99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  Dave nodded. “They’ll get them shipped. Pete gave me a firm ship time, Friday morning. Once he gives a date and time, he always follows through.”

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Well, we do have the time.”

  “That’s true.” Georgia and the rest of the analysts hadn’t made any progress decoding the ceiling symbols, and were getting shorter and shorter of temper.

  Elorie squinched her eyes closed and sighed. “The software is turning out to be more of a problem than you’d originally thought.”

  “Huh?” Dave said. “It’s off the shelf at the French firm I sent to you.”

  “Your French firm went into the French version of receivership last week,” Elorie said, eyes still closed.

  “Impossible. They’ve been in business nearly a century.”

  “Fallout from the Seven Suits acquisition and dismemberment of Elf Aquitaine.”

  “Crap. I agree with their goals, at least part of the time, but as always their implementation sucks. Someone should shoot those idiots.”

  “There’s a long line,” Elorie said. “Since they’re nominal Dubuque allies, you think you could put in a good word? I…” Elorie’s head wobbled as she spoke, and in the process, she almost dumped her laptop off her lap. Her hands shook and had turned purple again.

  “El?”

  “Uhhh.” She slumped forward, and twitched once, hard. The laptop fell to the floor with a crash.

  “El!” Dave leapt from the desk to catch her before she followed it. He lifted her face and her eyes rolled in their sockets. He lifted her from her chair – she weighed so little! – and laid her flat on the imitation Persian carpet. “Damn,” he said, putting his hand on her forehead. Ice cold.

  This couldn’t be happening, he thought. Not El, under the care of one of the 99 Gods.

  Her lifeless rubber-like skin carried the faint odor of decay.

  “Persona,” Elorie said, her whispered voice slurred. Her eyes closed. “Please?”

  Dave froze for a moment, unsure. His hands and arms went tingly, distant and impotent. He didn’t have any idea what had gone wrong with Elorie, but in his gut he understood the danger. Insight, instinct, washed over him and he knew what to do, without thinking.

  Dubuque, hear my prayer. There’s something wrong with Elorie, and she needs help. His thoughts rushed through his mind; his faith suffused him; he remembered Dubuque’s help when he had prayed to Dubuque in his own moments of weakness.

  To his surprise, he sensed the divine contact as well as a divine frown.

  Please?

  Turmoil, then calm. Dave didn’t know if he had been answered, but his heart no longer wanted to escape by beating its way out of his chest. Elorie, though, didn’t change, inching closer to some unexpected death.

  For a moment he closed his eyes as a sense of communion and purpose came over him. Dave’s hand rose on its own and he yanked his eyes open to find his hand enveloped in white fire. Not his doing. Streamers of multicolored energies flowed out of his hand and assembled themselves, slower than he wished, into a person-shape, a woman. A stunning woman, unbelievably beautiful, with jutting breasts, wavy dark brown hair that hung to her shoulders, and impossibly thick lips. She wore a strapless black dress that stopped mid-thigh. Her clothes had flowed out of his outstretched hand as easily as her body had.

  “Uhhh,” Dave said, not believing his own eyes. His still extended hand wavered in mid-air; the woman grabbed his hand with hers and shook.

  “You’re Dave Estrada, glad to meet you. Persona. Glad to be here, I guess.”

  “Ahh, um…”

  “Just a projection.” Persona cocked an eyebrow at him, a demand.

  “Buh, buh…” Dave said, overwhelmed by Persona’s presence and by a gut churning woo-woo sensation.

  “Peanut butter mouth. Just great,” Persona said. She shook her head and a tingly wave of invisible power washed over him.

  He found he could speak again. “Thanks,” he said. “Something’s wrong with Elorie.”

  “Uh huh. Stroke, among other things. You want her healed?”

  Shit. “Yes! She’s my wife! A human being! A…” His momentary sense of peace had vanished, and panic tore at him like a wolf.

  “I understand. Let’s get her up on her bed. We need her to be more comfortable,” Persona said, her voice calming and strong. Whatever she did allowed Dave to take a deep breath and steady himself.

