Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End (14 page)

Dionysus waved him off. He
looked up to find a large spider repelling down from above. “Ugh.”
Then he noticed that there were spider webs over everything. Legs
wriggling, half in sight.

“
The hell?”

Loki discovered that the
attendant was a one eyed freak of nature in overalls. “Wut git you
for?” it asked.

“
We’re filling up the...uh.” He found himself staring at rows
of half empty shelves with products hidden under a thick layer of
dust.

The attendant scowled and
gritted his misshapen teeth. “Huh?”

“
Nevermind. Here’s money.” He slapped a small wad of bills on
the counter.

“
Huh?” the attendant asked, again.

“
This is surreal,” Loki muttered to himself.

Loki made a beeline for the
vehicle. “Sorry it took a few minutes. The creature in there was
barely mammalian. English was a challenge.”

“
I was beginning to wonder,” Dionysus said. “Moon’s pretty,
though.”

“
Yeah, okay. This place is creepy. Let’s go,” Loki
said.

“
Like a psychedelic but awful horror movie. Did you see those
spiders?”

The screeching of car tires
cut off any forthcoming answer. A beat up Cadillac convertible
teared out of the garage, pulling a hard turn that lifted it up on
two tires. Jesus flicked a cigarette out of the car as it shot
past.

“
Great,” Loki said.

Jesus was lying on her bunk
staring at the ceiling. A cigarette was burned to the butt, still
dangling out of her mouth, with a trailing snake of ash.

“
I’ll pay. Fill her up,” Loki’s voice floated in through the
open window.

Jesus was clearly dressed
for a night out – PVC rubber, big shiny pistol – but had nowhere to
go.

Lilith pulled back the red
velvet curtain to her sleeping area. Amber and Mary were both
passed out in her bed, naked and snoring softly like kittens.
Lilith stumbled out, wearing nothing but underwear and combat boot.
An unwholesome glow radiated from her. Bite marks and scratches
stood out raw and red against her paleness. She stared at the
revolver on Jesus’ belt, blinked, and took a long pull on a bottle
of vodka.

“
I’m sweaty, I’m sore and these fuck monkeys just didn’t know
when to quit.”

Lilith went down on all
fours, forehead-to-forehead with Jesus. “Steal me a car,
you!”

Jesus looked out the
window. “I think we’re on the set for a Deliverance remake. There
can’t be a–”

“
I don’t care. Steal me a car. Let’s go out and have a little
fun.” She thumped Jesus playfully on the shoulder as she sat back
on the bed, nearly sliding off the edge.

“
Oh, fine,” Jesus said. “But put on some clothes.”

The Cadillac wasn’t too
bad, Jesus thought, once she got it up to speed. Her purple hair
and strips of fabric and yarn blew back in the nighttime breeze as
they shot down winding roads. Lilith leaned out the side and yowled
as they passed a diner. She was still working that Vodka
bottle.

Jesus finally broke a
smile. The speedometer gunned up: 80, 90, 100...she slammed a
sudden turn. The car fishtailed. Lilith laughed
hysterically.

They spun off the road and
bucked violently. Jesus gritted her teeth and slammed on the
gas.

“
Lilith. Vodka. Inspiration.
Please!
”

Lilith handed her the
bottle, and she finished it as they raced across an already
harvested corn field. Jesus grinned and slewed back and forth,
coaxing the wheels to skid, sliding the huge convertible about like
a rally car.

The wheel got out of her
control again. “Fuck you, we are
not
going to flip.”

They stopped in the middle
of the field. The beam of the headlights shined on a mooing
cow.

Jesus looked up at the
canopy of stars above them. She leaped out, and lay on the hood.
Lilith joined her.

The stars seemed to
pulsate. A verdant sea. Jesus’ breath slowed. She went completely
slack and approached the speed of light.

The stars spun, stuck in
place, and then time itself shattered. A universe of glass. Under
the glass, entities streamed information into her, in the code she
thought in before her thoughts became language. She began to
realize that these entities were nothing more than fractal masses
of code, aware of themselves, and aware of her intrusion into their
realm. There was no form. There was only the color red, a sense of
distance, thought entering her and leaving her like breath. Jesus
herself was nothing more than a passive transponder, suspended in
bliss, wetness, warmth.

Epiphanies were sucked back into the depths
of her mind as her thoughts slowed from microseconds to minutes.
The more profound, the further back they hid. It was as if she’d
already known everything there was to know, and the hiding was just
a game, something to do while the fire ants stung their prey, as
black holes sucked everything past their event horizons, as nations
rose and people died and loved and suffered and came to know.

Jesus’ eyes opened. Time
returned to its normal pace. “Would it be totally nuts...I mean,
totally fucking nuts, to say I think I’m thousands of years
old?”

“
Oh? Nah,” Lilith said.

“
Oh well. Cause I’m totally nuts,” Jesus smiled.

“
Though I’d guess you are a great deal older than that,”
Lilith said.

“
I’m hungry.”

“
I think we passed a diner somewhere back there.”

“
Pancakes. Fuck yes.”

It was indeed, as the sign
said, a diner. It had no name beyond that, and clearly no
aspirations towards greatness. The sky was beginning to turn a
brilliant blue as they entered.

