“And others went on a mescal jag, gunned down the groom and raped the bride and her bridesmaids and all of the rest?”
The mammal grinned and nodded. “You got it.”
Jim and the Mammal with No Name were picking their way over the uncertain dry ground above the water level of the Jurassic bayous. While the mammal told its long and involved story, Jim was content to make the right responsive noises while gazing out at the new world in which he found himself. The worst of the mist had been burned off by a white sun that blazed in a mushroom-pink sky, and now he could see a great deal more of his new prehistoric environment. At the horizon, no less than three volcanoes belched smoke from a range of jagged, snaggletoothed mountains. Closer up, the place looked a lot like the Florida Everglades, though the plant life was further back down the evolutionary trail. The resemblance was, however, enough to remind Jim of all the trouble that had befallen him in Florida. Miami was where they’d arrested him for allegedly flashing his dick at the audience. The straight truth was, Jim couldn’t remember whether he’d done it or not. He’d been drunk and tripping, flying at altitudes so high that, if asked to testify on oath, he couldn’t have sworn in all honesty that he’d even been wearing pants, let alone deliberately unzipped them.
A dozen or more large herbivorous dinosaurs seemed content to loiter, partially submerged, grazing on trees and bushes, while other, smaller reptiles splashed in the shallows. To Jim’s great relief, none of them showed anything but the most casual interest in him and the Mammal with No Name, and made no attempt to approach them. What bothered him more were the pterodactyls that circled lazily overhead. Although he suspected the flying lizards were meat eaters, the mammal assured him that they posed no threat. “Their eyesight’s so rotten, they never go after anything smaller than a horse.”
Jim didn’t find this as reassuring as the mammal had intended. The little creature could well have been taking a speciescentric view of the situation. The pterosaurs might not have been able to see a furry little ground dweller, but Jim was considerably larger; a pterodactyl with decent vision might tag him as a tasty morsel. And so he scanned the sky to make sure none of the flapping leather-wings was drawing a bead on him, and felt a lot happier when their route took them under the shelter of spreading palms and conifers rather than along the exposed edge of open water.
Although the reptiles mercifully kept their distance and their own counsel, the same could not be said for the millions of insects that flourished in the Jurassic. Great dragonflies, with wings spanning eighteen inches or more, scared the hell out of Jim by buzzing him at eye level; only when they failed to follow through with anything worse was he able to relax. The clouds of mosquitos, gnats, and midges, on the other hand, took a great deal more getting used to. They dogged the steps of Jim and the mammal every step of the way. They didn’t seem to bother the mammal, with its thick furry hide, but by the time the sun had reached its zenith they were making Jim miserable. One settled on his exposed left forearm and he squished it angrily. As he wiped away the smear of blood, he smiled grimly. “Steven Spielberg isn’t going to reconstitute any DNA from you, you son of a bitch.”
The blood made him take yet another look at the pterodactyls aloft, and when he did, he noticed something decidedly unusual. The sun was moving visibly across the sky. Jim glanced down at the small mammal. “How long are the days in this place?”
The mammal looked puzzled. “How long should they be? Same length as anywhere else. The Earth isn’t spinning any quicker, far as I know.”
Jim stopped and peered into the sun, shading his eyes and squinting like Clint Eastwood at high noon. “Then why is it I can see the sun moving?”
The mammal stopped in his tracks. “Uh-oh.”
This was the third time that Jim had heard a warning “uh-oh” in much too narrow a time frame. Saladeen of the puffball Afro and jewel-encrusted teeth had uttered the first two, all too recently, when one of the Voodoo Mysteres had appeared in the distance beyond Doc Holliday’s town. Now Jim could only guess what was coming next. “Trouble?”
“We may have a slight problem with time.”
***
Semple had known that Anubis’s nuclear fireworks display was being promoted as a big deal, but the size of the deal exceeded all her expectations. The actual detonation, as it turned out, was billed as the culmination of a twenty-four-hour Divine Atom Bomb Festival, throughout which Anubis intended to bask in the full glory of his own ego. The test itself was to take place in the desert some miles outside the city, but prior to that the God-King, his court, harem, retainers, praetorian guard, and half the Army of Necropolis would travel to the test site in spectacular procession, followed by more or less the entire population of the city: a public holiday had been declared to allow them to marvel at the triumph of their glorious monarch. Anubis, as fond of food as he was, had ensured that the entire event would be lavishly catered, all the way from the wine and delicacies that would be available during the course of the procession, through the picnic that would precede the detonation, to the massive al fresco feast and bacchanal that would follow.
Before Zipporah outlined the itinerary of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival, Semple hadn’t been aware that Necropolis was even surrounded by desert. Nor had she known that the environment extended so far that it would take a full two hours for Anubis to progress in beatific splendor to the city limits. She was accustomed to Afterlife environments that were as superficial as movie sets, all facade, illusion, and trompe l’oeil; a construction that encompassed two hundred square miles of downtown slums and suburbs took her completely by surprise. She disliked the dog-god no less, but she had to hand it to him for going all the way with his megalopolis. It was only when the procession actually got under way, and she saw both the slums and the suburbs for herself, that she finally grasped the extent of Anubis’s obsession. Like Aimee’s Heaven, much of the city was a scrapbook of its mad lord’s favorite things.
As was only befitting His Godhead, Anubis along with his immediate retinue was to ride in a special parade vehicle the size of a Greyhound bus, of a design that combined elements of an art deco railcar, Cleopatra’s royal barge, and a spacecraft from the Alex Raymond Flash Gordon comics. On the morning of the festival, as she and the other wives, concubines, and handmaidens walked through the huge and echoing hangar this preposterous craft shared with the God-King’s fleet of dirigibles, the chatter of idle conversation dwindled to an awed silence. Either none of the other women had ever seen the monster before in all its gold-plated glory, or it had been specially constructed and decorated for the Divine Atom Bomb Festival.
Anubis himself, who would, of course, be the last to arrive and board the craft, was obviously to take pride of place, seated on a throne on a raised quarterdeck at the stern of the machine, attended by the ever-present Nubian guards and handmaidens wafting long-handled fans and bearing the obligatory trays of culinary delicacies. The members of the harem would ride in front of their lord and master in the well of the craft, to gaze up at him adoringly. The prow of the ship, shaped like the vulture head of the lesser god Horus, was occupied by another squad of guards, police in full dress uniform, armed with far more serious weapons than the spears and scimitars of the ceremonial Nubians. Their heavy machine guns were capable of unleashing instant destruction on any section of the crowd who might prove threatening, unruly, or impious.