The Weight of the World (13 page)

Amanda
hesitated at first, then she, too, parted her lips and darted her
tongue forward, becoming the one responsible for deepening the kiss.
After a minute Nick pulled back, keeping Amanda in his arms.

“So,”
he said, watching her try to recover from flushed cheeks and swollen
lips. “If I'm going to take you out this weekend, I still need your
number.”

Sunday
morning Nick woke up to a text message alert. Amanda. He smiled as he
sat up in bed and typed a flirty reply. He would continue to see her
for a few more weeks and then let things fizzle out. Saturday's date
had gone even better than he could have planned. Nick was feeling
pretty good about himself.

He
climbed out of bed and hopped into the shower. Nick got dressed in
his standard shorts and crocs and checked out his shirtless physique
in the mirror. He made sure to restock the spare condom in his wallet
before picking up his phone again to make an important call.

The
phone rang twice before Valerie Hess picked up.

“Nick?”
she asked. She was confused by his call. They had a Pantheon meeting
in a few hours. What couldn't wait until then?

“Heya
Hess. Just wanted to share the good news.”

“What
good news?” her voice was tense. She could tell he was up to
something.

“Well,
good for me. Bad for you. See, I've got a new girlfriend and you've
lost a member of your little V-card club.”

“Nick,”
she snapped. “What did you do?”

“You
mean who?”

“Nick!”

Nick
was pretty sure that he had never seen or heard Angry Valerie before.
It was an anomaly. It was rather like watching a cat use a fork.

“I'll
see you at the meeting today, yeah? Drive safe.” Nick hung up as
Valerie screamed his name at her phone in fury.

“
They
stood where they stood by the power of the sword.”

-Thucydides

ix.

The
creature saw with a hundred dragon heads

and
consumed prey with a hundred dragon mouths.

It
slithered on enormous serpent bodies

as
high as the sky.

Those
serpent coils tightened around its victims

as
it flapped its many massive feathered wings.

Even
the gods of Olympus fled the beast.

All,
except for one.

The
goddess stood at the top of Olympus,

armed
with her Aegis, helmet, and javelin.

As
a hundred dragon heads roared in fury,

Athena
roared back.

“
Do
you see how the god always hurls his bolts at the greatest houses and
the tallest trees? For he is wont to thwart whatever is greater than
the rest.
”

-Herodotus

IX.

The
1963 Thunderbird was a gift from Zach’s father. On the rare
occasions that Mr. Jacobs thought of his son, he went all-out to make
up for the guilt of forgetting him for the rest of the year. At
least, Zach hoped that he felt guilty. Really, Mr. Jacobs went
all-out so that he would have something to throw in his mom's face
during their annual argument.

The
T-bird had been repossessed by the bank to pay for the debts of a
gambling addict. The car enthusiast who had purchased it for a steal
at an auction had used its restoration as a tool to avoid his failing
marriage. When the work was complete, he had painted it lime green
and sold it for a hefty profit to pay a divorce attorney. Zach’s
father had paid that price for a great, last-minute birthday present
when Zach turned sixteen.

Zach
loved that car. He loved it more than his father loved him. It was
the first model to feature an alternator instead of a generator and
the last model from the third generation. As an extra precaution to
keep his baby safe, Zach always parked at the back of the lot and
walked, even on a rainy day.

On
that Monday, the hot sun beat down on the hard top of the Thunderbird
as it sat, nearly alone, in the mall parking lot. After days of
torrential downpours, everyone was out enjoying the sunshine, except
for Zach.

A
distant whistling went unnoticed. It grew louder, as if approaching,
tearing through the air at tremendous speed. The whistling, now
closer, grew deeper and culminated in a mighty
whump
and a
crash.
For an instant,
the parking lot was filled with the sound of groaning metal and
breaking glass as an enormous spoon fell from the heavens and landed
directly on the hard top of Zach’s beloved Thunderbird.

Across
the lot, a hundred yards away, the car alarm on a beige sedan
sounded. Nobody passing by cared to look for the source of the
commotion.

Miranda
Rutherford stood on a step-ladder, placing paperbacks back on the
shelves of the book store at the mall. She had spent the previous
half-hour going around the store, picking out books that were
mis-shelved (her perfect memory made it easy to spot the changes) and
collecting them in a basket. Now Zach Jacobs handed her books while
she alphabetized them by author's last name, and she recited excerpts
from Ovid's Metamorphoses to him.

“Wow,”
he said, as she finished telling the story of how
Phaëton
crashed his father's chariot and scorched the desert. “So how much
of this do you think is true?”

Minnie
shrugged. “It's hard to say. Maybe some day we'll remember. I think
that a lot of the stories conflict. History is never kept accurately,
especially when poets and philosophers start adding convenient
appendices. We know what we remember. I doubt most of the lineage of
kings... it seems fashionable to claim a deity as your Dad.”

Zach
snorted. “Yeah. But I mean... well... with me.”

“With
you it is pretty likely.” Minnie laughed.

