The Gods' Day to Die

by David Welch

  “Don’t threaten me, you bastard,” she snapped. “Every day these abominations are alive, they are a threat to the Earth! I will not allow—”

  “These ‘abominations’ have been alive for nearly six thousand years,” Lenka said coolly. “And your Earth is still here.”

  “Yes, yes. Look, I know your country polluted its rivers and belched radiation all over the Ukraine. But some people care about this planet!” Chloe raged.

  “Miss Ezra,” Lenka said, remaining calm. “Understand this. I truly believe in the cause of your organization. I truly do.”

  “Uh, well,” Chloe fumbled, caught off guard. “Thanks. That’s . . . uh . . . good to hear.”

  “What’s more, I care about you,” he went on. “But you display a worrying degree of hypocrisy. And as a man who cares about you and your cause, I would be failing in my duties if I did not point it out.”

  “Hypocrisy—what?! What are you talking about—”

  “It occurs to me that you promote human extinction for the good of this planet. Yet you yourself are still alive. So either you are not a true believer, and this cause is a joke—”

  “I’ve been fighting for the Earth since—”

  “Or you are a hypocrite lacking the courage to act on your beliefs,” Lenka continued.

  “It’s passive reduction!” Chloe fumed. “We’re not going to kill ourselves! Just not have chil—”

  “As a friend who cares about you,” Lenka went on, oblivious to her words, “I can assure you this. Push me again, and I will make sure you live up to your cause. Would you like that, Miss Ezra? Would you like to ‘embrace’ your own human extirpation?”

  The line went quiet for a long moment.

  “I am a powerful enemy to make, Sidorov,” she growled.

  “You are a minor bureaucrat in a fringe organization, existing only on the crumbs that American ‘limousine liberals’ throw you,” he said. “There will be no great outcry over your death. Our relationship will continue, Miss Ezra, so long as you remember what it is. Our goal is the same. Why and how we seek this goal is irrelevant, only that it is seen through. Now answer me one question: Has your PI kept on Zeus’ trail?”

  “Yes,” Chloe said, sounding strained. “They are well ahead of you, in Colorado. Heading west.”

  “Then we shall follow. Have your man send his position to Yevgenny’s phone. He will e-mail you the information necessary,” Lenka said. “And next time, Miss Ezra, we will call you.”

  She began to protest. He cut the line, stuck the phone back into his pocket, then turned to Grigori.

  “Find us a route northwest,” he ordered. “They are heading west, and we have a lot of distance to make up.”

  17

  Big Sur, California

  The fist came quickly. It didn’t strike his head all that hard, but it moved with such a blur of speed that he couldn’t get out of the way.

  Desmond stumbled back, eyes tearing. He tried to steady himself to face the oncoming Ares, but quickly found himself falling, his ankles swept by his attacker. He slammed hard into the mat on the floor.

  “Ugh . . .” he muttered.

  “What did I tell ya? The jab is a distraction, too weak to do much damage. The real blow always comes after it,” Ares said, as if he were a professor lecturing a student.

  “Right,” Desmond groaned, getting back to his feet for the fifteenth time that afternoon.

  Immediately Ares was sailing toward him, not bothering to ask if he was ready. His fists flung out in a flurry. Earlier Desmond would have retreated, or tried to block. But hitting the ground more than a dozen times had drilled at least one lesson into him.

  He ducked, ramming his elbow into Ares’ stomach. The blow hit, buckling in the walls of muscle in the man’s midsection. But at that same moment Ares brought his knee up into Desmond’s sternum. The blow thrust him into an upright position, just as a pair of jabs struck. Desmond threw a jab of his own, but Ares ducked around it with crazy ninja speed. His hand shot out and grabbed Desmond’s throat.

  “You gonna throw me on the ground again?” Desmond asked.

  “No,” Ares said. “I think having your windpipe in my hand is proof enough that you lost.”

  Ares backed up, giving Desmond a chance to catch his breath. Desmond shook his head in astonishment. He’d once seen a martial arts show back in high school, with guys swinging katanas and slicing apples in midair, moving so fast it didn’t seem humanly possible. Ares had no sword, but he was definitely one of those people. If not better than them. His agility was inhuman. He struck and moved so quickly, it was more like a snake striking than a man attacking.

