by Dick Denny
The lady nodded. “See, most of the time God sends messengers, but those messages can get all skewed. That’s where prophets come in—we get the straight dope.”
“What do you mean messages get all skewed?” I asked as I leaned back and crossed my arms, doing everything I could to look skeptical of a lady who couldn’t see me anyway.
“Well, the way the prophets talk about it, Gabriel took a bunch of messages to Mohammad. Your basic Be Excellent To Each Other/Party On, Dude stuff. Problem is, he got the messages while hanging out in a cave that had natural gas deposits, so he was high as a kite. So Be Excellent To Each Other/Party On, Dude turned into It’s cool to toss homosexuals off buildings and It’s fine to rape nine-year-olds as long as you get a guy to say you’re married first. You know, skewed.” She leaned her head back for a few moments like she was looking at the ceiling, but I was pretty sure she was still blind. “It’s like when kids play that game where you whisper something and it goes around, but because it gets screwed up the message ends up different?”
“Okay?”
“So…” She slowly waved her hand like she was unconsciously directing an orchestra that was not in time with the tempo of her talking. “God talks directly to some prophets. Problem is you end up telling someone God talked to you you end up whacked out on anti-psychotics and locked up in places where you have padded walls and no shoelaces. So, your average prophet nowadays comes in two varieties: crazies and creative types.”
“Isn’t that redundant?” Gretchen asked with such a profound earnestness that I realized she wasn’t being sarcastic, but if she were trying to be sarcastic it would have been perfect.
“Maybe a bit.” The lady smiled sheepishly.
“So, you’re saying,” Gretchen was verbally trying to work the logic out, “Bon Jovi’s success is because he’s putting out the direct word of God?”
“No,” the lady shook her head making her hair flail like cilia. “Pretty much everything gets interpreted, explained, expounded, edited, et cetera.”
“Tommy and Gina,” I prodded, “tell us about Tommy and Gina.”
“The Prophet,” she began.
“Bon Jovi,” Gretchen said a little too dreamily.
The lady nodded, “Bon Jovi said on the party line that the world ends, that can’t be stopped. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Everything that begins has to have an end. I mean even if God didn’t just call the game, sooner or way later, you know, energy death of the universe or something like that.”
She sat there. A good minute passed and I realized she was looking for some kind of response. I looked to Gretchen and she shrugged. “Okay.” It was lame, but it was what I had to offer up. I was tired and the world was ending in as many hours and I had fingers one of my dick-beaters.
“Well,” she continued, “Jon said we couldn’t stop that. It’s as inevitable as corrupt politicians or rambling stories told by a toddler. But he said he was told that there were two who might be able to delay things. He called them Tommy and Gina.”
I chuckled.
Gretchen shot me a concerned look then groaned. “You’re about to speak only in Bon Jovi quotes now, aren't you?”
I shrugged.
The prophet continued. “He didn’t say how. He just said if anyone could delay it, it would be Tommy and Gina.”
“Well,” Gretchen asked, “did he say anything about Tommy and Gina?”
She shrugged. “Tommy would be a pretty basic guy, Gina would be living under her potential.”
Gretchen laughed.
The prophet pressed on. “He said they’d never have PhDs but that might be what saved us?”
“How?” Gretchen leaned in with her elbows on her knees and her knuckles under her chin.
“He said Tommy’s a doer, not a thinker, and Gina would have his back. So maybe it’s just in the doing, not the thinking?” The lady in the bed bowed her chin. “We don’t know, it’s just supposition.”
“It’s hard to hold on,” I offered, “when there’s no one to lean on.”
“Don’t do that,” scowled Gretchen, seeing through my fun. “So, what do we do?”
The prophet shook her head. “I don’t know.” She paused, sitting there silently before asking, plaintively, “So, it’s today?”
“Yes.” Gretchen didn’t sugar coat it at all.
“What are you going to do?” the prophet asked quietly, with worry. You could feel her concern, at the same time you knew it wasn’t for Gretchen and me.
“You live for the fight when that’s all that you got,” I offered.
