Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (28 page)

Zipporah didn’t seem as shocked as the other women, but she stared down at Semple from the side of the pool with a knowing and world-weary expression. Without saying a word, she made it abundantly clear that she had seen them come and go, and Semple should take care while she could. “That won’t exactly qualify as a good excuse.”

“And what would?”

Zipporah smiled coldly. “Sudden discorporation might just get you off the hook, my dear. Short of that, I can’t think of very much else. Acting the spoiled brat because you’re the temporary favorite certainly won’t cut it. Remember this is only the master’s second atom bomb, and he’s very anxious about it. The scientists have all been threatened with slow extermination if it doesn’t go off totally according to plan, and I doubt if any of us would fare very much better if we failed to show up for the great event.”

The detonation of the second Necropolis nuclear device was Anubis’s current obsession. Although, as far as Semple could glean from the seraglio scuttlebutt, the thing was little more than a small and very dirty bomb, not even up to Fat Man magnitude, the dog-god was so taken with the idea of letting off his very own man-made sun that he was designing an entire holy event around the explosion: a religious festival of the highest order, a full, dawn-to-dark day dedicated to the glory of his divine cleverness.

“You’re not going to let me slide on this one, are you?”

Zipporah shook her head. “I doubt I’d let you slide even if I could. I want you out of that pool and into the dressing room in the next five minutes.”

“You really don’t like me, do you?”

Zipporah regarded Semple with a look that was, at the same time, both sharp and glassy. “No, I don’t much like you, but that’s hardly relevant. All that concerns me is that you’re difficult, time-consuming, and potentially dangerous. When you finally get yourself into trouble, as you eventually will, you’re quite likely to drop some of us in the excreta right along with you.”

“You seem to have formed a very precise opinion of me in the short time that I’ve been here.”

“You aren’t the first to try to test the limits of her position.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“Of course it is. And even though I don’t particularly like you, I will give you one word of cautionary advice. Once the gloss of your novelty has worn off, you’ll need all the friends you can get.”

Semple nodded and reluctantly lowered her feet to find the bottom of the pool. She knew that in her own way Zipporah meant well, but Semple was resolved not to be a part of Anubis’s harem long enough to find out what it was like to fall from favor. She climbed from the pool, waving away the handmaidens who were hastening toward her with a robe and towels. As she passed Zipporah, she communicated what she hoped was a certain measure of respect. “I’ll watch the bomb go off and make nice. I’m not looking to clash with you.”

Zipporah acknowledged this as something akin to an apology. “I appreciate that, if you mean it.”

Semple pushed her wet hair out of her eyes. “Oh, I mean it. There’s more to me than just overbearing self-indulgence.”

With that she padded away to the dressing room, dripping water and trailing handmaidens, wondering all the way what kind of lunatic constructs and detonates atom bombs for his own personal amusement.

“So, as you can imagine, I was feeling pretty bad by the time that kid shot me dead back there in that bar in El Paso. I mean, a man’s sunk damned low when he’s riding with a crew of pistoleers who can turn up at a wedding, gun down the groom, the best man, the bride’s father, and the priest, and then go on to rape the bride, the bride’s mother, the matron of honor, the six bridesmaids, and a couple of nuns who just happened to be passing, and then have no remorse or any real excuse ‘cept being in the fifth day of a week-long shitfaced mescal drunk.”

Jim nodded. He was aware that the small Mammal with No Name hadn’t had a chance to talk to anyone or anything but the carnivorous plant in a long time, and it didn’t bother him if he wanted to prattle on. “I kinda know how you feel.”

“Of course, those were hard days. 1869—”

Jim was amazed. “You’ve been in this swamp since 1869?”

“Sure have.”

Jim blinked. “That’s quite a sojourn.”

“I had a lot of guilt.”

“Even so, that means you’ve been here longer than Doc Holliday, and not had half as much fun, from what I can see.”

“There aren’t many who have as much fun as Doc.”

“You know Doc?”

“Sure, I know Doc. We come from the same territory.”

“I thought you got yourself shot in Texas. Doc was more around Arizona and Colorado.”

“When I say territory, I’m talking more about time and ethos than the geography. Me and Doc were both good ol’ boys who headed west after the War Between the States. There were hundreds of us on the move back then. Talk about an evil season. A lot of them who went out West were crazy as a shitbug to start with. Sick and insane with seeing too much death, and knowing fuck-all except kill or be killed. I mean, after Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, and Pickett’s bloody Charge, what did anyone expect? No one had ever seen a war like that, my friend. We faced miniballs that could rip off half your arm at close to a mile, canister that could blow away a platoon of men with one shot. The world had never witnessed such a mechanical fucking slaughter. The first fully organized carnage of the Industrial Revolution. They say boys went crazy in Vietnam, but I’m telling you, Vietnam wasn’t dick compared with Chancellorsville. We lost as many in a bad afternoon as they did in all twelve years of Nam. After it was all over, and Bobby Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, we had homicidals and spooked-out psychotics wandering all over the Frontier for ten years or more. Some went after the Indians, like Custer and Sheridan, thinking a taste of genocide would lay the ghosts. Others, like the James boys and the Youngers, just went right on fighting the war—”

“And others went on a mescal jag, gunned down the groom and raped the bride and her bridesmaids and all of the rest?”

