Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (57 page)

“It’s gaining altitude.”

“It could actually be a bombing run.”

Semple was frightened, but she was also furious. She hadn’t allowed herself a full-blown tantrum in a very long time, but one was definitely boiling beneath the surface. “This is too fucking much. I swear. It just can’t happen to me. I’ve already been fucked up by one of Anubis’s nuclear weapons. It can’t happen twice. It just isn’t possible.”

Mr. Thomas was hardly the master of diplomacy. “It’s starting to look all too possible.”

Jesus leered at her. “It brought me to you, didn’t it?”

“And that was such a treat, wasn’t it? I got to watch you masturbate and talk to the goat.”

Mr. Thomas turned. He was clearly offended. “And what’s so bloody terrible about talking to the goat, may I ask?”

Jesus picked up the thread. “And what’s so bad about watching me masturbate? I’ve known women who were quite turned on by it.”

Semple looked at the two of them in furious bewilderment. “What’s with you two? How the fuck can you talk like that when one of Anubis’s psychotic flyboys is maybe going to drop an A-bomb on us?”

Jesus shrugged. “I’m Jesus Christ. Nothing can hurt me.”

Mr. Thomas also didn’t seem that concerned. “And I was tired of being a goat.”

“What about Gojiro? Anybody think about what happens to him?”

Jesus acknowledged this with a look of less-than-sincere sadness. “It will be a loss.”

Mr. Thomas nodded in agreement. “It will be a loss.”

Semple clenched her fists in frustrated fury. She would have punched Jesus, but she couldn’t see how it would do her any good. She also couldn’t see the point of screaming, but that didn’t stop her. “But what about me? I don’t want to be blown up by an atom bomb!”

Mr. Thomas was staring at the screen again. “A small object has just detached itself from the Flying Wing.”

“What is this place?”

“It’s one of the points where life and death interface.”

Jim and Hypodermic were standing together on a high ledge above a huge tunnellike cavern that seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction. The air was chill with a smell of mold and cold fungi, and Jim found himself shivering helplessly. His shirt was still soaked from the downpour in the Vietnam hallucination. The cavern was a dim, gloomy, twilit place, lit only by a faint white light in the far distance. It wasn’t the physical surroundings that held Jim’s attention, though. The flat floor of the cavern was consistently inclined so it formed a long continuous slope, like a never-ending ramp, and up this ramp trudged an endlessly moving tide of humanity. Heads shaved, every last one of them dressed identically in a shapeless gray coverall, they moved ever upward in a slow and weary lockstep, no military precision, but in rough ranks and rows, backs bent, shoulders drooped forward so their arms hung with a loose simian swing. They didn’t pause or even glance around at their surroundings, and their faces were made uniform by dour hopelessness. They didn’t speak, even to complain one to another, but the cavern was nonetheless filled with a perpetual, drawn-out, sighing whisper of absolute despair.

Dr. Hypodermic fixed Jim with a ruby laser gaze. “You hear that?

“What is it?”

“The breath of the dead.”

“And who are all these people?”

“A particular subsection of the recently deceased.”

“Subsection?”

The skull face displayed a singularly impatient contempt. “The regiments of the righteous, the drug-free, the ones who gratuitously ignored their imaginations and allowed their lives to be punctuated by TV commercials every eight minutes. The Great Double Helix can be a hard concept to grasp after a life of Diet Sprite,
Touched by an Angel
, the missionary position, and some corporate Insect King lunching on your slave-employee ass. These are the ones who did what they were told and just said no to everything that might have redeemed their miserable lives.”

“And where do they think they’re going?”

“They don’t have a clue. The only idea they have is to walk toward the light. That’s all they’ve ever heard. When dead, walk to the light. These ones will go to any white light that presents itself.”

“Will they ever make it to the pods?”

“Most will. When they finally manage to work it out. The recruiters will get some of them, though.”

“The recruiters?”

Hypodermic allowed himself a dry-bone, demigod laugh. “How do you think they keep Gehenna, Stalingrad, and Necropolis filled? Show them an Electric Xmas Tree Angel and they will follow you to the racks and the heated tongs of perdition.”

“How come I never saw this place?”

“You were one of my
garçons
. I spared you from this stage of things.”

“You mean I was too stoned to notice?”

“I mean you were always doomed to the fast track and the early conclusion.”

