She came back once during this time, hovering in downtown London and saying that she understood, now, that Earth has no leader, nor any laws that concerned her.
Hundreds of her fan sites were already up by that point.
***
And now Stellar had me in space.
I’d like to talk about the majesty of the view, about how all of humanity’s various incarnations seem meaningless when viewed from space, about how the boundless wealth of the open universe reduces a man to his humblest elements. I’d only like to talk about that. I can’t, though. Instead, I was fighting for breath, and knowing I was screwed, because I only had one ride home, and that was Stellar, and she was trying to kill me.
“You are Steve Clarke,” she told me.
“Yes,” I tried to say, but failed. Her voice worked in space. Mine didn’t. She plays by entirely different rules.
“Octagon has been my friend,” she said.
I was cold beyond imagining (weather rarely affects me) and scared out of my wits and trying to remember that it’s not proper to hit a woman. But if I had done so, at the moment when Stellar first grabbed me, if I had simply turned and struck her (three times faster than she might have expected) I might not have taken the ride up through the building, up through the clouds, and up past Earth’s universal fence line. The time for being a gentleman had passed, and the time had passed badly.
I punched her. I put everything I had into it, and the blow rocked her. It nearly put her away. She gave me a look that clearly expressed how she couldn’t believe she had been hurt, how someone had possessed the muscle to knock her around. Her look was the second clearest expression of disbelief in the universe. Mine was first. Mine was first because the power of my blow had separated Stellar and I, and that separation had sent me aimlessly spinning back towards Earth, which was itself spinning below me. We were both spinning. The only one flying straight was Stellar, who zoomed along with me at my side, looking me in the face (she was just out of reach, and there was nothing I could do about it) and then turning and flying away.
She said, “Have fun, Reaver.” Then she was gone.
I began to enter an argumentative atmosphere.
It didn’t want me around.
It was burning me. Licking me with flames. Then whipping me with flames. My speed was faster and faster. I tried to surf against the resistance, slow myself down, and I was screaming and then I blacked out and lost some time (and about forty thousand feet of altitude during my blackout) and then I could see a forest below (it turned out to be in Virginia, a long ways from my French point of departure) and it came closer and closer and closer and then I crashed through a few branches, broke a few tree trunks, shattered most of my limbs, traumatized a good number of squirrels and embedded myself almost four feet into the soil of the Shenandoah National Park.
There was blood dripping down onto me from the branches I’d crashed through.
There was blood spreading out from me. Seeping into the loam.
There was a good deal of forest silence. A hush.
There were air force jets overhead.
There was a dark and broken forest, suffused by a localized green glow.
In three hours time, there was Paladin, at my side.
The first time I’d seen him in months.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I
spent the night in Adele’s house, not really having anywhere else to go. My parents’ house had long since been turned into a museum of sorts, a tribute residence to so many of my exploits. It was largely unchanged since the days when I’d lived there, except for one section that had been rebuilt (destroyed by the
Nothing Really Anti-Matters
terrorist organization before Checkmate had arranged the security measures) and a plethora of plaques (citing my achievements) and threadbare carpeting that had endured the footsteps of over a thousand visitors a week.
I’d planned to stay in a hotel and watch some cheap horror movie or some such, but Adele talked me out of it by saying I could do that at her house, making me promise to stay down on the couch, and letting me know that Laura would probably still be walking around topless and, hell… that was something to see, wasn’t it? She gave me a look of whimsy, knowing that she’d trapped me because if I left after that it would have been an admission that Laura’s breasts weren’t beautiful, and that would have hurt her and besides I don’t like lying.
We watched monster movies. Creatures of the deep that had arisen, angered over man’s interference in the silent depths. Abominations thawed from eons-old glaciers. Technologically advanced monsters from outer space that demanded minerals, obedience, mates. Adele and I were on the couch. There was a large throw pillow between us. Laura, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of us, constantly adjusting her glasses, would occasionally pull the pillow from between us, and then either Adele or I would wrest it from her and return it in place, staring at the television screen the whole time. It was a wonderful night for thinking of monsters.