“Seriously,” the prophet asked, “what do you plan on doing?”
I sat there for a moment. I looked at Gretchen. Her dark eyes and mine found each other with the familiarity of magnets. There was a concern in Gretchen’s eyes, too, but it was different than the concern coming off the prophet. The prophet, “Ellen Ripley” was concerned for herself and what was coming. Gretchen’s silent concern was for something more. To Gretchen, it didn’t matter what happened to us. You could see it in her eyes as clear as the stars on a cloudless night. She was fine going out like Jammer as long as the world was here tomorrow.
I loved her for it and I hated her for it. I would have liked it more if I knew when the shit started flying, that she’d run. That’d be easier for me to live with. But she wouldn’t. She would go with me, as Jammer once put it, dick-deep in stupid. I’d have liked her more if I knew she’d run. I loved her because she wouldn’t.
“What do you plan on doing?” the prophet repeated with a shake in her voice.
I smiled, eyes never leaving Gretchen’s. “I’m going down in a Blaze of Glory.”
Gretchen smiled, and I felt better for it.
I knew we were done here so I stood. Holding my hand out to Gretchen, and with a cocky smirk, I sang softly, “Take my hand, we’ll make it I swear.”
She laughed and shook her head. But she took my hand and I pulled her to her feet. I kept pulling and tugged her into my arms. I was tired, but I wasn’t so tired I couldn’t hold her.
“That feels nice,” she whispered into my lapel.
“Your love is like bad medicine.” I smiled into her hair.
She looked up and mock hit me. “Hey!”
I smirked. “Bad medicine is what I need.”
“Okay, you need to quit that.” She said it, she probably meant it, but she laughed. That made it worth it.
“You two need to get a room,” the prophet muttered.
I thought about it for a moment; she might have been right. If the world was going to end anyway there were definitely worse ways to go than tangled up with Gretchen. Our eyes locked and she cocked an eyebrow. She was thinking the same thing.
It did get me thinking. And for more than a minute, I pondered taking a dose of Fuck-It-All and just letting the world end. We live in a world where the shit you work hard to earn gets taxed when you leave it to your loved ones when you die. A world where parents leaving babies to cook to death in cars isn’t news but is bandied about the news nonetheless. A world of banned books. A world where what to do about female genital mutilation is something whose solutions are discussed, ignoring the obvious answer of shooting the cock bags who do it in the fucking face. A world where people sue people who sold them coffee for the coffee being hot when they spill it on themselves. A world where athletes and entertainers are mistaken for being important. A world run by whack jobs because they’re the ones making enough noise to get noticed and the reasonable people get drowned out, or are smart enough to never play that game to start with. A world where people are afraid of science and science gets bent to politics. A world where Firefly got a truncated season, Farscape canceled on a cliffhanger, and yet the Kardashians pop up every goddamned day. A world where I still didn’t have a goddamned jet pack even though sci-fi writers, TV, and moviemakers had been promising me one forever. A world some dumbasses still thought was flat. A world where more people would recognize the cast of Jersey Sh
ore than could tell you who Edmond Hillary was or the amazing shit he did. A world that had yet to give me a World War Two-through-X-1-flight-years Chuck Yeager biopic.
A world that didn’t have heroes anymore because, honestly, it didn’t fucking deserve any.
A world that could go fuck itself for all I cared.
I hated most people. I didn’t know the rest, which meant I didn’t care.
You can’t blame a guy for thinking, just for a moment, “Let the world fucking burn.” We could find the nearest hotel, get a room and spend the rest of the world destroying everything in it in a fuck frenzy.
Then I thought about the handful of people I did care about. God knows there weren’t many of them.
Six months ago I would have said fuck it and gone, found a place, copped a squat with Jammer, and attempt to end as many bottles of Scotch I could before the world ended. The Scotch part still didn’t seem like a bad idea.
But there were a handful of people who deserved better. People who, despite all evidence to the futility of it, tried to make shit better. A handful of people who deserved more than what any demon or archangel wanted them to have. A handful of people who looked at the world and instead of saying fuck it would say fuck it then would continue keeping on keeping on.
