Last God Standing Read online

  MICHAEL BOATMAN

  Last God Standing

  I would like to dedicate this book to my nephew, Skylar A. Forney, who started this whole journey by asking a simple question. To, Myrna, who inspires me to finish what I start. And to Jacob, Aidan, MacKenzie and Jordan... my Reasons.

  DIVINE DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Yahweh Abrahamic God of the Hebrews, Christians, Muslims and Mormons

  Zeus King of the Greek gods

  Loki Scandinavian God of Mischief

  Ares Greek God of War

  Agni Hindu God of Fire

  Baron Samedi Haitian God of Death and Black Magic

  The Morrigan Celtic Goddess of Sex and War

  Changing Woman Navajo Earthmother

  Dionysus Greek God of Wine and Epiphany

  Poseidon Greek God of the Oceans

  Thor Norse God of Thunder

  Kali Hindu Goddess of Time and Destruction

  The Buddha Embodiment of Enlightenment

  The Archangel Gabriel

  The Seraphimic Angel Seraphiel

  The Angel Moroni

  Lucifer The Prince of Darkness (Retired)

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Michael Boatmen

  Copyright

  Divine Dramatis Personae

  Prologue

  Chapter I: DUEL

  Chapter II: I AM

  Chapter III: THE ELEPHANT WAS DOUBLE BOOKED

  Chapter IV: ARCHANGEL

  Chapter V: WHEN IN ROME, KILL THE POPE

  Chapter VI: HANNIBAL TIME

  Chapter VII: PARANOIA MADE BY GOYA

  Chapter VIII: SURABHI

  Chapter IX: MAGNUS AND MARIAN

  Chapter X: WINED

  Depression

  Chapter XI: COMIC CONVENTIONS, WHAT HAPPENED TO YURI LAST WEEK, VITILIGO ELF

  Chapter XII: LONDON CALLING, HERB & BARB, FIRE TAKES A HOLIDAY.

  Chapter XIII: ANGELS AND EXORCISMS

  Chapter XIV: YURI’S BIG DEAL

  Chapter XV: LONDON CALLING… AGAIN, CONNIE FINDS RELIGION, BARBARA.

  Chapter XVI: HOLIDAY’S LAW (RETURN TO EDEN)

  Chapter XVII: DEATH PENALOPY OR… COMEDY TONITE

  Chapter XVIII: WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU

  Chapter XIX: THE CHOICE

  Part2 : THE QUANTUM MECHANIC

  Chapter XX: HOMECOMING

  Chapter XXI: REORIENTATION

  Chapter XXII: A DAY IN THE LIVES

  Chapter XXIII: REVELATIONS

  Chapter XXIV: OLD GOD/NEW TRICK

  PART 3 DEAD GOD WALKING

  Chapter XXV: THE BIG PAYBACK

  Chapter XXVI: ENDTIMES

  Chapter XXVII: DEAD GOD TALKIN’

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Chicago, 1986 AD

  Christmas on the Cooper Plantation. My parents are fighting again because Daddy burned the turkey and Mother’s working on her fourth vodka tonic. I’ve been counting her drinks while I play with the octopus from my new GI Joe Underwater Action set. Barbara always says smartass five year-olds should worry about other stuff than how many cocktails she’s had. She hates when I count, so of course I do it a lot. My brothers are fighting over their presents. Nobody’s paying attention when the stranger steps out of our Christmas tree.

  “Look at you,” the stranger says. “Odin told me you’d done it, but I didn’t believe him.”

  The stranger squats down and winks at me.

  “You sneaky little bastard.”

  The smiling stranger is skinny. He’s dressed funny, and he’s kind of wavy. He makes my eyes hurt. I should tell, but my brothers are screaming at each other and my parents are yelling for everyone to shut up.

  “Get that thing away from Lando before he chokes to death.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Barbara Jean, he’s perfectly safe.”

  The stranger laughs. No one pays him any attention.

  “Daddy’s wrong, you know. You’re not safe at all.”

  His eyes do something weird. Then my rubber octopus comes to life and wraps seven of its tentacles around my neck. The other one slides into my mouth and slips down my throat. I can’t breathe. I can feel my father pounding on my back and yelling, “Let it go! Let it go, dammit!”

