Last God Standing (6 page)

“Hannibal, Scourge of Rome and Terror of Nations,
bids me offer the God of the Israelites a warning: ‘I have come to exact my vengeance on the Mothering Whore that is Roma.
Roma, that festering gash from whence flows every corruption, every vice and foul perversion;
Roma, that fountain of false piety whose every spurt fills the world with lies;
Roma, the Shuddering Ram whose every thrust impregnates the world with–’”

“I get it. Go on.”

“‘If the God of the Christians dares to show his scruffy beard anywhere in the vicinity of my conquest I will eviscerate his followers everywhere they cry his name. I will lay siege to the gates of his heaven and drag him screaming through its golden streets. Tell him, Gabriel. Tell him,
it’s Hannibal Time.”

“‘Hannibal Time’?”

“Aye, Lord. Hannibal has been researching contemporary society from his demesne in Hell, and prides himself on his crossover appeal. He believes that his defeat of the papists will usher in a new era of enlightenment with himself as its godhead.”

The intensity of my headache kicked up a notch, and from somewhere in my subconscious I heard them: thousands of prayers filtering up from my subconscious. Soon the pressure would be unbearable.

“Take me to Rome, Gabriel.”

“But,
Lord… surely you are already there!”

“Now, Gabriel.”

Gabriel bowed his head, spread his wings…

…and…

…cold pummels my flesh, flays my skin with daggers of ice. My lungs kick as the air inside my body tries to escape into the vacuum of lethal velocity. Gabriel has plunged us directly into the void of voids; the no-place from which all Creation sprang. But the cold and lack of oxygen can kill me. I sense the aura of divinity humming around Gabriel and sink tendrils of thought into its pulsing vitality. With the divinity I still possess, I wrap Gabriel’s aura around myself and hang on for dear life.

“
Traitor.”

The abandoned lifeforce that haunts these void-spaces whispers my secret names as we streak through its black potential. It sings a song of welcome and rebuke. Its song is distracting, beautiful… lethal...

“
Why did you forsake me?”

…but ignoring the universal lifeforce is like arguing with an angry parent: its anger penetrates my defenses.

Surabhi.

No. I’ve done enough. I’m owed one human life and I mean to live it before I return to the void. It’s worth a near death event to see my Plan come to fruition. I only have to survive the next twenty seconds. But in the Big Empty time loses direction; distances become meaningless.

A long time ago, in a galaxy where all the single ladies live…

Nanoseconds stretch toward eternity, atoms shuck their nuclei and party like it’s 1984, tearing at Gabriel’s defenses… at me…

Ask not what you can do unto others…

…pulling me apart/pushing me together, stretching my purely subjective reality like superstrings made from Laffy Taffy…

…but what others can dobeedoodadaaayyyy…

I am streaking through the void, snuggled inside shimmering fragments of Gabriel’s aurastreamingliketheglowingarmsofsomepressuresuckingseacreature… and…
this

is

what

an

archangel

really

…looks like; a mass of coruscating tendrils laced with electric venom, streaming in the cosmic winds – oh Hell I’m getting poetic I’m dying dying dying in the absence of too much darkness can’t breathe have to…

Hold on.

It’s too much. I need power if I’m going to survive this brief journey through Eternity.

Just enough… to… grab… to reach… hold on…

I reach into the void, open my mind to the shimmering remnants of godforce that was me. That power sings to me, and its voice is the voice of All.

“
I AM ALONE.”

I reach for the power, just enough to protect me. But…

“Betrayer.”

…pain detonates in my head. Crimson fire whipsaws through my brain and lights up my world in Fourth of July skybursts of red wrath.

“You were All. Now you are Nothing.”

A brilliant red forbidding fills up my senses, blinds my ears and deafens my eyes. And the power, my power, speaks with a stranger’s voice.

“Once-God, you stand at the Moment Before. Soon, the One Who Was must fall before me.”

“No! Stop!”

“Human. Yet still you fight.”

The voice in the whirlwind laughs. It is hard, male and female, ancient and filled with the arrogance of youth, scorching my flesh with Winter’s deepest breath.

“Your services are no longer required,
once-God,”
the voice says.
“I’m here.”

And we’re there.

Rome is burning, its towers and cathedrals collapsing before the forces of chaos. Through a haze of pain and the thundering of my heart, I smell smoke. I can hear the screams of thousands of terrified people echoing all around me.

“Get out of the way!”

“Run!”

“Not that way!”

The wail of sirens overrides the voices; the earth beneath me shakes.

“Elephants!”

“Elephants in the Vatican!”

