“A chair,” Dave said, bleary. He wasn’t sure how much, if any, sleep he got last night. He really hated jet lag.
Elorie smiled. “Something work related. In the document Georgia showed me, after ‘ceiling as guide’ someone had scribbled ‘under storage rooms or dwellings? Seismic?’ I’m thinking this is important, and that it points to your specialty.”
Dave chewed his upper lip as he tried to focus his thoughts. “Perhaps. What do you see here?”
“I’m thinking about all the time we spent underground yesterday. How our guide mentioned how many of these underground cities were unexplored, and how many had hidden passages, many lost. Could ‘seismic’ refer to finding these?”
“Yes.” He put down his jam-covered slice of fresh bread and thought. “I know exactly what they’re talking about. There’re quite a few tools we can use for mapping and locating lost passages. It involves…”
“Good. I don’t need to know the details yet,” Elorie said. “I just need to know if you can get this equipment here.”
Jack, who had been eavesdropping, moved himself and his breakfast over to their table, where he grabbed three slices of the bread from their bread basket. Georgia followed.
“I can get the equipment; my old consulting firm has what we need in a storeroom. The only problems I see are that we don’t know exactly what we need and getting the crap delivered here.”
Georgia shook her head. Jack laughed. “So you think your technical specialty’s going to actually be useful? I’m shocked and amazed.”
“It’s just a contingency,” Elorie said. She smiled. “Let’s get the stuff shipped here, everything, covering all the possibilities.” She turned to Georgia. “Do you have enough information to do your work remote?” Georgia nodded. “Let’s go back to Ankara. It’s the only way we’re going to get hold of Dave’s equipment any time soon,” Elorie said. “I can expedite the delivery from there.”
She stood and attracted the attention of all the others. “We’re going back to Ankara. Let’s get packing.”
22. (Satan)
“The only possible conclusion is that Dubuque’s a flaming loon,” Willie said.
Satan laughed, bitter, pained. A week ago she had moved her tent from the Auditorium of the Nativity to the Lamb of God weight room, the result of a long conversation with Marcia Wilson. Marcia served Dubuque as his director of athletics and the associate youth minister in the Foundation of the City of God here in Oklahoma City. Marcia had convinced Satan that if she pursued a rigorous workout regimen her healing faculties would rebuild her body and recapture her youth.
Well, not youth, but her apparent middle age. Dubuque had assigned several of his people to convert Satan away from her ‘evil ways’; Marcia had been the most successful, as few people could stand Satan’s aura or her inhuman body odor. Marcia had suggested vigorous exercise after Satan let her examine Satan’s skin.
Like anything useful, though, the stretches and exercises hurt.
“What’s our erstwhile Living Saint done this time?” Satan said. Despite their détente, Satan couldn’t forget the horrific darkness she had found coiled within Dubuque’s hidden heart, or the idiotic attack he ordered up against her. She couldn’t let the monster charm her into submission.
“He’s commissioned a set of ceiling paintings in his private chapel, the domed monstrosity, about the apotheosis of the 99 Gods. While he’s besieged!”
“I don’t understand the problem,” Satan said. Willie had all these assumptions, and Portland’s siege didn’t follow any of them. “It isn’t as if any of Portland’s attackers are bothering normal people.” If Willie had been in charge of the siege, he would have tried to cut Dubuque off from the rest of the world. Satan had to agree that Portland’s people were just too nice.
“It’s a fucking kabuki dance,” Willie said.
Satan nibbled on a bowl of granola and went back to her stretches. Many painful stretches later, she exited the tent she called home and ventured out into the deserted weight room. Wherever she lived, people moved away, complaining about her stench, her beady eyes and her aura. Whatever. Satan perched herself on the rowing machine and began to row. Within fifteen seconds, white lightning pain shot through her body – and this machine was the easiest of the lot. The squat machine, on its lowest weight setting, hurt far worse. Marcia’s advice worked, though. Even after just four days of this torture, Satan sensed her body adapting and rebuilding her osteoporosis-riddled spine. The only question she still had was whether this torture would straighten her spine or lock it in place in its current scoliosis-bent shape.
