Abandon All Hope

by Dick Denny

  “Charlotte,” I said, smiling, “do you think the Indians got a raw deal?”

  “Native Americans,” Switch politely corrected.

  “So so sorry, Native Americans.” I gripped her hand tighter causing her to wince. “Do you think the Native Americans got a raw deal, Charlotte?”

  She winced and stared at her hand in my grip, but she nodded.

  “They shouldn’t have gotten encroached on should they?”

  She shook her head. “Please, let go of my hand…”

  I leaned close, forcing my forehead to hers. Close enough that her eyes looked like one big eye in my vision. “If they got a raw deal and encroachment is wrong… get the fuck off our table. Because you’re as welcome here as smallpox.”

  I didn’t let her hand go as much as I threw it back at her. She stumbled to her feet almost knocking the chair over. It wobbled from leg to leg before finally settling down.

  I sat back and looked to Switch and we both started laughing. We drew stares and we didn’t care.

  Gretchen walked up with two disposable mugs with lids and cozies. “What’s funny?”

  “Your man and his people skills.” Switch chuckled as he took his mug and took a sip.

  Gretchen smiled before blowing over the small hole in the lid then taking a sip of hers.

  I’ve never been a coffee drinker myself. I have known too many people who useless as shit till they had their first cup of coffee, and I had just decided I’d rather be useless all goddamned day.

  Gretchen looked at me as I glanced around. “Nick, you okay?”

  “I want a meteor to hit this fucking place.” I sighed as I leaned forward crossing my forearms on the table.

  “So,” Switch said trying to be more helpful than my tired brain felt like trying to be, “do we have anything resembling a plan?”

  “Go, get shit faced, pass out, let the world end?” I offered.

  “Well, if that’s the plan I’m going to skip the drinking and find some companionship.” Switch chuckled.

  Gretchen pressed on even as the hipsters and assholes pressed in around us, bumping our chairs as they moved past. “So, why is Uriel trying to force things?”

  “She’s got nothing to lose.” I pulled my flask out and started unscrewing the cap. “Everything’s pointed to the world ending one day. So, from her point of view, why wait?”

  “But shouldn’t God be giving the orders?” Switch asked.

  I shook my head, “Lucifer seems to paint it as if the Father has just been kinda watching since the beginning.”

  “Okay,” Switch offered, trying to be helpful. “I don’t want to be that guy, but, and no offense, Nick, can we really trust Lucifer?”

  “He’s always seemed to shoot us straight.” Gretchen said slowly, defending Lucifer but definitely thinking about it.

  “Armageddon happens, Lucifer’s stuck in Hell forever. And the little imp fucker didn’t seem to relish that idea. So if anyone has a reason to draw things out, besides us, it’s Lucifer.” I didn’t want to think of the idea of Uncle Lew not really being on my side. Maybe it was naive, but if he’d not been shooting me straight, I was ready for the world to come to an end. “I don’t think the Fiery Sword is powerful enough to stop either side, but it’s powerful enough to make them pause. But neither side trusts me, and that’s one of the big problems.”

  Gretchen sipped her coffee and reached out to squeeze my hand. “We’re fighting for a status quo, and neither side believes that.”

  “We got no one that can help us that we can ask shit. Lucifer’s hands are tied, Gabrielle isn’t necessarily in the loop. It’s fucked.” I sighed, but I squeezed Gretchen’s hand.

  “Too bad we don’t have an oracle or anything,” Switch sighed as he scratched his beard.

  “What about a prophet?” Gretchen asked.

  Switch and my eyes shot to hers. “Yeah,” I offered, “that might fucking do.”

  “You know an honest-to-God prophet?” Switch squeezed his coffee mug hard enough to make the top pop off.

  “Well, no,” Gretchen admitted. “But I know where one happens to live.”

  “Okay?” I asked.

  She lowered her eyes sheepishly. “You’re not going to like it.”

