God Drug

by Stephen L. Antczak

“I’m not convinced of anything,” Lena said. “I think we’re all gonna die.”

  “No,” Hanna said. “Don’t think that.”

  The heli-dragon was closing in. The General once again aimed his gun at it. The face-off, the show-down. Suddenly the General lowered his gun.

  “What are you doing?” Tom asked.

  “I just realized… I don’t need this,” the General said, and he dropped his gun in the road.

  No time to reconsider now, the heli-dragon was almost there. Tom dove away, as the heli-dragon, mouth agape, bore down on the General, his fists raised in defiance. The General howled in fury as the two clashed. The heli-dragon scooped him up in its maw, gnashing with razor teeth, as the General’s howl shattered the sky. The sound changed to that of screams of pain, or was it laughter?

  The heli-dragon took him up, up, up, and away, into the spilled water color sky, lighter still but with whorls and splashes of reds, purples, blues, greens, and with black ink the void in-between. Straight up, the heli-dragon took the General, and lightning arched from it, static electricity, and then something unexpected happened.

  The heli-dragon exploded.

  And fell.

  They watched it all the way, Hanna, Tom, and Lena, until it disappeared beyond the horizon, leaving only a smoke trail like a phantom pillar.

  “Is it… destroyed?” Lena asked, eyeing Hanna, who frowned.

  “I think… so,” Hanna said slowly. “I don’t know. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel the General anymore, either. They’re gone.”

  “I was half expecting everything to return to normal once we destroyed that thing,” Tom said, looking around.

  Nothing had changed.

  “Well now what?” Tom asked.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Lena suggested. “See how Sparrow’s doing. I don’t think we’re going to find anyone else alive. I just have this feeling…”

  “Yeah.”

  They started walking, slowly, but Hanna didn’t.

  “What’s the matter?” Tom asked her.

  “I don’t know. Something…” She sighed. “I still don’t feel him out there anymore, but…”

  “But what? That means he’s dead, right? And the helicopter. Two birds with no stones.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Jovah’s still there, though, I can feel him. But something’s different.”

  “Let’s not worry about it,” Lena said. “Let’s just go home. Sparrow might need us.”

  Hanna nodded.

  They started walking back to the Blue House. And Sparrow.

  Chapter Twelve

  The room was still spinning. Sparrow closed her eyes again, but she could physically feel it. Round and round and round… Christ, when will it stop? Her hands gripped the sides of the mattress as she held on tightly, trying to anchor herself, to make it slow down and stop. It was no use. The room was spinning, the house was spinning, the Earth was spinning, the solar system was spinning, the galaxy was spinning, the universe was spinning. Spinning forever and ever.

  Sparrow had heard that sleeping on the floor helped get rid of the spins. So she dragged herself out of bed and onto the hardwood floor, pulling her pillow and sheets down with her. She rolled over, onto her stomach, arms and legs outstretched as if trying to stabilize the room.

  Gradually, and to her surprise, it did help; the spinning slowed and then stopped. Sparrow didn’t move for a while, though, enjoying the solidity and firmness of the floor beneath her. It felt real, as real as anything could possibly be.

  And then her stomach growled. That, also, felt real.

  She suddenly craved a bagel and lox, topped with chocolate sauce and gummy bears. On the other hand, the mere thought of said bagel, lox, chocolate sauce, and gummy bears was enough to make her sick to her stomach. But she needed something to eat. Something simple, that was the key. Maybe just a plain bagel, toasted, with nothing on it. It wouldn’t satisfy her bizarre craving, but at least it wouldn’t make her sick, either. There were sliced bagels in the freezer; all she had to do was get up.

  Get up, she told herself.

  Up!

  She willed her limbs to move, but nothing happened.

  “Help!” she tried to yell, but all she made was a croaking groan. No one responded to her plea. A wave of nausea hit her again. She felt sweat forming in beads on her face. She needed to get up, get some food, some water. The thought of cool, clear water focused her.

