Mythbreaker

by Stephen Blackmoore

  “Oh, the key to the car we left in.” Sam suddenly feels very possessive of it. “I like it. It’s... pretty.” Sam frowns. That’s not a word she’d usually use for something like a car key.

  “It is,” Medeina says. “Wood and leaves under... glass?”

  “I think it’s plastic,” Sam says. She tugs the key from Medeina’s hand. A little too forcefully. “What now?”

  “We could hunt again,” Medeina says. “There is smaller game, though not nearly as satisfying.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Ah. Yes. Complicated.” Medeina sighs. “I know there are things I need to decide. About the Chronicler, about my part in this drama. I was a pawn for Zaphiel and then a pawn for El Jefe. I have been a pawn for a very long time.”

  “But you’re not a pawn,” Sam says. “You’re a goddess.”

  “I am a very small goddess. And no one believes in me anymore. There are no songs to my name, no stories of my exploits. My people shifted their loyalties to other gods. I think perhaps the time of gods is over.”

  “But there are others still out there,” Sam says. “Only a few hours ago this whole thing sounded crazy to me, but I know what I’ve seen, what you’ve shown me.”

  “Thank you,” Medeina says, “but that very thing is the problem. You don’t believe because you believe. You believe because I showed you. That is this modern world’s curse. It demands proof. It insists on cold numbers. The power of humanity’s belief is not enough to sustain the old gods. You believe in new gods, like El Jefe or that scattered entity harboring the Chronicler. You believe in devils more than you believe in gods.”

  “But can’t Fitz help you? I don’t completely understand what he is or what he can do, but can’t he tell your stories and make people believe? Isn’t that what he’s supposed to be able to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Medeina says. “I know that he has great power, but I don’t understand what that power is or how he wields it. I don’t know that Zaphiel or El Jefe fully understand it, either. I suspect it is not quite what they are expecting. Besides”—Medeina strokes Sam’s cheek with a finger—“I did try to kill him.”

  “He believed me when I showed up with you. He knows he can trust you.” But can he? Sam has to admit that being hunted, seeing those corpses in the hospital, almost being killed back at the safe house, well, it’s likely to leave Fitz a little put off.

  “I don’t know that I want him to,” Medeina says. “I cannot shake the feeling that even as I step away from El Jefe’s game, I am still a piece in play. If I stay, do I play out some unseen strategy of his? I think the best thing for me is to leave.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Away,” Medeina says. There’s a finality in that word that makes Sam’s blood run cold.

  “You’re talking about dying,” Sam says.

  “I am already dead,” Medeina says. “The last time I had even one believer was over a thousand years ago. I am a footnote in history. They say the gods are arrogant, and that’s true, but sometimes we learn when it’s time to give up and step aside.”

  Sam is suddenly gripped with an uncontrollable panic. “No,” she says. “You don’t get to do that. That’s not you. You’re, fuck, Xena or something. You don’t run. You don’t hide.”

  “In the form of a hare, I do both very well,” Medeina says.

  “And then you come back later to fight. You’re afraid you’re a pawn in somebody else’s game? Then turn it the fuck around. Play your own game. You’re a fucking goddess.” Sam is shaking, her hands balled into fists. “You do not get to give up. Not after what you just shared with me. You don’t give that to a person and then turn around and throw it away. You say we believe in devils now more than gods? Make us believe. Help Fitz. Help him figure out what he needs to do, who he needs to be. Be a part of that.”

  Medeina says nothing, just looks into Sam’s eyes with the inscrutability of a statue. “We are broken gods, Sam,” Medeina says. “All of us. We’ve been turned out of our homes, our purposes and identities shattered. We are not what we thought we were. Every god and goddess, every myth and hero will be hunting Fitz down. They will try to make him do their bidding, just as some of them did to Jake Malmon. I know that Fitz is stronger by far than any other Chronicler has ever been, but I do not know that he is strong enough to withstand that onslaught.”

  “That’s why he needs your help. I know Fitz. If he doesn’t want to do something, he won’t fucking do it. Let them come. He won’t help them. But be his friend, help protect him, and he’ll do the same for you.”

