The Gods' Day to Die

by David Welch

  “They were the first, but not the only ones. Other immortals began popping up in Vesclevi villages. Hera was the first, or the first we know of, who didn’t descend from Kronos. Then Aphrodite, Hestia, Demeter . . . then dozens more. For a two-century span the genetics existed within the Vesclevi population to create, albeit rarely, an immortal human.

  “At first, from what my dad tells me, it was kind of like a club. The other Vesclevi villages didn’t want immortals among them, they thought it was unnatural, that they were making deals of some sort with evil powers. So inevitably they’d kick out the immortals and they’d wander to my dad’s village. Somewhere along the line, many, many centuries later, we got the idea to leave the mountains and go south, to the developing Mycenaean settlements of what is now Greece. Figured we could disappear more easily in a larger population. At least that was the idea before we started thinking we were gods.”

  “Okay . . . but what about the Vesclevi? You just said the genetics for immortality existed among them. Why did it suddenly stop after two centuries?” Desmond asked.

  “Invasions, migrations,” Artemis said. “The genes for an immortal are recessive, and the more intermarrying there was, the more diluted they became. Eventually immortals stopped arising from mortal parents.”

  “So you’re trying to tell me that you’re a different species of human?” Des asked.

  “No,” Artemis replied. “Maybe a subspecies. The differences between us aren’t that great.”

  “I think immortality is a pretty big difference,” Desmond replied.

  “We’re not really immortal, though we don’t die from age or natural causes,” Artemis said. “We can be killed, just like you. Most of us have been. Our minds are no different. We’re not stronger, we don’t learn any quicker. Granted, we have a lot of experience, so we learn from that more than most people do, but in terms of raw material we’re not much different.”

  “How different, then?” Des asked.

  “We have a third blood cell,” she said. “We didn’t learn this until the nineteen fifties. We have the normal red and white cells, but also another that Hera calls a ‘blue cell.’ It goes around in our bodies destroying free radicals, repairing DNA transcription errors the normal processes miss, and preventing our telomere chains from shortening. Or at least we think it does. We’re not sure exactly how the blue cells do it. But we do know they also destroy the DNA or RNA of harmful pathogens, so we don’t get sick.”

  “Lucky you,” Desmond deadpanned.

  “And we have large reservoirs of stem cells,” she said. “Far more than an ordinary person, throughout all our various tissues. It we lose a limb, or part of an organ begins to wear out . . .”

  “You grow a new one,” Desmond figured.

  She held up her right hand.

  “This is my third right hand,” she said. “Takes years for them to grow back, but eventually they do.”

  “So when you say you can be killed, you’re talking severe trauma or wounds,” Desmond said.

  She nodded, explaining, “Yes, the same way you would. The normal organ damage a person gets simply from being alive is replaced as it happens, over time. But if I was shot through the heart, the trauma would kill me just as easily as you.”

  “Okay,” he said, not entirely convinced, “if all this is true, why aren’t there millions of you? Six thousand years, that’s a lot of time to breed. And if you never die—”

  “The world should be overrun with us,” Artemis figured.

  “Yeah. And since you’re the first one I’ve met, it clearly isn’t,” Desmond said.

  Artemis swallowed back a wave of sadness. She always hated this part.

  “It’s because most of our children do not survive to adulthood,” Artemis said.

  Desmond cocked his head.

  “What? Why? Is somebody killing them?” he asked.

  “Not somebody,” she said, a tear rolling from her eye. “There is one disease that affects us.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “We call it Quick Rot. It’s an auto-immune disease. The blue cells don’t recognize their own body, and begin attacking the DNA of other cells.”

  “Jesus,” Desmond said, the disbelief in his voice vanishing, to be replaced by real concern. “How often does it happen?”

  “Nine times out of ten,” Artemis said, wiping away a tear. She began moving again, trying to regain her composure.

