Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End (11 page)

“
The combination is... suggestive. Hold your present location.
Additional assets en route.”

Trevino pocketed his phone
and sighed, rubbing his temples.

“
God help you little shits.”

Night fell as they wound
their way west. Jesus insisted on keeping the wheel, despite the
onset of a bone-throbbingly intense trip. Most of the passengers
watched the mile markers slip by, lulled into that trance that life
on the road can produce.

Artemis was cataloging the
weapons in their ever-increasing armory, acquired through a rather
aggressive “donations campaign.” A selection of repeating
crossbows, bolts, daggers, ropes, a few handguns and an AR-15. When
planning tactics, she had advocated the 'philosophy of
ninjitsu.'

Loki had nodded, saying
“Okay, we’ll go with that.”

She could never tell if he
was just humoring her.

“These mushrooms are
hitting me hard!” Jesus said. A pair of fairy wings twisted
awkwardly around the seat behind her. Her face sparkled with
glitter.

“
I’m sorry!” She yelled over blaring music. “The harmonics of
the silence are giving me a headache. I have to keep turning it up
to compensate.”

“
WHAT?!” Loki screamed.

“
Can you read my thoughts?!” Jesus eyed Loki suspiciously. The
vehicle began to drift out of its lane.

Loki grabbed the steering
wheel. “Will you at least let me drive?”

Jesus batted his hand away,
but did deign to turn down the volume slightly. “Hush. I’m at one
with the Beast.”

An American flag burst in
the sky, a malevolent, red white and blue terror.

“
Is that Captain planet?!” Jesus yelled.

“
No. It’s Captain fucking America. Pull over. Fuck,” Loki
said. The girls in the back grabbed weapons and ducked into bunks
and closets.

Jesus took a breath and
slowed down, pulling to the side. She turned the key. Took another
deep breath, both hands glued to the wheel. The interior lights
went down to a faint warm glow. “I have this covered,” Jesus said.
“Follow my lead.”

“
Okay,” Loki said.

A flashlight inspected the
interior of the Behemoth like an inquisitive finger. There were
several knocks on the window. Jesus tried to smile pleasantly at
the stereotypical cop that peered up at her through mirrored
shades.

“
What can I do for you, officer?” Jesus asked, batting her
eyelashes. What kind of mind lurked behind those glasses, she
wondered. She imagined it was something like a wasp or
hornet.

The officer's mouth opened,
but what came out was a long string of guttural
consonants.

Jesus swallowed hard. There
was no getting out of this one. They may as well have walked up to
a random police man, grabbed him by the shirt, handed him a fistful
of crack, and proclaimed “I AM THE GRIM REAPER!”

She looked over at Loki,
who was frozen in place. No help, there. The girls in the back all
gripped their weapons tighter. Artemis moved towards one of the
window, looking to line up a shot if need be.

“
MMMMMUUUGHHH MOOOOORRZZZ NNNNUUU FFFRRRRRMMMM?” Jesus said,
trying to imitate the cop’s language. The words seemed to ejaculate
straight from Jesus’ gut. Her eyes widened in surprise.

The stereotypical cop
nodded agreeably and took his hands off his hips. “Don’t let me
catch you speeding again,” he said, turning on his heel.

Loki unfroze. “What the
fuck was that?”

Jesus slowly removed her
hands from the wheel. “I...don’t know.” The steering wheel began to
melt. The speedometer turned into a snake and slithered off the
dashboard.

“
Loki?”

“
Yeah?”

“
I think it’s time for you to drive,” Jesus said.

The cop got back into his
car and sped off, a Babylon track cranked on his
headset.

The cops lights reflected
off of the window by Dionysus’ bunk as he pulled away. He was still
napping, but it had taken a turn for the worse. Once drifting on
thick rubbery clouds towards some rendezvous with an emissary from
an alien race of Libertarian Tree Nymphs, he now found himself
kneeling on a smoothly stained wood floor in a
cathedral.

Light filtered through the
arched blue and red stained-glass windows that lined the stone
walls of the baroque chapel slash courtroom, turning everything a
royal purple. Tendrils of ivy coated the walls, a knotted network
of veins and leaves. Clay pots brimmed over with orchids. Dionysus
realized he was wearing footie-pajamas and clutching a stuffed
dragon to his chest. Why couldn’t he ever dream about something
normal?

Muffled female voices
reverberated through the room, jarringly dancing to the domed
ceiling above. His eyes moving skyward and he noticed that the
ceiling was supported by a ring of stone pillars covered in
carvings of hunting cats. The pillars jutted fiercely out of the
last ring of pews, but the pews themselves remained
empty.

The organ music stopped. A
procession of milky skinned, masked women entered the room. They
were gaunt almost to the point of grotesqueness.

They filled the pews,
watching him from behind their masks. Occasionally, the women would
turn to another and make a hushed comment while pointing at him
with a razor-sharp fingernail.

He knelt before the Judge’s
bench. It towered over him like a skyscraper, reaching to the scene
above. In the fresco, women pressed grapes with their feet in front
of an orchard. A man wearing animal skins stood proudly, surrounded
by a circle of cherubic naked women holding wands topped with pine
cones.

A shadow passed over him as
the Judge entered the room, and hushed the Jury.

The Judge was a hulking
creature with ashen skin, wrapped in tattered linens that trailed
out from under his flowing black robes. His footfalls made no
sound, but Dionysus could hear the scuttling of spindly insect legs
on the floor. A host of spiders followed his every move, and
crawled under his robes when he was seated behind the
bench.

The room fell silent. The
Judge sat unmoving, deliberating.

“
You aren’t ready yet, child,” he finally said.

“
For what?”

