Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

forty-three: another fine mess

“WELL, DAMN, Ollie,” I said to Sam as we seated ourselves on a couple of the rocks ranged around the fire. “Sorry about this.”

“It’s one of your best, Stanley.” He shook his head in his best Oliver Hardy style. Usually this is funny, sort of, even when we’re in a horrible situation, but I don’t think either of us was feeling very cheerful. Knowing how much water you’ve both seen go under the bridge isn’t much comfort when the bridge finally collapses.

We all sat in silence and tried to warm our hands. Many of the Kainos-folk, who’d been watching our exchange like worried kids spying on the grown-ups, began to relax, or at least not to feel actively endangered. There were no real children, of course. Even the sentry Sharif, who in person turned out to look like a teenager, had probably lived a long full life, since that was the only kind of volunteer the Magians had recruited to come here, experienced adults willing to trade in the coin-flip of Heaven or Hell for a more nuanced afterlife. I imagine by now some of them were regretting the decision. Ragged, many of them bandaged, the Third Way pioneers looked a lot more like international refugees than the souls of the great and good enjoying their reward. A quick estimate of the number of campfires scattered through the woods told me there were probably only a few hundred survivors here in total. Not exactly an army.

The ground was hard and the air was raw and chilly, but at least whatever version of Earth this resembled wasn’t in the middle of winter. That was a good thing, because the fire wasn’t big enough to cook a single strip of bacon.

“How did everything go bad so fast, Sam? How much time’s gone by here since I saw you?”

“About two weeks, I guess. But it happened pretty quickly. You-Know-Who showed up the same day I got back. Luckily, most of us were away from the settlement when she came. Man, that angel’s not just ambitious, or complicated—she’s insane, or at least she was when she got here. Some of our bosses are complete assholes, literally holier-than-thou, but her . . . there’s something really wrong.”

“Doctor Gustibus,” I began, then realized Sam didn’t know who he was. It was another small blow, since in the old days Sam knew everything I knew, but things were different now and had been ever since this Third Way thing started. “This guy I know, kind of a researcher, said that she’s not like all the other angels because she was a goddess first.”

“Yeah, and not the nice kind.” Sam was bleak. “She came in here like gangbusters.”

I shook my head in frustration. “But we still don’t know why she built this place, what the whole thing is about. Why would she make such a risky deal? And what did Eligor get out of it?”

Clarence spoke up. “Is there something here she needs?”

Sam grunted. “What does a Heavenly Power need that she doesn’t already have? Or can’t already make?”

“This is horseshit,” said a third, clearly angry voice. I turned. It was Ed Walker, who was sitting a few feet away, giving us a bit less respectful distance than the others. “We’ve got more important things to do than talk about crap like that. Like surviving.”

“Simmer down, Ed.” Sam turned to me. “I assume you’ve figured out who this is by now. He’s a good man, but things have been a little difficult for all of us—”

“You don’t have to apologize for me, Sammariel,” said Walker. “We’ve got several hundred people here to protect, and she’s coming back. She’s coming back because of you.” He spat. “You Magians, you . . . angels.” It was a curse word. “You’re the cause of this. And now your crazy boss is going to destroy us all.”

“Or maybe your souls will go where they should have gone in the first place,” Clarence said. “The Highest won’t just let you disappear.”

“I had years left to live!” Walker stood up. “We need to kill that monster or buy her off somehow, because we can’t beat her. And if you can’t think of a way to do either of those things, then we’re all just wasting time here when we should be trying to get as far away as possible.” He gave Clarence and me a nasty look. “And when we run for it, our chances will be a lot better if we don’t take any angels with us—not even you, Sam.” He picked up his bow, turned, and marched away from the fire.

“Don’t mind Ed,” Sam told me as he watched Walker go. “He’s been patrolling night and day. He’s tired and scared. We all are.” But he looked bothered.

“How many people do you have here?” I asked. “And how do you keep them all fed?”

Sam actually smiled. “Fed? This was going to be a paradise, son! Souls don’t have to eat here in Kainos, although they can. Some of the settlers eat fruit or edible roots and vegetables, just because they like to. And of course we use the plants to make things.” He held up the blanket he wore over his suit coat. The coarse-woven fabric looked a lot like burlap. “There’s a plant fiber that we’ve learned to weave. And there are sheep and other animals, so I’m sure we’ll learn how to make proper clothing someday soon.”

“We? You sound like you’ve gone native, Sammy-boy.”

He didn’t smile this time. “I’ve had to pitch in. After all, I’m the one who brought a lot of these people here. And there’s plenty to learn—or re-learn, in a sense. Kainos has only existed for a few years, after all, and we recruited more scholars than farmers. That was Kephas’s—You-Know-Who’s doing. It’s like she went out of her way to pick the philosophical over the practical.”

