99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

  “What’s rounding?”

  Ken explained.

  “Oh, well, then, uh, none.”

  Ken thudded the carpet with his fist twice more. Nessa sniffed. Men were so strange. “Can you explain ‘none’?” he asked. Falsely polite.

  “I’m not sure I can,” Nessa said. “They were almost as far above us as we were above the ground, but not quite. Between three quarters and all the way.” Was three quarters a fraction? She wasn’t sure. It also sounded like seventy-five cents.

  Right now nearly everything confused her. Not remembering fractions? How could she not remember fractions?

  She always wanted to scream when her mind got this screwy.

  “Oh,” Ken said. “They weren’t in space, then. But they were up a ways. Commercial airplanes don’t fly that high.”

  “They weren’t in a plane. They flew like superman. Well, not exactly,” Nessa said. “The one who wasn’t human flew like superman. The human held onto the non-human’s hand, sort of dragged along by the other one’s trick and wasn’t wholly happy about the flying business.”

  Ken paused. “Why didn’t you say she was a God?”

  “A God? She was?” Nessa said. “You’re kidding. She wasn’t even as powerful as either of us.”

  Ken rolled over. With her eyes no longer in Ken’s armpit, the light blinded Nessa and she moaned from the pain. He took her in his arms and she buried her eyes in the angle of his arm again, this time on his front side. “You’re wet,” he said.

  “Wet happens.” Someone nearby ate waffles. The smell lingered in his nose and as he ate he satisfied Nessa’s appetite. Late teen, some guy who liked breakfast foods all day long. He didn’t understand why matching shorts and shirts looked good on women. Or why they took so much out of his paycheck in taxes.

  Ken sighed. “The God I met wasn’t very powerful, either, but unlike the two of us, his power level went up and down radically over the short time I, um, encountered him. Freaky. The one I met hit two orders of magnitude of power difference.”

  “Whatever.” Anyone who tried to order her magnitudes was going to end up with lead poisoning, that was for sure. Ken had tried to sneak her guns away from her and throw them away, but she fooled him into thinking he had succeeded.

  “Ignore the comment,” Ken said, and stroked her hair. A tiny bit of subconscious influence from Nessa soon had him rubbing her neck. Ummm. Ummmmmm. “So now you know what Gods sense like. What was the other one? Why was she different than either of us?”

  “The power wasn’t hers, but someone else’s,” Nessa said.

  “Her companion’s power?” He continued to rub her neck.

  “Nope. You believe me now?”

  “Yes, I believe you now,” Ken said, and sighed an artistically long theatrical sigh. Surely she hadn’t been that bad. Ken always over-reacted to everything. “Now, can you explain your headaches and your sun sensitivity?”

  “No. But they do happen,” Nessa said. “Right now is about as bad as ever.”

  “If you open up your mind to me, I’ll take a look,” Ken said. Nessa shivered.

  “I’ll try.” She wanted to trust Ken, especially right now when she could touch him and huddle up against him. Especially when she had this horrible headache. She had so many layers of shields, though. Some she never let down, never ever, but she could expand those so they covered Ken as well and they would both be on the inside. She moved things around, damping some of her shields and expanding others. It took more time than she planned. “That better?”

  “Jeez,” Ken said. He quieted.

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “Well, okay, how about Holy Fuck.”

  “I told you I was a mess.”

  He didn’t comment for longer than she thought conversationally appropriate. Nessa shivered. It would serve her right if he left her. She knew how bad a mess swirled and groaned in her mind. She couldn’t lie to herself about her head mess. “Ummm. What’s this?” Ken asked. Finally.

  He mentally tweaked her mind. She thought about it and figured out what he touched. “Oh. You tweaked my stamina trick. But the stamina trick can’t be why I have trouble with the sun. I haven’t been pulling on it much since I’ve been with you. You’re so relaxing to lie next to I can’t help but fall asleep. I don’t have to stay awake.” She had tried to learn martial arts once, but her temper had gotten the best of her and she had abused the mind of the poor Sensei. He had tried her patience.

  “I think it’s the other way around,” Ken said. “I think your headaches come when you’re not exerting yourself. Not using your stamina trick.”