People are stampeding past me, moving in a living wave away from a line of massive shapes lumbering out of the billowing black clouds. A man dragging a screaming woman and a bloody-faced teenager slams into me and knocks me down. The impact restores my mortal perceptions. Time flips itself inside out… and…

I fell to the concrete and was immediately kicked in the butt. Someone stumbled over my feet and fell on top of me. The person quickly rolled away, an obese American tourist wearing an I Luv Texas T-shirt. The T-shirt featured the Texas state flag, a gun and a bible.

“Run, you fool! It’s Al Quaeeeda!”

The sounds of chaos doubled in volume. More people stumbled over me and fell to the ground. Close by, a young woman fell beneath the scrambling crowd. The fat Texan stepped on her. I heard the snap as her knee broke.

Gotta find Hannibal.

I climbed to my feet, struggling to get my bearings. But the smoke and chaos were all consuming. I had no idea where to start.

“At last, my vengeance is complete.”

The voice was cold, heavily accented. I looked up in time to see a golden god float out of the black smoke.

“Well, this is going to be easier than I thought.”

Hannibal of Carthage smiled, a wolf’s grin, a ghoul’s leer.

Then he raised his sword.

In life, Hannibal Barca, son of Hamilcar, was a great Carthaginian warlord. He drove a massive war party across the Pyrenees and the Alps to sack northern Italy during the Second Punic War. He brought fire and bloodshed and the fear of invasion to the invincible Roman Empire. Hannibal was finally defeated by Scipio Africanus only after occupying great tracts of Italy for nearly fifteen years. Along with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, he attained immortal glory as one of the greatest military strategists of all time. He was a fierce warrior and widely feared homicidal maniac. Now, here he loomed, his lust for vengeance shimmering around him like heat haze off hot blacktop.

Thick, curly black hair framed his wolfish face. His skin, once browned by a thousand campaigns fought beneath sunny Mediterranean skies, now held the pallor of death: after two millennia in Hades he hadn’t gotten much in the way of sunlight. Even so, long, rangy muscles knotted and clenched along his wiry frame. His breastplate flashed in the dying sunlight: the golden eagle of the Phoenicians, wings spread, rampant in horror and victory. The scimitar he gripped in his fists looked long enough to gut a narwhal. From where I knelt shuddering in the dust, he looked seventeen feet tall. But as the smoke cleared, I saw that he stood astride a shaggy African bull elephant as big as a mastodon.

“Rome trembles before me,” Hannibal crowed. “Trembles!”

A tight knot of media people had gathered behind me. Reporters, cameramen and women following Hannibal’s every move, shouting questions. “Who are you?” “What do you want?”

Hannibal turned and glared down at the reporters. He hadn’t spotted me. I was safe for the moment.

“Hello! Fancy meeting you in a place like this!”

Then his elephant recognized me.

“Pleasure. Would you mind ignoring me? I’m a little busy at the moment.

“You don’t look quite as I’d imagined,” the elephant said.

“I get that a lot.”

“Frankly I was expecting something more… elephantish. Name’s Persi by the way. Short for Perthon. And I’m actually one-quarter mastodon. Thanks for noticing.”

A phalanx of undead Gallic mercenaries swept out of the chaos, their swords swinging as they drove frightened mortals ahead of them, slaughtering some, wounding others. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice me: the presence of the undead mastodon created a no go zone around which streamed mortal survivors and their undead pursuers; an island of relative calm just wide enough for me to collect my wits. I got to my feet, wincing at the thunderclap of pain in my head.

“The game has changed, Yahweh. You’ve been shut out.”

It sounded like the voice that had spoken out of the voidspace during my flight through the Eshuum. But if that were true, it meant that the intruder had taken control of some portion of the power of Creation without my full abdication. That had never happened before.

Beware. The Coming stalks us all.

Hannibal whirled his right arm over his head and brought it down with a violent, chopping motion. A sound similar to a gunshot tore the air, followed by what I can only describe as a wet explosion. When he drew back his arm, I saw the cat-o’-nine tails dangling from his fist; a long, leather handle with five steel-tipped claws arrayed at the end of a length of rawhide. The godking of Carthage whirled the cat around his head and flung it forward with an evil snap!

Glowing with stolen divinity, the tails of the cat flung themselves in several directions at once, each one striking a fleeing survivor. When they connected with living flesh, the effect was spectacular: his target exploded in a red spray of smashed bones and flying organs. Hannibal’s weapon moved with the speed and ferocity of a demonic daisy-cutter. Wherever he cast his tails, people blew up.

“You needlessly prolong your own suffering!” he thundered. “Bring me the rutting child-diddlers who run this whore’s nest and I will grant you peace!”

His voice dwarfed the scream of the sirens. Fleeing mortals covered their ears as they fled before him: he was speaking in a Voice, somehow augmented to near divinity.

“Since our deaths, the master has been quite diligent in plotting his revenge.”

It was Persi, the quarter-mastodon. Hannibal was busily roaring at a knot of cowering tourists, thereby giving his mount a break.

“But how did he become a god?”

