His voice dwarfed the scream of the sirens. Fleeing mortals covered their ears as they fled before him: he was speaking in a Voice, somehow augmented to near divinity.
“Since our deaths, the master has been quite diligent in plotting his revenge.”
It was Persi, the quarter-mastodon. Hannibal was busily roaring at a knot of cowering tourists, thereby giving his mount a break.
“But how did he become a god?”
“Actually, he’s more avatar than god. Friends in high places, if you gather my meaning.”
The reporters surged around me, fighting to get closer to Hannibal: “Are you associated with the Taliban?”
“What’s your name?”
“Are you Pro-life?”
“Who are you wearing?”
Hannibal smirked. “Who is seeing this?”
One woman, a tall brunette with a deep tan and dynamite cleavage, stepped forward. I moved closer, melting into the crowd. My lungs were burning and my head was screaming at me to find a quiet place to lie down.
“Everyone with access to a television or the internet can see these images,” the buxom reporter said, her voice low, her accent northern Italian. Hannibal nodded and eyed the busty brunette appreciatively at the same time.
“Everyone, eh?” Then he raised his voice and addressed the cameras. “My name is Hannibal Barca, of Carthage, Phoenicia and Ibaria. I have fought my way out of a thousand Hells, crossed oceans of Time, even as I once crossed treacherous mountain ranges: with the thrust of my unbreakable will.”
The quarter-mastodon shook his head and rolled his eyes, his great ears flapping like leathery fans. “Name’s Persi by the way. Short for Perthon. Can you believe him? Seven of us were along on that last crossing. He drove my herdmates to their deaths, the selfish bastard.”
“I am come to do violence on this den of thieves,” Hannibal cried. “After a thousand mortal lifetimes I am come to claim Rome, in the name of my father, Hamilcar the Great, my brother Hasdrubal the Fierce, and my first cousin Hamadul the Unkempt. I come in the name of the People of Carthage!”
The reporters stared. The paparazzi and their camera crews stared. Finally, an old Italian woman who lay on the ground clutching her broken ankle broke the silence.
“What the hell is he talking about?”
The busty brunette stepped forward and thrust a microphone up toward Hannibal.
“Contessa Rosellini, CNN. Are you claiming that you’re not a terrorist?”
Hannibal smirked, even while his eyes did their best to pierce Rosselini’s blouse. “To the whoremasters of Rome, signora… I am terror.”
This sent an awkward pulse through the survivors. A pudgy reporter in a pink suit stepped forward. “What cell are you associated with?”
“Cell?” Hannibal barked. “Hell has been my prison cell for longer than you can imagine!”
“No no,” the pudgy reporter snipped. “Cell… as in terrorist sleeper cell. Which one are you working with?”
“I knew it. He’s a Muslim!” the old woman with the broken ankle shouted. “Look at that curly hair, the swarthy complexion!”
A British tourist, who was trying to staunch the blood pouring from a gash in her husband’s forehead, spoke up.
“He looks Italian to me.”
“Italian? Where are your brains, slut? Look at those shifty eyes. He’s an Arab!”
“Or a Jew!” someone among the reporters piped in. “He could be an Israeli. Look at that hooked nose.”
“That’s anti-semitic!” a bearded man standing next to me barked. “You’re all racists!”
The discussion erupted into a shouting match, most of it centered around which objectionable ethnicity the man on the mastodon might or might not claim. The reporters edged in closer, trying to out-shout each other, thrusting their microphones up at Hannibal.
“So,” the quarter-mastodon sighed. “Taking a break from running the Universe?”
My head was throbbing like a banshee in menopause. My chest was tightening with every breath and I was still unable to access the Eshuum. “Something like that.”
“Lovely. Everyone needs to get away every now and again. I remember when my cow and kids and I stormed Trebia. This was before Trasimene. I lost my cousin Sathanat and six herdmates at Trasimene. Terrible war. But in Trebia we trampled hundreds.”
“Good times.”
