Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (55 page)

Jesus had surprised Semple by taking quite readily to the suggestion that he power up Gojiro to destroy Necropolis. After some initial blinking incomprehension, a brief tantrum, and then a quick dip in the cross-shaped pool, he had adopted her plan with comparative alacrity. He seemed relieved to have someone else to suggest a course of action. He had certainly exhibited no moral qualms about setting the monster in motion with the deliberate goal of eating an entire city. In fact, the only objections had come from the goat. “You’re supposed to be the Prince of Peace, boyo. Or had you forgotten that?”

Jesus had brushed the reminder aside. “I’ve been meaning to drive that fucking Anubis out of the temple for a long time.”

Semple didn’t want any geographical confusion. “Actually, he doesn’t have a temple, just a huge overbearing palace.”

“Same difference. I come not bearing garlands but with a sword.”

Mr. Thomas had snorted. “That’s not even the correct biblical quotation.”

Jesus had glared at him. “Those fucking gospel writers never got my shit right. They screwed up all the best bits.”

The goat gave him a look of cool disbelief as it coped with the next sway of the floor and Jesus went back to his remote. “I seem to have forgotten how to stop the dome from rolling each time he takes a step.”

“Go into DOS and try Esc-control-alt-F12.”

Jesus keyed the suggested sequence and immediately the swaying was reduced from the wild tilting of a yacht in a cyclone to little more than a rhythmic ripple. Jesus grinned at Mr. Thomas. “You remembered.”

“So would you if you hadn’t taken up residence on
Gilligan’s Island.”

“What would I do without you?”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

It had taken Jesus a few minutes to recover from the soporific effect of TV grip. He had keyed the wrong commands, and, as far as Semple could read the repercussions in the dome, he more than once set Gojiro reeling and staggering like a drunken mountain. In short order, however, helped by his own recovering faculties and a series of scathing reprimands from Mr. Thomas, Jesus regained his grip and put the great beast on line for travel and ultimate assault. Even the dome itself was altered by the process. The TV screen that Jesus had previously watched with such obsessive languor enlarged to a 180-degree wraparound format that appeared to offer all of the monster’s forward vision plus considerable peripherals. When it was first up, the image was shaky and unstable, subject to snow, flare-out, and solarization. It needed a couple of passes at the remote before he managed to bring it under control and activate a kind of Stedicam effect, which eventually got him, Semple, and Mr. Thomas a panoramic view of the swiftly passing desert as Gojiro jogged toward his target at a speed in excess of one hundred miles an hour.

Semple may have made the first crucial intervention when she’d taken the remote from Jesus and cut the electronic umbilical, but once the King of the Monsters was set on his lumbering way to Necropolis,
Semple was relegated to little more than a spectator’s role. The scene inside the dome was, to say the least, a strange one. Mr. Thomas stood foursquare in front of the screen, acting as forward spotter. Jesus sat in the center of the couch, the large remote on one knee, also staring at the screen like the commander on his bridge. Semple, in her scanty red superheroine costume and platform shoes, stood behind the couch that had now become Jesus’ command chair. Fortunately, Jesus was no longer naked. He had at least bothered to slip on Nike sneakers, a purple linen toga, and a totally unnecessary pair of Erwin Rommel goggles, pushed back on his forehead, before he put Gojiro into operational mode. To Semple’s mind, they were a highly unlikely trio to be in apparent charge of a massive reptile primed and looking for a fight.

“Do you have to steer him?”

Jesus shook his head. “No, he smells enriched uranium. He’ll go straight for it. Radiation is, quite literally, in the Big Green’s blood.”

Jesus was leaning back on the couch in a woodenly confident pose of overstated authority that he could have learned only from William Shatner. Trying to look every inch the commander of the massive instrument of destruction that Gojiro had now become, he was now the absolute diametric contrast to the prone and priapic figure that he’d been such a short time before.

“How long will it be before we see Necropolis?”

Jesus gave a half shrug, as though it hardly mattered. “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Certainly no more.”

Semple wondered how Jesus might react if she introduced him to her second idea over the course of the short journey to the target. He certainly seemed to be in a new mood for adventure; maybe it would be okay to deliver the second hit of the one-two combination.

“I have a sibling.”

Jesus nodded, keeping his new, hawklike Starfleet concentration on the forward screen. “That’s very interesting.”

“She has a need to make the acquaintance of someone like you.”

“It’s said the whole of humanity needs to make my acquaintance.”

Semple ignored this messianic ego flourish and began to describe Aimee, her Heaven, and her predicament in terms that were glowing if not necessarily accurate, using every chance at her disposal to stroke and flatter. She must have made some impression, for at the end of her recital he actually looked in her direction. “You’re saying that she needs a man to run her Heaven for her?”

“You could be her savior.”

The goat rolled his eyes; Semple was overdoing it. Jesus, on the other hand, basked in the appeal of the idea. It seemed that, where his supposed messianic qualities were concerned, flattery could get one just about anywhere. He stroked his beard and smiled. “And which of you would I be expected to have sex with? You or your sibling?”

