Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mick Farren

  “Uprising?”

  “Collateral damage?”

  “Don’t we even get a chance to recover from the Dragon Ride?”

  The Dragon Ride, although a close relative of the more familiar wind-walking, had been an arduous and exhausting experience. The violent psychic buffeting and energy shifts, the nightmare apparitions and hallucinations, all left Jim’s and Doc’s minds feeling folded, spindled, and mutilated. Semple might have complained of being equally ripped and crumpled, except that she was running on the adrenaline rush of a foul fury. Partway through the nerve-wrenching experience, Jim had wondered if perhaps some joker of yore, with an arcane, Hell-spawned sense of humor, had deliberately arranged for the ancient escape route to be as harrowing as possible, passing as it did though the death-stinking, blood-soaked interior of the Pyramid of the Moon, the hideous fetid lair of the Great Decapitator of the Moche, and through interstellar space, amid death rays, particle beams, and bad science fiction as Battlestar Galactica fought off an attack by the Cylons under Count Baltar.

  Jim looked from Doc to Semple as another burst of gunfire rattled the here and now. “I don’t know about you two, but I’d be willing to move on someplace else.” Semple stared at him grimly but said nothing. Jim grimaced and shook his head. He knew she was upset, but the facts had to be faced. “I hate to say this, babe, but this place is trashed beyond repair and I really don’t see how it can do us or anyone else any good to get involved in some feminist jihad.”

  To underline his point, a faint tremor shook the ground, but Semple could only snarl. “They wrecked my fucking place. I want to see someone suffer for what’s happened to it.”

  The clap of a distant grenade going off made Doc shake his head. “It can be kinda hard to extract payback when you’re outnumbered and outgunned.”

  Jim immediately backed him up. He felt sorry for Semple, but the shooting was coming closer. “He’s right, girl. Our best bet is to get the fuck out of here.”

  Semple, however, was ready to make a stand. “And how the hell do we do that? After that damned Dragon Ride, none of us has an iota of energy left. We couldn’t so much as levitate across the room.”

  She had a serious point, but Jim was starting to lose patience. “So what do you suggest we do?”

  Before Semple could answer, something moved in the shadows by the fallen Moorish archway. A young woman stepped around a curved panel from the fallen dome. Her head was shaved cue-ball smooth, and she wore a red robe with a strange gold insignia of a clawhammer and three nails on the breast. This had to be the new uniform of Bernadette and her mutineers; the red of the habit was most likely symbolic of the blood spilled by the serial killer Jesus, while the meaning of the hammer and nails was pretty much self-evident. A little incongruously, the nun-militant wore paratroopers’ heavy-duty lace-up jump boots, and bandoleers of ammunition across her chest. She also held a late-twentieth-century machine gun trained on the three of them. The rebel nun seemed in no way intimidated by the sudden appearance of Semple, Jim, and Doc. The muzzle of the weapon didn’t waver as she moved through the arch and into the chamber.

  “The three of you stay right where you are.”

  A second concussion grenade exploded and the nearest rubber guard folded and collapsed, a thick, dark blue liquid flowing from a rent in its hide and oozing thickly across the floor of the corridor. Plaster drifted down from the ceiling and small fires burned amid the debris of previous explosions. Red-clad nuns advanced down the corridor in fast zigzag rushes, firing bursts from their MAC-10s and AK-47s. Even with the help of Semple’s strange, soft-shelled robot guards, it was clear to Mr. Thomas that Aimee and her handful of loyalists were fighting a losing battle. They were steadily being pushed back, room by room, corridor by corridor, staircase by staircase. The rebels, in their new red habits and freshly shaved heads, were taking casualties, but it hardly mattered. Clearly these red sisters were happy to go to the pods in the righteous cause of Bernadette, the Hammer of God, their leader and inspiration. If it came to a battle of attrition, Aimee’s little band simply lacked the numbers to win. The hopeless course was set for their last stand. Run out of her Heaven and forced to take refuge in the despised domain of her destroyed sibling, her options were scant: it was either go down fighting or give herself up for crucifixion.

