Afterlife Crisis

by Randal Graham

  It wasn’t mulligatawny. Decorum demands that I describe the stuff no further, for I shan’t sully the Author’s work with what was clearly the fallout of Napoleonic torture. It had a marked effect on me. And Zeus, who wasn’t shielded from the sight by my editorial tact, took in the full, unspeakable horror of the scene.

  It smote him like a blow. He stood there goggling, rooted on the spot, his mouth opening and closing like a landed whitefish.

  One could see what he was driving at. He hadn’t known what his brothers and sisters in arms had been up to in this dungeon, and he hadn’t expected that his recent benefactor, the Regent Neferneferuaten, might be capable of such horrors. And for a man like Zeus, for whom loyalty is the cardinal virtue, it’s rather soul-destroying to learn that the team for which you’ve been drafted, the side to which you’ve currently pledged your fealty, is not only unworthy of your allegiance, but also — not to put too fine a point upon the thing — downright evil. It’d be like finding out that your diner’s club had secretly been serving you prime cuts of toddler, or learning that your favourite maître d’ has been watering down the single malts or replacing them with blends.

  Zeus took it big. After staring at the morbid scene for a space and drinking in the extent of its inhumanity, he did what any right-thinking mastadon might have done. He howled something resembling a full-throated battle yodel, charged forward like those half-a-league, half-a-league onward chumps I mentioned earlier, and snatched up one of the pistol-firing guardsmen near the centre of the room.

  You read that right. He snatched him up. By the legs, if you want to know. The snatchee seemed to take this philosophically, for he simply made an impassive face as though — like your better-known philosophers — he hadn’t a clue what the hell was going on. Zeus now held the man dangling by his ankles, like a fisherperson displaying a gaffed trout. Thus armed, Zeus strode into the nearest knot of guardspersons, now swinging the hapless snatchee like a mace, or morning-star, or whatever you call those blunt instruments designed for bashing in the heads of your opposition.

  Some of the swings were golf-like, and some more akin to the baseball variety. But whatever he struck, the impact was the same. Guards flew, seeming to arc toward the putting green or fly into home-run range, landing I knew not where.

  With Zeus having left our immediate environs — thus depriving us of cover — Vera, self, Fenny, and Nappy did the brave thing and dove behind the Eighth Street Chapter. It’s not that we regarded these chumps as bosom friends, or had forgotten their recent efforts to bring a spot of misery into our collective lives, but to be weighed against these sins was their undeniable utility as human shields.

  “Tuck in here,” said Llewellyn Llewellyn, scooching over to the side and making room behind the upturned table.

  “Tuck in here?” I asked, mildly affronted by the apparent chumminess this Llewellyn chap was showing. “Tuck in here? You expect us to treat you as a warm, congenial host, after all that—”

  Here I broke off. Not so much because I’d finished whatever I had been planning to say, but because a couple of bullets whizzed past my left ear, heightening the appeal of Llewellyn Llewellyn’s recent offer.

  We tucked in.

  Nappy was understandably displeased. Once we’d nestled into relative safety behind the upturned table, she glared at the membership of the Eighth Street Chapter with what I’ve often heard described as a baleful look.

  “You bastards,” she said through gritted teeth. “I ’ope you get what you deserve!”

  “Look,” said Llewellyn Llewellyn. “I’m sorry. But we were just following Norm. He said we were serving the greater good and—”

  “Serving ze greater good!” she yowled. “Vat kind of good can come of zees? Kidnapping and torturing a . . . an entire people, all in ze name of some crazy beliefs!”

  “Look, I get it,” said Llewellyn Llewellyn, “but Norm’s beliefs aren’t crazy. The beforelife is real. He’s going to help his people reach it. I’ve seen some pretty unbelievable stuff since—”

  “Seence what?” shouted Nappy, over a fresh burst of gunfire.

  Llewellyn Llewellyn looked ’round to see his gangmates were occupied by other things. Apparently satisfied that they weren’t hanging on his every word, he aimed a couple of sideways nods at them and mouthed the words “since Socrates.”

