The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 13
Fitz stares at me, expression incredulous. “You’re compromising our quest for fried chicken.”
“Bonchon is worth its weight in missed opportunities.” I pause. “Also, I wouldn’t call it a quest as much as travel pla—”
“You know this isn’t about you, right?” drawls Tanis over her shoulder, already on the way back into the house.
“I know,” I say. “But it makes me feel like I matter to contribute.”
“I don’t know which of you is worse,” says Tanis, “Fitz or you.”
“Hey. Hey.” Our Chronicler wags a finger. “You forgot someone. Cason absolutely belongs in that running.”
“He’s nowhere near as annoying as you two,” says Amanda with the frayed air of a parent at the end of their tether. As she turns on a heel, she pauses, halfway to familial shame. “Sorry.”
“Eh,” comes Fitz’s reply, the rest of us shambling into line. He rifles through his pockets for the small tin case in which he keeps his cigarettes and begins rolling a fresh smoke. “Fair enough, I guess.”
Only Sekhmet stands at a remove, her expression inscrutable.
“You too,” says Naree, voice soft as the down on a nestling. “Even if you did try to eat my skull.”
“That seems unwise.” Her shadow kinks into something less than human, the silhouette of a tail unwound over the pavement, a stray scribble of black yarn. “You should not invite predators to your home.”
“No, I know that. But as far as I’m concerned, you’re as much a victim as the rest of us,” says Naree, her eyes now as soft as the lilt of her words. “Come inside. It’s like y’all said. The end of the world is here. There’s time enough to be cold tomorrow.”
THIRTEEN
SURPRISING NO ONE, Sekhmet chooses to stay, as do several instances of Amanda which, according to the longest-running incarnation, have been souped-up with combat know-how. Despite their armament of martial knowledge, the Amandas all still share the same office-lady wardrobe: pencil skirts, fitted blouses, a palette of plain but pleasing colours.
“And don’t forget to message every night,” says Naree, Bee hoisted up on an arm. The two are in blue and vibrant orange, monogrammed with the initials of Naree’s employers. She captains the distribution of supplies, with Cason doing the heavy lifting. Notes on each container detail day of use and suggested combination.
I have no idea when Naree found time to make a grocery run, or even how. It’s early. Light slants in razored stripes through the blinds of the kitchen, grey and indifferent. If the house had seemed welcoming before, do-it-yourself domestic holiness, it feels cold today as we stand around with a mismatched collection of coffee cups. The Amandas have distributed themselves through the domicile: two lounge at the living room, exchanging notes on firearms; one haunts the vestibule by the front door; one outside mows a lawn already shaved down to the soil.
“I won’t,” says Tanis gently.
“Barring the possibility we might end up being forced into some other world—” I muse into my own mug, nodding at Fitz.
“Don’t get me involved in this,” he says flatly.
“Wait,” Naree says. “What other world?”
“Time to go.” The Amanda emissary, who I’m told is the original but it’s anyone’s guess if that’s true, places her mug down and hooks an arm through Fitz’s elbow. “We’ll call you from the road.”
But Naree won’t be deterred so easily. “Do you even know where the hell you’re supposed to go?”
“The black salt road,” says Tanis, suddenly, wincing as though the words cut. She swallows. “We’re going to find the dog that will lead us to the black road. The one who named the months, the one who lied to death a thousand times.”
Her voice trails to nothing. In a measured tone, Cason volunteers, “Is there any chance it’s on Google Maps?”
“No,” says Amanda, before anyone else can chip in, “but I think I know who we’re looking for. Also, it’s not a dog. It’s a coyote.”
“A coyote?” I ask.
“The Coyote, actually.”
HUNTING DOWN A god is easy when they want to be found.
We drive for days, Tanis’s laboured dreams our compass. At first, they came only when she’d slept for eight hours. The lamia, we discover, doesn’t so much slumber as lies catatonic, an unmoving weight with an arm over her eyes, softly snoring. But soon enough, the visions bleed through the saccades between each blink: a grinning muzzle, a black road, a dog with twist-tie limbs, laughing as he leads us on down a valley of white. Images of the father gods, luminous and inhuman and impossible.
