by Mick Farren
“Whatever nightmare I’m going into, I just hope you’re going with me, you dogheaded bastard.”
And yet there was no nightmare awaiting Semple, who merely tumbled anticlimactically to the burning sand as a rude, almost insultingly mundane afterflurry of earth tremor and hot wind sent her sprawling on her hands and knees. The storm of heat and dust and noise was over leaving her with ringing ears, a feeling of having been both flayed and roasted alive, but otherwise intact. The gold collar had become so hot that it was painful to touch; she tore it off and flung it angrily away from her. Moments earlier, it had been a priceless prize. Now it was worthless and irrelevant.
“Damn you and everything connected with you!”
The impossible had occurred; she had survived the atomic assault and if, right there and then, she could have expunged all trace of Anubis and his loathsome domain from her memory and consciousness, she would have done it. The mess that his grandiose folly had created was all around her. Red-ocher dust hung in the air, mingling with the smoke from dozens of small fires, cutting visibility to just a matter of yards. The once-garish flags and banners that had previously fluttered triumphant now flapped weakly in the last eddies of the explosion like burned and mutilated bats. What had once been a crowd was now a scattered profusion of bodies, like dry fallen leaves in the wake of a gale. They lay amid damaged, upturned pushcarts, buckled seats, and tangles of scorched draperies ripped from the viewing stands, and crawled from beneath other wreckage too blackened and twisted to be recognizable. Some almost immediately started sitting up, looking around, eyes glazed with uncomprehending shock, amazed as Semple that they were still in one piece. Others even tried to pick themselves up and rise unsteadily to their feet. Although their clothes were in tatters or ripped away entirely and they were caked with a combination of desert dust and a fine green-black atomic soot, most of those who were already moving looked to be only superficially the worse for the A-bomb trauma. On the other hand, there were quite a number who weren’t moving at all. Next to her a motionless figure lay face down, apparently not breathing, so begrimed that Semple was unable to tell whether it was a man or a woman.
Suddenly the figure started to twitch. Its body was wrenched by an arrhythmic series of spasms. It let out a wrenching groan and slowly began to curl into a fetal ball. Something strange and unpleasant began to happen to its skin. At first Semple thought it was merely the coating of dust flaking off and causing a tracery of hairline cracks to spread rapidly across its torso and back; it was only after a moment, to her horror, that she realized the unfortunate’s actual skin was cracking. Worse still, as the fissures widened, a thick and stinking liquid, the brown color of organic decay, began to ooze from within. As Semple watched, both mesmerized and nauseated, the entire body began wetly to disintegrate. What had once been living flesh melted in loathsome ropes and skeins of goo, away from a brittle ivory-yellow skeleton. Despite its obvious viscosity, this body slime quickly soaked into the sand until all that remained was a dark and foully septic oil slick surrounding a collapsing skeleton.
Semple’s first instinct was to get away from this hideousness. She crab-scrabbled backward, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the sickening remains. After gaining a swift two or three yards, she angled her legs under her and sprang to her feet. Without thinking exactly where she might go, she turned and looked for a route of escape, only to find the same process of accelerated decomposition had more bodies in its disgusting grip. They jerked and contorted as they melted like vampires in the sun, creating a tableau like something from an especially lurid and gruesome fifteenth century painting, with a stench like that of a charnel house.
Not everyone, though, was coming apart. At least for the moment the ones on their feet seemed okay; cut, bruised, and battered, maybe, but definitely in one piece and with their bodily fluids just where they ought to be. Like Semple, they stared at what was happening to their erstwhile companions at the Divine Atom Bomb Festival with horrified revulsion. Had they been spared this hideous fate, or was the same thing about to happen to them? Semple looked down at herself. She was inconveniently naked, but otherwise she seemed intact. What had happened? How could it be that some turned to liquefying mulch and others didn’t? Was it a matter of mind-set? Or were the ones oozing on the ground merely reproduction crowd fillers, while those who remained unaffected were true entities from the lifeside?
