The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 11
“What’s option B?”
“There’s no option B. If you don’t cooperate, I’m going to break both your arms and both your legs.” Her smile is frayed but sincere, completely divorced from the threat.
“Dictatorial rule. I can get behind that.” I suppose it is grim testimony to the toxic patterns of my life that I find being strong-armed peculiarly reassuring. I blame the ghouls. You always know where you stand with someone who will threaten dismemberment and mean it. There’s none of the idioms, the what-ifs, the did-they-mean-what-I-think-what-they-meants. And in this overly complicated world, I like it. “Okay. So, what do you want me to do?”
Another exchange of portentous looks, then Naree declares, quite gaily, “It’s a wedding. Let’s go get some BBQ.”
ELEVEN
I FUCKING LOVE Korean barbeque. I love gogi gui so much that it actually succeeds in anaesthetising my terror, leaving me drunk, ravenous, and happy to die so long as someone keeps spooning me rich mouthfuls of jumulleok right to the end. The restaurant that Naree picks out is, to no one’s surprise, the real deal: a hole-in-the-wall extravaganza packed to the lungs with people. The perfume of sizzling meat shimmers through the air. I can smell galbi of every kind. Were I not almost entirely certain that this is a bad idea and we are all going to suffer grievous bodily harm, I’d think I was in heaven.
“Who wants soju?” asks Naree.
A round of hands shoot up.
“Anyone here lactose-intolerant?” she continues.
Cason tilts his head, confused. “Are you ordering eggnog?”
“Not a terrible idea, but I don’t think we’re close enough to Christmas. No, the first round is going to be makgeolli.”
“Geseunheit,” Fitz says.
“Do not make racist jokes at my wedding—”
“That wasn’t where I was going with that!” He throws his arms up, almost broadsiding an Asian woman of indeterminable age. I’d hazard her to be in her late thirties, early forties, but I’d rather have my intestines strung across the interstate than ask. She collects herself and smiles thinly at Fitz, an expression that might be parsed as friendly, but only if you’re blind. Under her withering stare, Fitz shrinks, mouthing sorries until she steps around him to pad over to Naree.
Her eyes make an orbit of our table, expression shifting between subtle disapproval and even subtler disappointment. Naree alone, it seems, merits warmth. The two have a short exchange in Korean before she prowls away.
“Alright. Yoghurty rice wine coming our way.” Naree claps her hands together. Tanis has shed her wedding attire for a more practical get-up: leather jacket, undershirt, boots, blue jeans strung with chains. Naree, on the other hand, has not. She practically glows in the restaurant’s oddly harsh lighting, dark hair crowned by a single purple orchid. “Now we get to the fun part. How many of you have gone to a Korean BBQ?”
Cason and I raise our hands.
“How many of you can cook?”
“Define ‘cook,’” says Fitz.
“Bacon, french toast, scrambled eggs—does that count?” says Cason.
“Depends on how well they’re received.”
“My kids have not died of food poisoning yet.”
“Have you ever gotten a compliment for your cooking?” Naree folds her arms under her breasts and leans forward, which has the three of us scrabbling to look in every direction but cleavage. The giggle that follows is not malevolent, per se, but it has certainly considered malevolence.
“I have been told it’s wonderfully serviceable by the wife,” Cason replied.
I look over at him. “That isn’t a compliment.”
“My wife has exacting standards.”
“Being told that you are competent at mediocrity is not a compliment.”
Naree interrupts. “Bride calls vetoing power. No more jabbering. Rupert, stop poking fun at the soccer dad. Settle this outside.”
“I would, but I don’t want to get eaten by a crocodile.” Pause for effect. “Again.”
“Then behave.” She kills the conversation for a full minute. Naree is at least five years younger than the rest of us, but bears the authority of a dowager. It is ancient and indomitable, the spirit of every auntie to have ever lived distilled into a single incandescent glare. As someone repeatedly broken over the knee of destiny, and an Asian man raised in a traditional household, I’m not unfamiliar with the look. There’s something unsettling about wanting to squeak, ‘Yes, Mom’ to a woman who, from certain angles, reminds me of a child’s doll.