Semple decided she didn’t like this Captain Kirk version of Jesus any better than the comatose masturbator, but he might be exactly what she needed to inflict on Aimee. He could well turn her sister’s Heaven into a living Hell. She quickly played along with the gag, although she was starting to suspect, if only on instinct, that Jesus was probably impotent where women were concerned. “Perhaps the two of us will have to fight over you.”

This must have really caught his imagination, because he looked around sharply. “That could be the most interesting part.”

Semple kept her fixed smile, but now she knew for sure; this was the one she wanted to dispatch to Aimee. Jesus, though, was having second thoughts. “I don’t know if I should travel from here. The Big Green might need me.”

This stopped even Semple’s fixed smile in its tracks. “Need you? Why should he need you? You don’t do anything but watch TV inside a tumor.”

Jesus turned on the couch and looked at her with a nastiness she hadn’t previously observed. “Well, it sure as shit beats dragging a cross through the streets of Jerusalem, doesn’t it? How would you like to get crowned with thorns, scourged, and crucified? You want to spend your time schlepping up loaves and fishes for thousands of the great unwashed, start doing miracles at parties when the booze runs out, and have to ride around the desert on a recalcitrant stinking donkey? Or maybe you’d rather have me go through that shit all over again? Are you one of those miserable traditionalists?”

Semple had no diplomatic answer to any of this, and Jesus might have railed on much longer had not something on the forward screen caught his attention. The air on the horizon had become a smudge of dirt and pollution. “We’ll have to discuss this later. That’s Necropolis up ahead.”

Jim was strung out, a million molecules stretching to near-infinity, playing host to a traffic of vibrations that manifested itself in the
form of screaming, unimaginable, and totally unendurable pain. Pain defined his entire being. The receptors in his brain howled and hurt for things they couldn’t have. An interlocking helix revolved around him at sickening speed, blazing with colors unconfined to the limitations of the visible spectrum. He felt like he was going through an even more hideous death than his last one, but he knew this wasn’t the comparatively ordered interface between life and death, this was something far more complicated and far more awful, and that Dr. Hypodermic was deliberately doing it to him. His only recourse was to wail in his agony and helplessness. “How much more do you want from me? I fucking
died
for you the last time, didn’t I?”

In response, a voice hissed in his ear, a voice with the faintest trace of a French Caribbean accent. “My
petit ami
, Sid Vicious told me you were running away from me.”

“I wasn’t running—”

“So what were you doing?”

“I just didn’t want to get involved again.”

The red eyes of Dr. Hypodermic glowed like twin sources of malignant energy in the deep black space beyond the interlocking helix. “Involved?”

The helices increased their dizzying speed. Nameless blind larvae of things too iniquitous to contemplate snuffled at Jim’s stretched and strung-out molecules and Jim groaned. “Just make this pain stop.”

The disembodied eyes were pitiless and the voice ignored his plea. “Jim Morrison doesn’t want to get involved?”

“I don’t even know that I’m really Jim Morrison.”

“You know exactly who you are, and besides,
mon fils
, would it really matter? You made the addict’s compact, whoever you might be. I never forget one of my own.”

Jim was suffering to the point where he’d agree to anything. “Okay, okay, I don’t deny it. I’m yours. I’m a fucking thrall. I belong to you. I’ll never try to get away again. Just make the pain stop.”

“Look on this as a negative reinforcement, a remembrance of anguish past.”

Jim wondered if abject pleading might do any good. “Please, in all mercy, make the pain stop.”

It didn’t. “Now you know what Hell used to be like when Lucifer was running the show.” Explosions of blazing orange-yellow lava rocketed through the helix spirals, creating trajectories of fire. Suddenly Jim’s agony grew exponentially worse, and Dr. Hypodermic
chuckled. The sound was blood-chilling. “Where’s it written that death would separate us,
mon brave?”

“There was nothing ever written.”

“Wasn’t the accord of addiction ratified in blood?”

“I told you already. I give up. I’m yours, anything you want. You don’t have to torture me to make your point. I’m not fucking resisting.”

“And I am not making a point,
mon ami.”

“So what’s this all about? You already said it was a negative reinforcement. Is this Limbo?”

“Not Limbo, just a reprise of the pain before the gift of relief.”

And suddenly the pain was not only gone but hardly a memory. Jim free-floated fetal, curled naked, in the surrounding safety and warm liquid protection of a perfect womb, a dark star child whom no one could touch and only one could approach. The Caribbean hiss of the Doctor was his complete lullaby, the only one he needed or cared about. Hypodermic laughed again. “And now the gift of relief before the return of the pain.”

Mr. Thomas glanced back at Jesus. “Dirigible with fighter escort at eleven o’clock.”

The tallest towers of Necropolis were now visible on the horizon, as were one large black dot and three smaller ones in the air above the city. Jesus laughed. The prospect of the attack on Necropolis had raised his energy levels to a point where he was close to manic, and the messianic adrenaline seemed to be pumping double-time. “They always send up the air defenses first. It’s the standard opening move. Anubis is looking for a chess game.”