Pop Kult Warlord

by Nick Cole

  She burps and holds up a finger as she picks up my slice.

  “Don’t worry… they’re not poisoned. Just…” she burps again as though making room for more, like the scoundrel she is, “powerful.”

  Soon she leans back and sighs contentedly.

  Our once-golden pizza is thoroughly done to death.

  We order another round of the powerful drinks.

  She leans in close, snuggling in as though a nap is in order. The unseen guitarist plays some melody that seems meant for an afternoon in a Mexican joint that serves the most amazing Southeast Asian fusion pizza ever. You know… that one.

  “We’re going to kill him,” she murmurs. “We just didn’t know if you were… with Rashid. We needed…” And she trails off. Her eyes flutter.

  “I’m not asleep,” she says after a moment. “I’m just dreaming.”

  “About what?” I whisper.

  My eyes have closed and I didn’t even know it.

  I feel like we’re the only people in the restaurant. I feel like the world is just… this. And I’m fine with that. And then I drift off…

  * * *

  In that tower, lost somewhere in a valley I know I’ll never find the edges of, after the battle with the witches, we start up the inside of that spire. That spire that is more than a spire.

  A large beating black heart fills the tower above us, suspended in space. A giant demon’s heart. It pumps, its tempo strong and angry. As though it is seething with nothing but anger and insolence and pride. It beats as a heart beating on those vices could only beat: loud and wild until the sudden violent end that has been coming all along.

  It is a frightening thing to behold.

  I can hear blood swooshing through the arteries that run into it from the walls of the tower. The noise of it makes the same two-syllable sound every second, like a staccato backbeat to some song I should know.

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  From high up, from among the bloody red upper reaches, beyond the heart, a dark figure comes down a curving stair that runs along the outer wall.

  It is William Alucard.

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  Billy Alucard, the sergeant of the keep called him.

  The vampire and he are one and the same.

  He wears black plate mail. Spiked boots and pauldrons. Beneath one massive mailed hand he carries a helmet. A bastard sword in the other. It is made of some dark metal I know is unholy. The opposite of whatever Deathefeather is.

  I prepare to spend myself as a samurai must. I place one hand on the hilt of my katana and wait for him to come to me. The odds are not in our favor here. On the stairs, only one of us can fight him at a time. And he seems to agree that this is where things must end. His swaggering stride, heedless of the edge and the height and the manically beating heart, is careless of anything other than slaughter.

  The angel rushes forward, away from me, flying up the stairs like a sudden fury, seeming to still be in that odd slow motion her movements effected. Alucard dons his helmet and parries her first blow. The clash of their swords rings out, deafening the backbeat of the demon’s heart.

  I might have screamed no.

  The ring of sword on sword resounds again and again within the expanse of the tower’s inner hollowness, competing with that infernal metronome.

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  The angel is driving the unholy armored Billy Alucard back up the stairs, past the heart, with a cascade of blows from her bright and shining singing sword. He gives ground like a sure-footed pirate on a rolling ship at sea. Deft and economical. Revenant sword always between him and the fury that would have him dead. And then of a sudden, he would unleash a wicked backstroke and stop her momentum cold.

  I call out to her to stop because I know this can only end one way. Badly. Very badly. It is I who has to face Alucard.

  The samurai.

  Me.

  She lands a terrific blow and splits his helm in two. He dances away from her, falling back onto the steps above. I can see his spiky blond hair and a stream of blood coming from a jagged cut on his forehead. But his mocking blue eyes and whiplash sneer tell me he is still in control of the battle. Still dangerous.

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  She runs him through, but he just laughs in her face, spits blood across her gray shrouds, and pushes his own wicked black sword upward and through her stomach in the same moment.

  The cry that comes from her is sudden and horrible. It is the end of all things. The end of love.

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  He laughs and begins to move, his sword sticking out the length of her. She pulls her sword from his body and drops it on the stone steps. It clatters and falls off into the void, tumbling away, past the massive beating heart, into infinite nothing.

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  Ra-shiid

  I see the heart beating strong and hard. Triumphant. As it always will. And I know it is Alucard’s heart. I race up the stairs and grab for an artery just below the lowest ventricle of the insane thing. Both hands land around its bloody slipperiness, but only one holds. With the other I draw my katana and drive it up into the black beating heart. Again and again.

  Alucard and the angel are above me on the stairs.

  Alucard sweating and pale, but not dead.

  The angel is gone now. She hangs limply from his sword. Her eyes closed. But I can see that her mouth is moving. Saying something.

  “No. Not at all.”

  She turns her head toward me and opens her eyes. Deep brown eyes like two pools pity me for what I will see, and live through, long after her going. And then seem to apologize finally as she summons the last of her strength to fling herself over the edge of the stairs… just after she grabbed onto Alucard’s black breastplate.

  I can only watch them go. Spinning away into nothingness. Because that’s all there is down there at the bottom of the tower. Nothingness and the forgotten.

