Dubuque stood and transformed, his entire body glowing white, holy certainty replacing moral doubt. Even his suit and shoes became white in the extremity of his holiness. “I understand my test now, Lord. This man before me is possessed by an evil spirit,” Dubuque said, eyes to heaven. “Following in the steps of Jesus, I must save him by casting it out!”
“You’ll find no evil spirits in me, or any possessing spirit of any kind,” John said, resigned to his fate, despite the fact he knew, again, that Dubuque was controlling his mind. “I won’t fight you on this, daddy-o. Do what you must, and we’ll talk, afterwards.”
Battered by Dubuque’s holy power, John’s conscious mind winked out.
When John awoke, surprised at being awake at all, he found himself in a coffin.
“Whether superstition is the father of humbug, or humbug the mother of superstition (as well as its nurse,) I do not pretend to say; for the biggest fools and greatest philosophers can be numbered among the believers in and victims of the worst humbugs that ever prevailed on the earth. … If children are permitted to feast their ears night after night (as I was) with stories of ghosts, hob-goblins, ghouls, witches, apparitions, bugaboos, it is more difficult in after-life for them to rid their minds of impressions thus made.
” – P.T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World
“Reality is strange enough as it is. It doesn’t need my dubious help.”
4. (Nessa)
“I think this Atlanta’s doing it, too,” Nessa said. Antsy, she turned away from the flat panel display and shook her head. All this new stuff about the 99 Gods, their minor miracles, their long-winded utopian commentaries and their divisions into Territorial, Ideological and Practical Gods clogged her mind. She had learned enough for now. She couldn’t believe she had missed the arrival of the 99 Gods. She suspected her reclusive life in the hills above Eklunta might possibly have something to do with ‘why’, along with her more than occasional acquaintance with insanity.
“Doing what?” Ken said. She motioned Ken over to her computer and played an obscure video from a site specializing in police and crimes. The video showed a gore-dripping head impaled on a stop sign, a severed arm hanging over a bench, and farther back, the rest of a dismembered body stapled in some fashion to a light pole. “The same as Miami. This. The nasty stuff.” Nessa paused and closed the video before she spewed. Chocolate vomit would indeed mess up her tech setup.
“All those unsolved disappearances in Atlanta’s Territory and the so-called vigilante killer: it’s her,” Nessa said. “Or should I say ‘Her’? Perhaps a deeper voiced ‘Her’?”
“Say whatever you want,” Ken said. “I didn’t think you did hunches.”
“Of course I do. Most of the time, though, they’re inaccessible, hidden down in my subconscious. Stress brings them out,” Nessa said. “I learned this one a few years ago, after settling here in Eklutna.” She sighed. “I’m right, though.”
“I believe you,” Ken said. He put his left hand on her right shoulder, steadying himself. Fearful. “So what do you think of the Gods and what they’re spouting?”
“Well…” she said, pausing to gather her scattered thoughts. “I love the new commandment from God Almighty about ‘no more wars between nations’. As you know, I’ve always disliked war. It’s the rest of the stuff hidden in the bowels of their press releases and press conferences that bothers me, the stuff about doing good. Whose good? Who defines what’s good? So I’m not sure.” The Territorial Gods appeared to be the big cheeses, ranking the others, but she suspected that might be only due to the short amount of time they had been on Earth. “I don’t get any feeling of utter evil about them as a group. I sort of like the leader Territorial here in America, uh, Dubuque, and how he’s taken on the fringie fundies and proclaimed himself a Living Saint. He’s cute.” She had always had a thing for liberal ministers, probably having something to do with which churches she had attended with her parents in her childhood. The congregations always liked Nessa, or as she was back then, Vanessa, before she slipped up and made the inevitable scene.
“He’s a natural leader, I’ll give you, all tall, blond and thin,” Ken said. Nessa would call Dubuque’s hair light brown, but she supposed that sort of thing depended on where you stood. “I’ve heard him talk on the net and television several times. I’ll buy his point about the time coming to end war, even though it’s by fiat. I thought picking fights with the fundies about Christian doctrine from day one was a bit rude, though.”