Laura (forced into wearing pajama tops) told Adele and I (as a wolf-creature was discarding a scream-laden carriage over the side of a mountain pass) that fear and lust were identical twins, and that if you wanted to make a good impression on a date, never go to a romantic movie. Always create an atmosphere of tension.
“Tingles and shivers,” she said. “Gets ’em every time.”
“Some people don’t need to
get ’em
every time,” Adele answered, reaching over her sister’s shoulders to button Laura’s pajamas, a job that well needed tending.
“Some people are monsters, then,” Laura said. “That kind of celibacy terrifies me.” Turning to me, she said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Steve, but I want to ask a question of Reaver.”
I said, “Okay. We’re more or less the same person, you know.”
“Of course. But, I’m the same person too. Doesn’t mean I can’t be a different person at the same time.”
Adele gaped in mock (well-practiced) astonishment at her sister and said, “We shouldn’t have had vodka and ice cream and popcorn. This was not a good idea.” She was holding out a vodka bottle (forbidden to drink any herself, and merely chaperoning it away from her sister and myself) that had a piece of popcorn perched at the top, threatening to tumble within.
Ignoring her sister, Laura asked me, “This
fear
thing, Reaver… what scares
you
?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Too personal?” Laura asked. “You can always tell me to shut up.”
Adele said, “Laura, shut up.”
“See?” her sister said. “Adele tells me to shut up all the time. Doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
“Kid Crater,” I said. “That’s what scares me.”
Both girls went silent. I knew that I’d been supposed to say things about idiosyncratic fears (such as ostriches, or clouds that look like clowns, or aggressively topless lesbian sisters) or the usual suspects (death, and those letters from the IRS) but I had leapt into the realm of the real, which isn’t something that most people see coming. The thing is, after Paladin had pulled me up from the Virginia forest, after he had held my broken form as he soared away into the clouds (giving me, then, shivering flashbacks, because my last trip through the clouds had been a round-trip excursion into space) and outraced fighter jets (piloted by sullen men whose favorite toy now looked to be outdated), he had sat with me for three weeks in a Minnesota cabin on one of that state’s famous ten thousand lakes, talking about our lives in the past (as Greg Barrows and Steve Clarke) and our current lives (as Paladin and Reaver) and we’d gone fishing and we’d gone bloodless hunting (merely touching a checklist of animals and birds on their rumps or tail feathers) and we’d discussed how to be heroes, how to best go about the task, and in the second week we’d met Kid Crater. I was the first to meet him. Paladin was holding a press conference at the time (he’d flown to Washington in order to allay any fears that he’d retired) and Kid Crater had discovered the Minnesota cabin and had walked in unannounced, finding me in the middle of the kitchen without any pants, checking on my healing process, me holding my balls to one side, inspecting them to see if there were any remaining hints of green. It had been embarrassing as all hell for both of us, but after he’d joined the team (it was never really a team) and after he became my unofficial sidekick (neither of us were fond of that word, but there it was) we would joke about me and my self-inspection, with him singing a version of that old Jerry Lee Lewis song, except changing it to “Goodness Gracious! Green Balls of Fire!”
“Green Balls of Fire?” Adele laughed. She was balancing popcorn on her nose.
“Because I glow green when I…”
“I got it. I got it,” she said.
“Were they… okay?” Laura asked. “Machine still works?”
“We’re getting sidetracked,” I said. “I meant to talk about the days before Kid Crater showed up. With me and Paladin and the monster movies. We watched a ton of them. Celluloid gems.”
It was true. A thousand classics. A thousand monsters. And, I don’t know how the game began, but Paladin and I began discussing the movies… about how we would personally deal with each of the monsters, with each giant clawed hand that was wrapped around a fully-stocked family sedan, each vampire that had mesmerized a semi-compliant fraulein, each alien robot and its cosmically destructive capabilities. Paladin’s first stage was always trying to understand where things had gone off track, if there had been some miscommunication, some wrong that could be righted, some bit of folly that could be readdressed. I went right the hell past that stage. Things like that were something that could be considered once the beast had bled out.
