding from her head.
“S-s-someone pistol-whipped her.”
“Someone?”
“M-me.”
I hit him. He eyes went wide. His skin, white. Vomit gurgled in his throat. He slumped to one side. I hadn’t hit him very hard, but he could feel what had happened.
“It’s… it’s true?” he asked. He was having trouble with the vomit.
“It’s true,” I told him. I knew what he meant. Ever since the accident, ever since the crash, ever since the chemicals that nobody understands, something happens when I punch someone. Something about cell degeneration, and bond separation. There isn’t anyone who understands
why
it happens, but there are those who do understand exactly
what
is happening, and they’ve told me, again and again, in reports, at conferences, in newspapers, websites, phone messages, billboards, and so on, and so on. Not everyone condemns me for it. Some people just want to talk about it. To understand it. To understand my feelings about what happens.
I tell them that that I don’t understand my own feelings. I tell them that sometimes it feels terrible. I tell them that sometimes it feels great.
They tell me that every time I punch someone, that person loses roughly a year of their life.
Cell degeneration.
If you were going to live to be a hundred, and I punch you, then you’re down to ninety-nine. If I get really mad at you (and I admit that I do have problems with my temper) then I might not stop punching with the first punch. Or the second. The third. And so on.
Ninety-nine years of life on the wall.
Punch one down.
Pass it around.
Ninety-eight years of life on the wall.
The man screamed when I punched him the second time. His scream seemed to wake Gloria from her beaten daze. Outside, the other woman was staggering across the parking lot. She’d walked through the stream of gas and was making footprints. I should have gone out to make her stop. I should have been helping Gloria. I should have been calling the police. But I wanted to punch the man with the mustache some more. I really wanted to do that.
“What’s happening?” Gloria said. It took her several stutters to get that much out. She was holding herself up on the counter, no more than a yard away from a man with two less years of life. Gloria’s hand was next to an empty display box for beef jerky. She moved that hand up, passed it through the space where the cash register had been, again and again, like a blind person searching for it. If she really had gone blind, I wasn’t finished punching.
“You were pistol-whipped,” I told Gloria. “I interrupted the robbery. You’ll be fine. Can you see?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m…”
“Oh god,” she said.
“Right,” I told her. “Call the police. Tell them the three men who escaped from Athens Penitentiary are here, that they’re under custody, that you need an ambulance. I suppose they do, too.”
“Okay,” she said. She was moving back from the counter. I noticed that she was closer to the bald man than she was to me, perceiving me to be the more dreadful threat, even over a man who had beat her with the butt end of a Glock.
I’m accustomed to reactions like that.
“Tell the police that Reaver is here,” I added, going out the door. I signaled the bald man to follow along with me. He did. He didn’t want to. But he did.
He had to shuffle-hop on his one good leg. It looked like it hurt.
***
Outside, the Aryan Brother, Bigger, was flicking a plastic lighter. He got the flame going and then stumbled towards the stream of gas, which was now drying in the sun. His plan encapsulated everything wrong about humanity: things had gone wrong for him, so now he wanted to screw it up for everyone. It made me sick.
He saw me coming. He was closer to the gas, by far, than I was. He smiled.
I was faster than him.
No surprise, there, of course. I’m not as fast as some others I know, but I’m maybe three times faster than a normal human, and Bigger barely bent over in preparation for touching the flame to the gas before I had him in my hands again. I snuffed out the flame and wrenched the lighter from his grasp, taking one of his fingers along with me in my haste. Clumsy me. I felt horrible about it.
I tucked the lighter into Bigger’s mouth and then punched him in the jaw. He staggered backward, spilling lighter fluid and pieces of plastic from his mouth, and a year older than he was before I struck.
I hit him again, thinking of what he’d been doing to the woman in the car, how his fists had been coming up and down, up and down. I have a very good memory. It might be one of my powers. It might just be that I have a good memory. Either way, I could play out his assault in my head, and I knew that after I’d pulled into the parking lot, after I had turned off my music, I had either seen or heard him hit the woman fourteen times.
Fourteen.
My fist hit him a third time.
He yelled, “Oh shit! No! Reaver! I’m just… NO! Don’t do it!”