  I’m getting up right now, she thought. She applied all her force of will to her limbs, and managed to roll over. Above her spun the ceiling fan. She shielded her eyes from it almost reflexively. The spinning ceiling fan was too much. But, she suddenly realized, she’d moved her arm to block her view of it. She pushed herself up on her elbows. She felt better now. Water, she thought.

  She got up and ran out of the room. She felt a lot better. Whatever had hit her so hard had passed.

  “Anyone home?” she called. The house felt empty. She walked from room to room. The Blue House was indeed empty, aside from her. The heartpine floors, impervious to termites and heli-dragons, creaked as she walked across them.

  Sparrow took a deep breath. What a trip! But now she felt normal. Thank God it was over. It was morning. Light streamed in through the windows. Light, but not the crisp, cool crystal fragility of the early morning; more like a TV had been placed just outside her window, tuned to the Cartoon Network.

  She went to the window and pulled the blinds up. Outside, the sky ran with ethereal ink, paints splashed across the heavens, dripping and flowing like blood circulating, pastels in bold strokes, filigree of neon, in constant motion. She lowered the blinds and turned away.

  It wasn’t over. She wanted to believe it could be some meteorological phenomenon, but she knew better. Still tripping. Maybe, at least, the tail end of it. She didn’t feel strange anymore, so that was something.

  She remembered her hunger, and went into the kitchen, to the refrigerator. Beer, but nothing to eat, no bagels. She stood there with the refrigerator door open and stared at the cans of beer, until she became conscious of a buzzing noise that emanated from Tom’s room.

  Sparrow opened the door to his room and saw a roach fluttering around from surface to surface, buzzing through the air for a moment and then slapping into a wall, landing on the bed. The buzzing noise came from Tom’s alarm. She had no idea when it had gone off, but there it was still droning on.

  She shut the door.

  Sparrow went through the cupboards, looking for something, anything to eat. No bread, no cereal, no cookies. Someone had forgotten to go shopping. She found one can of cream of broccoli soup, some stale corn chips, and a bag of white rice. Rice would be good, but she didn’t feel like going through the whole rigmarole of the water, the boiling, the timing it just right. She knew she was pathetic if cooking rice was too much trouble. But it was.

  The hell with it, she thought, and got a beer from the refrigerator. She took a sip and the cold beer immediately reinvigorated her. She felt good, now. She drank some more, and the slightest alcohol buzz gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling that everything was going to be all right now. She knew she still needed food, though.

  Bagel Place might be open, but Sparrow didn’t feel good enough to consider riding her bike there. Her legs felt weak and wobbly. Too bad she couldn’t pop a beer in the toaster and spread some peanut butter on it. She belched loudly, the sound echoing through the house, and felt even better. Fresh air would be nice, she thought. She finished that beer, and grabbed another to take out to the front porch.

  The sky surprised her when she opened the front door. She’d forgotten about it. Okay, she thought, she had to still be tripping. No question about it. She had no idea for how long she’d been in bed. Could have been five minutes, five hours, or five days. He time sense was all screwed up. There were no working clocks. Tom’s was stuck on whatever time he’d set his alarm to buzz, and the clock on the VCR perpetually blinked 00:00.

  The sky made her d
izzy.

  She didn’t want to go back inside, though. The empty house made her feel lonely. If only someone else were there. Like Io.

  “From the Halls of Montezuma,” Sparrow sang to herself in a small voice, “To the shores of Tripoli…”

  She missed that little monster terribly. If everything was real, then Io was really gone. Sparrow took a deep breath and mentally told herself to deal with it. Be strong, and fight. She wasn’t convincing herself, though. Fight what? Her own mind? What was real and what wasn’t? She didn’t know anymore.

  Flying, telepathy, the heli-dragon… how could those be real? Either something wasn’t right in the world, or something wasn’t right in her head. Neither prospect held much hope. It could be worse, though, she told herself. It could be both.

  Real or imagined, Io was gone. She should have known Io was different, not quite… real. In the three years Sparrow and Emily and the others had been taking care of her, Io had not grown an inch. And she never got hurt. And never ate anything except ice cream and candy. Never.

