The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 5
But I’ll take a shower first.
And maybe, a haircut.
“THE WHOLE ‘SAVING the world’ business isn’t that bad, right?”
Fitz crosses his arms behind him and leans back, xylophone chest on display.
He has a point. Thisis nice. A faint crusting of algae floats along the margins of the pool, sure, but the declining sun flatters everything, including errant eukaryotic colonies. I might even say that the dusk has rendered them gorgeous.
“Maybe,” I concede, relaxing onto my lounge chair. Much to Amanda’s chagrin, Cason still hasn’t made an appearance. Apparently, somewhere in Orlando, an excellent rodízio churrascaria is regretting its policy on how many times you can request more slabs of meat. An extraction is currently taking place, leaving Fitz and I to do nothing but bask in the warmth. “Just maybe.”
“If it helps,” Fitz looks over the rim of his sunglasses, smirking. “Amanda says we’re free to order room service.”
“But does American room service deliver, er, outside rooms?”
“Who the hell knows? Doesn’t hurt to ask. We’re in Florida. The weather’s great. We’re probably going to die horribly sometime next week. But for now, we’re here, we’re alive, we have unlimited money to spend in a shitty Best Western. Take advantage of it.”
“I guess you’re right.” Against my will, the tension loosens from my shoulders. Fatalistic as his proclamation might be, Fitz has a point again. Tomorrow, we perish; today, we exist in the lap of moderate-to-adequate luxury. “So, you think the fish here’s going to be any good. I could murder for a—”
And it is right then, of course, that an alligator decides to fucking eat me.
FOUR
TAKE IT FROM me.
It is hard to breathe through a punctured lung; particularly, and I would like to strongly emphasise this for the benefit of future generations, when the object responsible for said perforation is still embedded in the chest cavity. I gargle blood as the world blurs into a blue-green blaze, unable to decide how I’m going to die: asphyxiating on my own fluids, eaten by the reptile that has absconded with me, or having my skull cracked against the pavement as my body flip-flops in its jaws.
My legs are definitely broken.
If I still had anything resembling a voice, or a larynx that isn’t stoppered with bile, I might scream, but right now, it is difficult to do anything but expire at a rate appropriate to the situation.
(‘Quickly,’ in case that wasn’t obvious already.)
But let’s backtrack. Indulge, maybe, in the fact that history is penned by the survivors and creative license is par for the course. Though I cannot be sure, what with the fact my head is bouncing along the asphalt and my viewpoint of the world currently inverted, I suspect the situation looks rather comical.
Picture: a five-eight Chinese man, in the grip of an alligator, feet dragging along as the reptile barrels towards the underbrush, limp as a doll. He must be colossal. The reptile, not the man. The position in which the alligator has me trapped would no doubt present logistical complications to a smaller specimen: I have an arm prospecting down his gullet, a shoulder pinioned, and judging from the pain clenching my left hip, my kidney’s been compromised.
It is getting harder to breathe.
It is getting impossible to breathe.
In different circumstances, I would have allowed nature to take its course. Mastication is unpleasant, but nothing that cannot be recovered from. I’ve died from bullets, knives, machetes, bicycle whips, every manner of bludgeon, a few exotic poisons, strangulation, immolation, impalement, disembowelment and, once, of spontaneous organ failure. Every single time, I’ve returned after a short jaunt through Diyu and continued with life as I knew it.
Unfortunately, resurrection isn’t without its drawbacks.
As the perspicacious might have guessed already, my reanimation inevitably involves restoring my pre-existing body, my one vessel. It is messy, and frequently redolent of the liquids that a corpse discharges, but it works. This will, naturally, be a problem if I allow the alligator to finish what it has begun. More likely than not, it intends to stash me at the bottom of a river, where I will then drown, rot and puff up accommodatingly, allowing the bastard to disembowel me at relative leisure.
As I say, death or disembowelment is not the part that worries me. What gives cause for significant consternation is the fact that I might be firmly lodged in the bowels of a swamp, unable to escape, unable to do anything but provide ample protein to the local ecosystem, even as I drown in the churning murk over and over again.
