The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 16
Marduk slows, turns, halts at Tanis’s posturing, his face rearranging itself to accommodate his displeasure. It is a strange process, peculiarly innocent in the way his features fumble with the idea: that rosebud mouth, so used to magnanimity, jackknifing into a frown; the lineless forehead uncertain of where to crease, the eyebrows at a loss as to how best to express his disappointment.
Tanis raises the Remington, points it at him. A token gesture. There’s no conviction in her grip, or in her face, in the set of her shoulders. But she squares her stance, anyway, brings the trigger halfway.
“Get Fitz out of here,” she hisses.
“No.” Marduk slurs the word, frown deepening, confusion supplanting his disgust at being defied. It hits me, then. He doesn’t understand language, how trachea and larynx need to cooperate on every sentence. It was burning topiary and omens for him, probably, hallucinations for his priests to origami into commandments. You don’t need social skills when you have minions. “Stay.”
Everything about him is a little slow, disconnected: the motions and the moods of a god who has to think his way through being human.
“Fuck you.”
“Not here for you.” His eyes roll up and to the right, landing on the trickster. I wonder if Marduk had his meat-suit custom-made, or if he’d commandeered it. “Coyote, we come to speak with you.”
Marduk licks his teeth, an obscene sight.
“Go home, dog.”
“I didn’t know I had a curfew.” Coyote drapes his arms across the back of the booth, two fingers on his right hand crooked in a Bruce Lee gesture. “You should come try the French dip. It’s good here.”
“Insolent.”
Another of his capacious grins. “No more than usual.”
“We know what you are doing, Coyote.”
“And that has stopped me exactly zero times since the dawn of time. At least half of you govern wisdom, or at least that’s what you tell me. But you still don’t get it. You don’t own it. None of you own me.”
“Yeah, I think this is where we get out. Don’t want to be in the way of a family inci—”
Until the day I close my eyes one final time, I will always remember Tanis shooting first. In a quick draw with a god, it was the lamia who won. The blast purees the lower half of Marduk’s face and what remains looks like chilli on the verge of done, except here, there: bone fragments, a crescent of teeth, miraculously whole; the tongue, bulbous and lurid, beached in carrion.
“I’ll hold him off.” And just like that, she’s not coming home. She looks over her shoulder, wild-eyed, her grimace desperate. “Tell Naree I’m sorry. Tell Bee—”
She doesn’t finish. Amanda’s voice floats up like a corpse on a river: You’re the ones most willing to die. She isn’t wrong. Tanis, Cason, they talk a good game about going home, but you know how the story goes. When you become a parent, when you love someone—really love them, like it’d break you, like a fish-bone in the back of your mouth, stabbing you every time you swallow—everything else is surfeit. You find out what’s extraneous, how love bleeds other sentimentalities away. In that way, it’s a parasite, I guess. A nerve agent. Love drives us to madness.
Meanwhile, Marduk, still upright, places his fingertips on the wreckage of his face. His brow furrows, or tries to, sending a knot of ruined tissue swaying. He skewers us with his one remaining eye, the other popped by the blast, and gurgles. Coyote starts laughing so hard the world crimps in his vicinity, the air around him impacted like broken glass, like foil scrunched in a hand: eye-watering, vivid.
Tanis fires again.
Blam.
Brain splatters on the wall behind Marduk, Pollockian. Smoke wisps from the ragged quarter-circle carved into his skull, the bar of his cheekbone swaying like a loose door hinge: a single strip of white bone against the gore. The god blinks. And then he sighs, clearly disgruntled, although it’s anyone’s guess if he’s incensed by the attempt or by its ineffectiveness.
I’m trying to drag Fitz from the commotion when the Chronicler lurches upright, lifts an inch from the tiles and hangs there, as though on an invisible hook. His mouth opens, blood drooling in glossy threads. What issues is his voice, is not his voice, is something like his voice amped up to a thousand, electric like the instant before lightning hits, and his lips do not move, and his tongue is a road of red, and his voice is not his but Marduk’s made flesh and tortured gristle.
“We loved you.”