The server comes back, giving Fitz a wide berth and narrowed eyes. Alcohol is distributed across the table to a chorus of gratified noises. Only when the clamour has died down and we’ve each received our share does the server, tray at a rakish angle, start inquiring about meat.
The short answer is: we order everything. Loudly, with lurid enthusiasm, stumbling over each other’s requests, Cason trying and failing to referee, while the rest of us shout and stomp. Our waitress receives the chatter without expression, her face still haunted by the echo of that thin-lipped smile.
From the outside, I imagine we probably look like drunks gone wild. But really, we’re here because gods don’t like witnesses. Demons neither. Nothing that has ever been pinned to a page in mythology cares for unsolicited scrutiny, and it’s all because of faith. Humanity reprogrammed itself to always gravitate towards the factual, the real, the truth, as determined by a billions-strong jury of its peers. In the face of wonder, our species now says, ‘Wait. Where’s the hidden camera?’
And that, in turn—or so Amanda assured us as she warbled Watership Down to Bee—is nothing less than a two-ton sledgehammer blow to a body already asphyxiating on the sermons of a thousand celebrity atheists. Without a proper framework, the divine and the dastardly are nothing but mist to be burnt away by an incredulous sun. So that’s why we’re here: if anything is tailing me, hoping to make loh mien out of my intestines, it would need to be subtle.
Also, we’re starving.
Mostly that, actually.
The woman leaves and then she comes back with galbi in various styles and marinades, king mushrooms cut thin for the grill, bulgogi steaming in a stone bowl, fish in garlic butter, pork belly red with spices, as much bak chan as she can jigsaw onto our table, and vegetables that no one touches. Naree takes charge of the grilling process, delegating the distribution to Cason, and alcohol duty to Tanis, who tops up everyone’s glass with an expression that softens, over the course of two glasses, from brooding to bemusedly at ease.
“You know, we can’t hide here forever,” Fitz observes.
I bring my bowl of rice up to my face, spear an unattended lobe of pickled garlic and shovel a mouthful of carbohydrates and onion-crowned bulgogi into my face before I speak. “You sure? I mean, if we spoke to the management, told them that two out of five can cook, we might be able to come to a bed-and-breakfast-and-total-servitude arrangement.”
Naree drops sweet potato rounds onto the grill. “We have a daughter.”
“It’d be culturally appropriate for her to—no? Okay. Let the record show that I apologized and gave up the tasteless joke right there. Sorry. Seriously. No need to punch me.”
“You don’t always need”—Tanis takes care to stretch out the syllable, smiling coldly—“to punch someone. Sometimes, you just want to.”
“But you know, Fitz’s got a point.” Naree juts her chin at the Chronicler. The crowd is beginning to thin. No one has yet made any hints about us leaving, but it is probably imminent. “We can’t hide here forever. Someone’s got to figure out what the fuck is stalking you.”
“Not me,’ said Tanis. ‘Can’t smellshit here.”
I look between everyone and down at the grill, the cast-iron still smouldering with the odiferous apparitions of cooked meats past. I stare at the shreds of skin cooked onto the metal, the fat charred black, and I sigh, the sound of a man who hadn’t just given up but is resigned to tying his own noose. “What do you guys know about black magic?”
“It’s not a great way to impress an angel on a date?” says Fitz.
Tanis curls her lip; when she speaks, there’s a newly sibilant quality to her voice. “My mother, I suppose, was divinely gifted, but her magic was as black as sludge, if you ask me. What do I know about it? It takes. It corrupts. It always makes you pay more than it is worth. That’s what I know.”
I nod, adrenaline frissoning through my limbs. Through the alcohol haze, it feels like the hand of a grandfather clock metronoming in my skull, cushioned by cotton. I shiver and swallow, willing down the twitching energy. I feel like a meth-head on a three-day bender, my heart clattering against my ribs. I know what I have to do next, and I don’t like it.
“Yeah. No. Yes. Kind of. That isn’t wrong.” I see-saw a hand, while the others watch me like a man tightrope-walking across the lip of a rooftop. “It’s about pain. Yours, someone else’s. Something has to hurt. The exchange is always about pain. But in an impersonal kind of way, you know? No one’s actually out to cause malice for the fun of it. Not usually. It’s really quite civil.”
I take a shuddering breath.
