This one takes the cake, way out on the south side of Dublin, where things get rural.
Behind a shack that’s barely managing to stay upright, with a swayback porch and a roof that looks like a really old person’s mouth without dentures in, a man, a woman, and a little boy are frozen, doing laundry the old-fashioned way that Ro used to wash her Grand Mistress robes. She said it kept her humble. There wasn’t a humble bone in that porky old witch’s body, not even a nice hair anywhere.
The man’s hands are iced to an antique washboard and he has some weird kind of metal thing iced on his shoulders like part of a frame that holds your head still if you broke your neck. The child is frozen, banging a spoon against the bottom of a battered pot. I don’t let myself look at the kid long. It slays me when they die. He never even got to have a life. The woman got iced while she was lifting a shirt from a bucket of soapy water. I stand at the edge of the lawn, shivering, absorbing as many details as I can from a distance, getting ready to freeze-frame in. If this scene behaves anything like the others, it’s going to explode soon.
“How did you even hear of this one?” The pubs I understand, even the fitness center because it was in Dublin and Ryodan knows everything that goes on in the city. But these are farmers doing laundry out in the country.
“I hear everything.”
“Yeah, but how?”
“That was supposed to terminate your line of questioning.”
“Dude, news flash. ‘Supposed to’ never works with me.”
“Observations.”
“They knew it was coming, whatever it was.” Which makes me feel a whole lot better. I can stop worrying about dying with no warning. Although the boy was looking down at the pot he was holding, the grown-ups’ mouths were open, their faces contorted. “They saw it and screamed. But why didn’t they run? Why didn’t she drop the shirt she was washing? It doesn’t make sense. Does it freeze them mildly before it totally ices them? Could they have a small reaction but not be able to fully move? Did it sneak up on the other folks at the other scenes from behind?”
“I need answers, kid, not questions.”
I puff out a breath. It gets foggy but doesn’t ice. “It’s not as cold as the other scenes.”
“It’s older. It’s thawing.”
“How do you know that?”
“There’s a drop of condensation on the end of the man’s nose that’s about to fall.”
I squint. “I don’t see no stinking drop. You can’t see that far that clearly.” I have supereyes and I can’t see it.
“Jealous, kid.” He lets the last word rise that one-hundredth of a note that he does sometimes when he’s humoring me. There’s a smile in his voice. It pisses me off more.
“There is no fecking way you can see a drop of water from here!”
“There’s another sliding down between the woman’s breasts. Just above the mole on her left one.”
“Dude, you can’t outsee me by that much!”
“I can out-everything you.” He gives me a look that I usually see in the mirror.
Just like that I’m in a total snit. “Then I guess you don’t need me, and I’m wasting my time.” I turn around and stomp back to the Humvee. But before I make it five steps, he’s in my way, looming over me, arms crossed, looking at me weird. “Not in the mood, Ryodan. Get out of my way!”
“Being needed is toxic.”
“It’s good to be needed. Means you’re important.”
“It means there’s an imbalance of power. There was no shortage of life-suckers before the walls fell. You’re not responsible for the world just because you’re more capable.”
“ ’Course I am. That’s what more capable folks do.”
“You could ask me to teach you.”
“Huh?” This night is getting weird in a hurry. “Teach me like you’re teaching a class or something? What are you going to call it: ‘You Too Can Be a Sociopath 101’?”
“It would be more like a graduate-level class.”
I start to snicker. His sense of humor sneaks up on you. Then I remember who’s talking and bite it off.
“You want to be faster, stronger, smarter. Ask me to teach you.”
“I ain’t asking you for nothing. And you might be faster and stronger. For now. No way you’re smarter.”
“Your choice. But turn around because you’re not leaving. It’s night, and you know what that means.”
“Like, it’s dark?”
“You’re with me until dawn.”
“Why dawn? You a vamp or a zombie or something that can’t stand the light?”
He freeze-frames away, moves in on the scene. “I like sex for breakfast, kid. I eat early and often.”
There I am thinking normal thoughts about iced people and how much he bugs me, then he slams me in the eyeballs with sex for breakfast stuff, and just like that my hormones do that crazy thing they do sometimes, where they start slapping up pictures all over the inside of my head and each one is more embarrassing than the last. And I can’t close my internal eyes because they don’t really exist and hormones are more stubborn and unpredictable than even me.
I wish I’d never watched porn movies or seen Ryodan “eating breakfast” because then the pictures wouldn’t be so vivid and hard to get rid of.
But there he is, in graphic detail because I know exactly what he looks like naked, I saw him. I know how his body moves. He’s got a lot of muscle. Scars, too. I know that when he has sex he laughs like the world is a perfect place. And when he did that, my hands curled into fists because I thought about touching his face like maybe I could catch joy in my hands and hold it. I had all kinds of fecking strange and stupid thoughts standing there on level four. I could so kick the shit out of myself for watching. I don’t get hormones. I don’t understand why the horny little buggers would even notice an old dude like him.
“You coming?”
I shake myself mentally, pick up and shift sideways.
Nothing happens.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.
“Kid, why are you still standing there?” He’s freeze-framing around the frozen trio. “It could blow any second.”
I don’t move, thinking how much I hope it will, so he won’t figure out I’ve lost my superpowers again.
“I have to, uh, use the, uh—” I gesture to the woods behind me. “Need a little privacy. Be right back.”
Just like I hoped, while I’m in the shrubbery, pretending to pee, the laundry people blow.
The ride back to Dublin is a long and silent one.