Chapter 14
"Heh. They're right when they say prison changes a man…"
"There you go with your racist little jokes again, Snowflake. I've seen that movie, you little piece of garbage." John muttered it with the tired resignation of someone who'd long since made peace with the fact that things sometimes came out of my mouth before I'd processed them. "Honestly, if the food was worse here and I didn't have my favorite mattress, I'd rip these bars out and beat your white ass with them. And by the way, you've been here less than a year, so cool it with the grand philosophical statements."
"Wow, where'd you pick up vocabulary like that—"
"Damn you, you ginger little Hitler youth." John grabbed the bars and narrowed his eyes like he was trying to bore through me with his gaze, but I knew him well enough by now to understand the rules. Don't insult the man himself or his people, and he'd keep it verbal. Everything else was theater. "I read about it in a book!"
"Really." That actually surprised me. "I didn't know you could—"
"You know what, asshole? You should be grateful you're getting out today, otherwise I'd shove your mentally deficient little friend straight up your backside!"
"Always my backside with you." A stream of water crossed the distance between our cells instantly, but as always, John simply tilted his head at the last moment, the toothpick not even shifting in his mouth.
"Dream on — you're not my type. I heard redheads don't have souls, so genuine love was never really on the table anyway." Without warning he spat the toothpick at me with enough force that if I hadn't been paying attention, I'd have caught a sliver of wood in the cheek. "Tch. You've gotten faster."
"No choice."
"Unlike your friend over there." He nodded past my shoulder and rested his head in his palm. "Looks like he's getting worse by the hour. Somebody needs to get him some crack or something, urgently."
"What?"
I glanced back. Sonar was staring at a Twinkie pinned to the wall by a toothpick, with the wounded expression of a child whose ice cream has just fallen off the cone. The toothpick had caught the snack mid-air and driven it into the wall. Not knowing how exactly to respond to this development, my cellmate stared at the accidental artwork for several seconds, then made a few half-hearted attempts to extract the toothpick, carefully scraping the cream that was running down with his fingers.
"God, Sonar — just leave it." My plea went unheard. The werebat, exhausted by his efforts, simply tore the whole thing off the wall — snack and wooden projectile together — and put it in his mouth. "I don't know whether to be glad you're opening up around me or sad that the cocaine and withdrawal are finally finishing off what brain cells you had left."
The question went unanswered, or rather was answered by John's vague shrug. Sonar chewed his Twinkie thoughtfully, the toothpick crunching pleasantly between his teeth.
That was how our last hours in this particular establishment passed. Correct — in a very short time I would once again be a free and law-abiding citizen, with all the doors of opportunity open before me. All the doors to janitor positions, garbage collection work, and other cheap, grinding labor that would efficiently push me straight back toward a life of crime. America, land of the free.
Jokes aside though — I could barely wait. The SDS workers were coming for us after lunch, so we were doing nothing, thinking about nothing, counting the remaining seconds.
At least I was entertaining myself with conversation. Victor, on the other hand — as John had observed — was getting genuinely worse, and the man needed fresh air and a change of scenery before he lost the remaining thread connecting him to human behavior.
"So things are bad there…"
"Sorry — I still don't fully understand who this girl is to you." I surfaced from my thoughts to find John, for the first time in my memory, actually talking about his personal life with some degree of openness. "You keep referring to her by first name only. Is she your daughter? Girlfriend?"
"Hm. More like a niece. Or a little sister. We're not related by blood." He clarified this, then returned to the topic I'd almost entirely missed. "Anyway, her parents don't approve of her dating a white guy—"
"That's funny," I said, before I'd thought it through. "Didn't know it worked the other direction—"
"Hydrant, you little — I knew you were some kind of Aryan mouthbreather!" John's hand came out of his pocket with a fistful of sunflower seeds and he started pelting me with them, to the delighted laughter of half the block. "I swear to God, when I get out of here I'm going to tan your pale little backside—"
"What in the hell is going on here?!" The sergeant arrived and dispersed the chaos with professional efficiency. The mustachioed watch commander put everyone back in their corners, threatening what amounted to actual punishment — reduced food rations, and water shut off to the toilets. That last one produced genuine outrage from me, as well as from the neighbors.
"You can't do that, boss! This is a human rights violation! You can't be this cruel!"
Bastards. Nothing more to say about it.