I owed them because they’d never failed me.
I felt the corners of my lips tug up into a smirk. Gretchen gave me an adoring, even if it was questioning, look.
“What are you going to be today, Nick Decker?” She smiled and leaned up, and tugged at my lower lip with hers before whispering. “I’m fine either way.”
I took her hand and we walked to the door. I tugged the door open with the loud cracking sound you find with doors at medical establishments. Out in the hall we were met with the quiet cacophony of regular everyday people living their regular everyday humdrum lives unwitting to the fact that the world was going to end unless a jackass who really needed a drink, but didn’t need to go to meetings because of it, could save it.
Not save it; it couldn’t be saved. But it could be delayed.
“Are you going to answer her?” the prophet called from the bed.
I looked to Gretchen the back to the prophet. I felt Gretchen’s hand in mine and I gave it a squeeze.
We couldn’t save the world, but we could delay it. How? How could the two of us stop the two greatest armies in all creation from ripping the living shit out of themselves and taking our world with it?
Gretchen smiled, and I felt less tired. In fact, I didn’t feel tired at all, but I did feel beat. There’s a difference.
Even though I spoke to the prophet, my eyes were locked to Gretchen’s, and the smile I couldn’t keep off my face was for her as well.
“I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride. And I’m wanted, Dead or Alive.” She kissed me. I held her tight. I whispered, “I’ll never give up the fight. I’ll go the distance.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
If I Ever Leave This World Alive… Or Any Other Applicable Flogging Molly Song
“If I Ever Leave This World Alive” Flogging Molly
Switch waited outside in his truck. Gabrielle had hooked him up with a jacked-up modified Toyota Tundra. The damn thing had a snorkel and God knows what else. KC Halogen lamps on the roll bar; the interior had a roll cage. The tires were idiotically large, not monster truck large but still pretty ridiculous. The bed was basically non-existent due to truck boxes and other equipment storage devices. In all honesty as idiotic as I thought some of it was, that truck was probably perfect for his I blow shit up for a living business.
He was wearing clothes that actually belonged to him now instead of hand-me-down Jammer garb. Cargo slacks, a button-up flannel, and a gray jacket hiding his pistol on his hip. Sitting between the seats of the truck was a pump shotgun.
Switch had posted up outside just in case. That was the world we were living in now. Just in case wasn’t a silly or paranoid thought anymore.
“Find out anything good?” he asked as he leaned back against the frame of the open truck door.
“Our coming was foretold by Bon Jovi.” Gretchen smiled, and the smile did nothing but obviously confuse Switch even more.
“Okay,” he said slowly, reaching up to scratch his beard. “Did we learn anything useful?”
I couldn’t help but smile. Were it not for Switch’s subcontinental background, he would have been the perfect World War Two British example of Keep Calm and Keep Buggering On. It reminded me Gary Oldman had finally gotten his Oscar for his portrayal of Winston Churchill. I wondered if Uncle Lew was pleased about that.
“The whack job in there,” I said, gesturing back to the assisted living joint, “said we couldn’t stop the end of the world, but we could delay it.”
“That’s vague,” Switch complained. It wasn’t helpful, but it was a lot more accurate than the whack job prophet we’d just talked to. “So, is there a plan?”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah, but it’s not a good one.”
“Are your plans ever good?” Gretchen asked.
“Hey!” I really needed her on my side, especially for what I was thinking.
“What do you have, Nick?” Switch asked as he rubbed his knuckles.
“We gotta limit variables. I ain’t gonna be able to think of what to do if I gotta worry about everything. We got too many variables.” I knew what the next move was, but I knew I had to build to it.
“Okay?” Switch nodded.
“First, I need you to go grab Megatron. Her modus operandi is to hunker down, I need you guys to run. Get her then get a burner phone from Agnes. When you do tell Agnes to scram as well. After that, I need you to go and crash in on my brother. I can’t have shit going sideways because some immortal shit head tries to come after me at the last minute using my nieces and nephews to get the Sword.”