“Wonderful times! First real holiday I’d had in thirty years. I remember the first time we trampled some Romans…”
I tuned out the rest of Persi’s story: Hannibal was enjoying the heated looks coming from some of the women, and not a few of the men who still lived. But soon he would tire of the attention and people would start dying again. And I still couldn’t connect to the power.
Just then, six armored North African warriors trotted out of the smoke dragging a filthy old woman behind them.
“Master of Men! The Vatican burns. The Whore’s armies flee in terror before our forces. We have taken our vengeance!”
Hannibal smiled. His chin jutted even further, straining the tendons in his neck as he turned to the cameras and roared.
“Victory over our enemies! The Whore has fallen!”
The silence was deafening. Then questions peppered the smoky air. “Who is this psycho?” “Why are those Arabs dressed that way?” “What’s with all the elephants?”
“All in good time, my new subjects. All your questions shall be answered… in Hannibal Time.”
Hannibal turned to his lieutenants. “I see you have brought my quarry, General Rashid.”
General Rashid, a huge Nubian with shoulders like boxcars, grabbed the dirty old woman by the scruff of her filthy robes, eyeing the cameras as he spoke.
“Great One, we caught this cur trying to escape with several of his vassals. We slew them most atrociously. I have brought their leader to you for disposal.”
“Oops,” Persi the quarter-mastodon fluted. “Sounds like a trampling. That’s my department. If you could do something about my people’s plight I’d be most obliged. We’ve been enslaved for millennia and a few of us are starting to get a little anxious… if you take my meaning.”
The dirty old woman raised her head, and I saw that she was a man; a very old man with dirt in his teeth.
“Ah,” Hannibal stage whispered. “And now the foul head of the ancient serpent turns its cataracts to me.”
The dirty old man climbed painfully to his feet. Eying the cameras, he squared his shoulders, took a deep breath and said, “I see.”
“What do you see, O leader of a dead faith? Do you see the coming of the true Messiah? Hannibal of the Winding Ways! Heart-render and Loin-piercer! Do you see me?”
The reporters swiveled their cameras and microphones toward the dirty old man.
“What is this delusion that speaks out of thin air?” the Pope wheezed. I’d recognized him by his thick Irish brogue. And the phlegm. “I see nothing.”
Hannibal snarled. “What?”
The Pope lifted one palsied hand to his ear. “Is someone speaking? I seem to hear a buzzing about my ears. Damned Italian fleas.”
“Fleas?” Hannibal said. “Do you hear the Father of Deception, my friends? Rome burns. We undead have made a charnel pit of the Vatican: shattered her great beauty before the eyes of the world. Yet this ancient vampire denies what all can see with their own eyes!”
The reporters swiveled again. The abused Pontiff cleared his throat and spoke directly to the cameras.
“I see nothing.”
An audible gasp went up from the milling survivors.
“Rome has been struck by a series of cataclysms. Earthquakes. Perhaps a biochemical attack that induces violent delusions. My sources within the Holy City inform me that several terrorist organizations have claimed responsibility for much of the violence. Rome has been attacked by anti-Catholic forces bent on destroying our way of life.”
“Anti-Catholic forces?” Contessa Rossellini cried. “Are you talking
about Islamic Jihad? Here in Rome?”
The Pope shrugged. “I’m talking about a terrorist attack, missy. One cleverly timed to coincide with some heretofore unrecognized natural disaster. Nothing more.”
“Sword wielding assassins are running rampant through the streets of Rome,” Rosellini shouted. “Isn’t it ridiculous to deny something so obvious?”
“Your Holiness,” the chubby reporter in the pink suit shouted. “What about the elephants?”
“Several zoos have reported break-ins. We believe the terrorists’ plot involves using freed animals to create confusion in the streets.”
“But some of the elephants are clearly dead, your Grace.”
“Nonsense, my son. Those poor animals are obviously the victims of excessive sun exposure.”
“‘Sun exposure’, your Holiness?”
“That’s what I said, boyo. I’m sure that’s what the Church’s findings will be when these matters are resolved through the ongoing investigation which even now is… ongoing.”
