“No!”
She would not let herself go like that. She would not allow herself to be reduced to a skull, a rib cage, and a stain. She would hold her body together with the last measure of willpower she could muster. She concentrated, totally focused on locking in the integrity of her physical self, attempting to exert control over each cell, each engineered structure of bone and sinew, each circuital continuation of her nervous system, and each and every vein and artery down to the narrowest microcapillary. On the lifeside, such complete awareness and command of one’s being would have been beyond anyone but the most advanced shaman; in the Afterlife, however, where so much of a person was a deliberate material construct, it was mercifully much easier, although the effort still involved an exhausting expenditure of energy.
On every side, survivors were divided into those who could halt the disintegration and those who couldn’t. Some continued to melt, while others, as far as Semple could tell from the intense frowns on their begrimed faces, appeared to be doing the same as she. Within a matter of just two or three minutes, it was all over. Those who failed to hold themselves intact were gone. Only the strong maintained their shape. The last skeleton collapsed into the last putrid puddle on the sand, and then there were no more meltings. The whittled-down survivors peered around at each other, almost reluctant to believe that they were safe, afraid to jinx their comparative good fortune.
In the next few minutes, however, new troubles emerged. New and very different figures appeared in the lingering remains of the dust storm, not wandering dazedly, but moving with purpose and precision. Phalanxes of Anubis’s guards, both Nubians armed with spears and regular Necropolis rocketeer police with flack jackets over torn and singed dress uniforms, and carrying far more formidable full-auto riot guns, advanced through the dust and debris.
Semple’s stomach clenched. If these cops and Nubians were on their feet, disciplined and organized, the atomic explosion, far from razing Necropolis as she had hoped, must have done little more than muss the hair of those within the royal enclosure. She wondered if Anubis, his harem, or any of his court had fallen victim to the hideous flesh-melt. She passionately hoped that the dog-god was now nothing more than a canine skull, an oily skid mark, but she knew in her heart he wasn’t. Anubis might be one of the most demented psychotics since Ivan the Terrible, but she couldn’t pretend he didn’t have the chops to survive. The real question was, what the hell did the cops and the Nubians think they were doing? The obvious assumption was that they had arrived to provide what aid and comfort they could to those who had survived the Divine Atom Bomb, but Semple somehow doubted that. Aid and comfort were simply not the God-King’s style.
This was dramatically reinforced when a survivor, still confused from the effort of saving himself from the meltdown, stumbled blindly into a Nubian, who promptly ran him through with his gold-tipped spear. Nearby survivors reeled back in terror.
“What the fuck did you do that for?”
Outrage outweighed judgment among one knot of men who had witnessed the stabbing. They started angrily toward the line of mixed authority. “Are you bastards out of your fucking minds?”
No less than three riot guns roared into life, and the knot of bystanders was cut down in its tracks. For a moment, survivors stood stunned. What had they done? What was the slaughter all about? Why had these men, who they thought were the spearhead of some relief effort, suddenly turned on them? Then self-preservation took over. Whatever the reasons, the only hope of escaping was to run.
Semple had some ideas of her own, but she didn’t stick around to test them. Her instinctive suspicion was that Anubis had gone completely insane after the nuclear malfunction, and ordered all those who had witnessed the debacle to be put to the sword or the machine gun. His technician-priests had almost certainly been executed already. To avoid her own extermination she scattered along with the rest, running swift zigzags as gunfire crashed out behind her and the wounded began screaming. For a few moments Semple sought cover to catch her breath, sheltering from the wild bursts of random shooting behind a solid copper boiler from the computer of a burned-out pushcart. Then the Nubians struck up a rhythmic vocal cadence, stamping their feet and calling the moves as they massed in a curved horns-of-the-bull formation. Once their blood was sufficiently up, they lowered their spears and advanced on the fleeing remains of the crowd at a measured lope. The atomic test site was about to become another kind of killing field.
Semple knew she wouldn’t stay hidden for long. The mass of Nubians were sweeping forward, gathering speed, systematically impaling everything in their path, lifting bodies high on their spears while the rocket-man cops gunned down any stragglers that they might have missed. Semple broke cover and started to run, unpleasantly certain that the only possible escape led directly out into the desert, straight toward where the mushroom cloud stood tall and mockingly proud, gray-white and tinged with pink, surrounded by an aura of tiny glowing subparticles.
***
Doc Holliday waved a proprietary hand across the landscape. The Jurassic swamp was now far behind them, the sun was up, and the dinosaurs and weird scenes in the old mansion were diminishing in substance like the black gossamer of a fading nightmare. “Behold the Great River, my boy. Some will tell you that this is the genuine River Styx, the Central Transit of the True Hereafter. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. You’ve never happened to find yourself on the Great River before, have you?”
Doc had decided that Jim needed to rest up after his trek through the swamp, and he had taken the helm of the boat while Jim lazed on the seat cushions in the stern of the launch, drinking and reflecting on how Doc cut something of an incongruous maritime figure, even in the context of this putative River Styx. His filthy, swamp-stained duster coat had been discarded, and he stood behind the wooden wheel in his slouch hat, ruffled shirt, and brocade vest, the skirt of his long gunman’s frock coat whipping in the morning slipstream, as though he’d been displaced from another movie entirely. The elegant motor launch, with its varnished timbers and brass hardware, made a brisk twenty knots, its bow slicing a perfect V wave in the untroubled surface of the water as Doc carefully maintained a course a little to the left of the river’s exact center. Jim took a drink, silently conceding that the legendary pistoleer could maintain a polished dandy’s assurance and a stoned killer’s certainty, no matter what the situation. He shook his head in answer to Doc’s question.
“I can’t remember being on the river, but then again, I still don’t remember too much about too much. For all I know, I could have been running up and down this stretch of Styx like a full-time pirate.”
Jim was growing a little irritated with the mess that was his memory. It had been bad enough when he’d been traveling alone, avoiding man-eating plants or fending off alien proctologists. Now that he seemed, for the present, to be running with Doc Holliday, he was forced to play novice to Doc’s all-knowing mentor. It made for an irksome inequality in their relationship.
“They don’t have too many pirates in this stretch of Styx. They mainly stay downstream, in the delta beyond the swamps, where the pickings are riper. This bit of the Great River is mainly for relaxing and admiring.”
At least Jim was starting to feel alcohol-relaxed, which made Doc’s geography lesson a little more palatable. He’d discovered that Doc had an entire marine cocktail cabinet in the form of a roomy ice chest stuffed with chilled beverages. With a tall green condensation-wet liter of Chinese Tiger beer augmenting his original bourbon, Jim was also doing his fair share of admiring. As Richard Nixon might have said, it certainly was a Great River, a great blue-graygreen, planet-scale artery of slow-flowing water, worthy of landscape paintings in styles from Rousseau to Turner. It flowed broad and smooth, with darker, moss-green rainforest overhanging each spacious bank, combining all the best features of the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Mekong, and the Zambezi. Somewhere inland, in the deep jungle, distant drums beat with a hollow and languorous baritone sensuality. Not drums of warfare or conflict, not the kind of drums that brought a man out in a cold sweat when they stopped, these were the drums of a slow ecstatic ritual in the name of some benignly sexual earth goddess who could make her followers understand that the Afterlife, far from being a shadowy projection of the mortality that had gone before, was actually a stripping of limitations, a removal of blinders and restraints.