“Is it my imagination, or are things getting out of hand?”
“My young friend, things have always been out of hand. It’s just that, now the Afterlife is so goddamned crowded, we tend to notice it more.” Doc gestured to the boat’s mooring rope. “Cast off that line, will you?”
Jim did as he was told and then settled into the seat next to Doc. As soon as they were under way and heading out into the open water of the swamp, Doc brought out his nautical bottle of bourbon, took a pull on it, and handed it to Jim. “Have a drink, young Morrison. I think we got you out of there not a moment too soon. I shudder to think what might have come to pass if you and yourself had come face-to-face.”
Jim gratefully accepted the bottle. “There is one other thing that’s still puzzling me.”
Doc adjusted the boat’s course to avoid coming too close to a group of foraging diplodocuses. “What’s that?”
“What was the story on the guy covered in bees?”
Doc blinked as though the story were stupidly obvious. “He’s a guy covered in bees. What else? A lot of people keep one around.”
“why”
Doc looked at Jim as if he were a total moron. “For the honey, of course.”
He don’t say nothing.
Semple found herself spinning, half flying, feet lifted from the ground, tossed about in a violent, superheated vortex of dust, debris, and contorted figures; figures that were once human but now nothing more than radiating, dull red skeletons beneath smokelike flesh that barely retained its humanoid shape. Semple was probably screaming, but it was impossible to tell. No single voice, even her own, could rise above the howling cacophony that shrieked across the complete audio spectrum like the seismic howl of a world in cataclysm. Even the sliver of rationality that remained at the deepest core of her identity was filled with a bitter, all-consuming rage. “You really managed to do it this time, didn’t you, you deranged fuck?”
The only thing that could have satisfied that tiny, articulate part of herself would have been learning that Anubis had so overdone his atom bomb test that he himself was now suffering in the same red-mist agony. She prayed, with a fervor worthy of Aimee in her stride, that his royal enclosure, with its cloth-of-gold hangings, its tasteless statues, simpering courtiers, and cannibal snacks, was being shredded in the radioactive maelstrom, that the towers of his despicable city would also soon be melting and burning.
At the same time, Semple’s fury at Anubis was only a momentary distraction from her concern about what might actually be happening to her, and what lay on the other side of the burning nuclear hurricane. The all-consuming power with which it ripped at the very fabric of Necropolis surely had to presage a fate infinitely worse than just a return to the Great Double Helix. Semple’s fear was that she was plunging through an event window that, for all practical purposes, would amount to a death beyond death, perhaps even to the long-rumored outer reaches of Limbo.
“Whatever nightmare I’m going into, I just hope you’re going with me, you dogheaded bastard.”
And yet there was no nightmare awaiting Semple, who merely tumbled anticlimactically to the burning sand as a rude, almost insultingly mundane afterflurry of earth tremor and hot wind sent her sprawling on her hands and knees. The storm of heat and dust and noise was over leaving her with ringing ears, a feeling of having been both flayed and roasted alive, but otherwise intact. The gold collar had become so hot that it was painful to touch; she tore it off and flung it angrily away from her. Moments earlier, it had been a priceless prize. Now it was worthless and irrelevant.
“Damn you and everything connected with you!”
The impossible had occurred; she had survived the atomic assault and if, right there and then, she could have expunged all trace of Anubis and his loathsome domain from her memory and consciousness, she would have done it. The mess that his grandiose folly had created was all around her. Red-ocher dust hung in the air, mingling with the smoke from dozens of small fires, cutting visibility to just a matter of yards. The once-garish flags and banners that had previously fluttered triumphant now flapped weakly in the last eddies of the explosion like burned and mutilated bats. What had once been a crowd was now a scattered profusion of bodies, like dry fallen leaves in the wake of a gale. They lay amid damaged, upturned pushcarts, buckled seats, and tangles of scorched draperies ripped from the viewing stands, and crawled from beneath other wreckage too blackened and twisted to be recognizable. Some almost immediately started sitting up, looking around, eyes glazed with uncomprehending shock, amazed as Semple that they were still in one piece. Others even tried to pick themselves up and rise unsteadily to their feet. Although their clothes were in tatters or ripped away entirely and they were caked with a combination of desert dust and a fine green-black atomic soot, most of those who were already moving looked to be only superficially the worse for the A-bomb trauma. On the other hand, there were quite a number who weren’t moving at all. Next to her a motionless figure lay face down, apparently not breathing, so begrimed that Semple was unable to tell whether it was a man or a woman.
Suddenly the figure started to twitch. Its body was wrenched by an arrhythmic series of spasms. It let out a wrenching groan and slowly began to curl into a fetal ball. Something strange and unpleasant began to happen to its skin. At first Semple thought it was merely the coating of dust flaking off and causing a tracery of hairline cracks to spread rapidly across its torso and back; it was only after a moment, to her horror, that she realized the unfortunate’s actual skin was cracking. Worse still, as the fissures widened, a thick and stinking liquid, the brown color of organic decay, began to ooze from within. As Semple watched, both mesmerized and nauseated, the entire body began wetly to disintegrate. What had once been living flesh melted in loathsome ropes and skeins of goo, away from a brittle ivory-yellow skeleton. Despite its obvious viscosity, this body slime quickly soaked into the sand until all that remained was a dark and foully septic oil slick surrounding a collapsing skeleton.
Semple’s first instinct was to get away from this hideousness. She crab-scrabbled backward, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the sickening remains. After gaining a swift two or three yards, she angled her legs under her and sprang to her feet. Without thinking exactly where she might go, she turned and looked for a route of escape, only to find the same process of accelerated decomposition had more bodies in its disgusting grip. They jerked and contorted as they melted like vampires in the sun, creating a tableau like something from an especially lurid and gruesome fifteenth century painting, with a stench like that of a charnel house.
Not everyone, though, was coming apart. At least for the moment the ones on their feet seemed okay; cut, bruised, and battered, maybe, but definitely in one piece and with their bodily fluids just where they ought to be. Like Semple, they stared at what was happening to their erstwhile companions at the Divine Atom Bomb Festival with horrified revulsion. Had they been spared this hideous fate, or was the same thing about to happen to them? Semple looked down at herself. She was inconveniently naked, but otherwise she seemed intact. What had happened? How could it be that some turned to liquefying mulch and others didn’t? Was it a matter of mind-set? Or were the ones oozing on the ground merely reproduction crowd fillers, while those who remained unaffected were true entities from the lifeside?
Just as Semple was gaining confidence, the first of the standing figures began to melt, quickly followed by a second and a third. Flesh streamed down their bodies like wax cascading down a blowtorched candle. Semple was suddenly and frighteningly certain she could feel something happening inside her own body. It was like a bizarre and disturbing tingle from what she could only describe as the place where flesh clung to bones. Her response was to shout in loud, angry defiance.