Lesser Gods

by Duncan Long

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  There was no answer.

  I stood motionless, watching and listening. Then, for some crazy reason, I remembered my prayer.

  With a shudder I knew. There was no doubt. Deep in my bones, I knew. My prayer had been answered. Alice was here, coming to me. That was it. I should go down to meet her.

  No! My rational self argued against such an act and my fingers dug into the wood of the door frame as if my feet might try to drag me downstairs against my will. It was insane to even imagine that Alice could come back. What had I been thinking of?

  Jesus spoke, “I’ve sent your wife back to you.”

  “No,” I groaned softly. “This is crazy.”

  But whoever it was downstairs was lingering in the living room. I listened attentively, my heart pounding in my ears.

  Then the shuffling feet began again, slowly winding through the hallway, step by labored step, to the foot of the stairs. Then I saw it. The figure paused in the shadows, as if waiting for something, obscure and impossible to make out.

  I crept forward into the hallway for a better look, peering over the railing into the gloom. Seeing nothing, I stepped back. My fingers snaked toward the light switch. I found it and flipped the lever, yet nothing happened.

  The electricity must be off, I thought. Someone must have cut the power and then broken in. I ought to go back into the bedroom and lock the door. But I couldn’t call the police; the only phone was an ancient hardwired unit downstairs in the kitchen. Indecision paralyzed me. I stood and listened and waited, just as the form in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs did.

  “Who are you?” I cried at last. “What do you want?”

  The stranger moved out of the shadows, dragging one foot behind her, as she mounted the first step.

  I inched toward the railing and peered down the stairwell into the gloom. At that moment the moon appeared from behind a cloud and shone through the stained glass window on the landing, throwing a red glow like a pool of blood across the floor.

  The form that slowly ascended the steps, its gossamer clothing billowing softly as if the wind were blowing, yet the air was deathly still and I felt no hint of a breeze in the hallway.

  I stood transfixed, knowing I should turn away and run. “Alice? Is that you?”

  There was no answer.

  It can’t be Alice.

  The figure was halfway up the stairs, glowing ever so slightly in the moonlight.

  “Alice?” I called again, almost hysterically, as if I were no longer in control of my voice.

  “I’ve come back,” the apparition whispered.

  “Come back?”

  The figure paused at the top of the stairway and I gasped, still frozen where I stood, peering into the darkness, wishing the lights would come on. “Alice,” I cried as she resumed her approach.

  “I’ve come back,” she murmured again, lifting her face as the moonlight fully lit her.

  I found myself staring into empty, hollow eye sockets.

  “Your prayer has been answered,” she crooned, her lips cracking and falling away to reveal a crooked, toothless grin on her mummy face.

  Then I realized my mistake. I had simply prayed she come back from the dead — but hadn’t asked that she be restored to what she had been in life. She had come back the way she had become in the grave. I tried to scream as she took my hand in her bony fingers and pulled me toward her bosom.

  “Kiss me,” she commanded.

  My screams finally escaped and echoed in the wide hallway. Then I clutched at my heart, only vaguely aware through the cloud of fear that a pounding pain had taken root in my chest like a cancerous weed. I sank to my knees and then sprawled across the hard wooden floor.

  Alice knelt beside me. “Having troubles?”

  “Heart attack,” I said through shivering lips.

  “Your heart was always weak, wasn’t it? But don’t worry, my love.”

  “You… You could call. The phone’s in the kitchen.” I gasped at the pain that shot down my arm. “Nine, one, one.”

  “No, no. After you die I’ll hide and let them take your body. Then, at the proper time, I’ll bring you back the same way you brought me back — I’ve been here in spirit watching all you did. After the worms have worked on you for a few years, we’ll be the perfect couple, a matched set. You won’t be so fearful of me once we’re alike.”

  “No,” I gasped, averting my eyes from the horror kneeling next to me. “Oh God, not that.” I groaned at the crushing weight on my chest.

  “See you soon, dear.”

  The darkness descended over me.

  Chapter 12

  Jacque Thuriot de La Tribunat

  The French soldiers, clad in their 1800s uniforms, fired a volley of shots from their muskets, momentarily vanishing in thick blue gunsmoke as they knelt to reload. Down the hill, the ranks of British troops thinned as the lead balls from the fusillade found their targets. The remaining Englishmen continued their illfated charge up the hill, bayonets gleaming in the sunlight.

  I sat calmly in the middle of the Battle of Waterloo, marveling at the slaughter going on around me, made all the more real by the small quantity of Jet I’d taken, smuggled to the Moon in a small vial in my uniform.

  Then I noticed the phosphorescent letters that appeared from the row of thundering cannons. The letters drifted through the black smoke that filled the air, dancing toward Napoleon, who stood majestically in front of his troops, blissfully unaware of the modern intrusion into his imminent defeat.

  Unlike Napoleon, who stoically ignored the glowing script, my response was to swear loudly. I hated the “scrolling alert” feature 3D corporations added to their broadcasts. Having letters dance around the room while viewing a historic panorama was nothing less than an irritation. Besides that, the reports were seldom “breaking news” at all (as required by law); more often they were simply press releases from corporations stealing free airtime under the guise of breaking news. Situé fraudes!

