99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

  “My place bothers you, doesn’t it?” Atlanta said. Dana nodded. “Your borrowed shit from Portland is reacting to what I have here.” Dana nodded again. “How about we go talk in a slightly more neutral location? It’s someplace you can get food and drink.”

  Dana stood. “Let’s go. However, I’m not sure I’d be able to eat or drink anything right now. I’m, well, this hasn’t been a good day.” Her voice didn’t say ‘you scare the crap out of me worse than the Suits did’, but her face did.

  Atlanta picked up Dana and they flew off.

  “Where is this place?” Dana said, when they landed.

  “Parking garage roof.”

  “What city?”

  “Athens, Georgia,” Atlanta said. “Don’t worry. Nobody will see us unless I want them to.” She led Dana to the corner of the roof and down the four story stairway to the street. The season had finally turned, Atlanta noted, pleased. No more early fall days in the 90s.

  “This doesn’t seem to be a college town,” Dana said, after they exited through a steel door to a busy sidewalk. She shifted uneasily, obviously outside of her comfort zone. Atlanta suspected she didn’t much trust the Deep South, too far in attitude and distance from the urban areas of the West Coast. Atlanta led them to the left.

  “Look closer.” Many of the buildings were over a century old, making the parking structure they landed on an outlier. Athens was, well, Athens. Not enough trees, generally too much harsh sunshine, regularly too humid and too hot. The student-driven economy changed everything, though. Atlanta smiled as she passed the Georgia Architectural Yacht, a bar whose initials spelled out the desired clientele, and she pointed it out to Dana. The Yacht was a typical College St. low-end storefront, barely twelve feet wide, part of the bottom floor of a three story building, and likely a full hundred feet deep.

  Dana didn’t comment, and continued looking. “What’s with all the dogs?”

  They came to the corner of College and Broad, and turned left again, ignoring the early evening indie-music blare coming from the Hardwired Lounge on the corner to the right. The tree infested north campus quad spread out, blocks wide, across Broad. “This is the University of Georgia,” Atlanta said. To Dana’s puzzled look, Atlanta supplied “home of the Bulldogs.”

  Dana’s puzzled look didn’t vanish, but she did follow Atlanta’s gaze to a small storefront two down from their destination, the ‘Dog Eat Dog World’, which sold baked goods for dogs. Athens had more dogs than anywhere else Atlanta had ever been. “Is everyone in this place crazy?”

  “No, just three quarters white,” Atlanta said. The UGA was a place where you damned well knew you were a minority. A place to build character, if you were black.

  She led Dana past the Grease Guys Burgers and Fries.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Dana said, a politely quiet whisper, when she realized the place next door was their destination. They walked around a sidewalk-parked red and white Vespa and over to the front door, framed by picture windows highlighted by day-glow orange paint. The sign above said ‘Anime Café’ in bold black cursive, above a picture of an anime boy stuffing his face with pizza. Under the picture was the store’s motto, in bright blue cursive, ‘Where Your Eyes Are Always Bigger Than Your Stomach’. The smell of excellent fresh brewed coffee wafted out the door as they entered, and the abnormal ambience of the place immediately quieted Dana’s nerves and allowed her to relax.

  Two women in thin hooded black cloaks immediately noticed them from the far back of the café. The narrow front half of the café widened out to a full forty feet wide in the back, spreading out behind the Tachee Takko next door. Atlanta wove her way through the college crowd set waiting in line at the coffee bar, around the near entry-way tables and chairs, as always unmatched and thrift store in origin, and past one of the flat screens showing anime, this one dedicated to the opening scenes of many an anime production, the main characters endlessly running toward the viewer.

  The back end of the Anime Café was normally less crowded, but today appeared to be holding a convention worth of the just-a-little-different-than-normal-human types who haunted the place. Atlanta hadn’t realized, before, that they had any Blacks or Asians mixed up among their tighty-whities and over-represented Hispanics.

  Dana continued to sightsee, distracted by one anime wall hanging after the other, a frown finally settling on her face when she reached the picture-poster of the overly cute anime teen girl in a sailor suit, on a subway, about to punch out a salaryman who was taking an upskirt picture of her with his camera phone. Atlanta ignored the familiar chaos and clamor and watched the two women in cloaks. She didn’t recognize the cloaked woman on the left, but she recognized Jan, the one on the right, as she was one of the local leaders and an old friend of the owner of the café.

