God Laughs When You Die Read online

  Prometheus shook his head. For just a moment he looked away, as if he didn't want to meet my eye. The tingle of fear I'd felt outside the post office returned. I wasn't sure I wanted to know whatever it was that could put a look like that on Prometheus's face.

  He's not telling me everything, I thought. How bad is this going to get?

  Then he reached into the leather satchel at his side, produced a thick envelope and laid it on the table.

  “Our youngest member received these two weeks ago, while he was pursuing his nemesis through Chicago. He had to summon his other self to help him deal with the emotional trauma."

  Prometheus pulled several photographs from the envelope.

  “Leonard and…the subject were very close. He hasn't returned to us since."

  I looked at the pictures, and I understood why little Lenny Arbogast had needed to summon the World's Strongest Samaritan. Each picture featured a man, at first it was hard to tell through the glaze of blood that covered him, one that I knew well enough from my own encounters with him. And although Gordon Shockley, AKA the Gentleman, would go down as one of the most evil men in history, he couldn't have deserved the things that Oberon had done to him.

  Shockley had been tortured. One set of photos featured the 'Midnight Sleuth' himself. In them, he had Shockley chained, with his back to a wall. Oberon stared directly into the lens, his piercing blue eyes glittering beneath the black cowl he wore to strike terror into the hearts of evil men. In another, Oberon’s right hand held Shockley by the chin, his left fist pressed against Shockley’s face in such a way that at first I didn't understand what I was seeing. There was so much blood, you see? But then I got it.

  "Oh my God…"

  Oberon had buried his forefinger up to the second knuckle in Shockley's eye socket. My gorge rose as I turned up the last and worst photo. It was the worst, not because of the depravity it contained, but because Oberon was smiling.

  He had murdered Shockley and dismembered his corpse. The Midnight Sleuth grinned like a kid in a candy store. He’d painted the walls with Shockley’s blood, hung his limbs from hooks, and used his entrails for bric-a-brac.

  A message was attached to the photo. Written in a tight, precise script, the message told me everything I needed to know about Lenny Arbogast's breakdown.

  “Dear Lenny,

  That's right, I know who you really are you little shit, so listen up. I've got the secret ID’s of every one of you meddlers in the Alliance of Justice. I know your strengths and your weaknesses better than you know them yourselves. You, for instance, can be dispatched by someone, say me for instance, sneaking in one night while you're sleeping and smashing your stupid, juvenile skull to fragments. All it takes is a well placed gag over your insipid little mouth to prevent you from crying out your ridiculous "magic word." Or maybe I'll just break your jaw and "Kazow!" No more Captain Wonder.

  "Tell them, Arbogast. Tell Prometheus and the others that I'm doing things my way from now on. Tell them I'll kill everyone they ever cared about if they get in my way.

  O

  I dropped the photos on the table. I tried to focus my breathing as I'd been taught to do by Mind Storm after my initial diagnosis. Oberon had captured the Gentleman, one of Captain Wonder's greatest foes and subjected him to the most inhuman torture imaginable. Then he'd sent the pictures to a ten year old boy with the power of twelve gods.

  "Each member of the Alliance received similar communications; delivered to our private residences," Prometheus said. "Each envelope contained images of one of our greatest foes, captured, tortured and murdered. I thought that, with your history having worked and fought with him in the past, I might coax you out of retirement for one last mission."

  I barely heard Prometheus. One of the world’s finest had gone to the "other side." No one, and I mean no one of Oberon's stature ever went over for long. Normally, in cases of mind control or some other unseen compulsion the big guns inevitably came back to their senses.

  But the photos would not permit me the luxury of believing Oberon might be saved. Captain Wonder himself had been unable to capture the Gentleman. Oberon's skills as a hunter were clearly as sharp as ever, but his mind, once considered the greatest deductive intelligence on Earth, was now incomparably evil.

  "You said he's done this to the others?" I whispered.

  "Yes. He sent Medusa an email containing a photo of the Furies,"

  He stopped. And for the second time that day, Prometheus did something that surprised me: He shuddered.

  "I don't like to remember that there is such darkness on your world," he whispered. "Will you help us?"

  I already knew my answer. I could no more have refused Prometheus than reverse the course of the disease that was slowly killing me.

