by Mick Farren
“GGGGRRRRAAAAARRRGGGHHH!”
Mr. Thomas voiced a concerned warning. “I think the Big Green’s sustained a chest wound.”
“Is it bad?”
“I don’t think so.”
Even though red blood ran down his chest, contrasting sharply with the green of his wrinkled hide, the great reptile didn’t appear to be weakened in any way. He seized the lead jet by the tail and, using it like a club, smashed down the next two in the formation. The fourth jet managed to loose its rockets, but the pilot must have panicked, because they flashed past wide, leaving white vapor trails. Gojiro turned and loosed his destructive breath at this and also the fifth and final jet as they screamed past him at head height. As two explosions created billows of black smoke, Jesus again grinned like a fiend. “He can be real fast when he wants to be.”
The dome was bounced around again as Gojiro performed an impromptu victory dance and Jesus laughed out loud. “I think that’s all they wrote.”
Mr. Thomas shook his head. “There’s something else coming at us.”
Jesus’ face straightened. “What?”
“It looks like a Flying Wing.”
Jesus looked puzzled. “What can they hope to achieve by that?”
“We may have a cultural reference going down here.”
Jesus’ puzzlement deepened. “Cultural reference?”
“Remember the George Pal version of War of the Worlds?”
“Of course.”
“In the movie, the Flying Wing was used to drop the atom bomb on the invading Martians.”
“You think Anubis would use an atom bomb on us? We’re already real close to the city suburbs. He’d kill a lot of his own people.”
Semple supplied the answer to this. “That wouldn’t bother Anubis at all. Can Gojiro survive a nuclear attack?”
Mr. Thomas looked deeply unhappy. “I very much doubt it.” Jesus was also worried. “In the movie, the Martians neutralized the bomb with their energy shields.”
Semple didn’t like the sound of this. “Do we have energy shields?”
Jesus looked up angrily. “What do you think? We’re in a fucking giant dinosaur, not a starship.”
The womb burst wetly and Jim found himself crawling across the overgrown, stone-flagged floor of a ruined temple. Tropical rain fell in leaden sheets, and he was immediately soaked to the skin. Miniature rivers followed the cracks and irregularities in the paving, with tiny torrents washing down the accumulated debris of leaves and twigs. Beyond the broken walls, napalm exploded, and the jungle burned despite the downpour. Helicopters clattered overhead and a stream of tracer cut through the smoke and steam of combat. Silhouetted against the explosions, a huge smiling Buddha had half its face blown away. The skeletal figure of a man in ragged olive drab squatted in the flame-shadows with his back to one of the broken walls. An M16 and a steel helmet were beside him and his poncho was pulled forward over his head to shelter him from the rain. Leaning forward with rapt concentration, under cover of the tented poncho, he was cooking up three white paramedic morphine pills in a blackened spoon over the flame of a candle in a K-ration can. A disposable syringe was clamped between his teeth. When he saw Jim crawling toward him, he fixed him with a hollow-eyed stare. “You stay the fuck away from me, okay? Fuck this up and I’ll cut you in half. It’s the last of my dope.”
Before Jim could say anything, Dr. Hypodermic came out from behind the Buddha, impossibly tall, impossibly thin, and totally out of place in his black stovepipe Abe Lincoln hat. Blue sparks clicked from his patent leather shoes and some kind of enveloping energy field stopped the rain from touching him. The junkie grunt looked up from under his poncho as though he weren’t in the least surprised to see the Voodoo Mystère. His voice had been threatening when he’d spoken to Jim, but now it turned into a complaining whine. “Look at the Buddha, man. They blew his fucking brains out.”
Dr. Hypodermic gestured soothingly with white-gloved hands. “I’m sure the Buddha will be able to handle it.”
The grunt shook his head as he drew the morphine solution up into the syringe through a ball of dirty cotton wool. “The motherfuckers didn’t have to blow a hole in his head. There was no need for that.”
Dr. Hypodermic’s death’s-head grin broadened as the junkie grunt tied off and went looking for a vein. “In half a minute, you won’t be worrying about it.”