  “Hey, Atlanta, what’s going on?” Jan said. Dana nearly leapt on Atlanta’s back when Jan spoke, as if before Jan had spoken she had been invisible to Dana.

  The leaders here had exceptional cloaks.

  “Just need a table and a quiet place to talk,” Atlanta said. “It looks like your gang’s all here. Something bad going on?”

  The cloaked woman on Jan’s left studied Dana intently, before whispering the obvious to Jan.

  “Some of you Gods have been misbehaving, and everyone’s upset,” Jan said.

  “I’ll talk to you later about that, January,” Atlanta said. Jan, who didn’t like her full first name, frowned. She was an athletic, young-looking woman with an eye-catching face, a voluptuous figure, died shock-blonde hair, and she almost matched Dana in height. She led Atlanta and Dana over to the four and a half legged table under a poster of seven mixed-gender anime child soldier types, arrayed with mech weapons, facing off against a leering multi-tentacled monster. Someday Atlanta wanted to know the story behind the added illegible signatures on the poster, one per child soldier, and the one legible block-writing note ‘Montana’, on the tentacled monster. “Coffee for me, my usual, and some calming herbal tea for my friend.”

  Atlanta and Dana sat, Dana bursting out of her own skin with curiosity.

  “So, Dana, where did you get your powers from?” Atlanta said.

  Dana blinked, turned her head back to Atlanta, and sighed. “As I said, from Portland.” Dana didn’t want to talk about what was going on in her life, but Atlanta read obligation in her. She owed Atlanta for the rescue. Which meant Portland had not only given Dana godlike abilities, she had also tied the mortal into Portland’s Mission. Mostly to her Integrity, but also to her Rapture and Congregation, the other two aspects of Mission.

  “I hadn’t realized any of us could do that,” Atlanta said. “This is something I need to talk to Portland about.” She wanted to make a deal and learn how to do the trick herself, if she could and it didn’t conflict with her Imago.

  Dana closed her eyes for a moment, in thought. “The Suits didn’t bleed, they oozed silver,” Dana said, a half minute later. “Portland bleeds and bruises when I fight her. Real blood. Is that only because I’m a mortal?”

  Back to the earlier question. Atlanta realized she liked Dana. Despite being terrified out of her gourd in a hopeless situation, Dana kept her head and could verbally spar with Atlanta, a rarity among the flesh and blood types.

  “I have no idea. As you’ve seen firsthand, our bodies are fake. They’re some sort of divine essence held together by our Imago, our image of ourselves.” Atlanta held up her jet-black arm and willed it to separate in the middle of the forearm, showing the silver. Painful, but not absurdly so. “See? No bones. No blood.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Why are you so scared, Dana?”

  “You’re not what I expected from Portland’s description of you,” Dana said. “Hanging out in a nerd cafe? In a place crawling with more, um, abnormal humans than I knew existed?”

  Truth, but not a real answer to Atlanta’s question. She was surprised Dana had found a way to detect the abnormality of many of the humans in this place. Atla
nta tentatively reclassified Dana from ‘tough victim’ to ‘untrained tough woman’.

  “What did you expect of me?”

  “Well, uh, a Marine drill sergeant. A six foot tall muscle-bound Amazon with a militaristic viewpoint on everything. Nasty. Um, not overly brilliant.”

  “Oorah!” Atlanta said. Six foot tall, though? Although Atlanta wasn’t tall, she did tower over the quite short Portland. “Say what you’re really thinking, instead.”

  “You’re evil,” Dana said, her eyes almost inadvertently on the monster-fight poster on the wall above Atlanta. She reddened after she spoke. Atlanta had led her perfectly into her blurt.

  Atlanta sighed. “Why is it anything you self-righteous types strongly disagree with you call evil? Don’t you realize that as soon as you do so, you lose all hope of any sort of rational discussion on the subject?”

