God Laughs When You Die Page 10

  “Who is that? Who’s there?”

  Exposed, the driver pauses. He shakes his head; clears his throat.

  “Come here,” he says.

  But his voice is less certain.

  The Empress shakes her head, backs out of the glare. Bleak senses the tension shift between them; two souls twisting in an undertow. His connection to the Mother has made him sensitive to the presence of the unseen.

  “Come…come back,” the driver says.

  He steps toward the Empress and stumbles; his infirmity now more pronounced. The Empress’s eyes widen.

  “Nick? Nick Santos?”

  “I SAID COME HERE!”

  The driver lunges for the tall woman. And in that moment, she bolts.

  Her name is Helen Mathison and she has existed in a waking nightmare for the last three hours. Awake, she remembers the truth of this man, and the red rage in him. She has bathed in the stinking abattoir behind his eyes. Even now, his power is a stabbing shriek in her mind.

  Fear pushes her screaming out into the night.

  But the driver’s fingers clutch at flying strands of her hair. He snags a handful of her, pulls her down. With one blow he stretches her out on the concrete. Her head strikes the ground and she lies still.

  The driver bends to tear at her as he has done in his dreams for the last six weeks. Tonight he will ease the fury that eats at him when they pass each other every day, in the halls of her beautiful museum. He will show the Great Lady that he is more than just a mop with a Mexican attached to it.

  But a piece of the starless sky rears up behind him. The shadow - less an absence of light than its renunciation - whirls with power, a storm of lethal darkness. The driver screams. And the shadow falls. Unprepared, he staggers; smothered, pummeled by hammer blows that would kill an ordinary man.

  The driver is no ordinary man.

  He cannot step proudly into the spotlight that follows the other magin. He knows what the spotlight will reveal should it train its glow on him, and so he has kept his awesome secret all to himself.

  But he has put the secret to good use. He has murdered thirty-two women across five states. He has left a swath of death in his wake like few others in the secret history of this bright new underworld.

  But Rufus Bleak has left a wider swath.

  The driver raises his fists, and the fire that consumed his sanity burns away the living shadows that surround Bleak. His talent blunts the force of Bleak’s attack. Undaunted, Bleak steps back and leaps high over the driver’s head, aiming a kick intended to break the man’s neck.

  The driver is agile despite his infirmity. He pivots and swings a booted foot into the center of Bleak’s back; slams him into the basin wall. Bleak flows out of the way as the driver scores the side of the basin with the hunting knife. The driver turns, too fast, and assumes a defensive stance.

  Bleak attacks; his fist passes through the space the driver’s head occupied a moment earlier. The driver counters left, then loops his right fist toward Bleak’s temple. The Stalker ghosts backward, evading the blow. The silver snarl of light from the driver’s left fist slashes through the bridge of his nose and tears the flesh from his right cheek. Pain, immediate and surprising, crackles across the nerve endings in Bleak’s face. He pauses, confused, and the driver slashes a burning trench across his chest.

  Focus, man.

  Bleak pushes the pain away. There is no pain when he serves Her truly.

  But the driver’s talent involves perception. With each attack, he drives his will against Bleak’s mind. Grinning, the driver cuts the fingers from Bleak’s left hand. His rage is a silent detonation. Blades of malice and memory flay Bleak’s subtle flesh.

  Nigger lovers…

  Bleak staggers. The driver’s disease delves deeper, searching until it finds the thing it seeks - the best place from which to strike - the long lost life of Rufus Bleak.

  “…unionist sons o’ bitches they ain’t welcome in Carlton County…”

  A cut to the jaw.

  “Get her down in the dirt so the preacher can see…”

  A backhanded slash mangles Bleak’s throat.

  “Look at her squirm, boys! I believe she likes it after all!”

  A slicing blow to the chin snaps his neck.

  “Sister, where’s Marie? Where’s my wife?”

  “Hush, Rufus. She’s in God’s hands now.”

  Then all worlds end in thunder and blood.

  Something moving; shining in the void. A force as cold as the heart of Death listens. It offers damnation, salvation, for a dead man’s prayer.

  “She screamed while they - took turns - with her. They ground her face into the dirt. They killed my whole congregation. Father God, I ask for justice.”