Jim pushed his wet hair out of his eyes. He couldn’t imagine what game Hypodermic was playing with him, but he didn’t like it, and his own tone was very close to the junkie grunt’s whine. “You wouldn’t like to tell me why you’ve brought me here, would you?”
A burst of small-arms fire erupted in the nearby jungle, but Hypodermic didn’t even look around. “I thought the two of you should get acquainted. You both died of the same cause in the exact same second.”
“He OD’d?”
Dr. Hypodermic nodded. “Chuck here OD’d in the middle of a firefight.”
Another burst of gunfire sent Jim scrambling and rolling for the cover of a pile of wet rubble. Chuck, the junkie grunt, had pushed back his poncho. He’d found a vein, eased in the needle, and was now lovingly raising a little blood into the syringe. Jim cautiously raised his head. “He doesn’t look like he wants to be acquainted with anyone.”
“Chuck doesn’t want anything except what he’s got right now. That’s what happens when you make the end unthinkable and refuse to permit the reality of death. Chuck here’s been going around and around in the same five-and-a-half-minute cycle, shooting the same three morphine pills since the bullet ripped the top of his head off. He’s built himself a closed loop. Hell as an eternally revolving door in the worst place he ever experienced.”
“I though you said he OD’d?”
“The dope killed him, but before he even had time to fall over, a slug from a VC AK-47 lifted his scalp.”
“Isn’t what killed him kind of academic?”
“A sequence of events is a sequence of events. What he doesn’t know is that the damaged Buddha is an analog for his own head wound.”
Chuck pulled the needle out of his arm and looked blearily at Dr. Hypodermic. “I ain’t going anyplace and that’s a fact. Never leave the temple. That’s the key to everything. Never leave the temple.”
A grenade exploded somewhere on the other side of the Buddha. Jim pressed himself closer to the wall. “Is this supposed to be some kind of object lesson?”
Dr. Hypodermic shook his head. “It’s just part of the tour.”
“The tour?”
“We have big things planned for you, Jim Morrison. Shall we move on? Or maybe you want to stay here with Chuck? I’m sure we can set you up with a needle and a spoon and a poncho to keep the rain off. It’s a blissfully simple existence.”
Jim was having enough trouble keeping up with the shifts and surprises Dr. Hypodermic seemed to be springing on him. His mind felt seared from the previous plunge into discorporal pain. He sighed and leaned against the wall, letting the rain stream down his face. “Of course I don’t want to stay here. It’s a bliss I can very well do without.”
“Perhaps you’d like to go back to your Parisian bathtub?”
Jim shook his head. “You’ll do what you like, whatever I say.”
Dr. Hypodermic nodded. “C’est vrai.”
Jim smiled bitterly. “So you’ve got me. I give up. Roll me on to the next horror.”
“It’s gaining altitude.”
“It could actually be a bombing run.”
Semple was frightened, but she was also furious. She hadn’t allowed herself a full-blown tantrum in a very long time, but one was definitely boiling beneath the surface. “This is too fucking much. I swear. It just can’t happen to me. I’ve already been fucked up by one of Anubis’s nuclear weapons. It can’t happen twice. It just isn’t possible.”
Mr. Thomas was hardly the master of diplomacy. “It’s starting to look all too possible.”
Jesus leered at her. “It brought
me to you, didn’t it?”
“And that was such a treat, wasn’t it? I got to watch you masturbate and talk to the goat.”
Mr. Thomas turned. He was clearly offended. “And what’s so bloody terrible about talking to the goat, may I ask?”
Jesus picked up the thread. “And what’s so bad about watching me masturbate? I’ve known women who were quite turned on by it.”
Semple looked at the two of them in furious bewilderment. “What’s with you two? How the fuck can you talk like that when one of Anubis’s psychotic flyboys is maybe going to drop an A-bomb on us?”
Jesus shrugged. “I’m Jesus Christ. Nothing can hurt me.”
Mr. Thomas also didn’t seem that concerned. “And I was tired of being a goat.”
