Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits Read online

  Seven. He’s read the myths. Hell, he and Cason have been pickling in the old stories. The Sebittu? Nergal must’ve found a way to give life to his demons. Seven protectors. Fierce warriors, by the stories. Though these looked like the farthest thing from fierce fucking warriors, but what does it matter?

  What mattered was, no Cason.

  And, worse: Frank saw the little burned papery bits. Each with a charred adab to Nergal. It was wrong. The bomb didn’t work.

  Uh-oh.

  So now here stands Frank, back outside under the downpour, trying to figure out where the hell to go next.

  That’s when the shit hits the fan.

  First, Frank hears Cason. A cry carries across the factory grounds—a cry of pain, without a doubt, coming from the old offices dead ahead. From up above, too—top floor. Where the owners and managers used to sit, watching their little workers work.

  But only moments later—

  A shape above in the sky. A dark shape, with long wings.

  Like a bat. But human-shaped and, worse, human-sized.

  Then, the snapping and popping of metal—sparks from the far end of the complex, as something shears through the chain-link.

  Headlights cut through the night.

  One car. Two. Then a third.

  Frank feels his skin crawl.

  They’re here.

  It’s too early. They shouldn’t be clued in this soon. Not yet. Not now.

  Frank looks toward the office building, then toward the approaching cars, rain disappearing in the headlights.

  He makes his choice. Frank darts back to the open manhole cover just as light sweeps over the space where he just stood. He knows he should go save Cason—Cason’s all part of the big plan, part of what the boss has in store—but whoever’s coming, Frank’s not ready to deal with them.

  Sorry, Cason. Can’t help you with this one. Not now. Not yet.

  And Frank hurries through the tunnels, away, away, the scurrying rat.

  CASON HURTLES ACROSS the room. Thrown like an errant dish.

  He crashes against the throne. It creaks as he slams against it, as he rolls to the floor. By now the pain is almost meaningless—so much noise the new pain is lost among the old and vice versa, and all Cason has is a pile of dead limbs to call his own.

  Again Nergal kneels. Presses Cason’s face hard against the white wood. Cason’s eye focuses in and out—sees how intricately carved it is, a filigree of bones within bones, of skeletons and skulls carved within the osseous wood, of cities and palms and footprints in sand and for a moment Cason wants to be lost there, wants to crawl within the open spaces and be one with the precious wood, just as Nergal desires—

  But then Nergal presses his face harder—Cason’s own vision distorts, washed out by the pressure and the pain.

  “Look at it,” the Storm Lord seethes. “Behold my handiwork. Admire its beauty. Absorb the art. I worked on this chair for an epoch. I separated myself from the flow of time and the river of life so that I could complete this for my bride. Who are you to tell me that it is as dung? You know nothing, half-breed.”

  “I know—” Nergal mashes Cason’s face harder. “I know you put yourself into this chair.”

  “It is the only way for one to create.”

  “I agree,” Cason says.

  And then he grabs one of the delicate throne legs—just enough of a leg to get his hand around—and yanks.

  It shouldn’t work.

  He knows this.

  And yet, something courses through him. Something wild and mad, something dark and light, something that accelerates and outruns the pain and fills him with a giddy inhuman vigor (you know nothing, half-breed), and the strength that blooms within him lets him snap the chair leg off its base—

  The crack of the wood is the same crack his own leg bones made.

  He’d take a moment to appreciate that, but there’s just no time.

  Nergal is taken aback. The Lord of Cutha jerks his head back. Gasps.

  “My lady’s throne,” is all he says.

  Then Cason jams the chair leg into the god’s flinty eye.

  Nergal stands, staggers backward. Fingers feeling along the dagger-like splinter of white wood sticking out of his face. He whimpers, then growls. Then fixes his one good eye on Cason. And that’s when Cason’s resolve breaks apart like a sand castle under an ocean wave—

  This was supposed to work.