  Artemis had insisted that they weren’t actual gods. But this man certainly lived up to the whole “God of War” thing.

  “You attack,” Ares said.

  “No,” Desmond replied.

  Ares cocked his head quizzically.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I don’t have a shotgun,” Desmond answered.

  Ares grinned.

  “A shotgun would be ideal for close-range carnage,” Ares said. “But my sister insists you’re a good shot already, and that you need hand-to-hand training. So here we are.”

  “Yeah,” Desmond said.

  With a sigh he surged forward. Ares’ muscles tensed in the split-second it took Desmond to cross the distance. Des had his hands up for a solid one-two, jab-cross combo. Standard stuff, but effective nonetheless. Ares’ hands shot up, no doubt to sweep away the jab and counterattack before the cross could even be launched.

  But then Desmond stopped before launching the attack. For a split-second Ares was caught off guard, expecting one attack but finding no attack. Desmond, desperate for some way to catch Ares unawares, chopped upward with his hand at the man’s armpit.

  The blow struck, and Ares’ left hand came down. Desmond saw an opening. But in the corner of his eye he saw Ares’ right hand arcing toward him in a tight roundhouse. He pressed close to the man, throwing his forearm into his neck and trying to duck his head low. Ares’ blow glanced off the back of his skull, doing little damage.

  Desmond lunged forward, trying to use the momentum of his body to hurl Ares back. For a moment it seemed to work; then Ares ducked to his right. Desmond’s momentum carried him forward, and Ares swept up with his left foot, tripping him. Desmond flew forward and slammed onto the mat again.

  “Hah!” Ares laughed, though there was no mockery in it. “Creative! Played with my mind, did something unexpected! Damn good!”

  “Yeah . . . except I’m still on the floor,” Desmond said, getting his arms under him.

  “You are,” Ares declared. “But I told you when we began: I have fifty-seven centuries’ experience and training. You’re not going to beat me.”

  “Well, forgive me,” Desmond said, getting up. “My inner male isn’t very PC. Doesn’t like losing.”

  “You’re not losing,” Ares replied. “When we started, you didn’t last five seconds. Now you’re up to nine.”

  “Nine seconds, great. I’ll have time to swear before I’m killed,” Desmond grumbled.

  “For a man who’s never trained or been in combat, you’re not a bad fighter,” Ares said.

  “I’ll have you know I took a single karate class in college to fulfill my physical education requirement,” Desmond declared. “Now, if you think you’ve got what it takes . . .”

  Ares laughed, and took up a martial pose.

  “I’ll get you to twelve seconds before the morning is through,” Ares said.

  Desmond grinned defiantly. “Tall talk for an old man.”

  Ares charged and caught him in a bull rush. Desmond found himself laughing maniacally as he was thrown to the ground, pounding away at his attacker’s back all the way down.

  “So, how much of your myth is tr
ue?”

  They sat on the deck, cooling off after their sparring. Each had a bottle of water. Desmond had managed to hit the mat another two dozen times before he’d called it a day. He hadn’t quite gotten to twelve seconds, a mistake in judgment that Ares chalked up to the tiny sprig of optimism in his soul that steadfastly refused to die. But he had made it to eleven, and managed to land three more punches on the God of War.

  “More of it than you’d think,” Ares replied.

  “And that tale about Hephaestus catching you and Aphrodite naked in the net?”

  “Oddly . . . yes. That did happen,” he said. “We still hadn’t figured out how to deal with jealousy yet, at least over the long term. And you have to, because after sixty or seventy years, even the best marriage needs a break. So you’re gonna be sleeping with new people, and you’re gonna have to learn how to deal with seeing your ‘wife’ with somebody else. Hephaestus didn’t quite know how to do that, and seeing Aphrodite and me together . . . the man went crazy. Looking back, I can’t be too mad at him for it. He was married to Dita at the time. She and I were having an affair. And I was just as jealous about some of my wives early on. Did some things to their lovers I’m not particularly proud of.”