  Worse, the feature could not be switched off. An additional frustration — courtesy of French legislators who worked hand-in-glove with the big corporations.

  My finger tapped the button that appeared to float in the air in front of me and a menu sprang to life. I was about to point to “Delete News Scroll” when I actually read what the headline said, “United Interplanetary Mining Crew Dies Unexpectedly.”

  “What?” I whispered, my voice lost in another massive discharge of weapons by the row of riflemen. I wished now I hadn’t taken the Jet — it clouded my thinking. France was heavily invested in UIM since the company used the French hyperdrive units. While it wasn’t in my job description, the Emperor often inquired as to what I thought about this or that bit of news. I was his, Lien vers l’homme du commun, as he put it.

  And it irritated him when I wasn’t up on the news.

  It’s never good to irritate an employer. So I tried to keep up on any news that involved French interests.

  I closed the menu and double tapped on the message with my virtual finger as the letters glided above a pile of dead British troopers who had been the object of French wrath. I chose the print version of the story which would give me the facts quicker without the usual video filler.

  In a blink, the battlefield faded into a ghostly background; somewhat incongruently, three company spokesmen in 1700s style dress, now in vogue with French corporations for reasons I would never understand, faced a camera that had captured their still image, making them look like deer in powdered wigs, caught in the headlight of an oncoming truck carrying a load of lawsuits. Alongside them was the story.

  United Interplanetary Mining Crew Dies Unexpectedly

  Paris — Les inspecteurs fédéraux failed to conduct nearly a third of required inspections of the quantum mechanics machinery used by UIM during its recent illfated mission during which both the space mining vessel crew as well as the Earth-based remote operators died. The French-made Deep S
pace Horizon ship had previously had a flawless record with no injuries or deaths, according to government records.

  Inspections carried out by the UN Minerals Management Service found no sign of trouble with the Earth-based half of the quantum device or with the new form of Jet employed by the company, according to documents posted Thursday by the UN MMS at its website.

  The MMS reports, including one dated three weeks before the deadly mishap, indicate that the quantum device was functioning properly. However, the records regarding testing of the new form of Jet have mysteriously vanished, according to unnamed sources. UN president Jim Boxeem promised a complete and lengthy investigation. “We plan on getting to the bottom of this so another accident like this can never occur again.”

  My thoughts were interrupted by a massive discharge of weapons by the row of French riflemen that had been frozen in the scene behind the news story that now vanished. Why was the display malfunctioning?

  Napoleon seemed to be eyeing me. He wore an eye patch.

  “An eye patch?” The Jet must be getting to me.

  “You look concerned,” Napoleon said, looking directly at me.

  “Program stop,” I ordered.

  Napoleon dismounted from his horse and strode across the grass to stand in front of me, drawing his saber as he came.

  “Program stop!” I demanded.

  “Perhaps you should retrieve a sword from one of my officers,” the dictator suggested, motioning one of his men over. The officer presented his sword to me grip first, as any gentleman would. Without thinking, I reached for it and, to my surprise, grasped the sword, feeling its cold hilt in my hand.

  Must have fallen asleep, I thought. A drug-hazed sleep in front of the console. La seule explication qui avait du sens.

  “No,” Napoleon said, flipping his blade toward me with a practiced flick. “This is quite real.”

  I felt a burning on my cheek. Raising my hand I felt the blood oozing from the grazing wound.

  “If you won’t fight, I’ll simply cut you to ribbons, little by little,” the dictator said, flexing his sword arm back and forth to get the kinks out of tired muscles, the blade singing through the air as he did so. “I know you’ve trained long and hard with the sword. A hobby. Now you can put your training to the test.”

  I raised my sword to a defensive position, and Napoleon was upon me, fighting like a demon.

  Real sword fights are generally over in a moment. One opponent gets lucky, takes advantage of the ground the fighters are on, or executes an unexpected move that catches the other off guard. There’s not a lot of clanging, footwork, or parrying; it is quick and deadly work.

  That’s how it was with this fight. Even though I had kept well back, taking into account the reach of our blades, my opponent charged with reckless abandon. I did have the satisfaction of seeing my blade graze his side, immediately drawing a stain of blood in his jacket.

  But he ignored the wound and lunged, and as I attempted to parry and step aside, I tripped on a rifle left by a fallen soldier.

  “Ha!” Napoleon cried, pouncing on me as I struggled to rise. His blade sliced through my throat and I realized, in the flow of dark blood that followed, he had severed my jugular vein.

  With disbelief I sat on the ground, everything becoming dark around me. I must be dreaming. There’s no other explanation.

  “No,” Napoleon said, glazing down at me with his one good eye. “You are dying. Prepare to meet your maker.”

  Ralph Crocker

  I awoke with a crushing pain in my chest, unsure whether I had somehow gone through the chilling resurrection of Alice in a SupeR-G, or whether a blow to my head had produced an addled but vivid hallucination.

  The two government thuggites, seeing I had regained consciousness, lifted me to my feat and bashed me up the side of the head for good measure. The strike to my head got my undivided attention, once I quit stargazing.

