“So,” he said, watching her try to recover from flushed cheeks and swollen lips. “If I'm going to take you out this weekend, I still need your number.”
Sunday morning Nick woke up to a text message alert. Amanda. He smiled as he sat up in bed and typed a flirty reply. He would continue to see her for a few more weeks and then let things fizzle out. Saturday's date had gone even better than he could have planned. Nick was feeling pretty good about himself.
He climbed out of bed and hopped into the shower. Nick got dressed in his standard shorts and crocs and checked out his shirtless physique in the mirror. He made sure to restock the spare condom in his wallet before picking up his phone again to make an important call.
The phone rang twice before Valerie Hess picked up.
“Nick?” she asked. She was confused by his call. They had a Pantheon meeting in a few hours. What couldn't wait until then?
“Heya Hess. Just wanted to share the good news.”
“What good news?” her voice was tense. She could tell he was up to something.
“Well, good for me. Bad for you. See, I've got a new girlfriend and you've lost a member of your little V-card club.”
“Nick,” she snapped. “What did you do?”
“You mean who?”
“Nick!”
Nick was pretty sure that he had never seen or heard Angry Valerie before. It was an anomaly. It was rather like watching a cat use a fork.
“I'll see you at the meeting today, yeah? Drive safe.” Nick hung up as Valerie screamed his name at her phone in fury.
“They stood where they stood by the power of the sword.”
-Thucydides
ix.
The creature saw with a hundred dragon heads
and consumed prey with a hundred dragon mouths.
It slithered on enormous serpent bodies
as high as the sky.
Those serpent coils tightened around its victims
as it flapped its many massive feathered wings.
Even the gods of Olympus fled the beast.
All, except for one.
The goddess stood at the top of Olympus,
armed with her Aegis, helmet, and javelin.
As a hundred dragon heads roared in fury,
Athena roared back.
“Do you see how the god always hurls his bolts at the greatest houses and the tallest trees? For he is wont to thwart whatever is greater than the rest.”
-Herodotus
IX.
The 1963 Thunderbird was a gift from Zach’s father. On the rare occasions that Mr. Jacobs thought of his son, he went all-out to make up for the guilt of forgetting him for the rest of the year. At least, Zach hoped that he felt guilty. Really, Mr. Jacobs went all-out so that he would have something to throw in his mom's face during their annual argument.
The T-bird had been repossessed by the bank to pay for the debts of a gambling addict. The car enthusiast who had purchased it for a steal at an auction had used its restoration as a tool to avoid his failing marriage. When the work was complete, he had painted it lime green and sold it for a hefty profit to pay a divorce attorney. Zach’s father had paid that price for a great, last-minute birthday present when Zach turned sixteen.
Zach loved that car. He loved it more than his father loved him. It was the first model to feature an alternator instead of a generator and the last model from the third generation. As an extra precaution to keep his baby safe, Zach always parked at the back of the lot and walked, even on a rainy day.
On that Monday, the hot sun beat down on the hard top of the Thunderbird as it sat, nearly alone, in the mall parking lot. After days of torrential downpours, everyone was out enjoying the sunshine, except for Zach.
A distant whistling went unnoticed. It grew louder, as if approaching, tearing through the air at tremendous speed. The whistling, now closer, grew deeper and culminated in a mighty whump and a crash. For an instant, the parking lot was filled with the sound of groaning metal and breaking glass as an enormous spoon fell from the heavens and landed directly on the hard top of Zach’s beloved Thunderbird.
Across the lot, a hundred yards away, the car alarm on a beige sedan sounded. Nobody passing by cared to look for the source of the commotion.
Miranda Rutherford stood on a step-ladder, placing paperbacks back on the shelves of the book store at the mall. She had spent the previous half-hour going around the store, picking out books that were mis-shelved (her perfect memory made it easy to spot the changes) and collecting them in a basket. Now Zach Jacobs handed her books while she alphabetized them by author's last name, and she recited excerpts from Ovid's Metamorphoses to him.
“Wow,” he said, as she finished telling the story of how Phaëton crashed his father's chariot and scorched the desert. “So how much of this do you think is true?”
Minnie shrugged. “It's hard to say. Maybe some day we'll remember. I think that a lot of the stories conflict. History is never kept accurately, especially when poets and philosophers start adding convenient appendices. We know what we remember. I doubt most of the lineage of kings... it seems fashionable to claim a deity as your Dad.”
Zach snorted. “Yeah. But I mean... well... with me.”
“With you it is pretty likely.” Minnie laughed.
Tony, her manager, came around the end of the aisle. He scowled at Zach. Minnie was a good worker-- the best he had, really-- but he still didn't like that Zach was always hanging around here lately. He was a distraction.
“Minnie. I need you to pass that off to Gary and go out back for a few before your shift's over. An order just came in and we need you to call a few guests and inform them their books came in,” Tony said.
“I guess I need to go home,” Zach said, “see what Mom is cooking.”
“We'll continue this philosophical discussion later,” Minnie said. She hopped down from the ladder and passed Tony. “Tell Gary that Q comes way before V, yeah?”
Zach watched Minnie disappear through the door to the back room.
