Ari took a fresh bite out of his roast pork and continued to talk, generating a fine spray of spittle and fragments of flesh. “I would have sold you to some son of a bitch in the slums.”
“I kind of gathered that.”
“No hard feelings, though, right?”
“None on my part. Did Anubis ever pay you for me?”
Fat Ari swallowed what he was chewing. “Did he fuck. That psycho bastard never pays for anything he takes a fancy to. Claims it’s his divine right to help himself.”
A number of passersby overheard Fat Ari’s heretical last statement and looked around in horror, but the slave dealer didn’t seem to care. His position in the hierarchy must have been so well entrenched that he believed he had nothing to fear. At that moment the trumpet fanfare rang out again, and the same booming voice intoned the countdown. “Zero minus thirty minutes and counting.”
Semple supposed she ought to be making her way back to her assigned seat in the royal box. It hardly made sense to antagonize Zipporah by showing up late for the bomb. Right at that moment, though, she would have been quite happy to stay and gossip with Fat Ari. With the possible exception of his table manners, Semple found that she was starting actually to take a liking to the man. He might have been an overbearing bully, without consideration for anything but his profit margins, but at least he was honest about what he was; he seemed free of the usual Necropolis delusions and affectations. Raising the leg of pork to his mouth, he treated Semple to a calculating look. “In fact, I figure you probably owe me one.”
Semple planted a hand on her hip and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Oh yes? And how do you work that out?”
“If it hadn’t been for me, you might still be rotting in the city jail.”
“That’s one way of looking at it, but I’m not sure it would be my way.”
“So if I was to ask you to put a helpful word in the doghead’s ear, you wouldn’t be willing to do it for me?”
“That would depend on the word and how I was feeling at the time.”
Fat Ari looked at Semple as though she were a major disappointment to him. “You’re not forgetting where you came from, are you?”
Semple was about to tell Ari that he wouldn’t believe where she came from, when she suddenly noticed that the crisp, slightly charred skin of his leg of pork was decorated with an indistinct but unmistakable tattoo, a faded scarlet heart above three hieroglyphs. Shock made her speak without thinking. “What the hell are you eating?”
Fat Ari looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. “Roast teenager, gorgeous. That’s the one redeeming feature of doghead’s compulsory parties. There’s always some human on the menu.”
Suddenly Semple’s mind flew back to her recent feast of marinated mystery meat. Why the hell hadn’t she paid attention to Aimee back in Golgotha? “I’ve also heard he encourages the practice of cannibalism.”
***
“I think I’m going to have to leave you here.”
Jim looked at the mammal in amazement. “What are you talking about? I thought we were partners. I thought we were sticking together for the duration.”
The final half mile to the old spooky mansion in the swamp had been the hardest part of Jim’s whole Jurassic journey. He had to stop and rest four times, and it was during the last that the mammal made his startling announcement. Jim’s immediate thought was that he’d done something to offend the creature. “Do we have a problem?”
The mammal shook his head. His eyes were sad. “No problem. But I smell something that makes me think I ought to make myself scarce.”
Jim looked around in alarm. “Smell? What do you smell?”
“VC.”
“VC?”
“Viet Cong.”
Jim couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You smell Viet Cong in a Jurassic swamp?”
“There are groups of them all over this swamp. They seem to like it here.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I’m not. I figure either they’ve made a camp close to the house, or they’ve been hired on to guard the place.”
Jim was at a loss for words. “Why would the Viet Cong want to live in a Jurassic swamp?”
The mammal gestured with his paw, the equivalent of a shrug for an animal with no noticeable shoulders. “You should know by now there’s no accounting for what folks do in the Afterlife. I mean, look at me.”
Jim thought about this. “If there’s VC around, maybe I should get out of here, too.”
“I doubt they’ll bother you. They only mix it up with the ghost grunts.”
“Are there U.S. soldiers here, too?”
The mammal nodded. “I’ve never seen them, but they leave their crap all over. Wherever they bivouac there’s a mess of cigarette packs, Coke bottles, empty Spam cans, and used needles. Of course, they could be fabrications, set dressing for the VC. Or they could both be third-party creations.”
Jim felt bemused. “Why in hell would anyone in their right mind want to reproduce the Vietnam War in among the dinosaurs?”
The small mammal’s lip curled. “Like everyone here’s in their right mind?”
Jim sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, but why are you so worried about them?”
“They might eat me. The story is, they look on my kind as a special delicacy.”
***
Later, in retrospect, Semple was willing to accept that she may have overreacted to the sudden confrontation with cannibalism in Necropolis, but right then, in the shocking heat of that moment, revulsion boiled and overtook her reason. Fat Ari, however, was so engrossed in his disgusting snack that he failed to notice the expression of pure horror on Semple’s face, and he continued to talk with his mouth full. “You should try the marinated infant in peanut sauce they’re serving inside.”
Semple’s horror doubled. Infant? Bile rose in her throat; choking it back, she spun away from Fat Ari, who looked up and blinked. “What’s the matter with you?”
She was too near gagging to answer. Fat Ari stared after her in confusion as she stumbled blindly across the royal enclosure with a fist pressed to her mouth. Her eyes watered and she had trouble forcing the unholy contents of her stomach to remain where they were. The Necropolis elite stared at her curiously as she staggered past, but no one spoke or tried to intercept her, and most turned back to what they had been doing, assuming that she was nothing more than an early emotional drunk. It was only when she approached one of the guarded entrances to the enclosure that anyone did anything to arrest her mindless flight. One of the huge Nubians, assigned to keep the common herd from mingling with the God-King and his aristocracy, lowered his spear as Semple approached, barring her way with its polished wood shaft. “You can’t go out there, my lady.”
Under more normal conditions, Semple might have been intimidated by the Nubian, seven feet tall and rocklike in his muscular perfection. Now the only thing that could replace Semple’s unthinking horror was unseeing rage. Her voice came out somewhere between a sob and a scream. “I’m Semple McPherson and I can do exactly what I want. And right now I want out! I want away from all these fucking cannibals!”
At a loss, the Nubian decided the best thing was to repeat himself. “You really can’t go out there, my lady.”
“I’m the Lord Anubis’s concubine. I’m his fucking favorite. Are you intending to stop me?”
The spear remained in place, but the Nubian shook his head. “I can’t stop you from going out there. I will have to stop you, though, if you try to come back in. Admittance to the royal enclosure is strictly according to barcode. One may only enter the royal enclosure from outside if one’s barcode is on the list. And obviously . . . ”
He nodded in the direction of Semple’s forehead. The goddamned barcode again. That thing was going to dog her every move until she was out of Necropolis entirely. But that was okay. Suddenly resolved, she snarled at the Nubian, “Remove that spear and let me pass.”