Tony,
her manager, came around the end of the aisle. He scowled at Zach.
Minnie was a good worker-- the best he had, really-- but he still
didn't like that Zach was always hanging around here lately. He was a
distraction.

“Minnie.
I need you to pass that off to Gary and go out back for a few before
your shift's over. An order just came in and we need you to call a
few guests and inform them their books came in,” Tony said.

“I
guess I need to go home,” Zach said, “see what Mom is cooking.”

“We'll
continue this philosophical discussion later,” Minnie said. She
hopped down from the ladder and passed Tony. “Tell Gary that Q
comes way before V, yeah?”

Zach
watched Minnie disappear through the door to the back room.

“Take
it easy, Jacobs,” Tony said. “We're not paying you to be here.”

Zach
shrugged and wandered back into the mall. He turned into a department
store to head out to the parking lot and spotted a familiar pair of
shoulders lurching through the men's department. The shoulders
themselves weren't that familiar, but the fact that they belonged to
someone over six and a half feet tall really narrowed down the
options for their owner.

“Frank?”
Zach muttered to himself. This wasn't the kind of store that he
imagined Frank shopped at. He was a jeans, work boots, and undershirt
sort of guy. Zach was about to call out to Frank when he saw someone
else meet him at the edge of the dressing room. Devon.

Zach
shook his head. He knew very little of what was going on there aside
from the strained greetings at Pantheon meetings, but he didn't care
to interrupt their rendezvous. Zach crossed to the back of the
store, through cosmetics, and made a B-line for the south entrance.

The
mall was kind of dead at four on a Tuesday afternoon. The lot on the
east side was empty as most of the shops on that end had fallen
behind on rent in a poor economy and closed-up. Zach saw it
immediately. His 1963 Thunderbird sat straight ahead with the roof
crushed in under the weight of a giant ladle. The large silver scoop
was shallow with a rim that curved in. It sat in a crater of impact
over the driver's seat. The broken windshield, held in one piece by
sheets of laminate, was shattered in a starbursts that radiated out
from the base of the scoop. The long stem of the thing pointed back
towards the taillights of the car and hung in the air. The end curled
over and formed the shape of a duck.

Zach
sat down quickly on the curb. He felt his breathing get tight as he
stared at the wreckage of his vintage hard-top. There were no
expletives colorful enough to encompass the shock and rage building
within him. His car was his baby. The car felt like a part of him.
Now, with the windows shattered and the roof caved in, Zach could
only imagine what the leather interior looked like. The custom paint
would have to be completely refinished if the machine wasn't totaled.
Would his vintage car insurance even cover this, whatever it was?

“A—a-
a spoon?” Zach shouted.

He
jumped to his feet and ran to the east entrance of the department
store. He threw open the heavy glass door and banged on the window of
the mall security booth. “Hey, someone better get out here,” he
hollered. His hair stood on end, charged with his own electric rage.
Who would do this? Who would destroy a classic car? Who were Zach's
enemies, aside from the murderous Titans he had killed a few months
ago? There were other Titans, metaphoric ones: there were the
football Titans, Olympia Heights' rival. Zach was willing to bet
anything that this was a really bad football prank. Someone was going
to pay for this. They would be lucky if the police arrested them
before Zach found them.

A
heavy balding man in a security uniform sauntered up to the glass. He
didn't seem to notice the urgency in Zach's pounding fist.

“Sir,
sir... I'ma have to ask you not to bang on the glass.”

“You
gotta get out here. Someone wrecked my car. There's a giant freakin'
spoon on my car!”

“What?”
He shook his head. Clearly he thought Zach was mad. “Did you say a
spoon?”

“Come
on!” Zach was even more wound up by the guard's lack of concern.
The rotund mall cop stepped out of his booth and followed Zach to the
south lot. When Zach rounded the corner of the building he was
surprised to see that, though his car was still wrecked, the ladle
was nowhere to be found. “I swear it was there,” Zach said,
though he couldn't understand how it had vanished in under five
minutes. Someone must have pulled up with a truck and loaded it off.
“Someone moved it already?”

“Hey,
you're the football kid,” the cop said. “Lightning.”

“Yeah,
that's me. Listen, someone wrecked my car. Maybe it was Miami West.
You have to check the tape. Someone has to pay for this!”

The
guard waved. Zach, still seething, followed him back to the booth. He
went through another door, into a large room housed inside the mall,
and waved for Zach to follow. They sat down in front of a row of
screens. Zach tried not to stare at a middle-school girl who was
handcuffed to a chair watching another guard extract shoplifted
jewelry from her purse.

“'Sup,
Max?” the other guard asked.

“Someone
trashed this guy's car. Lightning here says there was a spoon on it,
but it's gone.”

“A
spoon?” the guard shook his head. He pulled a gaudy, overdone ring
out of the purse and shook his head. “Now why would you even steal
this crap?”

Zach
turned to the screens as Max rocked back the security footage. He
stopped at minus-thirty minutes and played the tape. “There's your
car, just fine. Awful shame. That's a nice car.”