  Eyes downcast, Dana sighed. And shivered. “You’re right, Atlanta. I apologize, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” Atlanta said, despite the fact she had led Dana to the comment. “What have I done to make you call me evil?

  “I’d rather not answer. You did rescue me.”

  “I want to know where we stand on this, magician,” Atlanta said. She watched sweat drip down Dana’s face.

  Magician was the only word Atlanta could think of to describe Dana. Jan took that moment to walk up with the tea and coffee Atlanta had ordered. Jan was no barista, but she was willing to serve Atlanta. The better to keep an eye on her.

  “Not magician,” Jan said, whispering. “Supported.”

  That would do, despite the fact Atlanta suspected Jan had coined the term on the spot. Dana flinched as the accurate naming pinged her Imago but she took a deep breath and spoke anyway. “If Portland’s correct, you’ve killed thousands of people.”

  Jan didn’t walk away, or flinch. Instead, she smiled at Dana’s assertion.

  “Affirmative,” Atlanta said. She encountered far too many people like the Suits’ pet psychopath. She killed all she found.

  “Killing is evil.”

  Jan backed off, rolled her eyes, and fled. One of the things Atlanta liked about the group running this place, who gathered now in fear on the opposite side of the back part of the café, was the fact they knew how to kill, and knew the right people to kill.

  ‘People’ probably wasn’t the correct word for many, if not most, of their targets, though.

  “Governments kill people,” Atlanta said. “Try, convict and kill people. My mistake rate is far lower than theirs: zero. I can see the crimes people have done.”

  “I don’t believe in capital punishment either,” Dana said.

  “Well, at least you’re consistent.”

  Dana fidgeted. “I fear for my life around you, because you’re a killer.”

  “The people I’ve killed were rapists, murderers and thugs,” Atlanta said. “Are you?” Dana shook her head, radiating her fear. She took a deep breath, and took a sip of her herbal tea.

  “That’s not all you fear, Dana,” Atlanta said. The killing didn’t explain the magnitude of Dana’s earlier flinch. “Tell me.” Atlanta knew normal people found her direct questions difficult to refuse, a trait she shared at least with all the other Territorial Gods.

  Dana squirmed. “I’m afraid you might think I’m someone like John Lorenzi, a mortal with native magical powers. I didn’t lie to you. I do work for Portland and she did give me my, um, what Jan over there called supported powers.”

  Finally. “I believe you,” Atlanta said. “Tell me about yourself, Dana. How’d you come to serve Portland?”

  “I found her and volunteered. I sold her on the idea.”

  Atlanta raised an eyebrow. “Some trick, that.” Portland struck her as too wishy-washy to have decided so quickly to do something as momentous as support for mortal magicians or supported or whatever they were. “How’d you get access to Portland? What were you beforehand, a model?” Atlanta’s undercurrent implied talents abnormal for any human.

  “You’re a tease,” Dana said. She laughed and relaxed. Her worries about Atlanta had vanished, Atlanta realized. Annoying, but telling. Dana had relaxed when Atlanta said she believed her, implying if not proving that Dana could read Atlanta’s Integrity. “I’d just finished my PhD last year, and I was still hunting for the perfect job when I saw Dubuque’s press conference.”

  Dubuque had been the first North American God to go public, four hours after Apotheosis. When the Territorial Gods had gotten together for a meeting just before the end of Apotheosis, Dubuque hadn’t said a word. He had saved it all for his first press conference, where he tried to paint the 99 into a corner by refusing to use the word ‘God’, naming all of them ‘Living Saints’.

  He failed. His name didn’t take.

  “Go on.”

  Dana took a deep breath. “Dubuque’s press conference bothered me as much as his utopian ideals lifted my spirits. First he demonstrated his ability to do those miracles of his: walking on water, healing the amputee guy and the blind woman, and curing some child’s cancer to boot. Then he said: ‘Venerate us as Living Saints and together we’ll do good, and make the Earth into a paradise’. It just sounded so political to me, like: I’m not a God wink wink nudge nudge don’t worship me call it veneration wink wink nudge nudge followed by a standard quid pro quo.”

  “He didn’t heal the lame man, Dubuque made the guy a willpower prosthesis,” Atlanta said. “The effect will be the same in the long run, though.”

