Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  He knew that it was just his mind playing tricks with probability and that he had to be very careful. He had never been this far out before and was playing with forces that could easily get out of control. He thought of the sorcerer’s apprentice again and quickly quashed it.

  Then, he heard the howl of the wolf pack far off to his right. His steed reared up, its forelegs pawing the sky, steam snorting from its nostrils as it tested the air. Its hooves crashed down through plate glass probability as it veered toward the sound, galloping flat out across a dry streambed of smoked glass that swam with wraithlike sea monsters.

  He closed in on the sound of the pack. Their barking howls grew more distinct. As he drew nearer, it sounded more and more like some kind of growling, guttural, yipping language.

  His steed climbed a ghostly ridge, slipping and sliding through layers of shifting gray probability like thick ground fog. Harry could hear the wolves clearly now. He could almost feel them, like dense, black balls of malevolence, condensing out of the fog.

  He reached the top of the ridge and broke out of the fog. He spotted five wolves far below, loping out across a flat, desert landscape. Three of them carried limp, gray, rag-like shapes clenched between their jaws. The rags fluttered weakly. Harry heard a faint wail of despair and terror and realized that these were the kas of the recently dead. The wolves had probably snapped them off the resurrection trail from the battle in the Sinks.

  A few seconds later, he saw one of the wolves bite down hard on the ka it was carrying. Then it tilted its head back, opened its mouth and gulped it down without even breaking stride.

  They eat kas, just like that Susan thing tried to eat mine, Harry thought in numb horror as he followed the pack out onto the desert through a shifting mirage of rattle snakes and dust demons, through spectral sagebrush and tumbleweed. At last, he rode out of smoked glass probability onto the solid alkali flats of a dry lake bed where probability had collapsed and reality condensed around two ancient black, basalt pillars, standing beneath a burnt blue sky.

  Harry looked around uncertainly. The alkali flats seemed to go on forever in every direction. There was no sign of the wolf pack or of the shifting gray worlds of probability. For as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but alkali flats and these two pillars. They stood about fifteen feet apart and were at least twice the height of a man. The basalt was polished to a deep mirror-like sheen and perfectly carved into the shape of a man with the stylized head of a jackal. Its red ruby eyes gleamed malevolently down at him.

  Harry recognized them instantly. He’d seen pictures of Anubis, the jackal-headed guardian of the underworld and Egyptian god of the dead, in Jake Lloyd’s book. When Jericho first called the wolf-headed invaders, the Anubis, Harry just assumed it was a convenient metaphor. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Were the ancient gods rising again? Could these pillars be guarding the entrance to the underworld, the home world of the black wolves of Anubis? Were these the Anubis gates of Jake Lloyd’s book? Had he once stood on these alkaline flats and stared up at these two statues?

  Harry felt a shiver of premonition. He turned and looked back. Nothing had changed. He could see the faint shimmer of silver thread that bound him to his body extending back over the flats and disappearing into thin air about thirty feet away.

  Everything out here had a bright hard-edged solidity, everything except for that thread and Harry and his steed. They were as insubstantial as ghosts. He raised an arm and looked right through it, like looking through a faint mist. He stepped down off his mount and walked towards the pillars. Behind him the stallion dissolved into a cloud of flickering motes of light. They swarmed around Harry like moths around a flame and then swirled down into his body and disappeared.

  As he approached the two stone pillars, they began to change, running and flowing like melting wax. Then, between one step and the next, they snapped into two roughhewn granite posts, moss covered, cracked, and weathered. They stood less than five feet high, leaning towards each other with an old, rusty, wrought iron gate between. The gate leaned open on one hinge. Beyond it Harry could see an ancient, overgrown graveyard with cracked, broken headstones sinking into the rank undergrowth. The sky was a lowering gray drizzle.

  Harry smiled grimly. It seemed that even though probability had collapsed into some form of reality, he was still in the spirit realm where what you expect is what you get. This was supposed to be a gateway to the land of the dead and reality conformed to his unconscious idea by serving up a graveyard. The original pillars were probably only a reality residue of how the Anubis wolves saw the entrance to their world.

