In The Lap Of The Gods

by John B. Hendricks

  “I don’t like it,” Baldur said. “We should try to find Lucifer on our own. Let the Beermeisters get their own snacks.”

  “Every moment we waste is another minute closer to the Earth being destroyed,” Absalom said. “This may be the only way to stop Lucifer in time.”

  Baldur was very reluctant. His traveling companions seemed to be decent and honorable, but they were not Norse gods. He had been in contact with more weird shit in his lifetime that these men could possibly imagine in their wildest dreams. The prickling on his neck said that this mist was beyond even Baldur’s wide range of experience.

  “Baldur, are you in?”

  Baldur sighed. “I’ll be the anchor,” he told them. I’ll watch their backs the best I can, he thought. Belphegor strung them all together and slipped a coiled loop around his waist. With a word, he stepped into the heavy mist, jerking the line and forcing the group into a jog.

  When the shrieking started, Baldur dug his heels into the loose soil, trying to get some traction so he could stop and pull them all back out of the maelstrom, but the momentum was too strong. He quit dragging his feet and closed his eyes. As the coldness engulfed him, he felt the scream building in his chest, the taste of blueberries filling his mouth.

  Chapter 80[80]

  Belphegor stepped out of the mist. In the distance, he could hear the surf pounding the shore. Seabirds drifted lazily, dotting the sky. He felt like he was covered in dust, but a cursory inspection of his clothing showed that he was even cleaner than when he had entered the nastiness.

  He turned and tugged on the rope. It was very slack and he reeled it in quickly. He closely examined the severed end. The rope was burnt, melted and unraveled. He peered into the swirling mist looking for the others. Screams reverberated in the depths of the grayness, modulating louder and louder.

  “Uh-oh,” Belphegor said.

  Chapter 81[81]

  Fat Boy no longer felt fat. He ran his hands down his body, felling hard muscles he didn’t remember ever having. This is the body of a judo master, he grinned inwardly. He punched the air rhythmically. I’m the white Bruce Lee. No wait, that was Chuck Norris

  “Boy, what are you doing?” Colonel Sanders accosted him from across the room. He wore a paper hat and was wearing an apron. He waved his spatula at Fat Boy. “You need to eat more, boy. You’re wasting away.” The Colonel walked over to him. “You need to take your medicine,” he said, reaching into Fat Boy’s pocket. He pulled out a handful of red capsules, hissing like chicken in a frying pan. “Take these,” he instructed. “They’re chock full of all the fat, cholesterol, and artery-blocking agents that you’ll ever need to end your miserable life.” He grabbed Fat Boy by his big white collar. “Here you go, son.” The Colonel slammed his hand into Fat Boy’s chest, the pills sinking into his skin, digging into him. He could feel them slithering around his heart, squeezing it. His heart was thundering like a frightened herd of zebras.

  “Your momma liked it a lot too,” said the Colonel. “She just loved the gravy. Gallons of gravy. Damn shame she died so young. Maybe you can do an Elvis and die the same age as your momma. Open wide.” The Colonel started clucking, scratching his foot on the ground, and then jumped toward Fat Boy with his arms flapping. Fat Boy fell to the ground, buried under the ersatz gentleman, his heart no longer racing. In fact, it was no longer beating. He shoved the Colonel off him, jumped up, and ran.

  ***

  Paris looked into the mirror. Gone was the beautiful blond hair, the dreamy eyes, the winning smile, the dimple. The reflection of his face was totally blank, an empty canvas.

  “No!” he shouted, his vanity rising. He looked down into the sink. It was full of a pulsing blob of flesh, oozing with blood. He reached down and touched it lightly. Warm. With two hands, he reached into the sink and grabbed it by the outer edges. It dripped loudly and he bent over, rubbing it against his faceless head. He could feel the mass attach itself to his skull, rubbery tendrils working into him. He rubbed the new skin, smoothing it, caressing it. He felt life return to him, his eyes seeing vivid colors, the smell of meadows, and a taste of fresh air. He straightened and gazed into the mirror.

  Achilles looked back at him. Paris turned quickly in panic, raising his bow and shooting before he realized he was all alone. His mind exploded with a burst of screaming locusts as the arrow slammed into his heel, again and again and again. Limping, he ran.

