99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

“You just had some sort of fight, didn’t you?” Alt said. “Freaky. Neither of you said a word.”

  “The fight was telepathic,” Nessa said, taking deep breaths. She heard a crash from outside and the screech of torn metal. She flipped open the shades to watch Ken, out in the street, flaying a ten year old Honda with his teek, car shreds flying everywhere. she sent. He didn’t answer, and his shields were so tight he couldn’t hear her, either. With one clenched fist wave of his hands, the Honda silently exploded into the darkness, leaving behind an eviscerated drive train. Car shreds pelted the exterior of the apartment, pat pat pat, and stopped. Ken strode off into the darkness, and was gone. She stood and waited, tense, as a fully robotic garbage truck rolled down the street, carefully hooking, lifting and dumping the trash into the truck’s trash bin, before setting down each identical garbage bin and moving to the next.

  Nessa took a last deep breath, and calmed as Ken vanished from her senses and she, finally, no longer rode his emotions. She walked across the apartment and sat in a chair next to the bench where Alt sat. At her left, on an ancient fold-down round dinette table, a laptop computer’s power light blinked at her. Its screen had gone dark, timed out or whatever the word for a computer being off but not fully off Nessa always confused with other words. She reached over and wiggled the mouse, and as she hoped she remembered, the laptop started up and its screen lit. The screen showed IE, open to the CNN website. Headline of the hour: Lima, the territorial God of Peru, had supported the Constitutional Court and overthrown the Peruvian government, calling for new elections. In the meantime Lima had assumed the presidency as an ‘emergency measure’. Right…

  Ever since Ken, the bastard, had forced her to pay attention, crap like this filled the news every single day, Gods appearing to ‘do good’ in a way she knew wasn’t good at all.

  “What did you fight over?” Alt said.

  “You. Ken agrees with you. I think you’re both fooling yourselves.”

  Alt sighed and stood. “Sorry, Nessa, but you need to leave.” He grabbed Nessa and yanked her to her feet. “I’m tired of asking politely.”

  “You don’t want to piss me off,” Nessa said, anger returning to her voice.

  “You’ve already pissed me off, why should pissing you off matter?” Alt said. He dragged her toward his apartment door. “Now, get out of…”

  Nessa slapped Alt’s mind and he fell like a sack of potatoes.

  “Now do you believe?” Nessa said. She dragged Alt over to his God-article wall and propped him up into a sitting position, then sat on the bench opposite to watch him. He awakened after about ten minutes. Nessa couldn’t find Ken. Dubuque had gone out of her range, somewhere hundreds of miles to the southwest. Atlanta was somewhere in Georgia. Miami did something in the southern Caribbean. She didn’t bother to try to locate John Lorenzi. She had never been able to sense him at range without a secondary connection, like a phone call. Tired of the big stuff, she visited the local dogs to look for something interesting going on.

  “Bitch,” Alt said, his mind coming back.

  “Yah huh,” Nessa said. “I apologize. I’ve got a nasty temper, and I am crazy. I think all us Telepaths are. I’ve never met one who wasn’t.” She paused. “Want some chocolate?”

  “Sure,” Alt said, and winced. “My head. What did you do to me?”

  “Low grade mental attack,” Nessa said. “I call it blowing someone’s brain out their ears, or a mind blast, or the hard push. If I get scared and angry both, the attack is powerful enough to kill someone.”

  “That’s happened before, hasn’t it?”

  Nessa shrugged. This wasn’t something she would talk about to someone she just met. “You put together your God wall, Alt, because you’re afraid. You’re afraid of the Gods. You’re afraid of what the Gods are doing behind the scenes. You’re pissed because nobody’s doing anything to stop them and everybody believes in the coming Godly Utopia they’re going to bring.”

  Alt glared at her and didn’t answer.

  “Ken and I are doing something,” Nessa said. “We’re the other side. A small other side, but other sides have to start somewhere. We’re not failing, either.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Okay, then.” She pointed to a grouping of pinned articles. “Ken and I got jumped by Miami, the thug God, as you’ve so accurately named him. We flattened him and ran.” Nessa paused and looked Alt over. “Good. You’ve got enough active telepathy to be able to tell truth from lies. That’s basic.”

