“I’ve been looking for you.”
Tremors rattled through the sub-atomic structure of the barber shop. I was having a hard time pretending not to notice. The regulars were cackling and elbowing each other: BoomBoom must have let off a hot one. But my rejoinder would have to wait.
“My God,” the Voice trumpeted. “For a decade have I searched! Finally I am rewarded for my unflagging service!”
The voice was cold, its timbre unfamiliar. The arrogance however, was not.
Oh no. Not him.
“What do you want?”
“Let the trumpets sound! For Holy! Holy! Holy! is the Presence of the Lord!”
The giant hand withdrew back into the mirror, and the ripples of shredded reality healed themselves with a million sizzling snaps as the blare of a thousand trumpets announced to the universe that my day was about to slide down the toilet.
There came a blinding flash, the resonance of a million throats serenading me… well the former me. When my vision cleared I saw that everything had stopped: BoomBoom and Old Luke stood, immobilized in mid laugh. The regulars hovered, trapped between moments. I glanced at the digital clock on the wall: its readout flickered, held in still-time like a fly in amber. Whoever the intruder was, he or she was a Power; someone with lots of heavenly capital to spend and no conscience.
The visitor stepped out of the glow, its shining face averted at just the right angle of prideful deference. It was one of the heavy hitters alright: an archangel. And not just any garden variety archangel either.
“Gabriel. What are you doing here?”
Gabriel had clothed itself in a synthetic human seeming, male and icily perfect. In this body, he was over six feet tall, long limbed and athletically slender. A cascade of curly black hair surrounded silver eyes as bright as a winter lightning strike. Full black lips accented fatal cheekbones and a lantern jaw. Lush, white wings flickered in and out of visibility at his muscular shoulders.
“Eternal Master,” Gabriel breathed. “At last.”
The Angel of the Morning dropped to one perfect knee and bowed his head.
“Damn it.”
“Damn what, my Lord? Only show me the soul to be damned and I will carry it to Hell myself!”
“Why have you interrupted my sabbatical, Gabriel? I left strict instructions not to be disturbed.”
Gabriel looked up at me from beneath his midnight tresses. The cosmic devotion shining from his eyes was enough to turn my stomach.
“You must return, Lord. You are needed.”
Gabriel floated across the room, hovering between the beats of a nanosecond as he shimmered through a myriad potential shapes: one moment an elemental spirit wrapped within its throbbing halo, the next a darkling cloud of electrons whirling about a sunbright core, the next a luminous winged humanoid armed with a shining sword.
Two things people don’t know about angels: one, they experience the entirety of their physical existence simultaneously; somatically linked to their future and past selves, they can read a limited distance into their own future or peer into their distant past. Two, I didn’t make them. Well, “I” did, in the sense that all consciousness is the by-product of universes: you, your dog… and most empirically… me. Universal consciousness evolves as its observers develop more complex methods to perceive it. Mortal sentience arises from a universe’s need to understand itself. But Immortal consciousness arises from humanity’s need to control an unpredictable universe. Humans identify patterns in order to master their surroundings. Sometimes those patterns are useful.
For example…
But many times the patterns humans intuit are wildly unreliable.
And when human survival dictated that mortals believe the universe answers to them, they tapped into the Eshuum and defined their gods. Gods then channeled the cosmic power of the evolving universe to forward human agendas like sex, inter-tribal conquest, sex, religious warfare, sex, incest, incestuous sex, genocide, and sex.
Angels, however, exist outside this eternal cycle of creation/awareness/destruction. Each one is a cosmic singularity, and all of them, all nine million of them, are utterly devoted to me. And before you stop to wonder if such devotion is a good thing: Imagine yourself as Daniel Gallagher, Michael Douglas’ character in Fatal Attraction. Now imagine Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), only immortal and able to travel vast distances in the blink of an eye. Now imagine all those psychotic demi-divinities violently in love… with you. Finally, remember that there are precisely nine million of them. Angels: cosmic pains in My All Powerful Arse.