  This was Nergal’s vulnerability. Arrowheads for Eros. Ohta dollies for the Sasquatch Man. And this chair—not the adabs, not the prayers—was what would lay the Storm God to rest. It had to be. It had to be.

  And yet, there stands Nergal.

  Now marching toward Cason.

  Now reaching down with a trembling hand and lifting Cason high.

  Now staring an infinite beam of hate straight through to Cason’s soul.

  The man’s mouth opens. Blue threads of electricity snap between his teeth. The flies take flight, and now Cason sees that each fly has a man’s face, caught in a perpetual scream. His hiss brings waves of sickness that pour over Cason like a bucket of brackish water: the smell of cancer, of roadkill, of every hospital and funeral home and mass grave and—

  Nergal’s eye pops like a grape under a boot.

  His head follows suit, deflates like a punctured basketball.

  And suddenly Cason drops to the floor as Nergal’s body folds into itself and collapses like a skinsuit without a hanger—all his bones turned to air.

  The last flies circle, then drop to the floor.

  Cason laughs.

  It worked.

  It worked.

  The God of Storms, and Death, and whatever else fell under the madman’s aegis, was now gone from this world, this world of men, and there’s a moment as Cason lays there like a broken doll that he feels a sense of elation, a kind of deep self-satisfaction he hasn’t felt in a very long time. This god was complicit in the conspiracy against him and his family, a conspiracy he has yet to understand.

  His elation is woefully short-lived.

  Something punches through the wooden floor beneath him. Like zombie arms rising from the grave, hands encircle Cason’s midsection and pull him down through the shattering wood and throw him to another floor below.

  He crashes into the darkness. Smelling dust. Rust. Wood. And...

  The sea.

  Brine and salt and sand.

  Aphrodite stands over him. Even in the darkness, her beauty radiates off her in waves Cason can almost see—like ripples in water, shimmering and silver.

  “You had a chance to save yourself,” the goddess says.

  Cason tries to answer, but finds his words are only a whimper.

  She shrugs at his attempt. “Pity you did not take me up on my offer.”

  “To the Farm, then?” comes another voice behind him. A woman’s voice.

  “Yes, Driver. To the Farm.”

  Hands grab Cason. Leathery wings envelop his face, cover his mouth—can’t breathe, can’t breathe—and claws dig into the meat of his back. Then, suddenly, rain and wind and the sense of falling, and Cason’s whimper turns into yet another scream.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Horse Thief

  THE WOMAN IS off doing her... well, he doesn’t know? She hasn’t smoked another cigarette, so it’s probably not that. It’s likely some woman thing. She’s got to, and this is all just a guess, fix her makeup, pee for the hundredth time, adjust her bra, have her period, milk her bosoms, or maybe just sit on the toilet and cry.

  Of course, Coyote—‘Kai,’ he told her his name was—isn’t very good with women.

  He’s made love to thousands of women. Most of them human. All of them acquiesced to his charms, his wiles—it’s not magic. He has magic, yes, but that’s not what brings them to his bed (or to a patch of field, or to a rock in the middle of the woods, or to an ice floe, or to a... well, where hasn’t he done it? A gazebo. He’s never made love in a gazebo. He makes a mental note: have
wild rumpus in gazebo). The women come to him because they want to ride the Ki-yote Express. They want to feel his howls reverberate down through their lady parts and up through their teeth. They want to trap him, make him theirs. Ha, ha, ha, ladies. Good try. Good try.

  Everybody wants to trap the Coyote. But nobody can.

  Ah-ha-ha. So many women.

  And he still understands them not one fiddly whit.

  He wants to make love to this one, too. She’s a bit older, but certainly pretty. Her skin is like milk. Her hair is like fire. Primal and comforting, in equal measure.

  In his pocket, his member twitches.

  But that’s not why he’s here.

  At present, Coyote stands in the parking lot of a Conoco gas station in Missouri, the morning sun coming up over a flat blasted brown nowhere nothing patch of dirt that surrounds him and stretches off in all directions. The highway a pale ribbon cutting through it all. Tractor trailer grumbling by.