  “I’m not like you.”

  Nessa looked at the chocolate bar in Alt’s hand. “You’re a hell of lot more like me than you realize.”

  “You’re crazy, lady. You didn’t even mention the real reason I’m pissed at the Gods.”

  “Which is?”

  “Religious.”

  Nessa rolled her eyes. “You mean the fact you’re Jewish and you’re pissed they’re proving by their simple existence that monotheism is a crock of shit?”

  Alt’s lips thinned but he didn’t make a move toward her.

  “The local territorial God, Dubuque, calls himself a Living Saint,” Nessa said. “He’s a God anyway.”

  “You’re mocking me. You’re not making sense.”

  “The universe isn’t required to make sense,” Nessa said. She, at least, had learned that lesson before she was ten. “Alt, they don’t have flesh and blood bodies. Their bodies are something silvery and mottled, at least after you beat the piss out of them. But they’re not like big Gods. They’re like the little pagan tribal Gods of mythology books made tangible. Instead of being big Gods, they’re big trouble.”

  “God will smite them.”

  “God’s angels made them,” Nessa said. “Every one of them I’ve met believes this.”

  “Liar!”

  “You’re being a fool,” Nessa said. “You know I didn’t lie, and you’re lying to yourself. You’re enough of a Telepath to be well on the road to full institutionalized insanity, which is what happens to any of us who lies to themselves.”

  “You admitted you’re crazy.”

  “But I’m still functional, despite my craziness,” Nessa said, and wrinkled her nose. Somewhere near her, under the bench she sat on, Alt had some laundry that needed washing. It smelled like old tennis shoes. “I’m functional because I don’t lie to myself anymore.” At least too often. “The truth hurts, it always hurts like fucking hell, but the alternative is far worse.” She read Alt, concentrating on opening herself to his stray thoughts. “You’re unlucky at love. Bad things have happened to you in your personal relationships.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re, I’m not sure, scarred by death. That’s the worst, isn’t it?” Nessa said. Alt nodded again. “You encounter death too much in your job. Death isn’t pretty, and to you death is much worse than society allows it to be, in writing and the movies.”

  “Damn,” Alt said. He shivered and looked away from Nessa.

  “Talk,” Nessa said. “Talking helps, especially with other Telepaths.” She pushed at Alt, much easier after she had blown his brain out his ears and taken down his mental defenses. Some of his trauma was recent.

  Alt shrugged and leaned his head against the push-pin wall. “A couple of weeks ago I got a call from near the edge of my patch. ‘13 year old female, collapsed’. I got to her fast, I always do, even when I suspect it’s just a panic attack, or a faint, or a bad scrape or something. The location was in front of a tenement down by the Mississippi. I found the patient lying in a parking lot, her family circled around her, standing.

  “Her family was calm. They told me their daughter had told her parents she was sick, on the way back from the Laundromat, ready to vomit, so they stopped their car and she got out, shook a bit and then fell to the ground. Her parents had laid her on her back and although they were worried they weren’t screaming and crying.

  “I examined the girl and found a little vomit in her mouth. She
grunted and stopped breathing. Even when you run into these things often, they make you fly. I got my partner to cut off her clothes and start CPR while I got my ambu-bag and connected the defibrillator. She was in VF, which means her heart wasn’t pumping blood. It’s a rhythm we can shock and bring back to normal. Some of the time.

  “I shocked her. The defibrillator monitor showed asystole, which means her heart stopped beating. This sounds worse, but it’s one of the normal possibilities after a shock. However, I caught something impossible from the girl. She’d jerked herself conscious for a moment. I knew she was panicked and in pain. Then nothing.

  “Her parents asked us what was happening, but all we could tell them was their daughter was ‘ill’. That’s part of our training. You don’t tell people your patient is dead while you’re standing in a parking lot, in case they freak out and prevent you from doing your job. Lying makes you feel like a shit, but what else can you do? The girl was dead, right then, with her heart stopped. What we were trying to do was bring her back. If you were hoping I had any special psychic healing tricks, well, think again.