  “No,” the cold thing breathes. “Not the father. The Mother of Night. Serve me and you will live, for as long as the darkness lasts.”

  “You would redeem my life?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you ask in return?”

  “Only that you prepare the Way.”

  ***

  The driver rises, eyes shining and flat as a Mississippi cottonmouth’s. Confident, renewed by bloodshed, his will is strong. The Empress stands, walks to him and, dreaming, bares her throat to his blade.

  And Rufus Bleak chooses once more. Power pushes him back up into the living world. He rises - his body a ruined hulk. The driver turns, realizing his danger too late.

  Bleak screams.

  His shout rips away the veil between past and present, life and death; his pain a serenade of atrocity that pierces flesh and penetrates bone.

  The driver straightens, pinioned by power his eyes widening. His mind ignites and burns like dry kindling.

  “My…God,” he whispers.

  The effort costs him in flesh as he bites through his tongue. Blood fills his mouth; paints his chin.

  “Pleeease,” he whispers. “It hurts.”

  Bleak howls again.

  The driver’s brain, once a safe harbor for the disease, spills its secrets across the dry riverbed. The corpse remains standing, as if supported by a remnant of the driver’s former power even in death. Headless, it falls.

  Bleak feels nothing. The driver’s ultimate fate is beyond his wisdom or care. He is a dead thing, inured to the weariness of a body, exhausted nonetheless.

  “Happy New Year, Rufe.”

  This time, he doesn’t bother to chase away the voices. He is tired, and memories are all he has left.

  A gentle touch falls on Bleak’s shoulder.

  “Are you alright?”

  The Empress.

  Bleak hears the fear in her. They have shared a kind of Communion tonight. She has borne witness and has been changed, as he was changed.

  ‘In the blinking of an eye,’ he thinks.

  Bleak looks to the light in the eastern sky; he crouches. Better to conceal himself from her; the extent of his injuries.

  “I am,” he says, simply. “Your name?”

  “Helen,” the Empress replies. “Helen Mathison. You’re hurt. Let me help you.”

  For the first time in a century, Rufus Bleak smiles. It is a bitter smile, filled with a longing that can never be slaked. He smiles…and he strikes.

  The Empress dies unaware of Bleak’s betrayal. He catches her as she falls; gathers her in his arms and for a moment -

  Marie

  - his wife peers out at him from the eyes of

  Helen Mathison.

  This woman, so different…

  Yet somehow, they are the same.

  She is tonight’s Prize, a pawn in a game too

  vast for Rufus Bleak to understand.

  Her will be done, he thinks. But he is uncertain now. He is empty when he slumps down next to her body. Miles distant, his host, a dying man named Kenny Cortez, gasps. Then the chord that binds them frays and snaps.

  When the sun rises, there will be a new host, another Prize. Until then, Bleak will return to the void to a
wait Her pleasure. The Mother is nothing if not pragmatic.

  Dying again, the Stalker of Men thinks of the night he exacted his revenge on the men who murdered his belief, their screams when they finally knew him for what he was. They called out to their god and were forsaken, as he was forsaken.

  This time, the smell of pine brings him back. As sunlight pries his eyelids apart, Bleak remembers the inconstancy of gods: Powers at play in a shifting sea of mortal yearning.

  Then he makes his choice.

  One hundred years, he thinks. Long enough.

  His refusal will mean the real death. The Mother demands no less. But he has sacrificed too many souls to sate her dark appetites. Tonight, he will offer his own as a measure of recompense for the lives he has destroyed in her name.

  The thought of his ending warms him; he has not been warm in nearly a century. He will serve no messiahs.

  Salvation and damnation, he thinks. Same coin, different sides.

  But as the sun crawls across the sky, Bleak prays for the strength to reject the gods he cannot change.

  THE LAST AMERICAN PRESIDENT

  Dear Dairy,

  Today in the Oval Office, the Secretary of Defense tried to swallow his own intestines. It was hard work. They were slippery. The slimy suckers just kept gushing out of Secretary Halvorsen’s mouth and wrapping themselves around my National Security Advisor’s throat like wet red boa constrictors.