  Two years earlier, my final battle with Ubermensch atop the reactor at the San Rafael Nuclear Plant outside Los Angeles resulted in a containment breach of the reactor's core. I used a special compound in my steel silk blasters to contain the radiation until an emergency team could arrive to shut the reactor down, but I'd been required to stay and hold the web-seals in place for nearly an hour. I'd saved the city. But I'd overtaxed my hyperhuman resistance to radiation once too often.

  My doctor, a discrete associate at Tech-Gen Laboratories gave me the dreary prognosis a year later. As of this writing I probably have a year before the radiation takes its final toll.

  The irony is that my hyperhuman metabolism repels all attempts to save my life. The sickness has mutated and integrated with my powers. You could stab me and I'd heal fast enough to chase you down and make you regret it, but the thing that's going to kill me is eating away at me from the inside.

  I'd intended to spend my retirement writing books and consulting on movies about my hyperhuman adventures. I had no desire to expend whatever courage I had left pursuing costumed lunatics bent on blowing up the world.

  "Why did you come to me?" I asked. "You know I'm retired. Why not the Mauler? Or the Raven? She's at least as powerful as I am."

  Prometheus looked at me for a long moment. When he finally spoke it was with great care.

  "The Raven is dead, Jack. She encountered Oberon outside Milwaukee after he’d murdered a trainload of federal prisoners."

  Horror sank its talons into the lining of my gut. The Raven was an old friend. And at one time, as I've written elsewhere in these memoirs, she was more than that. At one time, we were engaged.

  I excused myself, stood up and went to the bathroom. When I returned I ordered a drink. Prometheus noted this with another raised eyebrow but said nothing.

  "You should understand one thing before I commit to helping you," I said. "My powers aren’t what they once were. I may not be much help to the Alliance."

  Prometheus smiled.

  "I think you may be just what the Alliance needs," he said. "There's more than one kind of power, Jack."

  And just like that, I had it, the reason why a man who could fly at the speed of light might require the aid of a dying, mid-level human superhero: The Alliance was filled with beings who, like Prometheus, were the stuff of legends: a boy with godlike abilities; a woman who wielded the powers of a mythological demon, androids, magicians. All of them were damn near immortal, invulnerable or both.

  But I wasn’t.

  "How’s your health insurance plan?" I said.

  The old banter felt right somehow. Hell, it was the first joke I'd made in a long while. My new partner smiled again. And I realized that Prometheus understood what makes human beings tick better than anyone might have believed possible.

  I took the envelope and slid it into my own satchel. I could feel the old curiosity kicking in, and the familiar compulsion to right a great wrong. One of the world's most powerful heroes had become one of its most dangerous villains. It was up to the Alliance to put him down.

  It would be a good way to die.

  I thought about the ancient Viking berserkers, men who'd held contempt for the warrior who died the "stra
w death," wasting away in his bed, rendered irrelevant by old age or sickness, rather than dying on the field of battle.

  Yes. An excellent way to die.

  But then I remembered little Lenny Arbogast, hovering in the nowhere dimension he inhabited whenever he summoned his mighty alter ego. I thought about the suffering that Oberon had inflicted on an evil man, and the murder of a good woman with whom I'd danced across a thousand moonlit rooftops…

  And I thought it might also be an excellent way to live.

  THE DROP

  Cyrell Biggs was just about to pop Buster Plump upside the head when the Colored Mermaid stuck her head out of Lake Armstrong and gave him the finger.

  Cyrell dropped the lug wrench Moniqua Plump had given him to “beat the fat dog killer’s brains out” with.

  “Goddamn it!” Buster said. “Where’d he go?” “Boss, I just saw…” Cyrell said.

  “Stanky Methuselah,” Buster said. “Biggest

  catfish anyone in this lousy town ever seen smelled or heard of. I had him hooked.”

  Cyrell tapped Buster on the shoulder on account of he was looking in the wrong direction. The Mermaid was still there, bobbing about twenty feet from where they floated in the Sweet Minnie, Buster’s tired little dinghy.

  She held one elegant black arm out of the water and extended her middle finger.

  Why, she’s ugly as two-week-old bladder panties, Cyrell thought.

  He thumped Buster again. “Look!”

  “What, man?” Buster said.

