Prepare to Die! (30 page)

Despite these interruptions, the interview went well.

What were some of my favorite memories of Greenway
? Searching for fossils with my friends. Standing together, one night, with Greg Barrows atop the Mighty Convenient convenience store, throwing rocks down into the parking lot until Tom (who was working that night) came out to investigate, and then Greg and I had tried to pee down onto my brother, which I admitted was gross, and juvenile, and all that, but I noted in my defense that Tom had, the night before, given my parents a complete list (gleaned from my computer’s history) of what I’d been masturbating to recently. There was a voice in my head telling me not to say such things (and that voice was Paladin’s, as it normally was) but I figured what the hell… I wouldn’t be alive much longer anyway. Might as well have some fun and tell the truth for a change.

Would I ever think of living in Greenway, again
? Of course I would think about it. There’s something about being home that makes a man think in terms of progress. You go away, and you move at your own pace. You develop. You whittle yourself away until you think you’ve created the person you want to be. And then, out there on your own, you grow comfortable. There’s something about coming home that makes a person take a good hard look at that comfort. Sometimes that jumpstarts another growing process. Sometimes it ditches everything.

Did I have any pets
? Kid Crater used to have an eagle that followed him around. Just for a couple weeks. Damndest thing. Sure there are pictures of it, somewhere. He named the eagle Tiny Dynamite. Hell of a name for an eagle. Myself, though… no. No pets.

Had I visited my house again
? Of course. Hadn’t gone in, though. Wouldn’t mind it. I’m sure there are a lot of memories, inside. (There had been no reports of a break-in, and I wasn’t about to spill any beans during a coffee shop interview.)

What did I think of Greenway’s changes
? Too soon to tell. I was just getting used to them. Lot of houses, though. There sure were a lot of houses.

Favorite sport
? Soccer. Or… women’s beach volleyball. Soccer for the beauty of the game. Women’s beach volleyball for the beauty of the players.

Okay then, speaking of beautiful women… was I single
?

As he asked this, Frank O’Neill leaned closer, his eyes narrowed. I could feel the camera zeroing in on my face.

It’s funny, with all the things that I do and that I’ve done, with having battled individuals who have leveled city blocks, with me having once single-handedly overthrown the dictator of a small nation, with me being a man who’s climbed into the core of a nuclear reactor in order to perform a mechanical operation and avert a complete meltdown, with my longtime battle against the Mexican drug war, with how I’ve used a barrage of punches to slide an array of superhumans incrementally closer to death, with me being the man who walked into a combined flamethrower and automatic weapon barrage, on live television, to rescue Senator Blykes when he was being held by the Sol Gone Anti-Advent Society, with me having been friends and partners with a man who was the clear and current front-runner for the
Jesus of the Modern Age
… with all of this and a hundred (maybe a thousand) other such peculiarities and incidents… reporters always seem to think the hardest-hitting question they can level at me is, “
Getting any lately
?”

I don’t think my answer would’ve been any different if Laura Layton hadn’t been sitting one table over. If her head hadn’t snapped up and her eyes hadn’t trained on me. If she hadn’t closed her laptop (so quickly that she nearly caught Apple’s fingers) in order to focus all of her attention on me. I don’t think, I honestly don’t, that my answer would have been any different if Adele’s sister hadn’t been there to catch my eyes with hers and silently demand that I tell the truth. I don’t think my answer would have been anything different than the one that went out over the airwaves to a waiting world, not two hours later.

“I’m in love, Frank,” I said. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
he winds, as we began our drive home, were strong. We were going first to the Super Eight Grocery Emporium, where Apple worked, a store with
eight… eight… EIGHT ways to save
, a message that was drilled into my head when I was a kid by means of a constant barrage of commercial ditties played during every prime time television show.

Apple parked in one of the first available parking spots, thankfully not one of those people who will spend fifteen minutes driving around in order to save themselves fifteen seconds of walking time. Laura mentioned that sometimes carrying groceries to the car can be annoying, because they get so heavy, but since
Reaver
was with them, they wouldn’t have to worry about that.

“How much can you lift, anyway?” she asked.

“In terms of groceries?”

