by Mick Farren
After that, there was no more resistance, and the King of the Monsters fell to a routinely systematic demolition of Anubis’s palace, up one wing and down the next, like an automatic and highly inevitable wrecking machine. Semple was almost tempted to become bored, but then she spotted the cluster of tiny figures standing on a flat roof near the high point of the ankh. She looked quickly at Jesus. “Can you zoom in on something?”
“Where?”
“There.”
“There?”
“That’s right.”
He played with the remote and a new inset appeared. This time it was an overhead color shot, but not from Gojiro’s POV. (How the fuck was this being done?)
“There he is!”
And there he was. Canine head swiveling anxiously, Anubis, God-King of Necropolis, stood surrounded by harem, courtiers, and guards, both ceremonial Nubian and the more practical rocketeers with their automatic weapons, who looked equally perturbed by their situation.
Mr. Thomas shook his head in puzzlement. “What does he think he’s going to achieve by waiting around up there?”
“Maybe he’s hoping to be airlifted out.”
“You think he’s got any planes left?”
Jesus studied the screen. “Never underestimate a deity when it comes to self-preservation.”
Gojiro didn’t seem to have noticed Anubis and his court or their ongoing attempt to save themselves. He was too busy on the other side of the palace complex playing the saurian bulldozer. Semple looked at the screen more closely. “People I know are down there.”
It took the goat to state the obvious. “Hardly surprising, considering you were one of his concubines.”
“There’s Zipporah, and Parsis, and that bloody Dream Warden.”
Mr. Thomas snorted. “If Anubis had half a brain, he’d simply wind-walk out of there.”
Jesus shook his head, as though he totally understood the underlying psychology of Anubis. And quite possibly he did. “He won’t. He’s enjoyed being a god for too long. For him, starting over somewhere else would be unthinkable. He couldn’t face rebuilding his power and his environment. To re-create the entire city all over again would be close to unthinkable.”
“He isn’t going to have too much city left after the Big Green gets through with it.”
“He not only has to escape but be seen to escape, at least by what he thinks of as his loyal followers. Kind of like Hitler at the end of World War II, getting away to Argentina in the U-boat.”
Mr. Thomas belched. “Nasty little shit, that Hitler. A vegetarian, used to fart all the time. Also he didn’t drink. Never trust a man who doesn’t drink or eat meat.”
“Aren’t you a vegetarian?”
“I’m a goat. I eat anything. Barbed wire, nails, you name it.”
“I take it back.”
“You know the weirdest thing about Hitler?”
“Aside from the mustache?”
“The bastard was a lazy son of a bitch. Never got out of bed before noon, and would sit up all night watching movies.”
Semple smiled. “Just like some others we could mention.” She paused and frowned. “But how could you have known Adolf Hitler? The time frames don’t compute.”
Mr. Thomas looked a little shamefaced. “It was on this side. After the boyo had laid low for a couple of decades, Der Führer decided he’d have another stab at Götterdömmerung and I, for my sins—quite literally for my sins—got a gig as a regimental goat in the Nibelungen Division of the Afterlife. Of course, I deserted once the Barbiturate Wars got started.”
Jesus ignored the entire exchange, even the passing reference to himself. “It’s like I was saying, if Anubis can pull off a spectacular last-minute escape, at least he’d be able to play the god in exile, and sit around conspiring and planning acts of revenge and terrorism against his supposed enemies.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“To his mind, he’d be maintaining an accepted and traditional continuation. He’d still be able to consider himself a god, albeit a god fallen on hard times. In fact, he might quite enjoy the situation. It would give him infinite scope for self-pity and acts of paranoid violence.”
“I’d be very upset if he were to get away.”
Jesus glanced at Semple. “You don’t forgive easily, do you?”
“I don’t usually forgive at all. I’m the dark half of the deal, don’t forget. Let Aimee run around granting dispensations and forgiving trespasses.” She looked at the screen, where Gojiro was still ignoring Anubis and his entourage of refugees. He appeared fixated on one particular section of palace near the lower left point of the pentagram. Not content with reducing it to rubble, he was actually digging in the rubble he’d created with his huge hands, delving into foundations and subbasements, like a dog after a deep-buried bone, tossing bits of debris over his shoulder like Henry VIII eating chicken. Semple pointed angrily. “What’s his problem? Why doesn’t he notice Anubis and his crew and do something really unpleasant to them?”
Gojiro unearthed what looked uncommonly like a large chunk of a cyclotron. Scrutinized it for about twenty seconds, licked it, and then pitched it away. Jesus turned to Semple. “Where did Anubis keep his weapons-grade uranium?”
Semple looked at him blankly. “How the hell should I know? Concubines weren’t party to that kind of information.”
“But was it someplace in the palace?”
“Yeah, I guess so. There was supposed to be this bit that no one was allowed into, with guards and steel doors and big chrome Tesla things that sparked and flashed. Anubis and the Dream Warden were always in and out of there. Sometimes girls were sent in for the scientists. At least, that was the story. I wasn’t around long enough to find out for sure.”