The mammal grinned and nodded. “You got it.”

Jim and the Mammal with No Name were picking their way over the uncertain dry ground above the water level of the Jurassic bayous. While the mammal told its long and involved story, Jim was content to make the right responsive noises while gazing out at the new world in which he found himself. The worst of the mist had been burned off by a white sun that blazed in a mushroom-pink sky,
and now he could see a great deal more of his new prehistoric environment. At the horizon, no less than three volcanoes belched smoke from a range of jagged, snaggletoothed mountains. Closer up, the place looked a lot like the Florida Everglades, though the plant life was further back down the evolutionary trail. The resemblance was, however, enough to remind Jim of all the trouble that had befallen him in Florida. Miami was where they’d arrested him for allegedly flashing his dick at the audience. The straight truth was, Jim couldn’t remember whether he’d done it or not. He’d been drunk and tripping, flying at altitudes so high that, if asked to testify on oath, he couldn’t have sworn in all honesty that he’d even been wearing pants, let alone deliberately unzipped them.

A dozen or more large herbivorous dinosaurs seemed content to loiter, partially submerged, grazing on trees and bushes, while other, smaller reptiles splashed in the shallows. To Jim’s great relief, none of them showed anything but the most casual interest in him and the Mammal with No Name, and made no attempt to approach them. What bothered him more were the pterodactyls that circled lazily overhead. Although he suspected the flying lizards were meat eaters, the mammal assured him that they posed no threat. “Their eyesight’s so rotten, they never go after anything smaller than a horse.”

Jim didn’t find this as reassuring as the mammal had intended. The little creature could well have been taking a speciescentric view of the situation. The pterosaurs might not have been able to see a furry little ground dweller, but Jim was considerably larger; a pterodactyl with decent vision might tag him as a tasty morsel. And so he scanned the sky to make sure none of the flapping leather-wings was drawing a bead on him, and felt a lot happier when their route took them under the shelter of spreading palms and conifers rather than along the exposed edge of open water.

Although the reptiles mercifully kept their distance and their own counsel, the same could not be said for the millions of insects that flourished in the Jurassic. Great dragonflies, with wings spanning eighteen inches or more, scared the hell out of Jim by buzzing him at eye level; only when they failed to follow through with anything worse was he able to relax. The clouds of mosquitos, gnats, and midges, on the other hand, took a great deal more getting used to. They dogged the steps of Jim and the mammal every step of the way. They didn’t seem to bother the mammal, with its thick furry
hide, but by the time the sun had reached its zenith they were making Jim miserable. One settled on his exposed left forearm and he squished it angrily. As he wiped away the smear of blood, he smiled grimly. “Steven Spielberg isn’t going to reconstitute any DNA from you, you son of a bitch.”

The blood made him take yet another look at the pterodactyls aloft, and when he did, he noticed something decidedly unusual. The sun was moving visibly across the sky. Jim glanced down at the small mammal. “How long are the days in this place?”

The mammal looked puzzled. “How long should they be? Same length as anywhere else. The Earth isn’t spinning any quicker, far as I know.”

Jim stopped and peered into the sun, shading his eyes and squinting like Clint Eastwood at high noon. “Then why is it I can see the sun moving?”

The mammal stopped in his tracks. “Uh-oh.”

This was the third time that Jim had heard a warning “uh-oh” in much too narrow a time frame. Saladeen of the puffball Afro and jewel-encrusted teeth had uttered the first two, all too recently, when one of the Voodoo Mystéres had appeared in the distance beyond Doc Holliday’s town. Now Jim could only guess what was coming next. “Trouble?”

“We may have a slight problem with time.”

Semple had known that Anubis’s nuclear fireworks display was being promoted as a big deal, but the size of the deal exceeded all her expectations. The actual detonation, as it turned out, was billed as the culmination of a twenty-four-hour Divine Atom Bomb Festival, throughout which Anubis intended to bask in the full glory of his own ego. The test itself was to take place in the desert some miles outside the city, but prior to that the God-King, his court, harem, retainers, praetorian guard, and half the Army of Necropolis would travel to the test site in spectacular procession, followed by more or less the entire population of the city: a public holiday had been declared to allow them to marvel at the triumph of their glorious monarch. Anubis, as fond of food as he was, had ensured that the entire event would be lavishly catered, all the way from the wine and delicacies that would be available during the course of the procession,
through the picnic that would precede the detonation, to the massive al fresco feast and bacchanal that would follow.

Before Zipporah outlined the itinerary of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival, Semple hadn’t been aware that Necropolis was even surrounded by desert. Nor had she known that the environment extended so far that it would take a full two hours for Anubis to progress in beatific splendor to the city limits. She was accustomed to Afterlife environments that were as superficial as movie sets, all facade, illusion, and trompe l’oeil; a construction that encompassed two hundred square miles of downtown slums and suburbs took her completely by surprise. She disliked the dog-god no less, but she had to hand it to him for going all the way with his megalopolis. It was only when the procession actually got under way, and she saw both the slums and the suburbs for herself, that she finally grasped the extent of Anubis’s obsession. Like Aimee’s Heaven, much of the city was a scrapbook of its mad lord’s favorite things.