by Vance, Ramy
The captain started to say something, but I shot him down by raising a second finger. “And for another thing, has bombing allies or innocents ever not resulted in radicalizing otherwise peaceful individuals?”
The captain shrugged. “That is a philosophical debate several rungs above my pay grade. We will continue as planned.”
“And if you do,” I said, slamming my fist on the table, “you will pave the way for the gods’ resurrection. And that will lead to enslavement, torture, pain and suffering for Others and humans alike.”
I took a deep breath, centering myself before I continued. “We have a real chance at stopping this,” I said. “And bombing the island isn’t necessary.”
Captain Donnelly tilted his head in obvious confusion. “Yes, I got Jean’s report and I must admit I found it all a bit odd. I thought the gods were gone?” the captain asked, and from his tone, I could tell he wasn’t entirely sure what “the gods are gone” meant. For all he knew, a few of them had stuck around. Hell, for most humans, powerful Others were gods in their own right.
“The gods are gone,” Jean said, “but apparently they didn’t take their dead with them.”
“Humph …” The captain rubbed a thumb against his cleanly shaven cheek, an obvious nervous tic of his (may the GoneGods help him if he ever played poker). “I’m no doctor, but given that—according to you—they engaged in a conversation with you, these dead gods aren’t really dead.”
“There’s dead and then there’s dead, dead,” I said, knowing that I was giving him the same kinds of cryptic answers I so often got from my Other friends. It felt good to share the misery.
My not-really-an-answer answer didn’t seem to perturb the captain, though. “So these not-dead, still-somehow-dead gods … who are they?”
“Baldr, Quetzalcoatl and Izanami,” I said. “Three dead gods from three different pantheons who are trying to make a comeback in a big way.”
“And we’re only talking about three, right?”
I stared up at the tall captain. His uniform was immaculate, every nook and cranny ironed, his suit so pristine that he looked like older version of a Ken doll that had just been taken out of the box.
And from the ridiculous question Donnelly had just asked, it was obvious this guy knew nothing. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard of these gods that made him ridiculous … it was that he was so obviously trying to wrap his head around the concept of magic and myths, resurrection and Others.
Given he was the guy the human world had sent to deal with the threat, I shouldn’t have had to lecture him on stuff from Others 101.
“First off,” I said, my voice dripping with disdain, “how many dead gods do you think there are? I mean, gods didn’t go around slaying each other. And despite what Kratos did in the God of War video game series, mortals really didn’t have the kind of power necessary to take down a god. So given the rarity of a god’s death, do you really think there would be more? I mean, you’re the guy in charge of fighting Others, because—what? You’re qualified? I thought you actually had to know something to be qualified.”
The captain’s face turned beet red. He had just opened his mouth like he was going to start yelling when Jean chuckled. “She has a point. I mean, Captain, sir, she has a point, sir. Captain.” He gave the befuddled commander a half-hearted salute.
The captain shot him a look that had probably sent hundreds of grunts running. Not that Jean seemed to care; he just looked back at the guy with disinterest.
Apparently, the seasoned military man had been in enough pissing contests to know when he should cut his losses. He took a deep breath, picked up his hat and tucked it under his arm before turning on his heel and heading toward the door.
“We start the bombing as soon as everything is prepped,” he said.
“No—you can’t! You have to give us more time,” I said.
“I have to agree with her,” Jean said. “A preemptive attack now may only serve to exacerbate the situation.”
The captain pinched the bridge of his nose. “I have my orders. What do you suggest?”
Jean stood. “Your orders are what? To bomb the island? To wipe out the Other army, right?”
The captain nodded.
“And what about the timeframe?”
The captain didn’t answer.
“No timeframe. Just an order to get it done, right?”
The captain was silent.
“Right?” Jean said, his tone commanding.
The captain nodded.