  Then everything gets dark.

  I wake up in a gray place, like a room made of smoke. I still can’t breathe but I can hear my parents fighting, a million miles away.

  “Goddammit, Herbert. You’ve killed him. On Christmas! I hope you’re happy.”

  Then a Golden Lady walks out of the dark. She’s shiny. She jingles when she walks and she looks like the ladies in the live Indian show we saw in Wisconsin last summer, only taller, a lot taller. And she’s shiny bright like the sun. Looking at her makes me want to laugh and cry all at the same time.

  “Not yet, buddy. Can’t have you upsetting the Plan.”

  Then she punches me in the stomach.

  I cough…

  “See you soon, old boy.”

  …and I’m staring up at my dad. He’s wearing wet chunks of rubber octopus tentacle all down his shirtfront. The smiling stranger is gone. Mother is over by the Christmas tree with the phone up to her ear. When she sees that I’m still alive, she slams the phone down.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Summer, 1990

  On a summer camp boat ride across Lake Michigan I decided to ask Angela Rhymer to be my girlfriend. We were nine years old that year, and I’d spent most of it staring at her. One day she told her big brother that I was stalking her. He beat me up. My mother met with the head camp counselor and said she’d castrate the next little sonofabitch who put his hands on me. I asked Angela, anyway. She said, “Maybe.” That was worse.

  We were alone on the deck of the ferryboat. All the other campers and counselors had run inside because it was starting to rain. I grabbed Angela’s hand. I had to yell over the wind.

  “If I were Odysseus you’d be my Penelope!”

  “You’re weird,” she shouted. “And a little creepy.”

  Then the ferry lurched and a wave rolled over the side of the boat and washed me over the safety rail. I hit the water hard. I knew how to swim, but no matter how hard I tried to keep my head above the water it felt like something was dragging me down. I kicked and splashed and screamed. Then the something yanked me under and the lake closed over my head.

  Dark water swirls all around me, pushing me around, flipping me over. The water is changing, churning, until it becomes the face of a bearded old man with eyes like burning emeralds. There’s light in the water… lights shining in my eyes, as the glowing face pulls me in closer. It shifts and rolls like waves captured by strange gravity. I can see dozens of fish swimming inside the face.

  “You’ve made fools of us all. More and more of your believers abandon you every day… and you asked for it.”

  I’m drowning. My heart is pounding and my lungs are screaming and I have to breathe and I’m afraid to die.

  “Hey, fishface!”

  The face in the water turns toward the sound.

  That’s when I see her. The Golden Lady. She’s walking on the bottom of the Lake. She’s holding something in her hands, something silver that shines even brighter than the old manface. She’s smaller this time, darker, with different hair and she’s wearing a nurse’s uniform. But she’s still the Golden Lady. And she’s come for me.

  “Poseidon. You’re pathetic.”

  The light in her hands goes nuclear bright, and suddenly I can breathe. I’m lying on the rocky bottom with all that water rolling above me but, somehow, the Golden Lady’s silver light protects me. Through the ceiling of black water, I can see the face looking down at us. It looks totally pissed.


  “Foul! Foul! Traitorous squaw!”

  “Begone, thou racist remnant! Go haunt an oil rig!”

  The face in the water, Poseidon, screams, and burns in the silver light from the object in the Golden Lady’s hands. Then it’s gone.

  “Are you alright?”

  When I wake up, I’m lying on the deck with rain hitting my face. The Golden Lady nods. Then she puts the shining thing in the small purse on her hip and the silver light goes out. I can hear people yelling on the other side of the ferry. I can hear Angela crying. But all I can see is the Golden Lady’s face. Her eyes.

  “Do I… do I know you?”

  “Not yet,” she laughs. “You will know me. But not yet.”

  “What is that silver thing? Can I see it?”

  “That would be very bad.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. You won’t remember any of this when I’m gone.”

  “I won’t?”

  “Nope.”

  “OK.”

  Someone, my camp counselor, screams my name. People are running toward us.

  “Lando! I found him! He’s over here!”

  But the strange nurse and her silver purse are gone.