“But, your Holiness…”
“Or would you rather go on record as having questioned God’s representative on Earth, and the judgment of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, thereby flouting the wisdom of the good people of Rome, every Catholic constituency in the free world and several hundred million of your own viewers?”
The chubby reporter looked away in shame.
“Good,” Hannibal snapped. “Now that that’s settled.”
He uncurled the blood-drenched cat-o’-nine tails from where it lay curled in his lap. Its steel tipped claws clicked as they banged lightly against the quarter mastodon’s knees.
“Bring him to me: I have papist pork to carve.”
“I didn’t hear that,” the Pope sang. “Nope. Nothing supernatural happening here.”
The Nubian warriors dragged the old man toward Hannibal.
I stepped forward. An undead legend beheading the sitting Pope before an international audience while Rome burned in the background might leave an indelible scar on the psychic flesh of human racial memory. Even a dimensional Reset might not be enough to heal the damage. Still, I had to try. I reached for the power…
But I was struck by a wave of nausea so intense that I nearly fainted. It felt as if a thin membrane had been drawn between my mind and the dimension the power occupied; the psychic interface hazy as a distant star glimpsed through brackish water.
“Swear your allegiance to your new master, false Pope. Swear allegiance to me, and perhaps I’ll allow you to serve the men as my comfort wench.”
“What’s that?” the Pope said. “Is that someone speaking?”
Hannibal slid off the back of his mount and landed lightly as a gymnast. He sheathed his cat-o’-nine tails, drew a long-bladed knife from a scabbard on his hip and rammed it through the Pope’s right shoulder.
“Can you hear me now?”
“An illusion!” the Pope gibbered, trying to staunch his gushing shoulder. “Some kind of psychosomatic stigmata brought on by atheist anti-Life, Jewish-Islamic extremists!”
Hannibal pulled his broadsword and raised it over the Pope’s head. “Wrong answer.”
The blade fell, whistling through the air, toward the Pope’s defiant face.
“Gabriel!”
The Carthaginian’s blade froze in midswing. Everything stopped as Gabriel appeared in front of me and the temporal anomaly that accompanied every angelic visitation dragged local spacetime to a halt.
“Yes, Mighty One?”
Everything would remain Stopped only for as long as Gabriel remained at my side. But the momentum of reality is so powerful that any substantive disruption of the spacetime continuum creates new problems: babies born before they were conceived; eggs hatched centuries after their descendants fertilized them... But how could I defeat Hannibal when I couldn’t access my own divinity?
As I was considering the extremely limited list of responses, Hannibal’s sword… moved.
“He’s resisting.”
“Resisting thy unassailable will, Lord?” Gabriel chuckled. “You’re testing me again, aren’t you? Or perhaps you’re assaying the infidelity of the big Mexican with the meat cleaver.”
“He’s not Mexican. He’s Carthaginian.”
I could sense Hannibal marshalling energies destructive enough to undermine temporal forces he couldn’t possibly have mastered. He was immobilized in time, but time was running out.
“I need Pluto.”
“The planet?”
“No, you idiot. Pluto, the Roman God of the Dead.”
“But, Lord, no pagan Death God has been active since–”
“Since they all agreed not to intervene in human affairs, yes I know. You have to go get him. Burbank. California. Check the Deadly Delights Horrorshop. He owns the place.”
At least I hoped he still did. Pluto was notoriously anti-social. For all I knew he might have sold his specialty bookshop and relocated to Miami Beach. But his absence from Hades had allowed Hannibal to escape. I needed his power.
“You’ll have to look for him under a different name. Greek, maybe Italian. I… Wait…”
There was a tremor in the fabric of spacetime, like the fibrillating heartbeat of a rogue quasar. The disruption was coming from Hannibal. He was glaring at me.
“You,” he growled. “I… see… you!”
His eyes were alight, focused, his muscles straining with the effort of fighting through Gabriel’s disruption.
“I… serve… I… serve… no god… but…”
I grasped for the dimension where my divinity reserves prowled… and felt the stirrings of power.
“Yes!”