  Above me the heart begins to heave spasmodically. Quickly. As though in sudden fear. As though it will explode.

  And there is still nothing I can do.

  Stones crash down from above as the heart begins a series of staccato seizures. The entire curving stairway collapses all at once, and the building shakes and trembles.

  I look down into the swirling nepenthe of the void and I know there is no other choice. Except to try what I know is impossible and hope isn’t.

  I swing and throw myself at the crumbling remains of the stairway.

  Deathefeather tumbles away and into the void.

  My hands find the edge of a broken step and then lose it. I scrabble to hold on to something, anything, and after a frantic second I find myself with just fingertips clinging to a bit of shattered stair barely large enough to stand on. I try to pull myself up but it’s beyond any strength I have left. The earthquake that is destroying everything is shaking my fingers loose. I try one last heave, willing myself to go up and over the edge…

  … but I have nothing.

  Nothing is left.

  A stone glances off my chest, just beneath my shoulder, and I lose my grip with one hand. My scream is drowned out by the roar of the collapsing tower. It feels like I was shot with a gun.

  Except what is a gun?

  My other hand holds on in defiance of the inevitable. Telling all the world and all the rules and everything it could ever throw at me that they are wrong. My white-knuckled fingers seem to scream, “I’ll show you!”

  And then a dark and hairy hand, massive and leathery, reaches down and takes hold of my wrist. And I am hauled up from the abyss and onto the broken stair. I grab my shoulder and roar as my vision turns red with murder and pain. In the darkness behind my eyes I can see her looking at me as she disappeared into the void be
low. As she fell away… did she reach out for me?

  “PerfectQuestion…” rumbles an animal growl above me. I open my eyes and see a massive minotaur standing on a stair above me. He snorts and smiles. His muscled chest heaving like a dark bellows.

  “You know me. I’m Morgax. We have to leave. This tower is coming down all around us.”

  And then he pulls me to my feet and we flee the collapsing tower. I…

  * * *

  “You. And me,” she whispers to me from far away as we lie there in the red vinyl banquette in the Mexican restaurant that serves strange mojitos called Saigon Whores. “I’m dreaming about you and me.”

  I’d fallen asleep too. I wipe some drool away from my numb lips before she can see it. She’s leaning against my chest. Eyes closed. Softly murmuring to someone in a dream.

  After a moment I ask, “Is it a good dream?”

  “Very.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  She’s quiet. I almost thinks she’s fallen asleep again. Then she speaks as though she’s even farther away now.

  “In a different world not this one anymore. No…” she says, and stops. “Not at all.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Later we wake again, though we haven’t even really been sleeping. It was like the most wide-awake sleep I’ve ever had, and it was completely relaxing. I imagine the eventual hangover from all the Saigon Whores will be brutal.

  I open my eyes and she’s staring at me. Her big brown eyes are wet. Like she’s been crying.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I shake my head. It feels like it weighs ten thousand pounds.

  “Don’t be. That was the best pizza I’ve ever had.” I laugh to let her know it’s okay.

  “I mean,” she says, “about trying to drug you in order to make you talk. That was…”

  I hold up a hand to stop her. “You didn’t. And it would’ve been worth it.”

  “Because of the pizza?”

  “That too.”

  She leans into my chest once more.

  Our bodies feel warm and electric. Like there’s some wild current running through us unrestrained and ready to do anything.

  “What if I make it so Rashid doesn’t become sultan of Calistan?”

  I don’t whisper this. I just say it. In Calistan of all places.

  She’s up. Almost pushing herself away from me in shock. Her movement so sudden and abrupt it startles me.

  “There’s a way. Tomorrow night,” I say.

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Yeah. But then I’ll have to leave town. And by town… I mean I’ll need to get out of Calistan if I survive. And quickly.”

  Her face falls.

  She leans in slowly. And this time there’s no sudden attack. No desperate searching. This time it’s that long slow kiss that means you don’t want to say goodbye. Ever.

  “You could leave with me,” I tell her. “There’s a lot of world to see.”

  * * *

  We leave the restaurant and I know we probably shouldn’t drive… so we don’t. She hails some sort of half-motorbike, half-wagon, and we climb in. Despite the beating engine and the smoke, it’s rather comfortable. Or maybe I’m just still drunk.

  It’s too loud to talk, so we just make out for the hour it takes to get where we’re going.

  I asked just before we got in, “Where are we going?”

  She smiled and said, “The Unhappiest Place on Earth.”

  Fun, huh?

  Now as evening falls across what used to be Southern California and surrenders to some kind of burnt orange and purple that spreads out and away over the smog-and-smoke-shrouded inland sprawl, I smell cooking meat on the evening wind. As though a thousand fires have suddenly sprung to life. We pass dark streets where I see candles in windows. Ancient streetlights remain dark and only occasionally does some wan electric neon sign advertising dancing girls or liquor pierce the darkness.

  We enter a ruin of collapsed businesses and apocalyptic streets. We thread these carefully, the puttputtputt of the motorbike wagon the only sound, and pull up in front of a sign that once announced a fantastic place called Disneyland.