  Hally kept making these awful retching sounds. He begged and bounced and hollered like a man cho-hoodlin’ down the crapper while trying not to shit himself. No doubt about it, Diarie: whatever the Vox Mortis had slipped into him wanted out in the worst kind of way.

  Halvorsen shot up out of his chair (to gain more leverage on those guts I imagine) and accidentally elbowed the British Prime Minister in the nose. Prime Minister Bell back flipped out of his chair and slid under the War Table. It was a good thing too, because it was right about then that the Pope turned into a saber toothed tiger and bit Joan Collins’s left arm off.

  While the Papal saber tooth was looking for a place to eat Vice President Collins, Gene Palmer, my National Security Advisor turned blue and expired; throttled by the Secretary of Defense’s chittlin’s.

  Outside, Hell was bending civilization over a log and making it squeal like a Christmas pig.

  Something big, like Godzilla big, strode past the barricaded windows that overlooked Constitution Avenue. I think it was the Leader of the Vox, the one whose name (if spoken aloud) has the power to transmute your bones into ground glass.

  Over across the mall, a female Vox was performing an act of double penetration on the Washington Monument. Christian decency forbids my describing it, Diarie. Let’s just say that Congress outlawed such acts back in ‘02, except for those constrained by the bonds of holy heterosexual wedlock as defined by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Himself. Hell, we’re gonna need the entire National Guard just to douche that sucker off.

  As Hally’s other organs began to chew their way out through his asshole, the Dalai Lama Number Who Gives A Rat’s Ass got up and tried to help. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and grasped the spitting entrails that were boiling out of Halvorsen’s mouth. But before the D.L. could offer anything more than an earnest tug, Vice President Collins reared up from behind the Dirty Harry pinball machine. The Papal saber tooth hadn’t left much of her: only an arm, her torso, most of her legs and half of her face remained, but the people of the U.S.A hadn’t chosen J.C. as their V.P. for n-o-t-h...nu-t-h...

  Aw Hell, Dairy, I don’t have to spell it out for you.

  With the same pluck she’d displayed during her wonderful acting career, the Vice President dragged herself across the room and tore the Dalai Lama’s face off. The fact that J.C. was over eighty years old didn’t slow her down. The fact that she was dead didn’t stop her from ripping that peace-loving pacifist a new asshole. Literally.

  Oh well, good riddance to bad rubbish I say. The D.L. was the biggest pain in the ass to my administration; always going on about “peace” and “compassion” and “democracy” and blah blah blah blah blah.

  Speaking of pains in the ass, I can’t believe what the female Vox did with the Monument after she’d pleasured herself. Christian decency forbids me to describe it, Dairy. Let’s just say that when we made partial birth abortions in the United States punishable by death, we should have included “Extra-dimensional Iterations of the United States” as well. As of this writing, there’s a smoking fifty foot long Vox fetus skewered atop the monument. It’s just hanging there squirming like a titanic black maggot.

  Occasionally, the fetus extrudes its tentacles down to the ground to snatch up a mess of unwary soldiers and cram them into one of the terrible gaping maws that pucker what I’m taking to be its ass end. (I call it the ass-end because of the river of crap that comes pouring out of it every thirty seconds, enough to cover the monument with the foulest smelling matter I’ve seen since we started drilling the Labrea Tar Pits.)

  Dr. Maisiella Fletchet, my Secretary of State, pulled her head out from under my desk and whipped a nine millimeter .357 Desert Eagle automatic out of the thigh holster she wore attached to her black leather corset.

  As the dead Vice President sprang toward me, the Secretary of State opened up on her with that big black beautiful piece of hardware (the gun, not Maisy). What was left of the V.P. splattered like the Blue Ribbon Squealer at the NASCAR ANNUAL HOG STOMP (At which, incidentally, I had the great honor of throwing out last year’s Black Piglet.)

  Funny, I never thought about it, Diarie, but it seems like that was just about when the Troubles began.

  That’s when the Vox Mortis invaded Earth.

  The Leader of the Vox, the one with the lethal name, was the first to step out of the great rip in space/time that appeared over Washington. He was the one who first informed the media about his damned race of devils, demons, witches and whores.