  Nappy didn’t seem interested in the Eighth Street Chapter’s past entanglements with assassins, for she continued denouncing Llewellyn Llewellyn and his fellows with a string of words and gestures revealing a most impressive command of the obscene vernacular and carried on calling him names beyond the point at which you might have expected both breath and inventiveness to have given out. I was impressed with the vehemence with which she ticked him off, for she displayed not only the lung power of a regimental sergeant major, but also the bravery of one of those first-responder chaps who seem to ignore the danger around them. Her anti–Eight Street Chapter diatribe was punctuated by the regular ping of bullets ricocheting all around us, not to mention other guards, struck by Zeus, flying past at about eye level at regular intervals.

  I turned my attensh from Nappy, who seemed to have matters well in hand, to Vera, who nestled at my immediate rear.

  She seemed to have taken a brief hiatus from her gig as an appliance repairperson in favour of taking on the role of field marshal, for she poked her head above the table and shouted exhortations to Zeus, telling him when to duck, when to pivot, and where best to aim his blows. This sideline coaching seemed to serve him well, for the chap managed to keep out of the gunfire while swinging his guard-shaped cudgel with what, in any world which didn’t feature human immortality, would have been called deadly precision.

  And while I won’t say that this precisely turned the tide of battle, since the tide was already flowing distinctly in the Napoleons’ favour, it did seem to throw matters into sharp relief for the guards. The impact on their morale was clear, and one could see the urge to retreat mounting within them, largely assisted by the image of Zeus battering their brethren and sending them flying who knows where.

  Those guards who could still stand did so with great alacrity, dropping weaponry at their sides, kicking the dust of the Regent’s hall from their boots and heading for the hills at a significant rate of MPH. Where exactly it is they went I cannot say, for they rabbitted out of sight, into hallways and through doors which I hadn’t hitherto noticed, what with all of my attention having been gripped by other things.

  Some Napoleons, perhaps taking a page from Zeus’s book, gave chase like terriers who’ve caught the scent of a fox or rabbit or whatever it is terriers chase; but most appeared to understand that their oppressors had been routed, and they stuck around on the spot to savour the victory.

  The Napoleon who called himself Jack was among those who stayed behind. And now that he’d cheesed the piranhic-feeding-frenzy routine and finally stood still for more than a couple of ticks, I was at long last able to make a detailed appraisal of his appearance.

  It was too awful for words — at least for words that went into any level of specificity or precision. I mean to say, I rarely set myself up as a judge of male beauty, and I don’t intend to convey that this Jack was, in his normal state, the sort of chap who’d offend the pupils. But now he was far from being in anything approaching his normal state. Indeed, when I say that his current appearance was too awful for words, I intend to convey that he showed every imaginable sign of his ill treatment at the hands of the Regent’s guards and now looked like something that had recently escaped from a butcher’s meathook or gone awol from an abattoir. My heart bled for the chap — which is saying something, as the last couple of times we’d crossed paths he’d done his best to make the Feynman heart bleed through sharp-force trauma.

  He surveyed the field of victory before him, managed something approximating a subtle smile, and then, no doubt owing to the weariness tha
t comes from a combination of bloodlust and blood loss, he crumpled into an unconscious lump among the carnage.

  “No High Priest is worth this,” said Llewellyn Llewellyn, still peeping over the table. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “Not before you pay for what you ’ave done!” said Nappy — though here again, “spat” or “seethed” might have been mot juster.

  “Look,” said Llewellyn Llewellyn — a word of which I think you’ll agree he was inordinately fond — “I’m not gonna defend anything we did. Norm was convincing. He was . . . I dunno . . . all religious about this stuff. He made it sound like it was a way for us to make some cash while also doing some good — letting people see the world for whatever it really is, or something like that. I didn’t see the harm.”

  “Didn’t see the harm?” shouted Vera, weighing in. “Didn’t see the harm? He was having people tortured.”