“What’s the problem, Gabriel?”
Gabriel’s lightning-hued eyes darkened, but only for a moment.
“I understand, Lord! You question me to encourage me to think, that I might grasp Thy Will, and my place within It.”
Gabriel’s brow furrowed with angelic cogitation.
“You want me to choose which aspect of the problem is most pressing, thereby revealing some unfathomed aspect of my spiritual state and illuminating my destiny in ways which reflect Your unrelenting omniscience!”
Never question an angel when it believes you know all the answers. The resulting mental vaporlock could outlast an ice age.
“Exactly. Tell me.”
“An Incursion, Lord. In Rome. The worst in a millennium. Thousands injured.” Gabriel cackled, gleefully rubbing his hands together like a cub scout warming himself over a campfire. “At least ten thousand mortals have died horribly.”
Another angelic fact: angels only help humans because I conscripted them into my service. Without the devotion they feel toward me, most wouldn’t urinate on a burning nun. Angels believe themselves the only beings in all of Creation worthy of God’s attention.
Gabriel averted his eyes. But I didn’t need godlike perspective to mark the ugly smirk on his beautiful face.
“Well?”
“Well what, Lord?”
“Who is it?”
My headache, a dull throb after my duel with Zeus only two days ago, was ramping itself up to a shrill pounding; a sure sign that something was happening.
“The name, Gabriel.”
“Ah! It’s Hannibal, Lord. The GodKing of the Carthaginians. He’s already gutted half of Rome and is marching on the Vatican even as we speak. All of which you already know, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I have the answer, Lord! The ‘problem’, as you put it, is complex in its scope and manifold in its severity. But I have sounded it to a suitable depth to answer your challenge.”
“Perfect. And… your conclusion?”
“Hannibal has mounted a mighty army of the dead to assault the mortal pontiff. Five thousand Nubians, seven thousand Carthaginian revenants, a thousand zombies, a thousand undead elephants! Forgive me, Mighty One. I know you know these things, so I will be brief. Hannibal sent a message. Shall I…?”
“Go on.”
Gabriel squared his shoulders and shook the hair out of his perfect eyes. (Did I mention that he was naked? All angels love to display their perfection. Gabriel shone with the energies of the universe, statuesque and perfectly androgynous, the joining at his inner thighs as smooth as a baby’s butt.) He cleared his throat and unruffled his spectral wings.
“Hannibal, Scourge of Rome and Terror of Nations, bids me offer the God of the Israelites a warning: ‘I have come to exact my vengeance on the Mothering Whore that is Roma. Roma, that festering gash from whence flows every corruption, every vice and foul perversion; Roma, that fountain of false piety whose every spurt fills the world with lies; Roma, the Shuddering Ram whose every thrust impregnates the world with–’”
“I get it. Go on.”
“‘If the God of the Christians dares to show his scruffy beard anywhere in the vicinity of my conquest I will eviscerate his followers everywhere they cry his name. I will lay siege to the gates of his heaven and drag him screaming through its golden streets. Tell him, Gabriel. Tell him, it’s Hannibal Time.”
“�
��Hannibal Time’?”
“Aye, Lord. Hannibal has been researching contemporary society from his demesne in Hell, and prides himself on his crossover appeal. He believes that his defeat of the papists will usher in a new era of enlightenment with himself as its godhead.”
The intensity of my headache kicked up a notch, and from somewhere in my subconscious I heard them: thousands of prayers filtering up from my subconscious. Soon the pressure would be unbearable.
“Take me to Rome, Gabriel.”
“But, Lord… surely you are already there!”
“Now, Gabriel.”