  He waits for the woman.

  Coyote leans back against the Mustang and pulls out his phone. He sends a text to someone in his address book listed only as ‘E.E.’

  The text: The golden thread is unbroken.

  The thread. Sometimes: the chain, the rope, the ladder. He’s even heard it spoken of as a frequency, as a signal, but to him it’s always been the golden thread. A thread is delicate. Easy to tear a thread in twain, and yet, the golden thread always remains, strung between all the gods of his ilk. They never know what will come down the thread or what the instructions will be when it comes to them. They never know the outcome or even the why. They only know that they do what they must because the golden chain must remain unbroken and what it demands must be done lest the whole thing come falling down.

  The world. Suspended by a thread.

  A beautiful image.

  It almost gives him a boner, honestly.

  Then again, a spring breeze gives him a boner. See also: a car honking, the smell of coffee, the stink of beaver pelts (not a metaphor, except when it is), a sneeze, a cough, a hiccup, a cricket chirping, peyote buttons, scorpion venom, the sound of flip-flops on a heavy woman walking along the boardwalk next to the beach...

  It all gives him a boner. He has a boner for this entire world and its contents.

  Other deities seem to hate this place. Those mopes. They dismiss it. They treat it like it’s a... a prison. Exiled here, thrown down (or in some cases, dragged up) from their places of import. Each seeing themselves as a pretty necklace around a beautiful woman’s neck that was suddenly yanked from her neck and thrown into the gutter forever.

  But Coyote likes the gutter. He likes this gutter, this world, most of all.

  It has hamburgers! And pornography. And remote control cars and Swisher Sweets cigarillos and cat videos and fast cars and loud noises and gazebos and lust and love and charity and books and soft human women with imperfect, asymmetrical breasts.

  Oh! And phones with the ability to text message.

  This, Coyote decides, is what Prometheus stole from the gods.

  A text comes in, bing-bing:

  DO NOT LOSE THE THREAD

  Ahh, Old Man Shu. For such a tiny fellow, he’s always so loud in his text messages. Time and again Coyote has told him: “You don’t have to type in all caps,” but Shu just shrugs and smiles that pinched little smile like he knows something nobody else knows (which is kind of their gig, isn’t it?). Coyote figures he should just be happy, since some of the others don’t tweet at all. Like that asshole Monkey King. What a sonofabitch.

  As Alison comes back out of the gas station, Coyote texts back:

  Not going to lose the thread shut up.

  Reply:

  GOOD

  Are you sure I can’t bed this one?

  Reply:

  YES

  Well, fuck-buckets.

  Alison eyes him warily. She has the keys; he’s been letting her drive.

  “I didn’t know if you’d be here,” she says.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You seem like that type. I don’t know.”

  He just laughs and hops in the car.

  WEST. LIKE THE strange man—‘Kai’—said.

  The sun comes up. Orange like an egg-yolk, then a bleached yellow like the pith of a lemon beneath the zested rind.

  They don’t talk much. The man whistles. Fiddles with the radio now and again—often singing along, smoking out the window and laughing at jokes apparently only he can hear. For now the radio is just static warbling between fundamentalist Christian stations and country music. He spins the dial, catches some hellfire-and-brimstone snippet—

  “Oh, how miserable your pleasures will be, when you must crawl through hellfire for an age...”

  Kai snorts. Shakes his head.

  “Not a church-goer?” Alison says.

  Another snort. He sweeps his arms. “This is my church.”

  “The inside of a Mustang?”

  He laughs. “The whole world.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “You people think you know God. Or the Devil. That amuses me.”

  “You people?”

  “Americans. White people. Same thing.”

  “You’re not American?”

  “I’m a bit older than that.”

  “You’re Native American, then.”

  To this, he says nothing. Offers her only a wink.