  They’d crossed over from another reality, he claimed, “from an Earth eons in advance of this one. One which cast the original cosmic shadow that spawned this pallid reflection.”

  Yeah. Sure.

  They call themselves the Vox Mortis, the Voice of Death; a race of pirates, murderers, and parasites who travel time and space feasting on the physical agonies and psychic misery of so-called “lesser” Earths, depleting their resources, enslaving billions of intelligent beings to help expand their “Vast Empire.”

  A vast empire? Interdimensional travel by alien giants who stalk the spaceways torturing innocent people, impregnating unwilling women, eating children and butt fucking Mother Nature ‘til she rolls over and craps pink lemonade?

  What kind of idiot do the Vox take me for?

  I’ll tell you what they really are, Diury.

  Demons. Hellspawn. Evil.

  I’m talking Big Technicolor Evil with digital sound, Evil on the half-shell; Evil that could only be foisted on the world by that red-faced trickster who fell from our Creator’s Loving Grace a couple thousand years ago solely to cause wholesale planetary chaos.

  That’s right, Dairy: I’m talking about Ted Kennedy.

  Just kiddin.’ I had him executed years ago.

  It’s the End Times alright. I just happen to be the one whom the Lord hath chosen to witness His Final Judgment.

  “Die, you incense sniffing motherfucker!” Maisy screamed. Then she blew the saber-toothed Pope’s brains out. Maisy was a lapsed Catholic herself. Maybe that’s why she was smiling when she pulled the trigger.

  Maisy did a victory dance atop the Popecat’s corpse, the barricades dropped off the doors. Then the doors swung open and a big red Indian walked into the room.

  The Indian was wearing full ceremonial headdress, buckskins and moccasins, and leading a dinosaur on a leash.

  The dinosaur was muzzled. The “Native American” (Hell, I still think of them as redskins even after what happened when the Vox stole Boston and replaced it with a city-sized open air cannibal market) was not.<
br />
  The Indian looked a lot healthier than most folks, seeing as how we’d outlawed exercise back in ‘01. I mean by 1989 the air and water were so bad that anyone without nose, lung and rectal filters stood about as much chance of escaping a life threatening disease as a crack whore working an AIDS camp at Chernobyl.

  Hell, I wondered. How’d we miss him?

  The dinosaur wasn’t big. It stood only about eight foot high. It was smooth, not scaly like the carnosaurs the Vox sicced on Texas when they first invaded. It sported a long, waving tail and a friendly, open expression. If it wasn’t for all the blood and bits of rotted flesh encrusted on its jaws I might have sworn it was smiling at me.

  Oh, and it was purple.

  “Freeze, scumbag,” Maisy snarled, her Desert Eagle leveled and ready. The big Indian looked at the two of us for a moment. Then he spoke.

  “I’m called Tom Hawk,” he said. “I’m here to turn out the lights.”

  Maisy squinted and cocked her head like she hadn’t heard him right.

  “What did you just say?” she said.

  The purple dinosaur growled, a deep rumble that rolled up from its belly. Tom Hawk soothed it with some soft words and a snatch of song. For a moment, I thought I smelled wildflowers on the burning wind, a shimmer of Spring that danced across the War Table and prickled my nostrils.

  I sneezed. My son-of-a-bitchin’ allergies were playing up on me again.

  The smell only lasted for a moment. Soon enough the tang of incipient sunshine was replaced by the odor of frying flesh wafting in off the Potomac.

  “I said I’m here to turn out the lights, sweetheart,” Hawk said. “You assholes are done.”

  Maisy lifted one bushy eyebrow and hissed, “Terrorist.”

  “Uh oh,” I said.

  Whatever was about to go down, it was gonna go down ugly. Maisy had a hard-on for towel-head reprobates, even though we’d never actually met one, and with his crazy, ethnic get-up and earthen pot complexion, Hawk looked enough like a Muslim fundamentalist to merit a high velocity Teflon jacketed Come-to-Jesus.

  Maisy lifted the Desert Eagle and pulled the trigger a nanosecond before Prime Minister Bell popped up from behind the War Table. Bell never saw it coming. A fist- sized chunk of the PM’s skull flew across the room and knocked my Ronald Reagan commemorative bust off its solid gold pedestal.