“Unworthies!” Holiday roared. “Those who wither beneath His appraisal are unworthy of His blessing!”
More Seraphim burst into flame. Some of the most powerful among them tried to fly away and were captured and consumed by glowing red tendrils.
“See?” Holiday crowed. “He judges the faithless! Fear God and give Him the glory!”
There was nowhere to run. Everywhere the red moon’s light fell angels and devils were destroyed. Or transformed. Some were changed into glowing multi-armed forms similar to giant spiders or massive slithering reptiles. I saw Juno of the Roman pantheon transform herself into a hawk a moment before the red tendrils crushed her in their coils. I saw Anansi the West African Trickster assume the shape of a huge lion just as the tentacles struck. In his place a screaming three-headed human infant lay wailing in the dust.
But most of the Seraphim were simply eaten alive as the tendrils grew brighter with each victim. Many of the panicked gods and demons turned to escape, launching into the sky on burning wings, or vanishing from view.
“Stand!” Holiday roared. “Stand or be destroyed as unbelievers!”
“Help them,” Benzaiten screamed. “It will kill us all!”
I stepped to the edge of the bowl.
“Holiday!”
The Voice of the Deus Ex Machina turned the heads of the survivors toward me. The gods and angels and demons and powers and principalities looked up at the place where I stood. On the far side of the valley, Yuri and Holiday froze.
And the crimson tendrils stopped.
“Well, the former office-holder stops by for a visit,” Holiday cried. “That’s very Willy Loman of you, Lando. Your alter ego has been rendered obsolete. Didn’t you get the memo?”
Beside him, Yuri’s face devolved into a snarl of such hatred that at first I thought I was looking at someone else.
“Fool!” he roared. “You’re wasting precious breath.” Then he turned to the gods and spirits in the valley below. “Kill him!”
But the revolutionaries hovered, trapped between the crimson tentacles and the Deus’s shuddering wrath.
“Weak!” Yuri raved on the hillside. “Cowards!”
The incarnation of Evil raised the hammer of Thor and sent a blistering fusillade of lightning down among his troops. Some of them evaded the lightning, others were blasted into atoms.
“He means the end of our power! The Rise of the Ape above the Gods!”
Gale force winds swirled around my little peak. The sky filled up with black thunderheads and the earth beneath my feet trembled. Yuri’s hammer summoned a barrage of fire from the heavens. Flaming death fried the air between us. But this time I was prepared. I raised a protective shout from the Deus. Its power caught the flames and held them, stoking their heat with my own until it blazed like a conflagration. Then I flung it back. The firebolt struck the hillside where Yuri stood and cracked it wide open.
Yuri danced across huge slabs of sliding earth, struggling to keep his balance as he careened downhill. He leaped onto a large outcropping of stone, lying prone as the landslide gathered momentum, burying gods and angels, sweeping them out of sight.
“Useless!” Yuri roared. “Useless! Useless! Useless!”
The Devil summoned a thunderstorm, filled the valley with wind and thunder and lightning. I lifted my right hand, the Word of his undoing rising to my lips.
Then a bolt of lightning blasted the hillside. The stone platform beneath Yuri’s feet buckled. For a moment, he hung there, supported by nothing more than the roaring wind. Then the entire hill gave way. Yuri dropped the shining hammer, vanishing beneath tons of liquefied dirt and crushed boulders.
“Yuriel!” Benzaiten shrieked, and vanished.
Yuri had betrayed me. His former incarnation’s great Covenant had been a farce. So why did my heart feel blasted into a thousand pieces?
“It always comes down to this, doesn’t it?”
Holiday stood a few yards away, the crimson moonglow burning in his eyes.
“A single visionary, a lone prophet sent by his God to inform the old god that his day is done.”
I strode forward, spoke a Word of Fire to burn him from my sight. Flame hot enough to melt steel exploded the air around him. Holiday shrugged, and sparks fell from him like burning embers. I raised my right hand, and the skies above us grew thick with moving shapes, not lightning or rain… insects, a Pestilence; every stinging fly and biting flea, every locust, every bee and wasp for miles answered my call and flew to the attack. In seconds, Holiday’s grinning cowboy face vanished beneath a thousand stinging forms.