  Mr. Thomas had no desire to make Thomas the Goat’s last stand, but from where he stood at the far end of the burning corridor, as far from the fighting as he could get, he wasn’t holding out that much hope. His eyes were burning and watering from the smoke, and precious little retreat remained. He was starting to resign himself to taking on a new incarnation. He could only tell himself that maybe he’d gone as far as he could go in goat form; perhaps it was time for a change. As far has he could see, his one hope to remain in this reality was somehow to separate himself so the mutineers wouldn’t associate him with Aimee. He needed to make himself look like an innocent victim, or maybe even a helpless hostage. Could he get himself some kind of Lamb of God gig with the new regime, and lie around all day being fed beer and glossy magazines by bald, red-robed nuns? It was a long shot. He knew “Goat of God” didn’t exactly have the same ring to it.

  Another grenade went off and started a flurry of commotion among the defenders. Mr. Thomas couldn’t quite see what was happening through all the smoke and dust until the dirty white rag was waved aloft tied to a piece of broken lath. That message was unmistakable. Aimee McPherson had given up the fight. The towel had been thrown in. Mr. Thomas knew it wasn’t a flag of truce. It had to be unconditional surrender. As far as he was concerned, the only question that remained was whether or not a goat could be crucified.

  “It would seem we have a Mexican standoff.”

  Despite the machine pistol the red-robed nun had pointed at Doc, a lot of her militancy dropped away when she found herself staring down the barrel of the Gun That Belonged to Elvis. The legendary pistol had magically appeared in Doc’s right hand, trained at her head. At the sight of her confusion, Doc laughed. “I wouldn’t be too upset, my dear. Drunk and sober, I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a very, very long time. It’s no disgrace to be faced down by Doc Holliday.” He inclined his head and looked more closely at the young woman. “Don’t I know you?”

  The rebel nun looked sheepish. “Yeah, Doc. You know me. You’d probably recognize me straightaway if it wasn’t for the haircut.”

  Doc frowned. “You’re . . . ”

  “I’m Aura-Lee. I used to work at . . . ”

  Doc smiled. He didn’t need to be told any more. “Right.”

  “Until I renounced the sins of the flesh—”

  “The sins of the flesh? Aren’t we getting a little overbearingly Victorian? From what I recall, you used to quite enjoy your work.”

  “I only enjoyed it because I didn’t know any better. Bernadette told us—”

  “Bernadette? Who the hell is Bernadette?

  “Bernadette is the Hammer of God.”

  Doc was starting to look as though he didn’t have time for this. “What the fuck kind of title is the Hammer of God?”

  “You knew her as Trixie.”

  “Trixie? She’s behind all this? That troublemaking bitch is calling herself ‘Bernadette the Hammer of God’? I always had her pegged as whorehouse lawyer, but I didn’t think she’d go as far as to infect you all with bloody Jesus.”

  Aura-Lee looked exceedingly unhappy. “I always liked you, Doc. You always treated me on the up and up, but you have to be careful what you say about Bernadette. Very soon, she’s going to be deciding your fate.”

  Doc’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “A lot of people have been convinced they could decide Doc Holliday’s fate.”

  “Please be careful. She’ll be here very soon.”

  A cherub, scarcely taller than Mr. Thomas, clad in a red diaper with little fleecy wings growing out of his back, clambered over a pile of rubble. Mr. Thomas might have laughed at the spectacle except for the big chrome .
44 Magnum the cherub had gripped in his chubby fist, and the intimation that, small as he might be, he knew how to use it. When he saw Mr. Thomas, he stopped in his tracks and brought the gun up. “Feel lucky, punk? I suggest you raise your hands, nice and easy, now.”

  Mr. Thomas didn’t like having guns pointed at him, especially by fat little cherubs with implausible baby voices pretending they were Clint Eastwood. It took him a moment to find his own voice, and when he did, it rasped from smoke and apprehension. “I can’t raise my hands up. All I have is hooves.”

  “So raise your hooves.”

  “I can’t do that. If I did, I’d fall over. I’m a bloody quadruped, you moron.”

  The cherub brandished the Magnum in Mr. Thomas’s face. “Don’t you call me a moron.”

  Mr. Thomas instantly realized that insulting anyone holding the most powerful handgun in the world, even if that someone was only three feet tall, was a moronic act. “Listen, kid, I’m sorry. I’m suffering from a lot of stress, you see?”