“Then here’s my promise to you: you’ll get to bomb the hell out of the island and you’ll get your decisive victory. Just not yet. Give us a bit of time to launch an assault and save you money by identifying a surgical strike that doesn’t take down our allies as well. You’ll get your medals and the world won’t descend into World War III. What do you say?”
I stared at Jean. Between “launching assaults” and “surgical strikes,” he did a pretty good imitation of a man not pulling a plan out of thin air. When I looked back at Captain Donnelly, I just nodded solemnly as though Jean and Keiko and I had talked this all through beforehand.
Captain Donnelly considered this. From his body language, I was sure he was going to turn us down. As he went into deep thought, he touched a spot along the centerline of his jacket—a spot directly under his chin and low enough that I knew he wasn’t subconsciously fiddling with something under his shirt. It was a pendant. And from the way his fingers moved, I guessed it was a cross.
The gods’ departure had thrown faith—and, by extension, the faithful—into disarray. On the one hand, it had confirmed that the gods and capital G God existed. But on the other hand, they had abandoned us. What was the point in worshipping something we knew wasn’t there?
Still, faith may have left us, but its guiding tenets hadn’t. Some held onto those with furious fervor. Some, like this captain, weighed the cost of life against his orders. He was weighing the chances of peace against the chances of victory through destruction.
He pursed his lips before nodding. “Amendment to your proposal, soldier. I watch the hell out of the island and if I see any of them leaving, I rain holy hell on the place with everything we’ve got. If all is silent, then we follow your plan until dawn.”
“Dawn?” I said.
“Dawn is the cut-off point. The bombs drop then, no matter what.”
“But—” I started, but Jean lifted a silencing hand. He gave me a look that said, “Don’t push it, because this deal won’t get any sweeter.”
Then Jean saluted Captain Donnelly—properly—and said, “Thank you, Captain.”
“Yes, thank you,” Keiko and I chimed in.
He grunted. “I’m not doing this as a favor to any of you. I’m doing this because, strategically, it makes the most sense. Now, if you don’t mind.” He tucked his hat under his arm as he turned on his heel and headed for the door.
And with that, he left Jean, Keiko and me in the metal tomb of this battleship’s bowels.
“That went well,” Jean said.
I shrugged. “I don’t really care how it went. We’ve got to figure out how to stop these guys.”
“Agreed,” Jean said, before scratching his head. “So how do we do that?”
Yep—my whole “pulling a plan out of thin air” theory about everything Jean had just spouted off to Donnelly had been 100% correct.
We sat in silence for a long minute before Keiko said, “Can I get to the water? I shall call the makara—”
“Meres Griffin,” Jean chimed in.
“You’re like a dog with a bone,” I said. “Please Keiko, go on …”
She gave me a curt bow. “I shall call the makara and ask the great sea creature what is happening. Such information will be valuable to us.”
“Agreed.”
“Not so simple,” Jean said. “These guys are trigger-happy. A giant sea creature shows up and they’d be all pew pew.” He gestured with his pointer finger and thumb out as he
made the laser gun sounds. “But we can get that grunt to speedboat you far enough away to avoid any friendly fire.”
“Make it so,” I said.
“Star Trek joke?” Jean asked.
I nodded.
“Because me and the captain of the Starship Enterprise share the same name?”
Again, I nodded.
“But I’m not the captain of any ship, Starship or otherwise. You know that, right?”
I gave him a blank look.
“Just to avoid any confusion: Jean-Luc Picard, him. Jean-Luc Matthias, me.”
“Now you’re trying to annoy me,” I groaned.
He pointed at me. “Pew pew.”
↔
Jean called it in, and within minutes Keiko was whisked away to have her little chat with Meres Griffin (hey, the name worked), leaving Jean and me alone in the USS Destroy Everything at Dawn.
“Now what?” Jean asked.