I opened the interface, hoping for a glorious flood of force, and was rewarded with a halfhearted blurt of divinity. Not nearly enough.
Better call in a contractor.
Occasionally I could “farm out” certain incursion events to friendly deities with whom I maintained good working relations. The biggest challenge in choosing a contractor was choosing the right god for the job. Unfortunately, in Hannibal’s case, I knew exactly who to call.
I cast my consciousness into the infinite, seeking the energies of the one I hoped could help. Hannibal was moving his other arm by then; twisting his right leg, driving the ball of his sandaled foot into the dirt, shifting his weight, turning toward me, his black-rimmed eyes glinting in Phoenician fury.
“I… serve… no god… but… but…!”
“What do you want, O tormentor of lonely hausfraus?”
The voice, so familiar from our meeting several summers earlier, was as luscious as I remembered.
“What’s happening inside your pants?” Gabriel said.
I couldn’t hide the prominent bulge that puffed out the front of my khakis. And the part of me that the newcomer was stimulating didn’t want to. No. I wanted to find the first woman within spitting distance, throw her down on the ground and…
“Is that a shillelagh in your pants or are you just happy to see me?”
Even Hannibal seemed to sense the change: the air had just been electrified by a massive dose of predatory Female pheromones.
“I… need a favor. A contact…”
“Oh my.”
“I mean a contract…”
Any woman would do. Old, ugly, too fat or skeleton thin…
“A contract… rebuking…”
The sultry female voice chuckled. My contractor was pouring it on a little thick, even for her.
“And are you willing to pay the price for my services?”
“I’ll pay, M. Wait… what do… you want?”
“We both know what I want, God of ancient deserts.”
I’d barely escaped from the clutches of this particular goddess at last year’s convention. Shango of the West African Pantheon was still limping after their bathroom encounter. But I’d worry about the consequences later.
“Alright, just hurry!”
“Men,” she sighed. “You’re all alike
. Silly fookers.”
Lightning flickered in the west. Thunder rumbled overhead. My contractor was notoriously stingy when it came to her divinity, choosing to spend her most recent incarnation as a disembodied wraith lodged in the co-opted consciousness of a schizophrenic Boston-Irish romance writer. This allowed her some leeway when she chose to use her powers: maintaining a seeming required a continuous outpouring of divinity; it was expensive even for the most powerful gods. Riding along in the mind of a socially awkward manic-depressive allowed my colleague to save up for special occasions. And when it came to her dealings with men, the Morrigan was always up for a challenge.
“The covenant is made.”
There was a flash of light, a crackle of electric sex.
“Hello, Yahweh.”
For this “occasion” she’d chosen the seeming of a statuesque redhead with sparkling emerald eyes and enormous breasts. The Irish sex goddess had sheathed herself in a form-fitting green shift made from living lianas. A hazy emerald halo encircled her head, finding its verdant echo in her catlike eyes. Her skin was radiant and smooth, tanned without freckle or blemish. Her hair, a deep red that alternated between the last flare of sunlight and the flash of autumn leaves, writhed of its own accord, as if she hovered within a plane without gravity. I crossed my legs. No man, regardless of his sexual orientation, could behold the Morrigan in her finest rags and not be instantly enflamed.
The Irish goddess of Love, Sex and War floated across the smoking plain and hovered a few feet over my head, just high enough, I noted, for me to catch a tantalizing peek under her vines.
“You’ve been working out, Lando Cooper.”
“Hello, M,” I said, fighting the urge to reach out and touch her flawless white foot. “You’re looking…”
“Yes?” she said, eyelashes batting, speedshuttering her emerald eyes. “Go on.”
“You’re looking… really well.”
“Sure and you’re a master of understatement,” she said, her voice lightly accented by her Celtic brogue. “I can spy, by the twinkle in your eye, that I’m lookin’ way past ‘well’.”
The Morrigan laughed in that richly erotic way that drove mortals wild. She wasn’t smirking at the twinkle in my eye. She wasn’t even looking at my “eye”.
Last God Standing Page 6