Lesser Gods (37 page)

“Wouldn’t want your image to suffer,” I said.

“Knew you’d understand.” He placed the ancient .44 Magnum revolver to my temple, thumbed the hammer back, and pulled the trigger.

There was only a click of the hammer drop. I gasped for breath and Death and his henchmen laughed. “Oops. Empty chamber. Dry run. This one’s for real, so say your prayers, wabbit.”

The barrel went to my temple. This time I watched the firearm and could see the bullet tip in the cylinder that was rotating into place as he pulled the hammer back.

This is it.

I closed my eyes, knowing the slug would end my life.
Goodbye, Alice, hope you’re right.

He pulled the trigger and I saw or perhaps only felt a burst of light and then nothingness as my brains splattered across the wall behind me.

It was a clear night, the city’s lights blotting out the stars as usual, transforming the sky into a gray expanse of nothingness. I looked upward and remembered the beauty of the star-studded firmament on the island Alice had created. I had the realization that my old neighborhood would never feel like home again.

But I would miss the gang.

“How’s it going?” I asked Quaker, stepping over to his small booth where he collected his toll while acting as look out. Rather than the usual silver coin I usually paid him, I took a heavy cloth bag out of my pocket.

“Better high-tail it now, man,” Quaker whispered. “You’ve got agents in your apartment. They counter-sniped Snipe earlier.”

I bit my tongue. I had never seen Snipe, but she’d saved my hide more than once and seemed almost like family. I fought down my sorrow at her loss, handing the bag to Quaker. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me over the years.”

He took the bag, opened it, and peered into it. “Woe! Are these… Gold coins?”

“Solid.” I smiled. “Be seeing you.”

“Hey, wait. There are agents in your apartment and they’re not Albert Schweitzers.”

“I know,” I said over my shoulder. “Don’t worry. Everything’s okay.”

I rounded the corner and started toward my apartment, moving cautiously out of habit, even though Snipe was no longer there to be a danger. I shook my head. Already homeless people were staking out spots on the sidewalk. Not that I didn’t feel they had a right to be somewhere. It was just that I knew they’d attract predators who would rob from them and who, in turn, would bring in drug dealers and so on and so on as the food chain expanded. The trouble that followed would gradually destroy the old neighborhood unless someone came to take Snipe’s place.

I slowed at the front door to my apartment fortress, placing my hand on the I-dent pad. “My name’s baloney,” I told the computer.

“Welcome home, Ralph,” the computer said in a low, feminine voice. “It’s been awhile. You might want to wait a bit longer before going up. By law I’m programmed to avoiding telling you there are government agents up in your apartment. So I won’t do that because I would never break the law.”

“Thanks for the un-warning. You’re the best program I ever met.”

“Why, Ralph, that’s the nicest thing anyone every said to me. Now get out of here before I propose marriage.”

I laughed and said nothing more. I don’t know who programmed the AI virtual gal, but they certainly did a sweet job. I’d miss her, too. I pushed my way through the armored door as it buzzed open. “You might want to make a call for recycle up in my apartment. Oh, in maybe an hour.”

“Have you become a prophet or are you expecting some trouble?”

“Both.”

I ascended the creaking stairs that lead to my room. The paper match was on the floor; they were waiting for me. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and tapped my code into the door lock. And I stepped into my apartment.

“It’s about time,” a burly government thuggite said, grabbing my shoulder and shoving me into a chair. The two of them very efficiently wrapped me in tape and jabbed a syringe full of something into my arm, no doubt to loosen my tongue.

I won’t bore you with the details. They did their best to extract the truth from me, and I did my best to make them think I was trying to hold out. They worked their way through my fingernails, then started on fingers and eyes, saving my private parts for the pièce de résistance. Finally I got to the place where I could blurt things out and have them think I was really telling the truth against my will. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you,” I said, gasping around the pain that radiated from various parts of my body.

“We’re listening.”

“Lido Beach. New Sarasota, Florida, Caribbean Union. That’s where Huntington is.”

“Street address?” one of my tormentors asked, pushing a cigarette into the socket where my eye had been.

I cried out, then gave them the address. They worked me over some more to double-check the facts I’d given them, then placed a bullet in my brain.

As I reformed myself in a distant place, I mulled over the odd fact that criminals and the civil servants charged with protecting us from them, are so alike.

Alice Liddell

Our plan set in motion, Ralph and I waited for the action to begin, hiding in plain sight right under Huntington’s nose.

I had become a tall palm in the garden next to the living room window where Huntington spent his evenings hooked to his computer, his powers growing as he extended himself through the net to encompass more and more of the world.

Ralph had become a small green lizard that now remained unnoticed in Huntington’s home.

Reptile,
I teased Ralph.
Type casting.

Funny
, he replied, swishing his tail back and forth in mock anger.
But I must say,
he added,
those are nice coconuts, lady
. He scurried across the floor to position himself near a wall so Huntington’s wheelchair didn’t turn him into road kill.

I tried to ignore the dark stains on the carpet, realizing that Ralph’s blood had put them there.
After this is over,
I thought,
I’m going to have to erase a few of Ralph’s memories so he doesn’t go nuts.

No way,
Ralph announced, to my surprise.

It’s okay for you to read my private thoughts but I can’t erase bad memories?