  ***

  Baldur was eating breakfast at the Cornerstone Café. He was staring at his plateful of blueberry pancakes, wonderful maple syrup dripping down the sides. He picked up his fork and took a big bite.

  “How do they taste?” Lilith asked.

  The Queen of Hell sat across from him, munching contentedly on a Belgian waffle. Aamon’s huge eyes begged pleadingly at him through the whipped cream on her plate. Lilith poked her fork into one of the eyes, plucking it out and popping it into her mouth. “Aren’t you going to eat your #3 special?”

  Barbato’s mouth lay open among his pancakes, his long black tongue lolling from it. “Baldur,” it voiced. “Why didn’t you take us with you? We trusted you and now look at us.” Baldur spit out his mouthful of food, pieces of Barbatos inner organs plopping onto the table.

  “Blueberries gone bad?” Lilith asked. “Maybe you need a little Ragnarok instead.” She pointed out the window. Odin, Frigga, and the rest of his friends rotated slowly over giant open fires, skewered like Christmas turkeys.

  “It’s not my fault!” Baldur screamed as he jumped up, knocking over his chair and running out the door.

  ***

  The hot Sahara wind felt like it was burning Solly’s face. He glanced down at the hand drawn vellum map. Twenty more paces. The sheer rock wall towered over him. He carefully counted his steps and stopped with his nose only a foot from the cliff.

  A jagged red brick jutted out, and he reached out and pulled it down. In a shower of gravel, a door ground open. “The Tomb of Jesus,” he grimaced, grit itching his eyes. The mildew smell washed over him and he took a deep breath and slid inside.

  He took a few steps and stopped. The daylight cast shadows everywhere and he held his arms straight out from his body, his silhouette a cross on the wall. He could make out a crypt just a few feet in front of him. He went to it and leaned over.

  “Why did you always have to leave me alone?” asked Mrs. Goldstein. She grabbed him by the shirt and lifted herself into a seated position. “For all of this? A dank tomb full of dank objects and dank people from the dank past? Did you find what you were looking for, Solly?” Blood started pouring from the holes in her palms. She reached out and grabbed his face, smearing him with the warm blood. She kissed him, her mouth tasting of vinegar and death. “Why have you forsaken me?” she whispered, falling back into the crypt, crumbling to dust.

  Solly touched the blood on his cheeks, then rubbed his hands on his pants, slowly at first, then frantically, trying unsuccessfully to clean them. He found the door of the tomb and ran.

  ***

  “Absalom?”

  He opened his eyes. Evangeline’s pale arm was resting on the equally pale white hospital sheets. Dozens of tubes hung from her, giving and taking to the tune of a number of beeping, humming machines.

  “Wife,” Absalom said, taking her hand. It was flaccid and cold. He rubbed it between his palms, trying to force some heat into it.

  “I died,” she whispered.

  Absalom’s eyes started burning. He could taste the acrid smoke. It filled his lungs with hateful spikes of pain, forcing his screams inward to his mind. He could smell the gasoline, the alcohol, and her perfume.

  “You killed me,” she breathed. She burst into flame like a burning leaf, smoke curling from her. A breeze came up in the hospital room, lifting her from the bed, embers dropping to the floor as she floated toward an open window. Absalom jumped up from his chair and reached for her, grabbing frantically. His hand closed around her shrinking form, crumbling noisily. He opened his empty hand,
black soot smeared on his palm.

  “Evangeline!” he shouted, fire and smoke and embers spraying from his scorched throat. He ran from the room.

  Chapter 82[82]

  “Where are we?” asked Solly.

  “On the very edge of sanity,” Absalom answered.

  They were standing holding hands in a circle. Absalom glanced at the frightened faces, eyes wildly reflecting something horribly wrong. Sitting within the perimeter of the terrified men was an enormous crystal sphere. It was filled with the deepest blue water that Absalom had ever seen. It shimmered in the dead silence, a swirl of rainbow colors swimming through it, disappearing, and reappearing.

  It started spinning.