  “Hmm . . . well, should I live to three hundred, I’ll try to remember that,” Desmond said.

  “Being a little optimistic?” Ares asked.

  “Well, medical science changes so quickly. And I keep reading about the miracles of nanobots,” he said. “Who knows? Centuries from now you might have millions of other immortals to commiserate with!”

  Ares shook his head and sighed.

  “Desmond, I don’t think I’m going to live to see the day technology makes everyone immortal,” Ares said.

  “I take it you’re not talking about Lenka catching up to you,” Desmond replied.

  “No, not Lenka . . .”

  “Jesus,” Desmond said. His voice lacked the disbelief that Ares had come to expect. Ares was used to disbelief, he’d seen and heard it a thousand times, from mortal wives and friends he’d had in the past. They’d learn his identity, learn he was Christian, and then spend a good deal of time scratching their heads trying to reconcile the two facts. This guy didn’t seem all that fazed.

  “So given what Artemis has told me,” Desmond said, “when you say ‘Jesus’ you’re not talking about finding God and being born again, are you?”

  “Well, I did find God,” Ares said. “And I was born again.”

  “But not like those annoying guys who walk around with pamphlets,” Desmond figured. “You actually physically found Jesus, didn’t you?”

  “He found me,” Ares replied. “But yes. I did know him.”

  Silence hung over them for a moment.

  “Look, I’m not really Christian myself, though I don’t rule out the possibility,” Desmond said. “But you just can’t drop a fact like that and not tell me more.”

  “What do you want to know?” Ares asked, shrugging.

  “Everything,” Desmond said. “How exactly did you run into Jesus, to begin with?”

  “Well, it was toward the end of the whole ‘we are gods’ period. Around a hundred BC we stopped ‘publicly’ holding court at Olympus. We’d still appear occasionally, and people still worshiped us. But as with everything else in our lives, even being worshiped grew old and stale. So I was traveling around Judea, hiring myself out as a mercenary when I wanted to fight. And in those days I wanted to fight. I loved it.

  “Everybody thought I was crazy. I could live forever, but I was always running off to join wars, or leading armies around causing chaos. By all rights, some random sword or arrow should’ve killed me, for all my skill. But it didn’t.”

  He paused, seeing himself in a hundred different types of armor, swinging a hundred different weapons. He saw himself before Troy, digging an arrow out of his heel. He saw himself in Judea, watching a young slinger kill his oversized friend. He saw himself at Plataea, fighting alongside Spartans as Persian cavalry swirled around them. He saw himself with Alexander, crushing those Persians’ descendants into the dust.

  “I’m assuming that’s why you chose ‘God of War,’ then,” Desmond said.

  “Yes. It seems so long ago now, but I can’t deny what I was. I’ve probably killed more human beings than any other person alive,” Ares said, his voice tightening. “Killed them, desecrated their corpses, raped their wives and daughters . . .”

  “Uh, okay,” Desmond said uneasily. “Why don’t we just get back to Jesus.”

  Ares nodded, wishing he could shift the memories of his sins as easily as he did his story.

  “So I come upon him one day, preaching to people. Telling them stories. I think he’s nuts, with all the ‘meek inherit the earth’ stuff, me being a warrior and all. And since I was a cocky bastard, I walked right up to him and basically told him he was full of shit. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Ares, you’re late.’”

  “Late?” Desmond asked.

  “Late. I was stunned he knew my actual name, since I don’t generally use it in my everyday life,” he said. “Then I realized that he’d spoken to me in Vesclevi! In my native tongue!”

  “Was that unusual?” Desmond asked.

  “Vesclevi was never a common language,” Ares said. “And by the time of Jesus it had been extinct for over two thousand years. Only immortals still knew it. Yet this man knows me, knows my language, knows everything.”

  “So what did you do?” Desmond pushed.

  “I pulled my sword on him,” Ares said. “And threatened him. To which he just said, ‘Redemption isn’t beyond you.’ To me! So I tell him that he clearly doesn’t know who he’s dealing with, and he responds by naming every human being that I had ever killed. Their names, how I killed them, all of it. At which point I just stared slack-jawed. So, shortly after that I started following him around.”

