Lessons on Destroying the World

by Gant, Gene

  Tyree’s cell phone chimed. At the tone, the six-year-old rolled her brightly beribboned head on her little neck. “Daddy!”

  “This is Daddy’s business, Pookie,” Tyree said apologetically, pulling the phone out of his pocket. The eyes that had glared at me on Friday night with icy, merciless fury were now round as a puppy’s and full of love. “I’ll just be a minute. I promise.”

  Emilia, a tall, shapely woman of thirty whose pale skin looked warm and soft, was the stricter of the two parents. “Kayla, stop all that whining,” she snapped, throwing an annoyed glance over her shoulder at her daughter.

  “This is T,” Tyree said into the phone.

  “T, this is Caesar” came the reply. Caesar Smith was the thug who had bashed Larry into oblivion. He was twenty-six and almost as tall as Owen Cummings. But where Owen’s mass was due to overdeveloped muscles, Caesar’s was due to overeating. He had a migraine nestled between his eyes and was anxious to reach his mother’s house for the big dinner she served every Sunday to her two adult children.

  Tyree had sent him to follow a dealer whom they suspected was a police informant. Caesar had just observed the dude meeting with a plainclothes detective in the lobby of a fast-food joint. Tyree would surely order that the fool of a dealer be “debriefed” to find out exactly what details of the operation had been passed on so that appropriate countermeasures could be implemented. Then, Tyree would want the idiot, and probably the detective, taken out at the next available opportunity. Caesar knew he’d have to come up with a way of doing the job. But that decision could wait. For now, Caesar just wanted to report his findings to Tyree so he could pop a couple of pain-killers and dive into his mom’s heavenly cooking.

  Caesar had just pulled his car, a black Mercedes, in to his mother’s driveway. He sat behind the wheel with the engine idling, his cell phone pressed to his ear. “I got bad news,” he continued. “It’s like you thought. The punk is passing info on your operation.”

  In his kitchen, Tyree scowled.

  Emilia saw the look and immediately beckoned to her daughter. “Kayla, I’m about to start frosting the cake. Come here and help me.”

  “You need me to taste the frosting?” Kayla asked hopefully as she slid out of her chair.

  “I sure do. We need to make sure it’s sweet enough.”

  Kayla ran across the room to the counter, where her mother placed a bowl of freshly made cream cheese frosting next to a Bundt cake as big as a pumpkin. Kayla squealed. “Can I taste the cake too, Mommy?”

  “Don’t push your luck, girl,” Emilia said.

  With their attention focused on the day’s dessert, neither mother nor daughter saw Tyree’s body dissolve into a bolt of energy. The shimmering spear shot upward, passing soundlessly through the roof of the house. At the same moment, several miles away, Caesar’s body disappeared in similar fashion from the front seat of his car.

  It would be almost an hour before Caesar’s mother would look out her window and spot her son’s empty car. Tyree’s disappearance was noticed in seconds.

  Kayla, upon sampling the bit of frosting her mother scooped up for her on a spoon, turned with a big grin. “Oh, Daddy, it’s the bestest frosting Mommy’s ever made—” And she stopped short upon seeing that the chair where her daddy had been sitting was empty.

  Kayla pouted, her feelings wounded. “Mommy, Daddy sneaked off again.”

  Behind her, Emilia nodded without looking up. She was used to her husband’s sudden disappearances to take care of business. “I wouldn’t worry, baby. He’ll be back.”

  EVER WONDER what lies beneath Jupiter’s seething gas clouds? I looked and found a great ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen, through which massive electrical currents surged like writhing gargantuan serpents. No human instrument could ever explore those depths. Any robotic probe would burn to dust long before it even fully penetrated the Jovian atmosphere. And a craft that did, by some miracle, survive the hellish temperatures beneath the lower clouds would be crushed by atmospheric pressures millions of times that at the Earth’s surface.