“They needed a good slap in the face if anyone did,” Nessa said. She stood. “Ken, if you want to keep talking to me, we need to go for a walk. I go stir crazy if I stay in my trailer for too long.” The warring emotions had built up in her again, and she had the urge to rip Ken a new one.
“You need some more chocolate?”
Nessa glared at Ken and rolled her eyes. “I can do a walk,” he said, surrendering.
She frowned, went over to the metal kitchen drawers next to the range, grabbed a handful of bullets, loaded her old Enfield pistol, and stuck it in her pants. Ken frowned. She also shoved both of her special socks in her purse. He didn’t blink at the socks.
“Sorry, but I like my guns,” Nessa said. Ken grunted and didn’t otherwise answer, bringing a half smile to her face. A memory flicker of earlier, when they had been dancing, chased away the half smile, and Nessa sighed. “Ken, I apologize.” She paused. She had a lot of practice with apologies. “I didn’t mean to bark at you. Are you still sure you want to deal with me? I’m an antisocial abusive shit without a good bone in my body. You’re too nice.” She paused. “You were always too nice.”
“I’m too nice?” Ken said, backing away, caught up in her roiling emotions. “You wound me. I’m never going to live it down. Nice? I’ve worked all my fucking life on becoming nice. I work fucking overtime to be nice. You know what happens when I forget to be nice.” Nessa’s trailer home moaned. She sniffed. Some things never did change. “So what, now that I’ve gotten all of those old bad problems of mine taken care of, suddenly I’m too nice?”
Ken’s tirade brought a smile to Nessa’s face. “You’re still a drama queen, pardon the sexual innuendo.”
“You’ve always said that,” he said. “Never could figure out why.”
“You weren’t a girl in high school.”
“Last I checked, no, that’s right,” Ken said. “Still need to take a walk?”
Nessa nodded.
“Let’s walk.”
“So, why walk?” Ken said, unable to resist once they got outside. “Why not use a car? I’ve got one out front.”
“I hate cars,” Nessa said, with a ‘fuck you’ voice. Without turning to see if Ken followed, she stalked off at a fast pace down the driveway and down the hill toward the main road to the village of Eklutna. Ken ambled behind her, nicely obedient. A wet sticky scent of mountain hemlock crawled up the hill and past Nessa’s nose. More rain nearby, some morning mist. Mountains did that.
“Your place is strange,” Ken said. “What’s with the sod?”
“Couple of years ago, some developers down closer to Anchorage miscalculated how much sod they needed for a subdivision. I bought them out cheap and put the sod around my trailer, like they did in the frontier days, back when they made sod houses.”
She kept up a vicious pace down the hill and over to the local rural road, which wound through a stand of towering mountain hemlocks that had sold this place for Nessa, many years ago. Ken already sounded winded. Good.
“One of your schemes, eh?” Nessa didn’t answer. “You wheedled them into a good deal, didn’t you?”
She still didn’t answer. Instead, she turned off the road, to a steep trail leading downhill that cut about a half mile off the walk. The rough terrain didn’t bother her, or the wet vegetation. She traversed the slope regularly with a full backpack and duffel full of groceries, uphill. Behind her, Ken cursed under his breath. Nessa smiled.
“How’d you do the roof? Woul
dn’t that much sod be too much for a trailer roof?”
“The roof is timber reinforced,” Nessa said. Arranging the reinforcing had been a bitch and a half and had eaten up nearly all the expected profit in reduced heating costs, a problem typical of her schemes. “The reason I did the sod trick was to cut the heating costs in the winter, which it does.”
“What about permafrost?”
“There’s only sporadic permafrost in this area,” Nessa said, gritting her teeth. It pissed her off that Ken knew about permafrost when she had only learned about it well after she moved up here.
Many things pissed her off. Nessa turned and stalked away, clambering down a thirty-foot boulder strewn slope, the worst part of the trail. She hoped Ken would twist an ankle. Perhaps she would leave him for the goddamned bears.
“There’s only a few feet of soil where I live before you hit rock,” she said, apropos of nothing. “There’s some patches of permafrost down in the valley, though, where the soil is thicker.”
