Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (13 page)

We took refuge in the battered old trailer, which had clearly seen better decades, and waited for the storm to abate. For a couple more hours, the thunder shook the ground and the rain battered the trailer’s sides. It was like sitting inside a giant aluminium dustbin that was being beaten by a million mad club-wielding monkeys. Gad and I didn’t have much to say to each other, but if we had, we would have had to yell to say it.

Finally, around 4
AM
, the racket began to die down, and soon the thunder was faint, distant, and then hush descended. Gad went outdoors and busied himself hitching a small boat to the back of his pickup. The boat was a Zodiac inflatable, harking back to earlier times when he had earned a living as a fishing guide, chartered by tourists to go out onto Sweetwater Lake and help them land chub and cutthroat trout. He kept the outboard in good working order and still took the boat for a spin occasionally on what was left of the lake, just for the fun of it. Nowadays his main source of income was part-time employment as a front-of-house meet-and-greeter at a casino owned by a cousin of his on a nearby reservation; the job remit was, in his words, “Reeling in the high rollers and rousting out the drunks. Ain’t pretty, but it pays the bills.”

We set off just as the sun was coming up, revealing a tormented, haggard landscape. Flash floods had torn gouges through the desert. Cacti and Joshua trees lay toppled, ripped up by the roots. Rockslides that had fallen across the roads tested the pickup’s suspension and four-wheel drive almost to destruction. The steam rising thickly off the ground was like smoke after a great fire.

“Mother of all storms, that one was,” Gad remarked. “The Great Spirit sure was pissed.” He made it sound personal.

“He and you have never got on, have you? That is, he and Coyote.”

“No love lost between those two. The Great Spirit had it in for Coyote from the start. When all the animals were choosing their names, right back at the time of creation, the Great Spirit made Coyote fall into a deep sleep so’s he’d wake up late and get last pick. Coyote coveted a cool name like Grizzly Bear or Eagle, but those were already taken when his turn came, so he got stuck with Coyote. The Great Spirit told him, ‘You’re the lowest of the low. You slink around and boast too much and do too little work. That’s why I punished you by forcing you to have the name no one else wanted.’ Since then, Coyote’s always been sly, quick to take offence, looking out for nobody but himself. Know why coyotes have those slanted eyes they do? It’s ’cause they take after their namesake, and Coyote’s eyes are slanted ’cause he props them open with sticks every night so he’ll never be caught out like that by the Great Spirit again.”

“Anansi and Nyame, the Sky God, have a similar relationship,” I said. “Combative. Anansi tried stealing wisdom from Nyame once. It didn’t work. He dropped the pot he was keeping the wisdom in, and it broke and wisdom ended up scattered in pieces across the world, a little bit of it in everyone. Nyame wasn’t best pleased about that.”

“Coyote stole fire from the Great Spirit and gave it to mankind. Same outcome: the Great Spirit wasn’t happy. Your god and mine, they’re a lot alike, ain’t they? Out of all the tricksters, they got the most in common. I guess that’s why I felt I could trust you with all of this.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and I realised, with a twinge of surprise, that I had all but forgotten there was a dead body in the rear of the pickup. Blame exhaustion – it had been a long, fraught night – and also my own conflictedness. My conscience was doing its best not to dwell on the moral bind I was in, the compromises to my integrity that I was making. It seemed to find it easier to just blank out the corpse that we were even now ferrying to its final, secret resting place.

I
HAD NO
choice but to focus my attention on the corpse once more as we pulled up at the edge of a shallow ravine and Gad jumped out and began untethering the boat. Here in this remote spot, far from human view, was where we would be embarking on a voyage to dump Solveig’s mortal coil where it would never be discovered.

A broad stream rushed along the ravine bottom, leaping and churning. “Usually it’s as dry as a witch’s tit,” Gad explained. “This is all storm runoff. And it’ll take us straight out there.”

By “out there,” he meant a distant silvery expanse of lake, which he indicated with a sweep of his arm.

“That,” he said, “is Sweetwater Lake. That’s how it used to look back in the day – how it
oughtta
look. They’ll have vented excess water, up at the hydroelectric plant. They have to, during a storm like last night’s, else the reservoir’ll overflow and the dam’ll burst. Water follows the course of the old river, fills the lake up nice and full again. Ain’t gonna stay that way forever, so we’d best make the most of it while we can.”