  The cherub stuck to the basics. “Quadruped or not, you’re my prisoner.”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it? All this has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I’m an innocent bystander, aren’t I? A noncombatant, look you. I’m not even supposed to be here.”

  “You’ll have to tell that to Bernadette. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a prisoner.”

  The cherub turned. Bernadette and her red nuns were coming down the corridor. The cherub gestured to Bernadette. “There’s another one over here, Mighty Hammer.”

  As Bernadette came through the arch and into the chamber, followed by her armed cohorts and bound prisoners, one of whom was a loudly protesting goat, Doc and Aura-Lee continued to stand with their guns mutually trained on each other. Doc knew that the arrival of the main body of the insurgents totally changed the dynamics of the confrontation, and the new odds were definitely not in his favor. Doc wasn’t about to admit this, though, or even acknowledge it in word or deed. Two dozen guns might have been pointed at him, but he was quite prepared to bluff to the last. Jim and Semple, being completely unarmed, knew they had little choice but to go wherever Doc’s lead might take them. Semple had no illusions of receiving any mercy at the hands of Bernadette.

  As Jim pretty much expected, Doc started his game with an openly reckless lack of concern. He looked past Aura-Lee and called out cheerfully to Bernadette, “How are you doing, Trixie? Aura-Lee tells me you’re calling yourself the Hammer of God these days. Do you really think God needs a hammer?”

  Bernadette colored and cast about for an angry retort, but Doc pressed blithely on. “Is that Donna I see there with her head all shaved and toting that M-16? And Lisa and Linda and Matilida, and Charlotte at the back there trying to hide her face? Seems to me we’ve got ourselves a real reunion, all my whores who went holy.”

  Bernadette finally found her voice.

  “What the hell are you doing here, John Holliday?”

  “John Holliday, is it? You can’t call me Doc anymore? After all the good times we spent together, way back whenever it was?”

  Bernadette flushed all the way to the top of her shaved head. The other ranks were looking to her for guidance, but even with a multitude of guns at her back it wasn’t easy to confront Doc Holliday’s glib and perverse charm. “Good times. You can talk about good times after all the awful things you forced us to do?”

  “Isn’t your memory getting a little distorted here, Trixie, my darling? I don’t recall anyone being forced to do anything.”

  “I asked you what you were doing here, Doc.”

  “Doing here? Why, Trixie, I’m hardly doing anything here. I just happened to stop by on my way out of Hell with my good friends Jim Morrison and Semple McPherson.”

  At the mention of Semple’s name, Aimee immediately let out a wail. “Semple, do something, for God’s sake. She’s going to crucify us.”

  An angel clapped a hand over Aimee’s mouth, cutting off her cries. Semple didn’t move; she was too focused on the interchange between Doc and Bernadette. Bernadette took a step closer to Doc. “Maybe you should have stayed in Hell.”

  As Bernadette spoke, the environment shook once more, this time violently, and with a deep and primally disturbing sub-bass rumble that threatened to liquefy the brain of everyone present. As the shaking escalated to a bouncing side-to-side motion, a number of people were thrown to the ground, and wide fissures appeared in the floor. An angel fluttered his wings, attempting to maintain his balance, and a red nun dropped her Uzi, causing it to discharge and accidentally waste two of her comrades. As Jim braced his legs, struggling to stay on his feet, he saw a way to back Doc’s play. Capitalizing on the fact that victorious euphoria was rapidly being replaced by a superstitious dread, he shouted so all the nuns could hear, “It doesn’t look like God’s too pleased with what you’ve been up to.”

  The shaking subsided slightly and Semple took this as her cue to step up beside Doc and face Bernadette. She took a more practical tack. “As the creator of this place, I think I should warn you that it’s about to come completely apart.”

  Even Bernadette put her theocratic power play to one side in the face of the emergency. “What do we do?”

  “My best bet would be to pool our resources and wind-walk the fuck out of here before we’re all toast.”

  Semple’s expression was bleak. “With our resources, the only place we’re going is Heaven.”