  Persona’s projection proved tangible enough to grab Elorie’s arms, at the shoulders. Dave grabbed Elorie’s feet. Together, they lifted Elorie up and on to her bed.

  He did wonder why Persona didn’t wiggle her nose or whatever and do it herself. Dimly, he realized he had no idea about the real and mundane capabilities of the Gods.

  “Can you help her?”

  “Of course I can help her,” Persona said. She stretched out her arms and stood up straighter. “Not that helping people like Elorie isn’t a bitch and a half.”

  “Why?”

  “She’ll tell you if she wants you to know. Now be quiet for a moment, man of Dubuque. I need to avert some more cell death.”

  Dave quieted and watched Persona work. Or not work, as the case may be. As far as he could tell, Persona didn’t do anything at all. He wasn’t sure what he expected – perhaps whirling glowing lights, ominous sounds, or other Hollywood special effect style happenings. Nothing.

  He found himself hyperventilating and shaking. He had never been in the actual presence of one of the 99 Gods or their projections before, and his woo-woo moment kept going on and on. The stupid part of himself, the part of him that doubted anything he couldn’t touch, happily reveled in the fact the 99 Gods hadn’t turned out to be a media conspiracy or something else equally idiotic. The emotional reaction made him giddy, on top of the horror over Elorie’s collapse.

  The smarter part of him wondered why Dubuque had sent Persona instead of healing Elorie himself. Dubuque philosophically opposed non-Territorials doing any form of miraculous healing.

  For some reason, Dave’s memories turned to the identification of thin sections in a petrology lab he taught one semester in Grad School.

  I had better get myself some tranquilizers if El ever gives birth, he thought. I must be too old for this.

  “There,” Persona said. “All better.”

  Elorie didn’t move. Her eyes stayed open, unblinking. She looked like she had breathed her last.

  “She’s dead.”

  “Well, uh, not exactly,” Persona said. She turned to Dave and put a hand on his shoulder. Her touch calmed him. “We could probably fool some medical examiners if we wanted, though. She does make a good zombie, now doesn’t she?”

  Persona had to be joking. However, Elorie still looked quite dead. He didn’t understand. “I’m…”

  “You’re flustered, out of your league, and don’t have a clue what’s going on or how to react.”

  Dave nodded. He had lost track of his tongue again.

  “Do whatever,” he stammered out, slowly. “I won’t mind.” Persona gave Dave a quick hug, and his mind cleared a bit, the panic easing back. Persona must have done something more to him. “Sit.”

  Dave sat on the bed, next to Elorie, and took Elorie’s cold lifeless hand. “I’m having a hard time coping. Am I hallucinating? Is this… Is any of this real?”

  “Everything here is quite real,” Persona said. “Though I’ll have to admit getting a message from Dubuque to save one of my own isn’t something that happens to me every day. Especially with what happened a few hours ago.”

  “Huh?”

  “Dubuque beat the Siege. Your side won. My side lost. Not that you had anything to do with the fight, either way. Still. I’m sort of grumpy.” Pause. “I guess Dubuque’s being magnanimous. He did offer me a full pardon if I joined the City of God.”

  Dave’s eyes opened wide. So did Elorie’s.

  “Go back to sleep,” Persona said, to Elorie. Elorie�
��s eyes stayed open. Persona wiggled her nose but Elorie didn’t fall back asleep.

  “No way,” Elorie said, her voice a dying whisper. Sleep she didn’t. “Come on, turn on the cable news. I want to know the details. Please?”

  Persona sighed, stood, searched the room, found the television remote, and turned on the cable.

  “For a God, you certainly have to do a lot of things physically,” Dave said, distantly realizing he had started to blather. “I know I shouldn’t say such things, ‘cause you’re likely dangerous. Somehow. But you’re, um, I dunno, too human to be, well, awesome. Godly.” Well, he thought, she was awesome, but only awesome on the level of a swimsuit model.

  “Be nice or I’ll give you a week long orgasm that puts you in traction for the next month,” Persona said.