Jesus plunked herself down
on a stool and motioned to the waitress. She was the archetypal
kind of diner waitress that looked like she might have been
attractive in her glory years: the Peloponnesian War, maybe. She
did her best not to react to their appearance.

“
Coffee, please,” Lilith said.

The waitress turned to
Jesus.

“
Yes. And pancakes,” Jesus said enthusiastically.

The waitress did a
double-take as she was about to go. She stared openly at the pistol
sticking out of Jesus’ belt. A .45. Not easy to miss.

“
Huh? Oh. Right. Silly me. I totally forgot I still had my
piece on me. I’ll put it in my car and it’ll be our secret,
okay?”

The waitress nodded
dumbly.

Jesus got up and headed to
the door.

Lilith lit a smoke. She
heard the door slam twice behind her.

“
Trannies aren’t wanted around here,” a voice behind Jesus
said. She stopped, several paces from the entrance. She didn’t turn
around.

“
Get in your car with your whore. Leave,” he
continued.

“
Are you stupid?” Jesus asked.

“
Huh?”

She could hear gravel
crunching as he approached her.

Jesus reached into her belt
and spun, leading with her shiny pistol. The fat trucker was
staring down its barrel.

“
My friend here speaks louder than I can,” Jesus said. She
had
always
wanted
to get to say something like that.

He froze like a possum in
headlights. Jesus cocked the hammer.

“
Don’t walk. Run.”

He remained frozen in
place.

Lilith came out of the
door, and it slammed behind her. With a crack that echoed across
the horizon, the gun went off. The trucker was lifted off the
ground with the force of it. Blood splattered
everywhere.

“
Shit. I didn’t mean to. What did I?” Jesus
sputtered.

Lilith ran over to the
body. She was grinning.

“
I didn’t mean to...”

“
That’s like a Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?” Lilith said,
tilting her head to look at the remains of his head.

“
Huh?”

“
The brains. Never mind. We’d better go.”

“
Yeah...”

The two of them jumped into
the car and took off.

Inside, the waitress was on
the phone. “That’s right. A coked out prostitute and a transvestite
with tits! Splattered poor Ed’s head all over the parking
lot.”

Jesus tapped on the window
with the handle of her gun.

Loki opened the door. “We
should have just left you assholes.”

“
Joyride, sorry,” Lilith said.

Jesus entered
silently.

“
What happened?” Loki asked.

“
We were going to get pancakes, but got distracted,” Lilith
said.

“
Description match. Lilith and the tranny,” a young cop said
to Trevino.

“
Her name is Jesus.”

“
Doesn’t seem right, calling it that,” the cop
said.

Trevino stared at him a
minute and shook his head in disgust. “Anything
physical?”

“
I just wouldn’t fuck anything with a dick–”

“
Evidence
.”

“
Oh. Casing. Tires.” He shrugged.

Trevino grunted. He peered
down at the chalk outline where Ed’s remains had been minutes
before. It was stained black around the head region.

“
If we can bring one of them in and work them with the witness
statements–” the cop said.

“–
Good luck with that.” Trevino turned and walked back to his
car, scowling.

He met his own gaze in the
rear-view mirror. Exhausted, sunken eyes returned the stare. They
closed. He took a deep breath and went perfectly still. Then, in a
flurry of rapid motion, he slammed open the glove compartment,
pulled out a napkin, and held it across the steering wheel with his
pen out. He wrote “GROUND ZERO’S JUST GROUND” crudely, with his
left hand. Crumpled the napkin in his fist.

He got out of the car and
approached the waitress. She was leaning outside the front door,
hands shaking as she sucked down a menthol cigarette.

“
Would you mind showing me where they sat, ma’am?” he
asked.

Stubbing out her smoke, the
waitress nodded.

A few minutes later,
Trevino stormed out.

“
Did you look under the table?” he asked the cop.

“
Yes. Nothing.”

Trevino held up an evidence
bag with the napkin inside. “This isn’t nothing. Write it
up.”

“
I didn’t find it.”

“
Write it up and you didn’t miss it, either. Do better,
kid.”

“
Yes, sir.”

Time to call the Suits and
ask for more resources.

Intermission

It took Don a long time to
realize that the horrible buzzing wasn’t emanating from a
three-foot tall green goddess with udder-like breasts. Hathoor the
cow-goddess had somehow been jumbled up by his subconscious, now
sharing cognitive space with the green-skinned alien that Kirk
tried to fuck, and the backwards-talking midget from Twin Peaks.
She was hovering above him, her mouth wrenched open in an eternal,
orgasmic wail
–
that electric heat scraped his eardrums with razors, gutting
his miserable brain like an acoustic fishhook. Stuck on the end of
the hook, he flopped and floundered, dragged slowly from a far more
pleasant realm.

No, not a fishhook. It was
an alarm clock. Which meant he had to go to
work
. A treadmill, headed nowhere.
The wailing cow-teet Goddess had abandoned him to this cold world
of concrete, business briefings, bullshit, and the only Gods he had
left came in Grande and Make-My-Heart-Explode-All-Over-Your-Shoes
sizes. That cruel gutterslut. The ungrateful whore of a cunt mother
of a
– OK, OK.
I'm
awake.

He couldn’t remember the night before,
though the drool ringing his mouth was a good indicator that it had
been far from pretty. Fragments began to cohere, and his eyes
widened and then slammed shut.