“Yeah.” Then something clicked. “Her enemies.”

“What do you mean, Bobby?” Clarence asked.

I looked around, but with Walker’s departure most of the other inhabitants of the Third Way had turned from us, perhaps because they didn’t want to know what we were talking about. I could tell by their faces that they were frightened, that angels didn’t mean many good things to them anymore. “I think that’s it,” I said quietly. “She wants to be worshipped. I think that’s what Gustibus was pointing toward. As an angel, she was just one of many doing the Highest’s work, however important she might have been compared to you and me. But I saw her in her home, and if you want to talk about a five-thousand-year-old Persian-American princess, that’s our girl. And if she was going to be worshipped again, like in the old days, she didn’t want lumps and idiots doing it, she wanted the best and the brightest. Like these.” I made a small gesture to indicate the people around us. “She wanted the smart ones, the rationalists, the kind who back on Earth hardly even believed in Heaven.”

“Really? All this—just to be somebody’s deity again?” asked Clarence.

“You don’t get the goddess out of your system that easily, kid. Yeah, it makes sense.” I felt like a piece of the puzzle—only a small one in our present situation, but still a piece—had finally fallen into place. “Why else would she risk everything to build something like this? First of all, it takes balls, serious angel balls, to go against Heaven this way, not to mention bargaining with Hell. Why else would she strike out on her own and build what’s basically a colony? Because she wanted worshippers again, her very own. That’s what she’s done here. But it’s gone wrong, and so she’s pissed off.”

“Ha. Pissed off doesn’t begin to describe it,” Sam said. “She came in on a chariot of light. I didn’t see it, but Ed Walker did—it’s one of the reasons he’s so angry. She came in on her chariot. It was pulled by those two lions, but they flew. They were made of light and diamonds, and they flew. She came in like a Phantom jet and she scorched everything around the house. You saw that, I’m sure.”

“But she didn’t burn the house,” I pointed out.

“I think that’s because the Going-To-Mecca cube is in there, but I’m not sure.”

“Or because it’s her church.”

“Huh?” Sam wiped his hand across his face, wearily. “Sorry, say that again. Even us angels need sleep here sometimes, just like on Earth.”

“Haven’t you wondered about the way the house is built? Taller than it should be? That big tower? It’s a stealth temple. It’s where she expected to be worshipped.”

Sam pursed his lips. “Maybe, but I’m doubting she expects much worshipping now. Not after what she did. Those of us who weren’t there could still hear her, even from miles away, so loud her voice echoed in the mountains, demanding that we turn over the traitors.” He looked at me. “By the way, those traitors are you and me, buddy—but mostly you, I’m afraid. Still, I’m pretty sure she won’t deal too kindly with me, either. Besides me, the last two Magians still here, Kelathiel and Phidorathon—we called them Kiley and Fred—were watching the settlement, and she vaporized them, along with a couple of dozen poor souls who happened to be there at the time. The only good thing was that she didn’t stay long, that she didn’t hunt the rest of us down and wipe us out right then.”

“You’re right, that’s hopeful. It means there’s some limit to her power, either here or because of something back in Heaven.” I filed that one away. I still didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in a game of Tartarus tennis, but I wasn’t giving up without some kind of fight.

A little while passed in silence, not the peaceful kind of sitting with old friends so much as the exhausted kind. Clarence and I hadn’t done much except to take a long walk, but seeing what Anaita had done to the place had hollowed me out, and I didn’t have much left. Also, I truly didn’t think we had much of a chance. It was a familiar feeling, in a way, like the hours before a major action back when I was in the Harps, especially after we lost our top-kicker Leo, and he didn’t get resurrected. It was all there—the doubt, the fear, the feeling that what you really wanted to do was start screaming about how unfair it was and never stop, or even just pick a direction and start running. But in the Harps we never did, mainly because everybody else was in the same position, and if you buckled, the whole wall might collapse and come crashing down. But, damn, the wall sure felt shaky.

“Anything else I need to know about the physics of this place?” I asked Sam after a while.

“What, you mean like, ‘You can avoid dying by jumping twice and then using your special Survival coin?’” Sam smiled sadly. “Ain’t a video game, B. This is pretty much just like Earth. Superior force beats weaker force. We don’t eat, and the souls themselves may not die, but they disappear and don’t come back if their bodies die here. We found that out after You-Know-Who blew our asses up. As the kid said, I’m guessing that the ones who got killed went back into real Judgement.” For a moment I saw the deep hurt he’d been keeping hidden. “God, I hope they did.”

