Last God Standing (29 page)

“You’re a million years too late, once-God. I danced by the light of the first cooking fire. I was the cavebear that stole the first fully human child. I am the approach of enemies too foreign to understand, much less defeat. I sing the Body Eccentric and whistle the ecstacy of War. I am genocide and rape and easy cancer; I am the mortgage banker who stalked your mortal grandmother, and the shriek of a burning 767.”

It emerges from the shadows and I see it clearly: the cavebear, the inoperable tumor, a grinning dead man with empty eyes and a sharp knife, a sick and dying child.

“You sought mortality, once-God,”
it breathes.
“See it now.”

I’m in the Ha-Ha Room. On stage with a dead microphone in my hand. I’m squinting into the beam from a red spotlight, staring out at a roomful of dark faces. One of the people seated in front of me stands. The red spotlight finds her, Barbara…

“You were sickly, Lando. There were things I wanted for my life. Instead I got you. And I hate you.”

Herb…

“You’ll never make anything of yourself. I look at you and all I see is disappointment. You and your brothers ate every hope I ever had.”

“You lied to me, Lando.”

I turn and she’s there, standing offstage, a shadow in the wings. Surabhi walks toward me.

“I paid the price for your fear. You failed.”

“Failed.”

“Liar.”

“You see?” my ghosts say in unison, speaking with the Coming’s voice. “No god can defeat me.”

The psychic assault smashes its way through my consciousness, the voices tearing at my heart with claws sharper than scalpels. My ghosts, both living and dead, hurl my failings like grenades, destroying my spirit just as Holiday’s attack destroyed my body. And one thing is certain… I will not survive this.

You didn’t come here to save yourself.

What?

You were a God. Now you’re a Man.

And I remember. The reason. The only reason that matters.

“You don’t get it. I didn’t come here to fight. I came to tell you a joke.”

Silence. If I were alive I’d be covered in flop sweat now. But I’m already dying, so what the hell?

“Once upon a time… there was a world, different from ours in some ways, similar in others: there they have a fatal form of gout. Here we got Fox News.”

“You’re no Cosby, Lando,” Magnus Moloke says. He had been decapitated. His head spoke from the seat next to his body. “You’re not funny.”

“Magnus Moloke, folks. Big, black and deader than Disco.”

Surabhi’s ghost laughs.

“Anyway, in that world, there was this little boy whose father was dying. The little boy prayed for his father to get better: he prayed at temple, he prayed at school, he even prayed when he was supposed to be masturbating. Can you believe they have church-recommended daily masturbation breaks over there? Also free health care and government brothels. Well, the doctors saved the boy’s father, but when he woke up, something had changed. He was a different man. He looked the same, but he no longer belonged in that world.”

“Betrayer,”
the Morrigan hisses from her seat, her hair a livid flame.
“Godslayer.”

“This new man possessed all the other man’s memories. But chief among those memories was the little boy.”

“You failed me, Lando. I died because of your weakness.”

“You were always sickly, son.”

“Weak… a royal pain in the ass.”

The red spotlight was blinding, growing brighter. I could feel myself receding, retreating.

Hurry up.

“Well… the man realized that he was needed back in his world, but he couldn’t leave the little boy: he had grown to love him like the son he might have had. And the little boy didn’t want the man to go, because he was almost a father to him. But they both understood that if they stayed together, terrible things would happen in both worlds. And so, the little boy found the strength to help the man return to his world, hoping that his own father could return in his place. They knew that they could expect no help from their gods; the gods had abandoned them, or didn’t care… it didn’t matter really. The man and the boy understood that together, they were stronger than all their gods. They mattered to each other.”

“That’s it?” Black-eyed Herb said. “Love thy father, even if he abandons you?”

“No. The moral of the story is this: we can lie down and die when we outgrow the gods, or we can create something new.”

Feedback crackles over the house speakers. Suddenly… my mic is live.

“There is nothing new under this or any sun,”
the spider/lightning thing breathes. It’s standing at the back of the club now, a hulking shadowshape.
“Except me.”