I shiver, stepping back. “Fitz. Jesus, Fitz…”
“You held your hands to us in the dark and you begged us for light, and we came.” Marduk sighs through Fitz’s lungs. “We gave you everything, gave you meaning, gave you reason to believe that the night will end. Under our guidance, your kingdoms flourished and mankind became as locusts, your shadow falling on every corner of this earth.”
Fitz twitches, a paroxysm that swells in waves until it’s too much for his body to hold, and he palsies in place. Still Marduk’s voice comes from his mouth, lilting and smoke-rough.
“What do you want, Marduk?” I manage. If there is anything I have learned in all these years, it is that gods like to talk.
“Quiet.” The stalk of Marduk’s face turns, his attention returning to Coyote.
The trickster’s doubled over, an arm around his waist. Still laughing, cheeks wet with tears.
“Come home.”
“I ain’t going anywhere.”
“You are our dog.”
“Coyote, Marduk!” He unfolds like the wrath of nations brought low for too long, bringing a hand down onto the table hard and making the cutlery jump. Coyote rises, snarling, his human self shivering from his skin, a winter coat shed all at once. What is left behind is an impression, godhood like a bark of gunpowder: raised hackles, jaws that could eat up the whole of creation. “I stole Buffalo’s children, I am the one who named the months. I am the one who made death what she is. You drank to me in your halls and every one of you called me brother. How dare you call me a dog, Marduk! You know better than that.”
“And this is why you are not dead,” Marduk says evenly, radiant despite his mutilation. “Come to heel and all shall be well. Yahweh did not listen and he is dead, his bones now toothpicks for our table.”
I crab-walk across the room without anyone taking notice, Marduk having commanded our silence, but not our stillness. His splattered cerebral matter has begun to run, yoghurt-like, down the wall. I look at my palm, jellied with Fitz’s blood. I have a plan and this is, even by my standards, an incredibly dumb idea.
Over Marduk’s shoulder, I see Coyote grin, one corner of a mouth that is mostly smoke curving to bare a gleaming tooth.
“You ate Yahweh? Tell you the truth: that doesn’t surprise me any. You’ve probably had an eye on him since the wane of Babylon. How many millennia has it been, Marduk? How long have you dreamt about filleting his haunch, huh? Browning it first. Slow-cooking it with garlic roasted on the fire until its gone that nutty-sweet gold. Thickening it with his blood. I bet you made the first cut, didn’t you?”
Patter. That is where the real magic is, forgotten amid the flourishes, the operatic resurrections, the meteorological wonders, the smoke, the glamour, the woman sequined in bright colours, sawed in half as she smiles for the camera. People forget that none of it would exist without the patter, the words that draw the eye from the point where one reality is swapped for another. Coyote keeps babbling and Marduk listens, while Tanis glares daggers at me, Remington tightly gripped. She mouths at me, What the fuck are you doing?
I shrug, mouth back, The hell do I know?
Truth is, for once: I do know. Sort of. I can see where it branches from here. There are two choices. One uses Fitz’s blood as barter, Marduk’s flesh as bait. I open the door inscribed on my arms and I push them both inside, hope one prophet can be substituted for another. That would be the wiser option, which is why I immediately go with option two.
I float a prayer up to Guan Yin, to the small gods of lucky breaks, and press my palm into the wall, three fingers curled, index and thumb splayed out. Let Marduk have built this body himself, because if he didn’t, I will have spent fifteen seconds finger-painting with brains for no reason.
It is a filthy spell, cheap, quick as an office Christmas party mistake. Blood to bind, blood to bond. It hitchhikes on Marduk’s power like a tick, rides it up to the god and opens a valve, turns a one-way transmission into a two-way channel. Looking in from the outside, you wouldn’t see anything save for a man doodling hieroglyphs on the wall, occasionally pausing to rub curds of brain between his fingers, which is, in hindsight, what the youth of today might call ‘a lot.’
Whatever the case, if I am right, this should stop Marduk dead in his tracks.
I dot the last rune, trying—and failing—not to be disappointed with the sloppiness, the uneven calligraphy. Luckily, infernal forces do not, as a whole, pay much attention to linework. A scream ripples through the restaurant, a scream picked up and amplified by every human mouth in sight, a scream that goes on until there is only this growling, wretched, basal whine, like the lowing of cows in a killing chute. Marduk goes down, chin slamming into the edge of a table, and without any structural integrity, with so much of his face already mush, the rest of it now erupts into pink jelly.
