“Do you know what you’re doing to me, you fucking mutant iguana?”
Gojiro stopped and Gojiro blinked, and then Gojiro lifted a mighty foot and brought it down with Richter-scale force, crushing Fat Ari, the intrepid camera operator, the rest of the set for Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club, and anyone else who might have remained in the vicinity. For an instant, Semple felt a twinge. Fat Ari was advanced cannibal pimp scum and definitely deserved to be flattened, but at least he had departed with class. Then she steeled her attitude.
“One down and some more to go.” She looked down at Jesus. “On to the palace?”
Jesus nodded, seemingly aware that Semple had taken charge, but having no immediate quarrel with the situation. “That won’t be a problem.”
***
Jim had entered an opium dream of unmatched extravagance, extravagance on a par with those visions of paradise Hasan-e Sabbah, the Old Man of Mountains, had offered his razor boy and blade maiden hashasheens to keep them killing and putting the fear of Allah and Hasan into the politicians of the twelfth century. Jim’s vision was a dark and smoky mirror viewed through drapes of burnished golden chiffon, which was probably in keeping with his character and disposition and with the fact that, as far as he knew, he was still somewhere in the loose confines of Hell. The vision was also colored by its origins with Dr. Hypodermic, for Hypodermic was not the kind of furnish marble pools, fleecy skies, and pliant handmaidens in any Morrison illusion of perfection. Hypodermic would never bring Jim to any Beverly Hills consumer lotus land of white-boy vices and Wonderbread sins. If Jim had indeed achieved his Xanadu, it would have to be a stately pleasure dome of night and mysterious mist, as far, far down in Coleridge’s caverns measureless to man as it was possible to go. It would hug the crags and surf and romantic chasms of ice and fire, where Alph the sacred river seethed at the apex of its ceaseless turmoil and crashed into the kraken depths of the great and sunless inward sea.
His Xanadu was a savage place and holy, both brutal and enchanted. A beast within a city, rampaging at its heart. Above the ring of Fenders and dulcimers, Bechtstein grand music loud and long, and the crash of dancing timpani and rocks, the voices of women soared as they wailed for their doomed and demon lovers amid a perfect chaos and a tranquillity of disorder that even Jim himself had never been quite able to visualize. The stillness of his dope-fiend vision was the peace in the ultimate eye of the hurricane. Why had he never thought of that before, made it his objective? The magic of the pipe had brought it all into such clear focus and sharp perspective. Previously he had only closed his eyes in holy dread and ridden upon the storm with his cold silver-ringed fingers locked into the mane of the nightmare. Around him, all was a spiral of magnificent fury. Fountains gushed scarlet flame and reptiles slithered about their business of corruption and seduction, but at the center of it all, he had finally found the strength and stability of the truly and fantastically free, free to waste an infinity of time if he so desired. Free to regard his right foot for a millennium if he so desired. To reinforce this bold discovery, his own face came toward him, with a woman, the woman, dark curls and pale, ready to reveal, repeating that it was true, it was all true, voice muffled but becoming clear, through the mirage of the ion-charged mist of Avalon, and no one cried, “Beware! Beware!” at his flashing eyes and floating hair or wove a circle around him thrice because he on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of-
“Okay. Enough, mon ami. You’re slipping into borrowed poetry. Time to wake and move.”
And Xanadu was gone and Jim was out of the dream and into a place of ice and freezing cold. “Fuck you, Hypodermic! I was just starting to enjoy myself.”
***
Semple had never seen the exterior of the palace before. Always before she had been on the inside scheming to get out; now she was on the outside scheming to destroy. From above, from the perspective of Gojiro looking down, the layout was that of an ankh enclosed within a pentagram, with tall steel and glass obelisks positioned at each of the intersecting points of the five-pointed star, and an ornamental reflecting lake in the upper teardrop of the ankh. In the design of the sweeping ground plan, Anubis had made sure his architect-priests had covered every symbolic base, but Semple knew it was going to take a great deal more than symbolism, no matter how perfectly crafted, to save the dog-god from reptile apocalypse.
Already the streets around the palace and even the palace gardens themselves were thronged with people fleeing the advancing monster. From the height of Gojiro, they formed ant-scurry patterns in and around the fake Egyptian, building-block structures. Then shots from nearer the ground started coming in on the auxiliary screens. (Again Semple wondered how the hell this was achieved.) The single-minded fear in the faces said it all. No heroics or civilized niceties like women or children first. Just run like hell and the devil take those who faltered. It was every man for himself. In a classic low-budget horror movie panic, children and senior citizens were trampled underfoot. Jesus laughed uproariously as a fat woman dropped the jewel box she’d been hugging to her ample breast. She hesitated, tempted to stoop to retrieve scattered gold and baubles. A man slammed into her and she staggered. Her black Cleopatra wig flew off. The jewelry might have been debatable, but the wig was nonnegotiable. She bent to grab for it, four more people cannoned into her, and she went down in the stampede. In the moment that the wig went flying, a pig-pink shaved head was revealed and Semple wondered if the woman and the guard who had given her barcode problems back in the city jail could be one and the same. It seemed too much of a long-shot coincidence, unless, by some strange and unknown process, the close-ups were somehow being geared to her personal payback.
At that point, whoever or whatever was directing the live coverage of Gojiro against Necropolis grew tired of close-ups of the human panic and switched back to the monster onslaught against the local real estate. As Gojiro snapped off the first obelisk he encountered and, using what was left of it as a makeshift mace, began reducing a considerable portion of the palace to random debris, the God-King’s air force decided to mount a last-ditch kamikaze defense. After the attack of the Flying Wing and the revelation that Gojiro was quite capable of swallowing a small nuclear device with no detrimental effects beyond a little flatulence and irritability, Semple would have given up and used all her remaining aircraft to get as far away from the Big Green as possible. She was well aware, though, that Anubis’s thought processes were very different from her own, and she could well imagine the dogheaded boy holed up in some deep palace bunker screaming for final death-or-glory stands by whatever was left of his armed forces. When the ill-assorted squadron came in low over the ankh in the pentagram, she was hardly surprised, and equally unmoved, as Gojiro, starting with the P51 Mustang that was leading the attack, used the obelisk to bat them out of the sky with all the ease and unconcern of a major leaguer playing amateurs. The last stand failed to so much as lay a suicidal glove on him.
After that, there was no more resistance, and the King of the Monsters fell to a routinely systematic demolition of Anubis’s palace, up one wing and down the next, like an automatic and highly inevitable wrecking machine. Semple was almost tempted to become bored, but then she spotted the cluster of tiny figures standing on a flat roof near the high point of the ankh. She looked quickly at Jesus. “Can you zoom in on something?”