Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (76 page)

Jim pushed his hair out of his eyes. The heat from the burning lake was causing him to break out in a sweat. “We just have to take it on trust. Doc’s right, there’s no other way.”

But Semple was digging in. Jim hadn’t known her that long, and
most of that knowledge was carnal, but he was already starting to recognize her capacity for resolute stubbornness. She was quite prepared to face down Doc Holliday if need be. “I bow to the fact that you’ve been around the Afterlife far longer than either me or Jim, but I’ve crossed a few bridges in my time and I’m pretty well versed in their symbolic content. I have to assume that a bridge that only goes halfway is exactly what it claims to be, a dead end. With the accent on
dead.”

Doc gave her a hard look. “I wouldn’t spend too long bowing to my experience. I can hear the bad guys coming down the tunnel.”

With no other alternative, they scrambled along the ledge toward the elegant stone arch of the ambiguous half bridge. Semple shook her head even as she ran. “I still think we’re doing the wrong thing.”

They were almost to the bridge when the pursuers came out of the tunnel. Bullets peppered the rock walls above the ledge, but none came close enough to be a threat. The posse was shooting on the run, more as matter of brute psychology than out of any serious intent to do harm. In no time they would catch up with Jim, Semple, and Doc, and the fugitives would be in the bag. Doc didn’t even bother to fire back. In four more paces, he was on the bridge. Jim was immediately behind him. For a moment Semple balked, then two more shots hit the rock wall and she started forward again. “Damn you both. This is insane.”

“You want to fall into the clutches of Kali?”

“I don’t want to fall into the burning lake.”

“Trust that you won’t fall.”

“I can’t just walk off into empty air like Daffy Duck.”

Jim and Doc held out their hands. “We’ll do it together.”

Semple grasped their hands. With Jim and Doc on the outside, and her in the middle, the three of them stepped into nothingness, with only the lake of fire beneath them. In the last second, Doc laughed out loud. “Entering the Dragon Ride—if the damn thing exists!”

W
hat has happened to my creation?”

Anger and alarm were Semple’s first response as she grew to human form out of the rolling swirls of orange Day-Glo mist in which she, Doc Holliday, and Jim Morrison had made their vaporous, billowing reentry from the Dragon Ride. She sprang to her feet before Jim and Doc were even fully formed and looked around furiously at the ruins of her onetime kingdom, as yet unaware that she was jaybird-naked. “I thought there’d be damage, but never anything like this.”

Jim was now also fully formed and he, too, had come through without a stitch of clothing. Doc, on the other hand, was clothed and correct—except, mysteriously, for his boots, each now on the wrong foot. As he irritatably tugged his left boot from his right foot, he glanced at the nude and bemused Jim. “Were you two having sex in the middle of all that?”

Jim looked at Doc and blinked sheepishly. “What makes you say that?”

“I heard some sounds just as we were being transformed into fog.”

Semple turned and glared at Doc. “Then you should have been minding your own business, shouldn’t you?” Her clothes were now assembling around her out of thin air. Not the red dress she had worn in Hell, but a midnight-blue, semi-military ensemble with a pencil skirt, padded shoulders, and epaulets that matched her current belligerent mood. Now that she was back home, Semple seemed to be building up a head of rage at everything around her. Jim’s time-honored leather jeans and loose shirt also appeared; only
the white tuxedo jacket he’d been given at the casino had vanished along the way. The three of them had arrived in the same mosque-like chamber with the high-domed ceiling, black marble floor, and ruby glass where Semple had once amused herself by torturing her prisoners and slaves.

In some ways, it was an apt reentry point, although right at that moment Semple was too angry to see it as such. Her blood was boiling at the ravages to which her glorious construct had been subjected. The marble was cracked and shattered, and part of the dome had fallen in, littering the already-damaged floor with rubble, smashed mosaics, and broken beams. The air was filled with dust, smoke, and the stench of cordite, indicating that some of the damage had been caused by indoor explosions since Semple’s departure. The gaping hole in the dome now let in an eerie, green-death light that had never been any part of her original design. Breathing hard, she repeated her question as though expecting someone or something to provide her with an answer. “What have they done to my beautiful home?”

The sounds of automatic weapons fire and a muffled explosion from another part of the environment supplied an answer of a sort. Doc finished switching his boots and warily eased to his feet, at the same time drawing the Gun That Belonged to Elvis from its shoulder holster. “They still seem to be going at it.”

Semple kicked angrily at the rubble and turned to face the two men. “It’s fucking Aimee.”

Doc frowned. “Your sister did all this?”

“She did some of it when she blew me into Limbo, but I think the rest of it’s the work of Bernadette and her rebel nuns. I’ll lay Vegas odds that the inevitable uprising has risen, and this is collateral damage.”

Jim and Doc looked at her with unhappy frowns. “Rebel nuns?”

“Uprising?”

“Collateral damage?”

“Don’t we even get a chance to recover from the Dragon Ride?”

