Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (56 page)

Semple was still standing slightly behind Jesus’ command chair. “Are those planes going to be a problem?”

Jesus grinned and shook his head. “The last time he went after Tokyo, they sent Fl 6s against him. All they managed to do was make him angrier.” He glanced at the goat. “What do you think those things are, Mr. Thomas?”

“One Zeppelin heavy gunship and three fighters. Two Fokkers and a Sopwith Camel, as far as I can tell. Either he’s confusing Godz with King Kong or he’s going for a World War 1 motif.”

Jesus grinned. “This is going to be a November turkey shoot.”

He hit the remote and to Semple’s surprise she found herself looking at a split-screen triptych. The center panel was the forward view as before, but on either side were two medium-shot side views of Gojiro moving across the desert. “How do you do that?”

“It’s the second and third unit.”

This piece of illogical tech was more than Semple cared to delve into, so she remained silent. If Gojiro traveled with his own movie crew, she really didn’t want to know the how or why. She was content to watch as he loped across the desert. As the three elderly planes homed in on him, the King of the Monsters made no attempt to attack or evade them. Either he or Jesus, whoever was really in control, held the same course, going straight for the city. The Zeppelin cruised at an altitude roughly equivalent to Gojiro’s eye level. Jesus noted this and nodded knowingly. “Whoever’s in command of the thing thinks he can come in head-on, make a half turn, and open up with a broadside. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s dealing with.”

“They’re very confident of themselves in Necropolis. Particularly the officer corps. I think it comes from a regular diet of roast baby.”

Mr. Thomas glanced at the two of them. “The commander could be a woman.”

Semple shook her head. “Not in Necropolis.”

The three fighters were adopting a different tactic. They were climbing, gaining height for a formation power-dive attack. Gojiro seemed to see the planes for the first time and slowed his pace. His giant brow furrowed and he stopped completely, letting out a slow, tentative growl.

“Ggggrrraaapph.”

The three fighters reached their operational ceiling and went into a slow turn.

Jesus’ eyes gleamed. “Here they come. They do think he’s bloody King Kong.”

The fighters dived, gathering speed as they dropped. Gojiro looked up; in the dome, the leading plane increasingly filled the forward screen section. Despite herself, Semple ducked and Jesus and Mr. Thomas exchanged smiles. The next moment, Gojiro took a deep breath and exhaled violently. The leading biplane was enveloped by his electric-blue, radioactive breath. The plane instantly burst into flames and spun out burning. The monster continued to breathe out, hosing down the other two fighters so they also burned and fell. Jesus let out a whoop.

“Yes!”

Semple’s eyes narrowed. To her mind, the way Jesus exulted in the thrill of the kill was a little close to unhealthy—something to note for future reference. The Zeppelin had now started to turn, though whether to bring its guns to bear or simply to get the hell out of there was unclear. This time, Gojiro chose not to use his radioactive breath. He charged forward, tail waving, and grabbed for the dirigible like a child reaching for a toy balloon. The airship managed to elude his reaching hands with a sudden and desperate surge of speed, but hardly had the maneuverability to do it a second time. The King of the Monsters grabbed and twisted the length of the fuselage very much like a man tearing apart a baguette of French bread. The aluminum skeleton that gave the airship its rigidity buckled and snapped, the fabric skin ripped, but then a spark must have been struck, for a hydrogen fireball suddenly exploded right in Gojiro’s hand. The monster hurled the blazing Zeppelin away from him with an angry shriek of pain.

“GGGGAAAAARRRK!”

The dome swayed dangerously. Jesus lurched sideways on the couch, Semple grabbed for it to stop herself from falling, and even Mr. Thomas staggered. Jesus’ hands flew deftly over the keypad of the remote and the environment quickly righted itself. The supposed messiah grinned. “Now he’s good and mad. There’ll be no stopping him after that.”

Mr. Thomas peered up at the screen. “Mad or not, they look like they’re going to have another try at slowing him down. There’s more aircraft coming up.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“What kind?”

The goat squinted at the forward section of the screen. “They look like Sabre Jets to me, or maybe MIG-15s. Certainly Korean War vintage.”

“So now we’re getting a bit more serious.”

The handful of jets came at Gojiro low and fast, racing across the flat desert in a perfect V formation, presumably hoping that, by staying low, they would avoid the worst of his radioactive halitosis. A thousand yards from the target, the lead plane lifted and fired a pair of wing-mounted rockets. This second attack rocked Gojiro, worse
even than the exploding Zeppelin. Again he was hurt and the dome reeled as he roared in pain.

“GGGGRRRRAAAAARRRGGGHHH!”

Mr. Thomas voiced a concerned warning. “I think the Big Green’s sustained a chest wound.”

“Is it bad?”

“I don’t think so.”

Even though red blood ran down his chest, contrasting sharply with the green of his wrinkled hide, the great reptile didn’t appear to be weakened in any way. He seized the lead jet by the tail and, using it like a club, smashed down the next two in the formation. The fourth jet managed to loose its rockets, but the pilot must have panicked, because they flashed past wide, leaving white vapor trails. Gojiro turned and loosed his destructive breath at this and also the fifth and final jet as they screamed past him at head height. As two explosions created billows of black smoke, Jesus again grinned like a fiend. “He can be real fast when he wants to be.”

The dome was bounced around again as Gojiro performed an impromptu victory dance and Jesus laughed out loud. “I think that’s all they wrote.”

Mr. Thomas shook his head. “There’s something else coming at us.”

Jesus’ face straightened. “What?”

“It looks like a Flying Wing.”

Jesus looked puzzled. “What can they hope to achieve by that?”

“We may have a cultural reference going down here.”

