Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (9 page)

While we waited for the great unveiling, Dick Lombard delivered a speech. He thanked us for our hard work. He apologised that we had had to redouble our efforts in recent weeks and that many of us had had to pull all-nighters in order to meet the revised, accelerated schedule, which was due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. The results, he assured us, would be worth the bloodshot eyes and the torn-out hair and the caffeine poisoning.

“This is a great day,” he said. “Historic, even. Today you are going to see, for the very first time, something that up until now people have only read about or watched movies about. Something that has existed purely in the realms of fantasy. We’ve achieved it through science, technology, imagination, and good old-fashioned graft. The world has been crying out for this. We’re going to give it to them. The official public announcement isn’t for another week, but here, for your delight and delectation, is a sneak preview. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you... the Dashavatara!”

They emerged from indoors, one after another in ascending numerical order, at five-second intervals, a neatly choreographed entrance parade. Matsya first, with his glossy turquoise skin and his flared gills. Kurma with his sturdy, quasi-chelonian
¹
armour. Porcine Varaha. Leonine Narasimha. And on and on. Rama looking haughty with his sleek recurve bow. Buddha, serene.

They were monstrous and absurd and alarming and beautiful and disconcerting and splendid. Lombard led a round of applause, the rest of us joining in, some enthusiastically, some more nervously. Here and there, a cheer.

I myself had no idea, at that time, how the Avatars had been created. Perhaps I should have asked, perhaps I should have been more curious, but I had been too caught up in a hurricane of creativity, and too dazzled by the lure of filthy lucre, to care. Men had been
remade
somehow. It was the only explanation that made sense, extraordinary though it was. Krieger’s boffins had applied their gene modification knowhow to the question of gifting humans with super powers, and had succeeded.

Now, I beheld the fruits of our labours; not just my own, everyone’s at Mount Meru, creatives and test tube jockeys and costumiers and armourers and number crunchers, the lot of us. The Avatars stood together in a huddle, amused by the reception they were getting, bemused by it too. They looked good in their new outfits. They looked right. Ego alert: I had come up trumps. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I’d nailed it. The costumes were different in each case but there were design elements common to all of them, not least the numbers. They were self-evidently a team.

I gave in to a little fanboy thrill, an inner
squee
of geeky rapture. Not so long ago I had witnessed for myself what Narasimha and Vamana could do. I had also witnessed, back on that the day I first arrived on the island, Rama and Krishna in action – although it had been just a glimpse, scarcely even that.

Imagine what ten of them were capable of.

Superheroes.

Real live superheroes.

Gods on Earth.

Lombard continued with his speech. He was telling us how each of the volunteers for what he called “theogenesis” had been selected with care. Each had a particular speciality which made him right for his role as an Avatar. Each was keen to work for the betterment of mankind, and fight for it too.

There would have been more. Lombard loved the sound of his own voice. But then someone scurried out from the complex, a personal assistant or PR guy, one of the Trinity’s smartly suited flunkies, our resident Armani army. He had an iPad in his hand and a worried frown on his face. He tugged Bhatnagar’s sleeve and showed him something on the tablet’s screen. Bhatnagar paled and drew Krieger’s attention to the iPad. Krieger also paled. He tapped Lombard’s shoulder.

“What?” said the Australian, breaking off testily. “What is it? You better have a ruddy good reason –”

“It’s happened,” said Krieger. “We thought it might, and it has.”

“An asura,” said Bhatnagar.

“Fair dinkum?” said Lombard.

“It can’t be anything else,” said Krieger.

“Where?”

“Manhattan, of all places.”

I turned to Aanandi, who was nearby, and said, “Asura?”

Her expression was tight and grim. “Demon.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I wish I were.” She hurried over to the Trinity to confer with them. Around me people murmured and exchanged looks. They seemed as much in the dark as I was.

Had she really said
demon
?

“Ah, everyone, if I could have your attention,” said Lombard, hands raised. “Really. Shut your flaming gobs, will you? Okay. There are reports coming in – from one of my own news networks, as it happens – of ructions in New York. It’s looking pretty much like an asura. Which sort, Aanandi?”

“A rakshasa, I think,” said Aanandi. “Unless it’s just some maniac on the loose. But I don’t think it is.”

“A rakshasa is attacking commuters on their way to work in Manhattan. Now, we, well, we sort of suspected we might have to face something like this. Maybe not so soon, but still. We’ve generated gods” – he indicated the Avatars – “and that was bound to create some sort of blowback. No coincidence, just karmic balance. Gods appear, so demons come crawling out of the woodwork. It’s a contingency we’ve anticipated and prepared for. Fellas?”

He was addressing the Dashavatara directly now.

“Hate to do this to you. You’ve barely put on your glad rags, and already we’re asking you to go out there and get busy.”

Parashurama took a step forward from the others, snapping off a sharp military salute. He was a broad-shouldered man-mountain, massively muscled, almost as wide as he was tall. I’ve seen bodybuilders less statuesque than him.
²

“Sir,” he said, “we are ready. This is what we were meant for. What we’ve trained for all this time. Let us go.”

Lombard was mightily gratified by this response. “Do you speak for all ten of you, Parashurama?”

Without even turning round to check, Parashurama said, “Yes.”