  They had a really simple message: “Stay out of our business,” the uglier of the two snarled. “Huntington’s ours.”

  “Huntington?” I said, trying my dumb routine.

  I was rewarded with another blow to the scalp, sending a trickle of blood flowing down my brow and across my cheek.

  “Death isn’t working for us any more,” the agent told me. “And that means you’re off the case, too.”

  “How about my pay? He owes me some money for all the work I’ve been doing. Who’s going to — “

  Another whack to my head left me without any more questions about pay or what I should be doing from now on.

  They turned my semi-conscious body over to a local cop whose hydraulic glove threatened to break my shoulder as he stood me at attention like a toy soldier. A second policeman tossed livecuffs at my wrists and the device coiled itself around my arms. The officer then methodically removed all my guns and knives, double-checking with a sniffer to be sure they’d missed nothing; the device bleeped a warning of the new claymore I’d mounted on my leg.

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t find this,” he said, placing my claymore into his booty bag. “Unless you’d like me to charge you with possession of a destructive device.”

  “There’s a law against owning a claymore?”

  “Five to ten.”

  “It’s yours,” He might have been bluffing, but I suspected not. As of late, the Supremes had been trying to downgrade the armament the citizenry carried on the streets, and I didn’t relish the idea of a jail term. Not when there was most likely a seven-foot tall professional prisoner wanting to rename me Rachel and initiate me into his harem.

  Finally the policeman relieved me of my PDA and billfold which vanished into the booty bag as well. Satisfied he’d confiscated everything worth stealing, the cops escorted me to the street where, after we dodged a couple of Snipe’s rounds, I was tossed into the back of a patrol car. The vehicle automatically drove itself to the nearest working courthouse a mile away, the one in our neighborhood having been burnt down by outraged citizens during the tax protests five years before.

  As I traveled, I did my best to avoid the mechanical arm that snaked inside my traveling cell that was the patrol car. But the claw finally caught its prey and then tightened to secure me, motionless in the seat. My cursing had no effect as the device plunged a needle into my arm, extracting a blood sample for the small lab built into the vehicle. The sample went into the system that hummed while I watched my freedom passing before my eyes.

  Thirty seconds later a tinny voice announced, “Controlled substance detected. Statute number four thirty-one has been disobeyed.”

  I wasn’t really up on controlled substances, but figured it had to be the jet, which had undoubtedly left a trace in my bloodstream. It was the only controlled substance I could think of that I’d used over the last few years since I’d cleaned up my act. With a sinking feeling I realized that if I hadn’t been in serious trouble before, I was now.

  Five minutes later we reached the bullet-pocked steel courthouse and the plastic-encased back seat of the patrol car became my porta-cell. The unit ejected itself from the car onto the loading dock where a robotic hand grasped my cell and placed it on a conveyer line.

  I tentatively tried kicking the side of my cell, only to be rewarded with a pre-recorded message, “Destruction of police property will increase sentencing time by ten percent.”

  I didn’t try kicking it again. Even a few extra days in a modern prison could easily mean the difference between life and death.

  Before I’d even reached the underground court area, the speaker in my traveling slammer announced, “Under the authority vested in this government computer by the Supremes, you have been found guilty of abuse of an unauthorized controlled substance number four thirty-one, AKA jet or hacker sauce. Any statements you make will be ignored as per Penal Code two million, five hundred thousand, four hundred, fifty-six of the addendum to the Patriot Act Revision of 2014. You will be sentenced momentarily when you reach the courtroom.”

 
I didn’t wait long.

  The charges were repeated as my porta-cell jerked alone the cable into the steel-walled chamber that served as the courtroom. A super computer presided at the judge’s seat with a pair of worn TV cameras bearing mute witness, carefully recording the event being broadcast to thousands of web sites and a few odd public access channels.

  “You are sentenced to four months of detoxification,” the computer rasped at me. “Due to the suspension of habeas corpus, this judgment is final and you have no right to appeal.”

  “Four months? Wait a minute, there must be a mistake. Four months can’t possibly be the correct sentence for —”

  “Next.”

  “Wait a minute!” I yelled helplessly as the conveyer line started, whisking me out of the courtroom and upward toward the surface even as a mechanical hand reached through the bars and injected a tiny RFID into the back of my neck. My cell emerged into the darkness of twilight where another crane removed my container from the cable and stacked me into a pile of cubicles, each with another misfit trapped inside.

  “Where we headed,” I yelled through my plastic bars to the tired-looking recomb sitting in the cubicle next to mine.

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “To me.”

  He smiled a grin that revealed a double line of stainless steel teeth. “Timothy Leary’s House for the Addicted.”

  I know my face grew pale. “You’re kidding. I thought they closed that place down two years ago.”

  “Reopened it shortly thereafter. Governmental economizing, you know.”

  I didn’t have a chance to say anything else because the roboarm clanged another cell on top of mine, completing the load. Our automated truck lurched to a start, pulling out of the dock, to speed through the night, taking me to Timothy Leary’s Home for the Addicted, the world’s first — and most notoriously unsuccessful — experiment in automated mental health care.

  Chapter 13