Ken skidded down the bottom five feet of the rocky slope, landing on his toes. Nessa turned for a moment to see if he needed help, but he didn’t. However, he had muddied up his wing tips and it was only a matter of time before he rubbed his muddy hand on his suit. Heh.
“Why are you so pissed at me?” Ken said. She turned and continued down the trail. No need to belabor the obvious. “Why?” Ken asked, unwilling to let it go.
“You’ve got a brain. Use it.”
Nessa picked up the pace on the gentler slope. She had seen bear sign in the mud below the boulder run. Bears weren’t a problem for her, but she didn’t feel like showing off right now. Ken’s comments about this God shit had her more worried than she let on.
“Oh,” Ken said, a minute later. “You’re pissed at me because you thought I came to visit you for personal reasons. But since my real reason to hunt you down was to talk about the 99 Gods, I trampled your expectations.”
“Close enough,” Nessa said. She had gotten lost in the anticipation, in the dance of bodies, before he popped his silly 99 Gods question. “I have to keep things simple to keep my head on straight. This 99 Gods crap’s making things too complicated.”
All those years ago, after the confrontation, she and Ken had argued about his marriage. She thought it wrong for people like her and Ken to get involved with people who didn’t know about their tricks, but Ken had kept his a secret from Livie, Ken’s then wife. Nessa had been convinced Livie already secretly hated Ken and their marriage was doomed. Ken had disagreed, vehemently. She and Ken hadn’t spoken since. When Ken had given her his formal apology for his mistakes, she had decided he had come up here to hook up with her. He had dashed her assumption when he had told her about the 99 Gods.
The mountain hemlocks parted around them, revealing a soggy field ahead, already cut for hay. Below lay the village of Eklutna.
“That’s a strange looking town,” Ken said, sprinting to catch up to her. She didn’t comment about the town’s mixture of Anglos and Native Americans. “Nessa, I wouldn’t take advantage of you. I know you well enough to know how skittish you are about intimacy.” He looked her in the eye. “But since we’re both entanglement free, we could date.”
Date? ‘Date’ hadn’t quite been what Nessa had been anticipating, or what she thought had been going on earlier. “But what if I no longer want a relationship with you? What if I only wanted a relationship with you because you’d come up here to seek me out for personal reasons? What if I just wanted a one-nighter because I was curious?” Nessa said, thoughts scattered and unfocused. “What if this is all just my crazy getting out of its cage again?”
Ken put his hand on her shoulder, but Nessa shook off his hand. “I don’t want your goddamned sympathy either!” She turned and strode away, stomping standing water as she power walked, stiff legged, the last two hundred yards to the main road. Mrs. Keith was out on her fat-tired bicycle, and Nessa waved at her. Mrs. Keith eyed Ken suspiciously.
Anger had never been good for Nessa.
The world contracted inside her mind and spots swirled about her, clouding her vision.
Then her world went away.
Nessa blinked hard, twice, and shook herself until the spots vanished.
She found herself standing on the main road through Eklutna, on the edge of town, right by the two-pump Conoco station. To her surprise Ken Bolnick stood next to her.
“Ken? What are you doing here in Eklutna? You on some sort of case?” All of a sudden nothing made sense.
Ken looked at her in horror.
“Nessa?”
“Yah huh.” Pause. “I think.” Most of the time she had known Ken her name had been ‘Vanessa’.
“You’ve been standing here, unresponsive, for nearly five minutes,” he said.
“Oh,” Nessa said. “A glitch.” She took a deep breath and wrapped her arms around herself. No wonder nothing made sense. “Was I saying anything?”
“Nope. Dead silent.”
“At least that’s something,” she said, softly. “Keyword?”
“99 Gods.”
Memories poured back into her mind. “Oh. Right. You came here to take advantage of me. We’ve got some sort of personal problem because of this.”
She hated her glitches. They were such a pain in the ass. Luckily they didn’t happen every day.
Ken sighed.
“What could fix this problem?” Ken said. “What do you need from me?”