  He had never seen such a threatening eyebrow raise before. No exaggeration here. “Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am. How’d I bring you in, ma’am? It wasn’t me, ma’am, was it?”

  Persona ignored his blather and changed the channel, without the need of a station guide, and adjusted the volume. The cable news talking heads yammered about a speech Dubuque made, then went live to a post-fight scene of joy outside of Dubuque’s megachurch, then to a loop of the actual fight. They cut back and forth between the story about the ending of the fight to the other breaking news of the moment, a tidbit about the unemployment rate climbing to 26 percent and a longer piece about some nasty-looking anti-God riots in Europe.

  “Did I hear that right?” Dave said. “Dubuque actually said ‘my followers have chosen of their own free will to venerate me as their sole intermediary to God’?”

  Persona nodded. “Uh huh. He’s still calling himself a Living Saint, though. I’d have thought with his new over-the-top philosophy he would have at least upgraded his self-given title to Post-Living Messiah or something equivalently hubristic.” Hmm. Three guesses as to which side Persona was on, and the first two don’t count.

  “The siege is over?” Elorie said. “The Helping Hands lost?”

  “Regrettably, yes, and decisively,” Persona said. “I was there, unfortunately. Dubuque found some way to hook the power of his, um, venerators directly into the capabilities of his Supported. He blasted far too many of Portland’s people out of the sky, leaving corpses everywhere. Then he went and publicly admitted having worshippers, though he still won’t admit to the exact term. I’m probably not good company right now. You should sleep, Elorie.”

  “Finally,” Dave said, to no one in particular, talking about the end of the siege, his voice having an unexpected hollow echo. ‘Sole intermediary’? Dave had a hard time swallowing the comment. Same with ‘corpses’, even if Portland and her thugs had been the attackers. His side was supposed to be better than Portland’s thugs. Dubuque’s defenders were the good guys!

  “Persona, what’s wrong with me?” Elorie said. “Why’d I have a stroke?”

  “Because you wouldn’t let me do a full cure,” Persona said, with a haughty sniff. She glared at Elorie with disdain. “Without a full cure, we’re relying on my patch job, which wore out.” Persona walked around Elorie’s bed and sat down to take Elorie’s other hand. “You’ve been putting too much of yourself into your work the past month. Not only that, you’ve kicked your husband out of your bed for the past two nights. The stress in your life is killing you.”

  Elorie closed her eyes. “I needed to work.”

  “Work, die, what’s the difference,” Persona said, doing Jewish mother. “If you want, I can turn you into a true zombie, a trick Montreal discovered. She got so pissed off at one of her people who wouldn’t take care of himself – a druggie, no true comparison to you – that she let him die, bound his soul into his corpse and animated him as the living dead.”

  So Montreal was one of the evil ones, eh? Or, did her trick count as pre-emptive self-defense?

  “Uh, no thanks,” Elorie said.

  “I think you need to give the idea some thought. As a zombie, you can work twenty four hours a day, as long as you get a few bites of living flesh at mealtime. Well, uncooked flesh, at least. Montreal’s druggie’s living off sushi.”

  She had to be pulling Elorie’s leg, didn’t she? Dave tallied that as ‘undecided’, and sighed.

  “Okay, okay, I get the point. I’ll cut back.”

  Dave had to smile.

  “If Dave hadn’t had his connection to Dubuque, you’d be dead,” Persona said. “You suffered a massive stroke. A few more minutes and – poof.”

  “Crap. I didn’t think I was that stressed.”

  “If I gave you a meter to measure how much in danger you were, you would push things into the red and make the problem worse,” Persona said. She put her hands on her ample hips and glared. “Your body can’t take the stress of your current life. Nor should you be doing things like ditching your pain pills and trying to grit your teeth through withdrawal. Neither should you be turning your back on love.”

  Elorie shook her head, glaring at Persona, and didn’t even blush. “You know the reason why I can’t do a full cure. Is there something in between?”

