The Afterlife Series Omnibus: Heaven, Hell, Earth, Wasteland, War, Stones

by Mur Lafferty

  “Wait! The improbability storm is still going on!” Scott yelled after them. “You could die out there!”

  True, but it’s not probable, Kate thought. She hovered near the door and let Daniel open it …Straight into the eye of the improbability storm.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The storm’s eye seemed to be about half a mile wide, with the wind swirling around them. Even though it was still dark, they could see the wind: solid here, gaseous there, even liquid and blue as it devoured the air around them.

  Kate bounced around on the wind until she materialized as a human again, acolyte robe blowing out behind her. “How do we move through that?” Kate yelled.

  “We’re gods, right?” asked Daniel.

  “No, dude, that won’t work!” she replied, squinting through the spluttering flames. “Did you forget that our powers are at best unpredictable in this shit?”

  Daniel grimaced. What was the point of being gods of this world if he didn’t have any power when he needed it? He remembered a story Kate had told him one night after they’d made love; they’d discussed their godly limitations and Kate had said that in Greek myths, the Titans had stuffed the god Ares into an urn during a battle, where he stayed until the other gods let him out. She’d always wondered how a god didn’t have the power to get out.

  Daniel thought it had made for good narrative, but really, what god had omnipotence? All of the gods he’d met had had powers, sure. He and Kate had created whole worlds. But neither of them could heal his eye, which had been taken by a god. If other gods could mess with their powers (as someone clearly had with this wall of fire), then they were not omnipotent.

  And what were these improbability storms but tools of chaos that pushed gods’ powers to the edge of uselessness?

  Something teased at Daniel’s mind then, a whisper from Odin, a name. Something like “Gagap.” He tried to chase the thought, find the information that the old god had left in his head, but it was gone as the scream of the storm drowned out all thought.

  “Hang on!” Scott Von Rothelsgeschitemeirson came running down the hall, waving two black robes. They flapped behind him like wings.

  Daniel took a step back from the hell outside the door and turned to meet the panting man.

  “If you’re determined to go out in that, you’ll want these cloaks,” he panted. “I don’t know why you would want to, but if you do, you’ll have these.”

  Kate glanced at the man, who calmly held out a robe to her. “How did you know to bring two?”

  He grinned down at her. “The paerhapsotron told me.”

  Kate snorted and accepted the robe. “What is it?” She glanced out at the roiling horror, which had started turning into billowy, black smoke that battered at the flames in front of them as if it were great fists.

  “I call them Order Magnification Cloaks,” was Scott’s answer. Daniel looked at him blankly. “They’re designed to protect you from the improbability storms.”

  Daniel ran his hands over the thick black wool. A power cell about the size of a D battery hung at the hem, spreading circuits through the cloak. “How do they do that?”

  “I took some chaos energy and tamed it with my Order Magnifier. It resonates through the cloak, forcing any chaos surrounding it to actually charge the battery. As long as chaos forces are at work, the cloak gets stronger and stronger.” The scientist’s eyes were wide with delight.

  “That doesn’t seem logical,” Daniel said, trying to remember the conservation of energy laws he’d learned in high school.

  “Or probable,” Kate said, breaking her gaze from the storm. “We’ll take them.”

  “Oh good!” Scott said. “Please, if you survive, let me know how they work, will you?”

  Daniel paused with the robe poised over his head, ready to fall. “Wait — you haven’t tested them?”

  Scott looked sheepish. “Well, no one will go into the storm to test it for me. And I certainly can’t go.”

  Kate grimaced. “Of course you can’t.” She smoothed the black robe over her white acolyte robe and said, “How do we turn it on?”

  Scott leaned over and switched both of their robes on, and they came to life, humming quietly around them. Daniel felt decidedly odd … a little heavier, a little less confident. Which was strange, he figured, since the cloak was supposed to help keep him safe.

  “Good luck!” said the scientist, beaming at them, his eyes wide through his glasses.