  “Wait? Following him? As in, apostle following him?”

  “Yes,” Ares said. “As an apostle.”

  “Which one?”

  The tone of the question struck Ares as strange. Here he was telling a man he’d been an actual follower of Jesus, and yet the man asked the question as if it were as normal as the sunrise.

  “I’m not sure I should tell you,” Ares said.

  “So you were Judas, then, yes?”

  Ares’ head jerked, locking on the man. Desmond didn’t flinch. He merely looked on with a curious expression.

  “Makes sense,” Desmond went on. “What other apostle would want to keep their identity secret?”

  “It isn’t like you think,” Ares said.

  “More and more I’m finding things rarely are,” Desmond answered.

  “He asked me to do it,” Ares said. “He asked me.”

  “Jesus asked you to betray him to his murderers?” Desmond asked, again as if it were a simple fact with an easy answer.

  “Yes,” Ares said, the heavy weight of guilt forming in his stomach. “He asked me. He said it had to happen for redemption to occur, and that I was the only one strong enough to bear it.”

  He swallowed bitterly, staring out toward the ocean.

  “Maybe he figured since I had so many deaths on my soul already, one more wouldn’t hurt,” Ares grumbled.

  “Maybe he figured if you were strong enough to deal with immortality, you could handle it,” Desmond offered.

  “The thought has occurred to me,” Ares replied. “Not that it does any good.”

  “You regret it?” Desmond ventured.

  “Yes . . . no . . . I—I don’t know,” Ares stammered. “He asked me. He asked me to betray him! How could I say no to him? To God? To the man who basically led me to remake myself into a semi-decent human being?”

  He sighed, shaking his head.

  “But I still feel it,” Ares said bitterly. “Every day, like
a weight on me. I killed him. I killed God. Me. Whether he asked me or not . . . I . . .”

  He shot to his feet, pacing nervously back and forth across the deck.

  “Two thousand years and I still can’t—” Ares began, then cut off the words. Desmond said nothing for a long moment.

  “But Judas hung himself,” Desmond said. “Unless that’s one of those embellishments Artemis keeps telling me about.”

  “No. It isn’t,” Ares said gravely. “I did.”

  “Artemis told me you’re physically as easy to kill as any mortal human,” Desmond said. “So how did you manage to survive a hanging?”

  “I don’t know,” Ares answered, his mind going back through the years. He could see the cedar tree he’d chosen, could see the dusty soil rushing at him, moments before the rope pulled taut. Then . . .

  “I went to the tree, and I did it,” Ares said. “Then I found myself on the ground, staring up at a dangling rope. The noose was still around my neck. When I grabbed it, I saw it had been cut clean through, by a blade of some sort. I looked around, but nobody was there, and somehow, I was alive.”

  Desmond nodded, clearly processing it.

  “Guess you had somebody looking out for you,” Desmond said.

  “I wasn’t worthy of it,” Ares replied.

  “Well, if God was responsible for cutting that rope, then clearly you were,” Desmond replied.

  “Says a man who’s ‘not really Christian,’” Ares said.

  If Desmond felt challenged, he didn’t show it. His response was as matter-of-fact as anything he had said.

  “I do not pretend to know what is behind this reality, or this universe, or whatever you want to call it,” Desmond said. “I don’t think I’m actually capable of knowing. I’m not sure anybody is.”

  “Some would say faith is about believing without knowing,” Ares replied.

  “Which is why I don’t dismiss it out of hand,” Desmond said. “I think the atheists are as crazy as the fundamentalists. Look, I know twenty-nine isn’t a whole lot of life by your standards, but the older I get the more sure I am that my mind, for all its great wonders, is incredibly limited. All human minds are. I mean, people pretended they could control economics, and it gave us socialism and a hundred million dead. People pretend they can separate fact from emotion and be objective, yet the news is still a sensationalist swamp and the smartest people in the world still do incredibly stupid things. So the more I think about an omnipotent being, or beings, or life force, the more I start to wonder if I would ever be able to understand such a thing.”