“Jesus on a pogostick, that worked.” I blink madly.
Coyote vaults over the table, whooping, human again, catching Fitz one-armed as he collapses. The trickster flings our prophet over his shoulder, beaming. He tips the sharp brim of a pork pie hat at us, while the rest of the details fill themselves in: monochrome hachures, like he’s a cartoon character being painted in.
“What the fuck did you—you know what? I’m getting really sick of opening sentences with that.” Tanis mashes a hand into her face, already running, her long-legged lope carrying her faster than me by a mile. “Next time, someone tell me what the fuck you’re going to do before you do it. Also, what the fuck is up with that—?”
“Father god,” Coyote singsongs, grinning. “Weren’t you paying attention?”
I throw a look back at Marduk. He is beginning to rise again, meat sloughing in clumps, bone gleaming underneath. I can see a vertebra tearing through the carnage; an eye opens in the marrow, blue spoked with golden light.
“Good plan, by the way.” Coyote keeps going, keeps his patter going, and I’m reminded that it isn’t only magicians who subscribe to the church of verbal distractions. Doctors, nurses, combat medics, EMTs, anyone who has had to talk a man away from paying attention to the fact half of him is steamrolled flat. The question is, who exactly is he doing it for? “Gods take bodies when they think they have to talk to their dinner. The father gods, they don’t usually need to mess around with that. Pain isn’t something they’re accustomed to. That must have felt like a truck.”
A flash of an image: an eighteen-wheeler coming down the tarmac, headlights like twin suns and then pain, supernovaing in fractal patterns, branching across the skeleton, bones splitting, the force of impact so hard that the heart bursts—
I gasp.
—intestines spread across the road, separated by vultures. A dead coyote’s grinning face, veiled in little black ants—
“Sorry, reality takes a minute to reset.” Coyote shoulders out of the door and the air greets us with a slap, damp and salt-drenched. He licks his teeth. Fitz’s blood pearls harmlessly on his outfit like he’s wearing plastic. “There we go. Now, where is Amanda?”
On cue, the familiar black SUV screams into view, Amanda half-hanging from her window, with Cason in the backseat, holding the door open as the vehicle thunders close.
“What the fuck?” she screams, thumping the wheel for emphasis.
“Is that the designated catch phrase for your group? Do you have a sponsor? Because I can absolutely see that working—”
“Shut. Up.”
WE ROARED OUT of Reedsport onto the first convenient exit, found ourselves en route to a college town named Corvallis, which Amanda professed to ‘not hating.’ It is bigger than Reedsport, built to accommodate itinerant parents. There would be motels. Places to stop, regroup, rethink our strategy—maybe even formulate one, to actually revise.
“How’s Fitz?” Amanda tenses her grip on the wheel, knuckles blanched of colour.
“He has been worse,” I say.
There’s a pause, a silence too big to be absorbed without awkwardness. Then, Cason says, “It could have been herpes.”
The backseat is a thin soup of blood, shallow puddles collecting in the ridged leather. Cason and I spend twenty minutes drenching Fitz in mineral water, rinsing him as best we can. Every capillary in his eyes burst during the ordeal, and the blood is beginning to coagulate, darkening the sclera. But there is no other indication of damage. He is breathing, at least.
“Should we get him to a doctor?” Amanda asks.
Coyote reaches around from the passenger seat and wafts a nonchalant hand over Fitz’s face. “He’ll be alright. You people never read the Bible? It was all in fashion back then. Making prophets wander the desert for decades, making them walk until they bleed. They’re resilient. They always bounce back.”
“Since when were you such a good Christian boy, Coyote?” Tanis snarls from the seat behind me, shotgun between her knees, cheek rested on the barrel.
“I’m not.” He laughs gauzily. “I was just askin’ if you’d read it.”
I rummage through the jumbled memory of our encounter with Marduk, draining another bottle of cold mineral water over Fitz’s face. He doesn’t stir. With the edge of my shirt, I begin dabbing again at the blood scabbing in his nostrils. “Can you heal him?”
