Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (62 page)

Mr. Thomas sniffed. He wasn’t taking the fate of Anubis quite as
personally as Semple. “A lot of leaders have tried to get away among the women. Britain’s Charles II tried it, so did Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Jeff Davis after the Civil War.”

“But he knows he can’t escape.”

In one respect, Semple was wrong. Whether it was actually Nephra’s ample breasts or not was unclear, but when Anubis grabbed her, Gojiro did actually pause. Although he could have crushed Anubis and the women of the harem in one fell handslap, he hesitated. Inside the dome, lizard-brain fireworks were visible as synapses processed the dilemma. Could it be that the big reptile held the dogheaded king’s cowardice in as much contempt as Semple? He hardly seemed capable of such finesse, and yet there he was, standing and waiting, wondering what to do next. Semple, too, was at something of a loss. She had no personal animosity against the women. When Anubis had appeared on the rooftop, she had assumed that they would share the same fate as the other innocent victims of the razing of Necropolis—regrettable, but too damned bad. Now that Gojiro was displaying this unexpected streak of dinosaur chivalry, she saw that she was going to have to revise her ideas.

“Has he ever behaved like this before?”

Jesus shook his head. “It’s extremely peculiar. He never used to be a respecter of gender.”

Gojiro’s next move was even more peculiar. He extended a clawed index finger and pointed at Anubis. It was the simplest of gestures, but its effect on the God-King was electrifying. His dog jaw dropped; he hurled Nephra from him. Gojiro continued to point at Anubis as he ran to the edge of the roof. Now it was Anubis’s turn to hesitate. He was plainly teetering in both mind and body, unable to decide whether to jump or to wait for the Big Green to tender his fate. Semple had no doubt what she wanted him to do. “Jump, you bastard! Do the decent thing and end it now.”

But Anubis didn’t jump. Clearly, terminating his own incarnation was not a part of his nature under any circumstances. Gojiro, however, had an idea of his own about how the wretched creature should meet his fate. The monster pressed his lips together and very gently blew. The radioactive breath came in a narrow stream, but it was enough. Anubis was engulfed in flame. His entire body was burning like a torch as he lurched over the edge of the roof and fell. Arms and legs outstretched, he spun as he dropped, leaving a spiral
of smoke while plummeting to the ruins below. He struck the ground on an incline of rubble beside an upended block of masonry with a tangle of steel projecting from its broken end. As sharp steel penetrated his burning body, a final hiccup of flame vaporized all that remained of Anubis.

Semple was silent for a moment. “So I guess that’s the end of that.”

Mr. Thomas asked the obvious question. “And how does it feel?”

Semple didn’t immediately answer and Jesus cut in. “The most divine of emotions is that of revenge well executed.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“To tell the truth, it doesn’t feel as good as it ought to.”

“You wanted him to suffer more? It was a long fall and he was on fire all the way down. He definitely crashed and burned.”

Semple frowned. “It’s not that. It’s just that what’s done is done, and I guess it’s over and that’s kind of hard to accept.”

The goat gave a superior sniff. “They say some people are never satisfied.”

Semple bridled. “I didn’t say that I wasn’t satisfied—”

“I’d also point out that it isn’t exactly over. The women are still there. Didn’t they used to be your co-workers?”

“What do you think he’s going to do to them?”

“I suspect that’s exactly what he’s thinking about now.”

Gojiro stood staring at the trembling group of women. Semple shuddered. “I wouldn’t like to be in their position.”

Jesus raised an eyebrow. “Do you really care?”

“They’ve got to be scared out of their minds.”

“But do you really care?”

Semple turned angrily on them. “I don’t know. I’m safe in here, so it’s all fucking hypothetical, isn’t it?”

Gojiro turned and began to walk away. The women of the harem, up to this point huddled together, started to spread out as if they couldn’t quite believe their unexpected deliverance. After a half dozen paces, though, Gojiro halted and looked back. The women also froze.

“Is he going to kill them after all?”

The thought may well have crossed the King of the Monsters’ mind. Certainly, inside the dome, Semple, Jesus, and the goat were treated to another brief synaptic fireworks display, but then the second-unit screens showed him turning again and moving on.

“He let the women go.”

“I guess he’s still into this new knight-in-shining-armor mode.”

“Yeah, but where’s he going now?”

The forward view on the screen was an extreme long shot, the replication of Gojiro’s distant gaze, fixed somewhere beyond the city limits, not only in a direction in which Semple had never been during her sojourn in the city, but directly into a totally surprising and highly colorful purple and magenta sunset.

Mr. Thomas looked worried. “Where did that fucking sunset come from?”

Jesus spread his hands. “Don’t look at me, I didn’t conjure it. Besides, the colors are just a result of crap in the air. It’s probably the dust he kicked up smashing down all those buildings.”

Mr. Thomas looked even more worried. “I think he deliberately made the sunset himself.”

Jesus shrugged. “He always gets a bit weird after he’s whacked a city.”

“He never made a sunset before.”

“You can’t say he doesn’t have a sense of theater. We’ve always known that.”

Mr. Thomas refused to let the matter drop. “I think he made the sunset to walk off into.”

“So he wants to impress the girls on the roof. So what?”

“So I think after he’s walked off into the sunset, he’ll go right on walking all the way to the polar ice cap.”

Jesus went white. “You’re not serious.”

Under stress, Mr. Thomas’s accent had become extremely Welsh. “Of course I’m bloody serious, boyo. That’s why I’m looking so worried.”

Semple interrupted. “Would someone like to tell me what’s going on here? Why should he be walking off to the polar ice cap?”