In next to no time the
Garuda
had been fuelled and prepped for takeoff, the Dashavatara were aboard, and the multi-platform adaptable personnel transporter was leaving its hangar and hauling out to sea, jet engine burring. It whisked off across the water and then was up, up and away, leaping aloft to commence its slingshot journey across Africa and the Atlantic to America.

¹
“Turtle-esque.”

²
Secret Origin:
His real name was Tyler Weston, and he was a Harvard valedictorian and an alumnus of West Point, joining the 3rd Ranger Battalion immediately afterwards as a second lieutenant. His father had been an enlisted man, and his grandfather. The army ran through his veins like magma through the Earth’s crust.

11. A RAKSHASA AT GRAND CENTRAL

D
OZENS OF US
were gathered in one of the rec rooms, glued to the television. It had been four hours since the
Garuda
left. The Dashavatara were due to be touching down on the US East Coast any moment.

There were techies present and backroom boys and all sorts. Some of the domestic staff mingled among us, chattering to one another in mellifluous Divehi.

Aanandi, however, was nowhere to be seen. She had gone off with the Trinity to help oversee the Avatars’ departure, and when she didn’t return, that was when it dawned on me that she ranked higher in the pecking order than I had thought. My assumption had been that she was a minion, more or less on my level, a fellow underling, but it seemed she was close to the inner circle, if not inside it.

I felt disappointed about this, and obscurely threatened too. The disparity in our status ought not to be a stumbling block. It wouldn’t prevent anything of a romantic nature developing between us. Would it? Then again, maybe this explained why, even though we had been getting on well together, I hadn’t been making any real headway with her. That or my smouldering sexual allure was just not compelling enough, which was inconceivable.

The TV was tuned to a 24-hour rolling news channel, Lombard’s very own US-based Epic News, which had first broken the story of the horrific assaults on commuters alighting from early-morning trains at New York’s Grand Central Station. The reporting was confused. No one had a clear idea what was going on. The police had cordoned off an area a block wide around the rail terminal, and Epic News’s on-the-spot correspondent, Melody Berkowitz, stood just outside a barricade of sawhorses and yellow tape, reiterating again and again the few facts she knew and speculating wildly about the rest. She was TV journalism at its rhinoplastied finest.

“What I can confirm,” Berkowitz said, gripping the microphone, “is that at least twenty-two commuters are dead so far. Those are the known casualties, but I should stress that it’s only a provisional figure and could easily rise. Their assailant – and we believe it’s just the one man – has been leaping out from hiding to carry out vicious onslaughts on victims chosen apparently at random. It’s suspected he’s using the below-ground tracks, of which there are around a hundred arranged across two levels, to conceal himself and move about unseen. To be honest, information is hard to come by at this present moment, but we are hearing rumours that – and I still can’t believe I’m saying this – that cannibalism may well be involved. It’s almost too horrible to think about. I have with me NYPD spokesperson Armand Dominguez. Mr Dominguez, is there anything you can tell Epic News viewers about what’s going on inside Grand Central?”

The camera operator pulled back for a two shot, revealing a portly, luxuriantly-coiffed Latino.

“Well, Melody,” said Dominguez, “the situation is still fluid right now. What I can say is that the station has been evacuated of all rail users and Metropolitan Transportation Authority personnel, we have managed to extract the casualties, and we’ve got several dozen uniformed officers in there right now combing the premises, hunting the suspect, who seems to have gone to ground since the initial wave of attacks. We’re confident we can have this wrapped up within the hour.”

“But the site covers nearly fifty acres. That’s a lot of ground to cover, a lot of places to lurk.”

“We’re confident we have the manpower for the job.”

“And the stories we’re hearing about cannibalism in the attacks – do you have any comment to make on that?”

“Not at this time,” said Dominguez.

Berkowitz’s scalpel-sharpened nostrils flared. “EMTs I’ve personally spoken to claim that the bodies of the deceased show signs of being partially eaten. Tooth marks.”

“Again, I can’t comment on that at this time. It’s a fluid situation and these are the kinds of statements that can’t be clarified or verified right now.”

“Do you think this could maybe be the handiwork of a deranged mole person – a subway dweller who has, as it were, gone off the rails?”

“I am not in a position to confirm or deny that as a possibility. Someone is committing a spree killing, that much I am at liberty to say, and we will stop him.”

The transmission cut back to the studio, where the anchorman began conducting a phone interview with an eyewitness, Lamorne Wilson, who ran a bakery concession on Graybar Passage, adjacent to the station’s main concourse.

“Yeah, I saw something all right,” said Wilson. “Only I ain’t one hundred per cent sure
what
I saw, you with me? I was, like, opening up the shop, same as I do five-thirty AM every morning, and suddenly there was this screaming, this woman running across the concourse, running for her life. She was this Filipina, I seen her before. Overnight cleaner would be my guess. She usually came in round ’bout then to catch the train home. And this – this
thing
was chasing her. Jesus, man, its skin was black, but not like my skin’s black, not African-American black, black like coal, black like oil, shiny, and its eyes glowed like flames, all red and huge. It was mean-looking, and it went kinda on all fours but it flowed as it moved, sort of like it was flying. I’m not crazy. I saw what I saw. I’m on the air, and I know millions of people are listening, and I’m telling you, and them, I ain’t crazy. This was some sorta ... I gotta say it: monster. Seriously. A monster.”