“Who’s to say that I haven’t done so already? With that pass of my hand, I may have put him into a healing sleep, and sent him on his path—”
I don’t point out that Fitz was already comatose.
“I think Rupert was talking something more instantaneous.” The sneer comes through in Tanis’s low, hungry rasp. “Something befitting a father god.”
Coyote grinned. “You’re not that much of a disappointment after all, koulev. I’m beginning to see what Maman Brigitte saw in you, although I think I like them less in love with murder—”
I cut in. “So she’s right? You are a father god.”
“Father god-adjunct, maybe. I’ve been called a demiurge a few times, and that feels more correct. I don’t have a pantheon. I just have peers. When we get together, worlds don’t come to be, but sometimes there’s a party and sometimes, that spills into a story—”
Tanis lets out a hiss. “That’s why it was you who had to lead us to the black road.”
“To be fair, you could have probably used Raven or Bunny instead, although I think you’d have trouble with the latter.” A flash of his teeth in the rearview mirror.
“You could have told us.” Cason finally speaks up, betrayal hemming a voice otherwise dulled to grey. He strips Fitz of his socks, face contorting at the stink of four-day feet, and replaces them with a fresh pair. “You could have told us.”
“No one asked.” The answer is reproachful but bright. “You took the koulev’s prophecies at face value, and came looking for a dog who could lead you to a black road. None of you thought to ask why that dog and not the other, and how a dog could do such a thing—”
The stress he puts on the word dog, it feels like he’s tugging on something, drawing it up tight and away from public scrutiny. Coyote is angry: a brittle, sugar-glass emotion, like the veneer that is starting to break.
The woods become fields, far as forever, dark honey in the storm-light. In the distance, I see wind turbines: futuristic contraptions, colossal, sleek-bodied silver.
“Amanda, did you know?”
She doesn’t answer, keeps driving.
“What I said earlier, it still stands.” Coyote winds down a window and lights up another cigarillo. This one smells like ozone, like lightning at the point of contact. “Whatever my parentage, I will still lead you to the black road.”
“Even if it means you dying,” Tanis says.
“Koulev, you saw what happened at Don’s restaurant. Let’s say that I wanted to two-time you. Wouldn’t I have done it yet?”
“Could be a ruse,” Tanis grumbles tiredly. “Could be a long con.”
“I promise you there’s nothing better than instant gratification.”
“Is Fitz going to be alright?” Cason whispers.
“I wasn’t lying about the healing sleep. He dreams of prairies and endless forests and nights unsoiled by electric lights. When he wakes, he will be fine.” Coyote’s voice gentles as he takes a drag, the cherry burning green this time. “As for dying, it isn’t so bad. Ask Rupert. Death is—”
“A terrible motherfucking thing to endure. Why would you even attempt to romanticise it, you sick asshole?”
“Because that is why we tell stories, Rupert. To make ourselves feel better about what we cannot change. Like you, I could have chosen to not be part of this. But love—” Coyote chuckles bleakly. “It makes us fools. Now, let’s find a motel so we can wait until the prophet rises.”
“As long as there are no more crocodiles.”
“Shut up, Rupert.”
SIXTEEN
I SLIDE ONTO the bar stool and sag, fingers wrapped around a glass of cheap bourbon. Sleeping hasn’t been easy; I didn’t even try this time. Luckily for me, Corvallis keeps collegiate hours and collegiate prices, meaning the bars cost nothing if you don’t mind main-lining sweetened mouthwash.
I probably could have chosen someplace less sticky, though.
“This seat taken?” Coyote’s voice, sanded down to something human, comes over my shoulder as I dip my fingers into the glass of cold water I’d ordered with my alcohol, rubbing the grime off against an ice cube.
“No. You can sit, if you want.” I raise my head. Tonight, he looks about eighteen and unsure of himself, the hoodie too big on shoulders that’ll still take a few years to fill. He’s still handsome, of course—gods can’t abide by poor aesthetics—but at least he’s trying to come down to my level. I can appreciate that. “Would you care if I said ‘yes’? Is anything ever sacred to you?”