So, let’s see how we can avoid that.
The asphalt melts into thorny viridian brush. My options are thinning as quickly as the daylight. It’s now, or an eternity steeping in the mud.
My mouth is full of salt and spittle, and I have to spit blood as I wrench myself upwards, anchoring my fingers in the reptile’s great nostrils. In retaliation, it tosses its head and multiple somethings shatter in succession. Fucking ow. Muscular control winks out below where my rib cage flares widest and the next time I breathe in, a wet throatful of rust, I feel the splintered end of a bone skewering what I assume to be some sort of organ. Pain glows through my core.
“Motherfucker,” I burble, jerking a shoulder upwards. The meat there, between the end of a clavicle and the length of my pectoral, feathers open like a rump roast on its way to becoming to pulled pork: muscle doesn’t like being forced to move around a giant tooth. But it gets me what I want, which is the opportunity to free up the other arm, breaking two fingers on its triumphant exit from the alligator’s mouth.
Okay, that last part I could have done without, but dinners can’t be choosers.
The leviathan rolls a yellow eye in my direction, blinking, and what I don’t expect is its shambolic attention, the languorousness of it, as though of a creature sedated and coerced into witnessing its own vivisection. Something is wrong. Apart from everything else, alligators aren’t meant to be horned, or feathered, or bewigged in the fashion of the ancient Egyptians, a solar crown rising precariously from the sable mass.
Also, this isn’t an alligator. It’s a crocodile.
Also—
“I don’t know if you realize”—teeth jangle in my mouth; I let my mouth loll open, let them tumble onto the pavement in a clatter of ruined enamel—“but there’s something growing out of your head.”
True enough, Sobek, Lord of Crocodiles, Pointed of Teeth, He Who Eats While He Mates, and all those epithets Wikipedia insists are associated with this icon of aggressive fecundity, has something blooming from his flat skull, a misshapen tumour largely comprising grey-blue ganglia and oily black hair. At first glance, I almost mistake the growth for a diasporic penanggalan, but then it swivels on the stub of bloody cartilage and fixes me with a grin.
Nope. No penanggalan here, no genteel intellect with a face to shame Aphrodite, the dangling effluvia beautifully flush, gorgeous and radiant as a bouquet of roses. This thing has a lunatic grin and waxen skin, a lidless stare with sockets too big for those bloodshot eyes rolling within. It chatters at me, nonsense noises, and Sobek spasms, slowing. I’m close enough to see the membrane of his great eye twitch, engorging first with black tendrils, before it erupts into gore, worm-like filaments needling through the mess.
“The fuck? Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh—”
I hyperventilate through obscenities while Sobek roars, thrashing as the thing, the parasite, the tumour, the whatever-the-fuck-it-is burrows deeper into his brain. Unfortunately, he has still yet to let go, although that is no active fault of the crocodilian divinity. I remain brochetted on his dentition. Something unravels from the pit of my stomach and a weight falls loose in loops.
Great. Just great. My intestines snarl like Christmas lights around everything from the shrubbery to Sobek’s foot, and the world lurches as something catches and something tears. Fuck. It is astonishing what you can survive when you’ve been rudely inoculated against shock. The lizard brain insists on survival.
Speaking of which, Sobek tosses his mighty head a few more times before at last capitulating to animal instinct. He flings himself down, writhing across the ground, twisting—driven, perhaps, by some vague molecule of ancestral memory, a certainty inherited from the dinosaurs: if you pulverize something, it will stop biting. But unfortunately, caveats apply.
If the offending organism has already colonised your brain, such methods are likely to prove impotent. Whatever that thing is, it doesn’t seem to care, content to continue domesticating the wrinkles of Sobek’s cerebral cortex.
Me, on the other hand? I care like anything.