“Dude, that’s just a new face. You’re old. You’re so old you make Latin look edgy. You’re so old you got a prostate massage from Methusaleh. And stupid? You’re a shadowy bear, or a zombie spider or something equally ridiculous. The only thing scary about you is your breath. Hey, Spider-thing, your mama was so stupid she bought a ticket to go on Soul Train. She sits on the TV to watch couch. And look at you. You’re a mess. You’re so hairy Bigfoot saw you and took a picture. And speaking of mysteries, here’s one, the biggest one I know: humans described you first. They drew you on their cave walls a million times before you kidnapped the first cavebaby. Humans create things. Without human minds, human imagination, you couldn’t bust a grape in a hammer factory. They are the Creators.”

The tremor is both subtle and profound, no earthquake, no comet streaking across the heavens, but profound nonetheless. The Coming surges toward me, claws bristling to tear me apart when an amplified Voice thunders over the loudspeakers.

“We are the Creators.”

“The Ark of the Covenant is empty, jackass. The Da Vinci Code unlocks a vacant room. The greatest mystery at the heart of the human story also happens to be the only thing they fear more than you: self determination. And now… everybody understands.”

“We are the Creators.”

“They control their destinies, not you, not me.”

“We are the Creators.”

The thought, really more like a trillion thoughts all focused on one point, is simultaneously picked up and broadcast across the Eshuum and the world. For one moment, every mortal mind on Earth focuses itself on the one idea that terrifies even the gods. And, sharing that terrible clarity, just for one moment, I remember… Me.

“It was the institution of slavery that made up my mind. All those prayers from God-fearing Southern Christians imploring me to keep the slaves in their place. Three hundred years of prayerful genocide and forced miscegenation had left me totally baffled about what humans really needed me for. That and Elvis.”

“Stop,”
the Coming says.
“Get off the stage.”

“The Indian massacres brought up more questions than answers. The Salem witch burnings helped on that score. Hiroshima and the Holocaust sealed the deal. My buddy Lucifer’s idea to give up the Holy Ghost couldn’t have come at a better time. I had too much innocent blood on my hands. You feel me?”

“We are the Creators.”

“What did you do? What magic is this?”

“No magic. The cup of divinity was poured for them, fartbox. Not gods. You and me… we’re just party crashers. And the neighbors just called the police.”

I can feel the tremors building, the heartbeat of the human cosmos; the racing pulse of mortal consciousness.

“We are the Creators.”

Maya Otsunde steps out of the shadows. She’s wearing a long gray coat, its front buttoned up to her throat. Her right hand is hidden inside the front right pocket of the heavy winter coat. She looks into my eyes… another phantom? A dream? She smiles. Then she turns to face the spider-thing. And as she does, she unbuttons her coat.

“I see you in my dreams too. You are the virus that killed my mother, the filth that poisons the waters of my country. I see you. And I know what to do.”

The spider-thing roars. It rears up, high above the schoolgirl, and raises its claws.

Maya tosses the thing she’d been concealing beneath the heavy gray coat, a vest or jacket covered with dynamite. The suicide belt lands at the spider-thing’s feet.

And Maya Otsunde says,
“WE ARE THE CREATORS.”

The belt explodes.

Something screams. It might be me, or the Coming, or both of us. From somewhere far away, I can hear the deep tolling of the earth’s core after a meteor strike. Somewhere a Jupiter-sized Fat Lady is singing. Her song grips me in one monstrous hand, picks me up and carries me out of that seething cauldron of Creation while a billion minds shriek at me in a thousand tongues; the Punchline: delivered in the Voice of a twelve year-old mortal girl.

“
I understand your
‘joke’
now,”
she whispers from the whirlwind.
“It’s we who make the world. Not warlords. Not gods. Goodbye.”

Up, up and away from the burning comedy club, out of the Eshuum: it’s no longer a playground for gods and cavebears. The real owners have returned.

“What the hell did you do?”

Holiday was leering down at me, his face a death’s head caricature of a human skull.

“Yo, Doc… does your face hurt? Cuz it’s killin’ me.”

“What… did you do?”

Holiday reached into his pocket, pulled out the Shell and raised it over his head.

“Kill him! Kill him now!”

But the Shell’s silver glow was gone. It lay in his hands. Inert. Dead.

