“What about the God Glove?” I said. “I asked last night, but you obviously didn’t want to talk in front of Clarence.”
“No, I just didn’t want to get into an argument in front Ed Walker and all those the other people. Kinda sucks for human morale, to watch angels call each other names. Because I can’t use it, B.”
“It’s the only real power we’ve got.”
“I thought I already told you about this. We all had them, all of us Magian angels. And when she did her Wicked Witch number, Phidorathon tried to use his glove against her. He burned up. Ed Walker was there—he saw the whole thing, but he didn’t know what was really going on. He thought it was something Anaita did to Fred, but I know better. That’s what happens when you try to use something like the God Glove against the Power that gave it to you.”
I tried to hide my disappointment, but he could see what I was feeling. We’ve known each other too long not to know things like that. “Can it at least let me make one private call on the Mecca cube?” I asked. “Without Anaita finding out?”
“Don’t know. Maybe. But she’s probably going to know about it.”
“Well, my idea would work anyway—not that it’s going to work, but in a hypothetical sense it could all still work even if she intercepts the call. She’ll still show up. But she’ll be a lot harder to beat.”
“I’ll do my best, B.” Sam punched my shoulder. It sort of hurt. “I say we think of it as an interesting challenge, a bunch of stone-age savages trying to take down a goddess.”
“They’re not stone age.”
“But their technology is. Our technology, too, because that’s all you and I have to work with. Let’s face it, this is going to be one of those Butch and Sundance things.”
“Yeah,” I said. I hope I didn’t sound as miserable as I felt. “I just hope the rest of these folks survive so someone will remember the cool things we said as we were blowing up.”
“Yeah. Me too. I was planning on, ‘Oh, shit!’ How about you?”
“Well, now I’m going to have to think of a new one, since you’re using mine.”
• • •
It was a long walk through the hills back to the house, and although everybody was reasonably young and fit, more than a few had sustained injuries in their initial escape from Anaita’s deadly tantrum, so the line got a bit strung out. If it hadn’t been for the cold air and snow flurries, and if I’d been wearing something warmer than a light jacket and t-shirt, it might have been a pleasant winter’s walk in the California hills. Except, of course, this wasn’t the same California, and back in the real one, autumn wasn’t even technically over yet. There was definitely a time slippage between here and Earth, and it made me wonder about some of the other differences.
“Not that much, really,” said Sam when I asked him. “When we first got here, nobody died, of course. That’s one of the reasons this group is so worried and fucked-up now. They thought of this as the afterlife, and afterlife usually means immortality.”
“What do you mean, nobody died. Should anybody have?”
“One of the men, African guy named Chima, had a tree fall on him when we were timber-cutting for the new houses. See, after the first few weeks it was pretty clear we were going to need more housing, so we made hand axes and started cutting down trees to make log cabins. None of the people here have really done this stuff, and some idiot planned his fall wrong. Chima couldn’t get out from under it. He should have died on the spot—that was a couple of thousand pounds of hardwood—but not only didn’t he die, his bones knit back together in about a week, and he was up and around again not too long after that. He didn’t even limp. I’d introduce you to him, but he was one of the people near the house when Anaita showed up.”
“Shit. So he actually died three times.”
“Maybe. That would probably be the world record for humans, but since he hasn’t come back this time, I don’t know how proud he’s feeling about it.”
“Anything else different here that we can use? People with odd abilities?”
“No. The mortals we brought here, the pilgrims as they call themselves, are just tougher than at home, but not stronger. Harder to kill—or they used to be.”
“Damn, man, stop cheering me up so much.”
• • •
The Kainos pilgrims started getting spooked even before we reached the great field of bare, devastated ground. I can’t really say I blamed them, since I was feeling that way myself. I suppose I should have been thinking about my life, reviewing my failings and my (very occasional) successes, thinking about my friends and loved ones, but except for a simmering bitterness that I probably wasn’t ever going to see Caz again, I could only focus on what was in front of me. It’s a protective mechanism. Just do your job. Just put one foot in front of the other. When you see the enemy, pull the trigger—although there were no actual triggers to pull in this case. Boil everything down to staying alive, think about the other stuff later, that was my plan.
Except there was one other thing. I’d thought I hated Eligor, the archdemon, the all-time nasty fucker of the millennium, but it was nothing to what I’d come to feel about Anaita. Eligor, bad as he was, was my enemy. He was just doing his job, even if he enjoyed it way too much. In the Highest’s scheme of things, at least as far as I could tell, he was doing exactly what he was supposed to. But Anaita, she was supposed to be like me, defender of the helpless, protector of the innocent, instead of what she was: an astonishing, gigantic, fucked-up pile of evil.
Whatever happened, I was praying I’d at least get to hurt her somehow. That alone might be enough to make it worthwhile. I wanted to be the mosquito that gave her a big ugly bite just before she was throwing a chic party for the other VIPs. I wanted to be her pimple on prom night.
• • •
We reached the charred ground shortly before the house itself rose into view above us. Considering it sat on a hill in the middle of nothing, you’ll have an idea of how much territory Anaita’s snit-fit had destroyed. We crunched across the cinders. Faint, windblown drifts of snow were accumulating, but not enough to cover the destruction, only to stripe the burned ground with undulating streaks of white, like lines of cocaine on a black light poster. We hiked across this great circle of ruination, the pilgrims scattered and trailing behind us, and I couldn’t help thinking about some of humanity’s other death marches—Bataan, the Trail of Tears. The chill, the lifelessness of the terrain, the faces of the people we’d brought here, all worked to drag me down into hopelessness. Sam hated seeing those expressions more than I did, I’m sure, since he had personally recruited dozens of the pilgrims.
We got to the house and gave it a quick inspection, but it was just as we’d left it, empty as a bill collector’s heart. A sifting of snow had accumulated beneath windows blown out by Anaita’s attack. We found what we needed, then got to work inside and outside, toiling in the cold like medieval peasants, digging and chopping and tying knots. Mostly digging. We stopped to drink water occasionally, more for the feel of stopping than any real need for a break. Sam was right—the pilgrims were a hardy lot, and the grim but determined mood seemed to have infected nearly everyone. Only Ed Walker seemed opaque to me, doing his part but always as though in his mind he was somewhere else. But where? That was a question that worried me. He’d overheard us the night before, when we thought we were alone, and he’d heard enough of my plan to angrily demand answers. He’d never seemed very satisfied with them, but to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have been either. It was a pretty damned desperate plan, and that was being charitable. Walker had reluctantly agreed, but he’d hardly met my eye since, which added to my feeling that the whole thing was too precarious to work, too crazy. And this was me, the guy who made crazy plans like clouds make rain.
At last, about an hour before sunset, we had done all we could. Sam called together Ed and Mayor Weng and Farber, her deputy. “It’s time,” Sam said. “Get your people out of here. I want all the noncombatants as far away as they can get in the next thirty minutes or so.”