  The Colored Mermaid dove. Cyrell saw that long black tail uncurl, its flukes glistening in the moonlight, before she sank out of sight.

  “I saw her,” he said. “She - It - daaahhhh.”

  Buster rolled his eyes - and his chins - and smacked Cyrell upside his head. The smack startled a nearby heron, who uttered a suggestive squawk and took off.

  “C - Colored Mermaid,” Cyrell gasped. “I saw the Colored Mermaid.”

  Still scowling, Buster glanced out over the water. The freckles on his nose twitched, then his eyes squeenched up even tighter.

  “Well now,” he said. “You might be right.”

  Cyrell ogled Buster like a neutered coonhound with a new set of nuts.

  “You believe me, Boss?”

  “Hell yes,” Buster said. “Seen her myself once.”

  He glared at the patch of black water from whence the mermaid had flipped them off. “She probably stole Ol’ Stanky right off my hook!”

  Something big splashed in the dark.

  “Anytime you’re ready, honey!” Buster hollered.

  “When’s the first time you seen her?” Cyrell said.

  Buster belched.

  “Back when I was fifteen. Me and my daddy was night fishin’ over the Drop.”

  Cyrell shuddered. Everyone in Pepper’s Flip, Louisiana Pop. 1643 knew about Lake Armstrong and the Drop.

  “My daddy told me it’s almost a mile deep, Cyrell said.

  “Your daddy was stupider than you are,” Buster said. “They got a network of bottomless caves down there. You swim down too deep and you’ll wake up in Hong Kong with lava shootin’ out your ass.”

  “Yeah?” Cyrell said.

  “Drop’s never been measured though,” Buster said. “Cuz nobody gives a raggedy goddamn.”

  “I heard the ghosts of lynched runaway slaves be walkin’ round down there,” Cyrell said, breathlessly. He knew he’d come out here to do something but he’d forgotten what it was. “When the moon is full and the mist gets heavy you can hear them screamin’.”

  Buster snorted. “Screamin’ for what?”

  Cyrell glanced around before answering. “Human flesh.”

  “Hmmmmph,” Buster grunted.

  “I heard the FBI even come out here lookin’ for UFO’s back in ‘77,” Cyrell said.

  “Awww bullshit,” Buster said. He produced one of his hand-rolled Dominican cigars and lit up. “Wasn’t no flyin’ saucer snatched my pap. Colored Mermaid done that. I seen it.”

  “She took Big Pooty?” Cyrell said. “But you told me he got drunk and run off with the Panther Girl from the African Soul Circus.”

  Buster plopped his butt down, plucked a fiftyounce bottle of Black Ram out of the cooler and cracked it open.

  “I lied.”

  The night heaved a warm sigh.

  “Snatched my daddy out this very boat,” Buster said. “Same way your Mama snatched the wig off Loquatia Jenkins’s head down at the Uppity Crab.”

  Cyrell winced as Buster brayed. Mama outdrank men three times her weight in that same establishment most Saturday nights. He dogpaddled through another blast of Buster’s ridicule; a sooty waft of cheap beer and cigar smoke hecatombed the hairs in his nostrils.

  “You know what I enjoy?” Buster said. “Drinkin’ beer, smokin’ cigars and stompin’ a mudhole in yo’ stupid ass.”

  Nearby, a geriatric skunk soiled its nest. Cyrell’s excitement faded into the crappy backdrop against which the rest of his miserable life was set.

  “No one except me is gonna believe you seen the Mermaid,” Buster said. “Nobody’d give a damn no how.”

  Cyrell nodded. In a town full of broke Blacks, poor Mexicans, indigent Indians and White Trash, Cyrell Biggs had the bottom of the totem pole all to himself.

  “Cousin,” Buster observed. “You ain’t just dumb. You got the double distinction of bein’ ignorant too.”

  “I ain’t bright,” Cyrell said.

  “Boy, you make Junebug Bicks look like a road scholar. And he been brain dead since they fished his ass outta this lake.”

  Cyrell nodded. Everybody knew the story of how Junebug got drunk one night and took a header off Ellington Pier; when they found Junebug lying face down on the shore a few hours later, he’d been bled half-dry from slashes on his chest and thighs and some other places that made Cyrell squeeze his knees together if he thought about it too much.