“Take it easy, Jacobs,” Tony said. “We're not paying you to be here.”
Zach shrugged and wandered back into the mall. He turned into a department store to head out to the parking lot and spotted a familiar pair of shoulders lurching through the men's department. The shoulders themselves weren't that familiar, but the fact that they belonged to someone over six and a half feet tall really narrowed down the options for their owner.
“Frank?” Zach muttered to himself. This wasn't the kind of store that he imagined Frank shopped at. He was a jeans, work boots, and undershirt sort of guy. Zach was about to call out to Frank when he saw someone else meet him at the edge of the dressing room. Devon.
Zach shook his head. He knew very little of what was going on there aside from the strained greetings at Pantheon meetings, but he didn't care to interrupt their rendezvous. Zach crossed to the back of the store, through cosmetics, and made a B-line for the south entrance.
The mall was kind of dead at four on a Tuesday afternoon. The lot on the east side was empty as most of the shops on that end had fallen behind on rent in a poor economy and closed-up. Zach saw it immediately. His 1963 Thunderbird sat straight ahead with the roof crushed in under the weight of a giant ladle. The large silver scoop was shallow with a rim that curved in. It sat in a crater of impact over the driver's seat. The broken windshield, held in one piece by sheets of laminate, was shattered in a starbursts that radiated out from the base of the scoop. The long stem of the thing pointed back towards the taillights of the car and hung in the air. The end curled over and formed the shape of a duck.
Zach sat down quickly on the curb. He felt his breathing get tight as he stared at the wreckage of his vintage hard-top. There were no expletives colorful enough to encompass the shock and rage building within him. His car was his baby. The car felt like a part of him. Now, with the windows shattered and the roof caved in, Zach could only imagine what the leather interior looked
like. The custom paint would have to be completely refinished if the machine wasn't totaled. Would his vintage car insurance even cover this, whatever it was?
“A—a- a spoon?” Zach shouted.
He jumped to his feet and ran to the east entrance of the department store. He threw open the heavy glass door and banged on the window of the mall security booth. “Hey, someone better get out here,” he hollered. His hair stood on end, charged with his own electric rage. Who would do this? Who would destroy a classic car? Who were Zach's enemies, aside from the murderous Titans he had killed a few months ago? There were other Titans, metaphoric ones: there were the football Titans, Olympia Heights' rival. Zach was willing to bet anything that this was a really bad football prank. Someone was going to pay for this. They would be lucky if the police arrested them before Zach found them.
A heavy balding man in a security uniform sauntered up to the glass. He didn't seem to notice the urgency in Zach's pounding fist.
“Sir, sir... I'ma have to ask you not to bang on the glass.”
“You gotta get out here. Someone wrecked my car. There's a giant freakin' spoon on my car!”
“What?” He shook his head. Clearly he thought Zach was mad. “Did you say a spoon?”
“Come on!” Zach was even more wound up by the guard's lack of concern. The rotund mall cop stepped out of his booth and followed Zach to the south lot. When Zach rounded the corner of the building he was surprised to see that, though his car was still wrecked, the ladle was nowhere to be found. “I swear it was there,” Zach said, though he couldn't understand how it had vanished in under five minutes. Someone must have pulled up with a truck and loaded it off. “Someone moved it already?”
“Hey, you're the football kid,” the cop said. “Lightning.”
“Yeah, that's me. Listen, someone wrecked my car. Maybe it was Miami West. You have to check the tape. Someone has to pay for this!”
The guard waved. Zach, still seething, followed him back to the booth. He went through another door, into a large room housed inside the mall, and waved for Zach to follow. They sat down in front of a row of screens. Zach tried not to stare at a middle-school girl who was handcuffed to a chair watching another guard extract shoplifted jewelry from her purse.
“'Sup, Max?” the other guard asked.
“Someone trashed this guy's car. Lightning here says there was a spoon on it, but it's gone.”
“A spoon?” the guard shook his head. He pulled a gaudy, overdone ring out of the purse and shook his head. “Now why would you even steal this crap?”
Zach turned to the screens as Max rocked back the security footage. He stopped at minus-thirty minutes and played the tape. “There's your car, just fine. Awful shame. That's a nice car.”
“Thanks,” Zach grumbled, “it was.”
They forwarded through the footage for a moment, watching other cars come and go in fast-forward. Then the screen went black. “Well that's odd. The camera stopped.” He pressed a button on the console and then jammed it a few more times with his index finger. “Hey, Jerome. This camera's still not working.”
“Huh?”
“Hasn't been running for twenty minutes. It's broken.”
“What?” Zach bellowed.
“Calm down,” Jerome said. “Ain't nobody dropped a spoon on your car. That's crazy.”
“There was a big spoon-- or a ladle-- it was a giant ladle on my car. I saw it.”
“Maybe you've been struck by lightning too many times,” Max suggested.
Zach took a deep breath. He could feel the surge of energy bubbling up in his chest and he knew that, if he let himself go, he would have another incident like the two on the football field last fall. It would be a lot harder to explain indoors.
“Listen, kid, I'm gonna call the police. You think hard about that ladle story. If you're pulling my leg...”