Just as Semple was gaining confidence, the first of the standing figures began to melt, quickly followed by a second and a third. Flesh streamed down their bodies like wax cascading down a blowtorched candle. Semple was suddenly and frighteningly certain she could feel something happening inside her own body. It was like a bizarre and disturbing tingle from what she could only describe as the place where flesh clung to bones. Her response was to shout in loud, angry defiance.
“No!”
She would not let herself go like that. She would not allow herself to be reduced to a skull, a rib cage, and a stain. She would hold her body together with the last measure of willpower she could muster. She concentrated, totally focused on locking in the integrity of her physical self, attempting to exert control over each cell, each engineered structure of bone and sinew, each circuital continuation of her nervous system, and each and every vein and artery down to the narrowest microcapillary. On the lifeside, such complete awareness and command of one’s being would have been beyond anyone but the most advanced shaman; in the Afterlife, however, where so much of a person was a deliberate material construct, it was mercifully much easier, although the effort still involved an exhausting expenditure of energy.
On every side, survivors were divided into those who could halt the disintegration and those who couldn’t. Some continued to melt, while others, as far as Semple could tell from the intense frowns on their begrimed faces, appeared to be doing the same as she. Within a matter of just two or three minutes, it was all over. Those who failed to hold themselves intact were gone. Only the strong maintained their shape. The last skeleton collapsed into the last putrid puddle on the sand, and then there were no more meltings. The whittled-down survivors peered around at each other, almost reluctant to believe that they were safe, afraid to jinx their comparative good fortune.
In the next few minutes, however, new troubles emerged. New and very different figures appeared in the lingering remains of the dust storm, not wandering dazedly, but moving with purpose and precision. Phalanxes of Anubis’s guards, both Nubians armed with spears and regular Necropolis rocketeer police with flack jackets over torn and singed dress uniforms, and carrying far more formidable full-auto riot guns, advanced through the dust and debris.
Semple’s stomach clenched. If these cops and Nubians were on their feet, disciplined and organized, the atomic explosion, far from razing Necropolis as she had hoped, must have done little more than muss the hair of those within the royal enclosure. She wondered if Anubis, his harem, or any of his court had fallen victim to the hideous flesh-melt. She passionately hoped that the dog-god was now nothing more than a canine skull, an oily skid mark, but she knew in her heart he wasn’t. Anubis might be one of the most demented psychotics since Ivan the Terrible, but she couldn’t pretend he didn’t have the chops to survive. The real question was, what the hell did the cops and the Nubians think they were doing? The obvious assumption was that they had arrived to provide what aid and comfort they could to those who had survived the Divine Atom Bomb, but Semple somehow doubted that. Aid and comfort were simply not the God-King’s style.
This was dramatically reinforced when a survivor, still confused from the effort of saving himself from the meltdown, stumbled blindly into a Nubian, who promptly ran him through with his gold-tipped spear. Nearby survivors reeled back in terror.
“What the fuck did you do that for?”
Outrage outweighed judgment among one knot of men who had witnessed the stabbing. They started angrily toward the line of mixed authority. “Are you bastards out of your
fucking minds?”
No less than three riot guns roared into life, and the knot of bystanders was cut down in its tracks. For a moment, survivors stood stunned. What had they done? What was the slaughter all about? Why had these men, who they thought were the spearhead of some relief effort, suddenly turned on them? Then self-preservation took over. Whatever the reasons, the only hope of escaping was to run.
Semple had some ideas of her own, but she didn’t stick around to test them. Her instinctive suspicion was that Anubis had gone completely insane after the nuclear malfunction, and ordered all those who had witnessed the debacle to be put to the sword or the machine gun. His technician-priests had almost certainly been executed already. To avoid her own extermination she scattered along with the rest, running swift zigzags as gunfire crashed out behind her and the wounded began screaming. For a few moments Semple sought cover to catch her breath, sheltering from the wild bursts of random shooting behind a solid copper boiler from the computer of a burned-out pushcart. Then the Nubians struck up a rhythmic vocal cadence, stamping their feet and calling the moves as they massed in a curved horns-of-the-bull formation. Once their blood was sufficiently up, they lowered their spears and advanced on the fleeing remains of the crowd at a measured lope. The atomic test site was about to become another kind of killing field.