“Yes. Of course. Olympic athletes are always lifting crates of watermelons and bags of rice. No, idiot… pounds. How many pounds can you lift?”

“I’ve never really measured it precisely.” This was a lie. SRD had made me measure
everything
precisely. One day, on my best day, I’d managed to lift the equivalent of a bit over thirty-two thousand pounds. That’s a lot of watermelon.

Apple reached over and felt my bicep, pretended to be thinking, and said, “According to my gypsy upbringing and incredible mental acumen, I’d estimate Steve can lift… oh… thirty-three thousand pounds.”

“Close,” I said. I tried to remember if the data had ever been published. Of course it had. There’s little about me that hasn’t been published.

“Are you really a gypsy?” Laura asked. “And… why’s it so cold? Let me check if I have a sweater.” She rooted around in a couple bags in the back seat of her car, paper bags full of clothes, shoes, toiletries, etc. I wondered why she had them in her car. After some thought, I came to the obvious answer.

“Sweater!” she said, pulling a blue cardigan from the bag. It had the design of an iconic sun embroidered on one side of the chest. It reminded me a little bit of Paladin’s design. My mind leaps there a little too often.

“You need something, too?” Laura asked Apple, who shivered a bit, frowned, glancing to the sky and then around the parking lot before saying, “It
is
cold, isn’t it?” The two of them fished through the bags, came up with another sweater, one that was a bit too big for Apple… though it only made her look adorable, in the manner of a petite woman in larger clothes.

“Probably nothing in here that’s going to fit you, Steve,” Laura said. “And, even then, unless you like embroidered kittens…?” She shrugged. She blinked. Dust had gotten into her eyes. The parking lot was dusty, and the wind was flinging the particles here and there, like a suburban sand storm.

I said, “I’m good. Regular temperatures don’t affect me.”

“Regular temperatures don’t affect me,” she repeated, in a mocking grade school voice. “Because I’m Steve Clarke and I have…” She stopped when my phone beeped at me. I took it from my pocket and peered at it. Laura tried to peer at it, too… but Apple stayed respectively distant. Of course, she could have been relying on Laura to relay the information.

It was a text message from Adele. It read, “I’m planning such a great surprise for you that you should definitely kiss me.”

Laura, reading it (damn… she read it fast) said, “Oh, sis. Dummy. It’s not a surprise when you tell people it’s a surprise. Where’s Mistress Mary when you need her? She’s still in town, right? She could order Steve to forget he ever read that message.”

Apple said, “Mistress Mary’s command powers don’t work on Steve.”

“Really?” Laura said.

“Really. Don’t you read your sister’s own writing? She wrote, like, four articles on it.”

“Not much of a reader. I mostly sit and paint. Or stand and paint. I have body paint. We could lay down and paint.”

I said, “If you two want me to leave…?”

“You have to carry the groceries,” Laura said.

“And buy them,” Apple added. “You’re still the only millionaire here. At least until Laura starts selling her paintings at Sotheby’s.”

“I’ll pencil that in for next Tuesday,” Laura answered, trying to tug a shopping cart from about thirty of them in a corral, all of them stuck into each other like a sexual conga line of metal-framed rabbits. I thought about telling the two girls about my shopping cart metaphor, but didn’t want to get them started.

We moved down the store aisles. Apple mentioned her substantial employee discount. It made buying foods easier. It’s hard to try new foods when the prices are as towering as Leviathan. I noticed, not for the first time, how many store advertisements used superhumans to sell the product. We were assured of Stellar tastes. A Siren’s call of savings. It wouldn’t take Mistress Mary to convince us that Super Eight is #1 in customer satisfaction. Other signs proclaimed similar messages.

There were other customers in the store who began following us around, trying to stay on the opposite ends of aisles, trying to pretend that they were looking at canned spaghetti, fresh bagels, jars of olives, anything besides what they were really looking at. Four people (a young couple, a plump housewife, and a young man with, “
I’m all for anarchy if that’s okay with you
,” written on his shirt) all had the guts to ask me for an autograph. Normally I would have turned them down. I didn’t. Nothing felt normal anymore. I signed a sketchbook (full of competent drawings of grizzled old faces) for the young couple, and I signed the young man’s shirt. The plump housewife (Eva, her name was Eva, mentioned four times) had me sign her arm, and then I posed for a picture with her, which Laura took, and afterwards Laura told me that Eva (Eva… Eva… Eva… Eva) would probably masturbate to it, at some point.