  “My god . . .” Desmond whispered. “So ninety percent of all your kids . . .”

  “Die before they reach their seventeenth birthday,” Artemis said. “It’s a curse, Desmond. They live long enough to be on the verge of adulthood. Then it comes, and in a matter of days they’re dead, their bodies destroyed from the inside out.”

  More tears came, and she turned away. She heard Desmond get up. He rested a hand on her shoulder, turning her around to face him.

  “So those pictures in the book are the ones who survived?”

  “No,” she choked. “No . . . their fathers were mortals. All except for one . . .”

  Desmond raised an eyebrow. Artemis realized she’d left that piece out.

  “Sorry. The Rot only happens to the children of two immortals. The genes are recessive, so when we have children with mortals, they live normal lives. They grow old and die,” Artemis explained.

  “Oh,” Desmond said. “Well . . . I guess that’s better than . . . you know . . .”

  “It is,” Artemis said. “Though it still hurts when they do die. Doesn’t matter how many times it happens.”

  She brushed away some more tears, then grabbed the book from her coffee table.

  “I never had an immortal child who lived to adulthood, Desmond,” she said, flipping through the pages until she came to the pretty face of a young girl. “I tried once. Kalethee. With Thor. She died of the Rot when she was fourteen.”

  “So these are your kids?” Desmond said.

  “Yes. Every one,” Artemis said, turning to the final page. “Diving Eagle was the last. Born in 1871, after I moved out here.”

  “You’ve been here for a hundred and forty years?” Desmond asked.

  “No, I moved a few times, around the country. Have to, every twenty years or so, or people start noticing that you don’t age,” she said. “I felt like moving back here a few years ago. Always liked it in the high country.”

  “You said ‘around the country.’ You’ve been living in the US for all this time?”

  “Yes. Pretty much all of us have. Fewer wars here, being separated by two oceans and all. And there is the insistence on individual freedom, and the fact that you all seem to distrust your own government. It’s easier to stay hidden in a country like this. Easier to slip through the cracks.”

  Desmond nodded, feeling a slight flush of patriotic pride. He turned his gaze back to the book in his hands. He flipped the pages, back to the first image.

  “So he was your first?” Desmond said.

  “Ethleus,” she said. “I had him with Actaeon.”

  “Actaeon? You didn’t have him torn apart by dogs?” Desmond asked.

  She rolled her eyes, saying, “Myths, Desmond. Most have been so convoluted and twisted over time that they hardly resemble the truth. Actaeon did find me bathing, much like you. He wasn’t my first man, but he was the first I had children with.”

  “So clearly the whole virgin goddess thing was a load of crap,” Desmond said.

  “Well, we did just have sex a few hours ago,” she said sarcastically. “What do you think?”

  “Curious is all,” he said. “You told me you live forever and were worshiped as a goddess. Lot of questions come to mind. Like why you said Zeus was the first, when the myths clearly say he was the youngest of the elder Olympians?”

  She sighed. “He was the first; those myths are not truths.
They’re copies of a copy of a copy some thirty times over. Second, they called me a ‘virgin’ goddess because compared to other immortals I’m somewhat . . . selective about my mates. Every one of us that’s left has books like these. There are one hundred and sixteen sons and daughters in mine. Guess how many are in Zeus’ book?”

  “Six-thousand-year-old man with a reputation for getting around . . . dare I guess?” Des said.

  “Six hundred and ninety-seven . . . so far,” Artemis said. “And my father is not the man the myths make him out to be!”

  “All right, I hear ya,” he said. “I do have to say, though, for a mother of one hundred and sixteen, you do look amazing.”

  Artemis cracked a sly smile.

  “Cute,” she remarked. “Any more questions?”

  “Dozens,” he said, then yawned. “But I think I’ll have to put them off. I’m suddenly very tired.”

  “Seriously? You get me all riled up telling you this stuff and now you want to sleep?”