“I really should stop babbling and get this show on the road, you know?”
Before anyone can stop me, I bring my palm down on the grill and pour the sum of my focus into not screaming as my hand sizzles to a sweet-smelling crisp.
THE WORLD SNAPS, pops, erupts like a blown bulb as the pain climbs to a pitch that I’ve still yet to find words for. Slowly, I chant through chattering teeth, my uninjured hand squeezing the wrist of the hand that’s still cooking, cooking down to the bone. This was easier when I had Bob, and Bill, and Andy, and all the dime-store demons who used to rent squares of my skin. But we make do.
Reality clarifies to a neon blue overlaid with moving shapes, so bright that the colour sears my eyes. I think someone is screaming for me to stop, to move my hand, but they might as well be trying to lasso an iceberg for all the good it’s doing. And my skin is beginning to blacken, and I wonder how long before I hit bone. I press down harder and magic swirls deliriously through my vision.
Black for humans, for things safe and simple. Whitish-pink like exposed muscle for everything else, shining from the hemispheres of Fitz’s brain, from Cason’s every pore, from the coil of Tanis’s spine. “Nothing. It’s not here. Piece of shit was probably just a domovoi playin’ with us,” I mumble, wondering already if Diyu would mind too much if I stabbed myself in the lungs for a get-out-of-hideous-disfigurement card.
“Okay, can someone shoot—?”
The words peel away.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “It’s on the ceiling.”
I raise the singed lump that was my hand towards the ceiling, a finger pointed straight up at the horror weaving sinuously along the beams. Amniotic ooze drips in gleaming strings from toothed limbs, as many as necessary to invoke trouser-staining terror. No one else notices, or seems to care. It swivels nearly one-eighty to gaze full upon me, grinning. Somewhere in the genetic makeup, there had been a cat—you can see it in the arrowing of its ears, the contours of its skull—but the resemblance is vestigial.
Its mouth bleeds where it has been coerced too far from its natural shape, become a fretwork of bloodied nodules. Eyes open diagonally along its brows; its face is honeycombed by them, like a lotus root bulbous with unnatural fruit. It gets worse from there. The attenuated spiral of limbs, bunched together like a ribcage cracked slightly open. The twist of organs. The smell.
Guan Yin, the smell.
Holding eye contact, it lowers itself behind the back of Naree’s head. Slowly, so slowly I can count the attoseconds between each passing moment, it unhinges its jaw. Static shimmers across the gunk-sticky mess of its pelt, like a ripple of poisoned silver.
Somewhere nearby, I can hear someone whispering, a sermon like the howl of desert winds, like the thundering of war bands and the percussions of their feet; like the musk of a leopard, its shadow stretched long over the sand; like a woman’s wine-weathered laugh, low and growling.
“Sekhmet,” says Fitz’s voice, clear as a bell.
She smiles at the mention of her name and her eyes bleed black. Sekhmet tilts herself forward, while I sit, suspended in my horror, pain roiling in waves. Naree’s head fits perfectly within that cavernous maw, the dentition layered as a lamprey’s. A scream builds in the house of my lungs, but already it’s too late.
Then Naree jackknifes forward, away and out of reach, snarling, “Fuck. That.”
And just like that, in the immortal words of Ice Cube, it’s on like Donkey Kong.
Cue battle music.
TWELVE
WHAT HAPPENS FIRST is that Naree picks up the earthenware bowl that had until recently sat mountainous with bibimbap and cudgels an Egyptian goddess. Twonk. Sekhmet howls like a cat hosed down with hot grease.
“—the fuck is that thing?” Cason, snarling. Coming out of my fugue is like having my head wrenched out of a bowl of molasses: a sucking sensation like my ears are being flushed, before clarity returns, along with colour, speech, the pain as the air hits a hand scorched clean of living nerves. I suck in a breath, hissing.
Fingers knot in the fabric of my shirt and haul me backwards out of my seat, nearly causing me more injuries as the chair tips over and I tumble out. But Cason, for all his apparent softness, moves me like a sack of potatoes, effortlessly and with only minimal compassion.