  Swirling in energy beams that moved at the speed of light, Tyree, Owen, and Caesar were transported molecule by molecule into the unfathomable liquid metal of Jupiter’s interior. I forced open a tiny pocket within that alien ocean and reassembled the three killers, generously sharing my awareness with them so that each man understood where he now was and what was about to happen to him. From the terror of their perspectives, death was forever in coming. Their demise actually occurred in a fraction of a second, which is how long their bodies remained intact before the incredible weight of Jupiter’s atmosphere took its toll.

  I’ll spare you the gruesome details of what such colossal pressure does to something as frail as a human body. Just know that it wasn’t pretty.

  STANDING IN the abandoned loading bay, I took a moment to reflect upon my handiwork thus far and saw that it was good.

  10

  “LORD….”

  I looked over my shoulder. There was a black woman, about eighteen or so, standing behind me in the loading bay, wearing a red blouse, tight black jeans, sneakers, and a stunned expression. When I looked at her, she became frightened and quickly tried to hide it. Her thoughts came through to me like a shout: This crazy fool is buck naked.

  Odd. My new brain could perceive the thoughts of every mind on earth, but somehow it didn’t pick up on the fact that I was standing in broad daylight without a stitch on. Before dying, I had despised my body and was fanatical about keeping it covered. I flunked my ninth grade gym class because I refused to shower with my other classmates. Now, standing naked in front of this stranger didn’t seem all that important. I did become annoyed, however, when the woman looked me up and down and she thought, God, what a freak, which struck me as rude.

  The woman eased around me in a wide arc, as if I were some kind of nasty, snarling dog. Once she was safely past, she broke into a run, disappearing around the bend in her rush toward Belz Avenue.

  You would think that in the act of rebirth, all my physical flaws would have been corrected. But no, here were the same bony, pimply legs, complete with the various scars I’d collected over the years; the same navel protruding like a bubble waiting to be popped; the same birdlike chest; the same skinny, hairless arms. Then again, I was alive and in control of fantastic supernatural abilities, so who was I to complain? I called on those gifts, pulling in molecules of air and rearranging them into a pair of white boxers, blue jeans, a blue T-shirt, and white sneakers. There was work to do, and I was eager to be about it, for I was now among the rarest of all things on earth—a poor kid with power.

  At my feet was an object the size and shape of a basketball. Once I was dressed, I picked the item up and turned it over in my hands. It was a beautiful thing, resembling nothing so much as a big, silvery pearl. This was the object responsible for my new state of being. It had once been in the center of the earth’s molten core. Over the eons, seismic pressures had gradually squeezed it to the surface. The thing came to light a week ago in a dusty, vacant lot just a few blocks away on Florida Street. A ten-year-old boy had found it there. Thinking it was a ball, he had brought it to this loading bay, along with a group of his friends, for an impromptu game of soccer. The game had gone fine until the orb’s density suddenly and mysteriously increased in midflight, causing it to hit the ground and punch a hole in the concrete. The kids couldn’t lift it after that, so they left it.

  Of course, it was not a toy. It was a machine, assembled five billion years ago by an awesome intelligence, programmed, and tossed into space to perform its assigned task, which it did flawlessly. It gathered material to itself and made the earth.

  When the Hulk was stomping the life out of my puny body, some of my blood had splashed (yes, he was hitting me that hard) onto the orb. Once again, it fulfilled its function, taking the blood and making a new Micah McGhee. In doing so, it had given my mind direct access to certain parts of itself—the only such link it had ever
allowed. It was recording the thoughts of every person on earth, something it had been doing since the first human came along. I could tap into those recordings anytime I wanted to. The orb was also capable of manipulating matter and energy, a function that it had now placed under my complete control.

  I studied the orb for several moments. The method of its construction was beyond my understanding. But if I may get dramatic for a moment, this was the power of creation—definitely not the sort of thing to leave lying around.

