Across the room Lusypher gave a curt nod at Crometheus and returned to his two ladies, only looking back once as if to confirm some opinion he’d quickly developed, while the girls laughed at some story told around the table.
The maître d’ who’d petitioned the headman known in the Pantheon as Lusypher seemed elated beyond expectation when he returned to Crometheus’s table.
“Magnificent, monsieur, your burger will be here shortly.”
Crometheus still had that dead-eyed killer look. The one that said he was still punk rock.
“And one for her too.”
The waiter almost had a heart attack.
He cast a furtive and worried glance at the table of one Mr. Lusypher, and that look told Crometheus everything. The slave would rather leap from the tallest building in Sin City than dare approach that table again. He’d chanced his luck once tonight. He wouldn’t try it again. Not for Crometheus. Not for anyone.
The maître d’ scribbled something on his pad, cutting to the chase and saving his life. Maybe.
“I shall make it happen, monsieur,” he said, sweat appearing on his brow. And Crometheus knew the man wouldn’t go back. Wouldn’t ask the powerful Lusypher. He’d just make it happen in back in the kitchen so that all would go well and no one need lose their lives tonight.
Keep everyone happy—that was the motto of a slave’s life on the Pantheon. Or else… fates worse than death awaited.
And everyone only ever meant the Uplifted. They were the only ones who counted as anyone aboard the Pantheon. All else were ephemeral nothings. Discarded gossamer. Dream cobwebs brushed away and forgotten as the day begins.
Just like the rest of the galaxy. As the Animals would be once the war was over. Forgotten like a bad dream.
The burger came out shortly like some sacrificial victim being delivered to fire gods in the long-ago prehistory of the Animals. Silver platter, a team of wait-slaves each bearing some needed thing. Condiment. Pearl-handled knife. One to remove the silver dome over the top of the platter. Others doing every busy-thing that needed be done.
And yes, all of that was needed. The very pomp indicated the circumstance would be epic. And that was enough.
“It’s beautiful,” moaned Miss Cyber Saigon as though she were still in some dream. Her voice a faraway murmur. Her mind reeling at all her good fortune as of late.
“It is,” said Crometheus nonchalantly, trying to convince himself that it was. That it was the burger he’d been looking for to make him happy. He’d eaten a lot of burgers back on Earth. Burgers just to survive out on the road between concerts. Burgers when he had all the money in the world and could eat at the hippest ironic gastropubs the world over. Burgers that were nothing more than gimmicks, like being wrapped in gold leaf or being served straight off a grill and onto the hubcap of a ’68 Mustang with a mess of greasy dirty fries.
He stopped cold.
Cold like he did when she always came to him. Holly Wood. She wasn’t here. But the ghost of her had suddenly, and unexpectedly, walked into Escoffier’s. If only just in his mind.
And before Maestro could strike him softly with some gentle note about Bad Thought or Bad Memory… the full recollection came flooding back over him. Like Bad Old Self deep down inside just opened up the barn door and let the horses out to run off. Hootin’ and hollerin’ his old man’s evil laugh and slapping the knee of his dirty overalls as chaos and mayhem ensued. Howling like some demon in the dark while innocents were run down by wild steeds with eyes rolling and foam forming at their mouths. Down in the Hollow. The Devil’s Hollow.
The swamp.
There are things down there.
Things you need to see, Crometheus.
There had been a burger served on the hubcap of a ’68 Mustang, once and long ago, that had been one of the best. Maybe even the one that kept him going through the long night of the many years that came after, seeking that perfect burger experience once more. Seeking through all the years of a long and lonely sojourn across the face of a crumbling, burning, poisoned Earth that wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t do as it was told. And of course through all the stars he’d been crossing between ever since. This memory had hidden out in the dark place of his realities where Maestro couldn’t touch it. Like some reminder that he’d once been human. Like some buried pottery shard among those ruins that would be his when he became a god. But now a desert wind had revealed enough for him to see what lay buried in the sands.
He’d had that one, that roadside burger, with her. Holly Wood. And it had been the best one ever. All others paled in comparison.
Fact.
When he’d gone traveling around the world with her, Miss Holly Wood, the hometown head cheerleader who’d finally found him now that he was a big old famous rock star, they’d found that burger in the most unlikely of places.
And it had been the best.
Out on the road somewhere. Hidden near some mountain community where the rich had all fled after the cities had turned into violent toilets filled with activists always activating for the cause célèbre of the week.
Striking teachers.
Striking opera singers.
People who couldn’t figure out which bathroom to use.
There were problems with authors, comic books, statues. Everything needed to be torn down.
Things had gotten out of control.
The rich and powerful had begun to flee en masse to private enclave communities that were off the maps and off the grid. Hidden paradises with all the services and amenities one could want located out in box canyons or high in the mountains, or even on lost islands and forgotten coasts. Long before anyone knew or suspected these private reserves had been forming, they’d been made ready because the end was starting to come into focus for those who were used to looking down the road and trying to monetize the future.
The world had begun to take its final shape. And it wouldn’t be pretty.