The Dragon Ride, although a close relative of the more familiar wind-walking, had been an arduous and exhausting experience. The violent psychic buffeting and energy shifts, the nightmare apparitions and hallucinations, all left Jim’s and Doc’s minds feeling folded, spindled, and mutilated. Semple might have complained of being equally ripped and crumpled, except that she was running on
the adrenaline rush of a foul fury. Partway through the nerve-wrenching experience, Jim had wondered if perhaps some joker of yore, with an arcane, Hell-spawned sense of humor, had deliberately arranged for the ancient escape route to be as harrowing as possible, passing as it did though the death-stinking, blood-soaked interior of the Pyramid of the Moon, the hideous fetid lair of the Great Decapitator of the Moche, and through interstellar space, amid death rays, particle beams, and bad science fiction as Battlestar Galactica fought off an attack by the Cylons under Count Baltar.

Jim looked from Doc to Semple as another burst of gunfire rattled the here and now. “I don’t know about you two, but I’d be willing to move on someplace else.” Semple stared at him grimly but said nothing. Jim grimaced and shook his head. He knew she was upset, but the facts had to be faced. “I hate to say this, babe, but this place is trashed beyond repair and I really don’t see how it can do us or anyone else any good to get involved in some feminist jihad.”

To underline his point, a faint tremor shook the ground, but Semple could only snarl. “They wrecked my fucking place. I want to see someone suffer for what’s happened to it.”

The clap of a distant grenade going off made Doc shake his head. “It can be kinda hard to extract payback when you’re outnumbered and outgunned.”

Jim immediately backed him up. He felt sorry for Semple, but the shooting was coming closer. “He’s right, girl. Our best bet is to get the fuck out of here.”

Semple, however, was ready to make a stand. “And how the hell do we do that? After that damned Dragon Ride, none of us has an iota of energy left. We couldn’t so much as levitate across the room.”

She had a serious point, but Jim was starting to lose patience. “So what do you suggest we do?”

Before Semple could answer, something moved in the shadows by the fallen Moorish archway. A young woman stepped around a curved panel from the fallen dome. Her head was shaved cue-ball smooth, and she wore a red robe with a strange gold insignia of a clawhammer and three nails on the breast. This had to be the new uniform of Bernadette and her mutineers; the red of the habit was most likely symbolic of the blood spilled by the serial killer Jesus, while the meaning of the hammer and nails was pretty much self-evident. A little incongruously, the nun-militant wore paratroopers’ heavy-duty lace-up jump boots, and bandoleers of ammunition
across her chest. She also held a late-twentieth-century machine gun trained on the three of them. The rebel nun seemed in no way intimidated by the sudden appearance of Semple, Jim, and Doc. The muzzle of the weapon didn’t waver as she moved through the arch and into the chamber.

“The three of you stay right where you are.”

A second concussion grenade exploded and the nearest rubber guard folded and collapsed, a thick, dark blue liquid flowing from a rent in its hide and oozing thickly across the floor of the corridor. Plaster drifted down from the ceiling and small fires burned amid the debris of previous explosions. Red-clad nuns advanced down the corridor in fast zigzag rushes, firing bursts from their MAC-10s and AK-47s. Even with the help of Semple’s strange, soft-shelled robot guards, it was clear to Mr. Thomas that Aimee and her handful of loyalists were fighting a losing battle. They were steadily being pushed back, room by room, corridor by corridor, staircase by staircase. The rebels, in their new red habits and freshly shaved heads, were taking casualties, but it hardly mattered. Clearly these red sisters were happy to go to the pods in the righteous cause of Bernadette, the Hammer of God, their leader and inspiration. If it came to a battle of attrition, Aimee’s little band simply lacked the numbers to win. The hopeless course was set for their last stand. Run out of her Heaven and forced to take refuge in the despised domain of her destroyed sibling, her options were scant: it was either go down fighting or give herself up for crucifixion.

Mr. Thomas had no desire to make Thomas the Goat’s last stand, but from where he stood at the far end of the burning corridor, as far from the fighting as he could get, he wasn’t holding out that much hope. His eyes were burning and watering from the smoke, and precious little retreat remained. He was starting to resign himself to taking on a new incarnation. He could only tell himself that maybe he’d gone as far as he could go in goat form; perhaps it was time for a change. As far has he could see, his one hope to remain in this reality was somehow to separate himself so the mutineers wouldn’t associate him with Aimee. He needed to make himself look like an innocent victim, or maybe even a helpless hostage. Could he get himself some kind of Lamb of God gig with the new regime, and lie
around all day being fed beer and glossy magazines by bald, red-robed nuns? It was a long shot. He knew “Goat of God” didn’t exactly have the same ring to it.

Another grenade went off and started a flurry of commotion among the defenders. Mr. Thomas couldn’t quite see what was happening through all the smoke and dust until the dirty white rag was waved aloft tied to a piece of broken lath. That message was unmistakable. Aimee McPherson had given up the fight. The towel had been thrown in. Mr. Thomas knew it wasn’t a flag of truce. It had to be unconditional surrender. As far as he was concerned, the only question that remained was whether or not a goat could be crucified.

“It would seem we have a Mexican standoff.”

Despite the machine pistol the red-robed nun had pointed at Doc, a lot of her militancy dropped away when she found herself staring down the barrel of the Gun That Belonged to Elvis. The legendary pistol had magically appeared in Doc’s right hand, trained at her head. At the sight of her confusion, Doc laughed. “I wouldn’t be too upset, my dear. Drunk and sober, I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a very, very long time. It’s no disgrace to be faced down by Doc Holliday.” He inclined his head and looked more closely at the young woman. “Don’t I know you?”