  I focused the orb’s power with the intention of transporting it off earth as I had done with Caesar, Owen, and Tyree. My reward was a migraine exploding behind my eyes like a rocket burst. A wave of nausea roared through me, and if I had eaten lunch that day, it would have decorated the loading bay floor now. The orb fell to the ground with a sharp, metallic clang, gouging a second crater for itself. The loading bay turned a flip, and I lost my balance, sitting down hard on the concrete.

  I leaned forward, arms draped over my upraised knees, chin resting on my chest. The sickness passed as quickly as it had come. After drawing several deep breaths, I opened my eyes and found the world steady again. Wow. Do not try that again.

  Apparently, the orb reflected any energy directed at it back upon the energy’s source. After getting to my feet, I decided to adopt a different tack. I thought how nice it would be if the orb were buried somewhere no other human could easily reach it. A mile-long shaft appeared instantly beneath the orb, and it dropped from sight. The plunge took several seconds. Once the orb hit bottom, I materialized dirt and rock above it, sealing it away.

  When I awoke that Sunday morning with some seven billion voices crying out a multitude of needs in my head, three urges overrode them all. With the two bodies gone from the loading bay, my killers punished, and the orb secured, those urges had been satisfied. I was now free to consider my next move.

  I held the kind of power that every human being longs for in some form or another. Almost any material need could be met with no more effort than a thought; wishing a thing would literally make it so. That knowledge should have been as tantalizing as a fresh-baked cookie on a child’s plate. Growing up, I had never gone hungry, unclothed, or without shelter, but there was a multitude of things I’d wanted that Mama simply couldn’t afford. And in the months since her death, it had been all I could do just to keep myself housed and fed.

  I’d dreamed of having a car so I would never have to ride a city bus again. And tons of money in the bank. And a humongous flat-screen TV. And lots and lots of clothes. And a girlfriend. A nice, sweet, smart, gorgeous, do-anything-for-you girlfriend. Only, now that I could have any of those things, they weren’t a priority anymore.

  At any given moment, there is a great deal of suffering among seven billion souls. I remembered some of the prayers and emotions the orb fed into my brain before I broke off that contact. It’s one thing to know that there are starving people in the world. It’s something else when you actually feel the pain of their starvation and the complete hopelessness that goes with it. Hearing the prayers and feeling the anguish of the suffering touched my heart in a way nothing else had in my sixteen years. I had to help these people.

  Not even a demigod can do a billion things at once, however. I realized I would have to start small, as my tenth-grade English teacher had suggested on the morning I beat my head against his desk in frustration over the term paper he had ordered me to write.

  “I want to know about people who need help,” I said aloud. I’d begun to think of the orb as some kind of living thing, and I reminded myself that it was a machine that received my instructions whether I spoke them or not.

  At once, a chorus of voices erupted in my head, fed to me by the orb. “No, wait, that’s too much. Stop!” I clamped my hands uselessly over my ears. The voices stopped.

  Show me one person close by who’s in pain or needs—

  I didn’t get a chance to finish the thought. A single voice slipped into my head, crying softly. And with the voice came the crying person’s sight. I could “see” exactly where this grieving soul was.

  With the location fixed in my head, I walked back along the grassy path to Belz, turned left, strolled down to Third, and turned left again.

  11

  THE SURGE of grief was coming from the Greater Blessing Missionary Baptist Church, that imposing white complex on the west side of Third Street, two blocks below South Parkway. A white hearse was parked in front with two white limousines behind it. The sun beaming down from a cloudless blue sky rendered all that white blinding. Cars filled the parking lot to the south of the church. An organ dirge wafted from the building like the wail of a mortally wounded animal. Just the sort of thing to lift the mourners’ spirits.

  I climbed the steps, pushed through the stained-glass doors, and passed through a narrow foyer into the auditorium. The place was cavernous, making what was actually a large gathering appear somewhat small, scattered as it was among endless rows of white pine pews. Fifteen members of the Greater Blessing Men’s Chorus sat in the sprawling choir stand, moaning along with the organ, which seemed to be mercilessly tortured by the heavyset woman pumping away at its keys.