The heavy metal door clanged open and Marcia walked in. “Good morning, Bais,” she said. Marcia, in her forties, had light brown hair showing gray, four children who she would show you pictures and movies of on her phone-gadget at any provocation, and a round face showing little fat. Marcia ran marathons, she said.
“There’s nothing good about this morning,” Satan said. “Back’s on fire.”
“Hey, sorry,” Marcia said. “We knew this would be bad.” She pulled over a weight bench next to the rowing machine and sat down. “I got in contact with your German doctor friend.”
“You did? He was willing to talk?” Satan said. She wouldn’t call him a friend, no more than she would call Marcia a friend. Just people who hadn’t turned on her yet. Her German doctor had been testy the last couple of times she had visited him.
“Well, I wouldn’t call him willing, but he did agree to send over some of the work he did on you. I ran his work by Dr. Bruce and had him explain the terminology to me.” Dr. Bruce, one of Dubuque’s Supported, didn’t do miraculous healing, but had been turned into a superior doctor. His diagnoses were always correct. Save for when Dubuque sent him to look at Satan; he had run away puking and cursing, which gave Satan a few chuckles. Not one of the strong ones.
“You understand better why I’m the way I am?”
Marcia nodded. “Uh huh. According to what Dr. Bruce said, essentially, Bais, you’re a toxic waste dump. I mean that literally. It’s because you’re so old.”
Satan nodded. “There’s another component, the smell of my kind. I’m not too far off from human normal, but my guess is that anyone from the era of my birth would smell a little off…”
A telekinetic hand slapped at her, rustling her clothing and kicking up dust as it slid off. Satan winced in pain as four linked Telepaths tried to break into her mind. Five projections of Supported from Portland’s crew ghosted into the room, solidified, and blasted at Satan with various colored rays of divine energies. All bounced off her and the surrounding exercise equipment.
Satan concentrated and made sure the ricochets and flat out misses also missed Willie and Marcia. One slip on her part and her acquaintances would die. Her companions often died if she didn’t pay attention.
A foam plastic handle on one of the devices in the weight room flash-burned and the stench of melted plastic filled the room. “You shouldn’t have stayed in Dubuque’s foul lair,” a projection said. “Consider this a warning of…”
The projection vanished, blindsided by a ricochet from a different projection.
“Fools,” Satan said. She had wondered when Portland’s attackers would turn on her. They didn’t appear to possess a lick of sense or any patience.
At least they hadn’t gone after Willie.
Satan waved her hands at the remaining four projections. “Boo!” she said. They faded. She turned to Marcia, glad she hadn’t died from Portland’s minions’ foolish attack. “How bad off are you?”
One of Marcia’s eyes wandered on its own. Marcia pointed hesitantly at her throat but made no noise. “You’d better go see Dr. Bruce or one of Dubuque’s miracle workers. Otherwise…” Satan made a throat cutting motion. Marcia nodded and skittered off. Satan’s ability to protect those near her was quite problematic.
Satan went back to her rowing, eating the pain and waiting for the inevitable.
It took Dubuqu
e twenty minutes to nerve himself up.
“Even you see the truth in their evil,” Dubuque said. Since the first day, when he confronted her and she told him her conditions, they hadn’t spoken. Now, after Portland’s idiots attacked her, he came to visit. He at least had learned something from their first meeting; he hadn’t started by calling her nasty names. Nor did he attack, or bring an entourage. Well, not exactly correct. His entourage waited outside the Lamb of God weight room.
“I see the truth of their foolishness,” Satan said. “If they wanted to avoid the effect I have on their attacks, all they needed to do was to confront your people somewhere else. Your Supported aren’t having any luck near me, either.” No one could use the tendency for the supernatural to misfire around her for their own personal benefit.
“True,” Dubuque said. “I’ve also learned from Dr. Bruce that the miasma of rotten eggs around you has a purely physical explanation and isn’t supernatural. You were right, and I apologize. He also thinks I might able to cure you of your odor. Miraculously.”