Those few short months he had with Holly Wood had been the best. They’d found each other as everything began to go to hell. He was welcomed into the enclaves because of his insider rock god status. All-access to all those secret communes. Welcomed and expectantly asked to join as though he would be another feather in their caps. A diamond on display. A jewel in their crown. A standard by which they might measure themselves a little better.
They were courting him.
And he was playing hard to get.
But halfway between Reno and Rome as they used to say, they, he and Holly, had pulled into a roadside diner along a low mountain road. In the forgotten hinterlands that had become lawless in those end-of-days… days. They were nearing some sort of community ahead. A place he’d been invited to. Private security military teams patrolled the roads so that the rich could drive “down the hill” as he remembered them saying to one another, to have a burger at the Yacht Club. That’s what the roadside place was called. The Yacht Club. Located out under some mesquite trees and live oaks beyond a dirt parking lot on a windswept ridge off to the side of a lonely highway. Firepits designed like art sculptures of sailing ships and men on fire. RUBs, rich urban bikers, all having a microbrew. Or a Pabst if just to be ironic.
With Holly on the back, her tanned slender arms around his chest, he’d pulled the hog into the dusty parking lot of the Yacht Club. The RUBs, and even some who would become Uplifted in just a few short years, or decades, his timeline tended to get hazy this far from the original story, recognized him, Billy Bang rock god, and welcomed him with a cheer. As though he had been expected. As though they had been anticipating his arrival with the stunning beauty head cheerleader from his high school years before he was anyone.
They all totally got that.
Because they’d all done the same thing when they’d made it. Every one of them had climbed their own particular mountain, forsaking the company of friends in order to be
come the best at whatever they did. And when that had been done, they went back for the one they’d been doing it for all along. Nine times out of ten it was the head cheerleader of their youth. Nine times out of ten it didn’t last beyond a single weekend.
So say many along the Path.
The long-cozied dream didn’t match the reality. It never did. This too was a truth once spoken by Anubis in the dark of the Forbidden Decks.
Except he and Holly had made it for a few months instead of a mere weekend. Combing the world after the last tour of Rebel Child, seeking the best burgers paradise had to offer. They’d made love nonstop out on the road.
At the time he thought it was just sex. Epic, really great, sex.
But in the years after she was gone… the years when he got fat and ordered ten burgers from the Greek restaurant down the block from his mansion in Beverly Hills, behind the Green Zone cordon, he realized it had been love that they’d been making all along. He just hadn’t known it back then.
But at that moment out on the road at the roadside diner under the oaks as the house band began to play, she wasn’t gone. And they sat around picnic tables in the old honky-tonk as the twilight came on and the jamboree of locals began to bang out some serviceable hard-rock licks. They were sudden celebrities, but they’d both become used to that. Her always the beautiful head cheerleader, him because he’d clawed his way to the top of the charts.
That was when the unforgettable burger on the ’68 Mustang hubcap came out.
Yeah, he thought even now as he looked at the beautiful burger on the plate in front of him in the best restaurant in Sin City, an epic call girl whose every desire was to please his darkest wishes at his side… yeah, that burger at the Yacht Club was the best. Nothing would ever beat it.
Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years later. Trillions of miles from Earth. On the other side of humanity and heading toward godhood…
Hands-down. It had been the best.
There are lies you can tell hoping they’ll become true. And then, curse Socrates… there’s just the truth. Whether you like it or not. Regardless of everything you’ve tried to tell yourself since.
That burger was the truth.
It was covered in dirty fries. Which were basically twice-cooked fries with some secret seasoning that could have been nothing but salt, pepper, cayenne, and maybe just a little dust of sugar.
He tasted the first one.
It was the most decadent fry he’d ever eaten. It looked like just some greasy french fry that had been twice fried and over-seasoned. But it was not that.
Later he’d find out, while smoking a joint with the chef who seemed to be half mountain man and half biker, and who was covered in prison tats, that the fries were cooked in something wonderful and that was the secret to their greatness.
Never forget that the insiders love to keep the real-deal criminals close… for street cred, or danger, or on the off chance they’ll get a floor show of ultra-violence gone off the rails… who knows because all three are right. Insiders love criminals.
And the burger chef, though brilliant, was a criminal.
Mountain Man, or, Roach, or whatever his name was that he decided upon probably in some hot sweaty jail down along the Mississippi coast, told him the secret to the fries. Gave it all away amid gusty guffaws as they passed the weed back and forth and listened to the ramble of the jam band out on the patio while the summer night came on.
The dirty fries were cooked in goose fat. Which, when sourced and rendered properly, is the most decadent of all fats.
Truth.
Roach had bellowed loudly at the telling of this wisdom and swallowed a whole cold beer in one gulp like some Southern preacher working into a hellfire-and-damnation sermon that would have the whores turned away from their scarlet lives.
Now, in Crometheus’s mind at the Yacht Club, and also in Escoffier’s in Sin City in real-time, which is a trick to understanding the Pantheon, the ability to be in all those places inside a mind that’s like a mansion, or so it seems inside your own personal hard drive, he tasted those long-forgotten fries once more.