  He studied the scene and hesitated. There was no telling what lay beyond those gates. “You’ll never get another chance like this,” he told himself. “You mean a chance to commit suicide?” he answered. “Just a quick peek and then jump back again,” he told himself. “Just make sure you don’t get your umbilical caught in the door. Okay let’s do it!”

  He stepped through the gate. He felt a moment of disorienting vertigo as his umbilical lifeline gave a sharp, painful tug. The cemetery vanished, and he stood in some kind of prehistoric jungle instead. The air was hot and humid, with a steaming mist sifting through the thick undergrowth. The place was a riot of all the wrong colors. The sun was an arc welder blue, white dwarf, and much too close, while the sky was tinted a garish Halloween orange. The vegetation ranged in color from bruised blacks and blues, through corpse greens, to livid violets.

  He realized he was standing in the dark entrance to a large stone structure. He turned and looked up. The entrance formed a truncated triangle at least three hundred feet high, framed by huge basalt plinths. He had to step out to get a full view of the building. It rose out of the rampant jungle growth, tier by stone tier, a gigantic black pyramid, like some fabled lost temple from a B-movie adventure.

  A narrow dirt track led away from the pyramid, and Harry started to follow it. Lavender-colored fog steamed up from the jungle floor and curled around his legs. The air tasted of copper and cyanide. Suddenly, someone screamed nearby. It was a very human scream, followed by a loud barking shout that wasn’t human at all.

  Harry heard someone running towards him, crashing wildly through the thick jungle growth. A moment later, a man, his eyes bulging with blind terror, his naked body crisscrossed with bleeding welts burst out of the jungle and ran straight into him. Instinctively, Harry stepped back and raised his hands to take the hit, but the man just ran right through him as if he didn’t exist, which in a sense, he probably didn’t.

  Once again, Harry felt that sharp disorienting tug on his lifeline and a moment later a transformed Anubis wolf charged out of the undergrowth. It was over seven feet tall with the body of a man and the head of a jackal, like the two pillars on the alkali flats. Its body was as black and shiny as polished basalt. The fur around its head stood out in a thick ruff as stiff as porcupine quills. It wore a bright red harness that consisted of two tank-top like straps that went over its shoulders and merged into one wide strip that went down between its legs and up its back. A wide black belt was cinched around its waist with some kind of weapon hanging from it in a long black scabbard tied down on its thigh.

  Harry wondered momentarily if this was one of the Anubis wolves he had been trailing that had now taken on its jackal form. If so, then maybe that poor, frightened human was one of the kas, the rags of dead-soul stuff, they had been carrying back with them, but how did this poor human get a solid body while Harry remained a ghost? Could it be because Harry’s body was still alive in another dimension with a lifeline back to it?

  He had no time for answers, no time to even step aside before the jackal-headed Anubis crashed right through him. Unlike the human though, the Anubis staggered momentarily and shook its shaggy head in confusion. Then it sighted the fleeing human and whipped out its weapon in a lightning fast, gunfighter draw. The “gun” resembled a spun glass ankh, one of those ancient Egyptian crosses that had a round handle instead of the bar abo
ve the cross piece. The Anubis wolf held it by the handle and fired without even sighting.

  A cone of blue-white light shot from the end of the ankh and struck the fleeing man high in the back. He screamed in agony and froze in mid-step as the energy beam peeled the skin from his back in a cloud of sparkling molecules that were sucked up the beam and into the ankh.

  Like a human vacuum cleaner, Harry thought in horror, as he watched the beam peel the body from the bone in seconds. Then the skeleton crumbled into sparkles of dust that were also instantly vacuumed away. The beam cut off, leaving only a faint wisp of smoke and a burnt circle of vegetation where the man had stood. There was no sign of his ka.