  Jim had never seen Aimee’s Heaven in its overtime Walt Disney glory, and the damage and decay only caused him to wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever have wanted to live there. Most of the buildings were now burned-out, smoke-scarred ruins. The great lawn was plowed up by shell craters, and a World War II vintage Nazi Tiger tank, crudely painted a garish scarlet, stood abandoned on Aimee’s favorite terrace overlooking the lake, where it had apparently been shelling the bejesus out of the Great Cloister with its turret-mounted eighty-eight. Shells and mortars had shattered the trees on the headland where virgins once danced, and reduced the Maxfield Parrish temple to a pile of rubble. Dead bluebirds littered the ground, where they’d expired with beaks agape and feet in the air. Weird mutated Bambis lurked in the ruins, five-legged and two-headed, Siamese twins and ones who looked perfectly normal except for foam at the edges of their nostrils and a distant rabid stare. The lake itself was now nothing more than a gray-green expanse of dead, polluted water with the flotsam of conflict floating on its oily surface, while over everything lowered a threatening sky the color of elderly mold.

  As Jim got to his feet after falling heavily out of the end of the wind-walk, he looked round in total disbelief. “What the fuck is this place, some kind of physical representation of clinical depression?” He glanced at one of Bernadette’s angels who had emerged right beside him. “This is what you were fighting over?”

  Just to complicate matters even further, the mass wind-walk from Semple’s imploding environment had turned out to be a major disaster. Jim had been one of the lucky ones. He’d only materialized in Heaven a couple of feet off the ground and suffered nothing worse than a mildly bruising fall. A half dozen of Bernadette’s nuns had been so tightly bunched up when they made their exit that they had merged in transit into a hideous composite of limbs, heads, and tattered pieces of bloody garment protruding from a shapeless mass of amorphous flesh like a joint nightmare of Francis Bacon and John Carpenter. Doc had emerged close to this abhorrent mess of human meat and was staring at it with grim revulsion. The heads and mouths that remained on the outside of the quivering mound of tissue started to scream in unison. “Finish us! Finish us!”

  Doc turned and beckoned quickly to Bernadette. “Are you going to get your people to destroy that thing or do I have to shoot it myself?”

  “Shoot it?” Bernadette looked groggy and was having difficulty grasping what was going on. She might even have been regretting her grab for power.

  Doc glared angrily at her. “Yes, shoot it. Or blow it up with a
grenade. Put the poor bastards out of their misery one way or another.”

  The screaming went on. “Finish us! Finish us!”

  Bernadette was close to panic. “I can’t waste my own people.”

  Doc’s voice was tinged with contempt. “It goes with the territory. Put up or shut up.”

  Bernadette held out a hand and a nun gave her a German stick grenade. Doc tried to shout a warning as she pulled out the pin. “Let the rest of us get fucking clear first!”

  But he was too late. She’d already tossed the potato masher into the screaming flesh.

  A large number of nuns and angels ran straight for the lake to wash away the gore. Among them was Semple, who had a clot of brain tissue lodged in her hair, but most came to a halt before they reached the water’s edge. Already spooked by the wind-walk and the subsequent vile disaster and explosion, the sight of a huge white letterbox-format screen, more than seventy feet across, rising majestically from the waters of the lake had the majority of them down on their knees, praying for their souls and sanity. The screen continued to rise until it was floating ten feet above the surface, with no visible means of support. It was hardly a biblical apparition, neither a leviathan nor a burning bush. Either of those might have been more understandable to the nuns. At least they would have been congruent with their religious zeal. Something so techno-geometric filled them with more irrational dread than the sight of Jonah’s whale, a pillar of fire, or the Archangel Gabriel playing a Miles Davis composition on his trumpet.

  Jim was probably one of the first to realize what it was: a big Diamond Vision projection TV screen of the kind that had come into use at big-time stadium rock concerts a few years after his death. Certainly, along with Doc and Semple, he was one of the few who didn’t go into a paroxysm of Pentecostal confusion when the first image appeared on the screen. To Jim’s relief, it wasn’t some rerun of a middle-aged Mick Jagger in concert, but a logo sequence of a woman’s arm brandishing a gleaming sword, rising slowly from a crystal-clear, pristine lake that put Aimee’s stagnant body of water to shame. The arm was accompanied by a written legend in veveVoodoo characters. After holding for about twenty seconds, it was replaced by three huge and formidable close-ups of Dr. Hypodermic, Danbhala La Flambeau, and Baron Tonnerre. They peered from the screen as though, via some two-way system, they were seeing the inhabitants of Heaven just as the inhabitants were seeing them.