“He’s waiting,” Tanis whispers as we cross into the endlessness of Kansas, voice parched. I pass her a beer from the cooler and she rests it against the slope of her brow.
“Where?” says Amanda.
“North,” comes the hushed response. “Near the water, near the stones.”
Sunset-bloodied Kansas slowly melts into more phantamasgoric terrain. As we cross into Wyoming, the Rocky Mountains rise up like a warning, like gods. I say nothing for the first hour, entranced. The snow-mottled peaks, hachured by shadow and divine design, jagged against a sky burnt red by the setting sun, look surreal.
There are mountains in Malaysia—I grew up with the Tahan Range curving green against a heaven heavy with storms—but they’d been gentle, and they hadn’t made me wonder what it was like to believe enough to pray.
We find truck-stop motels along the way, a few Best Westerns, none of them anything close to full. Some nights, we spend in leaf-encrusted pools, the water glowing green. Talking about nothing, something, anything that isn’t what’s coming. Some nights, we sleep while Amanda stares out of a window, waiting, her face bleached by the halogen moonlight.
“You know,” says Fitz, arm hooked over the car door, “we could have taken the airplane.” He’s had the window rolled down for hours, but the car smells still of tobacco and sweet cloves. The last three gas stations had nothing but Gudang Garam for reasons no one understood. Amanda says it means we’re closer.
“Unreliable.” Amanda flicks a glance up to the rear view mirror. “We’re trying to find a god. Airplanes don’t offer us much mobility.”
“Yes, but. Wouldn’t it be easier if we at least took an airplane to the right coast?”
“Coyote likes to move,” replies Amanda.
“But you can arrange first-class tickets,” Fitz continues, unrelenting. “I like first class.”
Cason has subsided into brooding since we first began the expedition. Every time I look over, I find him rummaging through old photographs on his phone, his mouth like a fracture. The dad jokes were gone, the attempts to have us eat, sleep, guzzle water on schedule. Only silence now, a faraway look, a brittle expression. I worry he’ll break before we find our way.
“You know,” says Cason, voice hardly more than a rasp. I force a beer on him out of instinct, and he accepts it without comment. “First class is something most people don’t get to see in a lifetime. It’s just priced out of the way. Most people, they save up their whole lives, storing miles and what-have-yous, for that one trip they’ll remember until they die.”
“You think I don’t know that?” comes the reply, quick as whiplash. Idaho is shading into Oregon, and the air smells of cold. “Fuck. It isn’t like I’m the one with a kid and a family and the chance to live until I’m eighty. Fuck, with all this bullshit I’ve snorted in the last ten years—”
Fitz cuts himself off.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “We’re going to die soon, anyway. “
No one says anything for the next hour or three. Eventually, the monotony peels away the uncomfortable silence, and we wind up in a small town called the Cascade Locks. Bundling into an even smaller diner, we settle and sift through our options as the last light breaks into shadows along the distant blue wall.
“You’re a useless fucking prophet,” says Tanis, massaging her temples.
“Chronicler. Not prophet.” Fitz digs a fork into his heap of scrambled egg whites and bacon, soaked through with gravy and green chillies. “Big difference.”
“Really?” says Tanis.
The answering grin shone like a lamp. “No idea. But it’s a good excuse.”
“Asshole.” Tanis props both elbows on the table and digs thumbs into her temples, flinching with every rotation of the digits. “I think we’re close. Really close. There’s… a bridge. He’s waiting nearby. Dirt road and that fucking grin. I hate that fucking grin.”
I pause for a minute. Mostly because of the burger: two weeks into my first sojourn through America, and I’m still making the mistake of assuming the food isn’t scaled for giants. I’d since given up on trying to properly consume the tower of bread, cheese, anaemic lettuce leaves and ground meat. Instead, I’m now dismembering it, layer by layer, with fork and a blunt knife. “There are a lot of bridges here. Any idea which one?”
“I—there’s a phrase that keeps coming up,” Tanis says. “Bridge of the gods.”
Our waitress comes back. She flashes me a lean smile, black curls over pale eyes. When the light fills them just the right way, they’re a shade of honey as rich as a kind word. Marie, she said her name was, voice quiet and sleek as her long-bodied frame.