  Switch started working the lid back on his coffee. “What else is new?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Prophet or Net

  “Modern Love” David Bowie

  I instantly hated the idea. The only thing I hated more was that I couldn’t think of anything better, which meant I was stuck with Gretchen’s bad idea. That in and of itself was confusing. She was usually a good idea machine, pumping them out the way Spacely’s pumped out sprockets. I didn’t hate the idea because it was dangerous, I hated it because it felt like a waste of time. Yet here we were, seven-and-a-half hours from the end of the world, standing in the front of an assisted living center.

  The girl working the desk was wearing pink, but not clothes that looked like they should be pink. She was dressed like a serious, professional grown-up. The cut and style of everything should have been what someone with a laser pointer in a boardroom should have worn but instead, it was pink like a serious person’s clothes had been in a Bismol explosion. The flowers on her lapel were pink, her shirt was pink, her jacket was pink, her glasses rims were pink, and I was willing to bet the pink cape thing hanging on the coat rack nearby was hers, too. She was in her late twenties but dressed like a secretary in a 1940s coloring book where the kid coloring it had just gotten lazy.

  That said, I couldn’t tell you what she looked like, but what I could tell you was this woman was seriously pink. In all honesty, she’d have done great as a bank robber. I dunno, officer…I just remember pink.

  I stepped up to the desk. Gretchen was with me, wearing a white lab coat complete with pocket-protector that she lifted from the costume bin at Sharky’s. Her hair was tied back and she was wearing a pair of rectangle tortoise-shell glasses.

  The girl at the desk looked up and was about to open her pink lipstick-smeared mouth when I held up a hand and said, “Ma’am, I’m Dr. Carter McCoy. This is Carol…” gesturing to Gretchen. “We’re here to see Ms. Ripley.”

  She looked down and leafed through some pages on a clipboard. “I don’t have anything here about a visitor for Mr. Caulfield. I also don’t have any Dr. McCoy on the list of approved physicians.” Her face then broke into a grin. “Doc McCoy, like Star Trek.”

  I vomited a little in my mouth but choked it back down. “Yep, he’s my grandfather, or was, God bless him.” I hated when people fucked up references. I also hated Star Trek. Give me the corporate dystopia of Blade Runner any day over that communist utopian crap.

  I reached in the inside right pocket of my jacket and pulled out my fake police credentials. I flashed them with a practiced hand, letting my suit jacket fall open enough to show the underarm rig. “Doctor as in psychiatrist with the police department. It’s nothing major, but we think Ms. Ripley can give us some insight on some things.”

  Her smug confidence, bolstered by the backing of paperwork evaporated with the flash of a police badge. She pulled out a binder and opened it to a page with a log-in sheet. I smiled. “Is that really necessary?”

  She blanched and then blushed, shaking her head with embarrassment. “Sorry, offi—er, doctor, go on in.”

  I looked at the board of room numbers and found Ripley, E. We headed down the hallway Gretchen a step to my left and a step behind that I didn’t really like. I preferred her next to me, not this odd subservient shit. But appearances had to be maintained I guess, and to be honest she was better at playing this kind of thing than I was. So if that was the way she was playing it I’d roll with it.

  I put the back of my hand to my mouth and yawned. Then I dug my knuckle in my eye before shaking my head and yawning again even less politely.

  I felt Gretchen prod me in my ribs and I realized I had walked past the door. I stopped and came back to it. I took the c
hart out of the holder by the door and lazily flipped through it while nodding. It seemed a “doctor” kind of thing to do. I looked at the name and sighed, feeling myself lose even more faith in humanity.

  I stepped inside and let Gretchen slide past me before I shut the door. I felt myself glaring at the lady in the bed. She could have been writing out the cure for cancer and I would have still disliked her. “Seriously?” I asked. She looked toward me but her eyes had that milky glaze that belayed the fact that she couldn’t see shit. “Ellen Ripley?”

  She smiled the grin of a child who is standing with their hand in the cookie jar when their parents ask what are you doing? Her head cocked a little to the side presenting a little more ear as she heard us. “One name’s as good as another, isn’t it?” she asked so not-quite-petulantly that it definitely came out petulant.