I need to remember the bad so I’ll be strong enough to defend myself when the need arises.

True. You like to act gruff, but you’re not. You’re softhearted.

I guess that’s supposed to be a compliment.

It is. Now quit reading my private thoughts.

If you want your thoughts private, you need to make them that way.

We’ll talk about that later.

Good. My little lizard toes feel the vibrations of someone coming up the walkway.

And his sensor cells were correct. The government agents were arriving right before sunset as we had suspected they would. They tossed in flash-bang grenades, and the usual contingent of Ninja-clad SWAT members streamed in. Three of the team efficiently surrounded Huntington, keeping the invalid in the wheelchair covered with their submachine guns while other members of the outfit ransacked his home.

After rummaging through his belongings and failing to discover the jet, they ruffed Huntington up, trying to coax the whereabouts of his stash out of him. Battering him was a big mistake because it angered him.

And an angry Huntington is a fearsome sight to behold. The ashen figure in the wheelchair closed his eyes.

“He have a heart attack?” one of the SWAT team asked.

Worse,
I thought.

Far worse,
Ralph added.

The figure in the chair turned into sawdust, crumbling into a fine powder that trickled through the fingers of the agents trying to catch him, as if they had hoped by capturing the disintegrating parts they might somehow reassemble their Humpty Huntington once again. The dust dropped into the wheelchair with the surplus overflowing onto the floor.

After some muttered oaths, the SWAT team stood and observed a moment of tongue-tied silence.

Finally one tried to speak: “What the…?”

That was all the farther he got, fear cutting off his voice as first one and then another Huntington stepped into the room. Eventually fifty of the Huntingtons entered, each armed with a glistening meat ax.

All was silent and then the Huntingtons started swinging their axes like the Grim Reaper’s scythe during the worst of plagues.

The ensuing battle was one-side and anything but pretty. I wished I had Ralph’s lizard-high vantage point on the floor because I was suffering direct hits to my trunk from the exploding bullets the SWAT team unleashed, sending projectiles flashing through the air, striking members of both sides of the fray during the confusion.

Are you injured?
Ralph asked me.

I wasn’t sure. But thought,
Don’t worry about it — I’m a palm tree, right? Only dead wood at my core.

I hoped I was right. I turned my attention back to the fight proper, where panicked screams mingled with the blood and moans of the dead and dying. Much of the horror resulted because the Huntingtons fought vigorously, well beyond what any SWAT team had ever encountered in the past. With limbs or even heads blown off, the duplicates continued to battle, crawling or staggering forward to fight, stopping when they had been shot to pieces and completely drained of blood. Only then did the flesh discontinue battle.

In the end, the meat cleavers proved to have an uncanny ability to cut through ballistic armor, the wide blades gravely slashing exposed flesh. After ten horrific minutes, the gory brawl drew to a close.

When the gunsmoke cleared, only two SWAT team members remained, wounded but alive, standing back-to-back in the room strewn with bodies and enough wilting body parts to make a grown Harvey weep.

The brave pair of government fighters loaded the last of their ammunition into their submachine guns and waited.

But only for 20 seconds.

Another salvo of Huntingtons appeared at the front stoop and the final chapter of the battle ensued, ending swiftly when the firearms were empty and the madmen with cleavers swarmed over the pair. Ralph climbed up the wall to avoid being drowned in the blood flowing across the floors of the wall-to-wall slaughterhouse.

The massacre over, Huntington reappeared, his duplicates vanishing as his wheelchair creaked out of the closet it had taken refuge in, the red sea of gore parting so its wheels passed over dry ground.

“My, my,” Huntington said, settling into the contrivance. “Looks like I’d better get into the government’s database and remove my files again. Can’t have thugs dropping in unannounced like this.”

His voice bore the artificiality of an amateur actor, and for a moment I wondered if he was aware that Ralph and I were there, watching him. Then I decided he must surely be unaware of us.

He carefully wheeled himself across the room, surveying the damage like a vengeful prophet. “Better get this mess cleaned up while I’m at it.” He closed his eyes and like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, summoned an army of brooms, along with scoop shovels and mops.

“Use this mess to fill up the old sunken garden,” Huntington ordered them. “I’ve been meaning to fill it in anyway and this will save having to haul in dirt. Should help fertilize the earth while we’re at it.”

Even with a hundred implements of housekeeping, it took most of the morning and into the evening to scrub and clean away the mess.

Ralph Crocker

With timing that couldn’t have been better if I’d planned it that way myself (well, okay, I had), the doorbell rang at eight PM, just as Huntington had settled in for a long summer’s nap.

“Who could that be?” Huntington muttered, wheeling himself to the entryway in his PJs. He opened the door a crack. “What do you waaaa —”

Death’s two mesos thundered in like rhinos in heat, ripping the door from its hinges and dumping the old man onto the floor with a bone-jarring thump. One of the mesos tossed Huntington’s wheelchair across the room while the other broke his arms, softening him up for the main act.

This overture complete, the curtain rose and Death made his grand entrance to begin his aria. “Well, well,” his voice intoned as he stepped over the fallen door, his antenna waving with sadistic anticipation. “So this is the great Jeff Huntington? Frankly, I’m disappointed. I expected something more than an old prune slobbering on the floor.”