Jesus’ puzzlement deepened. “Cultural reference?”

“Remember the George Pal version of
War of the Worlds?”

“Of course.”

“In the movie, the Flying Wing was used to drop the atom bomb on the invading Martians.”

“You think Anubis would use an atom bomb on us? We’re already real close to the city suburbs. He’d kill a lot of his own people.”

Semple supplied the answer to this. “That wouldn’t bother Anubis at all. Can Gojiro survive a nuclear attack?”

Mr. Thomas looked deeply unhappy. “I very much doubt it.” Jesus was also worried. “In the movie, the Martians neutralized the bomb with their energy shields.”

Semple didn’t like the sound of this. “Do we have energy shields?”

Jesus looked up angrily. “What do you think? We’re in a fucking giant dinosaur, not a starship.”

The womb burst wetly and Jim found himself crawling across the overgrown, stone-flagged floor of a ruined temple. Tropical rain fell in leaden sheets, and he was immediately soaked to the skin. Miniature rivers followed the cracks and irregularities in the paving, with tiny torrents washing down the accumulated debris of leaves and twigs. Beyond the broken walls, napalm exploded, and the jungle burned despite the downpour. Helicopters clattered overhead and a stream of tracer cut through the smoke and steam of combat. Silhouetted against the explosions, a huge smiling Buddha had half its face blown away. The skeletal figure of a man in ragged olive drab squatted in the flame-shadows with his back to one of the broken walls. An M16 and a steel helmet were beside him and his poncho was pulled forward over his head to shelter him from the rain. Leaning forward with rapt concentration, under cover of the tented poncho, he was cooking up three white paramedic morphine pills in a blackened spoon over the flame of a candle in a K-ration can. A disposable syringe was clamped between his teeth. When he saw Jim crawling toward him, he fixed him with a hollow-eyed stare. “You stay the fuck away from me, okay? Fuck this up and I’ll cut you in half. It’s the last of my dope.”

Before Jim could say anything, Dr. Hypodermic came out from behind the Buddha, impossibly tall, impossibly thin, and totally out of place in his black stovepipe Abe Lincoln hat. Blue sparks clicked from his patent leather shoes and some kind of enveloping energy field stopped the rain from touching him. The junkie grunt looked up from under his poncho as though he weren’t in the least surprised to see the Voodoo Mystère. His voice had been threatening when he’d spoken to Jim, but now it turned into a complaining whine. “Look at the Buddha, man. They blew his fucking brains out.”

Dr. Hypodermic gestured soothingly with white-gloved hands. “I’m sure the Buddha will be able to handle it.”

The grunt shook his head as he drew the morphine solution up into the syringe through a ball of dirty cotton wool. “The motherfuckers didn’t have to blow a hole in his head. There was no need for that.”

Dr. Hypodermic’s death’s-head grin broadened as the junkie grunt tied off and went looking for a vein. “In half a minute, you won’t be worrying about it.”

Jim pushed his wet hair out of his eyes. He couldn’t imagine what game Hypodermic was playing with him, but he didn’t like it, and his own tone was very close to the junkie grunt’s whine. “You wouldn’t like to tell me why you’ve brought me here, would you?”

A burst of small-arms fire erupted in the nearby jungle, but Hypodermic didn’t even look around. “I thought the two of you should get acquainted. You both died of the same cause in the exact same second.”

“He OD’d?”

Dr. Hypodermic nodded. “Chuck here OD’d in the middle of a firefight.”

Another burst of gunfire sent Jim scrambling and rolling for the cover of a pile of wet rubble. Chuck, the junkie grunt, had pushed back his poncho. He’d found a vein, eased in the needle, and was now lovingly raising a little blood into the syringe. Jim cautiously raised his head. “He doesn’t look like he wants to be acquainted with anyone.”

“Chuck doesn’t want anything except what he’s got right now. That’s what happens when you make the end unthinkable and refuse to permit the reality of death. Chuck here’s been going around and around in the same five-and-a-half-minute cycle, shooting the same three morphine pills since the bullet ripped the top of his head off. He’s built himself a closed loop. Hell as an eternally revolving door in the worst place he ever experienced.”

“I though you said he OD’d?”

“The dope killed him, but before he even had time to fall over, a slug from a VC AK-47 lifted his scalp.”

“Isn’t what killed him kind of academic?”

“A sequence of events is a sequence of events. What he doesn’t know is that the damaged Buddha is an analog for his own head wound.”

Chuck pulled the needle out of his arm and looked blearily at Dr. Hypodermic. “I ain’t going anyplace and that’s a fact. Never leave the temple. That’s the key to everything. Never leave the temple.”

A grenade exploded somewhere on the other side of the Buddha. Jim pressed himself closer to the wall. “Is this supposed to be some kind of object lesson?”

Dr. Hypodermic shook his head. “It’s just part of the tour.”

“The tour?”

“We have big things planned for you, Jim Morrison. Shall we move on? Or maybe you want to stay here with Chuck? I’m sure we can set you up with a needle and a spoon and a poncho to keep the rain off. It’s a blissfully simple existence.”

Jim was having enough trouble keeping up with the shifts and surprises Dr. Hypodermic seemed to be springing on him. His mind felt seared from the previous plunge into discorporal pain. He sighed and leaned against the wall, letting the rain stream down his face. “Of course I don’t want to stay here. It’s a bliss I can very well do without.”

“Perhaps you’d like to go back to your Parisian bathtub?”

Jim shook his head. “You’ll do what you like, whatever I say.”

Dr. Hypodermic nodded.
“C’est vrai.”

Jim smiled bitterly. “So you’ve got me. I give up. Roll me on to the next horror.”