  A brass-colored casket rested on a bier in front of the pulpit. The deceased, one William James Freeman, was decked out in a black suit, looking like a figure carved from wax. His mother, a plump woman in her sixties, stood before the casket wearing a gray dress, low-heeled black shoes, and a black box of a hat, replete with veil. She stroked Willie Freeman’s frozen face over and over while tears, mucus, and sweat dripped off her chin. She shook her head, slowly and repeatedly, as if to deny that her only child lay dead before her. It was her devastated thoughts that had drawn me here.

  Brother Freeman was much loved. There was hardly a dry eye in the place. Even the Reverend Marshall Duckett, a tall, gray-haired man who looked regal in his black robe, was dabbing away tears. The widow, however, seemed composed enough. Ramona Freeman stood to the left of her grieving mother-in-law, wearing an elegant black dress that complemented her slender figure. Her chin jutted bravely forward.

  The grief, at this range, was more than I could bear. From the back of the auditorium, I looked at the deceased and said, “Get up.”

  William J. Freeman sat up right away.

  Several things happened then. Three preteen boys, seated on one of the back pews, turned to gape at me in astonishment. Simultaneously, a collective gasp went up from the assemblage, along with several barked curses uttered by some who understandably forgot they were in the house of the Lord. Mother Freeman slapped her hands to her face and fell over backward in the throes of a myocardial infarction. Brother Freeman slapped his hands to his chest, feeling about for a wound that was no longer there.

  Then he caught sight of his wife, and a blend of outrage, disbelief, and horror surfaced in his face. “You shot me!”

  Another collective gasp escaped the mourners, this time interspersed with an “Oh my goodness!” here and a “Lord have mercy!” there. The stunned widow suddenly reached out and slammed the casket lid down. Brother Freeman screamed, threw his shoulder against the lid, and upended his casket, which slid to the floor in a rumbling crash.

  The Reverend Duckett, as if trying to inspire the congregation to praise, threw his hands above his head and began to shout, “Oh God! Oh God!” With the former corpse scrabbling about in an effort to gain his feet, all the while spitting out an inspired blend of profanities, the former widow kicked off her pumps and sprinted down the aisle toward me. Several of the congregants, their shock giving way to panic, leapt from the pews and bolted along the aisle ahead of her.

  This was not good.

  The prospect of being trampled by a stampeding crowd scared the hell out of me. My molecules flew apart in a flash, shooting through the doors and outside as invisibly as the wind. In my own panic, I had the presence of mind to do two things. Mother Freeman’s heart became whole again, leaving her on the floor in a faint but otherwise healthy. A
nd the memory of Ramona shooting Willie J. in a fit of anger vanished from the couple’s heads. The mourners who heard Willie J.’s shout suddenly had no memory of it. Mr. and Mrs. Freeman now believed what everyone else had believed all along, that Willie J. had accidentally shot himself while handling his gun. I thought about punishing Ramona for murdering her husband, but something in me balked at the idea.

  As I flew away, people ran screaming from the church. Their horror was much more painful to me than their grief had been, and I wanted to escape it. My incorporeal form shot northward in a ray of light.

  THE MAN’S body was skeletal, his head bald. The skin on his face, neck, arms, and hands had an odd, grayish, flaky texture from an out-of-control fungus. Wearing blue linen pants and a white, short-sleeved sweatshirt, he walked barefoot along the narrow walkway, enjoying the feel of the hot concrete on his soles. Although he was thirty-three, he moved with the slow, unsteady gait of a man sixty years older. He made it halfway to the street before fatigue and shortness of breath stopped him.

  That he could no longer make it to the street saddened him deeply. He stood in the sunshine to catch his breath and gather his strength. The hot air felt good to him. Lately, he had been plagued with chills. A week ago, he had signed himself out of the Methodist Hospital on Union Avenue. He had just recovered from his third bout of pneumonia, but his doctors weren’t hopeful. He was tired of illness and medicines and tests and doctors and hospitals and the virus that was swiftly eating away at his body.