  “You’re avoiding my argument.”

  “You are correct,” Atlanta said. She liked Dana’s attitude. A lot.

  “Anyway, since Dubuque said we had one of the Territorial Gods as a local – I was in Seattle for a job interview – I flew down to the city of Portland and used my head. I found Portland and got her to talk to me. We talked and I convinced her that she, and the rest of you Gods, couldn’t do your jobs alone and needed help. I made the suggestion that she distribute her divine power to mortals, turn it into a cooperative enterprise, and she did.”

  Atlanta raised an eyebrow at Dana’s ahead-of-the curve insight and proactive nature. She interrupted her next comment when Jan and her companion, an even taller cloaked woman, glided over, pulled up chairs, and sat down at their table. “Sorry,” Jan said, to Atlanta. “Bringing someone of Portland’s here has messed up our analysis capabilities. If the two of us sit here, we can cancel out the interference on the others, though.” Atlanta nodded. From what little she knew of the Anime Café crew, they called themselves the Indigo and they primarily worked on the edges of the unnatural and arcane. Minor things involving enhanced senses and enhanced analysis. They hadn’t told her the details, and she hadn’t asked. Not yet. They were too wary of her to cough up anything technical. They did know how to fight, though.

  They wanted Atlanta as an ally, and she similarly wanted them, and she didn’t begrudge them their paranoia. They were being far more forthcoming than Atlanta would have been in a similar situation.

  Jan turned to Dana. “Don’t worry about us passing along any sensitive information. We know how to keep a secret.” Dana nodded.

  Atlanta, who had been eying a new anime poster, of an anime girl with long blonde hair, a bow on her head, and a cute frilly skirt, punching out an innocent looking teen for no apparent reason, swiveled her head back to Dana. “Portland’s leant out her willpower to other mortals?”

  Dana shook her head. “I’m the only one she trusts with the level of support she’s given me, so far, but since I’ve proven myself there’s three others in training and several other experiments with lesser, um, supported.”

  Jan smiled.

  Atlanta leaned back on her creaky pipe-metal chair and stared at the water-stained ceiling and the hanging racks of industrial fluorescents. “Dubuque wanted maximum publicity, a show, to drive home his anti-war agenda. Any of us Territorials could have done the miracles he did. I’m keeping my head down for now. As you may
have noticed, the media hasn’t linked me to the thug killings in my territory and they never will unless someone blabs. Unlike the Suits, nothing I’m doing is impacting the 99’s group Integrity. My long term Mission, as I see it, is security. I want people to be able to leave their doors unlocked at night.” To succeed, the Gods would have to take over everything.

  Which didn’t bother Atlanta one bit.

  Dana nodded.

  “What’s your PhD in?”

  “Economics.”

  “Figures,” Atlanta said. “You’re trouble, Dana. You’re, what, six one?” Dana towered over Atlanta by half a foot, disquieting in another woman.

  “Five ten and big heels,” Dana said.

  “Where’d you come from? You have a funny accent for an Iranian.”

  “I was born in the States,” Dana said, frowning. “But I spent five years in London when I was a kid. My father’s British and my mother’s Iranian, or was until she defected and started calling herself ‘Persian’. I’m twenty five, if you care. I entered UCLA at fifteen and did my graduate work at the University of Chicago.” She sighed. “I’ve never done any modeling. I’m a virgin because I don’t want to disappoint my mother. Any other nosy questions?”

  Jan and the unnamed woman both covered their mouths to repress laughs. Atlanta ignored their amusement at the show. “How’d you locate Portland?”

  “I had one example, Dubuque,” Dana said, her voice back to professional. “I analyzed his actions and the effects on the world around him. In the city of Portland I talked to people and Googled around until I found the same sort of sudden economic disruption Dubuque had caused. It didn’t take me long to find a half dozen in-town condos, right next to each other, that had sold for far less than they should have, leaving no lawsuits behind. I disguised myself as a courier, got in to see the owner and found Portland. As I had hoped she was staffing up her operation, so I told her I was no courier and introduced myself.” Dana smiled. “I wanted the chief of staff job, but Portland wanted to talk, and…”