  “Not at first!” riposted Llewellyn, but you could see his heart wasn’t in it, for he seemed to dish the argument for the defence at this point and just stood there looking down at his shoes. “Crestfallen” sums it up nicely. And then, as if to fill the uncomfortable silence, he muttered something about just wanting to “keep the gang together.”

  “I’m . . . I’m all they have,” said Llewellyn Llewellyn, looking over his fellows in what you might describe as a fretful sort of way. And I won’t say my heart melted for the blighter, for it’s difficult for any heart, however soluble, to melt for a chap whose recent habits included kidnapping, false imprisonment, and the strapping down of your friends for a spot of unwanted medical intervention. But I could, to some degree, understand the chump’s dilemma. For if Vera’s television had been accurate — which I’m fairly sure it always was — then this chap’s whole circle of pals had been mindwiped by Socrates in the fairly recent past, and he was straining every nerve and doing whatever was needed to ensure their well-being in their post-Socratic, mind-addled state. I was doing the same job for Zeus and had gotten myself into loads and loads of unexpected scrapes by making the effort. “Put yourself in this blighter’s shoes,” I said to myself as I watched him mother-henning over his chums and imagined the lengths to which I’d go in order to keep my nearest and d. out of both frying pans and fires. And while I’ll admit that none of these lengths would, in my case, have involved kidnapping Napoleons and treating them like pincushions, you have to budget for the fact that this Llewellyn Llewellyn might have been one of those weak-minded bimbos you meet on life’s journey, and one who had gotten himself wrapped up with a charismatic, prophecy-spouting religious zealot in the form of Norm Stradamus. These religious z.’s can wrap weak-minded bimbos around their little fingers, as the expression is, and have them doing all manner of goshawful stuff while chanting hosannas about Making Detroit Great Again before you can say “what ho.” Why, I once knew a chap who’d been convinced to skip the brace of cocktails before dinner, another who worked himself into a zealous frenzy about others’ bathroom habits, and yet another who felt it was a religious duty to steer clear of librarians. Convincing gullible people to act in bizarre and anti-social ways seems to be what zealots are for.

  “There but for a functioning cerebrum go I,” I remember thinking.

  That particular train of thought pulled into its station and ground to a halt when Zeus appeared at our side, kicking his way through the rubble and righting the table behind which we’d been nestled.

  “The coast is clear!” he announced.

  “Terrence!” said Kari Slice.

  “Zeus!” said Nappy.

  My colossal gendarme twisted his mouth sideways in a puzzled sort of expression. He had the look of one who, at the halfway point of a long journey, has stumbled upon a crossroads whose presence wasn’t announced by the GPS.

  He looked at me, he looked at Nappy, he looked at Llewellyn Llewellyn, and he looked at me again. He might also have looked at Vera, Big Hurt, and Kari Slice, but I couldn’t tell, for it’s hard to keep track of everything someone as tall as Zeus drinks in with a couple of darting glances, he being able to observe things from the high ground, as it were.

  He then contorted his face again, replacing the air of bafflement with a mask of firm resolve.

  “Call me Zeus,” he said at length.

  I felt the thing wash through me like a dose of salts, or the news that the horse on which you’ve bet your little all has taken the crown by a short head.

  “Gadzooks!” I shouted, rising, my heart fuller of raw emotion than it had been in quite some time, “You remember!”

  He shook the loaf. This surprised me.

  “I don’t remember anything. Not from before I met the Regent,” he said in a downcast sort of way. “But . . . well, I don’t think I like the people who call me Terrence, or who I’d turn out to be if I stayed with them. If it’s all the same to you,” he added, fixing his gaze on yours truly, “I think I’d rather be Zeus, and stick with you.”

  I can’t remember another single paragraph of dialogue that has so quickly gone from stripping every scrap of wind from the Feynman sails to suddenly filling them up with gales. The heart practically burst out of my chest, through my ribs, and ricocheted off a wall or two.

  “Of course you can stick with me!” I said, my voice thick with manly emotion.

  He turned from me, and glared down at Llewellyn Llewellyn.

  “You’d better get out of here,” he said. “Take your pals and run.”