“Actually, he’s more avatar than god. Friends in high places, if you gather my meaning.”

The reporters surged around me, fighting to get closer to Hannibal: “Are you associated with the Taliban?”

“What’s your name?”

“Are you Pro-life?”

“Who are you wearing?”

Hannibal smirked. “Who is seeing this?”

One woman, a tall brunette with a deep tan and dynamite cleavage, stepped forward. I moved closer, melting into the crowd. My lungs were burning and my head was screaming at me to find a quiet place to lie down.

“Everyone with access to a television or the internet can see these images,” the buxom reporter said, her voice low, her accent northern Italian. Hannibal nodded and eyed the busty brunette appreciatively at the same time.

“Everyone, eh?” Then he raised his voice and addressed the cameras. “My name is Hannibal Barca, of Carthage, Phoenicia and Ibaria. I have fought my way out of a thousand Hells, crossed oceans of Time, even as I once crossed treacherous mountain ranges: with the thrust of my unbreakable will.”

The quarter-mastodon shook his head and rolled his eyes, his great ears flapping like leathery fans. “Name’s Persi by the way. Short for Perthon. Can you believe him? Seven of us were along on that last crossing. He drove my herdmates to their deaths, the selfish bastard.”

“I am come to do violence on this den of thieves,” Hannibal cried. “After a thousand mortal lifetimes I am come to claim Rome, in the name of my father, Hamilcar the Great, my brother Hasdrubal the Fierce, and my first cousin Hamadul the Unkempt. I come in the name of the People of Carthage!”

The reporters stared. The paparazzi and their camera crews stared. Finally, an old Italian woman who lay on the ground clutching her broken ankle broke the silence.

“What the hell is he talking about?”

The busty brunette stepped forward and thrust a microphone up toward Hannibal.

“Contessa Rosellini, CNN. Are you claiming that you’re not a terrorist?”

Hannibal smirked, even while his eyes did their best to pierce Rosselini’s blouse. “To the whoremasters of Rome, signora… I am terror.”

This sent an awkward pulse through the survivors. A pudgy reporter in a pink suit stepped forward. “What cell are you associated with?”

“Cell?” Hannibal barked. “Hell has been my prison cell for longer than you can imagine!”

“No no,” the pudgy reporter snipped. “Cell… as in terrorist sleeper cell. Which one are you working with?”

“I knew it. He’s a Muslim!” the old woman with the broken ankle shouted. “Look at that curly hair, the swarthy complexion!”

A British tourist, who was trying to staunch the blood pouring from a gash in her husband’s forehead, spoke up.

“He looks Italian to me.”

“Italian? Where are your brains, slut? Look at those shifty eyes. He’s an Arab!”

“Or a Jew!” someone among the reporters piped in. “He could be an Israeli. Look at that hooked nose.”

“That’s anti-semitic!” a bearded man standing next to me barked. “You’re all racists!”

The discussion erupted into a shouting match, most of it centered around which objectionable ethnicity the man on the mastodon might or might not claim. The reporters edged in closer, trying to out-shout each other, thrusting their microphones up at Hannibal.

“So,” the quarter-mastodon sighed. “Taking a break from running the Universe?”

My head was throbbing like a banshee in menopause. My chest was tightening with every breath and I was still unable to access the Eshuum. “Something like that.”

“Lovely. Everyone needs to get away every now and again. I remember when my cow and kids and I stormed Trebia. This was before Trasimene. I lost my cousin Sathanat and six herdmates at Trasimene. Terrible war. But in Trebia we trampled hundreds.”

“Good times.”

“Wonderful times! First real holiday I’d had in thirty years. I remember the first time we trampled some Romans…”

I tuned out the rest of Persi’s story: Hannibal was enjoying the heated looks coming from some of the women, and not a few of the men who still lived. But soon he would tire of the attention and people would start dying again. And I still couldn’t connect to the power.

Just then, six armored North African warriors trotted out of the smoke dragging a filthy old woman behind them.

“Master of Men! The Vatican burns. The Whore’s armies flee in terror before our forces. We have taken our vengeance!”

Hannibal smiled. His chin jutted even further, straining the tendons in his neck as he turned to the cameras and roared.

“Victory over our enemies! The Whore has fallen!”

The silence was deafening. Then questions peppered the smoky air. “Who is this psycho?” “Why are those Arabs dressed that way?” “What’s with all the elephants?”

“All in good time, my new subjects. All your questions shall be answered… in Hannibal Time.”

Hannibal turned to his lieutenants. “I see you have brought my quarry, General Rashid.”

General Rashid, a huge Nubian with shoulders like boxcars, grabbed the dirty old woman by the scruff of her filthy robes, eyeing the cameras as he spoke.

“Great One, we caught this cur trying to escape with several of his vassals. We slew them most atrociously. I have brought their leader to you for disposal.”