  Daniel smiled at him and took Kate’s hand. She frowned and opened her mouth, but then they stepped outside and any protest she had was lost in the screaming storm.

  Whatever the flying creature had done to create the wall of fire had begun to weaken. The door slammed behind them, and Kate and Daniel stood and watched the storm batter at the fire in front of them.

  “Now what?” Kate asked.

  “Let’s head north as far as we can. Stay on this side of the fire,” Daniel said, squinting in the darkness.

  The fire had begun to show holes, like a piece of paper licked by flames. They linked hands and ran, passing paths that led into the hills, presumably to more caves and more scientists. Their footing went from gravel to dirt to grass and back to gravel. Kate was pretty sure they passed a clockwork bird that stood on the top of a metal perch. She was further convinced that the bird swiveled its head to follow them, and it flapped its metal wings in alarm. But they were moving too fast to know for sure.

  It dawned on her slowly that although they were running as hard as they could, they weren’t making very good time. They both stumbled more than once in the darkness; at times their dashing felt more like plodding.

  The improbability storm. Of course. It dampened their divinity; they may as well be mortal. She shivered. Right now mortal and alive was terrifying — of course, since she had died as a god, it was proof divinity meant little to nothing when something godlike wanted you dead.

  Then the improbability storm broke through the wall of fire and drove all other thoughts from her mind.

  Kate had never considered what colors would feel, smell, or sound like. Her sight left her as the storm enveloped them and she had a sense of being accosted by colors instead of wind. She closed her eyes and felt pink tickle at her cheeks, and green wind around her ankles like insistent vines. She heard blue moan softly near her, and a small burning taste of yellow forced itself past her lips to linger on her tongue. She sensed thousands of other shades whirling around her, but they ceased suddenly when Daniel pulled her hood over her head.

  He pulled her head in to touch his forehead and gripped her shoulders. “Your hood slipped off. Are you okay?”

  Grateful for sight again, she nodded. “Are we close?

  He sighed. “I am not sure. This storm is pretty damn big.”

  “I can’t sense anything,” she said.

  “I know. We just need to keep going. And keep that hood up.”

  They linked hands again, with magenta burrs sticking to their exposed skin, and ran on.

  The colors were only felt, not seen, but lighting flashed through the clouds, sometimes right in front of them, leaving behind a smell of sulfur and spots before their eyes. As bright spots blossomed in Kate’s eyes, images assaulted her.

  She stumbled to a halt. Images of Daniel with his numerous ex-girlfriends. The image of her father, stony-faced, at her funeral, refusing to cry. The image of her grandmother in the hated nursing home, abused by an orderly because no one gave a damn about her anymore.

  A duckling she had allowed to starve to death after Easter one year, forgotten in the wake of chocolate bunnies and jellybeans. The suicide of a boy whose depression began when she had laughed at his invitation to a dance.

  All reminders that she was far from perfection; she was far from lovable. She felt Daniel pulling at her wrist, but the magenta burrs caused her to gasp and let go. He disappeared in a swirl of wind that tasted like regret.

  Small gnomes, giggling and pudgy with tall red caps, fell out o
f a cloud and grabbed her hands and pulled. She resisted and watched her fingers stretch like putty. She blinked past the horror and realized this was the improbability storm attacking her from all sides. She didn’t have to stand for this. She was a god, and even if she didn’t have her power right now, she was still Kate, and that aspect of her being had gotten her out of more than one scrape.

  She pulled her hands inside her cloak, and the extra tendrils of fingers broke off, causing her to gasp in pain. She didn’t look down at her hands; she’d be okay eventually. She needed to be inside the protection of the cloak. She took a deep breath and stepped forward into the mist.

  The storm had abandoned the concept of colors as tangible things and had moved on to emotions. Her hood mostly protected her, but as she trudged forward, looking around for Daniel, she found herself lost in a haze of euphoria, despair, and guilt.

  She stumbled over something dense and short and went sprawling. She lacerated her hand on a sharp stone and watched the blood well up.

