God Drug

by Stephen L. Antczak

  “It’s only fair.”

  “She’s afraid,” the General said, looking at Hanna.

  “So are we,” Lena said.

  “I’m scared shitless,” Tom added.

  “It’s not the same,” the General said.

  “Bullshit!” Lena yelled. “I’ve never been more scared in my entire life!” Tears started. “I don’t want to go back out there, but Sparrow’s right, we can’t leave our friends out there!” She managed to swallow back a sob.

  “Please don’t make me…” Hanna said, shaking her head, her eyes wild with fear. “It’s just that…” Hanna struggled to speak without breaking down. “We’ve had nightmares for as long as we can remember.” She glanced at the General. “Things… just like it, they wiped us out in Vietnam, except it wasn’t really Vietnam, it wasn’t really a war… it was like a game that got out of control and our friends… died, and we were there, we felt it.”

  “I’m sorry, Hanna,” Sparrow said softly.

  Hanna closed her eyes, squeezed them shut… then opened them. She looked calm.

  “Let’s go,” the General said. “Let’s get this over with.” He moved toward the door.

  “Wait,” Tom said. They all looked at him. “I don’t like it. We can’t trust him. How do we know he won’t cause more trouble?”

  “My orders are to merge with her,” the General said, nodding his head toward Sparrow. He didn’t see her shudder. “If this is what I need to do in order to accomplish that, then I’ll do it. I’m a soldier.” He looked right at Hanna as he said this. “I follow orders, whether I like them or not.”

  “Let’s just go,” Sparrow said. “The longer we wait, the less chance our friends have.”

  She moved toward the door, then suddenly faltered. She reached out and grabbed Tom’s shoulder to steady herself.

  “You okay?” he asked Sparrow

  “Dizzy all of a sudden.” she replied.

  “You look really pale,” Lena said, concern evident in her voice.

  “I don’t feel good,” Sparrow.

  “Maybe you’d better lie down.”

  Sparrow shook her head. “I’m going with…” Her voice trailed off. Without warning she crumpled; Tom was barely able to catch her and keep her from whacking her head on the hardwood floor.

  “Sparrow?” She didn’t respond. Tom knelt down by her side as he eased her down “She’s breathing.”

  “Let’s get her to her bed,” Lena said. She and Hanna helped Tom carry Sparrow to her room, the General right behind them. They gently put her in bed.

  “Okay guys,” Lena said. “Get out. We’re not going to undress her with you in here.” It was directed at the General. “Tom can keep you company.” She smiled sweetly.

  “Come on,” Tom told the General, who obeyed. They left the room.

  Lena and Hanna pulled Sparrow’s skirt, sneakers, and socks off, leaving her in just a t-shirt and panties. Then they pulled a sheet over her. She appeared to be asleep, but having a less than pleasant dream.

  “I wonder what she’s dreaming,” Lena said.

  “We can share it, if you want,” Hanna said. “Because of the drug. Do you want to?”

  Lena shook her head. She didn’t want to know what was going on in Sparrow’s subconsciousness. She felt Sparrow’s forehead; it was hot. She turned on the ceiling fan to keep Sparrow cool.

  “Nothing better happen to her,” she told Hanna.

  “I don’t want anything to happen. I’m not the same as the General.”

  They rejoined Tom and the General, who were sitting silently in the living room.

  The General spoke first. “We need a strategy.” Perplexed stares greeted this pronouncement. “To bring your people back here,” he reminded them.

  Realization. Their friends were still out there. Surely some of their friends had escaped the massacre at the Shop. The heli-dragon was probably hunting them.

  “Where would they go if they’re alive?” the General asked. “Is there a rendezvous point?”

  “We’re not soldiers,” Lena said. “We don’t have things like rendezvous points.”

  “Here,” Tom suddenly said. “The Blue House. They all come here.” Lena looked at him. “Remember that time Bob Nob came here after getting mugged?” he asked.

  Lena nodded. “Right! And Sin came here after waking up with some guy on top of her in bed. Luckily she was able to bash him upside the head with her bong.”