  They had not wanted to notice these things because they’d loved her so much. Sparrow knew that now. Io was such a wonderful little munchkin, how could they not want her to be real? To think that Io was actually part of the same madness as Galactic Bill and that General character, and Hanna…

  The thought of Hanna made Sparrow smile, gave her a warm feeling inside. Hanna was hope. The way things were going, Sparrow wondered if hope wasn’t anything more than a cruel joke.

  The Blue House was awash in rainbows, but the ground around the house bore the scars of the heli-dragon; black, jagged, still smoldering. Sparrow’s heart rate quickened at the thought of the machine creature. What was it? Was it alive, or some kind of robot? Was it another government experiment gone awry?

  Sparrow drank more beer.

  Even the heli-dragon did not reek of the same pure evil as the General. Looking into his eyes, Sparrow had seen the Abyss. What did he have in store for her? Become one? What did that mean?

  Her head throbbed painfully, so she drank more beer. She didn’t want to think of the heli-dragon and the General and Io and what was happening to her world. She just wanted to feel normal again. Just to close her eyes and forget everything that had happened to her since taking the drug. The memory of making love to Tom in mid-air floated through her mind, and she smiled. Well, she thought, maybe not forget everything.

  Tom loved her. She knew it had to be true. Truly, madly, deeply… he loved her.

  But… did she love him? She imagined him walking up to the Blue House, imagined that they were married and had been together for, say, fifteen years.

  “Hi, honey, how was work?” she asked aloud, and smiled.

  Married to Tom? Did he love her enough to want to spend the rest of his life with her? Did he even understand what that meant, the rest of his life?

  Yes, she decided she did love him. But she also decided it was best to just leave it at that. Love was great and all, but there was no reason to go and get carried away with it. Besides, who knew if it was real between her and Tom, or if it was the drug. Sparrow would need to be with Tom after the drug had worn off, with a clear head, to know how she truly felt.

  For the first time since waking she noticed that across the street the hospital was gone. All that remained was a blackened hole in the ground as if a meteor had smashed into it and obliterated the entire building. Razed by the heli-dragon, Sparrow figured. It felt all too real.

  Without really thinking about it, Sparrow went into the kitchen and retrieved another beer, brought it back out to the front porch. It was ice-cold and felt good slipping down her throat when she took the first sip. How many had she had? Three? She felt nothing, not even the slightest buzz. She knew she drank a lot. She smoked too much pot. And took too much acid.

  Somehow she felt it ironic that LSD had once been used to treat alcoholism. It had been used as a form of shock therapy on the mentally ill, including, Sparrow had read, on the actress Frances Farmer. Timothy Leary’s disciples used it as a spiritual aid on the Path to Enlightenment, to see God. No one had ever considered that it might be a way to become God.

  Was Sparrow the new Acid Queen?

  Turn out, drop in, tune on.

  No, that wasn’t it.

  Tune up…

  Turn in, drop on, tune out.

  No, and no.

  Tune in, turn on, and drop out.

  Yes, that was it. But what did it mean? Sparrow was tuned in to a nightmare. She desperately wanted to drop out of it.

  She finished her beer, started to get up, to go get another, but a sudden queasiness came over her, a sudden fire burned in her stomach. Before she could react, her body acted. She threw up, her stomach tightening, spasming, and forcing everything in it back up Sparrow’s throat. Used beer splashed onto the steps and Sparrow collapsed to her knees on the porch, thick droplets clinging around her mouth. She wiped most of it away with her forearm.

  “Mommy…” she whispered, and fell forward, off the porch and slammed down the concrete steps to land in a heap at the bottom, lying in her own puke. The sour smell of it overwhelmed her, but Sparrow couldn’t move to get away from it. She whined helplessly.

  Overhead, the swirling sky made her head spin, so she closed her eyes. And there smiled her mother, or a ghostly apparition of her.

  “I’m so proud of you,” she said to Sparrow. “Off to college. You’re going to be somebody, I just know you are. You’re going to change the world.”