  Great. Nothing good ever happens when I get cut.

  Her attention was distracted from the blood leaking from her hand to the stump she’d fallen over, which wasn’t a stump at all but Daniel, crouched with his arms wrapped around his knees. He sobbed quietly, and Kate felt a cloud of grief around him.

  She reached forward and put her arms around him. He mumbled something incoherent about, “—’s all going away.”

  Struggling with nothing more than her normal strength, she hauled him to his feet and murmured encouraging words to him as she forced him through the storm.

  The storm had stopped accosting them directly, but Kate was still beset by strange visions. In one, a distraught man with only one arm and one leg yelled at an anthropomorphic penguin. In another, an air whale drifted through the storm, and then plummeted messily to the earth. A third had a high school crush of Kate’s getting up the nerve to call and ask her out, but it was when she was on the phone with her best friend, and the busy signal discouraged him.

  “He only got the nerve to ask me out once? That coward,” muttered Kate.

  Daniel continued to sob at her side, and she didn’t know if her irritation was a false emotion caused by the storm or if it was real. Still.

  “Hey, Daniel, chin up, dude, we have a job to do. Whatever the storm showed you, it was false. Not real. Fabricated. Let’s move on, okay?” He wouldn’t look at her. She gave him a little shake. “Daniel. Sweetie. I just saw a guy yelling at a penguin. This shit isn’t real.”

  He finally looked up at her. She recoiled from his wide, red-rimmed eye. “What I saw was real. I know it was. It was heaven. And it wasn’t good.”

  “What was going on?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but just yelled, “Look out!”

  They ducked together, watching the blue-tinged net fly over their heads.

  “That was real,” Daniel said, sniffing.

  “Agreed,” Kate said. “Why is someone throwing nets at us?”

  “I think it’s safe to bet that while we figured out who Sam was, he probably figured out who we were.”

  Kate fingered the rich grass she realized they’d fallen on. “Oh. We’re here.” She rolled and got to her feet, but the darkness and wind didn’t allow her to see anything around her.

  “Listen, I’ll go see if I can find Prosper. Can you handle Sam?” she asked.

  “Jesus, why me?”

  Kate sighed. “You’re the trickster, dude. You can handle anyone. I’m not nearly as subversive as you are. You could trick him, reason with him, or just confuse him and lure him away. I don’t know! All I know is he has one god imprisoned, so I’m betting he can catch another one, so we need to free Prosper and get out of here.”

  She kissed him briefly and ran in the direction she thought the caves might be. She had gotten pretty good at ignoring what the storm was throwing at her, be it gnomes or colors or grapevines wrapped around trellises at the perfect height to clothesline her …

  Oh. That was real.

  * * * * *

  She came to with her head aching and her neck raw and sore. She sat up. How long had she been out? And — wait. Where was she?

  She sat within a shallow cave about six feet deep and ten feet tall, clearly chipped out and man-made. She sprawled on the rocky floor amidst several tendrils of grape vines, some wrapped around her ankles. The vines seemed to originate from inside the cave and stretch out to the trellises. A lump of vines lay clumped in the corner. The storm still had hold of the outside, but had lessened to the point of odd gusts of wind. The horizon glowed slightly with light.

  “God, how long was I out?” She asked, rubbing her head.

  “Three hours,” came a hiss from the other side of the room.

  Kate jumped and swore as the sudden movement made her head ache more. “Who’s there?”

  The lump in the opposite corner stirred, and the vines wrapped around Kate’s legs tightened. She slid back until her back was against the wall, but the vines stayed firm around her ankles.

  The lump in the corner continued to stir and almost unfolded, branching out and becoming man-shaped. The rough, round, barky base of one vine turned slowly, and two green eyes peered out. It smiled, then, showing roots and a mossy interior. Its tongue was a white root.

  “Prosper, My Lady,” it said. “Your prisoner.”