---
"Well, congratulations, Aqua-Squirts — you're a free man." The guard at the exit handed over my belongings, double-checked the name on the paperwork, and visibly winced as he said it out loud. "No offense, buddy. That's just what it says here…"
The door was already closing behind me when I heard him explaining to his colleague:
"Go on, laugh it up — but imagine if he demonstrates his name right here. Who's cleaning that up?"
"Can everyone please leave my backside out of their conversations for five consecutive minutes…"
"It's practically become public property at this point." Sonar spoke for the first time all day. The disheveled werebat was coming back to life visibly, looking slightly better with every passing second — though he was nowhere near his best, and I suspected the path back would run through some grimy bar where half the patrons would be delighted to put a shiv in my kidney. "Did you know you've become part of prison legend? They tell new inmates about you."
"Oh, God. Not only does that sound like everyone's been there, it's also—" I put my hand over my face. The stutter was back just from the embarrassment. "Forget it."
I kept my gaze forward and walked quickly across the parking lot.
"Relax." Sonar straightened the red tie at his throat, smoothed the sleeves and shoulders of a fitted blue suit, and turned to me with the most serious expression he was capable of — which was, of course, his normal expression, the blank-eyed stare that frightened strangers. Honestly, even his monstrous head bothered me less than the unblinking no-pupil gaze at this point, and I'd gotten used to that. "How do I look?"
"Magnificent. Like an enormous bat in withdrawal who just got out of prison."
"Really?" His face moved very slightly — a surprised sound from somewhere in his mouth, lips only. "Thank you. That means everything will go just fine. Listen—"
He stopped and stared at me for almost a full minute before speaking. These were the moments — especially when he did it from the ceiling or lying on the bed — when I genuinely wondered if he'd died. He smelled appropriate for it too.
"Today I intend to snort, smoke, and pour into myself everything I can get my hands on, while using a variety of surfaces as a table — starting from the milky plains and ending at the hanging mountains—"
"Disgusting."
"You say that," he said, shrugging off my commentary, and beckoned me toward an old but immaculately polished Chevrolet parked nearby. "All of them are wonderful. Come and meet my baby."
"Looks like it just came out of a showroom." I didn't know much about cars, but it was hard to miss that someone had been caring for this one with extraordinary dedication. Why a creature that could fly needed a car remained a philosophical question for another day.
"They washed it before we came out." Sonar settled into the driver's seat and stroked the wheel for a moment while I loaded my things into the back. "I paid the guards."
"You couldn't have paid them to properly disinfect our cell?!"
"What was wrong with the cell? You made a mess every morning, but the smell cleared quickly enough—"
"*Me?!* *I* made the mess?!" We pulled smoothly out of the lot. Despite the emotional content of the conversation, both of us were sitting completely relaxed, which probably looked surreal from outside, but we'd had so many conversations like this— "Are you telling me *I* was the one coughing up rodent fur? Dropping from the ceiling? Screaming like a Nazgûl?"
Sonar gave a quiet, ambiguous sound that suggested he was completely comfortable with his position on this, which told me more clearly than anything that he was genuinely recovering. He eased us onto the highway heading toward the city. Old familiar Los Angeles lay in the distance.
Horns, engine noise, a police siren somewhere, music — ah, home.
Fine, this was all a lot of bravado to keep the nerves down and fight the moisture that kept trying to appear, because in three days I was supposed to begin the Phoenix Program practicum. To be specific — I'd be joining Team Z, composed entirely of former villains and criminals who'd been given a chance at rehabilitation.
Grandma and Amanda tomorrow. Tonight, at my cellmate's personal request, was a boys-only outing. No family, no women connected to us — just a sausage parade to the nearest strip-club-adjacent bar or equivalent establishment, where Victor could taste freedom at last. Although my working prediction was that I'd end up holding his ears — or wings — while a heavily narcoticized bat vomited in the filthy bathroom of a cheap dive.
Probably worth stopping at a pharmacy for a liter of hand sanitizer or antiseptic. The energy coming off Sonar strongly suggested I'd want to be able to bathe in the stuff afterward.
"We're here." His cheerful announcement was directed at a thoroughly mediocre, cheap dive establishment that belonged on the set of a stereotypical drug-and-crime movie.
"I have a feeling I'm going to regret this."
"Less talking, more action." He gave the bouncer a collegial nod and walked straight in, mentioning that I was with him — and we stepped into an environment that was difficult to do justice to in words alone.
