Quick said, “Just because he went underground, that doesn’t mean he disappeared. Or that there aren’t plenty of mortals out there willing to follow him.”
“Mortal losers,” mumbled Lucky, “following a loser god. Do you know that he’s still using transfigured souls as personal agents? Who does that anymore?”
“How do you know that?”
Lucky gritted his teeth.
“I might have run into one.”
Quick turned off the television.
“No shit?”
“Just one,” added Lucky hastily. “It wasn’t even a big one. And I smote it. End of story.”
“They deserve to know. For their own safety.”
“They’re not in any danger. Anyway, aren’t mortals supposed to die in service of their god? Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?”
Quick squinted hard at Lucky.
“Don’t blame me.” Lucky picked up a magazine and pretended to read it. “Blame the system.”
The serpent god drained the last of his tomato juice and slithered into the kitchen to refill it. Lucky thumbed through the magazine until Quick returned. He turned on the television, and neither of them said anything until the show ended.
“I used to think like you,” said Quick. “I used to think mortals were disposable commodities, to be used and discarded at my whim. You lose a couple, you gain a couple. What did one or a hundred or even a thousand here or there really mean in the end?”
“Hey now,” said Lucky. “I’m not advocating strapping anyone onto an altar and cutting out their still-beating heart.”
Quick shot him a dirty look. “That’s not fair. That was a different time.”
Lucky shrugged. “I’m just making the observation. That’s all.”
“I never asked them to do that,” said Quick. “They just started doing it on their own.”
“You didn’t stop them, though, did you?”
“No, I didn’t stop them. I should’ve, but I didn’t.”
Lucky tossed aside the magazine. “Aw, crap, Quick. I’m sorry. That was a cheap shot.”
“No, you’re right. I wanted the blood. I didn’t ask for it, but when they offered it, I didn’t complain.”
“Different time. Like you said.”
“Did you ever wonder how a handful of conquistadors managed to topple an empire? How I let that happen?”
“You always said you were on vacation when that business went down. By the time you came back, it was already over.”
“Come on now. What kind of god would I be if I didn’t check in on my followers now and then?” Quick blew a raspberry. “That story was bull, and you always knew it. Everyone always knew it. We just play along because if there’s one thing we gods excel at it’s avoiding responsibility.”
Lucky said, “Mortals kill each other. It’s not our job to solve all their problems.”
“Bullshit!” roared Quick. A clap of thunder shook the house. His glass of tomato juice spilled across the carpet, and the sofa fell over, sending Lucky sprawling.
Quick transformed into his human shape. He stood twelve feet tall and had to hunch under the ceiling. Symbols in fresh blood were painted on his flesh. In one hand, he held an onyx spear. In the other, he dangled a collection of skulls. He bared his pointed teeth and glared with bloodshot, raging eyes.
“Take it easy, buddy,” said Lucky.
Quick glowered. “I saw it happening. I knew what was going on.” He lowered his head and wiped a tear from his cheek. “I watched them die.
“They prayed for my intervention. But I thought, screw’em. Not my problem. If they couldn’t take care of a handful of Spaniards with blunderbusses then why the hell should I bother? Let the weaker followers perish so that the stronger should thrive. And if I lost them all, so what? I’d just start again. There were always more mortals, more followers. So I stood by and did nothing. Nada. I just let them die. They offered rivers of blood in tribute that I gladly accepted, but when it came time to do my part, I just walked away.”
Quick shrank into human proportions, and helped Lucky right the sofa.
“But you want to know the worst part about it?” asked Quick. “The worst part is that after it was all over, I still didn’t care. Do you want to know when I started caring?”
“No,” said Lucky.
“It was about fifteen years later. I had a handful of followers, but nothing to get excited about. I couldn’t figure it out. Here I was, the grand and revered Quetzalcoatl, and I was mostly forgotten. A few hundred thousand dead mortals didn’t mean much to me, but they sure as hell made an impression on any potential followers. Guess they decided that if ol’ Quick wasn’t powerful enough to save an empire, they’d be better off looking for divine intervention somewhere else. And damned if I didn’t agree after I had a century to think about it.”
He transformed into his slouching serpent form.
“By then it was too late, of course. I’d blown my reputation. I’d lost all credibility. End of story. Game over.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Quick. You’ll get back on your feet… er, tail.”
“No, I’m finished. Just an old used-up god, a remnant from a different era, more of a novelty than a deity. Don’t make the same mistakes I did, Lucky.”
Quick sighed and ran his tail around the tomato juice stain. “Teri is not going to be happy about that.”
“I’ll tell her I did it,” said Lucky. “It’ll be easier for her to take.”
“Thanks.”
Lucky slapped Quick on the shoulder. “I get what you’re saying about Phil and Teri.”
“So you’re going to tell them?”
“I’ll let them know. When the time is right.”
Quick shot Lucky a glare.
“I need some time to show them the benefits of my company. You can’t expect me to spring this other teeny little mostly unimportant detail on them out of nowhere, can you?”
“No, I guess not,” agreed Quick. “But you should tell them. And tell them soon.”
“Oh, absolutely. Next week or the week after that. A month at the very most. In the meantime, I’m sure everything will be fine.”