  “Cyrell,” Buster said. “You’re worse than dumb. You’re nigga dumb, and that’s ten times dumber than regular dumb.”

  Buster cracked Cyrell across the back of the head - THWAAK! - and Cyrell’s last piece of strawberry Bubble-rific bubble gum shot out of his mouth and hit the water with a loud plunk!

  “I’m talkin’ to you, man!”

  “Sorry, Boss,” Cyrell said.

  “I din’t become owner of Buster’s Barbecue Empire to be disrespected by an ungrateful asshole like you.”

  “Sorry, Boss.”

  “You ain’t sorry yet,” Buster said. “But you gonna be.”

  Cyrell blinked. “What?”

  “Take us out,” Buster said. “Catfish bite better over the Drop.”

  As he turned away, Buster’s penny loafer snagged the business end of Moniqua’s lug wrench.

  “What the hell is that doin’ here?”

  Cyrell grabbed the wrench, trying to ignore the flush of guilt burning up the back of his neck. Buster was glaring at him the way a night owl eyes a back-broke rat.

  Happily ever after, muchacho.

  The thought of Moniqua waiting set Cyrell’s heart a ‘flutter. You make sure he’s good and drunk, she’d told him. Then pop him and dump him.

  Cyrell steered the Sweet Minnie toward deep water. He coughed, trying to hide the secret little smile he got whenever he thought about the way he loved Moniqua. ‘Specially that little noise she makes when we’re mem-o-ratin Chin Chin, he thought.

  Moniqua’s dog Chin Chin was the reason Cyrell got lucky three nights a week behind the animal shelter out on Route 9.

  “Buster threw my baby into a cremation canister while he was sleeping,” Moniqua told Cyrell one day. “Fat son-of-a-bitch paid the Animal Control man a hundred bucks to take a long lunch while my Chin Chin burned.”

  Sometimes Moniqua wanted to “commemorate” the little Shih-Tzu on top of all seven cremation canisters. Sometimes Cyrell had to limp home after commemorating Chin Chin all night long.

  Oh yeah.

  M
oniqua didn’t seem to mind that the Lord Jesus Christ had given Cyrell the brain of a half dead Chinese jackass. Then again, Cyrell figured there was one hacked off Asian burro gunning for the man who got his cock & balls to boot.

  Ay, muchacho, Moniqua said, the night they christened Chin-Chin’s canister. That’s a lotta chorizo. The Lord had been good to Cyrell in that respect.

  Around that time, Shed Wilbon - the ex-con who fixed trucks down at Hy’s Auto Repair - came sniffing around. Pretty soon he and Moniqua started carrying on like they were sharing a dirty little joke without letting Cyrell in on the punchline.

  THWACK!

  “I said hand me another beer!” Buster said. “You’d best pull your head outta your ass, Cyrell Biggs.”

  Buster unleashed a gastric detonation that offended a family of gators lounging in the reeds. Caught unawares, the big bull performed an involuntary “death roll,” righted himself and sank quietly out of sight.

  Buster was glaring at Cyrell in that strange, hungry way again. Then he looked out over the water.

  “You don’t see her when she gets you,” he said. “Night she took Big Pooty, I only caught a flash of that black tail slidin’ around my daddy’s throat like a big wet cottonmouth. Then he was gone.”

  “Jeeesus,” Cyrell said. “Would’ a been neat to set a eyeball on her. Like that goat sucker they got down in…”

  Cyrell’s voice tapered off. Then he shot to his feet.

  “Hey, Boss! You think they might could put me on one of them TV shows about para-natural experiences?”

  Buster cussed and belched at the same time.

  “God-bhrraaapp your ignorant ahhrrauuggg, Cyrell. Some amphibulous whore snatches my lovin’ daddy and makes me an orphan. What the hell’s so ‘neat’ about that?”

  “I just…”

  “Boy,’bout the only thing more mentally inert than you might be a bag o’ hammers,” Buster said. “And that slut I married, of course.”

  “Don’t…” Cyrell rasped before he could stop himself. But Buster was rolling and he didn’t notice.

  “Between you and that no account egg sack it’s a wonder I ain’t treated myself to a tri-state killing spree.”

  Hit him, Cyrell thought. Shut that fat mouth once and for all.