  “I continued CPR while my partner got the trolley out of the ambulance. We needed to load and go because this girl needed to be in the hospital as soon as possible. While I did the CPR the girl vomited all over me and her heart went back to VF. So I shocked her again, standard procedure. No glory. She went back asystole. We got her on the trolley, continuing the CPR, and loaded her into the ambulance. I didn’t stop the CPR, just like the rules say, but, dammit, I know when things turn futile. She’d fled her body. I did pick this up with my special tricks. I couldn’t say anything, of course, especially because her father was with us in the ambulance. We got to the nearest hospital in only a few minutes.

  “The hospital nurse took charge of the father while we wheeled the girl into the resus room and into the care of the specialists. This hospital is one of the good ones who allow parents to watch the resus attempt. The family will know we tried everything to save their dead child. My partner and I de-stressed in the nurse’s station for a few minutes and then went back out to finish our shift, as if nothing had happened.

  “If you do enough nightshifts, you lose the ability to care about anyone or anything. Later, though, I learned they hadn’t been able to resus the girl. That’s when the goolies hit. The girl was dead, never coming back; her family was devastated and they’ll never recover. They’ll always think of me as the loser who killed their daughter. I know they will. I don’t know how I know, but it’s true.”

  Nessa wiped tears from her eyes and looked over at Alt. She had turned away while he talked. Tear streaks ran down his face. “You’re not a monster, despite what you think. Want some more chocolate?”

  Alt shook his head. “I don’t want to be able to read people’s minds. I can’t imagine a worse horror.” I don’t want anyone seeing my secret thoughts.

  Nessa recognized a clue when it hit her square in the nose. “Someone you loved almost died when you were young, and you were with them,” Nessa said.

  Alt nodded.

  “You held on to their thoughts, engaged their ego, and kept them alive by keeping them from giving up on themselves.”

  Alt nodded again.

  “Then they went and died some time later when you weren’t around. You blamed yourself,” Nessa said. “You locked the neat trick back into your head because you lost confidence you’d done good.”

  “Damn you.”

  Nessa wrung her hands. She couldn’t bear to look at Alt or sense how he felt about her. “You’re human, Alt. Just human. Nothing’s wrong with being human.”

  “Why’d you have to exist!” Alt said. “Just go away. Leave me alone.”

  “This is necessary. The Gods don’t have our sense of conscience or morality. That’s what your wall means,” Nessa said, quiet. “It’s why you put up the wall, because you know, even though the reporters don’t have a clue. Telepaths like us are terrified of what we can do, so we don’t use our tricks unless we’re forced to. Or unless our greed and foibles overwhelm our empathy, but if we use our tricks too much their use always bites us in the ass until we remember we’re human, have consciences and shouldn’t be mucking with people and reality and things like that. Alt, the Gods don’t give a shit about such considerations. They use their tricks as needed, consequences be damned. They don’t care, and we’re in big trouble. The rest of the world hasn’t realized they’re in trouble yet, but they will. It’ll likely be far too late by then.” She paused and let Alt sniffle. “I’m asking you, we’re asking you, to help us cope with these Gods. Stop them if we can. Undo the damage they’ve done when we can. It’s our responsibility as Telepaths because, well, because nobody else can do a damned thing to them.” Nessa wiped her eyes. “Thanks, by the way, for sharing. I’d forgotten why what I’m doing is important. I’ve got a friend of mine who’s been captured by one of the Gods and I’ve let my personal problems color my motivations too much. I’ve been told I have a tendency to obsess.”

  If one believed a sock.

  “What do I do?” Alt said. “How does this work?”

  “The more you use a trick, the better you can control it, and the better the trick works,” Nessa said. “I can speed this up by going into your mind and ripping open all the little scars keeping your mental tricks locked inside your head.”

  “Huh?”