Semple knew she wouldn’t stay hidden for long. The mass of Nubians were sweeping forward, gathering speed, systematically impaling everything in their path, lifting bodies high on their spears while the rocket-man cops gunned down any stragglers that they might have missed. Semple broke cover and started to run, unpleasantly certain that the only possible escape led directly out into the desert, straight toward where the mushroom cloud stood tall and mockingly proud, gray-white and tinged with pink, surrounded by an aura of tiny glowing subparticles.
Doc Holliday waved a proprietary hand across the landscape. The Jurassic swamp was now far behind them, the sun was up, and the dinosaurs and weird scenes in the old mansion were diminishing in substance like the black gossamer of a fading nightmare. “Behold the Great River, my boy. Some will tell you that this is the genuine River Styx, the Central Transit of the True Hereafter. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. You’ve never happened to find yourself on the Great River before, have you?”
Doc had decided that Jim needed to rest up after his trek through the swamp, and he had taken the helm of the boat while Jim lazed on the seat cushions in the stern of the launch, drinking and reflecting on how Doc cut something of an incongruous maritime figure, even in the context of this putative River Styx. His filthy, swamp-stained duster coat had been discarded, and he stood behind the wooden wheel in his slouch hat, ruffled shirt, and brocade vest, the skirt of his long gunman’s frock coat whipping in the morning slipstream, as though he’d been displaced from another movie entirely. The elegant motor launch, with its varnished timbers and brass hardware, made a brisk twenty knots, its bow slicing a perfect V wave in the untroubled surface of the water as Doc carefully maintained a course a little to the left of the river’s exact center. Jim took a drink, silently conceding that the legendary pistoleer could maintain a polished dandy’s assurance and a stoned killer’s certainty, no matter what the situation. He shook his head in answer to Doc’s question.
“I can’t remember being on the river, but then again, I still don’t remember too much about too much. For all I know, I could have been running up and down this stretch of Styx like a full-time pirate.”
Jim was growing a little irritated with the mess that was his memory. It had been bad enough when he’d been traveling alone, avoiding man-eating plants or fending off alien proctologists. Now that he seemed, for the present, to be running with Doc Holliday, he was forced to play novice to Doc’s all-knowing mentor. It made for an irksome inequality in their relationship.
“They don’t have too many pirates in this stretch of Styx. They mainly stay downstream, in the delta beyond the swamps, where the pickings are riper. This bit of the Great River is mainly for relaxing and admiring.”
At least Jim was starting to feel alcohol-relaxed, which made Doc’s geography lesson a little more palatable. He’d discovered that Doc had an entire marine cocktail cabinet in the form of a roomy ice chest stuffed with chilled beverages. With a tall green condensation-wet liter of Chinese Tiger beer augmenting his original bourbon, Jim was also doing his fair share of admiring. As Richard Nixon might have said, it certainly was a Great River, a great blue-graygreen, planet-scale artery of slow-flowing water, worthy of landscape paintings in styles from Rousseau to Turner. It flowed broad and smooth, with darker, moss-green rainforest overhanging each spacious bank, combining all the best features of the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Mekong, and the Zambezi. Somewhere inland, in the deep jungle, distant drums beat with a hollow and languorous baritone sensuality. Not drums of warfare or conflict, not the kind of drums that brought a man out in a cold sweat when they stopped, these were the drums of a slow ecstatic ritual in the name of some benignly sexual earth goddess who could make her followers understand that the Afterlife, far from being a shadowy projection of the mortality that had gone before, was actually a stripping of limitations, a removal of blinders and restraints.