  Llewellyn Llewellyn seemed all for this plan, but Big Hurt voiced an objection.

  “But . . . but . . . where do we go? Norm was looking out for us. He paid us to help him reach the beforelife and—”

  “Just get out,” said Zeus. “Forget Norm. Forget the beforelife. I don’t think the Napoleons are out for revenge, but if they are, you’d deserve whatever they wanted to dish out.”

  This roused Llewellyn Llewellyn, who rose to his feet and made the case for the defence: “But we weren’t the ones who tortured them!” he cried. “We didn’t fight against them in the revolt! We—”

  “You let it happen on your watch!” Zeus thundered. “You could have said something, and you didn’t!”

  Astute observers of this colossus will have noted that, on the cue “and you didn’t,” a little vein in the nor’nor’easterly portion of his face, right above an eyebrow that he was currently furrowing at Llewellyn Llewellyn and his fellow guards, twitched almost imperceptibly and began to enlarge, though whether it filled itself with blood, or with righteous indignation, is a matter best resolved elsewhere. But Llewellyn Llewellyn seemed to note the transformation, and to understand that it heralded a Zeus who was approaching the boiling point. And although Zeus had dropped his human-shaped cudgel somewhere on the field of battle, he seemed poised to arm himself at any moment, perhaps with another member of the Eighth Street Chapter.

  Llewellyn Llewellyn may have weighed his options for a millisecond or two, but if he did there was no outward sign of this hesitation. Instead, he simply gathered up his pals, avoided making any form of eye contact with the members of my troop, and fled out the door through which we’d entered, perhaps to collect Philly the Rook preparatory to entering some type of witness protection program.

  And thus is was that the Eighth Street Chapter disappeared from the remainder of my memoirs.

  Nappy, rather than hurling objects or curses at the retreating chumps, seemed to have cast these blisters from her thoughts, now having eyes only for Zeus. For she flung herself at him, and the chap had no choice but to catch her in something resembling an embrace.

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” said Zeus. “You’ll be all right.”

  “Call me Nappy,” is all she said.

  “What do we do now?” asked Vera.

  “Search me,” I said. “You’re the one who has television. Have a peep, and let us know what the future holds for our little gang.”
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br />   “We’re getting out of here,” said Zeus, setting Nappy down gently and patting her shoulder in a comforting sort of way. “We’ve got to get as far away from this place as we can. I know the way out.”

  “I thought you’d never been down here,” said Vera, doubtfully.

  “I’ve studied the blueprints,” said Zeus, and once again I felt myself applauding this chap’s thoroughly helpful nature.

  “Great,” said Vera. “But we’re taking Jack. The other Napoleons seem to be all right for now, but I think he’s down for the count. Besides, we’ll need him later.”

  “What do you mean we’ll need him later?” I asked, agog.

  “I’m not sure,” said Vera. “Something to do with my vision.”

  “Not the bally poetry again,” I said, bewildered. “I thought we’d left that all behind us.”

  “No,” said Vera. “It’s still important. It’s about stopping Isaac, and it’s the key to bringing this whole story its conclusion. And we’ll have to have Jack with us to make it happen.”

  I was expecting someone present to ask what it was that we were supposed to make happen, and how in Abe’s name Jack was involved, but such was the force of Vera’s personality that we simply did her bidding, Zeus wading back into the battlefield and scooping up the recumbent Jack preparatory to taking our leave. He slung Jack over a shoulder, Jack uttered a sort of “oof” indicating that life still animated his corpus and that he wasn’t doing whatever it is Napoleons do before they reincarnate, and Zeus bounded up a nearby hall, barely encumbered by his passenger.

  If you’ve been playing close attention to the story so far, you’ll know I’d have followed Zeus practically anywhere, this chap’s well-being being fairly high on my personal list of Things That Matter. So when he turned on his heel to lead us out, I didn’t waste a moment before stringing along behind. Vera, Nappy, and Fenny strung along, too, the last of whom had little choice in the matter because he was still tucked in my pocket, apparently waiting for further assurances that we were out of the line of fire.