Gabriel bowed his head, spread his wings…
…and…
…cold pummels my flesh, flays my skin with daggers of ice. My lungs kick as the air inside my body tries to escape into the vacuum of lethal velocity. Gabriel has plunged us directly into the void of voids; the no-place from which all Creation sprang. But the cold and lack of oxygen can kill me. I sense the aura of divinity humming around Gabriel and sink tendrils of thought into its pulsing vitality. With the divinity I still possess, I wrap Gabriel’s aura around myself and hang on for dear life.
“Traitor.”
The abandoned lifeforce that haunts these void-spaces whispers my secret names as we streak through its black potential. It sings a song of welcome and rebuke. Its song is distracting, beautiful… lethal...
“Why did you forsake me?”
…but ignoring the universal lifeforce is like arguing with an angry parent: its anger penetrates my defenses.
Surabhi.
No. I’ve done enough. I’m owed one human life and I mean to live it before I return to the void. It’s worth a near death event to see my Plan come to fruition. I only have to survive the next twenty seconds. But in the Big Empty time loses direction; distances become meaningless.
A long time ago, in a galaxy where all the single ladies live…
Nanoseconds stretch toward eternity, atoms shuck their nuclei and party like it’s 1984, tearing at Gabriel’s defenses… at me…
Ask not what you can do unto others…
…pulling me apart/pushing me together, stretching my purely subjective reality like superstrings made from Laffy Taffy…
…but what others can dobeedoodadaaayyyy…
I am streaking through the void, snuggled inside shimmering fragments of Gabriel’s aurastreamingliketheglowingarmsofsomepressuresuckingseacreature… and… this
is
what
an
archangel
really
…looks like; a mass of coruscating tendrils laced with electric venom, streaming in the cosmic winds – oh Hell I’m getting poetic I’m dying dying dying in the absence of too much darkness can’t breathe have to…
Hold on.
It’s too much. I need power if I’m going to survive this brief journey through Eternity.
Just enough… to… grab… to reach… hold on…
I reach into the void, open my mind to the shimmering remnants of godforce that was me. That power sings to me, and its voice is the voice of All.
“I AM ALONE.”
I reach for the power, just enough to protect me. But…
“Betrayer.”
…pain detonates in my head. Crimson fire whipsaws through my brain and lights up my world in Fourth of July skybursts of red wrath.
“You were All. Now you are Nothing.”
A brilliant red forbidding fills up my senses, blinds my ears and deafens my eyes. And the power, my power, speaks with a stranger’s voice.
“Once-God, you stand at the Moment Before. Soon, the One Who Was must fall before me.”
“No! Stop!”
“Human. Yet still you fight.”
The voice in the whirlwind laughs. It is hard, male and female, ancient and filled with the arrogance of youth, scorching my flesh with Winter’s deepest breath.
“Your services are no longer required, once-God,” the voice says. “I’m here.”
And we’re there.
Rome is burning, its towers and cathedrals collapsing before the forces of chaos. Through a haze of pain and the thundering of my heart, I smell smoke. I can hear the screams of thousands of terrified people echoing all around me.
“Get out of the way!”
“Run!”
“Not that way!”
The wail of sirens overrides the voices; the earth beneath me shakes.
“Elephants!”
“Elephants in the Vatican!”
People are stampeding past me, moving in a living wave away from a line of massive shapes lumbering out of the billowing black clouds. A man dragging a screaming woman and a bloody-faced teenager slams into me and knocks me down. The impact restores my mortal perceptions. Time flips itself inside out… and…
I fell to the concrete and was immediately kicked in the butt. Someone stumbled over my feet and fell on top of me. The person quickly rolled away, an obese American tourist wearing an I Luv Texas T-shirt. The T-shirt featured the Texas state flag, a gun and a bible.
“Run, you fool! It’s Al Quaeeeda!”
The sounds of chaos doubled in volume. More people stumbled over me and fell to the ground. Close by, a young woman fell beneath the scrambling crowd. The fat Texan stepped on her. I heard the snap as her knee broke.
Gotta find Hannibal.
I climbed to my feet, struggling to get my bearings. But the smoke and chaos were all consuming. I had no idea where to start.