  “They’ll all be trying to make it back here,” the General said, thoughtful.

  The General snapped his fingers, a loud crack! “They’ll be using the trees for cover, to stay hidden.”

  “What if they can’t make it? What if they’re hurt?” Tom asked. “Do we just leave them out there? Or do we go get them? If we were out there… what would we want?”

  Light shone over the horizon, a faint glow, perhaps a harbinger of hope that with the day would return normality, the ashes would uncrumble, the flames would flicker and die, and the grip of the drug would loosen. The pre-dawn sky almost hummed with deep purple and flashes, hints of red… promise.

  “Beautiful,” Lena said.

  The General grunted.

  “Do you hear something?” Tom asked.

  They listened. Their footsteps crunched lightly in brittle ash as they trooped along Second Avenue. Lena’s car had been in no shape to drive, gutted by fire and practically shorn in two. Hanna walked behind them, refusing to let the General near her, and especially not behind her. She tilted her head to listen, though, as well.

  “Humming,” Lena said. “Coming from… everywhere.”

  “What is it?” Tom asked.

  The General shrugged. “The universe, I guess.”

  Gainesville was deserted. They were near downtown, and had not seen a single vehicle in motion, a single house with lights on or the ghostly image of a TV flickering through the window. Most of the houses had been burned, too. They didn’t check for bodies.

  “We may be too late,” the General said, as they approached the Hippodrome State Theatre, the skeletal remains of it, anyway, like a gutted carcass after the hyenas had finished licking the bones.

  There was no stench now, not from the fires, which still burned in places, nor from bodies. There were no bodies left.

  Then they heard a shout, a plea for help.

  “Over there!” Tom pointed toward a pile of rubble that had once been a house. They ran to it.

  They found Chuck Speedy buried up to his waist, blood dripping from his mouth.

  “Pull me out,” he said. “I’ve been stuck here for-fucking-ever!”

  “Are there others?” Tom asked. He and Lena each grabbed one of Chuck’s arms. Speedy shook his head. Then gritted his teeth as Lena and Tom began to pull.

  He screamed.

  They pulled harder, some of the rubble gave way and he began to slide out.

  Chuck Speedy suddenly stopped screaming. His face went slack. Tom and Lena pulled him out… but only half of Chuck Speedy came free of the rubble, from the waist up. The rest was still stuck beneath the collapsed house.

  “Oh God,” Lena turned around and tried not to vomit.

  Tom could only stare dumbly at the now calm expression on Speedy’s face.

  “Let’s go,” the General said. His voice was a serrated knife cutting through the silence.

  “He was our friend,” Tom explained.

  “Get over it. We have a mission—”

  “He was our friend!” Before anyone could react, Tom punched the General in the face. The General stumbled back, but didn’t fall.

  “Friends die in combat all the time,” he told Tom through clenched teeth. “You want to survive, you listen to me. I give the orders around here.”

  “No one put you in charge,” Lena said through tears.

  “I’m the General. I’m always in charge.”

  “Hey, you guys,” Hanna said. Her voice sounded small in the midst of the argument.

  “You don
’t even exist,” Tom told the General, ignoring Hanna.

  “I exist,” the General said. “I’m right here. A walkin’, talkin’, smokin’, killin’, machine. I exist because I have a purpose. What’s your excuse?”

  “Hey!” Hanna yelled, getting their attention. She pointed toward the crown of approaching dawn, now lighter with more reds and oranges. And in that abstract painting was a speck, an imperfection, a blemish.

  The heli-dragon.

  Chugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchughugchugchugchugchug.

  “What should we do?” Hanna asked.

  Now all eyes turned to the General.

  “Stand and deliver,” he said with a grin. Then he pulled a brand-shiny-new forty-five automatic from a holster no one remembered seeing at his hip before. His pipe shifted from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Let’s have a war!”

  Suddenly the others were all holding assault rifles.

  Suddenly it was war.

