He pushes his way through the heavy metal door and stops, staring at what the Man has done in there. Any rooms that the place might have held before have been torn out, leaving a hollow shell filled with racks upon racks of huge television monitors. Thousands of them span the walls, hang from pipes suspended from the ceiling, stand propped up on the floors.
And a face stares out from each one. White faces, black faces, yellow faces, brown faces, red faces, green faces, blue faces, faces that aren’t human, faces that aren’t of anything alive, faces that aren’t even faces. They are all yelling, having some sort of epic argument. Their voices squawk through speakers beneath the monitors, echoing through the cavernous hall.
But the moment Fitz steps through the door, they all go quiet.
“Ta da!” the Man says, breaking the silence and throwing his arms out like a magician who’s just revealed a particularly impressive trick. “I told you he’d be here, folks.” The Man wags an admonishing finger at the screens. “O ye of little faith!”
He turns to Fitz. “So glad you could make it, my boy. So glad. I knew you’d come around. Just needed a little time is all. Come on in and meet everybody. Don’t be shy.”
Fitz steps warily into the room, looking at all those faces staring at him, his heart hammering in his chest. It was one thing to experience the gods’ scrutiny in his dreams, but with them all looking at him through those monitors, it feels weirdly more real. The nuclear option is looking better and better.
“I was just telling everybody how you’ll be helping in my new regime. Between yours and my demonstrations the other night we’ve spread the word and they’re all on board.” The Man looks at a cluster of monitors in the distance and scowls. “Well, most of them, anyway.”
“How will he help?” says a voice in the back.
“Will he tell our stories for us? Make the mortals believe again?” says another.
“Or will he only do it at your command?” says a third.
“Excellent questions,” says the Man. “I always welcome such insightful perspectives. I know some of you have some reservations. Things have been a little rocky for all of you over the last several years, but now with this important management change I can personally guarantee that things are looking up. We’re going to have a real paradigm shift here for everyone. The answer is, of course, yes. He will be telling your stories. And he’ll be doing it under my guidance.”
“No,” Fitz says, yelling it so he can be sure to be heard in the back. “I’ll be telling stories. But they won’t be the ones you want to hear.”
“You lied to us,” one of the gods says, a lizard-faced man with fire for eyes. “This prophet is not yours to command. He belongs to us all. Give him to us. We will make use of him.”
The Man sighs. “You can’t just throw me under the bus like that, Fitz. We talked about this. This is your only option. Did my daughter put you up to this? She did, didn’t she?”
“He did lie to you,” Fitz says to the screens, ignoring the Man. “And you’re lying to yourselves if you think I’ll be doing anything for you.” The lizard god’s name pops into Fitz’s mind. “Ningishzida. Son of Ereshkigal. Keeper of the One Tree.”
Fitz scans the room, making sure all eyes are on him. “You think you’re in charge. You think, because you’ve been around for millennia and people used to believe in you, that you’re still important. Still relevant. You’re wrong. You’re all wrong.”
“Fitz, what are you doing?” the Man says.
“Making some changes,” he says. He feels the Man trying to exert his will on him, but Fitz already has a good hold on the red threads coming off the God of Authority. He brushes the attack aside with barely a thought, then throws the Man across the room and pins him against the wall.
“See?” yells another god, Rongo of the Maori. “This is a sham. This new god has no power here. Ningishzida is right. The prophet belongs to all of us.”
“You have no idea how wrong you are,” Fitz says. “This guy here? He thinks he’s in charge and he outclasses every one of you fucking worms. And look what I have him doing.”
“You little shit,” the Man says. “Throwing me around means fuck all. I will personally gut you for what you just did. You have to sleep some time.” Mutters of agreement fill the room.
“He has a point,” Ereshkigal says from a monitor in the corner. “What can you do to us all? I’ve seen your power first-hand. Will you throw us all against a wall?” Nervous laughter fills the room.
“No. I’ll tell the stories that erase you all from existence. You’ll be forgotten, nothing more than a footnote in the back of an archaeology textbook. Amanda? If you would? Only a couple hundred of them, please.”
“My pleasure,” Amanda says through his headset.
At first nothing happens. The expectant pause stretches out, and for a terrifying few moments Fitz is afraid it didn’t work. That he’s just come in here, talked shit to a bunch of motherfucking gods and has severely fucked himself.
And then the screams start.
They erupt from speakers across the room, agonized cries, yells of surprise descending into anguish. The room fills with the crackle of fire, the dull thud of explosions. Slowly, the cries taper off and descend into terrified silence.
“I have a friend,” Fitz says, “who’s taken the stories I’ve written, stories about each and every one of you, stories where you die horrible, painful deaths, and used them as the payload of a computer virus that’s infected every PC, every smartphone, every mainframe, every handheld video-game player everywhere. If it’s got a circuit in it, it’s got it.”
Some of the gods are confused, clearly not understanding the words. Others, though; they get it. They know what he’s talking about, and the looks of horror on their faces are priceless.
“When that virus goes active, every person around those devices gets a little burst of a story beamed right at them. They’ll see it or they’ll hear it. My stories that I wrote about each one of you. Maybe it’s how Ningishzida is consumed by flames. Maybe it’s about how Loki is eaten by insects. Maybe it’s about how Abassi is turned into sludge and drains away never to be seen again.”
“You would not dare destroy us all,” says Yama, the blue-skinned Hindu god of death, the eyes in his buffalo head flashing angrily. “You cannot. We have believers still. I have over a billion people who believe in me.”