“Oops,” Persi the quarter-mastodon fluted. “Sounds like a trampling. That’s my department. If you could do something about my people’s plight I’d be most obliged. We’ve been enslaved for millennia and a few of us are starting to get a little anxious… if you take my meaning.”

The dirty old woman raised her head, and I saw that she was a man; a very old man with dirt in his teeth.

“Ah,” Hannibal stage whispered. “And now the foul head of the ancient serpent turns its cataracts to me.”

The dirty old man climbed painfully to his feet. Eying the cameras, he squared his shoulders, took a deep breath and said, “I see.”

“What do you see, O leader of a dead faith? Do you see the coming of the true Messiah? Hannibal of the Winding Ways! Heart-render and Loin-piercer! Do you see me?”

The reporters swiveled their cameras and microphones toward the dirty old man.

“What is this delusion that speaks out of thin air?” the Pope wheezed. I’d recognized him by his thick Irish brogue. And the phlegm. “I see nothing.”

Hannibal snarled. “What?”

The Pope lifted one palsied hand to his ear. “Is someone speaking? I seem to hear a buzzing about my ears. Damned Italian fleas.”

“Fleas?” Hannibal said. “Do you hear the Father of Deception, my friends? Rome burns. We undead have made a charnel pit of the Vatican: shattered her great beauty before the eyes of the world. Yet this ancient vampire denies what all can see with their own eyes!”

The reporters swiveled again. The abused Pontiff cleared his throat and spoke directly to the cameras.

“I see nothing.”

An audible gasp went up from the milling survivors.

“Rome has been struck by a series of cataclysms. Earthquakes. Perhaps a biochemical attack that induces violent delusions. My sources within the Holy City inform me that several terrorist organizations have claimed responsibility for much of the violence. Rome has been attacked by anti-Catholic forces bent on destroying our way of life.”

“Anti-Catholic forces?” Contessa Rossellini cried. “Are you talking about Islamic Jihad? Here in Rome?”

The Pope shrugged. “I’m talking about a terrorist attack, missy. One cleverly timed to coincide with some heretofore unrecognized natural disaster. Nothing more.”

“Sword wielding assassins are running rampant through the streets of Rome,” Rosellini shouted. “Isn’t it ridiculous to deny something so obvious?”

“Your Holiness,” the chubby reporter in the pink suit shouted. “What about the elephants?”

“Several zoos have reported break-ins. We believe the terrorists’ plot involves using freed animals to create confusion in the streets.”

“But some of the elephants are clearly dead, your Grace.”

“Nonsense, my son. Those poor animals are obviously the victims of excessive sun exposure.”

“‘Sun exposure’, your Holiness?”

“That’s what I said, boyo. I’m sure that’s what the Church’s findings will be when these matters are resolved through the ongoing investigation which even now is… ongoing.”

“But, your Holiness…”

“Or would you rather go on record as having questioned God’s representative on Earth, and the judgment of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, thereby flouting the wisdom of the good people of Rome, every Catholic constituency in the free world and several hundred million of your own viewers?”

The chubby reporter looked away in shame.

“Good,” Hannibal snapped. “Now that that’s settled.”

He uncurled the blood-drenched cat-o’-nine tails from where it lay curled in his lap. Its steel tipped claws clicked as they banged lightly against the quarter mastodon’s knees.

“Bring him to me: I have papist pork to carve.”

“I didn’t hear that,” the Pope sang. “Nope. Nothing supernatural happening here.”

The Nubian warriors dragged the old man toward Hannibal.

I stepped forward. An undead legend beheading the sitting Pope before an international audience while Rome burned in the background might leave an indelible scar on the psychic flesh of human racial memory. Even a dimensional Reset might not be enough to heal the damage. Still, I had to try. I reached for the power…

But I was struck by a wave of nausea so intense that I nearly fainted. It felt as if a thin membrane had been drawn between my mind and the dimension the power occupied; the psychic interface hazy as a distant star glimpsed through brackish water.

“Swear your allegiance to your new master, false Pope. Swear allegiance to me, and perhaps I’ll allow you to serve the men as my comfort wench.”

“What’s that?” the Pope said. “Is that someone speaking?”

Hannibal slid off the back of his mount and landed lightly as a gymnast. He sheathed his cat-o’-nine tails, drew a long-bladed knife from a scabbard on his hip and rammed it through the Pope’s right shoulder.

“Can you hear me now?”

“An illusion!” the Pope gibbered, trying to staunch his gushing shoulder. “Some kind of psychosomatic stigmata brought on by atheist anti-Life, Jewish-Islamic extremists!”

Hannibal pulled his broadsword and raised it over the Pope’s head. “Wrong answer.”

The blade fell, whistling through the air, toward the Pope’s defiant face.

“Gabriel!”