  “A chance to relive the good times,” the General said gleefully. The heli-dragon headed right for them. “Dig in,” he ordered. He pointed to the ruins of the house from which they had just pulled half of Chuck Speedy.

  “Tom.”

  Then he pointed across to the Hippodrome’s smoldering skeleton.

  “Lena.”

  Then back down the street, to where the fire department’s burnt-out ladder truck listed to one side like a sinking ship.

  “Hanna.”

  “What about you?” she asked him.

  “Right here,” he said. “Front and center!” Middle of the road, stance wide like a gunfighter from the Old West, no longer afraid, no longer a drone for Jovah. This was him, the General, what he was all about. The real General Archimedes Carter had laughed in the face of death, spat in it, kissed it, pissed on it. The General knew that, he felt it, and he could be that way too, if only Jovah would leave him alone. If only Jovah would let him be. Right now, Jovah didn’t have a choice. The heli-dragon could destroy him, them, like it almost did before.

  Hanna knew it, too. Her paralyzing fear wasn’t gone, but only just below the surface, now a quivering, shaking demon that threatened to emerge and turn her into a statue if she let her guard down. She wanted to become inanimate, stone, statuary marble, petrified flesh. Part of her realized it was the Jovah in her that was afraid, but that didn’t make it any easier.

  And the heli-dragon’s approach was more defined now, a shallow dive, right for the General.

  The assault rifles were raised, aimed, fingers on triggers, ready.

  This is his reality, Tom thought, even as he sighted the heli-dragon along the length of the gun. The General’s environment, not mine.

  But he didn’t challenge it, so it became his, too.

  Lena’s concerns were a little less esoteric, more obvious, and practical. She wasn’t as much worried about whose reality was whose, as she was about getting eaten. Whichever was the one where she didn’t wind up heli-dragon chow, that was the reality she’d buy stock in. However, she wasn’t too convinced an assault rifle was the way to go against a chrome-toothed, saw-tailed bringer of the Apocalypse.

  “Ready!” the General roared.

  The heli-dragon’s eyes reflected the roiling red, violet, orange, blue of the brightening sky.

  “Aim!”

  Its mouth opened, as if grinning, daring them to stand their ground.

  “FIRE!”

  Round after round after round after round.

  Bullets ricocheted off the heli-dragon’s seemingly invulnerable hide, until the General fired a shot, one shot from his forty-five. Oil sprayed from the fuselage of the heli-dragon’s body; it screeched like a mechanical banshee, but kept coming. The General pulled the trigger again, and metal bits flew off the heli-dragon’s underside. And again. Sparks from inside its mouth this time; and it was too close, the General barely had time to dive out the way as it swooped over him. He rolled across the tarmac, and the buzzsaw tail sliced a trench along the centerline of the road trying to bisect him, but it missed.

  The General came up on one knee, and managed to fire off another round at the back of the heli-dragon, as it climbed for altitude, but this time he missed.

  Tom threw his assault rifle down in disgust. “I must have hit that thing a hundred times!”

  “You don’t think the heli-dragon can be destroyed,” the General told him. “You’re making it harder for the rest of us to kill it.”

  “It can’t be destroyed,” Tom replied. “Not like this. We have to wait for the drug to wear off…”

  “Ha! I’ve been waiting for years!”

  The heli-dragon had climbed, turned, and was now approaching in a steep dive, a forty-five degree angle, screaming through the dawn’s light right for the General, coming at them much faster than before.

  Lena opened fire.

  The General fired round after round directly at it, without effect, and the heli-dragon slammed into him. His body flew up into the air, sailed over the collapsed house Tom had been using for cover, across the street, and landed on the roof of another house, this one still standing. The General lay there on the roof, still, unmoving, as the heli-dragon circled around toward the house.

  “He’s dead,” Tom said. “That son of a bitch.”

  “He can’t die that way.” Hanna said. “Look.”

  The General was not dead. He moved slowly, groggily, as if in a dream, and he still held his gun.

  Chugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchug.