I care because it is a one-ton animal wantonly applying its weight to the bone-meal remains of my spine. I care because with every circuit, every stomach-turning twist, I am that little bit closer to becoming purée, a smear of questionable colours spread across Orlando. I care because my synapses have begun free-associating, bewildered by this palette of agonies, and I had no idea there were so many bones to snap, so many muscles to rip, intestines ribboning across the air, and I’d scream if I wasn’t drowning.
Then something gives.
The turbulence dislodges me from my impalement and I am flung up—up—head over heels over head. The sky is gorgeous, faultless as power, blue and hot. A little delirious, a little chewed-up-by-crocodile, I extend a bloodied hand to the horizon. Gravity elects that moment to reassert itself and the firmament is replaced by the less pleasant sight of the open mouth of a crocodile god.
I vanish headfirst into Sobek’s throat, guzzled with less effort than a broken-backed bunny.
All things considered, it could be worse.
“OW.”
I’m dead. Finally.
Relieved, I pat myself down, ecstatic to be whole again. The fact that I am in Diyu is entirely inconsequential. This isn’t the first time, and I imagine it won’t be the last. Sure, the climate is unexceptional and the less said about the topography the better, but the population trends towards being both courteous and interesting, and I am told they’ve become infatuated with bubble tea of late. By and large, it could be worse. It could be the stomach of a divine being, each second dilated into a century, your body corroding in the acids, flesh sloughing in foaming tatters.
I unfold to my feet, pushing up from one knee and then another, an inventory of my limbs taken yet again. There is one consolation to the whole situation. Ordinarily, transitioning from the mortal realm to Diyu is an experience like no other, pain of a magnitude that words have failed to concisely encapsulate. But it would appear that my entanglement with Sobek was so profoundly agonizing it supplanted my awareness of the journey.
A pair of shadows wash over me, accompanied by animal musk.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Ox-Head has a slow, placid voice, the kind you’d expect of a well-fed herbivore.
“There are a few people still angry at you, Rupert.” Likewise, Horse-Face’s speech is serene, self-assured. His diction says, This is a stallion of means, confident of his prowess, bereft of any need to assert his dominance, so prodigious his reproductive abilities, so exquisite his genetics. Look upon him and delight in his calm temper, his even gait.
“You are lucky none of them is Yan Luo.”
The trick to dealing with these two is ignoring the structural dissonance of their mandibles, and taking no note of their respective maxilla. It isn’t even that their teeth are unsettlingly carnivorous in architecture. It’s the way they fit.
“I mean, as long as he isn’t pissed at me.” I dust myself off. “Are you two pissed at me, by any chance?”
They exchange looks. Both Horse-Face and Ox-Head have always been of variable height, never precisely as tall as you think they are, always worse than you expect. Today, however, they take especial care to loom menacingly. But it doesn’t work. After the day I had it feels like home, the posturings of cousins on the first night of Chinese New Year, when everyone is in competition about who has done better for themselves.
Before they can speak, I add: “I missed you guys, by the way. Like, seriously missed you guys. I know we’ve had some rough times, been through a few arguments. You’ve even killed me, too. But all in all, I like you guys. I don’t think I’ve ever said that.”
They trade looks again, caution tensing in their eyes.
“A trick, Rupert?” Horse-Face purrs, sibilant as he breathes, and all despite that there is none of the right consonants. Ox-Head, scowling, tilts his polearm at me.
I raise my palms with a grin. “No. No, I swear. Nothing like that. I’m just really glad to be back in a situation where I understand everything. You wouldn’t believe the day I fucking had.”
“Does it have something to do,” Ox-Head rumbles, circling behind me, “with the crocodile attached to your leg?”
“Eh?”
I peer down. Somehow during my initial self-appraisal, I had succeeded in completely overlooking the fact that I was, in no uncertain terms, hosting a stowaway.
From tail to snout, this specimen couldn’t be more than four metres, a veritable twig beside the monster I’d grappled with. Its belly is comically round, swollen solid, a scaled balloon on which the rest of the reptile was unsteadily balanced, the creature wobbling with every gust of sulphuric breath. The limbs are vestigial, the eyes too; webbed with mucus, they might as well be decorative.