  Nessa laughed. “Well, I guess I’m going to have to start exerting myself more. Starting now.” She knew sex cured her headaches. Some of the time. “Besides, it’ll give me an excuse to get out of my wet jeans.” Give her an excuse not to think about how messed up her mind was today.

  At least she wasn’t forgetting names.

  She just hated it when she forgot her own name.

  The night air hung leaden with humidity, thick enough that breathing took extra work. Nessa walked hand in hand with Ken along the beach. They had walked down to the south end of the barrier island, to some inlet, nearly eight miles, far enough south so they weren’t in Palm Beach any more. They talked the entire way, sharing their lives and scanning for Opartuth. Nessa’s feet ached, not used to walking on sand.

  “The sun’s going to be up before we get back,” Ken said. Nessa sensed his exhaustion. “Your headache will come back.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to keep going.”

  “I was thinking we could take a taxi back.”

  “What’s so special about this inlet here?” Nessa said.

  “One of my hunches. I think…”

  “It’s not Opartuth,” Nessa said. “But…”

  She pushed out with her mind. Although close, the contact pushed back, as difficult as she remembered from her youth. She quickly took off her sandals and waded into the water. “Come with me.”

  “Okay.”

  Partly in the water the contact became clearer. Contacts. “Oh, no!” Nessa said.

  “What is it?”

  She queried the minds she contacted. They couldn’t answer in human words, of course, but she understood the gist of it.

  “Opartuth’s no more. Dead, I guess,” Nessa said. The world spun around her. She fought for control. “I think I’m going to have one of my fits. It’s going to be bad. Bad bad bad.” The fit had been building all day long.

  Opartuth couldn’t be dead. Not possible. It didn’t make sense. However, Opartuth was no longer present.

  Ken backed off.

  Nessa howled with her voice and with her mind. She became the howl. Her sense of self fled.

  “Tell me,” right sock said. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Loss and pain,” Nessa said. She felt like herself again. Almost. Enough to know her own name and remember fractions. She had her right hand in a sock, an impromptu sock puppet, and they talked. This wasn’t the first time she had talked to a sock puppet. Not even close.

  “Death, you mean,” right sock said. “You can’t run from death.”

  “I have so far,” Nessa said. A car rumbled overhead. She sat on damp sand under a bridge. The bridge was the A1A bridge over the inlet. She hadn’t gone far, physically, while she had her fit.

  She hoped Ken had coped. She sensed around with her mind and found him peering around the corner of a bridge support fifty feet away. She loved him for staying close. He was worried and terrified.

  “The running is why this is so painful for you,” right sock said. “Why doesn’t it bother you when your animals die?”

  “Because they’re animals. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “This is different how?” Right sock always asked hard questions.

  At least she only spoke to one sock. Two sock conversations? Much worse.

  “Opartuth,” sniff, “was more than just a normal mind. O
partuth was immense. Immense power. Immense wisdom, even though we had our differences. Big mind. Big loss.”

  “You wanted the easy way out,” right sock said. “You wanted this to be like before. You wanted to go to Opartuth and have Opartuth admit to being behind the 99 Gods, agree to stop, and have the entire 99 God problem go away. You knew it wouldn’t work that way, though. Not this time. Even if you refused to admit this to yourself.”

  “Yah, I kinda thought Opartuth wasn’t involved.” Sweat covered Nessa, fully drenching her top and her shorts. She needed water. “But even so, I thought Opartuth might know what’s going on. Be able to give me some advice. Help me rescue Uffie.”

  “You didn’t want the responsibility,” right sock said.

  “Of course I don’t. The whole idea that Ken and I are going to have to deal with the 99 Gods by ourselves is ludicrous. Even though I’ve seen how weak the Gods are individually. I mean, they’re Gods. If they don’t blow us out of the water with their godly shazams, they’ll just steal a nuke and blow us to atoms. We’re nothing but bugs on the windshield of life. Even if the one I sensed wasn’t impressive.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” right sock said. “You haven’t seen enough. You’re lying to yourself again. Like with Opartuth. You and Ken, again, here, just like when you were kids. Did you think you could go back and recreate your old triumph? Don’t you know how much the world’s always changing? Think back to back then. No smartphones, or cellphones of any variety. No laptops. No MP3 players or HDTVs. No DVDs, even.”