“What about Gojiro? Anybody think about what happens to him?”
Jesus acknowledged this with a look of less-than-sincere sadness. “It will be a loss.”
Mr. Thomas nodded in agreement. “It will be a loss.”
Semple clenched her fists in frustrated fury. She would have punched Jesus, but she couldn’t see how it would do her any good. She also couldn’t see the point of screaming, but that didn’t stop her. “But what about me? I don’t want to be blown up by an atom bomb!”
Mr. Thomas was staring at the screen again. “A small object has just detached itself from the Flying Wing.”
“What is this place?”
“It’s one of the points where life and death interface.”
Jim and Hypodermic were standing together on a high ledge above a huge tunnellike cavern that seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction. The air was chill with a smell of mold and cold fungi, and Jim found himself shivering helplessly. His shirt was still soaked from the downpour in the Vietnam hallucination. The cavern was a dim, gloomy, twilit place, lit only by a faint white light in the far distance. It wasn’t the physical surroundings that held Jim’s attention, though. The flat floor of the cavern was consistently inclined so it formed a long continuous slope, like a never-ending ramp, and up this ramp trudged an endlessly moving tide of humanity. Heads shaved, every last one of them dressed identically in a shapeless gray coverall, they moved ever upward in a slow and weary lockstep, no military precision, but in rough ranks and rows, backs bent, shoulders drooped forward so their arms hung with a loose simian swing. They didn’t pause or even glance around at their surroundings, and their faces were made uniform by dour hopelessness. They didn’t speak, even to complain one to another, but the cavern was nonetheless filled with a perpetual, drawn-out, sighing whisper of absolute despair.
Dr. Hypodermic fixed Jim with a ruby laser gaze. “You hear that?
“What is it?”
“The breath of the dead.”
“And who are all these people?”
“A particular subsection of the recently deceased.”
“Subsection?”
The skull face displayed a singularly impatient contempt. “The regiments of the righteous, the drug-free, the ones who gratuitously ignored their imaginations and allowed their lives to be punctuated by TV commercials every eight minutes. The Great Double Helix can be a hard concept to grasp after a life of Diet Sprite, Touched by an Angel, the missionary position, and some corporate Insect King lunching on your slave-employee ass. These are the ones who did what they were told and just said no to everything that might have redeemed their miserable lives.”
“And where do they think they’re going?”
“They don’t have a clue. The only idea they have is to walk toward the light. That’s all they’ve ever heard. When dead, walk to the light. These ones will go to any white light that presents itself.”
“Will they ever make it to the pods?”
“Most will. When they finally manage to work it out. The recruiters will get some of them, though.”
“The recruiters?”
Hypodermic allowed himself a dry-bone, demigod laugh. “How do you think they keep Gehenna, Stalingrad, and Necropolis filled? Show them an Electric Xmas Tree Angel and they will follow you to the racks and the heated tongs of perdition.”
“How come I never saw this place?”
“You were one of my garçons. I spared you from this stage of things.”
“You mean I was too stoned to notice?”
“I mean you were always doomed to the fast track and the early conclusion.”
Semple watched transfixed as a dark speck dropped from the underside of the Flying Wing. It was so tiny that it could easily be mistaken for a fault in the screen’s image or a floating trick of the eye. That something so insignificant could pose such a terminal threat was all but inconceivable, but Semple was unfortunately all too able to conceive it. As she watched it fall, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed, she felt her body start to stiffen. Her legs felt weak and when she put a hand on the back of the couch to steady herself, her nails dug into the leather upholstery, red on black, causing deep creases. For a micromoment, she found herself fascinated by her own hand. Very soon it would be gone, never to be seen again. Her mind, even her soul, if she had such a thing, might continue, but this flesh was about to be vaporized, her body, her hair, her internal organs all gone, and the absurd comic book costume along with them.