“That’s it, then.”
“That’s what, then?”
“He’s going after the U-248.”
Semple shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Pigs go rooting for truffles. The Big Green goes for super-enriched uranium. It’s his favorite delicacy.”
“Fuck the great green overgrown retard and his favorite delicacies. Can’t you do anything to distract him? I want that bastard Anubis chewed up and spat out.”
Mr. Thomas stared at Semple as if to bring her back to earth. People who lived in brain tumors didn’t throw rocks at the Big Green when he was on a roll. “There’s no stopping him when he’s digging for uranium.”
But, as the goat spoke, Gojiro hit paydirt. He dragged up what must have been, on any human scale, a safe the size of a large room, raised it to his mouth, and squeezed it like Popeye opening a can of spinach. Something gray and metallic squirted into his mouth. After swallowing, he sat back on his haunches with a satisfied gloat on his face. Almost immediately, all hell broke loose in the dome. The screens instantly degenerated into distorted acid-trip light shows. A distended arterial system appeared in the fabric of the structure, pulsing green-death radiance. A high-frequency shriek forced Jesus and Semple to cover their ears and almost sent Mr. Thomas into convulsions, unable as he was to do likewise with his hooves. The disruption seemed to last for around a hundred seconds and then subsided. Afterward, Mr. Thomas looked decidedly sick. “I hate it when he eats fissionable material. I swear that’s what gives him tumors.”
Semple, on the other hand, was immediately back to taking care of business. So the goat thought she was pushy. She hadn’t come all this way to be bilked out of watching Anubis get his. She rounded on Jesus. “So now that he’s had his fun, let’s get him moving again.”
Jesus shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Semple was uncomprehending. “What do you mean, you don’t think so?”
“I fear our jolly green buddy is going to be a bit sluggish for a while.”
“Sluggish?”
Mr. Thomas, who had regained some of his equilibrium, explained. “His usual pattern is to go to sleep for a while after a snack of uranium. Especially enriched uranium.
”
“He can’t go to sleep now.”
Jesus shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it.”
The picture was now back intact on the auxiliary screens and it showed a King of the Monsters who was definitely looking smug and somnolent. Semple, on the other hand, was close to throwing a temper tantrum. “Can’t you give him some kind of shock?”
Again Jesus shook his head. “Nothing so he’d notice.”
“But look at the screen!” Semple pointed at two large passenger-carrying autogiros that were running low and fast straight for where Anubis and his entourage were waiting. The large, bulbous planes, with their big, forward-mounted radial engines, huge rotors, short stubby wings, red and silver livery, and art deco fuselage styling, had to be Anubis’s ace in the hole—his ticket to ride. Semple’s voice modulated toward the high C of an anguished wail. “That dog-headed fuck is going to get away! After everything, the bastard is going to escape!”
Jim’s breath steamed with each exhalation as he looked around at the ice cavern. The opium spell was irrevocably broken and he was cold to the point of shivering. All around, twisted glacial shapes loomed over him, as though some great cascade had been instantly frozen, only to crack under its own internal stresses and then refreeze again, leaving gaping crevasses and bottomless fissures, straining without motion against the forces of some great internalized kinetic agony. Wasn’t one of the moons of Neptune like that? So unstable that it constantly blew itself apart, but so cold that it was immediately returned to a sphere of sunless ice? Dr. Hypodermic sat some twelve or fourteen feet above where Jim was standing, angular arachnid legs formally crossed and smoking a long thin cheroot, the smoke from which drifted on an almost horizontal plane in the sub-zero air. While he sat and smoked, frost formed white on his shoulders and the crown of his stovepipe hat. “This is what used to be the very core of hell. Where Lucifer sat entombed in ice after his great bust-up with God.”
Jim turned. “I don’t see him.”
“I’m telling you how it was then, man. Not how it is now.”
“So where’s Lucifer now?”
“Quite likely playing cards in the casino with Doc Holliday.”
“Doc play cards with the devil?”
“Doc has always been a student of challenging all possible limitations.”
“But gambling with Satan?”
“Something of a tradition, n’ est-ce pas?”
Jim nodded. “I guess so. Except that I thought I saw Doc in the opium den.”
“How many places can Doc be at once? Let me count the ways.” Hypodermic produced a leather cigar case with silver fittings. “You want one of these?”
Jim nodded. “Why not?”
The Doctor tossed Jim a cheroot. He caught it deftly and with equal dexterity conjured a flame at the tip of his thumb and lit it. The smoke tasted good and he was pleased that he had accomplished everything so neatly in front of the Mystère. The Mystère, meanwhile, gestured around the ice cavern like a real estate broker hustling a client. “This place could be your fortress of solitude.”
Jim looked up quizzically. “Are you suggesting that I sign on as Superman?”
“It’s one way to go.”
“What is this? Some kind of sequence of temptations?”
“Not exactly.”
“So what is this all about?”