With a sigh, Quick slipped off the sofa and slithered away.
11
Phil stopped at a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket on the way to work. He didn’t normally waste his money but decided it wouldn’t hurt to check the benefits of his new god. He figured that a lottery ticket was a good test for a minor prosperity god, and Phil wasn’t taking anything on faith.
He won twenty bucks.
In the interest of science, he bought another five tickets. Three of them were winners, and one broke even. He ended up with an extra hundred dollars. Under ordinary circumstances, he would’ve walked away, but he continued the experiment. He spent the winnings on tickets. Some won. Some lost. And he ended up maxing out at the hundred-dollar threshold.
Phil would’ve purchased another round of tickets, but he had to get to work. His understanding of the god/follower relationship told him there was a limit to the good fortune Lucky could provide. There was only so much prosperity to go around, and until he earned more favor to raise his share, he figured a hundred bucks wasn’t bad. Just a little help. Exactly what Lucky had promised.
There was a traffic jam on the expressway, and the navigation charm pulled off on its own. He didn’t fight it. The eyeball hanging from his rearview mirror seemed to know what it was doing. It guided him down side streets and alleyways on a route he would never have picked on his own. But it worked. Whatever lane he was in was the fastest. Every light was green. And his car merged so smoothly, it was almost as if the other drivers had all signed an agreement to let him pass. Phil’s only complaint was that the charm did such a great job that he found himself a little bored by the end. He’d remember to bring some reading material tomorrow. Maybe he could get a DVD player installed.
There was a new computer waiting in his cubicle. H
e ran his hands along the monitor.
Elliot’s head appeared over the cubicle. “They found it in the back of a storeroom. Nobody even knew it was there. Must’ve been misplaced. They offered it to Bob, but it’s kind of old so he turned them down. So lucky break for you, huh? And since my car showed up at my apartment yesterday, all polished with a full tank of gas and a two-for-one coupon for Applebee’s pinned under the wiper, and your shirt is devoid of jelly doughnut stains today, I can only assume that you’ve straightened things out with your new god.”
“Yup. From now on, it’s smooth sailing.”
Phil leaned back. His chair collapsed, and he fell on the floor.
Elliot couldn’t stop laughing.
“That’s priceless,” he wheezed between guffaws.
Phil inspected the chair. The screws had all fallen out.
“That’s weird,” remarked Elliot needlessly. “You didn’t do anything to anger your god, did you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Eh, probably just a prank. They’ll do that sometimes. Or it could only be a coincidence. Things like that happen, even with luck on your side.”
Phil inserted the screws back into place. He rattled the loose chair.
“Here, dude, this might come in handy.” Elliot reached over the cubicle wall and held up a screwdriver.
“Thanks,” said Phil. “Where did you get this?”
“Had it in my desk drawer. It was there when I moved into the cubicle. Funny coincidence, huh?” Elliot smiled devilishly. “Or is it?”
Phil smiled as if amused, but the smile was accompanied by the dawning realization that perhaps life wasn’t so simple when you followed a luck god. The idea kept popping into his head. It was easy to ignore at first, but as the day progressed it started occupying more of his thoughts until it proved to be a distraction noticeable not just to him but to those around him.
Without a god watching over you, it was safe to assume that things just happened. Finding twenty bucks on the sidewalk was good luck, and having a pigeon crap on your shoulder was merely ill fortune. There was an advantage to being subject to the whims of an indifferent universe. You didn’t have to interpret every little thing that happened to you during your day.
If Phil had picked a patron of gardening then it would be a lot easier to blow off these little occurrences unless they involved making sure the tomatoes grew properly or keeping gophers from eating the carrots. If his deity’s domain had been automobiles, Phil could know a leaking radiator was probably a sign he’d fallen short in his tribute and a lack of bugs on his windshield was a divine thumbs-up. In either case, it would be easy to ignore a sprained ankle or a cracked foundation as just a random event.
Phil’s god was a god of luck, and everything was in his province. All the little things, anyway. And Phil was beginning to understand that life often hinged on those moments.
The support of the gods wasn’t absolute. At least once a year a foolhardy disciple of Zeus was struck by lightning on the assumption that he was immune to thunderbolts. The truth was that with Zeus on your side, the odds of getting zapped went down significantly, but no god, not even a big leaguer like the King of Olympus, could immunize all his followers against every stray bolt of lightning from the sky. And Lucky couldn’t protect Phil from every possible bit of bad luck.
But Phil couldn’t help but see a conspiracy of heavenly disapproval behind every touch of ill fortune. The supreme irony was that with Lucky at his side such moments were rare, and that just made them more obvious. And it wasn’t Phil’s imagination that those unlucky moments were a bit more unusual now.
For five minutes, he couldn’t find a working pen. Even the pens given to him by coworkers were inexplicably dry once he took them in hand.
At lunch, the waiter dropped Phil’s food three times and had to send it back to the kitchen. The waiter apologized. The restaurant waived the check. But Phil wasn’t certain their incompetence was the problem.