  “What’s your real name?” I leaned back against the door. Gretchen glided over by the window.

  “Ellen Ripley.” She stuck to that story.

  “Fine, well, I’m Dwayne Hicks and that’s Newt.” I gestured toward Gretchen. It was out of habit; I knew the lady couldn’t see what I was doing.

  “Why am I Newt?” Gretchen asked with a slightly annoyed purse to her lips. “Why not Vasquez?”

  “Because we really should put you in charge,” I offered with a shrug and was rewarded with a smile.

  She did a little curtsy.

  “So, what’s your real name?” I asked the lady in the bed. She had that odd-looking age on a lady that I can never figure out how old she is. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she was in her forties; I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she was in her sixties. Sometimes you just can’t tell, or I can’t anyway.

  Which is also an odd juxtaposition because my Jailbait or No Meter is calibrated with the perfect accuracy of predicting a third-world election where only one candidate is running because the others committed suicide by shooting themselves in the back or throwing themselves off balconies.

  “What do you want?” the lady asked. Her voice sounded like she’d sang lead for a metal band for years while working for a second job chewing up coal to shit diamonds for industrial drill bits.

  I gestured to Gretchen, again out of habit—I wasn’t intentionally trying to fuck with a blind person. “My friend here says you’re your a prophet.”

  “F-I or P-H-E?” she asked.

  “Fa not Fi,” Gretchen said as she sat on a rolling stool that was in the corner. She smiled with childlike glee and gave herself a spin on it.

  “And how would you know?” the lady asked. I refused to think of her as the heroine of the Alien franchise.

  “Trust me,” I assured her. “She knows weird shit.”

  “Like what?” The lady asked cocking her ear toward Gretchen.

  Gretchen chewed her lip then offered, “The first movie to ever show a toilet flushed was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960.”

  The lady clasped her hands together on top of the covers as she sat up on the bed. “That’s obscure, but not really odd.”

  “Point being,” I interjected, “we know you’re a freaking prophet.”

  “So, what do you need a prophet for?” she asked.

  “Shouldn’t you know that?” Gretchen responded. “I mean, you’re supposed to be the eleventh best prophet in the world.”

  “Eleventh?” I asked her. “It’s the end of the damned world, probably, and we couldn’t even crack the top fucking ten?”

  “Oh,” the blind woman said, “that’s today?”

  “Shouldn’t you fucking know that?” I felt a little bad at yelling at a blind woman. If she had some Matt Murdock shit going on that might have been painful for her. Yet she seemed nonplused. “What kind of fucking prophet are you?”

  “What do you think a prophet is?” She seemed bemused and that was annoying.

  “See the future and stuff?” Gretchen asked, which was curious because this was her plan—shouldn’t she already have a better grasp on crap?

  The blind lady shook her head. “No, God talks to us directly, that’s it.”

  “What do you mean directly?”

  “Normally, he sends Gabriel to deliver his messages.” The lady reached up and scratched her head and made her hair go even crazier than it already was.

  “Gabrielle,” I corrected.

  “What?” she asked curiously.

  “Never mind. So, God talks to you, so what?” I checked the clock; it was already after lunch.

  “Well,” she offered with an annoyed Socratic air, “why do you assume he says anything often? Or useful for that matter?”

  “How often do you chat?” I asked, leaning back against the door. I didn’t think anyone would try to interrupt, but I wasn’t risking it either. Fucking hospital-style doors without locks.

  “Three times.” She smiled, very proudly.

  “Three times a day?” Gretchen asked brightly.

  “Total.” The lady nodded annoyed that we weren’t getting it. In our defense,

  I was getting it, I just didn’t like it. “Three times in your whole freaking life?”

  She nodded.

  “What did he say?” Gretchen asked; there was no hiding the wonder in her voice.

  “Well, first, he started giving lottery numbers but then apologized for talking to the wrong person. So I only got three numbers, not really enough to win anything.”

  “That’s a bummer,” I offered consolingly.