“These movies… they reminded you?” Adele asked. She was gesturing to the television. It was wall-mounted, sequestered among a group of paintings (Laura was quite possibly going to be a success as an artist, which clearly confused her) of monster movies with the principal characters reversed, so that a villager was terrifying groups of vampires, and a giant Tokyo businessman was breathing fire on a city populated by lizards. On the television screen right then was a slime creature advancing on an inattentive guard, sliding out from an air duct, which are always sources of terror and assault in the movies.
“They did remind me,” I told Adele. “Paladin always thought the monsters were just… misplaced. Considering the way Earth has treated us,” here I gestured to myself, and tried to go speedily on, realizing I’d somehow separated myself from Earth as a whole, “he felt that if people just accepted the monsters, they could fit into society.”
“What societal role would King Kong play?” Adele asked, protecting the vodka bottle from her sister.
“Center for the Knicks,” Laura said. “Or… some sort of athlete, anyway. Maybe a soccer goalie? Hard to score on King Kong.” She stopped, a wicked smile teleported into place and her eyes lit up, but before Laura could say anything, Adele, the love of my life, cut in with, “Laura… please don’t tell any jokes about scoring on King Kong. Steve is trying to be serious.”
“I’m not trying to be serious. I just am.”
“We could help with that,” Laura said. “I’m an artist and Adele is stupid, so neither one of us is serious. We could teach you of our ways.”
I said, “Did either of you know that Greg Barrows was Paladin?”
I suppose I should have had a segue. Some sort of transition. But the question popped into my head and I wanted to know.
The room went silent except for the purring of Wiggles, the cat, on the couch next to Adele, and the screaming of the television guard as the slime cascaded down from the air duct and burnt him to the bone.
***
The car was on fire. At some point, it had exploded, and had done so with a noise like the entire Earth had been shoved into my ear. Officer Horwitz had been torn almost in half and my hand was in his stomach. I could feel the warmth of it as I planted my hand, trying to gain my feet. When I understood where my hand was, understood what had happened, his stomach and intestines felt ten times warmer than the flames.
I had been thrown from the car by the collision with the tanker truck, was resting partially in the ditch, somewhat on the road. Greg was staggering around, going nowhere, covered in blood, missing an arm. Tom, of course, was already gone.
The tanker had split open, spilled its contents. About two thousand gallons. The ditch had flooded with an incredible array of foul-smelling liquids, many of them trying to mix, and most of them not willing to do it. They skimmed over each other, sank within each other, separated like boys and girls at the start of a dance. My legs were within the chemicals. And they
were
chemicals. Not just liquids. They’d been separated in the tanker truck, compartmentalized, but a fault line had run its course through the tanker, and the mingling had begun. There was embryonic fluid (from sperm whales, I’ve been told) and an array of stem cell solutions (chiefly human, but other species as well, including one batch from a resurrected Tasmanian tiger, and a full array of sea life) and the whole mess was radioactive, a tanker full of chemical hell that had been bound for Nevada disposal, having been born/concocted/bombarded in the solution tanks of SRD. They’d been trying to induce mice to regrow their tails/teeth/eyes/sperm count/youth/and maybe a hundred other things.
Back at the SRD base was the first of the Supers. They weren’t human. They were rats and mice and, poetically, butterflies. A lot of people don’t know that a butterfly’s wings are entirely made of protein. When they become damaged, the butterfly looks at its wing and it screams, “FUCK!” It might say it in some lyrical butterfly language… but that’s what it means. Because a butterfly can’t regrow its wings. It can’t even heal its wings in any manner whatsoever. Butterflies look fragile because they are fragile. But a mile away, hidden beneath the supposedly long-shuttered Wennes airport, was a small SRD laboratory environment (flowers, a petite pond, heightened oxygen, a shitload of sensors) full of super-butterflies, which sounds far more appetizing than the super-rats or the super-mice and of course the super-cockroaches, including one the size of a bus that I hope never gets loose, because I just know I’ll be the one that has to fight the disgusting thing.