Secretly as the wait-slaves of Escoffier’s busied and fussed, and the Asian gamer girl caressed him and willed herself to be all that an Uplifted could ever want.
He was there.
Back in the past. Where he’d once been human.
With Holly Wood.
They were crispy on the outside, curling and crusted with seasonings and salt. But on the inside, they just melted in your mouth. Like fried goose fat turning to salty potato-flavored melted butter.
He remembered Holly Wood’s brilliant blue eyes going wide, much like Miss Cyber Saigon’s had when she saw the coke they’d party with for the weekend. Much like, as in, just the same.
Maybe his immortal god-mind hadn’t found the unexpected, it had just been reminded of something lost? Maybe that too was a pleasure for one so long-lived. The resurrection of dead memories. Even if you’d deleted them yourself. Even if you’d made up others to replace them.
Edited.
Who was it who said there’s nothing new under the sun?
Some forgotten rock star? Some old king?
There was more to the memory. There was that most legendary of cheeseburgers in paradise sitting beneath the pile of dirty fries in the middle of a vintage ’68 Mustang hubcap. The meat was chargrilled. Two thick slabs of fresh ground hamburger that had done time over the flames of hell. Not too much time because on the inside it was running with juice. Just a nickel, as they say in all the prisons and jails Mountain Man or Roach had ever had the pleasures of.
The bun was soft. A standard bun. Maybe even a little flour from the bakery on the bottom. A dusting, one might note. And inside these two buns lay the perfect burger he could never forget. Occasional memories of which had driven him across all the years of loneliness and into the stars and from planet to planet and battle to battle, searching to recapture that lost thing he’d had within the palm of his hand… so long ago at a roadside diner halfway between Reno and Rome.
As some like to say.
He’d searched for it so long that he’d forgotten he was searching. And only now, here, at Escoffier’s, was he ambushed by the past once again.
Within the bun was tangy Thousand Island dressing. Imagine that. No special sauce. Just something done well. And then lettuce, tomato, onion. A thick chargrilled patty, two slices of American… he hadn’t said that word in a long time… American cheese. Another patty. Thick and juicy and between the two another wash of delicate onion slices. Not a whole onion. Then more cheese on top of the top patty. Pickles. More sauce. Grilled onions now. Cut up and browned dark. Sweet and syrupy almost. Then the top bun.
Easy.
And yet amazing how so many across the rest of his many lifetimes had failed to achieve what Mountain Man or Serial Offender or Roach of the Prison Tats had managed to produce there along that lost highway astride the road he and Holly Wood were following. Looking for something they already had.
Each other. Because wasn’t that what it was really all about? Finding the one you love and the freedom to finally be together. You think it was the meal, or the day, or some walk in a museum, but it wasn’t. It was the hand in yours. The wild new energy surging between the two of you.
He remembered taking a bite at the picnic tables inside the Yacht Club as the jam band jammed. And it was like taking a big greasy bite of heaven. Or what eternity should offer. Juice ran down his hands and face and every bite was sharp and meaty and tangy and vinegary because of the pickles. Sweet because of the grilled onions. Decadent from melted cheese and tangy sauce. Everything a concert crescendo of what eating a burger is supposed to be. Glorious. And human.
And don’t forget the dirty fries.
And don’t forget Holly, he reminded himself in the back of his mind at Escoffier’s
as if the memory were so real that it was right now. As though he could merely decide to change how the past had been written the way they, the Uplifted, changed the truth to suit their present needs and goals. He heard the child he once was tell himself not to forget Holly. Where Maestro couldn’t reach. In the places where he said all the truth that was his and his alone.
Mine.
That was where he kept her. Kept Holly Wood of long ago.
Because she too was his. And his alone.
Now, sitting in the most celebrated restaurant within the Pantheon, with galactic victory at hand, he stared at the secret off-menu burger they’d served him. He knew it would be great. Of course.
But it would never be that burger from long ago.
Whatever it had been on the mountain road halfway between nowhere and the future. With Holly Wood.
It would never be that.
But here in Escoffier’s they were all watching him, though pretending not to. Even Lusypher, who’d given his special reserve blessing that this moment might happen, was watching.
Tell a lie enough times and it becomes the truth, Crometheus thought to himself, blocking out the memory of that long-ago perfect burger with Holly Wood. Protecting it the way all truths had to be protected. By a bodyguard of lies, as someone had once said.
The maître d’ returned with a silver cup of fries.
He set it next to the gorgeous burger dripping with sauce and cheese and swimming in a dark Bordelaise along the bottom of the hot platter. Crometheus took a bite of the burger expecting all the happiness that the galaxy had to offer, expecting it to come to him now, if it was ever going to come. And thereby perhaps set him free of her, Holly Wood. And maybe he would be free to finally shed that last bit of humanity. And become.
It was good.
Great, even.
Because he’d decided it had to be. And those watching would know that.
His face did that acting thing the actress had taught him down in Louisiana when they weren’t having sex, or making love, between takes on the set of the zombie flick. The trick to make a lie the truth.
Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Page 12