  Absalom felt like he was on the world’s tallest rollercoaster. His stomach sunk to his feet. A voice emanated from the sphere. It started slowly, dragging vowels and consonants across a gravelly road. In seconds, the sphere began to spin faster, the worlds becoming more intelligible.

  ”Humans?” it said. “Alive?” It paused. “Alive. Live. Humans.” The rainbow shimmer got bigger, dancing intricate moves in the blue depths of the sphere.

  ”Yes,” Absalom answered quietly. Rage, fury, and anger struck him, the raw emotion like a vicious kidney punch.

  “Chain! Chain! Chain!” the voice raged, striking Absalom again. The chain rattled in his pack. Wind started blowing from the sphere.

  “Don’t let go,” Solly said, his thin grey hair lifting from his head. “We need to hold on together or we’re finished.” Fat Boy dropped to his knees in pain, brilliant flashes of light colliding in his retinas. He vaguely saw Absalom shrugging his pack off his shoulder.

  Absalom’s mind chugged through the violent wind and light. This was as vivid as any dream he could remember but he had been through so many violent nightmares that he wasn’t frozen with panic like his friends. The scene with Evangeline reassured him that this was all a mind game. She had never spoken to him after the car wreck. By the time he had disentangled himself from the police and arrived at the hospital, she was in a coma and he had never heard her angelic voice again. Lucifer’s madness had pulled up the deepest seeds of his guilt over the accident and replayed them to maximize his pain. Guilt. That’s what made the madness of Lucifer so powerful. Everyone was guilty of something in their lives, and the power of the mist amplified it, leaving man in eternal torment. But why was it still here? What would Lucifer have felt so guilty about when he fell from Heaven? The realization shuddered through the marrow of Absalom’s bones and the emotional pulsing light from the sphere shined the truth on him. Lucifer didn’t feel guilty about trying to overthrow Jehovah. It wasn’t even close. Lucifer felt guilty for his failure to save Mankind! Was Absalom on the wrong side?

  Concentration creased his face. What would break this cycle of insanity? He felt the bandoliers pressed across his chest. He glanced down and saw they were fully packed with the red shells. The familiar weight of the shotgun on his back told him it was time to act now before it was too late.

  He wrenched his hand from Fat Boy’s and reaching over his shoulder to grab the shotgun. “Where has God gone?” he shouted at the sphere.

  “Jehovah lives to reign forever and ever!” the sphere rumbled back.

  Absalom yanked two cartridges from the belt and glanced at the imprints on the cases. Nietzsche and Reason. He slammed them into the shotgun. “We have killed him – you and I” he screamed and fired into the crystal sphere.

  In the split second before the bullet impacted, Absalom felt the least expected thing he would have ever considered possible from the Lord of the Flies.

  100% pure love for Absalom and the human race.

  When the explosion flung him into the depths of the grey mist, uncertainty trailed behind him.

  Chapter 83[83]

  He was still angry about it.

  Mukali and his Mongol horde camped out on the beach for a month, burning gigantic bonfires, cursing, drinking, and singing old battle songs and teary dirges about their mothers and lost loves. Eventually, the sparks of fury that drove them slowly flickered and went out, leaving them with massive month-long bender headaches and no direction.

  Their erstwhile boss, and only possible salvation, was gone, tricked by his venomous ex. After the betrayal, Mukali and his men gaped at the sight of Lucifer trapped back on Earth and attempted to save him, but Lilith’s loyal minions kept them from getting to him. Lilith started waving that damned scepter around and Mukali called for a rapid retreat.

  The Mongols returned to their barracks close to Lucifer’s cabana, but decided to camp out under the stars for a change of pace. The beach was as far away from their previous lives on the steppes as he could have possibly imagined while he was still roaming the Earth, but the level of drinking and carousing was about the same.

  Mukali was getting a soda from the machine when he heard the rumble. It reminded him of the sound that he and his warriors made when they were thundering into Europe. He looked in amazement at the approaching ornate carriage that screamed up the road, a cloud of dust billowing behind it. It shuddered to an abrupt halt in front of the cabana. He could hear shrill screaming over the grunting and wheezing of the giant misshapen beings that pulled it.