Satan shook her head. “Not going to happen.”
“You don’t want to be cured of the stench?”
“Oh, I do, but even if I wanted your divine tricks to work on me they wouldn’t,” Satan said. Her subconscious would never allow such an intrusion. “Surely he told you about Dr. Hogenboomer’s idea that the poisons in me could be leeched away using modern medical tricks.” She had been mulling Dr. Hogenboomer’s idea for years, so far unwilling to hazard the risks.
Dubuque shrugged. He didn’t sit, but stood, uncomfortable and edgy, twenty feet away from Satan. He at least had enough brains not to attempt to divinely banish the burnt plastic smell from the weight room.
“Yes, Dr. Bruce told me. What he said was the German doctor’s idea would kill anything this side of a toxic-resistant bacteria and that Dr. Bruce wouldn’t suggest any such thing even to his worst enemy.”
“I’m leery of the procedure myself,” Satan said. “Not because I fear poison, which I don’t, but because if Dr. Hogenboomer’s idea’s wrong, whoever administers that treatment to me would likely die. As Sigmund said, my subconscious is very protective.”
“In any event, I’ve ascertained that you are not the actual Devil. Now that you’ve experienced the treachery of Portland’s attackers, it’s past time that you and I come to an agreement.”
“You think I’m here to help you?” Satan said, mildly surprised. This revealed a side of Dubuque he hadn’t shown to her before.
“Why else would God have sent you, Bais? I rehabilitated Blind Tom,” Dubuque said. “I can rehabilitate you as well. Baptize you to the cause.”
Dubuque hadn’t followed up his initial attack after their first meeting, not even with an extended version of the standard ‘foul Satan begone’ routine. “I find your cause intriguing and worthy of debate, Dubuque, but I don’t agree with your means,” Satan said. Or the darkness his means revealed. “I can’t join you unless you give up on coercing your City of God into existence and you give up murdering people to advance your plans. Your attacks on the Telepaths – my people – simply for being who they are is dead wrong.” She had heard the truth of the matter from Nessa, who couldn’t lie to her on the subject. Dubuque’s hands-clean rest-stop attack on the Telepaths, before the fight between Atlanta and Miami, had been what convinced her to take a closer look at Dubuque.
“We are the knights of Christ,” Dubuque said. “Our cause is just and we cannot and will not give up our right of self-defense. A Man of God always has the right to seek God’s Kingdom.”
Satan shook her head. “Your hubris damns you, Dubuque. You aren’t God. Neither are the ones who made you.”
“Who are you to talk of God?”
“I’ve lived long enough to have come to peace with God and to commune with Him,” Satan said. “I know enough to realize a few tricks won’t make me holy. My calling is elsewhere. You must learn the same.”
“You think we Living Saints aren’t holy?”
“A bunch of Angels waving their hands at someone, giving them extraordinary and miraculous abilities, doesn’t make anyone holy,” Satan said. “Holiness has to be earned, and it is earned in this world of pain and woe, not in the world of spirit. Define holiness by your faith and your deeds, not by your tricks, and you can save yourself from the damnation you fall toward.”
“So you serve Portland’s schemes even though her people attack you? I hadn’t thought you to be a fool.”
“Sorry, Dubuque,” Satan said. “The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. I have too many enemies for this to be true. Take a number and get in line.”
Dubuque sighed. “Believe me, if there was a better way for me to bring about the City of God, I’d follow it. Even self-defense bothers my conscience.” He lifted his eyes up to the heavens, almost in pleading. “Bais, the world of pain and woe, as you call it, is the way it is because of the sins of mankind. Even the United States, the most heavily Christian nation on Earth today, has fallen far from God’s grace; even here we follow the laws of man, not the laws of God. There is no way we can be true Christian people unless we trust God and his immutable law and follow both. For this, the City of God is absolutely necessary, for if we are not ruled by God, we are ruled by tyrants. And it’s always the right of any God-fearing man to defend himself from tyrants and oppressors.”