  Change the world.

  Sparrow wondered what her mother would think of her now. Her mother, selling Mary Kay cosmetics after work, and Tupperware on weekends, swooning over Tom Selleck on TV, reading James Clavell paperbacks, a religious listener to Elvis Presley records. What would she think of her little bird now?

  “Mom, I’m sorry,” Sparrow said, then coughed and spat up more beer. She felt it ooze slowly down her cheeks. She could tell it was the last of the beer that had been in her stomach, but she didn’t feel any better. “I didn’t want it to be this way, Mom,” she said. She hoped that somewhere, somehow, her mother could hear her. And forgive her.

  “It’s okay, honey,” the ghost of her mother said.

  Sparrow felt better. Yes, she lay sprawled in vomit, but she felt better. She knew her mother loved her. That made all the difference in the world.

  She also knew she was starting to feel sorry for herself. She opened her eyes. The sky was still there, still spinning.

  “Oh, God,” Sparrow groaned. She could almost feel it, the centrifugal force tugging at her body. Thankfully there was nothing left in her stomach to eject, but that didn’t prevent her from convulsing with dry heaves, one after the other until she thought pieces of her innards might come loose and be spit up in blood.

  She wanted to go back to her room, back to bed, surrounded by the sheets her mother had given her all those years ago just before Sparrow had left for college. Sparrow forced herself to roll over, onto all fours, and slowly crawl back up the steps, onto the porch, pausing often to catch her breath from the effort. She made it to the front door, and then inside the Blue House which seemed to embrace her, to welcome her.

  She knew she’d miss the Blue House terribly when she eventually left Gainesville. She knew she would leave someday, of course. But not yet. Leaving was the future. Now, all she wanted was her bed. She crawled across the hardwood floor of the living room, feeling grains of dirt on her hands and grinding into her knees. She went down the hall to her bedroom. Her room was bright and cheerful with her books and records and posters, beads from Mardi Gras, a Wonder Woman poster on the back of the door, a David Bowie poster over the wall behind her bed.

  Sparrow managed to crawl back into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Warmth surrounded her. She closed her eyes.

  Sleep crept up on her gradually, giving her time for one more memory before she slipped away from herself.

  The memory was of her father after he’d driven
her to college. He stood by his car, awkward as a father can be during a rare tender moment. He’d made mistakes in the past with her, had left them and had come back, and Sparrow had grown up not sure about her feelings for him.

  “I’ll be fine, Dad,” she had said, cheerful.

  “I know you will,” he said. “I’ll worry anyway, of course.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Every single day of my life,” he said. “I’ll think about you, and hope you’re all right.”

  “You shouldn’t, Dad,” she said.

  It was then that he took her up in a great bear hug, and she realized that was what she’d been wanting him to do for so long. She wished it could last forever.

  “Sweetheart,” he said as he held her. “I’ll think about you every day, and wish you’re all right, because I want to.”

  And Sparrow knew that nothing else he could have said would have meant more to her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hanna stopped walking. She tilted her head to one side, listening.

  “Hear something?” Tom asked. He didn’t hear anything at all. Silence hung about them like a fog as they walked down Second Ave.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Lena said.

  “I don’t know,” Hanna said. She thought she heard the General laughing, but the General was gone, destroyed. The heli-dragon was the only thing that could destroy him, and it did. Hanna didn’t know what that meant, though. Was the heli-dragon satisfied? The heli-dragon was part of Jovah, like the General, like Io, like Galactic Bill, like Deuce… like herself.

  She tried to make sense of it. Jovah’s body had disappeared, wasted away and dissolved in the sensory depravation tank. His mind, fueled by the drug, had survived the death of his body and had created the avatars. The General had gone to them, systematically hunted them down and absorbed them, starting with the weakest and winding up with Hanna.

  Hanna was too strong for the General, which she didn’t quite understand. She didn’t feel strong. She was the last of them, though, the last survivor of Jovah’s divided Self, but not Jovah. Hanna was still just a fragment of the whole.