“Nick…” Switch started, but I interrupted him.
“I need you to close out the variables, Switch.” Then I looked at Gretchen. “Both of you.”
Gretchen didn’t just look offended, she looked hurt. Her eyes got wet. “No.”
“Gretchen…” Switch said. God love him, he may not have liked it but he saw the logic of the plan. He may have hated it, but he saw what I was trying to do and was backing me. I wondered if civilians had friends the way veterans did?
“No,” she stated adamantly. She glared at me with those shining, abysmally dark eyes. “It’s like Jammer said, if the situation were reversed you’d be right there with me, dick-deep in stupid.” She reached out grabbing my face in her hands so there was nowhere for me to look but in her dark eyes. She brought our foreheads together. We were so close the focus shifted and it looked like she had one large eye instead of two. “This started with us, Nick. You and me, there at Sharky’s. When the Heaven’s Hotdogs came it was us. This started with you and me. That’s how it’s going to end.”
The tip of my nose brushed hers. “Tommy and Gina, huh?”
I saw her cheeks rise as she smiled making her large, optical illusion eye narrow. “We’re halfway there.”
I smiled and whispered, “Livin’ on a prayer.”
She let go of my face and reached down taking my hands. I let go of her right hand with my left and slid my arm around her, pulling her into my chest. I looked to Switch over the top of her head.
Our eyes met and there wasn’t anything to say that our slow, shallow nods didn’t convey. Gretchen slid around to my side and I held out my right hand to Switch. I felt Gretchen squeeze my waist as Switch and I clasped forearms.
“I’d fight this with you.” His voice was quiet, but quiet in the way that a steel sword knew it didn’t need to be a brass bell.
“I know.”
His fingers dug into my forearm. Then without a word Gretchen slid from my side with the silent grace of a moonlight shadow and slid her arms around his neck. I smiled as his beard bunched up on her shoulder and tangled slightly with her silken raven hair.
“You take care of
our boy,” he told her quietly, “because God knows he’s a fuck up.”
“I will,” she assured him. I couldn’t tell her expression as her face was buried and muffled in his shoulder.
They slowly extricated themselves and I did see Gretchen smile. “You try not to let Megatron drive you crazy.”
He laughed and nodded. Then he turned to climb up in his lifted truck. He stopped before he pulled the door shut and looked back at me. “Strength and Honor, Nick.”
I felt the smirk tug the corners of my lips. “Smoke me a kipper. I’ll be back for breakfast.”
“You know,” he said with a surprisingly carefree smile, “I have never fucking known where you got that.”
I felt Gretchen look up as I chuckled. “I got it from a Brit TV show called Red Dwarf.”
“It action or something?” he asked with arched eyebrows.
Gretchen snickered and I smirked. “It’s a comedy.”
He silently chuckled and shook his head. “That’s fucking fitting.” He reached over and cranked the truck then looked to me. “See you in Hell, Nick Decker.”
I smirked and nodded as he shut the door.
Gretchen and I stood in silence as he drove away. There was nothing really to say till he was out of sight, and even then we stood arm in arm, silent but for our breathing.
“That was a good thing you did,” she said quietly, eyes still on the road where Switch’s truck had disappeared.
“Broken watch is right twice a day.” It wasn’t a lot, but it was what I had to offer.
“So how do you think this is gonna end?” I felt her turn her eyes to me. I kept looking down the road; I wasn’t sure how I’d react when I looked at her. I could see myself being fine, and I could see my damned knees falling out from under me. Oddly enough neither of the options seemed like a great outcome all things considering.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my flask. I gave it a shake and knew it was about three-quarters full. I slowly got the top off and took a slow swig. I let the Scotch sit cool in my mouth and felt it slowly getting warm. I swallowed before it lost its appeal. I slowly started screwing the lid back in place. “I think the world’s gonna fucking end. But the good news is we’re probably gonna be dead before that happens.” I slid the flask back into my pocket. I glanced at her, our eyes meeting. My knees didn’t give out. “So, three cheers for little victories, I guess.”