He laughed. The horseflies and wasps and hornets crawled over his skin and did not bite or sting or harm him in any way. He raised his hands, a living suit of infestation, and the insects lifted above him, swirling around his head. Then they attacked me. The Deus Ex Machina burned many of them to ash, but too many of them got through. They covered me, blocking out the gray sunlight and plunging me into darkness. I was stabbed by a million tiny swords. The pain disrupted my connection to the Deus. Under its crushing weight I fell to one knee. My eyes were stung shut, my throat locked and swelling closed. There were bugs in my mouth, under my eyelids… burrowing beneath my scalp.
Holiday kicked me in the chest, knocked me over onto my back.
“This is just the beginning, Lando. A paradigm shift undreamt of. After all the hard work by your other self and a million other gods before him, after humanity’s long, brave march up from the primordial ooze… fear wins.”
He kicked me again. Something in my side came apart with a wet snap and the buzzing in my ears filled up the world. Blinded and suffocating, I pulled myself toward the edge of the precipice.
“‘Fear is the heart of love.’ You know who said that, Lando? Oh, sorry. You can’t answer me with chiggers in your throat. It was a fella named Ben Gibbard. He’s the lead singer for Death Cab For Cutie, a sweet little indie rock band out of the Pacific Northwest. Ben originally couched that phrase in his song, I’ll Follow You Into The Dark. It was a renunciation of his Catholic upbringing.”
He kicked me again. The insects burrowed deeper into my flesh, stinging harder, their angry buzzing becoming the world.
“But Ben missed the point. Fear should be embraced, Lando. It’s what got us here today.”
He bent and grabbed my hair. Insects crawled up his arm, swarmed around us, caressing him, stinging and biting me. He pulled my head back, forcing me to look him in the eye.
“I am the face of Fear. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. Cause in the end Fear gets the girl, the Golden Fleece and the whole, sad enchilada.”
Then he kicked me in the face. Through one half-blinded eye I saw the assembled host staring up at us. The Pantheons, all the surviving gods and devils and angels ever described by humankind, their shining faces vivid as Greek masks, depicting comedy, tragedy, lust, revenge and terror.
Fear.
They’re waiting to see who wins.
“A new beginning,” Holiday crowed. “But you won’t be here to see it.”
Something Holiday said was rising up in me, filling me up the way the crimson moon filled up the sky.
Fear is what got us here today.
Paradigm shift.
We’ve reached our childhood’s end. We can lie down and die…
Or create the world we want.
Paradigm shift.
And a shifting skein of faces, of people, enemies, family, gods and friends…
We are children playing with the power of Creation.
Paradigm shift.
Faces, the golden God of a world that might have been my home in another life.
Children.
And the Morning People remembered…
Paradigm shift.
I summoned the remnants of the Deus, drew its dying power into myself…
One. Last. Miracle.
I extended my hand over the valley, high over the heads of the assembled hosts where the desperate, f
rightened faces of the supernaturals stared up at us.
They’re afraid.
Many of them had conspired with Holiday to accomplish my destruction. But they were afraid of him too, afraid of what the Coming represented. It was an opening, a window. I reached… and…
They
Let
Me
In
Through them, I plunge into the river of human consciousness. Through them I am absorbed into the flow of All, allowed entry onto the DNA-encoded information superhighway that defines every god who ever lived. I kick down the unlocked doorways of doubt – doubt can’t help me here – and plunge deeper, past what is known to what is hoped, to what is dreamed and dreaded and adored and hated, falling until I reach the primaevel core of human creativity, linked directly to the collective unconscious; the morphogenetic field; the phenomenon that unites humankind through simultaneously generated ideas and shared cultural symbolisms. It is the sea from which consciousness arises and the river through which it flows. It is the uncharted depths of shared metaphor, the River of Souls: the Eshuum.