Noticing my attention, it rolls its gaze up. Tries to, at least, the whey-like substance glueing its corneas in place. But the rough panting noise that it makes isn’t unfriendly, like a dog’s greeting, eager but unsure.
Worms, whispers a sudden memory from when I hadn’t given up on secondary school, when the biology teacher, who was tired of us running barefoot through the mud, soaking up hookworms and Guan Yin knows what, coerced us into watching a documentary about parasites. Tapeworms, given an ounce of a chance, will multiply until there is no room and they have to eat through the intestinal walls, find somewhere else to fester.
I stare at the crocodile still latched to my calf and wonder if I’d notice if it passed on the infection to me.
“What the fuck is that?”
Neither Ox-Head nor Horse-Face debase themselves with an answer. They stare, stonily, their heads cocked, ears twitching with more emotion than their muzzles could or would communicate, those ears
“Seriously, what the fuck is that?” I jab a finger at the thing.
“A god,” intones a fresh voice, a quiet voice, a voice we all know.
In concert, the three of us go to our knees, kowtowing without resentment in the presence of Meng Po, Lady of Forgetfulness. She smells as she always does of the tisane she pours for the dead who have paid their dues, those prepared to revisit the karmic wheel. A medicinal bitterness, an attar that puts to mind liquorice and the sweet ginseng soup in which the yearly serving of tang yuan might float.
“Lady,” I whisper.
“Lady,” says Horse-Face.
“Lady,” says Ox-Head and there is an ache there, a tremble of worship.
“Rise.”
We obey.
Meng Po, you’d think, would aspire to opulence, cream-pale jade in the stitchings of her sleeves, gold threads for her robes. No reason to pauper yourself of excess when you sit at the apex of a pantheon, the flow of worshippers contingent on your favour. If Meng Po willed it, no one would leave and those who escaped Diyu would be worthless to the gods, their souls annihilated by the memory of torture. Yet despite that, Meng Po upholds a bewildering austerity, her only vanity an insistence that her chignon is perfect as the silver of a priest’s cross. Without exception, she is only ever glimpsed in peasant garb of deepest ink, woven of rough wool.
Once, I asked her why. Meng Po had said it was so that the dead will not be surprised by how quickly old will come again.
“He was a god once. When the world was kinder to both itself and the ideas it worshipped.” She hobbles to me, stooping to stretch a hand to the apparition. To my bewilderment, it nuzzles its snout into her open palm.
“Begging your pardon, lady, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t Sobek. The Lord of Crocodiles, last I saw of him, was alive and possessed of a hearty appetite.”
Meng Po shakes her head, scratching a path from the creature’s nostrils up to the ridges that frame its sightless eyes. Unperturbed, it continues to croon. “That thing you saw wasn’t Sobek.”
“Sure looked like a giant crocodile god.”
“Manners, Rupert, or I will make a necklace of your bones.” Ox-Head lets it be known that he does not appreciate my impertinence by pincering my head between two colossal fingers. I’ve wondered for a while if he might be sweet on the old woman. Age is no factor among immortals, after all. And though the compulsion to wisecrack does stir, Ox-Head’s application of pressure on my temples is more than sufficient to neuter it.
I swallow instead. “Got it.”
“Perhaps I should be more clear. It was Sobek. Now, it is a husk, emptied by whatever it was that had taken root in its flesh, the last remnants of the god evicted and sent down here with you.”
“Wait. Why? What’s the point? Are the Egyptians working together with whatever the hell—ow, ow, ow, Guan Yin save me from your besotted ass, you stupid—ow.”
“I worry sometimes that my speech is too anachronistic for this epoch. You keep misunderstanding me.” Meng Po brings her head down, presses her mouth to the brow of the crocodile, a gesture so tender that I find myself inexplicably lonely for a mother whose face I no longer recall. That we might all meet our ends this way, safe in death’s care, secure in the thought there would be no more pain. I envy him. “Let me rephrase. He is not here for any nefarious reasons. He is here to die.”