He hauled the Zodiac on its little trailer down the ravine bank, floated it out onto the stream and lashed it to a boulder. Then he came back up, and together we carried down Solveig’s rug-wrapped remains and loaded her into the boat.

Not long after that, we were puttering along on the bounce and surge of the stream.

T
HE RAVINE DISGORGED
onto the lake and we swapped turbulent, racing water for calm. The sun had risen well above the horizon and was already hot on our heads. Mine more so than Gad’s; he had put on a John Deere cap. The lake surface was laced with flotsam: scraps of wood, strands of vegetation, every now and then the bloated remains of some rodent or other, a jackrabbit or prairie dog, drowned in its own burrow.

Gad steered us far out onto the shining water to a place he knew, somewhere where, submerged right now but not for long, there was a sinkhole that plunged underground. How far down it went, no one could quite say, but it was deep.

I could tell we were getting close to it when the current picked up and the water became turbid. Soon there was an appreciable swirl on the surface, a slow-moving whirlpool some ten or fifteen yards in diameter. Gad set the Zodiac against the whirlpool’s rotation and throttled back on the outboard until we were effectively at a standstill.

“You do the honours,” he said to me, and I bent and put my shoulder to the grim task of heaving Solveig, in her rug cocoon, overboard.

She was a slight thing but heavier than she looked. I struggled to roll her up onto the Zodiac’s gunwale. I asked Gad for assistance, but he said he had to keep his hand on the tiller to hold the boat steady. So, beginning to sweat, I resumed grappling with the corpse and eventually managed to lay it across the rubber float. After that, it was easy enough to tip it off into the lake.

The rug soaked up water but the body stayed afloat, drifting lazily round in the spiralling current and spinning in smaller circles of its own. Gad and I watched it keenly as it was drawn inexorably towards the centre of the whirlpool. I noted the whirlpool gathering speed but didn’t immediately apprehend the significance of this fact. All I wanted was for the corpse to be gone, to disappear from sight so that we could be done with this grisly business and leave.

To my horror, and Gad’s as well, the rug began to unpeel itself. Solveig’s pallid, bored-looking face was revealed, and then one of her arms flopped free, almost as though she were alive and attempting to swim. The arm wafted in the water in a slow parody of volition, while Solveig’s hair fanned out around her head, rippling like the fronds of a sea anemone.

It was awful, and yet I couldn’t tear my gaze away. Then, to my immense relief, the whirlpool abruptly pulled her under. She was there one moment, bobbing on her back, like a blonde version of Rossetti’s Ophelia; gone the next, sucked down into the sinkhole in a single gulp, leaving no trace, not even a few bubbles to mark her passing.

Gad inhaled sharply, as though for the past minute or so he had neglected to breathe.

“Well,” he said softly, “that’s that over with. She ain’t ever coming back. Loki? If you’re listening? Sorry, guy. Them’s the breaks. For what it’s worth, she was a good choice. Or he. This transgender stuff confuses me.”

“She,” I said.

He nodded. “She did you proud, Loki. Shame it had to end this way for her.”

It wasn’t much as eulogies go, but it was all poor Solveig was ever going to get.

E
N ROUTE BACK
to the ravine, I noticed something curious.

“I can see the bottom,” I said, peering over the boat’s bows. “The bottom of the lake. I’m sure I couldn’t when we were coming the other way.”

“Yeah, is that so?” said Gad nonchalantly.

“Yes. The water’s getting shallower. Definitely.” Which would account for the quickening of the whirlpool. I thought of the water around a plughole, turning faster as the bath drains out.

“Guess I’d better pour on the speed, then.”

The boat did accelerate but not by much. Our speed climbed, but I wouldn’t say Gad exactly
poured
it on. Maybe this was as fast as the Zodiac could go.

I studied the lake with increasing concern. Boulders were appearing above the surface, and other rocky outcrops, all of which I was sure hadn’t been there before. In places, the lake was only a couple of feet deep, whereas earlier it had seemed unfathomable. The landscape was emerging from beneath it, like some mythical continent arising, a desert Atlantis.

I turned to Gad. “We really need to hurry. We’re not going to make it.”