She thought for a moment and stamped her feet on the damp ground to get her circulation moving again. Schemes and ideas ran through her mind, accompanied by the usual mental arguments. “Assurances. I’m not working for you,” Nessa said, eventually.
“I never asked you to work for me,” he said, exasperated. Nessa smiled, making sure Ken couldn’t see her face.
“I don’t have any money,” Nessa said. “I can’t go with you on this crazy mission you’ve given yourself. I can’t be a parasite. Being a parasite messes me up worse than anything.” If she allowed herself to be a parasite, that meant she had failed, and she had enough failure in her life. She couldn’t stand any more.
“Well, okay,” Ken said. “Nessa, will you marry me?”
Huh? “Oh, that’s romantic,” Nessa said. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Her comment shut Ken up. She didn’t have to look at him to know she had pissed him off with her cavalier rejection. Maybe he would just go away.
Don’t be a fool, Nessa.
Oh, you shut yourself up!
If Ken went away, she would have to figure out how to help Uffie on her own. To start with, she would have to learn more about the 99 Gods, which meant she would have to use this internet crap without any help. Over twenty years and the annoying fad still hadn’t faded. Such a bother. She did have the odd resource out in the wider world, people who might have calmed down since the last time she pissed them off. Ken would normally have headed her list, if he hadn’t just made a fool of himself by proposing to her.
“Surely you know I love you,” Ken said.
Nessa stopped.
“You actually believe you love me, don’t you,” Nessa said. Damn. She closed her eyes and put her bony hands over her face, fighting for control. Back in LA, after the confrontation, he had told her he loved her, but his comment hadn’t counted because he had been married to Livie at the time. Just one of those male things. Territoriality. Harem formation. Pack dominance. Ken and Ron had never gotten along. Two roosters, one hen. Ron had done a good job at taking care of her for a while. A few too many nips on the neck, perhaps…
Too much time with the wolves, Nessa.
I told you to shut up!
Most people wore their emotions on their sleeves, easy for Nessa to pick up, but Ken hid himself from her. She could only pick up glimpses of this and that. And what he wanted to show her.
He did love her. She had seen the truth when he said the words.
She didn’t want to cry. She hated crying.
She didn’t cry.
Ken put his arms around her, from behind, and hugged her. “I’ve loved you since the day we met. I’d do anything for you. I let you work for me, despite the problems it caused between us, because with a career and a husband you had stability for the first time in your life. Nessa, I didn’t come up here to threaten you, I came up here to beg you. I’d sacrifice myself to you, if you had been behind the 99 Gods in any way, to get you to call them back. I’m terrified about what they’re going to do to us. That’s one of my hunches. I’ll do anything to help you rescue Uffie. I’ll move mountains. I’ll look around those awful dark corners we know about, where no one in their right mind should ever look. I’ll even pick up firearms.” His voice picked up an actor’s tremolo. “Whatever you need, whatever you want, whatever suits your desires, I will comply.”
Damn him and his drama!
Nessa whirled around, grabbed Ken in her arms, and kissed him. A dim part of her mind knew she scandalized the townsfolk of Eklutna, but she didn’t care. He touched her heart and Nessa wasn’t inhuman enough to have rejected love entirely. She had said so on many occasions, but she had lied, and she knew she had lied, so it didn’t matter.
She did have her limits. As much as she wanted to boink him right here, she couldn’t do that in front of the Eklutnans.
The Eklutnans kept her sane. Relatively speaking.
“I still can’t marry you,” she said, after she wiggled out of Ken’s embrace. “At least not legally.”
“Can you tell me why?”
She shrugged. Now, she would rather boink than talk, but she suspected she would lose the urge by the time they hiked back uphill to her trailer. However, she knew a few quiet places around town where the local kids boinked in the warmer months. Places crawling with tourists during the tourist season, when all those horrid people with their horrid crying infants and their horrid cameras and camera phones came calling during the summer. She did her odd jobs to make money during the summer, the best time of the year for such work. She worked nights, cleaning like a demon. She got far less than minimum wage from her efforts, but she had other reasons for the jobs. She needed the affection of the people of Eklutna.
99 Gods: War Page 5