The distant drums may have provided the sound, but what was left of Jim’s poetic instincts told him that the river itself pulsed like a mighty hidden heart, from which all surrounding life emanated. It was the energy source of the monkeys who howled in the forest canopies and the thousands of parrots that would suddenly take to the air in brilliant multicolored clouds. It was the yellow light in the eyes of the black panther that slipped along a hunting trail, just yards in from the riverbank; it was what moved the cranes and kingfishers that darted in the shallows while hippos wallowed in the deeper waters. That so much vibrant life could exist in a place beyond death had Jim totally convinced that the Great River was more than just the creation of some master illusionist. If it hadn’t been for recent events, Jim would have found the situation primally idyllic. Unfortunately, drink as he might, he couldn’t altogether shake the impact of all the recent nightshade images. They might fade with the coming of the sun, but they refused to depart completely.
“It was kinda weird back there, Doc. One strange gold mine, that old house.”
Doc didn’t turn or take his eyes off the river. “I long ago gave up making judgments about what’s weird and what isn’t.”
“It seems like it’s going to be the way I end up, though.”
“Beer-fat and sexually twisted ain’t what you call ending up. It’s nothing but one more piss stop on that lonesome highway.”
Jim took a swig of beer and chased it with a little whiskey. “That’s how I ended up on the lifeside. Fat and crazy in Paris. Except I was shooting dope instead of having some broad carve the mark of Zorro on my back with a sword. Of course, I died that time around.”
“So you’ve done that one already. You won’t be dying again. Only one per customer. That’s the rule of the universe. Unless you count the reincarnies.”
“Now time just keeps going out of joint on me.”
Doc’s shrugged, indicating that worse things could come to pass. “Do you miss it?”
“Paris or being fat?”
“Shooting dope.”
Jim shook his head. “Come to think of it, not in the least. I guess, if you die of something, it maybe cures the craving.”
“There’s still plenty of heroin here in these afterdays. A lot of those coming across in recent times seem unable to resist the temptation to reconstitute themselves as junkies. I can’t tell whether it’s a new kind of self-abasement or just old habits dying hard.”
Jim smiled wryly. “I did try it a couple of times after I got here.”
Doc turned and looked at him. “One of the things you do remember?”
“Not the where or when, but certainly the doing.”
“Not the same?”
“Some of the same seduction, but it didn’t have
that way about it.”
“That way about it? That’s a goddamned tame description, even for a self-proclaimed ex-poet.”
Jim cringed slightly. “It didn’t have that big jolt; that moment when Sister Morphine makes her promise of absolute and perfect peace, and it becomes the central core of all one’s motivation. I guess, without the risk of death, a lot of the appeal goes out of it.”
Doc nodded. Now Jim was at least trying to be articulate. “So you went back to drinking?”
Jim looked at the bottle in his hand. “I guess I did.”
Doc laughed and beckoned to Jim. “Why don’t you stop drinking and take the helm for a spell so I can do some kicking back and gazing at the scenery?”
With a certain unsteadiness on Jim’s part, the two men switched positions and roles. Doc issued instructions as he settled himself in the stern. “Just keep her steady and don’t try anything fancy. All the caveats about drunk driving also apply to boats.”
Jim straightened his shoulders and gripped the wheel, attempting to act the part of the responsible helmsman. Doc rummaged in the ice chest. “All we had in my day was laudanum and opium.”
“Wasn’t that enough?”
“I kinda thought so, and so did a lot of other folks, from what I observed. In the golden days, it got so there was an opium den behind just about every laundry and chop suey joint from one end of the Santa Fe Trail to the other. And the shit they had back then, my boy, you wouldn’t have believed it. We had Shanghai black tar so powerful that even Curly Bill Broscius and Wes Hardin were seeing visions of the Golden Buddha. Although Curly Bill, who was a fool at the best of times, would usually have to go and try to shoot out the goddamned moon, braying like an ass and claiming the Buddha made him do it.”