Fitz is still standing slack-jawed, intoning prophecies and psalms to the glories of the mutated horror hissing at us all. His eyes suppurate ink. “All hail thee, goddess, Dread Lioness of Khem, She Who Must Be Obeyed, the All-Conquering Queen. We love you with the blood of our bodies and the blood of our enemies; we feast in your name, we conquer for your—”
“Why the fuck haven’t you two started doing anything useful?” Surprising no one, least of all me, Tanis is the only one with a gun out, firing at point-blank range into the warped skull. The bullets do nothing. Sekhmet grins at her, giddy, her attention seduced by a new toy. Tanis dodges the goddess’s first playful swipe with ease but by the third, the fourth attempt, I can see sweat glossing her tanned skin and hear her panting like a sled dog.
“Someone fucking do something useful,” Tanis shouts again.
Naree volunteers. “I could hit her with the bowl again?”
“That was surprisingly effective.” I wobble into something approximating an upright position. The pain is less transcendent now: no longer holy but no less powerful, still a throbbing supernova of Jesus-fuck anguish, like a fever, like necrosis at double speed, rotting away all awareness of the world save for that agony. “You could,” I gasp in the lulls, where the world doesn’t feel quite as likely to melt.
“Sit,” Cason snarls. “Down.”
His hand falls on my shoulder and the weight of it alone is enough to drive me to the floor, a limp clatter of limbs. I can smell myself. I smell delicious.
In the next second, the universe becomes suddenly redolent with something else: Sekhmet’s spoor, rising like petrichor from burning sand. The goddess lunges from the ceiling, bearing down on Cason in a ripple of golden fur and unctuous black. As she passes me, eyes bloom along her ribs in a teardrop shape, and I swear I can hear her laugh.
Cason pushes me into safety, just as Sekhmet and he collide. I try, fail, try again to get up, legs slip-sliding like a newborn fawn’s. It takes a third attempt for me to crowbar my way to my feet again, but by then, it’s pointless.
Because Cason ignites.
And I’ve wondered for a while why he was the Lamp, and Tanis the Knife, and Fitz and I are other nouns of no apparent connection. Cason lights up. Not like the Fourth of July; nothing as trite as that. He goes nuclear. Something like the filament of a bulb combusts beneath his muscle, radiating through his clothes. It is gold at first breath, then gradients to sodium, to the blue-white incandescence of lightning. As the heat crests, boiling from Cason in waves, his features blur, eaten by glory. I see his bones in silhouette under the veneer of his skin, his organs in profile for one heart-stopping moment. Soon he’s nothing but light under Sekhmet’s writhing bulk, divine effulgence laid low by the whim of a father who lived to be worshipped.
“Get the hell off me!” He speaks like a man at the precipice, like a growling dog who’s had enough.
It is then that I notice a singular anomaly, even as Cason struggles, rawly phosphorescent, human only in outline: there is no panic in the room. Not one of the customers has paid any attention to the dinner theatre of our desperate confrontation. Everyone is still sitting there, unperturbed, murmuring in lowered voices over the quality of meat, the excellence of the banchan. The waiters glide around Sekhmet. They ignore the bullet holes scarring the walls.
“I guess Amanda—” I shout to my preoccupied audience, flexing my injured hand. Meat flakes in charred strips. I hiss.
“Now. Is. Not. The. Time,” Cason roars back.
The air winks from the room as Cason’s fist makes contact with Sekhmet’s muzzle, light swirling inwards, as though whatever had transformed Cason into a primal avatar of light and heat is trying to inhale the goddess. But it fizzes out. An angry one-two of claws follows in retribution. Thankfully, it does as little as Cason’s assault. He snarls.
While the two tussle like kittens, Tanis staggers over to me. Fitz is still useless, an antenna tuned to a half-forgotten world, babbling Sekhmet’s glories like a streetside preacher in the throes of an acid high.
“You know, we could probably sling Naree and Fitz over your shoulders and get out of here. Those two will probably be here a while,” I tell Tanis.
Tanis stares at me, appalled. “You want to leave him here?”
“You want Tanis to do all the carrying?” Naree hefts her bowl again.
“No! I mean, yes! I mean—”
“Again, not the time!”
I waggle the damaged appendage, and a chunk of meat sloughs off. “It’s not like I can do anything right now. My hand is a piece of hamburger.”