  “You bunch of idiotic toad scum! I told you to slow down, not give up.”

  Lilith.

  Mukali ducked behind the soda machine. He peeked around it and watched as the demons unloaded a woman from the back of the carriage. She was bound and gagged in ragged clothing, but was still the most beautiful women that Mukali had ever seen. One of the creatures slung her over his back like a sack of potatoes and carried her into Lucifer’s cabana.

  Lilith followed, looking at the surroundings with obvious distaste and eye-rolling disdain. Her jeweled crown glinted fiercely in the hot sun and Mukali could see her squint her eyes in aggravation, using her scepter to block the glare the best she could. The door closed behind them.

  Mukali’s mind veered back and forth. If Lilith was involved, the situation in front of him truly stunk of the worst possibilities. Why put a bound and gagged woman in Lucifer’s cabana? Did Lilith’s depravity run so deep that she got some kind of thrill out of a kinky escapade in her former husband’s summer house? Probably, he thought.

  A monstrous hand covered his shoulder and Mukali jumped. Busted. He reached for his sword but another monstrous hand grabbed his wrist.

  “Quiet,” Poseidon said. The God of the Sea was dripping wet, as usual, and his intense green eyes were flashing.

  They watched as Lilith and the demon exited the domicile. Lilith was laughing and slapping the uncomfortable grunt on the back. She was still hooting uproariously as she climbed up into the carriage and they quickly sped off, a bag of beer cans flying from the window, scattering onto the road.

  “Just when you thought she was as evil as possible,” Poseidon said. “You find out she’s a litterbug. There’s just no end, is there?” Poseidon stepped onto the sidewalk and watched the receding carriage. “Let’s give her a few minutes to create some distance between us, and then we’ll go inside and see if there’s anything we can do to help Lucifer.”

  “Lucifer?” Mukali asked.

  “Yes,” Poseidon said. “Words out on the street that Lucifer is back in town with a bunch of Norse Gods and is on the hunt for something important. I suspect that something is just behind these doors.”

  “Words out on the street? Which one are you, Starsky or Hutch?”

  “I always pictured myself more as Huggy Bear,” Poseidon said, and headed for the door. “Street-smart and hip.” He eased it open and they both looked inside. The beautiful woman sat roped to a high-back dining chair, her head adorned with Satan’s Jeweled Crown, the scepter tied to her limp hand, and a note pinned to her shirt.

  “Lucifer, I’m sorry and I wish for your forgiveness,” Poseidon read. “Here are the things you need for your happiness. Always, your Lilith.” Poseidon took a step back. “This looks like a case for the bomb squa
d.”

  “Too bad it’s just you and I,” Mukali said. “What do you think, Huggy Bear?”

  “I think we’ll take the gag out of this woman’s mouth and see if she knows anything.” Poseidon stood beside her and pulled the gritty piece of cloth out of her mouth. Eve spat and spluttered. “Did you take long enough to do that?” she complained.

  “Sorry, Eve,” Poseidon said.

  “How do you know me,” she asked with surprise.

  “Lucifer described you down to the smallest freckle on your dimpled butt,” Poseidon answered. “By the time he was finished going through all your vital stats, anybody who listened to him could have picked you out of any police lineup. Great Zeus, there was fifty or sixty guys head over heels in love and they had never even met you.”

  “Down boy,” Eve said.

  “Sorry,” Poseidon said, embarrassed. “It’s just something in the Greek god genes that makes us appear to be horny old goats.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Mukali asked Eve.

  “No,” Eve said. “Lilith said that Lucifer was looking for me. I don’t know how or when.”

  “I think she’s bait,” Mukali said to Poseidon.

  “A Trojan horse, perhaps?” Poseidon said. “Like the one I gave the Greeks during the Trojan War?”

  “I didn’t know you were involved in that,” Mukali said. “We were more slash, burn and kill types ourselves. Not of lot of strategy there.”

  “Fellows,” Eve said. “Let’s concentrate on me and not relive past military glories.”

  “Okay,” Poseidon said. “First, we’ll untie your hands so you can drop the scepter. Then we’ll untie you so you can take off the crown. That seems like the safest way to proceed.”