If we were back in Montreal, I would have suggested going to the Other Studies Library and hitting the books. But given we were on a ship on the other side of the planet, that wasn’t really an option. Still, we weren’t without resources. Or rather, we weren’t without access to those with resources. “Does this floating bathtub have Wi-Fi?” I asked.
What’s the Plan, Phil?
Jean logged me into one of the terminals using his login details. The first scene that came up had three folders on it, which were labeled: Active Missions, Classified and Toys Yet To Be Purchased.
“Toys yet to be purchased, huh?” I said. “RPGs, semi-automatics … an iron maiden from Medieval Torture ‘R’ Us? You know, I was put in one of those and—”
Jean was clearly annoyed by me chiding him, because he clicked on the folder and said, “No, just toys.” In the folder, images of He-Man, Cabbage Patch dolls, G.I. Joes, Transformers, Voltron and Smurfs appeared on the screen. His eyes lit up on seeing them. “That’s what I’ve either collected or kept from my childhood. This folder is what I have left to collect and—”
“I get it,” I said. “You’re a geek.”
“At your service, ma’am.” He gave me a real salute instead of the half-hearted ones he’d given his superiors. Then he closed the folder with a mutter. “Simpler times. So what do you want?”
“Chrome.”
“Chrome?”
“Or Firefox, Safari … any browser other than Explorer, really.”
“You want access to the Internet? We literally have the greatest Other database ever conceived and you want … what, Wikipedia?”
“Actually, Twitter for reliable sites and Reddit for knowledgeable people. I want to talk to some online peeps who actually know their history and mythology. Unlike Captain Crunch out there.”
Jean clicked on an icon that brought up a screen typical of Windows 10 and clicked on the Chrome icon. “Here you go,” he said. “And as for Captain Crunch, I give him a hard time, but he’s one of the good guys.”
“In my limited three hundred years of experience, I’ve come to learn two truths. One—the real bad guys are the ones who think they’re the good guys.”
“And,” Jean said gesturing for me to hurry up with my point.
“Two,” I said, drawing out the word for an unnecessarily long time … you know, just to annoy the soldier, “good guys have to do bad things to stop them.”
“Humph,” Jean said. “Cynical much?”
“You would be, too, after what I’ve—”
“—seen?” Jean interrupted.
“Done,” I corrected.
I clicked on the search bar and logged onto Twitter. “Let’s start with our Norse god, shall we?” I muttered to myself and typed Baldr’s name followed by #FolkloreThursday. Immediately several searches came up with his name. “Before the gods left, this was a pretty cool hashtag created by people who love mythology, legends, old stories. You know, the non-toy geeks.”
“Hey, it’s a Venn diagram,” Jean said.
I nodded. “But after the gods did their whole GrandExodus thing, this hashtag exploded, with the diehards archiving everything known. And I have it on very good authority that there are some heavy-hitter Others that contribute to this every week.”
“Like who?”
“Like Penemue and the Sphinx, to name a couple.”
Jean ran his hand through his hair. “Holy guacamole. Penemue, I don’t know, but the Sphinx? That’s about as heavy-hitting as you can get knowledge-wise. How the hell does the army not know about this?”
I shrugged. “I have my theories and you wouldn’t like any of them.” I opened more browsers and repeated the search term for the other two dead gods.
The initial information that came up was fairly typical stuff, everything we already knew about the three dead gods. Baldr was killed by a spear made out of mistletoe; Izanami was trapped by her once husband Izanagi; Quetzalcoatl slept with his sister and, out of shame, killed himself on a funeral pyre made by his servants.
Like I said: typical stuff.
They all died, true, but each came from a pantheon with the power of resurrection. And their counterpart gods chose not to raise them from the dead. Izanami because it was feared that death had corrupted her. Baldr because they believed his death was a sign of Ragnarök. Only Quetzalcoatl’s myth stories didn’t give a reason for why he remained dead.
Deirdre had mentioned on the plane over to Japan that a deal had been made with the gods after Jesus’s resurrection. No god could return any dead thing back to life, but that didn’t explain why these dead gods weren’t brought back. They had all died before Jesus—before the accords.