  The heli-dragon had come back for more. This time they couldn’t see its approach. The clamor of the rotary wings echoed all around, as if there were a dozen heli-dragons coming from every direction. The General stood up, scanning the sky for his adversary, but the sky was empty.

  Then it rose from behind the house, right there close enough to touch. The General whirled, managed to get off a quick shot, before the heli-dragon’s mouth spat fire. The General was engulfed in flames. He staggered to the edge of the roof, then fell off. The house was now aflame, and the heli-dragon swept its tail through it once, and it collapsed. Most of it fell right where the General had landed.

  The heli-dragon flew off.

  “Now he’s dead,” Lena said. There was certainty in her voice.

  Hanna didn’t say anything this time.

  They ran over to the wreckage, still burning, to see if they could find him, or his body at any rate. It was too hot to get close enough, but they tried anyway.

  “He’s alive,” Hanna announced suddenly.

  “You see him?” Tom asked.

  She shook her head. “I feel him, though. He’s alive.”

  A pile of shattered bricks moved, pushed up, and a hand broke free, the hand holding a forty-five caliber handgun. He fired three shots straight up into the air. Then the bricks fell away and the General sat up in their midst. He threw his head back and emitted a protracted battle cry. Then he stood, brushed the dust from his blackened uniform, and walked away.

  His uniform might have been singed, but not a scratch marred his features, not a dent, not a cut, no blood, no bruise, and his pipe was still lit, his mirrorshades still reflected the world around with clarity, slightly warped by their curved surface, but even that may have been closer to his reality. He grinned, and marched right up to Hanna, close enough to breathe on her.

  “Didn’t know you cared, soldier.”

  She didn’t avert her gaze. She looked into his mirrorshades, looked her own reflection square in the eyes, and said, “I don’t.”

  The General laughed, then whirled around. “Where’d it go?”

  “That way,” Tom said, pointing in the direction the heli-dragon had gone.

  “It’ll be back. Unfinished business.”

  “What are you saying, that thing has a personal grudge against you?”

  “It has a grudge against all of us, son. All life, or imitations thereof. This is the battle between man and what man has created. Fear, people. This is the test of f
ear. We have nothing to fear but ourselves, or what we ourselves have created.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tom said.

  “Me neither,” Lena admitted.

  Hanna didn’t say anything.

  “Hell,” the General said. “It’s all clear to me.”

  “Well I guess we’re just stupid,” Lena said sarcastically.

  The General looked at her. “Not stupid,” he said. “Just fooling yourselves.”

  “So what now?” Tom asked. “It’s coming back. Apparently it can’t kill you, but I don’t think it’d have the same problem with us.”

  The General shifted his pipe in his mouth. “Your decision.”

  “If it was my decision, nothing could kill me. But I know life doesn’t work that way.”

  “Cartoon characters can fly until someone tells them what they’re doing is impossible,” Lena said. “Are you telling us we’re in a similar situation?”

  “You are,” Hanna answered for the General, as she suddenly realized. “That’s exactly it.”

  “Because of the drug?”

  Hanna nodded.

  “It’s allllllll because of the drug!” the General bellowed. “The drug! Deny the drug, you deny reality, because the drug is reality. Think, think, think! Perception, reality, hallucinations, consciousness, dreams, nightmares, space, and time! It’s all the same Goddamn thing. War is a nightmare. Nightmares are dreams. Dreams are the subconscious perceptions of reality. Reality is what you make of it. Hallucinations are conscious dreams of space and time, real enough because you see ’em! Your consciousness creates reality, but normally you don’t realize it.”

  “Mind over matter,” Tom said.

  “Child’s play.”

  Lena smiled and pointed down the street to where, at a distance, she could see the heli-dragon cruising fast and low, a straight arrow-shot toward where they stood in the middle of the street once again.

  “So, we just convince ourselves it can’t hurt us, right?” Tom asked nervously. “Right?”

  “Right. But you better be sure, you better be absolutely positive. Otherwise, you’ll wind up like your friend: two for the price of one.”

  “Well, I’m convinced.” Tom didn’t sound convinced, though. He didn’t feel convinced.