Satan flared her nose and frowned at Dubuque’s revelation. “Why does this make any of the 99 Gods or their allies your enemies? They aren’t responsible for the political establishment; in fact, they’re opposed by them.” The city of Portland had made their namesake God no longer welcome within the city limits, the federal government had passed laws stating none of the 99 Gods were above the law, and these days the US media cut down the Gods more often than they supported them.
Dubuque met her gaze. “Any who do not support me tacitly aid the tyrannical laws of man and the bureaucrats and judges who enforce them.” His holy aura grew as he spoke, his charisma almost strong enough for her to feel.
“Finally,” Satan said, and relaxed. For a moment in this conversation she wondered if she had made a mistake in her initial judgments and she had been wrong about the darkness she sensed in Dubuque. Until this point, Dubuque had been too reasonable.
“What have you seen?” Dubuque said, still wreathed in holiness.
“Nothing good,” Satan said. “I’ve heard ‘anyone who does not support me is my enemy’ from nearly every damned tyrant I’ve ever opposed. That philosophy’s never more than a sop to what little conscience a tyrant has managed to retain. By stating that those who don’t support you are the enemy, the ‘other’, you give yourself and your followers the right to do anything you wish to anyone who isn’t your follower. In modern terms, you’ve dehumanized them and printed yourself a license to do evil.” She paused for effect. “You truly are a tyrant.”
She had fought, in her limited fashion, pieces of pig dog excrement like Dubuque ever since she found her first tyrant ruling an early city.
“Then you’re beyond my help,” Dubuque said. “You’ve left me no choice.” He turned and stalked out of the weight room.
23. (Satan)
“Dubuque’s on to something,” Willie said.
“What do you sense?” Satan said. She lay on her cot, staring at the roof of the tent, willing away the pain.
“In the past day, four of his Supported doubled their light.”
“Which means what?” Satan said. Willie had developed his own terminology for Dubuque’s people as he slowly expanded the boundaries of his magic.
“Power, Bais, power,” Willie said. “So far, Dubuque’s holding back his new Supported from the fight. I think he’s waiting until he has trained more of them. They’re a danger to us, as well.”
Satan snorted. “If he sends more powerful minions after us he’ll just cook his own goose faster.”
“But I’m not you.”
She looked at Willie, and noticed a few more
signs of the squirming multitudes building behind his eyes. “For which I thank the heavens,” she said. “What would you suggest?”
“Nothing you would accept,” Willie said. “We should attack. I can feel the power growing in me as well; I’m now more powerful than even John Lorenzi! The true power is mine, now. I can take Dubuque’s minions unless he gets too many of these new, more powerful ones.”
“I told you not to listen to those voices in your head. They mean you no good. You have no right to attack Dubuque’s people just because they might attack you sometime later.” No individual had such a right. “Without this right, you cannot win.”
“But the voices tell the truth!”
“What they say is true, but also incomplete,” Satan said. “They hide from you the consequences of your actions. This is why I told you that if you want to save yourself, free yourself from my service, all you need to do is ask me to let Lorenzi remove your ability to do magic. Otherwise, the voices will destroy you.”
“I don’t believe they will,” Willie said.
Which is why you’re damned already, Satan said. Well, the damnation was his choice.
The door to the Lamb of God weight room creaked open, followed by the sound of many footsteps and voices.
“Trouble,” Satan said.
Willie nodded. “No Supported.”
“Worse trouble.”
Willie shrugged. Satan sat up, grabbed her canes, and hobbled to the opening of the tent. The voices had started chanting, of all things. Willie opened the tent flap for her and she hobbled out, ignoring the pain, today centered in her left hip.
“It is her!” a man said, and prostrated himself before her. “Satan!”
The rest of the crowd bowed as well, a wave leading away from her. The chit chat in the back intensified, and another two dozen quickly walked or trotted into the weight room to kneel or prostrate themselves before her.
99 Gods: Betrayer Page 30