"My shoes are sticking to the floor."
"You could always clean it all with your water." A few seconds of the unblinking stare, a shape that vaguely resembled a laugh, and a hand on my shoulder. "Come on. Time to unwind before the superhero career starts. Oh, and tomorrow we need to pick up a friend of mine — she gets out too."
---
"Come on, Herman! Shake it!"
Images flickering past. Bright colors bleeding into each other, neon signs swapping places, each one leaving my head slightly louder and less organized than before.
Reality and something else had stopped being distinguishable a while back. Each moment felt like eternity, and then stretched into a week.
The aftertaste of alcohol was lodged somewhere in my throat, making it difficult to breathe properly. Sharp tobacco smell, cheap perfume, sweat, vomit, and terrible food — fried in oil that had last been changed during a previous presidential administration — competing with the smell of whatever narcotics had permeated my friend and former cellmate.
"The corner booth. That's what I missed most about that apartment."
"Sonar — it wasn't an apartment, we were in prison."
The words came out of my mouth into a microphone, slurred but apparently coherent enough, because the room erupted in laughter.
Music pounding against the ears. Aggressive, loud, rhythmic — nothing beautiful, nothing interesting, just the most functional beat available to keep drunk people attempting to move and occasionally falling over, to everyone's apparent amusement.
It had started reasonably — no it hadn't. I'm sorry, Grandma, your dumpling is apologizing, but from the very first moment everything had gone sideways, and while I knew that after your own youth among the hippies you'd be the last person to judge your hopeless grandson, I was still embarrassed about it.
Practically from the entrance, while we were still making our way to a table, Victor had downed several tablets that loosened his tongue considerably, and the following two hours I spent steadily drinking, trying to anchor myself in the Garvard stories I'd already heard many times.
But at some point things shifted, and the alcohol started taking hold — probably with some assistance from my control over my own power, since I was on day nine of not leaking, which sounded like a tampon commercial and I didn't care.
The moment the first burning shot got through the resistance of a superhuman body, the world transformed.
There I was, standing in a bar full of villains, singing karaoke, attempting to dance, while a fully-transformed Sonar tried to convince a drunk regular to provide a specific kind of attention in his current form. The enormous bat was patiently explaining to the poor woman that she was absolutely capable of it, and the attempt might even have succeeded if the transformation didn't apparently come with the loss of his clothing.
"And the n-next song—" I pulled my attention from my friend and tried to order something else, but a bearded, rumpled bartender grabbed me by the collar and dragged me away, while shouting came from every direction.
A police siren cut through the noise, and a voice that carried across the whole room:
"Supers! Get out!"
My eyes rolled back and opened again to find me horizontal, staring at the ceiling — or trying to, past the woman dancing in a cage above me. Victor's laughter came from somewhere nearby.
I managed to turn my head enough to catch him at the exact moment he vacuumed an enormous white line through his porcine nose. Female laughter from multiple directions. Someone stroking my hair. My hand being placed on something soft, accompanied by the words:
"I heard that with one touch you can make girls wet?"
My eyes found Victor, who was doing something with my phone — showing it to a series of semi-clothed women in turn, then returning it to my pocket.
Heart hammering. Consciousness giving up. Out again.
Coming back to find myself in the front seat of Sonar's car, half my body hanging out the window. Streetlights strobing past. Music still drilling through my skull and chest, other cars swerving around us and leaning on their horns.
Victor was shouting something after them. From the back seat a large man with an extravagant thirties-style mustache was cheering him on. The man was dressed in a black-and-yellow superhero costume with a small smiley-face badge pinned to the chest.
"Look, your princess is awake!" He spotted my glazed expression and crowed with delight, then forced an almost-full bottle of whiskey toward my mouth. I felt the seat beneath me grow damp. The bottle slipped, fell directly onto the delighted man, which only made him laugh harder. "Holy — I think he pissed himself!"
"No, man." I flopped back against the seat, trying to find coherence somewhere and focus on what was happening inside the car rather than what was happening outside it. "That's his superpower. He, like… ugh… processes the alcohol."
"I've got that power too! HA!" The car filled instantly with the smell of ammonia, accompanied by gleeful laughter from both idiots. I couldn't take it — I stuck my head back out the window and let the water do what it wanted to do, taking a substantial quantity of alcohol with it on the way out.
That was the last thing I registered before I went out completely.
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