  “Well, it’s nearly three in the morning, and we were out hiking all day,” he said. “And if you are what you say you are, there is little chance you won’t be here in the morning. If you didn’t want to trust me with this, you would’ve run and not told me. But you did. Which makes me think you still want me here.”

  His logic was sound, as always. She sighed. He had an annoying habit of seeing to the heart of things. And of keeping his emotions under control. Now that she thought about it, his initial disbelief after she’d told him was the most emotional she’d ever seen him behave outside of sex.

  “I do,” she said, a deliciously evil thought entering her mind. “But all fired up in this condition, it’ll be hours before I’m able to sleep. And since it’s your fault I’m like this, I guess it’s your responsibility to fix it. So you are going to have to find some way to ‘tire me out.’ ”

  “And how does one tire a goddess?”

  “Oh, I think you know. Right now the real question you should be asking yourself is whether you still want to get naked with me, knowing I’m an old crone and all?”

  She undid her sash, the robe dropping to the ground around her feet. Desmond froze, and thought about it for a second. Then his eyes took in her naked form, which made him think there was really no need for thought right now.

  “They always say age ain’t nothing but a number,” he said.

  “Is that so?” she said, taking his hand and leading him toward the stairs. It would be another hour before either of them got to sleep.

  8

  Near Algodones, New Mexico

  Once the building had been a garage for large mining trucks. Now it was empty, save for Lenka and his people. The windows had been covered over in cardboard, and the great doors locked shut.

  A contact of his in the States had made him aware of this place. The mine it had once serviced had been abandoned for years. With all the mine waste sitting around in pools, few ventured into the area. Most important, it was several miles off any main road, stuck in an empty desert. Which meant even if his mother’s screams should escape the cavernous building, there would be little chance anyone would hear them.

  Lenka lit a cigarette, and strolled toward the center of the garage. A chair had been set up, and his mother chained to it. She sat woozily, her body crisscrossed with cuts and bruises. On a normal person, half her wounds would’ve been infected by now. But immortals didn’t get sick. So the wounds scabbed over. Older ones turned to scars. And the oldest scars had nearly faded away, replaced by skin that showed no signs an injury had ever occurred. He’d made his mother explain it to him once. Apparently immortality didn’t “set in” until the late teens. Any scars from before then were still present, but after that point the bodies of immortals seemed to reset. No matter how brutal the injury, if they survived it, they eventually returned to their youthful and perfect forms.

  The thought made him seethe. He fought a little more every day to breathe, and there she sat in a twenty-something’s body, confident that one day all the bruises and scars would disappear, and that she would go on living as if none of this had ever happened. As if he had never happened. As if her failings as a mother and a human being could be forgotten. He bore the scars of those failings. The whole of his life was one giant scar . . . and it all traced back to her.

  He growled at the thought, and turned to one of his men.

  “Hook her up, Alexi,” he ordered.

  Alexi nodded, and moved to a nearby generator. From it he dragged two wires. With practiced ease he hooked them up, one to each nipple.

  “No . . . no, Lenka, please—”

  Athena didn’t get to finish the sentence. Her words became a painful scream as her torturer spun a dial. Electricity coursed through her body, wracking her limbs with spasms. Lenka ignored her screams. He’d grown so used to them over the past months that he no longer really noticed them. Besides, it wasn’t like she was going to die. He wasn’t sending enough juice through her for that.

  He motioned for Alexi to stop, and he did. Athena slumped forward. She would’ve fallen to the floor, but her restraints held her firm.

  “Mother, please tell me where I can find them,” he said.

  She snarled in a language he didn’t know. He sighed, and motioned to Alexi. Her screams echoed through the garage once more. He let them go on a bit longer this time. He puffed away on his cigarette, noticing calmly as her areolas grew black and burned.

  “Enough,” he said. Alexi turned off the current.