There is power here, enough to change the world. It’s intoxicating. I consider hijacking it: I have the powers of a million gods backing me up. I could turn humanity around and make it march to the tune of our choosing for the next thousand years. I could take it all back.
Then I see the Coming.
Up ahead: a great, dark shape nestled among the shadows reserved for mankind’s greatest terrors. Humanity’s newest God hovers at the nexus of thought and deed, the meeting place of dread and action.
“You’re a million years too late, once-God. I danced by the light of the first cooking fire. I was the cavebear that stole the first fully human child. I am the approach of enemies too foreign to understand, much less defeat. I sing the Body Eccentric and whistle the ecstacy of War. I am genocide and rape and easy cancer; I am the mortgage banker who stalked your mortal grandmother, and the shriek of a burning 767.”
It emerges from the shadows and I see it clearly: the cavebear, the inoperable tumor, a grinning dead man with empty eyes and a sharp knife, a sick and dying child.
“You sought mortality, once-God,” it breathes. “See it now.”
I’m in the Ha-Ha Room. On stage with a dead microphone in my hand. I’m squinting into the beam from a red spotlight, staring out at a roomful of dark faces. One of the people seated in front of me stands. The red spotlight finds her, Barbara…
“You were sickly, Lando. There were things I wanted for my life. Instead I got you. And I hate you.”
Herb…
“You’ll never make anything of yourself. I look at you and all I see is disappointment. You and your brothers ate every hope I ever had.”
“You lied to me, Lando.”
I turn and she’s there, standing offstage, a shadow in the wings. Surabhi walks toward me.
“I paid the price for your fear. You failed.”
“Failed.”
“Liar.”
“You see?” my ghosts say in unison, speaking with the Coming’s voice. “No god can defeat me.”
The psychic assault smashes its way through my consciousness, the voices tearing at my heart with claws sharper than scalpels. My ghosts, both living and dead, hurl my failings like grenades, destroying my spirit just as Holiday’s attack destroyed my body. And one thing is certain… I will not survive this.
You didn’t come here to save yourself.
What?
You were a God. Now you’re a Man.
And I remember. The reason. The only reason that matters.
“You don’t get it. I didn’t come here to fight. I came to tell you a joke.”
Silence. If I were alive I’d be covered in flop sweat now. But I’m already dying, so what the hell?
“Once upon a time… there was a world, different from ours in some ways, similar in others: there they have a fatal form of gout. Here we got Fox News.”
“You’re no Cosby, Lando,” Magnus Moloke says. He had been decapitated. His head spoke from the seat next to his body. “You’re not funny.”
“Magnus Moloke, folks. Big, black and deader than Disco.”
Surabhi’s ghost laughs.
“Anyway, in that world, there was this little boy whose father was dying. The little boy prayed for his father to get better: he prayed at temple, he prayed at school, he even prayed when he was supposed to be masturbating. Can you believe they have church-recommended daily masturbation breaks over there? Also free health care and government brothels. Well, the doctors saved the boy’s father, but when he woke up, something had changed. He was a different man. He looked the same, but he no longer belonged in that world.”
“Betrayer,” the Morrigan hisses from her seat, her hair a livid flame. “Godslayer.”
“This new man possessed all the other man’s memories. But chief among those memories was the little boy.”
“You failed me, Lando. I died because of your weakness.”
“You were always sickly, son.”
“Weak… a royal pain in the ass.”
The red spotlight was blinding, growing brighter. I could feel myself receding, retreating.
Hurry up.
“Well… the man realized that he was needed back in his world, but he couldn’t leave the little boy: he had grown to love him like the son he might have had. And the little boy didn’t want the man to go, because he was almost a father to him. But they both understood that if they stayed together, terrible things would happen in both worlds. And so, the little boy found the strength to help the man return to his world, hoping that his own father could return in his place. They knew that they could expect no help from their gods; the gods had abandoned them, or didn’t care… it didn’t matter really. The man and the boy understood that together, they were stronger than all their gods. They mattered to each other.”