She looked back at the screen and the bomb had grown larger. The second and third units showed that Gojiro had come to a complete stop and was sitting back on his tail staring up at it. As the bomb came silently down, one of the great reptile’s hands flashed out and, in a more-than-reptilian turn of speed, he caught the bomb. Semple, turning on her platform shoes, cringed from the screen, knowing that this move would have to detonate the nuclear device. After five seconds of nothing, she opened her eyes, scarcely daring to look. When she did look, she incredulously had to raise her superheroine visor, unable to believe what she was seeing. Gojiro sat, tossing the bomb up and down on the palm of his massive hand, not unlike George Raft with his trademark silver dollar. Quickly, she bit back a scream. “Is the damned lizard out of his mind?”
Mr. Thomas took the question literally. “He’s a lizard, so it’s a little hard to tell, isn’t it?”
Semple turned on Jesus. “Can’t you make him throw it away or get rid of it somehow?”
Jesus shrugged. “He’s running the show right now.”
“Does he even know what it is?”
Mr. Thomas nodded. “Oh, I think so.”
And with that, Gojiro tossed the atom bomb somewhat higher, caught it in his mouth, and swallowed it with a gargantuan gulp, much the way a particular kind of extrovert human might toss a peanut into his mouth, or a chocolate-covered Whopper. Semple stood stunned. “I don’t believe it.”
“Oh yes, he swallowed it.”
“What the hell happens now?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
For approximately five seconds, Gojiro sat perfectly still. His eyes closed and the enormous hawser muscles in his neck worked convulsively. Mr. Thomas stroked his beard with a front hoof. “He looks like a pachuco who swallowed a full half pint of tequila on a bet.”
“Gggggggrrrrrrrwwwwwzzzzzz.”
Gojiro let out a long rasping wheeze that reverberated through the dome like a ripple in its very fabric and caused Semple to grab again for the couch. At the end of the breath, a perfect smoke ring of brightly glowing vapor floated from his mouth.
“Krrrkkk.”
Semple’s legs felt weak. “I see it, but I hardly believe it.”
Mr. Thomas seemed equally awed and even Jesus was unable to remain totally blasé. “So it seems the Big Green’s digestive track can neutralize nuclear fission.”
Semple sank down on one of the arms of the couch. “I can’t handle this and stand up at the same time.”
Jesus, on the other hand, done with being impressed by the King of the Monsters’ gastric prowess, wanted to get back to the wanton destruction of the city. “I imagine we can assume that Anubis has nothing else to throw at us.”
He key
ed commands into the remote, but Gojiro remained sitting. Jesus frowned. “He refuses to move.”
“He’s just put away one hell of a snack. Perhaps he doesn’t feel too good.”
“We can’t just sit out here in the desert doing fuck-all. There’s Necropolis to tear down.”
Mr. Thomas looked at Jesus as though he secretly considered him an idiot. “After digesting an atomic blast, he may not be too hungry.”
Jesus worked the monitor again. At first it seemed as though Gojiro absolutely wasn’t going to move. Then the monster belched.
“Bbbbbrap.”
Very slowly, he lumbered to his feet. He looked around for a few moments as though confused and possibly disoriented. Sniffing the air, he appeared to make up his mind. Falteringly at first, but quickly gathering speed and momentum, he started in the direction of Necropolis.
Jesus laughed out loud. “I guess the suburbs go first.”
The totality of the darkness was only punctuated by the struck blue sparks that told Jim Dr. Hypodermic was still with him. All was silent except for his own breathing and the occasional reverberating rattlesnake buzz and hiss that also confirmed Hypodermic was near. Obviously the Doctor’s tour was still in progress, but Jim had no clue where they might be or even why the Mystère had brought him to this place, which seemed to be devoid of absolutely everything except their own presence. Then the light appeared. At first it was nothing more than a point, a lone and errant flame-yellow star, but as it grew in the sky, Jim could see that it was actually one point of light surrounded by a strange flattened halo. It took Jim some time to realize that what he was really seeing was a light moving across water. It was the ripples in the halo that gave it away and his whole perspective suddenly changed. He grasped that he was standing on some dry-land vantage point, overlooking a vast black unseeable sea.