Free Prepare to Die! by Paul Tobin

I could stall until the end, or if I should fake having to go to the bathroom. I wondered if I’d have to fake. I truly felt like I needed to piss.
    Tom leaned over to me and said, “Don’t be mad, but I’ve been listening in. Don’t tell her a damn thing.” He didn’t whisper. Didn’t try to make sure Adele couldn’t hear. She reached over and pushed him, slowly, away from me. I was glad that she was pushing him away, but not at all glad that Adele was touching a man who was getting a handjob.
    “Don’t listen to your brother,” Adele told me. “Be the smart one. Tell me what’s changed.”
    “You just look better in a dress,” I said. First thing that came to mind. Well, the first thing that had come to mind past my fears and my thoughts of flight.
    “That’s all?”
    “I guess you look better in everything.”
    “That’s as much as you can tell me?” I had a feeling she was decades older than me, or more honestly, decades smarter. She put her hand on my lap, only on my leg, but she had to have known how it scalded. It’s amazing how many things a woman knows.
    “You make the town seem bigger,” I said. “Or maybe smaller. It’s just… the whole town is you. I can’t… you move so… I think…”
    “Just kiss her,” Tom said, leaning over again. Judy was smiling up at me from his lap. She’d pretended to drop something on the floor. The handjob had progressed. Most of her head was covered with Tom’s coat, shielding her from view, but I could see her eyes. Adele shifted the coat so that Judy was entirely covered, then she pushed Tom away again, this time telling him not to come back, that his brother could handle himself.
    Then, to me, she said, “Is that, those things you were saying, is that some sort of poetry?”
    “Guess so. Didn’t really mean it that way. I don’t like poetry. It’s just… you make me think of different things.”
    She looked at me for a long time. I could hear the murmur of surrounding people. Tom saying Judy’s name, low. Her giving a soft answering grunt. I was vaguely aware of the actors on the screen (I really do not have any recollection of that movie) and the sound of the humming projector behind us. I was watching Adele move some of her brunette hair away from her eyes. I was seeing how her skin looked in the movie theater, with the lights down so low. I was watching her eyes sparkle, reflecting light. I was watching how her lips were slightly curled up, how her nose turned up at the end, how her shoulders were rising as she wrestled with some decisions, how her breasts were pointed up, her nipples evident in the cool of the theater, how it seemed like every part of her was pushing up, and up.
    “Tom was right,” she said after a bit. “Just… kiss her.”
     
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    I rolled into Greenway at almost five in the afternoon. It was the first time I’d been home in nearly nine years. The town had undergone an enormous amount of changes. It didn’t look like a small town anymore; it looked like a small town with growth cancer. There were quite a few new buildings. Hundreds of them, in fact. Greenway had gone from a thousand residents to sixty thousand, and all in a decade. The main reason, of course, was the SRD base. As much as I wanted to see Adele right away, I knew that the base would have to be my first stop. And, honestly, I was fearing seeing Adele, so it was a convenient detour, one that was completely within reason, one that had nothing to do (I told myself) with being a man who was three times faster than normal, who was hundreds of times stronger, who could heal from almost any wound, who could steal men’s lives, a year at a time, with a punch, a man who had put on a costume and stood against the worst villains that the world had ever known, the only supervillains the world had ever known, the murderers of, in some cases, tens of thousands, creatures that could fly, bend steel, transmute their bodies, fire lasers, control the