  Nessa nodded. “The world had promise, then, and my name was Vanessa. Now it’s all gray dirt.” She wouldn’t mind a change of clothes. Matted angry hair lay sideways across her forehead. Her braid had come loose and her long hair had spun everywhere.

  “The world had promise because you were young. The world had promise because you had promise.”

  “I failed. I didn’t live up to my own promise,” Nessa said.

  “You only think you’re a failure,” right sock said.

  She had argued this with right sock far too many times. She didn’t want to have the argument again. “So what do I do now?”

  “Opartuth is gone, but you heard others out there with names and a human voice. You sensed these replacements to the south, but they’re too far away for true verbal contact. You know where they are now. Visit them. Ask them. They might be able to help.”

  “I’ll have to learn them. We’ll fight.”

  Right sock laughed. “You fight with everyone and everything. Then you apologize. You can do better.”

  “Okay. I promise I won’t fight with these new ones.” She crossed her fingers and lowered her voice. “Unless they dis me.”

  “You would’ve even fought with Opartuth.”

  “Would not.”

  “Would so.”

  “Would not,” Nessa said. She looked at her left hand, where her wedding band hung loosely. Ken had put the ring back on her finger at the end of the afternoon. She hadn’t tossed it again, to her surprise. Of course, with Ken’s tricks, if she had tossed it in the ocean he would have been able to find the ring and get it back. “We’d settled.”

  “Twenty seven years ago you’d settled,” right sock said. “You know better. You’re lying to yourself again, and…”

  Right sock quieted as Ken stood and ran over to them, radiating notice.

  “Nessa, snap out of it, we’ve got big problems.”

  Nessa looked up at Ken. He looked just as agitated in her eyesight as he looked in her mental sight. “Go away. This isn’t the time.”

  “Pay attention to what’s going on around us,” Ken said, his voice harsh and commanding, his boss Private Investigator voice.

  “Shut the fuck up, dammit!” Nessa said. She stood and balled her fists. How dare he interrupt…

  Her train of thought derailed when she sensed a mental presence flying through the air toward them. “One of the fucking Gods!” The God pissed her off. “Right sock’s going to sort this piece of shit out.” She jogged out from under the bridge. Debris, drift lumber and other human garbage marred the inlet’s sand, not at all like the pristine beach she remembered from her youth. Over the Atlantic, the sun brightened the eastern horizon, predawn. She jogged farther out along the beach, toward the whitecapped water, to where she could see to the south. Nothing. The God remained invisible to her eyes. Her less accurate trick senses picked him up, though, now that the bridge’s concrete didn’t obscure her view.

  Ken followed. “Wait, wait. We need to be ready to defend ourselves. This one’s Miami, the God who attacked me.”

  Nessa couldn’t care less if Jesus fucking Christ himself came by for tea. Nobody interrupted a discussion with a sock. Either sock. “Whatever fucking piece of shit you are, Mr. God sir, if you know what’s best for you you’ll leave before I get angry with you,” Nessa said, and projected her message mentally to the God. “I won’t harm you if you leave.”

  The God kept coming and didn’t answer. He stopped twenty yards to the south and a dozen feet in the air, paused for twenty seconds, and became visible. The God appeared impressive, larger than life, using several little tricks to fool the mind into believing the God larger and scarier than his reality, that of a dark haired young man in a fancy business suit. “I told you to never come back to my territory again,” the God said, to Ken. “I couldn’t make you dance, but let’s find out if I can make your white slave floozy dance.”

  The God turned to Nessa and said “Strip, bitch” and pressed at her mind to make her obey.

  Anger whirled within her. The nerve of this so-called God. She flipped him the bird.

  The God’s face turned red. “What the fuck are you people, anyway?” The God flew closer, and the pressure on her mind grew stronger as he approached.

  “Last warning, shithead,” Nessa said to the God. His ‘I am better than you’ tricks pissed her off. The God ignored her warning.

  “He’s gotten better,” Ken said, a whisper. He hissed and the air around them filled with sand, a sandstorm fifty feet wide. A cloud of fog appeared above them and spit tiny splays of lightning. Nessa’s hair stood on end from the static electricity of Ken’s new shield. Nessa smiled, impressed. She hadn’t ever seen Ken do this trick before. The sand and fog didn’t hold back the God as he approached, but the trick did slow him down and did stop cold his attempt to take over her mind. Ken normally held back from this level of power because it scared him.