  We climb out of the cab, barely, and I gaze up at the faded graffiti-covered icon as Chloe forces cash onto the smiling gap-toothed driver. Then he’s off into the night, and I can hear the music that is the only sound of this ancient monument to the world before the Melt.

  Not really music. More like chanting. On the other side of a fallen mesh fence and long-trampled landscaping is the most massive parking lot I’ve ever seen. And in the distance, the ruins of the place. Half a mountain and half the skeleton of some ancient dinosaur that never was. And the hunched skeletal shadows of what remains of the rides. And in the dark among these shapes, the flicker of a thousand candles.

  “C’mon,” she whispers as though we’re about to enter a cathedral, or some holy place. “It’s safe.”

  Hand in hand like lovers, we walk across the ruined parking lot that is wider than any field I’ve ever seen. It’s cracked and broken from countless burning days under the sun and long years of no one bothering to maintain the abandoned place.

  I knew it never opened again after the Meltdown. But until now I never really put it together that the reason it never reopened was because it was no longer in Southern California. It was in that foreign nation now known as Calistan. Not America.

  She whispers, as if in the presence of something sacred. “Disney Apple… back then it was called just called Disney… abandoned the park after the riots.”

  “The riots?” I ask.

  “When the sultan and his mercenaries started airlifting in jihadis from around the world to take control of Southern California after the collapse, a bunch of my people held out here for two months against the sultan. There was a big battle. We call it Las Lágrimas de Tomorrowland.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask in a whisper as we draw close to the ruin. Approaching the turnstiles. The old ticket booths. Some still bear the prices and the old characters even I recognize from Disney Apple’s constant merchandising on the internet. But these are somehow different… as though I’m staring at ancient hieroglyphs from some lost civilization that once ruled the known world.

  “The Tears of Tomorrowland.”

  A pathway illuminated by guttering candles placed in jars leads off through the wreckage beyond the gate.

  “Tomorrowland was once a place inside. It promised us what the world was going to be like in the future. And it also happened to be the last defense of the freedom fighters. No one surrendered to the Muslims. They were all killed inside.”

  I look at the line of candles, a string of hazy specters guiding us from one realm to another. Across some unseen boundary.

  “And what is it now?”

  She takes my hand. It’s warm and soft. There’s a tenderness there I didn’t expect. And I allow myself to be led along as she talks of all she knows.

  “It is our memory,” she begins. “And our hope. The Catholics, our priests, they have a secret order here now. Every night they chant from dusk until midnight. Offering prayers, solace, comfort… and hope for a better tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  She doesn’t answer. We pass into the park. Above us an old-timey train station rises like a shadow in the night. The engine and some passenger cars have been pushed down into the courtyard. Upon these, and on every surface, graffiti has been written. And beside each is a date.

  “We call this el patio de los guerreros. The courtyard of the warriors. Everyone who has ever died trying to bring back freedom to Southern California has been tagged here. The dates are when they passed into heaven.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  She takes a slight detour and kneels near the bottom of one paint-covered axle. Down near the pavement is a name.

  Luis Camerano.

  She takes a small jarred candle and places it in front of the name. She lights it.

 
She continues to kneel, and I just stand there.

  I can hear her sobbing.

  And then she stands. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  I shake one out. Light it. Hand it to her.

  She takes a drag.

  “He was my father.”

  By the glow of the ember I can see her face. It’s cold and far away.

  “I never knew him,” she says. “He died before I was born. No one knows how. Except that jihadis who had become the official army of Calistan got him. After he was dead they crucified him on an overpass in Fullerton. As a lesson to us not to fight back. Not to believe in God. My mother’s brothers found his body and removed it after curfew. The buried him at sea. This is only… this is all I ever knew about him. This place.”

  She’s lost. There. Wherever there is.

  “My mother said he was brave. That he believed in America. That he died for America. Trying to bring it back after the Meltdown. But it was all gone by then.”

  “I’m…”

  She holds up a hand. “Don’t.”

  Then…

  “Don’t say you’re sorry. Everybody’s said that to me my whole life. About him. About my mother as she drank herself to death on bathtub tequila. She died the day he died. She just didn’t know it then. And everybody said they were sorry. My abuela knows what I do… and she says she’s sorry even though she’s ashamed of me. So please… please be different and don’t ever be sorry for me. Promise me that. Right now. Okay? Please don’t be sorry for me. No matter what happens.”

  She takes a long drag from the cigarette and stares at me as she blows the smoke out across the courtyard. Over her shoulder. Daring me to be different than everyone she’s ever known.

  I nod.

  “I promise.”

  There are some promises you make that you never should. But how can we know?

  She flicks the cigarette off into the darkness and reaches for me to take her. To hold her. I do, and we kiss like we’ve never kissed before. Like it is the last kiss before the end of the world.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I ask.

  “Because I want you to see some things. And I want you to meet someone.”