“Yeah, but she’s got that wired somehow, too,” I said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t risk freeing all those souls. She must have some way to silence them about Kainos when they’re being judged. Maybe the same trick she used on me at my trial. Or she’s keeping them away from judgement altogether.” I confess I shuddered a little. “What was it like here before everything went to shit?”

“How do you mean?”

“What was the routine? Did the wicked witch visit often, when she was Kephas?”

“I’m sorry about that, Bobby. You were right about her. I just didn’t want to hear it. I’d put too much into the place. I let myself get conned into believing in something again.”

“It doesn’t matter now, Sam. I just want to know all the odds.”

“You think there’s something we can do other than just get barbecued like so much brisket?”

Clarence wasn’t saying anything, but he was clearly listening. I had come to like him enough that I was truly sorry I’d got him into this not-so-fine mess. “Who knows?” I said. “But I live in hope, so please answer the questions. The Mecca cube, for instance. Does it connect to anything besides Anaita?”

“Just Herself, as far as I know. She used it to send us messages, instructions, back in the days when we all believed in this. And we could call her with it if we had an emergency. She didn’t like that much—even then, when she was Kephas, she was kind of a pain in the ass about answering questions—but it always worked.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway. Do you still have your magic glove?”

He was a bit surprised. “Yeah. Tucked away in here.” He patted his crude jacket. “But I don’t think I can use it against her. In fact, I’m pretty damn sure of it, because Fred—Phidorathon—had one, too. All us Magians do. Walker said Fred tried to use it against her when she came. All that happened was that Fred burned up like a road flare, hand first, then all down him. At least it was quick. In fact, I might use it that way myself, if it comes to it.” He laughed, and for a moment sounded a bit more like the old Sam. “Better quick than slow.”

“Don’t do anything stupid. We’re not totally out of options.”

He gave me a look, mostly cynical, but with just enough interest to make me feel like a real bastard, because even I didn’t believe any of my half-baked ideas had a chance of working. Too many variables, especially variables as crazy as whether Eligor could be trusted. Yeah, that’s what I said. If we had even the tiniest chance to survive this, it would be because the archduke of Hell, who hated my guts and had already swindled me several times, would decide to do something that would help me. He’d accepted the deal I offered him in Five Page Mill, but that meant exactly nothing. In fact, since even if he fucked me again, Eligor himself would stay fat and happy, the odds were distinctly against his honoring his promise.

“Options? Tell me,” Sam said.

“Is it safe? Can all these people be trusted?” Clarence asked.

It was a fair question, but as I said, none of the Kainos-folk seemed to be listening. Still, I beckoned Sam and the kid to get up and move with me a little farther away from the camp. It wasn’t until long afterward that I realized I never checked to see where exactly Ed Walker had gone.

“It’s like this,” I said when we’d settled ourselves against an outcropping some distance away. “We really don’t have a prayer—no pun intended—against our goddess friend if we’re just going to try to trade shots with her.”

“We’re not going to trade any shots, anyway,” said Sam. “You may have noticed that other than the Mecca cube, there isn’t any technology here that would make a medieval peasant scratch his head. We’ve got arrows, spears, clubs. Shit, we haven’t even got around to smelting bronze yet. So how are we going to fight You-Know-Who? This isn’t Kansas, but it isn’t the Emerald City, either. You could throw the world’s biggest bucket of water on her, and it wouldn’t do a thing.”

“I know. But I’m not just going to lie down and die, either. The bitch has been after me for months, sent that Smyler psychopath after me, brainwashed Walter Sanders and banished him to Hell—yeah, I know, kid, I haven’t told you about that, but guess what, she did. Oh, and she murdered a really nice young woman who was a friend of mine. And now she wants you and me on a stick, Sam. You too, Clarence, since you’re with us. She won’t leave any witnesses.”

“Harrison,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You promised you’d stop calling me Clarence.”

“Shit, yeah, I did. Look, if we survive, I promise I’ll do better.”

“That’s so like you, Bobby,” he said, but without too much heat. “Give a promise you know you won’t have to live up to.”

“The only kind worth making, my friend, the only kind worth making. Now, just let me spin out some stupid, hopeless ideas, and you guys can start shooting them down.”

“I’m too tired,” Sam complained. “Can’t I just tell you now that you’re full of shit, it won’t work, and you’ll get us all killed, so I can get some sleep?”

“Not a chance, big guy. We’re all in this for the duration, but it may go down as soon as the sun comes up, so we need to do our talking now.”

Sam sighed. “Shit. You probably won’t stop talking even if you do burn up.”

So, as the familiar and yet wildly foreign stars wheeled through the sky above us and the camp fell into silence and sleep, I explained to them the novel way I’d figured out to get us all killed.

Because who wants to die some boring, old-fashioned way?