  Ken liked to be as human as possible.

  Nessa no longer saw the God, but he remained in her mind’s eye. As the God approached, he reached out toward her with his arms.

  “Don’t let him touch you!” right sock said, startling Nessa, filling her with adrenaline.

  Nessa used the adrenaline and drove her anger and her grief at Opartuth’s passing and her annoyance at having to leave her Eklutna home and the God’s sexist dismissal of her into a full-bore mental blast, screaming “We’re Telepaths!” as she blasted, answering Miami’s idiot question. Ken winced and yelled from the backwash as her attack passed and detonated in the God’s brain.

  The God fell without the slightest resistance to her mental blast. Nessa sucked breath; she hadn’t meant to kill the poor helpless thing. She thought something with enough brass to call itself a God could stand up to a pathetic loser like herself.

  Ken let the sand shield fall a moment later, but kept up his original telekinetic shield. “Holy fuck. Holy fuck,” Ken said. The God had vanished from Nessa’s sight. “What did you do to Miami, Nessa?”

  “I blew his fucking brain out his fucking ears,” right sock said. Right sock normally spoke with the voice of reason, patience and loosy goosy utopianism. The comment sounded almost like left sock.

  Nessa shivered and walked over to the Godly remains. She licked her lips, took the sock puppet off her right hand and stuck it in her pocket. Nope, no more quiet discussions with right sock today, not with its blood up. “This’s absurd,” she said. The Go
dly remains stained the beach, a mottled silver puddle standing a half inch high, an amalgam of black grit in mercury: no bones, no blood, no brains. Nor did the goo seep into the sand. Nessa knelt and peered down. She hadn’t expected the Gods to be anything like this. She hadn’t expected to so trivially harm a God.

  “Get back!” Ken said, a scream. He stayed back. Nessa sensed Ken’s fear and felt him put up another of his top end telekinetic shells around them, this one thick enough to bend light funny.

  A hand rose from the gritty puddle, reminding Nessa of some nasty movie she had seen back in her private detective days. No, the God hadn’t died. She sensed the God’s mind hiding now, wounded, behind a new set of crafty mental shields. Nessa slapped at the hand with a second mind blast. The hand vanished. “No more of that, Goddy,” she said. She blasted the puddle a dozen more times until she nearly exhausted herself.

  Ahhh. Wonderful. Exerting herself always helped. Nope, no more headaches today.

  “Damn,” she said. “This fucking thing’s still conscious, no matter what I do.”

  “You tried to kill a God?” Ken said.

  Nessa turned to face Ken, a bounce in her step. “Me? I’m no killer,” Nessa said. “I’m just pissed. Right sock’s pissed, too. Hell, I’m still pissed. I just wanted to make sure he stayed like this. What is this shit, anyway?” She reached into her soaked fanny pack and got out a lipstick tube. She used her meager teek to remove the lipstick from the tube, the effort of such a minimal teek more taxing than her mental blast. The tube empty, she reached down to scoop up some of the gritty amalgam. The God’s distant mental howl rang through her mind after she separated a piece of the God’s remains from the rest. “Awwh, poor Goddy didn’t like what I did.”

  “Nessa, this is one of the damn Gods you’re shitting with,” Ken said. “Haven’t you ever heard of hubris? Let’s get the fuck out of here before he recovers.”

  She put the lipstick tube’s cap back on and stuck the tube and its contents into her fanny pack. “Watch this thing with your tricks,” Nessa said to Ken, referring to her lipstick case. “Warn me if anything at all changes. I’ll put a telepathic whammy on it to keep this thing mentally warded and shielded, just in case.” She looked at the main patch of the God’s mottled silver remains, cognizant of the thing’s ample mental activity. Even after her dozen mental blasts, the God still thought his godly thoughts and she could no more read his mind or control him than before. “What the fuck is going on?” Nessa said, her voice a raw whisper from her earlier fit. “This is fucking insane.” Nothing obeyed her preconceptions. She had attacked the God’s mind, not his body, yet his body had sustained the damage. His mind huddled in anger and fear behind decent but not excellent mental shields. She didn’t think she had hurt his mind in the slightest.