Semple watched transfixed as a dark speck dropped from the underside of the Flying Wing. It was so tiny that it could easily be mistaken for a fault in the screen’s image or a floating trick of the eye. That something so insignificant could pose such a terminal threat was all but inconceivable, but Semple was unfortunately all too able to conceive it. As she watched it fall, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed, she felt her body start to stiffen. Her legs felt weak and
when she put a hand on the back of the couch to steady herself, her nails dug into the leather upholstery, red on black, causing deep creases. For a micromoment, she found herself fascinated by her own hand. Very soon it would be gone, never to be seen again. Her mind, even her soul, if she had such a thing, might continue, but this flesh was about to be vaporized, her body, her hair, her internal organs all gone, and the absurd comic book costume along with them.

She looked back at the screen and the bomb had grown larger. The second and third units showed that Gojiro had come to a complete stop and was sitting back on his tail staring up at it. As the bomb came silently down, one of the great reptile’s hands flashed out and, in a more-than-reptilian turn of speed, he caught the bomb. Semple, turning on her platform shoes, cringed from the screen, knowing that this move would have to detonate the nuclear device. After five seconds of nothing, she opened her eyes, scarcely daring to look. When she did look, she incredulously had to raise her superheroine visor, unable to believe what she was seeing. Gojiro sat, tossing the bomb up and down on the palm of his massive hand, not unlike George Raft with his trademark silver dollar. Quickly, she bit back a scream. “Is the damned lizard out of his mind?”

Mr. Thomas took the question literally. “He’s a lizard, so it’s a little hard to tell, isn’t it?”

Semple turned on Jesus. “Can’t you make him throw it away or get rid of it somehow?”

Jesus shrugged. “He’s running the show right now.”

“Does he even know what it is?”

Mr. Thomas nodded. “Oh, I think so.”

And with that, Gojiro tossed the atom bomb somewhat higher, caught it in his mouth, and swallowed it with a gargantuan gulp, much the way a particular kind of extrovert human might toss a peanut into his mouth, or a chocolate-covered Whopper. Semple stood stunned. “I don’t believe it.”

“Oh yes, he swallowed it.”

“What the hell happens now?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

For approximately five seconds, Gojiro sat perfectly still. His eyes closed and the enormous hawser muscles in his neck worked convulsively. Mr. Thomas stroked his beard with a front hoof. “He looks like a pachuco who swallowed a full half pint of tequila on a bet.”

“Gggggggrrrrrrrwwwwwzzzzzz.”

Gojiro let out a long rasping wheeze that reverberated through the dome like a ripple in its very fabric and caused Semple to grab again for the couch. At the end of the breath, a perfect smoke ring of brightly glowing vapor floated from his mouth.

“Krrrkkk.”

Semple’s legs felt weak. “I see it, but I hardly believe it.”

Mr. Thomas seemed equally awed and even Jesus was unable to remain totally blasé. “So it seems the Big Green’s digestive track can neutralize nuclear fission.”

Semple sank down on one of the arms of the couch. “I can’t handle this and stand up at the same time.”

Jesus, on the other hand, done with being impressed by the King of the Monsters’ gastric prowess, wanted to get back to the wanton destruction of the city. “I imagine we can assume that Anubis has nothing else to throw at us.”

He keyed commands into the remote, but Gojiro remained sitting. Jesus frowned. “He refuses to move.”

“He’s just put away one hell of a snack. Perhaps he doesn’t feel too good.”

“We can’t just sit out here in the desert doing fuck-all. There’s Necropolis to tear down.”

Mr. Thomas looked at Jesus as though he secretly considered him an idiot. “After digesting an atomic blast, he may not be too hungry.”

Jesus worked the monitor again. At first it seemed as though Gojiro absolutely wasn’t going to move. Then the monster belched.

“Bbbbbrap.”

Very slowly, he lumbered to his feet. He looked around for a few moments as though confused and possibly disoriented. Sniffing the air, he appeared to make up his mind. Falteringly at first, but quickly gathering speed and momentum, he started in the direction of Necropolis.

Jesus laughed out loud. “I guess the suburbs go first.”

The totality of the darkness was only punctuated by the struck blue sparks that told Jim Dr. Hypodermic was still with him. All was silent except for his own breathing and the occasional reverberating
rattlesnake buzz and hiss that also confirmed Hypodermic was near. Obviously the Doctor’s tour was still in progress, but Jim had no clue where they might be or even why the Mystère had brought him to this place, which seemed to be devoid of absolutely everything except their own presence. Then the light appeared. At first it was nothing more than a point, a lone and errant flame-yellow star, but as it grew in the sky, Jim could see that it was actually one point of light surrounded by a strange flattened halo. It took Jim some time to realize that what he was really seeing was a light moving across water. It was the ripples in the halo that gave it away and his whole perspective suddenly changed. He grasped that he was standing on some dry-land vantage point, overlooking a vast black unseeable sea.