“Doing the best I can, Dion. Lake’s drying up faster’n I thought it would. Sun’s evaporating it, ground’s absorbing it. But we got time, I think.”

“You
think
?”

“Ain’t an exact science, but I reckon we’ll get back to –”

There was a hideous scraping sound, the Zodiac’s soft hull rubbing across the top of some hidden stone reef. Gad grimaced but piloted us doggedly on. Shading my eyes, I searched for the entrance to the ravine, but couldn’t see it yet. I realised it would be touch-and-go whether we reached it. The flat-bottomed boat had minimal draught, but the waters were receding fast. Lake Sweetwater’s brief burst of renewed life was coming to an end. Its mayfly renaissance was over, and the dry times were returning.

Now little low islands were visible, raised patches of glistening mud. Gad circumnavigated them, and although he continued to radiate an air of imperturbability, I caught what I fancied was a flicker of concern in his eyes. He didn’t relish the prospect of becoming stranded out here any more than I did. He, like me, was keen to make it back to the pickup and, ultimately, back to the Friendly Inn, where we could tie up any dangling threads and go our separate ways, never to meet again. At that moment I wasn’t even thinking about the contest. I was experiencing the low-level nausea of the crook who simply wants to be able to get away with his crime scot-free, even as fate does its very best to thwart him.

Seeing life from the other side of the fence now, eh, Dion?

Snide comments from Anansi did not help.

The Zodiac juddered across something rugged, and Gad swore some Native American curse and veered sharply sideways. For several seconds the boat skimmed freely through the water. Then it hit some other obstruction. Gad and I were jolted out of our seats. We landed back more or less upright, and Gad gunned the motor and the Zodiac charged forward, but not for long. All at once it was ploughing a furrow through mud, and the propeller became clogged, and we lost momentum, and just like that the motor cut out and we were at a halt, beached, going nowhere.

“Well, shit,” Gad sighed. “If that don’t suck a fat one... Could’ve sworn the lake’d stick around longer than that.”

The boat lay at a slight angle, amid a sea of mud.

“What do we do now?” I said, trying to keep an edge of anxiety out of my voice.

“We could stay put.”

“But the way you said that, you don’t think it’s wise.”

“It ain’t got much to recommend it. Mojave’s not what you’d call a hospitable spot, ’specially to two fellas without a drop of drinking water on ’em. Our best bet’s abandoning the boat and going on on foot. Won’t be easy, but it’s preferable to just sitting here and letting the sun slowly bake our brainpans.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” I surveyed our surroundings, the lakebed that was almost entirely land again. “Let’s get cracking.”

“After you,” said Gad.

W
E STEPPED OUT
of the Zodiac, onto the mud. Straight away I sank in up to my ankles; Gad likewise.

“Trick is to keep moving,” he said. “Stop, and you’ll just carry on sinking.”

So we hurried, or tried to. We trudged. We slopped. We slurped. We forged through the mud. It accumulated around our calves in clumps, layer upon thickening layer. The further we travelled, the more of it stuck to us, and the more that stuck, the harder we had to struggle just to walk. In some places the mud was so shallow we could virtually skate over it. In others, it swallowed our legs up to the knees and we were wading along, arms swinging, like astronauts in cumbersome spacesuits.

There was the mud, and the heat of the morning, and I could feel them both taking their toll, but I dug deep and carried on. Gad, at least twenty years my senior, was finding the going tough too, but he had a lean, wiry build and I sensed his stamina was well above the average for someone his age He might even be as fit as me. We could do this, I thought. We could make it through to the ravine and the pickup.

But soon my strength was ebbing. The mud was relentless and treacherous. More than once I lost my footing and went floundering into it face first. I managed to pick myself up and lumber on, but each time it was more difficult to recover than before. I lost my shoes, and my socks, and had no recollection of them being wrenched off my feet and vanishing, and didn’t care. I began to despair. The ordeal seemed endless. The mud went on forever.

I didn’t realised I had stopped in my tracks until Gad said, “Don’t just stand there, Dion. Up and at ’em.”

I forced my legs to move, hauling them one after the other out of the mud and back into more mud, on and on. Increasingly I found myself bent over, scrabbling along on all fours. I was covered in muck. Dank gluey brownness was all over me, inside my clothes, smeared on my face.