  The Knock Knock Club. Peoria Illinois. 2003

  3am and my set killed. It was a full house; a great crowd full of happy drunks. Afterward, feeling victorious and lonely, I bought all the other comics a round. By midnight I was way too drunk to drive.

  Screw it. It’s your birthday.

  I’m trying to shove my inhaler into the ignition slot when she appears. No special effects this time. She is simply… there, sitting next to me in the passenger seat. This time, she wears the face of a Cherokee matriarch; regal bearing, long gray hair loose and flowing over strong, straight shoulders. She’s wearing a velvety black cloak made from… made from…

  “Thunderbird feathers,” she says, as if she’d read my mind.

  “I did read your mind. Why do you keep flinching?”

  “Cause every time you show up something tries to kill me.”

  The Golden Lady laughs. “I know the feeling.”

  “Who are you, lady? Why do I know you?”

  “That’s a long story, Lando Cooper. But I’m afraid you’re in no condition to hear it.”

  “Are you my guardian angel?”

  “Eewww. Gross.”

  “What’s your name, Golden Lady? Pretty Indian Lady with the long pretty hair.”

  “I’ve had many names. The gods of the Navajo nation called me Changing Woman. For now, you can call me… Constant.”

  “Constance?”

  “Constant.”

  “Well, Constance, today is my birthday.”

  “Of course. A very special birthday.”

  “Thass right, Connie. For today I am a man.”

  “And just look at you. Your parents must be so proud.”

  The unexpected gravity of that statement stalls my tongue and I have to look away before I embarrass myself.

  “They never understood me.”

  “Oh boy. Look, we’ve got so much work to do I don’t even want to think about it. It’s time to go.”

  “Where exactly are we going, my Connie?”

  “To school, my bumbling mortal idiot.”

  “Hey, lady… I happen to be the possessor of a Bachelors degree from one of our nation’s finest educational institutions. I done made the grade.”

  I try to start the car with my inhaler again and throw up all over the steering wheel instead.

  “Oh boy.”

  Then Constant is holding the thing I’ve turned over in my memory since that day on the ferry. She holds it so that I can see it plainly: it’s a seashell. A shining seashell. She raises it, bathing my face with silver radiance. And I am suddenly stonecold sober.

  “I know this. This is… this is…”

  “Yes. It is.”

  I was twenty-two years old and completely unprepared for what came next. It was the first day of the rest of my mortal life. Like most people, I thought I was special enough to handle whatever destiny the Golden Lady represented.

  I was wrong.

  CHAPTER I

  DUEL

  I should be happy. After two thousand years spent doing the job I was created to do, I deserve a little happiness. If only there was someone I could complain to; a clergyman or union representative. But there isn’t. And even though that’s mostly my fault, it still sucks. See, thirty seconds ago the saleswoman lost twenty pounds and started speaking French. That means a lot of people are about to die: there’s a god waiting outside this jewelry store and he wants to kill me.

  “Your fiancée will be so happy, Monsieur Cooper,” the saleswoman says. Then her polite professional demeanor evaporates, replaced by the confusion I’ve come to know all too well. “I’m thin! And I’m speaking French!”

  “Yes.”

  “But I don’t speak French.”

  I stuff the little gold-wrapped box into my front pocket. I’ve worked my butt off to be able to buy that ring and, angry god or no angry god, it’s coming with me.

  “In another life, your father accepted that job at Banque Populaire and moved your family to Paris. You grew up there.”

  “But Daddy didn’t take that job. They were getting a divorce and… Wait… how did you know that?”

  Outside, someone calls me by my professional name.

  “Yahweh! Come out and face me!”

  The voice is loud, supernaturally powerful, and familiar.

  “Mon dieu… what’s happening?”

  The saleswoman is getting more French by the nanosecond. I can’t help but pity her – she doesn’t know she’s about to die. If she did she wouldn’t have worn that dress.

  “I’m French! I love zis life!”

  “Don’t get used to it.”

  I step into the sunlight basting Michigan Avenue. Chicago is in the last throes of a vicious midsummer heatwave, but my immortal enemy stands just up ahead, all puffed up like he’s still got the whole world in his hands.