Inexplicably nervous, I spear a triangle of soggy bread and blot it on a pool of congealing cheese. I know the tradition for broken-hearted heroes is to fall in love as they go, but I still miss Minah like I’m learning how to breathe. Marie refills our coffee. We wait until she’s out of earshot before we resume conversation.
“That,” says Amanda, stirring a spoon and three cubes of sugar into her cup, “is a really fucking Coyote place to be.”
“Because it is such an ambiguous thing that could involve everything from a museum visit to completing a magical—?” I begin.
“Yes,” sighs Amanda. “But also no.”
Cason offers context to her exasperation. “It’s an actual place.”
“Hell is also an actual place.” I shake my head. “You have to be more clear.”
“No, as in, a place on Google Maps.”
I pause.
“What?” I say.
“What?” Fitz says.
“Why?” Tanis puts her face in her hands.
“Knowing Coyote,” says Amanda, “it’s because he came here a hundred years ago to begin his setup for this joke.”
“This is the worst dad joke I’ve heard, and we’ve been stuck with Cason for two weeks,” I declare, wagging another slice of meat at the room. The burger is exceptional. Even deconstructed, I can tell it would have been sublime as a whole. “Having said that, I’m kind of looking forward to meeting this Coyote.”
“Good,” says Amanda. “Because you’re driving. I’m fucking staying here.”
WE FIND COYOTE in the corner of a rusted-up gas station, abandoned for so long the Oregonian wilderness has begun taking it back: brush seeping through the doors, a young birch extending its branches through the cracked glass of a dusty window. Berry bushes are everywhere, their fruits black and red and gleaming. Everywhere, there’s the rain. Not like in Malaysia, where it comes in torrents, blotting the world with silver. Here, it lingers, a cold fine mist that catches in everything, leaving you damp with diamonds.
He stands there, shoulder slouched against a wall, good-looking in that way that unlatches hearts, legs, mouths, and wallets quicker than you can hiss the word ‘please.’ Hair long and oil-money black, knifing to his waist. Brown skin. Cheekbones and jawline perfect as mathematics. Balanced like a trapeze line, the cherry almost kissing his nail, a cigarillo that leaks cloves and animal musk.
“Took your time.” He swaggers up to us, narrow as a shadow, tail pluming behind him, brown-grey as a dried-up prairie, a greeting in its slow wag. “Not that I’m complaining. I missed this place, you know? Oregon’s gone so secular these days, but they still know how to make good sandwiches, at least. They’ve even learned how to make kale good.”
“I know you.” Tanis stares at Coyote like she’s seeing through him, seeing the man, the coyote with its belly low to the dirt, stalking a bunny to its warren. A sibylline confusion overtakes her, abstracts her expression. Side effect of having eaten Cassandra’s heart, I guess. “I know you.”
“And I saw you,” says Coyote, “watching me through worlds, little snake girl. How is your mother doing?”
“She’s dead.”
“Good. I couldn’t stand her. There were a few years when she was convinced that I was the solution to her problems. Said that if I only intervened, reality would overturn that poor trick that Hera played on her.” He takes a drag from his cigarillo and resumes his pacing, circling us, a sly smile perched on his lip. “The rest of you, I don’t know if I was expecting. You, particularly. Cason, you and I are so far apart in taxonomy, I’m amazed that fate led you my way. In another life, you’d have been the brooding anti-hero, surly and filled with enough pathos to put Batman to shame. In this life, you’re a soccer dad.”
“See, I’m not the only one who thinks that.”
“Shut the fuck up, Rupert,” Fitz growls.
“We’ve already met, Coyote,” says Cason, jaw flexing.
The god cocks his fine head. “I guess. I don’t know. You were a bit boring the last time I saw you. So focused on revenge and rescue and things like that. You’re interesting now, and it’s a lot more fun to pretend this is the first time. What will you do if they put your wife and your children on the altar?
“But it isn’t.” Lines build in the feathered gap between Cason’s eyebrows. “And don’t fucking talk about my family.”