  “You believe so? Even after the things I’ve done to hunt him down? He’s witnessed innocents I killed in anger. He knows what I am capable of, what I have done. And not just in the hospital; throughout my entire existence. He knows my stories. After all that, you think he will help me if I help him?”

  “Yes,” Sam says, hoping she’s right. Medeina looks at her for a long time, saying nothing, then gives a short, sharp nod.

  “All right,” she says. “I will help him. And I will”—she pauses, her face twisting on the word as though tasting something for the first time and not sure if she likes it—“ask him for his power to make others believe in me, rather than demand it of him.”

  “If you ask him, I know he’ll do it.”

  Medeina shakes her head. “Asking. Who knew that it would come to that?”

  Sam smiles at her, curls tighter into her side. She has never felt so content, so peaceful. “Humans,” she says. “We’re complicated.”

  THE SKYSCRAPER OFF Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles is all blue glass and polished steel. Most of its windows are dark, and the ones that aren’t stand out in the empty night. The building houses the corporate headquarters of eight commercial banks, three credit unions, nine collection agencies, fourteen brokerages and five S&Ls.

  And somewhere inside it is the god of money.

  “And you’re sure he’s up there?” Fitz says. Amanda says he has a suite of offices at the very top of the building, where he can look out over the city.

  Two Amandas, Jake and Fitz sit in the van across the street looking at the front entrance. Inside is a security guard at a reception desk; ten minutes ago another came out of the elevator, chatted a bit and then swapped.

  “I’m sure he’s in there,” one Amanda says. “As to where in there, I have no idea. I haven’t been able to crack into any of his buildings’ surveillance. My eyes stop at the street.”

  “So you saw him go in,” Jake says.

  “And not come out again, yes,” says the other Amanda.

  It had taken a while to figure out where Big was hiding out. He’d gone off Amanda’s radar after he’d sold them out at the hotel and she hadn’t been able to pick him up again on satellite imagery or surveillance cameras. She had to go back several hours before she found him again. From there it was easy to follow him to this building.

  “How do you know he has an office at the top?”

  “Same reason I know he’s got a casino in Hawaiian Gardens,” she says. “I’ve been there. He is my brother. We’re at least friendly, even if we don’t get along.”

  “We’re here to kill him,” Fitz says. “I’m not sure that really counts as friendly.”

  Amanda shrugs. “Chalk it up to sibling rivalry. If the roles were reversed, he’d be trying to kill me too.”

  “You have a very fucked-up family life,” Fitz says.

  “And you keep thinking we’re human,” Amanda replies.

  That’s a good point. He’s been racking his brain the entire trip over and he hasn’t come up with a plan. So far it’s worked out something like this:

  1) Confront Big Money

  2) ????

  3) Profit.

  Maybe he needs to look at this differently.

  But maybe his problem is that he’s looking at taking him down the way a person would be taken down.

  “What does it mean for a god to die?” Fitz s
ays. It’s been bothering him ever since Jake brought up the topic back at the safe house.

  In the last couple of days he’s been filled with the gods’ stories, and though many of them are still a jumbled mess, bits and pieces are bobbing to the surface, patterns are emerging.

  They aren’t things, so much as they’re concepts. Concepts with teeth, concepts with bodies and shapes and desires. They are War and Love and Hatred and Greed.

  How do you kill a concept?

  Destroy them with who they are, Amanda had said. Take what they are and use it against them. In her case, maybe a virus. In Big’s case, what? An economic meltdown? He had said that he changed according to the way the world’s economy moved, and suggested he wasn’t actually a god.

  Fitz doesn’t buy it, just like he doesn’t buy Amanda’s insistence that she isn’t a god. Dude’s the embodiment of money, just like she’s the embodiment of technology. So what is Big’s weakness?

  “One thing at a time, big guy,” Jake says. “We gotta get in there, first.”

  “You have guns,” Amanda says.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Fitz says. “Just because I’m caught up in all this bullshit doesn’t mean I want to start shooting innocent people.” There’s been too much death already.