“I'm not pulling your leg,” Zach growled. “Just tell the cops I'll be waiting outside.”
Zach got up, knocking his chair over, and marched back outside. The sky had clouded over and thunder was starting to rumble. Great. Now the car was going to get wet, too. He sat down on the curb as heavy drops started to fall and stewed in his own misery.
A navy blue Volvo, a throwback from the 80s, pulled up. Minnie rolled down the window. “Why are you out in the rain?” she asked. She had just gotten off of work.
Zach got up and crossed to the car. He leaned against the passenger side window to answer her. “Uh... my car is wrecked.”
“What? The Thunderbird?”
“Yeah... there was a giant ladle on it and then it was gone and security thinks I'm crazy. Cameras didn't get it and the cops are on their way now.”
Minnie put the car in park.
“Zach,” she said. “Giant ladle?”
“I know it sounds strange, but it didn't just fall from the sky.”
“Zach, it might have.”
Zach took a deep breath. He closed his eyes and groaned. “Shit. And all this time I've been assuming it's a football prank.”
“Ladle? Dipper? Big Dipper? We made the constellations, Zach, according to myth.”
“So it might be--”
“Don't tell the cops about the ladle. And get in the car. You're getting soaked.”
Zach climbed in the passenger seat. Minnie turned the heat on for him and handed him a small towel from the back seat. “We should go over your story before they get here. You got outside and found the car totaled. No ladle, got it?”
The police took Zach's statement and AAA towed his car. When all was said and done, it was past dinner time and Zach's mom had called to find out where he was. Minnie offered to stay and give him a ride home and Zach was grateful to accept it. He didn't want to wait for his mom to get to the mall, and he wanted to talk about the possibility that the ladle was Pantheon related.
Minnie had cranked up her stereo while she waited for Zach, and when he opened the passenger door to duck in from the rain, he was assaulted by a symphony of heavily distorted guitars and violins. “Woah, this is what you listen to?”
Minnie turned it down so he could hear her over the female singer's operatic vocals. “Not what you expected?”
“Not at all.” Zach listened to Dave Matthews. He had never pegged Minnie as a girl who listened to metal.
“I am a goddess of war, you know.” She put the car in drive and pulled out of the mall.
“Still got that towel?” Zach asked.
“In the back.”
Zach turned in his seat and reached back. His hand landed on a glossy black skate helmet covered in stickers. “What's this?”
“My derby gear,” Minnie said.
“Derby?”
“Roller Derby. You know, girls skating in circles, knocking each other down.”
“You do that?”
“Well, I have to be on the junior league team until I'm twenty-one.”
“You don't seem like the type.”
“And apparently I don't seem like the type for symphonic metal either. You don't know me very well, Zach.”
“No, I guess not.” Zach picked up the helmet and read the back of it. “Hermione Danger.”
“That's my derby name, though it's taken in the WFTDA registry, so when I get to move up in a couple years I'll have to coin a new one. I'm thinking JK Rolling.”
Zach laughed softly. “You're full of surprises.”
Minnie turned the radio off completely. “We should probably be worried about this dipper,” she said.
Zach set the helmet down in the back. “Do you think whoever did it meant for me to be in the car?”
“I don't know. Maybe, but not likely in a parking lot. And if they were close enough to come retrieve the dipper in that short of notice, then they probably would have attacked you anyway. Or there's the possibility they can make the thing vanish. I mean where did they get it? From the actual sky? Does that mean they could send it up
there again?”
“Or was it actually a football prank and we just withheld evidence from the police?”
Minnie shook her head. “You said it was thirty feet long. Traffic out of here is tough enough in a Volvo. Add a trailer long enough to carry it and you wouldn't be able to pop in and pop out in that amount of time. Plus, like I said, where else would they get it? If it's heavy enough to crush a classic car, made out of real metal, then it's not likely some gimmicky soup kitchen sign.”
“Not very bright, whoever it was, attacking me. There are easier targets in the group.”
“If I were trying to kill us, I'd attack you.”
Zach just looked at her with his eyebrow raised. Minnie read the confusion in the silence.
“Any sensible opponent would cut off our head first and watch us squirm. In the chaos, without a leader, we'd be easy pickings. The ladle was likely a warning.”
“Then maybe we ought to warn the others,” Zach said.
Minnie nodded. “I think so. I'll send out an email blast tonight explaining the situation.”
She turned down Zach's street. He sat in silence, thinking about what she had said about cutting off the head. He'd have to start being a lot more careful if someone was really out to get them. It was foolish to think that Epimetheus and Prometheus were the first and last of their enemies.
He turned his gaze to Minnie. He had always thought of her as the group encyclopedia. Now he was starting to see her as warrior goddess. It was a strange lens to view the tiny girl through.
“This is you, right?” she asked as she pulled into the driveway of a yellow house. Zach's mom had a little four-foot garden in the front, and their narrow strip of lawn had one of those mirror lawn globes on it.
“I know you're mad about the car,” Minnie said, putting the car in park. “I mean, it was a really nice car.”
“My dad gave it to me,” Zach said, “on my sixteenth birthday.”
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