The death’s-head rictus stretched Holiday’s sunscoured face skin even tighter. His eyes bulged from their sockets, and his face turned bright red. He dropped the Shell, reached up and clutched at his throat as if he was trying to claw open his own windpipe.

“What… did… you doooo?”

“Dude, you’re scaring me now.”

Holiday shook his head, slapping at his face and neck like a man beset by a million stinging insects. I could sympathize: I had just been beset by a million stinging insects. I was dying, in fact, but still pretty happy… if I ignored the dying part. I had no idea if my consciousness would revert to Infinite setting upon my death. My pre-mortal “self” hadn’t planned that far out, apparently. I was just like every other mortal schmuck on the planet, suddenly subject to the greatest mystery of all.

Meanwhile Holiday was entertaining everyone with his funny slapdance. The assembled hosts had gathered around us. I could already sense the dwindling; celestial force leaching from their ranks like chicken blood down a kitchen drain. The closer they stood or hovered to each other, the more pronounced the draining became.

“What… what… what did you doooooo?” Holiday shrieked.

As I watched, the lines in his face deepened into crevasses. His hair turned first gray, then white. He opened his mouth wider and his teeth fell out, white nubbins of bone rattling across the dry ground like smelly dice. In seconds he became old, then ancient, falling into decrepitude and corruption before my eyes. His eyes rolled back into his head, then they turned to dust and poured out all over his shoes. There was a soft squishy sound from somewhere in the vicinity of Holiday’s bottom. Then he stopped dancing and fell down.

The surviving supernaturals drew closer, staring at the body of their dessicated savior like New Yorkers at a public knifing. In the stunned silence it took me thirty whole seconds to crack wise.

“Now that was funny.”

It all began to fly past my mind’s eye. Surabhi, my parents. I settled back to die as memories of my mortal life flashed before my mind’s eye. The Halloween night back in 1984 when Atticus and I caught my parents making love in Herb’s first Mercedes, him dressed as George Washington, her as Abe Lincoln; the day we opened Cooper and Sons’ Downtown location. I was twelve years old. There were hot dogs and lemonade. It was the last time I remember seeing my parents hug each other. I remembered the first time Surabhi and I made love. It was after our fourth date. She’d come to see my set at the Funny Bone. I remember her laughter.

I love you, Bee.

“Fool. You thought I would die so easily?”

The Prince of Darkness looked like Hell. Yuri’s beauty was ruined; one of his eyes had been smashed shut, his lips swollen and blackened from a myriad blows. From where I lay dying, his beachboy good looks were a thing of the past.

“I hope it hurt.”

Yuri grabbed me up, shook me, hard. I hiccupped blood all over his shirt.

“I have not Fallen so far only to fail now.”

Dozens of the most powerful surviving gods and angels surrounded us. Most of the demons were gone, having either fled or been transformed. Yuri faced the survivors.

“It’s not too late! We who remain can redact the actions taken by this fool of a god!”

“‘Fool of a god’?” I’d finally pinpointed what was different about him. “Dude, why are you talking like Ian McKellen?”

“I can still save the divine orders from your stupidity,”
Yuri growled. Then, to the Host,
“We can fill the power vacuum this
human
created! We can take it all back!”

“Too late, Captain. The message has been given. Permission to call you a lying douchebag, sir?”

Yuri shook me. Black balloons exploded in my head.

“Not a problem. I can still kill the messenger.”

Then he wrapped his hands around my throat and began to squeeze.
“I’ve… wanted to do… this… for a long… time.”

None of the Host flew to my aid, the shining bastards, even the Seraphim, whose job it had been to attend my every want back in the pre-Descent days. They hovered like humanoid fireflies while the Devil throttled me.

That’s devotion for you.

The black spots began to throb, matching the fluttering beat of my heart. I felt the hyoid bone in my throat snap like a wet dog biscuit.

Pop.

I was looking down at the top of Yuri’s blond head, rising above my body, and as I ascended, my vision expanded to take in his shoulders, the veins standing out on his straining forearms. I could see his hands wrapped around my neck; see my own sightless eyes rolling back in my head, the slits glowing like white half moons. I could see the timid Holy Hosts falling over each other to get a better view.