  “They do work for my brother,” Amanda says. “I’d hardly call that innocent.”

  “Fuckers are just trying to make a living,” Jake says. “Jesus, you’re all the same.”

  “I don’t want to kill anybody,” Fitz says.

  Amanda rolls her eyes. “We don’t have to kill anybody. I restocked the van. Smoke grenades, bean bag rounds, rubber bullets.”

  “I look like I could shoot a shotgun?” Jake says.

  “You look like you’ll keel over in a stiff breeze,” one Amanda says. She points at her twin. “We’ll do the fireworks. You just stay low and don’t get shot. Once we’re in, I should be able to get a better idea of where he is.”

  “How?” Fitz says. “You said you don’t have access to surveillance in the building.”

  “The closer I am to him, the better I can sense him. He’s holed up in there. There are wards and sigils in the walls that prevent me from seeing inside. Once I get in there, though, I’ll be able to sense him.”

  “And he’ll sense you,” Jake says. “Great plan.”

  “He’ll know we’re there the moment the smoke grenades come out,” Fitz says, “and we’re going to have to get upstairs. It’s not like we’re going to have surprise on our side.”

  “And when we find him?” Jake says. “Then what?”

  “I’ll think of something,” Fitz says, and really, really hopes he’s right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE CONFERENCE ROOM is about as normal and corporate a conference room as one can get. Abstract art on the walls, one wall of solid glass overlooking Los Angeles, a heavy teak conference table surrounded by Herman Miller chairs.

  And then there are the occupants, who are very far from normal.

  Big Money sits rapidly shifting from men to women, professional and dingy, Asian, white, black, Latin. He can’t seem to keep a form for more than a couple of seconds at a time. Next to him Baron Samedi, a tall man in a black suit and a top hat whose head is a skull, drums bony fingers on the tabletop. Then Vaiśravana, a heavily muscled Asian man in plated armor, his form blurry as if seen through a thick haze, leans back with his arms crossed. The Sumerian Ereshkigal, a woman in a long flowing robe of woven wool, a gold headdress atop her braided hair, casually cleans her nails with the tip of a massive dagger. The brightly-colored serpent Quetzalcoatl, wings of red and blue and green sprouting from its back, has its body coiled into a chair as if to spring out of it at a moment’s notice.

  They sit around the conference, eyeing the two at opposing ends of the table: Zaphiel and the Man.

  “I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for coming,” the Man says, his cigar glowing as he takes a puff on it. “Really, it’s great to have this time to sit down, have a face to face and work some things out.”

  Zaphiel scowls with his four mouths. He has given up any pretense of humanity, and stands opposite the Man with all four wings unfurled and brushing the ceiling. His skin is cracked and blistered from Amanda’s attack near the airport.

  “You promised us the Chronicler,” Zaphiel says, his harmonizing voice thick and slurred.

  “And I delivered,” the Man says. “I did everything but tie him up in a bow for you. Say, that’s quite a burn you’ve got there. You want some Bactine, or something?”

  Zaphiel digs his claws into the conference room table, gouging long furrows out of the wood. “You said he would be simple to pick up.”

  “You’re the leader of the Cherubs,” the Man says. “I didn’t think a little godling of the Internet would be a problem for you. Clearly I was wrong.”

  “Your kind are an abomination,” Zaphiel says.

  The Man takes a puff on his cigar. It glows an angry red. “You Old Testament types really like to toss that ‘abomination’ thing around, don’t you? My kind. What exactly is my kind?”

  “Usurpers. Pretenders to godhood,” Zaphiel says. A nod from Baron Samedi, echoed by the others. Big Money pushes himself further back in his chair.

  “You call yourselves new gods, as if you have any place among the Heavens,” Zaphiel says. “We are thousands of years old—”

  “Hundreds,” the Man says. “At least, some of you are. Or am I mistaken that the Baron here got his start in the holds of French cargo ships as his worshippers died by the score on their way to the New World? When did you first raise your eyes to the stars, Lord Saturday? Mid-seventeenth century? Eighteenth? A few hundred years among your paltry flock? Don’t speak to me about age.”