“At last, my vengeance is complete.”
The voice was cold, heavily accented. I looked up in time to see a golden god float out of the black smoke.
“Well, this is going to be easier than I thought.”
Hannibal of Carthage smiled, a wolf’s grin, a ghoul’s leer.
Then he raised his sword.
CHAPTER V
WHEN IN ROME, KILL THE POPE
In life, Hannibal Barca, son of Hamilcar, was a great Carthaginian warlord. He drove a massive war party across the Pyrenees and the Alps to sack northern Italy during the Second Punic War. He brought fire and bloodshed and the fear of invasion to the invincible Roman Empire. Hannibal was finally defeated by Scipio Africanus only after occupying great tracts of Italy for nearly fifteen years. Along with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, he attained immortal glory as one of the greatest military strategists of all time. He was a fierce warrior and widely feared homicidal maniac. Now, here he loomed, his lust for vengeance shimmering around him like heat haze off hot blacktop.
Thick, curly black hair framed his wolfish face. His skin, once browned by a thousand campaigns fought beneath sunny Mediterranean skies, now held the pallor of death: after two millennia in Hades he hadn’t gotten much in the way of sunlight. Even so, long, rangy muscles knotted and clenched along his wiry frame. His breastplate flashed in the dying sunlight: the golden eagle of the Phoenicians, wings spread, rampant in horror and victory. The scimitar he gripped in his fists looked long enough to gut a narwhal. From where I knelt shuddering in the dust, he looked seventeen feet tall. But as the smoke cleared, I saw that he stood astride a shaggy African bull elephant as big as a mastodon.
“Rome trembles before me,” Hannibal crowed. “Trembles!”
A tight knot of media people had gathered behind me. Reporters, cameramen and women following Hannibal’s every move, shouting questions. “Who are you?” “What do you want?”
Hannibal turned and glared down at the reporters. He hadn’t spotted me. I was safe for the moment.
“Hello! Fancy meeting you in a place like this!”
Then his elephant recognized me.
“Pleasure. Would you mind ignoring me? I’m a little busy at the moment.
“You don’t look quite as I’d imagined,” the elephant said.
“I get that a lot.”
“Frankly I was expecting something more… elephantish. Name’s Persi by the way. Short for Perthon. And I’m actually one-quarter mastodon. Thanks for noticing
.”
A phalanx of undead Gallic mercenaries swept out of the chaos, their swords swinging as they drove frightened mortals ahead of them, slaughtering some, wounding others. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice me: the presence of the undead mastodon created a no go zone around which streamed mortal survivors and their undead pursuers; an island of relative calm just wide enough for me to collect my wits. I got to my feet, wincing at the thunderclap of pain in my head.
“The game has changed, Yahweh. You’ve been shut out.”
It sounded like the voice that had spoken out of the voidspace during my flight through the Eshuum. But if that were true, it meant that the intruder had taken control of some portion of the power of Creation without my full abdication. That had never happened before.
Beware. The Coming stalks us all.
Hannibal whirled his right arm over his head and brought it down with a violent, chopping motion. A sound similar to a gunshot tore the air, followed by what I can only describe as a wet explosion. When he drew back his arm, I saw the cat-o’-nine tails dangling from his fist; a long, leather handle with five steel-tipped claws arrayed at the end of a length of rawhide. The godking of Carthage whirled the cat around his head and flung it forward with an evil snap!
Glowing with stolen divinity, the tails of the cat flung themselves in several directions at once, each one striking a fleeing survivor. When they connected with living flesh, the effect was spectacular: his target exploded in a red spray of smashed bones and flying organs. Hannibal’s weapon moved with the speed and ferocity of a demonic daisy-cutter. Wherever he cast his tails, people blew up.
“You needlessly prolong your own suffering!” he thundered. “Bring me the rutting child-diddlers who run this whore’s nest and I will grant you peace!”
Last God Standing Page 5