For about an hour, his shoelaces kept coming untied. He tried knotting and double-knotting, but nothing could stop them from hanging loose. He didn’t trip, but he came close a few times.
He ignored the pen incident, and he tried not to make too much of the dropped food. But after the shoelace problem he nearly called Lucky. Phil didn’t follow through on that impulse. He did not want to be one of those people who saw the work of divine powers in every little thing. Or even worse, one of those other types of people who appealed for divine intervention at the slightest inconvenience. Favor was supposed to make his life easier, but only an idiot expected it to solve all his problems.
He resolved to stop thinking about it. He couldn’t quite succeed, but he did manage to stop focusing on it so much. By quitting time, it occupied only a little corner of his mind, and he was able to ignore that corner for the most part.
Elliot and Phil were leaving at the same time. They ascended the stairway to the top level of the parking garage, where they parked out of habit. They weren’t really friends so much as two guys who spent eight hours beside each other five days a week. Neither disliked the other, but they never saw each other outside the office.
“One more day closer to death,” remarked Elliot with a grin. “At least when I get to Tartarus, I’ll be used to the grind. Pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity almost sounds relaxing compared to another boring meeting on”—he shuddered—“teamwork dynamics.”
Phil chuckled as they exited onto the garage roof. Half the spaces were empty, leaving the place wide open. The fading heat of the day rose from the black asphalt. A flock of finches perched on Phil’s car. And only Phil’s car.
Every bird was red with black spots and bright blue eyes. They were eerily silent and almost unmoving. They’d also caked his car with bird crap. Elliot’s car, right beside Phil’s, was untouched.
As one, the birds turned their blue eyes in Phil’s direction. Then, without a screech or a warble, the flock launched itself in Phil’s direction. It whirled around Phil and Elliot like a cyclone. The chirping grew into a ghastly chorus. Phil covered his ears. But it wasn’t the sound that drove a wedge into his brain. It was something supernatural underneath it, a psychic assault. The static made it hard to think, but it didn’t stop him from pondering just how painful it would be to be pecked to death by a hundred little bird beaks.
Phil and Elliot made a break for it. Phil’s car was closer, and it obligingly opened its doors for them. They jumped inside, and the doors slammed shut again. By a stroke of luck, none of the birds made it in with them. The car shielded them from the birds’ deafening chirps.
Phil slouched in his seat and exhaled.
“Thanks,” he told the navigation charm hanging from the mirror.
The eyeball bobbed at him.
The finches settled in a circle around his car. They went silent again.
“Thank you, Lucky.” He turned to Elliot. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. You?”
Phil checked himself for any cuts or bruises, but miraculously, the birds hadn’t laid a beak on him.
An especially large finch glared at him through the windshield. Then, in an instant, they were gone, launching themselves skyward and disappearing.
The navigation charm hanging from Teri’s rearview wasn’t perfect. It had trouble parallel parking. And while it was pretty good at avoiding traffic jams, it wasn’t able to perform miracles.
A series of fender benders, a serious accident, and a tractor trailer jackknife had reduced traffic to a crawl. There was nothing to do about it but sit it out. The charm made it easier. She didn’t have to pay attention and could while away the time reading.
It was probably why she never saw the truck coming.
Her car was passing through an intersection when a cement truck barreled along and smashed into the rear half of her coupe. She spun out like a top and bounced off another automobile, coming to a stop across two lanes.
It happened so fast that it was over before
she even realized. But it was only the first part of the accident.
Brakes squealed as another car plowed into the coupe. She was knocked a few feet more and into the path of another truck. She yelped as it moved forward. Its bumper was higher than her hood, so the truck bounced onto the coupe. Its huge front tire rolled across the hood and right toward the windshield. Teri ducked into her seat, as if that would prevent her from being crushed.
But the coupe didn’t crush. Even as the large vehicle came to a halt with its tire resting on her roof.
It took her a few seconds to realize she wasn’t hurt. Another few seconds to remember that she was riding in an invulnerable car. There wasn’t even a crack in the windshield. She was a little shaken up, but even that seemed minimal. Maybe there was some kind of enchantment that protected the passengers from the worst of a collision.
Lucky had saved her life.
She rolled down her window and peered upward at the truck perched above her. Cautiously, she exited the coupe and moved to a safe distance. The intersection was a pileup of automobiles. The cement truck that had caused the chain of vehicular carnage had plowed into a storefront. The driver peeked from the open door. He glanced around the scene. His eyes met hers, and he frowned.
He jumped to the sidewalk and ran away. She lost sight of him in the crowd.
A trio of red spotted pigeons landed on the truck. They were strangely un-pigeonlike in their movements. Their heads didn’t bob, and they just perched on the truck, staring down at her. And just her.
A shiver ran through her, but that had to be because of the accident, the noise, the chaos. The pigeons were just something weird for her to focus on. But she had a winged serpent sleeping on her couch and her best friend was dating a raccoon, so Teri’s definition of notably weird had changed over the past few days.
Still, the oddly colored pigeons qualified.
A siren drew her attention, and she glanced away. When she looked back, the birds were gone.
But she couldn’t get them out of her mind.
Bruce made it back to his home without getting caught.
A Lee Martinez Page 9