  “Age is not the point,” Ereshkigal says. “You are”—she searches for the word—“unseemly.”

  “We ssee what you are trying to do,” Quetzalcoatl says, his snake’s jaw working around the words. “You think thiss modern world hass no need for uss, and sso you would replace uss.”

  “You mean to hold the Chronicler as your own,” Vaiśravana says. “He is a resource to be used by us all.”

  “By which you mean yourselves,” the Man says. “I see what you’re trying to do, too. You want to cut everyone else out. Make him your little pet. News flash! So does everybody else. How long before the bunch of you squabble and whine amongst yourselves? How long before you’re tearing poor Fitz into pieces trying to get your stories told? Twenty years? Ten? Two?”

  “We found him,” Zaphiel says.

  The Man laughs. “Oh, and you think you’re the only ones who did that? How did I find him? How did Bacchus?”

  The gods jerk in surprise as though they’ve been slapped. “Bacchus found him?” Ereshkigal says.

  “Oh, yes. Had him in his hands longer than any of you did.”

  “Bacchus is dead,” Baron Samedi says. “We all felt it. Did the Chronicler kill him?”

  “That’s impossible,” Ereshkigal said.

  “Quite,” the Man says. “No, he didn’t kill him. You know, it’s a funny thing. When everything went to shit for all of you up there in the firmament, I was just an idea. The vaguest of concepts. There was no need for me. There was Yahweh, Odin, Zeus. All the other father gods who spilled their seed across the heavens so many thousands of years ago and spawned all of you. I watched it all happen from down here. Quite the perspective. Seeing all of you fall, seeing the doors of your homelands locked up tight. But you know what was the most interesting? All the father gods left. Up and disappeared.”

  “We know this,” Zaphiel says. “You are not telling us anything new.”

  “No, I suppose I’m not. Well, this might be new. Have you heard the phrase, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’?” the Man says. He looks around the table at the blank stares and then brightens as Ereshkigal gasps. “Oh, we have a winner! She gets it. How about the rest of you? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? No? You want to exp
lain it to them, honey, or do I need to spell it out?”

  “That is not possible,” she says. “How could such a thing occur?”

  “What in the hell are you two talking about?” Zaphiel says. “What is not possible?”

  “I killed Bacchus,” the Man says. “Me. The abomination. Because when all your daddies fucked off to Buffalo, the universe said, ‘Welp, looks like we need another one and none of these other yahoos fit the bill.’ There’s a new sheriff in town, boys and girls, and it’s me.”

  “This is preposterous,” Baron Samedi says. “I have heard enough. I will tear this worm to pieces.” He stands, shoving Big Money out of the way in order to get to the Man, who puts his arms wide as if to embrace him, a smile on his face.

  The bony hands of the Baron wrap around the Man’s throat and squeeze. Energy courses through the Baron’s fingers, making the Man’s throat glow blue.

  Other than that, nothing happens.

  “What exactly were you thinking would happen?” the Man says. “Maybe something like this?” He punches into the Baron’s stomach, ripping through his suit, his fist a hot coal. Fire bursts through the Baron’s eye sockets, the bones charring, cracking from the heat. The Baron goes up in flames; in less than a second, he is nothing but ash and steaming ichor.

  “That’s pretty much how Bacchus went, too,” the Man says, tipping ash from his cigar onto what’s left of the Baron.

  THE FIRST FLASH-BANG takes care of the lobby’s glass doors, blowing them out in a shower of shards. The guard at the reception desk screams, drops to the floor, blind and deaf.

  The two Amandas stroll through the shattered glass. The elevator opens and a second guard steps out, kisses the floor when he sees the two women with shotguns.

  “They don’t pay me enough for this!” he yells, his hands on the back of his head.

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” Fitz says, running up behind the Amandas. He reaches down, grabs the guard’s keychain from his belt and selects the elevator key. “Just need this.”