  * * * * *

  Kate stared at him. She wanted to look away, but she knew she had to face this grotesque mockery of divinity that had been utterly used and corrupted.

  “Prosper. Shit. Listen. I didn’t do this to you. Daniel didn’t either. We had nothing to do with it.”

  A vine waved as if an airy hand, waving away her protests. “I know that. I have been owned and passed around between farmers for hundreds of years. But you, you were the first jailer.”

  Kate stumbled to her knees and started to crawl forward, eyes darting around at the shifting vines. “Listen, I was not the first. In my view, I’ve only been alive again for a couple of days. We didn’t imprison you, but we’re trying to free you. What can I do to help?”

  She looked around helplessly. The vines all originated from the god’s body, and she didn’t want to think about what he had gone through to have those seeds implanted. She thought of the fine wine, the Cmar, that she had drunk, and her stomach turned over. No wonder it had been so good.

  She slowly approached him, and he simply watched her. But when she reached out a hand to gingerly touch one of the thick vines growing from his chest, a smaller vine snaked out and wrapped around her wrist, keeping her away.

  “Prosper, I’m just trying to help you. Can we cut the vines and get you out of here?”

  More vines wrapped around her ankles and lifted her into the air. She struggled, annoyed at how her cloak and acolyte robe threatened to fall over her head. He held her in front of his warped and wooden face.

  “These are my children. I give them life. Through me they are able to bear fruit. What kind of god of the harvest would I be if I allowed them to die?”

  Kate gathered the cloak at her waist and held it tight. “Well, you’d be a free god, for one thing, not used for some lucky mortal’s wine business.”

  He shook her and lifted her high, taking her outside the cave and high into the air. Kate could hear him yelling, but she was lifted too high to hear what he was saying.

  She was too preoccupied with hanging upside down from the tentacle-like vines growing out of the god she was trying to rescue that it took her a moment to realize the improbability storm had passed, leaving a lovely morning on the green hilltop.

  It also took her a moment to realize Daniel was nowhere to be found.

  But the lack of storm also meant she had access to her powers again. She tried to will herself wings, trying to grow them as the enraged god took her higher and higher into the air.

  Nothing happened.

  “Shit.” What had changed? The storm was gone, she was unharmed; she shouldn’t be having
problems.

  But when Prosper dropped her, gravity felt very real.

  * * * * *

  Luckily the wind in her face snapped her into quick thinking. She let go of the loaned cloak and let it slide over her head and off her arms.

  Immediately wings burst from her back and she stopped her fall, swooping low over the ground and back up in the air, panting. No wonder the cloak had made her feel so sluggish. As it had repelled the worse of the improbability storm, it had been dampening her own divine power. That had some serious repercussions.

  But the serious issue now had to do with Prosper and his inhuman screams.

  Kate flew down and landed lightly on the ground, paling at what she saw.

  The dropped cloak had landed directly to cover the main vines growing from Prosper’s cave to the vineyard’s trellises. Blocked from the divine influence of the god, the vines were wilting and shriveling, and one by one they snapped, causing Prosper to howl louder with each one.

  Finally having her awareness returned to her, Kate caught the sound of a door opening. She turned and saw Sam, looking a lot less friendly and a lot more menacing, step out. He had a large wooden harpoon gun that was armed with a net.

  “From one to three in one night; not bad!” he said, and aimed.

  The final vine snapped under the cloak and Prosper’s screams turned to sobbing. Kate moved as fast as she could, zipping into the cave as the net crashed into the rocks behind her. She grabbed Prosper, who battered her arms weakly with his vines, and lifted him in a fireman’s carry.

  One step outside the cave to let her wings stretch out and she was in the air, leaving Sam cursing behind her.

  “Oh, would you shut the fuck up, for your own sake?” she said. “I just saved you from slavery.”

  “My babies,” he wept.

  “That was an accident, and I’m sorry about it,” she said as she climbed higher. “You dropped me and I had to either lose that cloak or break my neck. I didn’t mean to drop it on you.”