“It’s simple. You were a star, then you were a drunk, then you were a junkie, and that made you mine. Now I have to figure out what to do with you.”
“And you’re trying different contexts on for size?”
“You got it, mon ami.”
Gojiro’s eyes slowly closed and the forward screen blacked out. The second-unit images showed that the two autogiros were taking a circular course, giving the monster the widest possible berth before making the final approach to pick up Anubis and his people. Semple was bedside herself. She stood with Mr. Thomas, in her ludicrous superheroine outfit, all but beating her gloved fists on the screens in angry frustration as the autogiros slowly made their turn. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Mr. Thomas’s eyes were large and phlegmatic. “It’s the luck of the draw, girl.”
“I don’t need fucking platitudes.”
“You can’t win them all.”
“I can’t win any of them.”
Jesus put the useless remote aside and leaned back in the couch. He, too, seemed to accept the escape of Anubis as inevitable. “Self-pity is very unbecoming.”
“Fuck unbecoming. You two didn’t have to sleep with the dog-headed psychopath.”
Mr. Thomas waggled his horns. “And for that we are profoundly grateful.”
“You also didn’t nearly get blown apart by his bloody atom bomb.”
Jesus looked offended. “It brought you to us, didn’t it?”
“You said that before.”
“But it’s still true, isn’t it?”
“And, like I asked you before, what good has that done me? I’m decked out in this absurd fucking outfit, and—”
Mr. Thomas looked up at her. “I rather like the costume.”
“Then you fucking wear it. It looks dumb. It leaves me half naked. It’s uncomfortable. It constricts and cuts in all the wrong places and these boots were certainly not made for walking.”
As Semple railed against fate, Jesus, and Mr. Thomas, a mighty snore echoed through the dome. For Semple, this was the last straw. “The damned thing’s gone to sleep.”
Jesus yawned in sympathy. “I’m afraid so.”
“If you were any kind of real messiah, you’d do something. You wouldn’t just sit here in a tumor with a goat and cross-shaped pool. Jesus Christ? If you saw a real fucking cross, you’d run a mile. Three Romans with nails and no one would see you for dust.”
“Rudeness and insults are even more unattractive than self-pity.”
Semple swung around, fists clenched. This time, she was more than ready to punch out the phony Christ. Maybe a black eye and a bloody nose would do something for his calm self-satisfaction. As she turned, however, the forward screen suddenly came to life again. “What’s happening?”
“He seems to have woken up.”
The autogiros were now just a hundred yards from the roof where Anubis and the courtiers and concubines were waiting, moving slowly in for the pick-up.
Mr. Thomas was the first to grasp what was going on. “It’s the autogiros. The Big Green hates aircraft.”
The dome trembled and Jesus grabbed for the remote, at the same time looking reproachfully at Semple. “I’ll do what I can, but you really don’t deserve this after what you said to me.”
Gojiro stumbled ponderously to his feet and lurched toward the two aircraft. The autogiros immediately took evasive action, swinging away from Anubis’s rooftop refuge, but in two mighty strides the irritated monster had them within his grasp. He grabbed the nearest of the pair just behind the cockpit, literally ripping the plane out of the air and crushing it between his three-fingered hands. The pilot of the second aircraft, seeing what had happened to his partner’s machine, immediately threw his into a climbing turn, desperately trying to make both height and distance and get himself out of reach of the reptile’s clutches. Unfortunately, the Necropolis version of the autogiro was neither fast enough nor maneuverable enough to do what was required of it. A green hand flashed up and seized it firmly by the tapering tail. The pilot’s last forlorn option was simply to open the throttle as wide as he could and hope he could tear himself free by sheer raw horsepower. This theory actually worked, up to a point. The engine screamed as it revved beyond all safety limits, but instead of pulling free from the monster’s grip, it simply tore itself loose, destroying the autogiro in the process. The detached engine’s momentum carried it on and up for an instant, but then it flipped over and began to spiral crazily to the rubble below. The body of the plane remained firmly in Gojiro’s left hand. A crewman plunged through the gaping hole in the fuselage, and Gojiro glanced
down as the body fluttered to earth like a twisting leaf. A mere falling human could hardly hold his attention for very long, though, and with a terminal gesture of finality he mashed the second autogiro with a thunderous clap of his hands.
Semple watched with bated breath, her previous anger forgotten, and even Jesus and Mr. Thomas were leaning in, rooting for the big guy. “Okay, now go for the people. Go for the people on the roof.”
As though for Semple’s benefit, one of the mysterious second units closed on the potential targets on the roof. To Semple’s undying delight, the God-King of Necropolis appeared on the verge of a very ugly panic. He paced and he raved and was obviously wishing that he could order violence done to someone he could hold responsible. Sadly, from Anubis’s point of view, the only entity responsible for his current predicament was green and vastly unassailable. Gojiro, on the other hand, continued to be completely unaware of Anubis’s existence.
“Get him, you great idiot.”
Of course the King of the Monsters couldn’t hear her, so she flashed around on Jesus. “Isn’t there any way you can direct his attention?”