I said, “Not everything has to do with sex.” I was a little irritated, frankly. Eva had seemed nice enough, and had said that she appreciated what I do… the parts where I put my life on the line. Her father (she mentioned this twice) had been a police officer. She knew it was a burden on him, and she couldn’t see how it would be any different for me.

“Not… everything has to do with… sex?” Laura repeated, as if she were rolling the words around in her mouth, trying them out for sound, trying to understand what the words could possibly mean.

My phone beeped again.

I reached for it, but thought better of it. Laura’s eyes were a bit too curious.

“Mind kissing her?” I asked Apple, pointing to Laura.

Apple said, “Huh? Sure! Why? You want to
watch
us, or…? Oh. I get it. Pucker up, girlfriend.”

The two of them kissed (Apple took off Laura’s glasses, first, with a wink at me) and I took the opportunity of their distraction to look at my phone message. It was another text from Adele. Laura, even while locked to her girlfriend’s lips, swiveled her eyes towards me, but I’d been a couple steps ahead of her and there was no way she could read what it had said.

She asked about it.

A lot.

She asked about it when we were buying cake (apparently it was needed for a surprise party for an unnamed superhero they knew… though by that time I could guess).

She asked about it when we were buying stuffing. And bananas. And grapes. We bought red grapes and green grapes because none of us could decide which was best, and then we added in wine because it seemed like we should complete the theme.

Laura asked about the message again (earning her a pinch from Apple) when we were grabbing pasta and shrimp and the makings for a sauce that Apple swore would taste exactly eight times better than Siren’s kiss.

Laura asked about the text a few more times, but I kept quiet about the truth of it, dropping red herring hints that it had been from Octagon challenging me to a tennis match, or hints that it had been from Commander Bryant, saying that a 30-foot cockroach was on the loose, and dropping further false hints (or I guess, more accurately, false statements) that it had been from the head of the United Nations, appointing me as ambassador to an incoming alien fleet, and I even dropped hints that it had been from Mistress Mary, ordering me to tell Laura Layton to be quiet.

But what I didn’t say was the truth.

It had been from Adele.

And it had said, “
I’ve been thinking about my earlier text, and… Steve… seriously, I do think you should kiss me. I think you should do that
.”

It was… pleasant to see it, right down in real words, where I could read it, again and again. I kept taking my phone out. Looking at the words. There were still there, every time.

When we paid for the groceries, and went outside, the wind was howling.

Howling.

***

The first time I ever met Tempest (which is also the first time I fought her, because the number of times that we have met
exactly
matches the number of times that we have fought) was when Paladin and I, some time after leaving the Minnesota cabin, travelled to Ecuador in order to try to root her out of her growing cult, which was centered near Guayaquil, along the coast, drawing converts from the wealth of banana, cacao, and coffee plantations.

Paladin had been earlier negotiating with Tempest, trying to coax her into surrendering herself for the crimes she’d committed in the United States, but she was not only insane (even Paladin should have realized this) but had done an admirable job of inserting herself as a local goddess, Misevályue herself, reborn. Misevályue had been a mythological weather goddess, and the mother of all dancing and singing. Tempest could easily play the part of a weather goddess (it could even be debated, theologically, that she was one) and the members of her growing cult were taking care of all the
dancing and singing
aspects. There were a few sacrifices involved. Goats. Chickens. Foreigners.

When Paladin received SRD word that I’d been killed (as the initial reports said) by Stellar (and how she had dropped me from space) he’d left Tempest behind and flown to Virginia to find me, to pinpoint the spot where SRD tracking satellites had placed my descent. He’d been astonished to find me alive (I’d been no less astonished) and we’d forgotten all about the feud that had divided our partnership. I’d recovered in the Minnesota cabin, aimlessly hiking, watching wildlife, and swimming beneath the lake (I can’t breathe water, but I can hold my breath for… oh… an hour or so) in order to let the bemused indifference of the fish ease what was already becoming, even then, a somewhat melancholy heart.