I hit him a fourth time. Four years of his life were now gone. It was cruel. I hate being cruel. But I hate being forced into being cruel even more. I think that’s what feeds me, at times. Feeds me the wrong way, I mean. I get mad at myself for being cruel. And then I get even madder at people who make me that way. Paladin once told me I was strong enough that nobody could make me do anything; if I didn’t want to be cruel, I didn’t have to be. I wish that I could aspire to beliefs like that. I wish I could. I don’t even remember what I told him. Most probably something about there being a reason that I was called Reaver and he was called Paladin. That sort of thing, it doesn’t just happen.
I hit Bigger a fifth time. And a sixth.
It was, as I said, cruel. But at the same time I was pulling my punches. I could have killed the man with a single blow. I could have done that. But he had hit the woman fourteen times, and he needed to take fourteen blows.
I spaced them out. And I made him count them.
I suppose making him count them was cruel.
***
Afterwards, when the police had arrived, and I’d given three autographs (two police officers, and then a young woman, a paramedic, of the type obviously attracted to danger, and who had mentioned she was single, and free later, and had then whispered something in a voice too low to be heard) I thought briefly about shoplifting some of the caramel crab cakes from the store. Surely I’d earned them, right? But as usual I could hear my moral voice telling me how that wasn’t true. For the record, my moral voice always sounds like Paladin. Even now.
I should add that I didn’t honestly consider taking any caramel crab cakes, even though I’d been thinking of them for a hundred miles. It’s the curse of being the type of person I am, with the things that I can do, that I can’t joke about anything anymore without someone thinking I’m serious. A normal man, he can say, “
I’d like to murder my boss, and then toss that blonde secretary over my shoulder
,” and people always think he’s just blowing off steam. But, me? A statement like that would panic my boss, and the blonde would probably be worried, too. Probably.
Before the police arrived I’d cleaned up the spilled gas to the best of my ability. I didn’t have any special way to do it, just grabbed a hose and sprayed the area down. The blonde (her name was Doria Grables) helped me do it, turning on the water while I held the hose. She was astonished that I wasn’t doing it in some extraordinary way.
“Can’t you fly or something?” she asked. I told her that I couldn’t, but didn’t ask how she thought flying would help anyway. Once I was sure the gas station wasn’t an inch away from a fire or an explosion, I did what I could for the two women. The man who had been in the car, peeking up now and then, pulled away from the convenience store, slowly, as if his car itself was dazed, picking up more speed once he’d made it to the highway, and then more and more speed, barreling away. I thought about stopping him. He was a witness. At the same time, I could understand him not wanting to stay around. I didn’t want to, either. All I wanted was to take a piss. Anyway, I let him go.
Doria was nervous as I looked over her wounds. Most people are frightened of me touching them. It’s not my touch, though, that drains the years. Only my punch. I told Doria that it was a special power, that it only works when I’m specifically willing it to happen, that it needs to recharge first, so that I couldn’t do it right then anyway. It wasn’t exactly true. Okay, it’s completely false. It’s not something I do consciously. I don’t have to will it into existence. If I punch something, it decays. Whether I want it to or not. But, it only happens when I punch. A touch doesn’t cause the effect.
And it certainly doesn’t need to recharge. I can do it all day long. And I have, before.
Doria had a split lip, a couple broken teeth, a split on her cheeks, a lot of bruises. She was still in shock, so the pain wasn’t as bad as it was going to be. I took some bandages and a first aid kit from the Minute Marvels store, and a bottle of rum as well. I’m not sure why I didn’t consider it to be shoplifting, but I didn’t, and I still don’t. Gloria, the clerk, watched me take the alcohol, but she didn’t say anything. She was talking on her phone. Possibly to a boyfriend. Telling someone she was okay. It looked more accurate than it had ten minutes ago. She’d washed her face and scalp. There wasn’t much blood anymore. She was a brunette, with short hair and a few splattered freckles. A long sleek nose. The phone was tucked between her shoulder and her ear. It made her left breast rise up. I felt bad for looking. She nodded at the rum, letting me know it was okay.
I got both women drunk before their pain set in, and bandaged Doria as best as I could, first disinfecting the wound on her cheek. It made her hiss. She looked into my eyes the whole time, scared, but… I think… wanting me to know that she trusted me. Even so, she said the thing that I knew she would say.