  “For instance, Ken and I lived far apart until recently, though we’d worked together in the past. Since the last time Ken and I worked together, he’d given up on his telepathy. Mind reading isn’t his strong suit, and costs him a lot of work and energy. When we first got back together, he couldn’t send a thought to me no matter how he tried. Then, after a while, he remembered how to send thoughts, but his mental voice was so weak I had to concentrate to hear. A little while later, he was back to normal, able to mentally chatter to me like he’d never given up on his telepathy. He got his telepathy back quickly because I was always in his head, rattling around with my own megaphone mental voice, ripping open scars.”

  “He’s pissed at you.”

  “We’re always a little pissed at each other. That’s what being in love is all about,” Nessa said.

  Alt frowned. “You’re strange.”

  “You haven’t seen strange yet,” Nessa said. “This here’s about as functional as I get. Give me enough time and I’ll guarantee I’ll have an interesting breakdown for you.”

  “You talking tonight or this week?”

  “I’m talking minutes, Alt,” Nessa said. “Like if you try and make a pass at me like you’re thinking of doing.”

  Alt reddened.

  “Or try to convince me that since Ken’s pissed enough at me to leave, my marriage with him is over.”

  Alt reddened some more.

  “You don’t know us enough to predict like that,” Nessa said. “By the way, you only think you can predict the future. You can’t. You’re just picking up other people’s thoughts and plans and integrating them. Which, by the way, is a well-known talent Ken and I call ‘hunches’. Ken gets a lot more of them than I do, but he’s limited to his personal experiences and surroundings. You aren’t. We need you. We need you a whole lot.”

  Alt shook his head, eyes wide.

  “The ability to see around corners we call clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is best when you can use someone else’s eyes, although most clairvoyants don’t bother, instead reconstructing people’s vision from their emotional auras. Ken calls this imaginative projection.”

  Alt turned on Nessa, angry. “Get the fuck out of my head!”

  Finally. Nessa got on her hands and knees and backed away from Alt. She looked up at him like one of the myriad dogs she had been in her life. “Make me. Push me out of your mind. You can do it.”

  Alt closed his eyes and yelled. His mental push nibbled on Nessa’s mind.

  She licked her lips, focused on Alt’s face, and pushed her thoughts all the way inside him, until she could see herself
out of his eyes and feel his rock hard erection. She limped his dick and yanked at his mental scabs. Alt panicked, yelled and pushed her out of his mind again.

  “Yah, Alt,” she said, cooing. “Do it, baby.”

  She rubbed against him, her nose filled with his musk. Then the next and the next. She shivered with an orgasm and continued. Then another. And another. Her mind on fire, she let the pleasure flow inside her. She made animal noises. She saw through animal eyes. Dirt her body, leaves and twigs her hair, she entered nature and left her previousness behind. She rubbed and stroked, fueling the fire inside. And again.

  This time, no pleasure. She had done enough, the long expanse of rubbing. Hours and hours. She called without words, for she had none.

  came a mental voice in reply. The name she recognized and understood. Then more words in her mind she didn’t understand. She rubbed up against the next and shivered in hot anticipation. Ready, fully ready. Time passed. The world stood still. More time passed, then motion.

  He arrived.

  Ready, too. She walked over to him, swaying, seductive. Clothes vanished. Impaled. Instant blinding light and pleasure. She held him in her until she fully drained him. She heard words as she collapsed in his arms, words she couldn’t understand. As she faded, she released her hold on the dogs, cats, raccoons, skunks, deer, horses and one lonely cow who hadn’t come home. Those she had called fled as they must.

  Nessa awoke in Ken’s arms, naked, in a shower. She didn’t recognize the place. Immaculately clean. Ken, naked as well, not as dirty as her, washed her as she buried her head in his curly chest hairs. She let the clean water run down her skin and wash off the dirt.

  “You’re back?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What happened?” Ken said. “What did you do to me?”

  “I’m not sure.” Beat. “Besides the obvious. What did I do?”

  “You called me and I couldn’t resist,” Ken said. “I came for you, but I didn’t find you in Alt’s apartment. I wandered, lost, crazy, and found you in a stand of forest about a mile away. I found you standing naked, surrounded by all the world’s animals.” He paused, his words filled with repressed horror. “I’ve never been so horny in my life. I took you without thinking and it was over in a few seconds.”