“I know. And when I get through with you, you’ll have none. I don’t give a damn who you fuckers think you are, what you think you can throw at us, but gods are nothing to people. In the end, we made you, and we’ll fucking destroy you, too. So try me. You’ve seen what I can do. You felt the others die, I know it. On my say so, or should anything happen to me, the whole list goes out. Every single fucking one of you turns to slag.”
“You fucker,” the Man screams, furious. “I will eat your fucking heart. I am going to shove my prick so far through your goddamn skull it’ll pop out the other side.”
“You need to shut up,” Fitz says.
“Or what?” the Man says. “You’ll kill me, too? You sure you can? I’m in charge, you little monkey. Not you. Me. The motherfucking Man. You want to try it, you little shit?”
“I do, actually,” Fitz says. “I want to kill you like I’ve never wanted to kill anything in my life. But I won’t. You know why? Because you’re too powerful to waste. I have something special planned for you. Amanda? Could you send out the Man’s file, please?”
“You sure you want to do that?” she says through the headset. “You could whip up a new story. Take him out once and for all.”
“And have another one pop up in his wake? Not having somebody like him around is what caused the problem in the first place. Yeah. I think it’s time.”
“You’re the boss.” Something about that phrase sets Fitz’s teeth on edge. Is he about to make things worse? Is he going to be like the problem he’s trying to solve? He shrugs it off. That’s a problem for another day.
The screams die down to whimpers, turn into heavy, ragged breaths. He goes limp. Fitz lets him go and he falls heavily to the floor.
Fitz steps over to him, squats to the floor to look him in the eyes. “Well?” He taps his own forehead. “Where’s that skull fucking you promised me? I’m waiting.”
The Man looks up at him, broken and empty.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“What did you do to him?” Ereshkigal says.
“I made him my bitch,” Fitz says. “When your daddies all fucked off, humanity made him to take their place. But people are fucked in the head, and this is what we came up with. Some goddamn Super Nazi. Well, I own him now. I’ve rewritten him. He’ll do what I tell him. You’re nothing compared to him, and he’s nothing compared to me.”
Fitz wonders if this next part will work. And how quickly. Will it take minutes? Days? Decades? Will it even work?
He knows the gods will leave him alone now, he can see it in their eyes. They won’t cross him. Hell, most of them are probably wishing they’d never heard of him.
“What now?” whispers a terrified voice in the back. “What happens now?”
That’s a good question, and though he hasn’t worked out the details, he has an answer. He can shape the gods, make them dance to his tune. But do they have the power to do what he needs them to do? Are they powerful enough to be tools?
People gave form to the gods with their belief, but the gods gave form to humanity’s cultures, their values. It’s a vicious circle that keeps going around and around and never stops. People kill in the gods’ names, and the gods demand sacrifices to give humanity a sense of security, and so people kill more, and nations rise and fall, and people die, and horrible atrocities are done.
All because of the gods.
It’s a cycle of horror that needs to stop. And though he’s only one man and a single man can’t change the world, there is something he can change.
He looks out at the sea of monitors, making sure every eye is on him, every god’s attention is focused on him and him alone.
“Now we remake the world.”
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Blackmoore is the author of the urban fantasy novels City of the Lost and Dead Things and the 1930s pulp novel Khan of Mars. His short stories have appeared in the magazines Needle, Plots With Guns, Spinetingler, Thrilling Detective and Shots, as well as the anthologies Deadly Treats, Don’t Read This Book and Uncage Me.
stephenblackmoore.com
@sblackmoore
Five years ago, it all went wrong for Cason Cole. He lost his wife and son, lost everything, and was bound into service to a man who chews up human lives and spits them out, a predator who holds nothing dear and respects no law. Now, as the man he both loves and hates lies dying at his feet, the sounds of the explosion still ringing in his ears, Cason is finally free.
The gods and goddesses are real. A many-headed pantheon—a tangle of divine hierarchies—once kept the world at arm’s length, warring with one another for mankind’s belief and devotion. It was a grim and bloody balance, but a balance just the same. When one god triumphed, driving all other gods out of Heaven, it was back to the bad old days: cults and sycophants, and the terrible retribution the gods visit on those who spite them.
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The Guardian
‘Exactly the kind of spin I was looking for. Bad asses, psychotic cannibals, religious fundamentalists, zombies and insane clowns... Wendig has created a zombie-infested world that you will enjoy spending time in.’
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SOMEONE HAS STOLEN COYOTE’S PENIS.
The Native American trickster god and Richard Greene, one of his mortal marks, find themselves unwitting bedfellows as they seek to regain what they have both lost. The trail leads them to England, where they find murdered Anglo-Saxon spirits, a reclusive god of the forge, a London gentleman’s club exclusively for deities and a terrifying conspiracy. If Coyote is going to save the world and get his mojo back, it’s going to take everything in his bag of tricks—and he’s suffering from the ultimate performance anxiety.
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A VAMPIRE IN ZOMBIELAND
Coburn’s been dead now for close to a century, but seeing as how he’s a vampire and all, it doesn’t much bother him. Or at least it didn’t, not until he awoke from a forced five-year slumber to discover that most of human civilization was now dead—but not dead like him, oh no.
See, Coburn likes blood. The rest of the walking dead, they like flesh. He’s smart. Them, not so much. But they outnumber him by about a million to one. And the clotted blood of the walking dead cannot sustain him. Now he’s starving. And on the run. And more pissed-off than a beestung rattlesnake. The vampire not only has to find human survivors (with their sweet, sweet blood), but now he has to transition from predator to protector—after all, a man has to look after his food supply.
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– Richard Dansky, author of Beloved of the Dead and Firefly Rain
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