“That’s it?” Black-eyed Herb said. “Love thy father, even if he abandons you?”
“No. The moral of the story is this: we can lie down and die when we outgrow the gods, or we can create something new.”
Feedback crackles over the house speakers. Suddenly… my mic is live.
“There is nothing new under this or any sun,” the spider/lightning thing breathes. It’s standing at the back of the club now, a hulking shadowshape. “Except me.”
“Dude, that’s just a new face. You’re old. You’re so old you make Latin look edgy. You’re so old you got a prostate massage from Methusaleh. And stupid? You’re a shadowy bear, or a zombie spider or something equally ridiculous. The only thing scary about you is your breath. Hey, Spider-thing, your mama was so stupid she bought a ticket to go on Soul Train. She sits on the TV to watch couch. And look at you. You’re a mess. You’re so hairy Bigfoot saw you and took a picture. And speaking of mysteries, here’s one, the biggest one I know: humans described you first. They drew you on their cave walls a million times before you kidnapped the first cavebaby. Humans create things. Without human minds, human imagination, you couldn’t bust a grape in a hammer factory. They are the Creators.”
The tremor is both subtle and profound, no earthquake, no comet streaking across the heavens, but profound nonetheless. The Coming surges toward me, claws bristling to tear me apart when an amplified Voice thunders over the loudspeakers.
“We are the Creators.”
“The Ark of the Covenant is empty, jackass. The Da Vinci Code unlocks a vacant room. The greatest mystery at the heart of the human story also happens to be the only thing they fear more than you: self determination. And now… everybody understands.”
“We are the Creators.”
“They control their destinies, not you, not me.”
“We are the Creators.”
The thought, really more like a trillion thoughts all focused on one point, is simultaneously picked up and broadcast across the Eshuum and the world. For one moment, every mortal mind on Earth focuses itself on the one idea that terrifies even the gods. And, s
haring that terrible clarity, just for one moment, I remember… Me.
“It was the institution of slavery that made up my mind. All those prayers from God-fearing Southern Christians imploring me to keep the slaves in their place. Three hundred years of prayerful genocide and forced miscegenation had left me totally baffled about what humans really needed me for. That and Elvis.”
“Stop,” the Coming says. “Get off the stage.”
“The Indian massacres brought up more questions than answers. The Salem witch burnings helped on that score. Hiroshima and the Holocaust sealed the deal. My buddy Lucifer’s idea to give up the Holy Ghost couldn’t have come at a better time. I had too much innocent blood on my hands. You feel me?”
“We are the Creators.”
“What did you do? What magic is this?”
“No magic. The cup of divinity was poured for them, fartbox. Not gods. You and me… we’re just party crashers. And the neighbors just called the police.”
I can feel the tremors building, the heartbeat of the human cosmos; the racing pulse of mortal consciousness.
“We are the Creators.”
Maya Otsunde steps out of the shadows. She’s wearing a long gray coat, its front buttoned up to her throat. Her right hand is hidden inside the front right pocket of the heavy winter coat. She looks into my eyes… another phantom? A dream? She smiles. Then she turns to face the spider-thing. And as she does, she unbuttons her coat.
“I see you in my dreams too. You are the virus that killed my mother, the filth that poisons the waters of my country. I see you. And I know what to do.”
The spider-thing roars. It rears up, high above the schoolgirl, and raises its claws.
Maya tosses the thing she’d been concealing beneath the heavy gray coat, a vest or jacket covered with dynamite. The suicide belt lands at the spider-thing’s feet.
And Maya Otsunde says, “WE ARE THE CREATORS.”
The belt explodes.
Something screams. It might be me, or the Coming, or both of us. From somewhere far away, I can hear the deep tolling of the earth’s core after a meteor strike. Somewhere a Jupiter-sized Fat Lady is singing. Her song grips me in one monstrous hand, picks me up and carries me out of that seething cauldron of Creation while a billion minds shriek at me in a thousand tongues; the Punchline: delivered in the Voice of a twelve year-old mortal girl.
Last God Standing Page 29