“GGGGAAAAARRRK!”
The dome swayed dangerously. Jesus lurched sideways on the couch, Semple grabbed for it to stop herself from falling, and even Mr. Thomas staggered. Jesus’ hands flew deftly over the keypad of the remote and the environment quickly righted itself. The supposed messiah grinned. “Now he’s good and mad. There’ll be no stopping him after that.”
Mr. Thomas peered up at the screen. “Mad or not, they look like they’re going to have another try at slowing him down. There’s more aircraft coming up.”
“How many?”
“Five.”
“What kind?”
The goat squinted at the forward section of the screen. “They look like Sabre Jets to me, or maybe MIG-15s. Certainly Korean War vintage.”
“So now we’re getting a bit more serious.”
The handful of jets came at Gojiro low and fast, racing across the flat desert in a perfect V formation, presumably hoping that, by staying low, they would avoid the worst of his radioactive halitosis. A thousand yards from the target, the lead plane lifted and fired a pair of wing-mounted rockets. This second attack rocked Gojiro, worse even than the exploding Zeppelin. Again he was hurt and the dome reeled as he roared in pain.
“GGGGRRRRAAAAARRRGGGHHH!”
Mr. Thomas voiced a concerned warning. “I think the Big Green’s sustained a chest wound.”
“Is it bad?”
“I don’t think so.”
Even though red blood ran down his chest, contrasting sharply with the green of his wrinkled hide, the great reptile didn’t appear to be weakened in any way. He seized the lead jet by the tail and, using it like a club, smashed down the next two in the formation. The fourth jet managed to loose its rockets, but the pilot must have panicked, because they flashed past wide, leaving white vapor trails. Gojiro turned and loosed his destructive breath at this and also the fifth and final jet as they screamed past him at head height. As two explosions created billows of black smoke, Jesus again grinned like a fiend. “He can be real fast when he wants to be.”
The dome was bounced around again as Gojiro performed an impromptu victory dance and Jesus laughed out loud. “I think that’s all they wrote.”
Mr. Thomas shook his head. “There’s something else coming at us.”
Jesus’ face straightened. “What?”
“It looks like a Flying Wing.”
Jesus looked puzzled. “What can they hope to achieve by that?”
“We may have a cultural reference going down here.”
Jesus’ puzzlement deepened. “Cultural reference?”
“Remember the George Pal version of War of the Worlds?”
“Of course.”
“In the movie, the Flying Wing was used to drop the atom bomb on the invading Martians.”
“You think Anubis would use an atom bomb on us? We’re already real close to the city suburbs. He’d kill a lot of his own people.”
Semple supplied the answer to this. “That wouldn’t bother Anubis at all. Can Gojiro survive a nuclear attack?”
Mr. Thomas looked deeply unhappy. “I very much doubt it.” Jesus was also worried. “In the movie, the Martians neutralized the bomb with their energy shields.”
Semple didn’t like the sound of this. “Do we have energy shields?”
Jesus looked up angrily. “What do you think? We’re in a fucking giant dinosaur, not a starship.”
***
The womb burst wetly and Jim found himself crawling across the overgrown, stone-flagged floor of a ruined temple. Tropical rain fell in leaden sheets, and he was immediately soaked to the skin. Miniature rivers followed the cracks and irregularities in the paving, with tiny torrents washing down the accumulated debris of leaves and twigs. Beyond the broken walls, napalm exploded, and the jungle burned despite the downpour. Helicopters clattered overhead and a stream of tracer cut through the smoke and steam of combat. Silhouetted against the explosions, a huge smiling Buddha had half its face blown away. The skeletal figure of a man in ragged olive drab squatted in the flame-shadows with his back to one of the broken walls. An M16 and a steel helmet were beside him and his poncho was pulled forward over his head to shelter him from the rain. Leaning forward with rapt concentration, under cover of the tented poncho, he was cooking up three white paramedic morphine pills in a blackened spoon over the flame of a candle in a K-ration can. A disposable syringe was clamped between his teeth. When he saw Jim crawling toward him, he fixed him with a hollow-eyed stare. “You stay the fuck away from me, okay? Fuck this up and I’ll cut you in half. It’s the last of my dope.”
Before Jim could say anything, Dr. Hypodermic came out from behind the Buddha, impossibly tall, impossibly thin, and totally out of place in his black stovepipe Abe Lincoln hat. Blue sparks clicked from his patent leather shoes and some kind of enveloping energy field stopped the rain from touching him. The junkie grunt looked up from under his poncho as though he weren’t in the least surprised to see the Voodoo Mystere. His voice had been threatening when he’d spoken to Jim, but now it turned into a complaining whine. “Look at the Buddha, man. They blew his fucking brains out.”
Dr. Hypodermic gestured soothingly with white-gloved hands. “I’m sure the Buddha will be able to handle it.”
The grunt shook his head as he drew the morphine solution up into the syringe through a ball of dirty cotton wool. “The motherfuckers didn’t have to blow a hole in his head. There was no need for that.”
Dr. Hypodermic’s death’s-head grin broadened as the junkie grunt tied off and went looking for a vein. “In half a minute, you won’t be worrying about it.”
Jim pushed his wet hair out of his eyes. He couldn’t imagine what game Hypodermic was playing with him, but he didn’t like it, and his own tone was very close to the junkie grunt’s whine. “You wouldn’t like to tell me why you’ve brought me here, would you?”
A burst of small-arms fire erupted in the nearby jungle, but Hypodermic didn’t even look around. “I thought the two of you should get acquainted. You both died of the same cause in the exact same second.”
“He OD’d?”
Dr. Hypodermic nodded. “Chuck here OD’d in the middle of a firefight.”
Another burst of gunfire sent Jim scrambling and rolling for the cover of a pile of wet rubble. Chuck, the junkie grunt, had pushed back his poncho. He’d found a vein, eased in the needle, and was now lovingly raising a little blood into the syringe. Jim cautiously raised his head. “He doesn’t look like he wants to be acquainted with anyone.”
“Chuck doesn’t want anything except what he’s got right now. That’s what happens when you make the end unthinkable and refuse to permit the reality of death. Chuck here’s been going around and around in the same five-and-a-half-minute cycle, shooting the same three morphine pills since the bullet ripped the top of his head off. He’s built himself a closed loop. Hell as an eternally revolving door in the worst place he ever experienced.”
“I though you said he OD’d?”
“The dope killed him, but before he even had time to fall over, a slug from a VC AK-47 lifted his scalp.”