  The Anubis slowly turned and stared at the spot where Harry stood. It squinted and tilted its head from side to side as if trying to find just the right angle to see what was hiding there. Harry decided it was time to leave. He turned and started to run down the dirt tail. He imagined Anubis all around him, flitting wraithlike through the lavender fog that hissed and sizzled with the bright blue sutures of their beam weapons.

  Just then, he felt another rush of vertigo and a sudden tug on his umbilical, this time more powerful and painful than before. The Anubis howled triumphantly and lifted its weapon just as Harry was snatched backwards with a powerful yank from his umbilical. He felt as if he was on the end of a recoiling bungee cord that had been stretched to its elastic limit. The world of the Anubis wolves vanished in the blink of an eye.

  Harry felt the instant his umbilical snapped. One moment, he was being pulled back to his body; the next, he was like a balloon with its string cut, tumbling toward the white light of death, the resurrection trail, and the wolves that were probably waiting to tear his ka apart.

  He had a momentary vision of Diana’s face crushed with sorrow and defeat, and he screamed in denial.

  42

  Insomniac Ghosts

  Roger couldn’t sleep. That was nothing new. He hadn’t been able to sleep for the last six months. He went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t like what he saw, the hanging jowls, the broken blood vessels in his nose, the hint of gray in the ginger stubble on his cheeks. Harry was right. He looked like shit and the black eye the son of a bitch laid on him didn’t help. How could he have let it go this far? He needed a drink or maybe something a lot stronger, but he was afraid if he started he wouldn’t stop and this night would end like so many others with him passed out on the floor.

  “No, you’re just going to have to go through this cold turkey,” he muttered at the image in the mirror. He thought of Susan. He tried to push it away, but the demons of guilt and pain kept coming back, tearing at his guts with their sharp, little teeth.

  God, he needed a drink! He sank onto the toilet stool, closed his eyes, and buried his face in his hands. Closing his eyes only made things worse. Susan waited for him behind his closed eyes, Susan with her tortured, battered face, Susan screaming, “Help me! Please help me!”

  “No-o-o!” he screamed and jumped up and came face to face with himself in the mirror. “No-o-o!” he screamed again and slammed his fist into his mirror image. The mirror shattered, and the sharp burst of pain from his bleeding fist brought him to his senses. He pulled a large splinter of glass out of his lacerated fist and dropped it on the tile floor. He watched the blood dripping onto the rose petal tiles. “Oh, Susan, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice flat and hollow.

  Me and Harry, he thought as he got out some bandages and antiseptic and began dressing the wound. You can sure pick them, Susan. Me and Harry, we both led you down the garden path to perdition, didn’t we?

  He understood Harry now. They were as close as blood brothers. They both shared the betrayal of love and the agony of guilt. Their lives were so intertwined, their fates so scarily similar that he almost wondered if maybe there wasn’t some kind of Old Testament god of vengeance and retribution pulling the strings behind the scenes.

  He finished bandaging his hand and looked up and caught a glimpse of a blood-shot eye staring back at him from a long splinter of mirror that still remained in place. He turned away. “It’s going to be a long night,” he thought and shut off the light.

  He was alone, the house as quiet as a tomb and filled with ghosts. He walked down to the gym and turned on the overhead lights. The skeletal chrome and plast-steel bars and rings and weights of the exercise machines gleamed with the cold comfort of an operating theater; or maybe a high tech torture chamber, he thought.

  On nights like this, he would come down here, avoiding all those damned machines, and head straight for the heavy punching bag and the speed bag he kept in a little room at the back. On nights like this, he’d tear into them with a ferocity fueled by hate and despair until, at last, he hung against the bag drenched in sweat, exhausted, and gasping for breath. And sometimes after an hour or two down here beating up his rage, sometimes, if he was lucky and it was a good night, he might even be able to fall asleep without waking up screaming.

  Tonight though, he didn’t even have this way out. His bloody bandaged fist split open as soon as he began, and the bag was soon slick with blood and he had to stop. He wrapped a towel around his fist and leaned back against the wall. Slowly, he slid down to the floor, pulled his knees up against his chest, and stared out at the gym he hated so much.