That gelled with what Aki the tanuki had said about the gods … about how vile they were and more of a liability than anything else. But still, so many gods did so much shitty stuff that these guys’ crimes fell pretty firmly in the bog-standard column of the Horrible Stuff Gods Do category.
“This is useless,” I said. “We’re not learning anything new.”
Jean nodded. “I was hoping to find some commonality between the three, but I can’t. You can find common elements between two of them easily enough, but all three?” He shook his head.
“OK, let’s work on a dual basis. What do we get?”
“Quelzalcoatl and Baldr were both burned on a funeral pyre. Izanami and Quelzalcoatl both manifested something after their death. Quelzalcoatl manifested flocks of birds and Izanami created monsters called shikome after she died. Baldr and Izanami’s pantheons both believed that their deaths were a sign or stepping stone toward the end of the world—”
“And all three were left behind when the apocalypse happened,” I added.
“So? It wasn’t like the gods leaving ended everything.”
“True, but maybe that’s out of design. Think about it: immortal beings don’t exactly think in terms of immediacy. Maybe their leaving was step one. Step two is these guys return.”
“So what? We’re on the Seven Step Plan for the Apocalypse?”
I shrugged. “Maybe? Two out of three are signposts for the end of days. And as for the third one—Quelzalcoatl—he … he …” I snapped my fingers as I jolted back to the computer. “Where is it? Where is it?” I said as I went through my searches, looking for a tidbit of information I had bypassed. Finding it, I clicked on the link. “Here.”
“The Book of Mormon?”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “Our Venn diagram finally has a three-circle overlap.”
“Again … The Book of Mormon? Outside of scratchy underwear, what do the Mormons have to do with the end of days?”
“Read here,” I said. “ ‘The story of the life of the Mexican divinity Quetzalcoatl closely resembles that of the Savior’ … as in Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah,” Jean said, “but it also says that the theory was debunked as folklore.”
“So? We live in a world that is literally one huge, world-shattering debunking of folklore. What if”—I looked at the name—“John Taylor the church leader is right? What if Quetzalcoatl
is Jesus? Then his return is a sign of the Apocalypse.”
“Our overlap,” Jean said with a groan.
Normally figuring out something like this would have resulted in a victory lap, but all we really managed to uncover was that the three dead gods shared one common trait: their return meant the end of days.
↔
“OK,” Jean said, “but we’re still no closer to anything we didn’t know already. All we’ve done is upgraded this from a gods-are-coming-to-enslave-us bad to a gods-are-coming-to-kill-us bad. We still don’t have a plan other than that we need to stop them.”
“Which is something I was doing until you pulled me out.”
Jean waved a dismissive hand. “Spilled milk and all that.”
I leaned back in my chair, rubbing my temples. I had no idea what we needed to do other than get me back into the Kami Subete Hakubutsukan, where I stood a fighting chance of taking them down. And all that was predicated on the hope that I could get the god-killing Lance of Longinus back and that the gods hadn’t gathered enough power to be more of a challenge.
“If ever we needed a miracle, now’s the time,” I muttered. And as if answering my prayers, a radio crackled in the room.
↔
Keiko’s voice came through the speakers. “Jean, Kat … I have spoken to the makara.”
I looked over at Jean, expecting him to repeat his joke, but the soldier didn’t and I took it as a bad sign. He was giving up, and right now we needed all the fight we could muster.
“We’re here and listening. Go on,” Jean said.
“I have spoken to the makara,” she repeated. “Explained our situation. They are willing to help us engage the enemy. A coordinated attack is to happen at midnight—this evening. They will help us find a way back into the museum.”
That wasn’t good enough.
“But the bombs will go flying at dawn,” I said. “The last time I was in there, I was gone for thirty-six hours. We’ll be caught in the explosions.”