  “Well, well, well. How far the mighty has fallen.”

  Typical. Retired for two thousand years and the thick Greek lummox still hasn’t mastered English.

  “Hey, Yahweh! I’m talkin’ to you!”

  “We’re too old for this, Zeus.”

  I cut a wide swath around the barrel-chested lunatic, focusing on my lime green Sketchers as they slap the pavement.

  Just keep walking, Lando. Hey! Check out that pile of dog turds. Much more interesting than the lummox.

  “You hear what I say, desert dog? I’m going to keeek your ass! You and your faggoty son!”

  Hello. I’m a real boy. This is not my problem.

  I’ve struggled with anger issues. I won’t go into detail – just read the Old Testament and you’ll get the picture. But thoughts of the future help to keep me calm. I’ve sacrificed everything to be here. Literally.

  I can do this.

  I’m five yards from the elevated train entrance; fifteen feet from the comforting embrace of other Chicagoans and their everyday human problems when a thunderclap shatters store windows up and down Michigan Avenue. Then a Voice thunders overhead.

  “Face me, Yahweh! Or I’ll burn this city to the ground!”

  Damn.

  The howling maniac is six and a half feet tall and built like a man-shaped oak tree. He stands there, flexing his Mediterranean muscles in the middle of Michigan Avenue. Clearly the King of the Greek Gods is determined to make ignoring him difficult. The lightning bolt that blasts the concrete beneath my feet makes it impossible: I jump backward, narrowly avoiding electrocution.

  The skies over the Loop go black. The wind off Lake Michigan whips itself into a fury, howling through steel and stone canyons: Zeus must have bullied one of his bastard elemental offspring into harassing me. His third bolt strikes a group of Swedish tourists getting off a double decker tour bus parked in front of the jewelry store. The tour bus explodes. The jewelr
y store goes up in a tremendous ball of smoke and flame. The shockwave knocks me off my feet as a peal of hypersound like the silent bellow of a newborn sun rings out over the city, the air clanging with the shriek of unauthorized Creation: the birthscreams of diverging realities.

  A few yards away, a woman in a tight green dress lying in a shattered Best Buy window display staggers to her feet. Well, part of her staggers to her feet: she’s technically dead but her soul has nowhere to go, not with all this celestial interference clogging the ethers. The woman in the green (and red) dress is staggering around, deceased and utterly confused. Her legs are long and well-formed: a dancer’s legs.

  The leggy dead dancer lurches toward a young mother grasping a stroller. The young mother gapes as the dead hottie bumps into the stroller, spilling the toddler inside it out onto the sidewalk. The toddler bounces off the curb and rolls into oncoming traffic. Fortunately, the spectacle Zeus is creating has stalled traffic on both sides of Michigan Avenue.

  The dead hottie staggers toward the toddler. The young mother bolts past the burning tour bus, jumps off the curb and onto the dead hottie’s back, the two of them twirling around in the Buses Only lane; a shrieking blonde motherbear driven insane by a rapidfire intrusion of the Weird, catfighting with the hot dead dancer while a thousand terrified onlookers look on.

  “Hey, douchebag,” a Voice says from everywhere. “Are you ready to parlay now?”

  Parlay. Damn, how I hate the Greeks.

  Amid a chorus of screams from the panicking mortals around us, Zeus assumes an Aspect and rises toward the sky. Lightning flashes from his eyes, crackles from the ends of his hair. And he’s naked. Looks like someone has been hoarding his divine energies: His godly member extends the length of a steel girder.

  “What do you want, Zeus?”

  “I want your head, God of the Hebrews!”

  Behind him, the John Hancock Center shudders and bursts into flames. More screams. A taxi driver on the far side of the burning bus tries to move his car and smashes into the Prius in front of him. The Prius’ owner jumps out of his car, swearing in Farsi. He reaches in through the cab’s window, pulls the driver out and begins to pummel him. Fights are breaking out all along Michigan Avenue. Several dozen onlookers attack themselves, punching and tearing their own faces. An attractive African-American female police officer near the epicenter of the disturbance, gets out of her stalled patrol car and stares, openmouthed, at Zeus. Then she breaks into applause.