The Jury began clacking
their teeth together. Dionysus couldn’t imagine a more unsettling
sound.

“
You are hereby sentenced to dinner.”

The Jurors clapped and
tittered in anticipation of the feast. They also came to their
feet, encircling him, shuffling closer as they continued clicking
their teeth in unison.

They took him. There was
nowhere for him to run.

Claws tore through his
flesh with surreal ease. They kneaded the meat on his bones like it
was fresh hamburger. Ensanguined nails sliced his skin to ribbons
and tongues lapped at spouts of thick, sticky blood, like red
semen. The Judge stood impassively as he watched the
spectacle.

For some reason there was
no pain at all, but he screamed nonetheless, howling glittering
gobs of plasma and lymph until he had no lungs left. The wooden
floors soaked through, despite the throng licking the floorboards.
Bodiless, Dionysus retained a detached awareness of the
proceedings.

Their frenzy didn’t cease
when his body was completely desiccated. Writhing around on the
floor like wallowing pigs, their stained fingers ran through clumps
of hair, slid between quivering legs. Tongues licked bellies, toes,
even eyes. They moaned together senselessly, somewhere between the
low braying of a donkey and the snarl of a panther. Eventually,
their fervor gave way to a languid purring, as they lay strewn
amongst his remains.

The Judge finally stood and
made a gesture with his hand, which the women reacted to
immediately. A sarcophagus was carried from a side corridor, and
touched ground with a whoomp. They opened the ornate lid and began
shoveling his bones inside.

They closed the lid. The
Judge brought his arms out to the side, as if he was crucified, and
then he spoke:

“
In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal
life,

We commend our
Brother;

And we commit his body to
the ground;

Earth to earth; ashes to
ashes, dust to dust.

The wind bless him and the
waters keep him,

The wine returns to blood
again…

This blood feeds the
earth;

For out of it wast thou
taken:

For dust thou
art,

And unto dust shalt thou
return.”

The Jury repeated each line
in hushed tones with their heads bowed, hands interlocked. Their
masks were gone. If Dionysus wasn’t mistaken they were actually
weeping, the saline water running clear streaks through his dried
blood. When the Judge finished his curious eulogy, they picked up
the sarcophagus and solemnly carried it to a tube behind the bench.
They heaved.

He plummeted through slimy
water, past clusters of fungus that grew in fat packets around
girded edges in the tubing. The sarcophagus fell into the cold deep
with a splash that echoed for miles up into the sewers. A single
bubble escaped to the surface of the water, sat there a moment
before bursting and then all was still.

Soft hands moved over his remains, melding
them back together again. Through a veil of cloth he could make out
the face of someone very familiar to him, though he couldn’t place
it.

Finally he was able to speak. “Who are
you?”

She smiled and put a finger to his cracked
lips. “Shhh. Just a little while longer now.”

Humming in my bones. This is the part where
I look around, and going outside, forget who I am… Rows of herbs in
labeled bottles above an old stove with gas burners. The more I pry
into the sensation of being here, the more the room pulses around
me, fading into a cold abyss and then returning.

Two eyes regard me from beyond this abyss,
bringing me out of a final dip into darkness. She is wearing a
dress, and I cannot discern its color. Is it blue? Green? She
gestures with her hands while she is talking – she has been
speaking to me slowly, comfortably. Those thin hands look like two
doves, her fingers curled outwards like fragile feathers. Her lips
are thin and yet full, I am watching them move, so slowly.

I can feel my weight compressing in the
chair beneath me, the sensation of my breathing, and now I am
really here. Alright, what is she saying, now that I am here, now
that I can pay attention?

“…
I had been looking for you for so long…The story isn’t yet
finished, love.” She poured wine into a glass. It rushed and
gurgled like a brook. “There is one thing you have left to
do.”

My sense of time and perspective keeps
jittering: forward, backwards. I am inside myself and then watching
myself from the corner.

She offered the cup to him. A plain
teakettle in the background whistled, but she ignored it.

“
I’m done, I’m done, I’m done,” he said. It droned on in his
dusty skull. “They’ve taken of my flesh. There is nothing
left.”

She handed him the glass and smiled. Faint
lines appeared around her eyes. “It isn’t your place to say. We
exist to serve humanity, even if they are tantrum throwing
two-year-olds. Do you give up on your toddler when he’s thrown a
ball through the window? You clean it up. Drink this, you’ll feel
better.”

Her lips lightly grazed his cheek, and she
patted him on the head. “You need to prepare them for what is about
to happen. Then you can rest a while.”

“
What is going to happen?” he asked.

“
You already know that. But…if you don’t let go and open up to
it, it will shut you down. Maybe even tear you apart. You won’t be
good to anyone like that.”

“
Um,” he said. “I think your tea is ready.”

Beneath the howling of the steam, he could
hear voices – millions of them, shrieking in horror – and the
crashing of waves. Mother wiping away buildings like children’s
toys.

When he looked up, there were tears in her
eyes.

Dionysus sat upright in his
bunk. “I am the Green man!” he exclaimed.

Ariadne rolled towards him.
“Hm. What babe?”

“
Weird dream.”

She hugged him. “I couldn’t
sleep.”

Amber’s snoring and the
other sounds around the cabin were keeping her up. Ariadne smiled.
Snoring normally drove her insane. But something about Amber, the
way she could mix grace with total trashiness, made it cute instead
of intolerable. She had the seemingly fragile beauty of a fairy
princess, but the manners and unflappable poise of a sailor. That
was it.

Ariadne sat up and pushed
stray dreadlocks out of her face. They had developed at first by
accident, the result of life on the road, but she liked the look of
them. They just felt right, somehow.