“You only say that because you’re mortal, Cason. Time is subjective. Reality is subjective. There’s nothing in this world that can’t be talked into becoming something it’s not.”
As Cason stares at him uncomprehending, Coyote’s expression alters. It shifts from arch humour to sudden, convulsive, brassy-sounding laughter. He slaps Cason on the shoulder, turns before the man can retaliate, somehow both supernaturally quick and languid as a Sunday fuck.
“There was a prophecy,” Fitz interrupts, one eye scrunched.
“Of course there was. The world is made up of them.”
“There was a prophecy that involved you.”
Coyote’s smile is littered with canine teeth. “Of course there is. No prophecy is complete without a wild card, and what is wilder than a Coyote, huh?”
Fitz pinches the bridge of his nose, a gesture I’m coming to recognize.
“Fuck it, I appreciate the mood you’re trying to set,” I begin. “And I absolutely appreciate those brogues. I am pretty certain they cost at least two hundred dollars—”
“Don’t insult me. If I’d actually paid for them, they’d have set me back six.”
“—wow, okay. What I’m trying to say, though, is that I know there are, uh, rituals associated with these things, but we don’t have time. There’s a prophecy and we’re trying to save the world and apparently, you’re the dog that’s supposed to lead us down the black road to where the father gods wait.”
“Oh, I know that one.” Coyote has teeth like scimitars even in that pleasant human mouth, and when he smiles, my lizard brain tries to shimmy down my spine with my skin in its grip. I grimace. He isn’t even trying to intimidate me, but the rising ape remembers the direwolf, ancient as fear. “That’s the one where I die.”
His proclamation shuts us all up.
“What?”
“I…” Tanis begins, a hand splayed over her throat.
“Did you see me coming with you? After I opened up the black road so you could walk it to your dooms. Did you see me there on the road with you?”
“For a little while, yeah.”
“Then what happened?” Coyote saunters up to our Prius, leans against it, arms crossed. He tips his head at Tanis, who at last is beginning to recover from her oneiric fugue. She rests the tips of three fingers on a temple, rubs the flesh in circuits; she still looks coked-out, pupils the wrong shape, but she’s coming back.
Eyes closed, she says. “Nothing. You were gone. You melted into the road.”
“Whoever or whatever it is that governs the giving of visions, they like it neat.” A red tongue laps over his bared teeth. The rain picks up. It seeps through the rest of us, makes cups of our shoes but Coyote and his silk-and-sable Saint Laurent suit, it does no more than dapple. “They’re squeamish, you know? If they can gloss over the violence, they will. In that timeline, in that version of the future, the daddy gods carve out my heart and eat it. What do you have to say about that?”
“Do we win?” asks Tanis.
Coyote smiles. “You don’t lose.” He takes another drag from his cigarillo and blows it out loudly, the smoke spiring upwards into the breeze. “I can tell you that much.”
“In that case, I guess the only thing we can do”—Fitz gnaws on a thumbnail, the dull crack echoing in the desolation—“is promise we’ll do our best to keep you from coming to harm.”
“I’m not the only one. Rupert dies too.”
I shrug and slosh over to the door of the backseat, careful not to bump up against Coyote, the medulla oblongata still possessed by basal terror. This is wrong, it says. The mile-a-minute patter, the lackadaisical charm, the earnestness, the come-lets-have-an-adventure lilt in every word. Magicians—stage magicians, that is, the ones who won’t get arrested when they set up on a street curb—do that, when they want to talk your attention down from what they’re doing. Coyote wants us distracted and that frightens me. “Okay? Not like this is the first time I’ll have died.”
“It’ll hurt so much.”
“Look, I got eaten by a crocodile earlier this week.” I shrug again. “I came back. At this point, it’s just another Tuesday.”
“Thursday,” says Cason.
“Whatever.”
A long velveteen ear pricks from his scalp, the tip curled like the edge of a page. “Look at you folk heroes. I do love your kind so much. Never any fear of death. Never any knowledge of the fact your lives mean nothing, that there’s no point to them, that you’re not stardust but just dust. Not even luminous. Just cold and grey and already rotting from the moment you’re born. To you, it’s all a grand adventure.”