  “Not if you’re relying on me. I think Doctor can, but this week he’s on the other side, if you catch my drift. Try again next week. Besides, I’m not sure he’ll consider you an interesting enough case. I mean, you’re just a workaholic who refuses to take care of herself.” Persona paused. “Elorie, I don’t care if you’re two days behind in your paperwork…you will not go another night with only an hour or two of sleep, and you will sleep with Dave here tonight. There’s real chemistry involved in love, Elorie, and I’m not talking allegory.” She paused again. “And I don’t want to hear even a peep out of you about how long you’ve lived alone. Your life has changed. You have to change as well.”

  “I’ll say,” Elorie said. She took a deep breath. “I don’t suppose you can do anything about this headache?”

  “I can, but I won’t,” Persona said. “Consider it an incentive to take better care of yourself. Now get some rest!” Following the obvious unavoidable command from on high, Persona’s projection abruptly vanished.

  Dave tried to calm himself and failed. He turned back to watch the cable news, now showing some talking head interviewing Oklahoma City dignitaries about the details of the fight. Absurd. What just happened in this hotel room hit his absurd button, way beyond impossible. How did this happen? How did he…

  Why was he still stuck in his horrible woo-woo moment?

  “I’ve got a strange request,” Elorie said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got a little voice in my head saying I need to finish healing, and I’ve got twenty nine minutes and forty seconds left to go. I don’t think I’m going to be much fun in those twenty nine minutes.” Elorie forced a smile, enough to show the dimples near her mouth that nearly melted Dave’s heart whenever he noticed them. “If you don’t talk to me and don’t say my name…”

  “I get the point,” Dave said. “Sleep.” He suspected he knew what Elorie would look like, and he was right. There she lay, eyes open, not breathing. Literally dead. Dave closed Elorie’s eyes and put his hand at her throat, and waited.

  Three heartbeats a minute. Well, given how he felt now, he made up for Elorie’s lost heartbeats with his own.

  He sure as hell hoped Persona knew her stuff.

  The bad woo-woo moment refused to go away. With half an ear listening to the cable news, he sat on the floor at the foot of the bed. He meditated, eyes closed, in another likely futile effort to follow the instructions he had found on the internet to open himself up to his buried Psychic nature. At first, nothing happened. A minute in, though, he started seeing flashes of things. He concentrated…then fell, overwhelmed, into something entirely new.

  Smells. Touches. Ideas. Sights. They all rushed into him and ran over his free will. Overwhelming him.

  Chocolate chip cookies. A feeling about someone he had never met but had always known, suffering from claustrophobia on an airplane fl
ight and worried that she and Portland would have yet another fight. The touch of well-worn leather on his fingers. Tiff saying “Gotcha now, sucker”, hacking into the cellphone Lorenzi had provided Dave. The astringent taste of a diet soft drink. Verona saying “It’s too soon to reveal this, my friend. We are too weak and I fear the consequences” and Dubuque answering “but my hidden leverage will change everything and bring all of us together.” A vision of a cloaked woman looking out over a low forested mountain, and deciding that this was the place. A disembodied voice saying “echoes caused by repeated thoughts bounce from one mind to the other, even a little in the minds of non-Telepaths; amplify those echoes and you can change the world.”

  “Stop this, please!” Dave said. With effort, he shook himself out of this waking nightmare and opened his eyes.

  His woo-woo moment vanished. He tried to make sense of what happened to him and failed. The hallucination seeped out of his memories, dream-like, leaving behind only the smell of chocolate chip cookies.

  He tried to remember more and failed. In the meantime, he watched the cable news.

  Twenty minutes after Elorie resumed her healing, they re-ran Dubuque’s entire victory speech. Dave had to close his eyes to stop the tears.

  “You sure you’re up to this?” Dave asked. He and Elorie walked side by side, not hand in hand, four paces behind Jack and Georgia, who did walk hand in hand. They said they had found an American style disco, and Elorie instantly took them up on the idea of going dancing.

  “Think of it as doctor’s orders,” Elorie said. “No more work for me today. I’m as hearty as I was in the first week after Persona’s original cure. Especially if you add in a rather unquenchable desire to sleep regular hours.”