“So raise your hooves.”
“I can’t do that. If I did, I’d fall over. I’m a bloody quadruped, you moron.”
The cherub brandished the Magnum in Mr. Thomas’s face. “Don’t you call me a moron.”
Mr. Thomas instantly realized that insulting anyone holding the most powerful handgun in the world, even if that someone was only three feet tall, was a moronic act. “Listen, kid, I’m sorry. I’m suffering from a lot of stress, you see?”
The cherub stuck to the basics. “Quadruped or not, you’re my prisoner.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? All this has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I’m an innocent bystander, aren’t I? A noncombatant, look you. I’m not even supposed to be here.”
“You’ll have to tell that to Bernadette. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a prisoner.”
The cherub turned. Bernadette and her red nuns were coming down the corridor. The cherub gestured to Bernadette. “There’s another one over here, Mighty Hammer.”
***
As Bernadette came through the arch and into the chamber, followed by her armed cohorts and bound prisoners, one of whom was a loudly protesting goat, Doc and Aura-Lee continued to stand with their guns mutually trained on each other. Doc knew that the arrival of the main body of the insurgents totally changed the dynamics of the confrontation, and the new odds were definitely not in his favor. Doc wasn’t about to admit this, though, or even acknowledge it in word or deed. Two dozen guns might have been pointed at him, but he was quite prepared to bluff to the last. Jim and Semple, being completely unarmed, knew they had little choice but to go wherever Doc’s lead might take them. Semple had no illusions of receiving any mercy at the hands of Bernadette.
As Jim pretty much expected, Doc started his game with an openly reckless lack of concern. He looked past Aura-Lee and called out cheerfully to Bernadette, “How are you doing, Trixie? Aura-Lee tells me you’re calling yourself the Hammer of God these days. Do you really think God needs a hammer?”
Bernadette colored and cast about for an angry retort, but Doc pressed blithely on. “Is that Donna I see there with her head all shaved and toting that M-16? And Lisa and Linda and Matilida, and Charlotte at the back there trying to hide her face? Seems to me we’ve got ourselves a real reunion, all my whores who went holy.”
Bernadette finally found her voice.
“What the hell are you doing here, John Holliday?”
“John Holliday, is it? You can’t call me Doc anymore? After all the good times we spent together, way back whenever it was?”
Bernadette flushed all the way to the top of her shaved head. The other ranks were looking to her for guidance, but even with a multitude of guns at her back it wasn’t easy to confront Doc Holliday’s glib and perverse charm. “Good times. You can talk about good times after all the awful things you forced us to do?”
“Isn’t your memory getting a little distorted here, Trixie, my darling? I don’t recall anyone being forced to do anything.”
“I asked you what you were doing here, Doc.”
“Doing here? Why, Trixie, I’m hardly doing anything here. I just happened to stop by on my way out of Hell with my good friends Jim Morrison and Semple McPherson.”
At the mention of Semple’s name, Aimee immediately let out a wail. “Semple, do something, for God’s sake. She’s going to crucify us.”
An angel clapped a hand over Aimee’s mouth, cutting off her cries. Semple didn’t move; she was too focused on the interchange between Doc and Bernadette. Bernadette took a step closer to Doc. “Maybe you should have stayed in Hell.”
As Bernadette spoke, the environment shook once more, this time violently, and with a deep and primally disturbing sub-bass rumble that threatened to liquefy the brain of everyone present. As the shaking escalated to a bouncing side-to-side motion, a number of people were thrown to the ground, and wide fissures appeared in the floor. An angel fluttered his wings, attempting to maintain his balance, and a red nun dropped her Uzi, causing it to discharge and accidentally waste two of her comrades. As Jim braced his legs, struggling to stay on his feet, he saw a way to back Doc’s play. Capitalizing on the fact that victorious euphoria was rapidly being replaced by a superstitious dread, he shouted so all the nuns could hear, “It doesn’t look like God’s too pleased with what you’ve been up to.”
The shaking subsided slightly and Semple took this as her cue to step up beside Doc and face Bernadette. She took a more practical tack. “As the creator of this place, I think I should warn you that it’s about to come completely apart.”
Even Bernadette put her theocratic power play to one side in the face of the emergency. “What do we do?”
“My best bet would be to pool our resources and wind-walk the fuck out of here before we’re all toast.”
Semple’s expression was bleak. “With our resources, the only place we’re going is Heaven.”
***
Jim had never seen Aimee’s Heaven in its overtime Walt Disney glory, and the damage and decay only caused him to wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever have wanted to live there. Most of the buildings were now burned-out, smoke-scarred ruins. The great lawn was plowed up by shell craters, and a World War II vintage Nazi Tiger tank, crudely painted a garish scarlet, stood abandoned on Aimee’s favorite terrace overlooking the lake, where it had apparently been shelling the bejesus out of the Great Cloister with its turret-mounted eighty-eight. Shells and mortars had shattered the trees on the headland where virgins once danced, and reduced the Maxfield Parrish temple to a pile of rubble. Dead bluebirds littered the ground, where they’d expired with beaks agape and feet in the air. Weird mutated Bambis lurked in the ruins, five-legged and two-headed, Siamese twins and ones who looked perfectly normal except for foam at the edges of their nostrils and a distant rabid stare. The lake itself was now nothing more than a gray-green expanse of dead, polluted water with the flotsam of conflict floating on its oily surface, while over everything lowered a threatening sky the color of elderly mold.
As Jim got to his feet after falling heavily out of the end of the wind-walk, he looked round in total disbelief. “What the fuck is this place, some kind of physical representation of clinical depression?” He glanced at one of Bernadette’s angels who had emerged right beside him. “This is what you were fighting over?”
Just to complicate matters even further, the mass wind-walk from Semple’s imploding environment had turned out to be a major disaster. Jim had been one of the lucky ones. He’d only materialized in Heaven a couple of feet off the ground and suffered nothing worse than a mildly bruising fall. A half dozen of Bernadette’s nuns had been so tightly bunched up when they made their exit that they had merged in transit into a hideous composite of limbs, heads, and tattered pieces of bloody garment protruding from a shapeless mass of amorphous flesh like a joint nightmare of Francis Bacon and John Carpenter. Doc had emerged close to this abhorrent mess of human meat and was staring at it with grim revulsion. The heads and mouths that remained on the outside of the quivering mound of tissue started to scream in unison. “Finish us! Finish us!”
Doc turned and beckoned quickly to Bernadette. “Are you going to get your people to destroy that thing or do I have to shoot it myself?”
“Shoot it?” Bernadette looked groggy and was having difficulty grasping what was going on. She might even have been regretting her grab for power.
Doc glared angrily at her. “Yes, shoot it. Or blow it up with a grenade. Put the poor bastards out of their misery one way or another.”
The screaming went on. “Finish us! Finish us!”
Bernadette was close to panic. “I can’t waste my own people.”
Doc’s voice was tinged with contempt. “It goes with the territory. Put up or shut up.”