  “Mother, we know how this will end. You will fight me, maybe even enough that I’ll have to drug you. And you know that makes you nauseous and miserable,” Alexi said. “So give me a location now. You know half of the homes you give me when you’re drugged turn out wrong. And then I have to come back and do things like this to you. Don’t make me do that, Mother. Just tell me where.”

  “I should’ve killed you in the womb!” Athena snapped with surprising strength. Lenka smiled and shook his head. She was still coherent enough to be angry. He needed her much more broken than that.

  “Alexi, give her a full course. Whatever you think is necessary,” Lenka said, turning from Athena and puffing on his cigarette. “Nicholai! Ready the Sodium Pentothal!”

  Across the garage another of his men nodded, and started rooting through a briefcase. Athena’s screams rose again, filling the chamber. Lenka ignored them, walking to the small office attached to the building.

  There he found Duscha, his daughter, sitting at a desk and cleaning her gun. Her mother, Stasya, had been his commander in the KGB. And after the Soviet Union had collapsed under its own idiocy, the two of them had become jobless. Stasya had taken to drinking at the same bar as he, and eventually had started going home with him. Despite being closer to fifty than forty, she had conceived, and Duscha was the result. He had trouble thinking of her as anything but his daughter, though. Despite the child, Stasya had never recovered from the shock of losing her position, and had drunk herself to death shortly after the girl’s birth.

  He had never lost too much sleep over it. Stasya had not meant all that much to him. The only thing she’d ever given to their daughter was her beauty, and even then he could definitely see Athena’s look in her. Everything else about the girl was his.

  “Is she being difficult again, Papa?” Duscha asked, looking up from her gun, her stone-gray eyes meeting his.

  “When is she not difficult?” Lenka replied.

  “When she sleeps,” Duscha replied matter-of-factly.

  He smiled, and tousled her long, black hair.

  “She will not be sleeping soon,” he replied. “There is too much to do.”

  “Should I have another ‘talk’ with her?” Duscha asked, an evil smile coming to her face.

  “No, my child,” he replied. “I believe the drugs will be enough this time.”

  Sh
e gave him a fake pout.

  “Please, Papa?” she pleaded. “Let me use the whips.”

  “No. She is much too soft for that right now,” Lenka said.

  She sighed. “I suppose. Bring me Ares. I could have so much fun with him.”

  Lenka frowned, looking deep into his daughter’s eyes.

  “You will have to find your fun elsewhere,” Lenka growled. “When I find Ares, I will kill him.”

  “No! Keep him alive. As a favor to me?” She batted her eyes.

  Lenka shook his head.

  “No, moya devushka,” he said solemnly. “You are far too soft to deal with him.”

  “Speak Russian, mother.”

  Athena’s eyes swooped about. Lenka’s people had laid off her face for several days, allowing the swelling to go down. Lenka could actually see his mother’s soft brown eyes as they shifted lazily from place to place, never stopping to focus. She was too hopped up for that.

  “Nyet!” she replied with a bout of laughter. “It’s an ugly language! I do not care for it . . .”

  Lenka sighed. “Fine. English it is.”

  “English is a fun language,” Athena said. “It’s like German, but it’s also like Latin . . . and then there’s the Americans . . .”

  “The drug seems to have worked,” Duscha said, disappointment thick in her voice.

  “I—I don’t do drug—Oh, the drugs I have done, Lenka . . . you wouldn’t believe . . . This one time me and the oracle got so high—”

  “Mother, focus. Where can I find your family?” Lenka demanded.

  “My—my family?” Athena wondered. “You’re my family, Lenka! And your father! He was such a handsome man . . .”

  “Your family,” Lenka said. “Your brothers and sisters. Your stepmother and father.”

  “My—my mother . . . Metis is my mother!” Athena declared proudly.

  “I know that, Mother. Your stepmother, Hera” Lenka said firmly. “Where is she? Where can I find her?”

  “I’m not gonna tell youuuuu!” Athena grinned.