“If he’s walking off to the polar ice cap, it means he’s going to go to sleep for a couple thousand years and we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“I didn’t even know there was a polar ice cap in the Afterlife.”

“If there isn’t, he’ll make one.”

“And we’re in serious trouble.”

Semple was perplexed. “I don’t understand. What’s the problem?”

“If he goes to sleep, we’re prisoners in here for the next two millennia or more. No light, no heat, no power, no TV. We’d go insane.”

Semple looked at Jesus and the goat as though they were total idiots.
“But that’s crazy. With the three of us, we ought to be able to raise the kinetic energy to wind-walk out of here.”

Jesus and Mr. Thomas exchanged glances. “Will you tell her or shall I?”

“I tried to explain it to her earlier.”

“We can’t get out of here.”

“Why not?”

Jesus shifted uncomfortably on the couch and put the remote to one side. Gojiro was now jogging steadily across the landscape with an ominous sense of purpose. “It’s the bit between the tumor and the eye. Remember the way you came in?”

Semple nodded. “Of course I remember. It wasn’t that long ago, even though it might seem like it.”

“In order to make it through there, we have to put ourselves in animation mode.”

“Mr. Thomas already told me that.”

“Well, we can’t do it anymore. The equipment broke and we couldn’t fix it.”

Semple turned sternly to the goat. “I though you said he’d forgotten how to do it. You didn’t mention equipment.”

“I was giving you the simplified version.”

Jesus arched an eyebrow. “And probably trying to make me look bad at the same time. He does that, you know?”

“But it’s true that we can’t get out of here?”

“Absolutely. One hundred percent.”

Semple thought about this for a long while. “My sibling Aimee and her nuns may be able to get us out of this.”

Mr. Thomas treated her to a long and slightly suspicious sideways look. “They could?”

“I think so.”

“How?”

“Either of you know the gold telephone trick?”

A
gold telephone materialized out of nowhere on the balustrade of the terrace, right next to a dead cartoon bluebird. For fifteen seconds, it did absolutely nothing, and then, exactly on the sixteenth second, it rang. Aimee was so taken by surprise that she didn’t immediately answer it. No less than four of the double-time European-style rings went by before she finally picked it up and tentatively put it to her ear.

“Hello.”

All around her, Heaven had continued to deteriorate. The sky was now a perpetual slate gray. The once-lush lawns were sere, brown, and dead. The trees had lost nearly all of their leaves. The lake had turned oily and polluted and every day more dead fish floated amid the greasy green scum on its surface. Increasing numbers of cracks and structural faults had appeared in the once-pristine buildings and window glass constantly and mysteriously shattered. Strange and sinister Santa Ana–style winds came in from the mountains and whipped up vortices of garbage and dead leaves, and threatening black smoke rose from beyond the same mountains from invisible fires that never ceased burning. To add the final insult to this catalogue of environmental injuries, the young women who had once danced by the temple on the Maxfield Parrish headland now spent their time consuming a diet of vodka, recreational amphetamines, and quaaludes, and coupling in wanton lesbianism.

“Who is this? It’s a very bad connection.”

Aimee had dispatched squads of nuns to do something about these girls flaunting their depravity right under her nose, but the young women were clever. Whenever the nuns were spotted, they simply
ran off into the hazy mid-distance over which Aimee now had little or no control, a less-than-stable area into which the nuns were loath to follow them. As soon as the nuns gave up the chase, the young women would reappear and, once again, start disporting themselves, large as life and twice as obscene. Since the establishment of her Heaven, Aimee had never ordered the crucifixion of a woman, but in the case of these dirty and insolent little bitch perverts she would have happily made a precedent-setting exception—had she been able to catch them. Unfortunately, they proved totally uncatchable.

“Semple? Is that you? You sound so far away.”

Her own physical condition was on an exact par with the state of affairs in Heaven. She was plagued with respiratory problems and stomach pains, and in the last few days, each time she brushed the golden tresses of which she had always been so inordinately proud, she found the bristles of the hairbrush filled with alarming quantities of dead hair.

“You’ll have to speak up. I’m having a lot of difficulty hearing you.”

Perhaps the worst of the slings and arrows to which she had become heir since Semple’s departure was the awareness that her nuns were moving ever closer to a state of mutiny. Even as she tried to make sense of the mysterious phone call, half a dozen of them stood in a watchful, conspiratorial group whispering among themselves, eavesdropping, their expressions not unlike those of a pack of carrion scavengers waiting for the prey to die. If it hadn’t been for her ability to keep conjuring Prozac, she would have given up and returned to the pods long since.

“What are you trying to tell me? You’re bringing someone to do what?”

The nuns were edging nearer. The arrival of the gold phone was an occurrence so out of the ordinary, they weren’t able to contain their red-nosed curiosity.

“You’re bringing Him? Are you serious? Him? I’m telling you, Semple, things are not good here. I don’t have the reserves or the energy to put up with any of your nonsense. If this is some joke, it’s in extremely poor taste and—”

Aimee was suddenly paying such undivided attention to what her sibling was saying at the other end of the crackling phone line that, for the first time in what seemed like an age, she had momentarily forgotten the decaying world around her, the resentful plotting nuns, and even her deteriorating health.

“Yes, yes, I realize you can’t say whether he’s authentic or not. Right at this moment, even a low-rent replica would help matters a great deal. Just as long as he has some kind of power. He’s been living
where?”

Now Aimee really couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Just tell me this isn’t one of your elaborate hoaxes. Just please tell me that.”

She knew credulity might be the product of a truly desperate hope. She wanted to believe Semple so badly. “You want us to wind-walk you in?”

Maybe her sister really was on the level.

“Yes, yes, I think we can do that. In fact, I’m certain we can do that.”