  It/she wanted it, not him. He watched her working out down here for hours, the unholy thing that possessed her driving her to exhaustion. They wanted to ride only strong, healthy animals.

  He closed his eyes and thought about the party. He knew there was no use fighting it any longer. It always came to this point late at night when he could no longer put it off, when exhaustion and despair wore away his defenses until, at last, he just gave up. He always thought that maybe he would be able to sleep afterwards if he just got it out of his system, but it never seemed to work out that way.

  It was the party, that goddamn party! Why did he have to go to that goddamn party? Why did he have to drag Susan along? A bitter smile cut his face like a razor. How many times had Harry probably asked himself the same thing?

  Susan hated that crowd. She couldn’t understand what Roger saw in those rich, powerful, greedy men and their beautiful, predatory, amoral women, the cream of society, the movers and shakers. What did Harry call them, “The not-so-beautiful people”? Roger wondered if Harry ever suspected how right he was. Scratch away the varnish of money and power, take away the makeup and clothes, and you were left with a pack of wild, ugly scavengers who devoured people and things in their insatiable hunger for more and more.

  They were the perfect devotees of black ice addiction. No desire was too gross to satisfy, no perversion too obscene, no drug too dangerous. Hell, you hardly noticed any difference from before they were possessed and after, Roger thought.

  So why the fuck did you have to go to their goddamn parties, he asked himself, just as he had asked himself a thousand times before. Who the hell were you trying to impress? You were already top of the heap, the king of the castle, you had it all. You didn’t need to impress anyone.

  He knew the answer even though he didn’t like it. He’d been born dirt poor and brought up to resent it. He’d had his face pushed in it, made to feel worthless, never quite good enough. After his parents were killed, he grew up fast, like a feral animal, alone, despised, and feared.

  Nothing much changed when he got to New Hollywood, where he ruthlessly clawed his way up from the bottom, wheeling and dealing, always on the outside looking in, always looked down upon and despised by those “not-so-beautiful people” who held the real reins of power. Then, when he finally saw his chance, he took it and when he became richer and more powerful than any of them, when he finally became king of the castle and didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, it still wasn’t enough.

  He was like a man who had been starved all his life and couldn’t stop eating. He needed constant proof that he really was someone. He needed those goddamn parties t
hat he threw on his private island estate. He needed all the “not-so-beautiful people” scrabbling for invitations, and he needed an invitation to every major event, and it was never enough.

  Sitting there under the harsh glare of the overhead lights, looking out at the gleaming chrome and steel skeletons, he realized for the first time that maybe he and “the not-so-beautiful people” were not so different after all. He was just as hungry, just as insatiable. No matter how much money or power or prestige he had, no matter how many parties he threw or how many of the rich and powerful patted him on the back and told him what a wonderful guy he was, it never seemed to be enough. It never filled the hole that years of poverty, slights, and scorn had left inside him.

  The only thing he ever had that was clean and pure was his love of Susan and in the end, he betrayed even that to his insatiable hunger. He knew there was black ice at that party. He thought he knew how dangerous it was, how ruthlessly proselytizing black ice addicts could be, yet he took Susan there anyway.

  Then he left her for a bit of backroom, back-slapping wheeling and dealing, left her unprotected, a lamb surrounded by a pack of wolves and when he came back, Susan was gone. Oh, her body was still there, unconscious on a settee, on a penthouse terrace overlooking the Emperor’s fairytale castle. There was a half-empty glass on the table beside her.

  Roger squeezed his eyes shut and banged his head back against the concrete wall again and again trying to drive away the image, trying to stop the inevitable scene from playing itself out in his mind.

  He forced his eyes open and pushed himself to his feet with a heavy groan. He looked around, hating this place where the wolves had driven his wife, bending, twisting, and stretching her mercilessly on these mindless machines. The wolves had an almost neurotic need to drive their victims like racehorses, training and exercising them constantly.