  “The second,” she pressed on, “he gave me the secret to making the perfect omelet. He said you use two eggs not three…”

  I interrupted her. “So, you’re telling me God is L.L. Cool J from Deep Blue Sea?”

  She thought for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. Is it a movie?”

  I admit that I was tired, I was annoyed, I was getting exasperated. “Lady, you’re fucking blind. I don’t know that you’ve ever seen anything!”

  She chuckled. “I guess that’s true.”

  “What’s the third thing?” Gretchen pressed on. At least she was on task.

  “Oh, about six months ago he said to come off my diet and start eating pudding again because the world was probably about to end, give or take anyway.”

  Gretchen’s eyes met mine; we’d both instantly done the math in our head. That was about the time all this started with the Fiery Sword. Gretchen then looked back to the profitless prophet. “What’s he sound like?”

  “British,” she didn’t even hesitate. She had had that answer right there in the chamber. “But not like posh British, like, regular British.”

  “So not James Bond British but Young Ones British?” Gretchen asked with the intensity of an investigator about to solve a crime.

  “I don’t know what that is,” the prophet admitted.

  “Which one?” Gretchen pressed, “James Bond or the Young Ones?”

  “Does it really matter?” I asked.

  Gretchen chewed the corner of her lip then sadly shook her head.

  I looked at the lady in the bed. “Well, thanks for nothing.”

  “If the world doesn’t end I’m coming back for the omelet recipe,” Gretchen told her.

  “Well, wait,” the lady offered. “Just because he didn’t tell me doesn’t mean I don’t know stuff. Prophets talk. We have a party line.”

  “Seriously?” I asked, my hand on the door handle. “Those things still exist?”

  “Have you heard anything?” Gretchen asked the far more pertinent question.

  The blind lady nodded. “The prophet—like the head prophet on the world right now, the one God talks to most—he said the world’s going to end, it can’t be stopped, but it could be delayed.”

  “How?” I asked because delayed was better than five hours from now.

  “He didn’t say specifics, but he said it was up to Tommy and Gina.” The lady nodded adamantly, patting the back of one hand into the palm of the other as she said the names.

  “Who are Tommy
and Gina?” Gretchen asked.

  The lady sighed. “I was kind of hoping you two were Tommy and Gina, who it’s said would never back down.”

  I felt my jaw drop and I looked to Gretchen then I looked to the more or less useless prophet. “That’s Bon Jovi.”

  “Huh?” she asked.

  “That’s Livin’ On A Prayer by Bon Jovi,” I said slowly like I was explaining to a child that chocolate milk doesn’t come from brown cows. Even though that was silly and there was no science to support that chocolate milk didn’t come from brown cows… Goddamn I needed sleep.

  “Oh.” The lady smiled. “So you’ve heard the prophecy?”

  “The fuck?”

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Take My Hand, We’ll Make It I Swear

  “Livin’ on a Prayer” Bon Jovi

  So Gretchen and I found ourselves sitting down at the side of the blind lady, who kept insisting her name was Ellen Ripley. Part of me wanted to just brush her claim off as bullshit, but at the same time, it was one of those things that seemed so stupid it had to be true, because who could make up something that stupid? It was the narwhal of stories, proof of the validity of creation because something that stupid had to be made; it couldn’t just happen.

  “So, you’re telling me,” I asked with absolutely no credulity, “you’ve never heard Livin’ On A Prayer?”

  Gretchen’s jaw fell slack as she looked at me. “That’s what you are taking issue with here?”

  I nodded. “Hell yeah, everything else is so batshit stupid that it isn’t worth thinking about. But not having heard Livin’ On A Prayer? I’m willing to bet you can go talk to the freaking clicking people in Africa and they’ve heard Livin’ On A Prayer.”

  “Clicking people?” Gretchen looked confused.

  “Yeah,” I nodded, “the folks that talk with all pops and clicks and shit.”

  “The Koysan peoples,” the crazy lady in the bed offered.

  “Don’t help him,” Gretchen told her before continuing with a much more civil tone. “So, you’re telling us that the rockstar Jon Bon Jovi is the world’s greatest prophet?”