  “Don’t judge us too harshly,” she says. “We try to do okay. And we’re not all like that. Just the loudest among us.”

  “Then you shouldn’t let the loudest speak. You should get louder!” He shrugs. “Or shut them up with duct tape.”

  “Maybe. But we are who we are.”

  He smiles. “Good thing, too.”

  It’s then she asks, because she must.

  “Are you human?”

  Another wink.

  “Okay, seriously,” she says, “no coy winking, I want to know. Are you human? Is this real? Is this really happening? Who are you?”

  “I told you. I am Kai. Beyond that: what does it matter? This word, ‘human.’ It’s not a meaningful word. I’ve known some humans who were less than human. Sub-human. I’ve known humans that were better than the angels, stronger and smarter than all the gods in all the heavens. I’ve known some animals that were the nicest people I’ve ever met, and I’ve known some gods that were more human than human. Human is just a sack of skin. It’s just the flavor of your meat, like pork or beef. Don’t worry about that word. Human.”

  Her hands tighten around the steering wheel. “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “I often don’t.”

  “Oh.”

  He clears his throat, flicks his cigarillo out the window. “Hey. Don’t suppose you want to have a quickie?”

  She’s about to be appalled, to refuse and say no, double no, hell no—

  But before she can:

  Woop-woop.

  Strobing cop lights. Red, blue, back and forth. The wail of sirens.

  “Oh, what the hell? I was doing the speed limit. I’m in the right lane.” She flicks on her turn signal. Kai gives her a quizzical look.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Pulling over.”

  He flips the turn signal back off. “Just gun it.”

  “What?”

  “This car has pep. It’s like if a horse had sex with a rocketship and this is its baby!”

  “I’m not outracing the police.”

  He sighs. “We’ll be fine. Vertical pedal on the right. Come on. Chop chop, vroom vroom.”

  “Wait. Why are they pulling me over? Do you have outstanding tickets or something?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  “What are they going to see when they pull your license plate?”

  “License plate? That’s not my license plate.” He shrugs. “This isn’t even my car.”

  “What?”

  “Oh. Yeah. We stole it. Did I not explain that?”

  �
��We?”

  “You’re driving. Actually, I’m not even in the books. So, legally speaking, it’s pretty much you, not we.”

  “Oh.” She feels the blood drain from her face. “Oh, no. I’m not a car thief. I don’t... I don’t do this.” It’s like her whole life is a train on a rickety trestle that’s creaking and swaying, the tracks starting to fall apart beneath her.

  She again puts on her signal and this time lets the car drift over to the shoulder. As the car slows, her heart races.

  Kai just shakes his head, clucks his tongue.

  The cop pulls in behind her. The sirens no longer wail, but the strobe continues. Red, blue, red, blue, sweeping over the car.

  Cars pass on the highway. Alison can feel the eyes of rubbernecker drivers watching her, in the same way she’s watched dozens of others get pulled over.

  Shame sends blooms to her cheeks.

  “Okay,” Kai says. “I didn’t think it would come to this but... you never know, so.” He goes rustling in his pocket, pulls out something that looks like a foot-long desiccated strip of beef jerky. Like something a dog would chew on. He hands it to her.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s my penis.”

  She doesn’t drop it so much as fling it at him.

  He bats it back at her like it’s an errant volleyball.

  “You’re going to need that,” he says, frowning. “Take it. It has powers.”

  “This is all some kind of strange joke.” She feels queasy. “I’m not taking it.”

  In the rearview, she sees the cop step out of the car.

  She turns back to Kai, starts to say, “You have to explain to him—”

  But nobody is there.

  Alison is alone in the car.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  The cop. Military-looking type. Aviator sunglasses. Stubble.

  She rolls down the window.

  She sees the crooked strip of jerky sitting on the passenger seat. The cop is speaking to her, but she can barely hear him. All she hears is the whoosh of traffic, the rush of blood in her ears, the sound of her own breath—tight, shallow, fast, panicked.