99 Gods: Betrayer Page 3

  2. (Dana)

  “It’s not the plants, it’s the dust,” Greg Clover said, his biker knees popping and his thick leather jacket creaking as he knelt in the muddy snowless clearing. He had crept up on the patch of ground, pistol out, as if the straggly clump of weeds was a wild animal. Although innocuous to the naked eye, the patch did scream of raw evil to Dana and the Kid God’s willpower tricks.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Jurgen Lowezski said. According to Lara Minor, Dana’s primary Indigo go-between, Jurgen, asshole entrepreneur and corporate titan, hadn’t been out on an Indigo ‘field mission’ such as this one in years. He was out here to kick the rust off. “Dust. I’m out here hunting down dust?” Lowezski, not one of Dana’s favorites among the Indigo, had haughty and offended down to a fine art. A huge man with a bushy black beard, he had over six inches on Dana’s five ten and two inch boot heels.

  Dana, with a duck on her shoulder (the Kid God’s projection of the day), stayed well back. The Indigo’s assigned bodyguard, Elise, a well-armed white blonde who spoke English with a mixed British and Slavic accent, kept herself between Dana and their target.

  “You need to experience a Hell-problem in person,” Lara had said, when she talked Dana into going out on this crazy ‘field mission’. “You can’t understand what we’re up against otherwise.” Translated: you need the experience so you can lose the image of us as a decadent religious cult with an overdependence on conspiracy theories. Lara, the owner and manager of the Anime Café in Athens, Georgia, where Dana currently lived, was an old hellraiser in a young body, an archetypical manic pixie dream girl filled with bounce and energy, at least whenever she wasn’t having a bad PTSD day. Dana hadn’t yet figured out how to refuse Lara, mostly because of Lara’s glaringly obvious crush on her. Dana, a virgin in all things of that nature, did appreciate the attention, and besides, a little first-hand evidence of the dangers of Hell might be important.

  The Indigo’s alleged war against the Hell-beasts and humans serving Hell (who they termed Hell-traitors) was a long slog with infrequent battles and far more frequent espionage missions. This was, according to the Indigo, the first potential Hell problem to surface since the coming of the 99 Gods six months ago. Dana, who had coopted the Indigo into being part of her support as Regent of the old Atlanta territory (and to help her as a foster mother to Persona’s impossible God-child), really didn’t have a choice.

  “Ooh, impressive,” Grover said. He stood a pace and a half to Dana’s left, cadging a little bodyguard protection from Elise. Of the Indigo members willing to reveal themselves to Dana, Grover March was the craziest, and he, as always, made her skin crawl. It wasn’t the unwanted male attention vibes she got from a few of the other, younger, Indigo members – from what she could tell, Grover had enough problems of that nature without adding anyone else to the mix – but his tendency to randomly switch from true believer to utter skeptic. “It’s a Supernatural, then.” He wrapped his jacket tighter around his beefy torso and shivered. When he wasn’t babbling, he was at least interesting to listen to.

  Dana scratched the side of her head at his babble. “Aren’t they all supernatural?” she asked. “Besides, I thought you had preliminarily labeled this a Hammer.” She didn’t understand any of the Indigo terminology, and if she had realized how far the Indigo had fallen into their private world, she wouldn’t have allied so closely with them.

  January Cox, today’s team leader, chuckled, as always drawing Dana’s attention with a yank. “The category names we use for our enemies come from television, movies and anime, and Grover and Jurgen keep changing them. In this case, I believe Grove’s referring to the television show of that name.” January, she of the dyed blonde hair and her impressive ability to seem taller than Dana despite being two inches shorter, wore medievalish leather armor under her gray cloak.

  Dana sighed. “Well, okay. I sure as hell hope we don’t run into a Middle Earth.”

  “Oh, we have,” Grover said. She could tell, with her borrowed willpower tricks, that Grover wasn’t lying or exaggerating. She backed up a step before she caught herself reacting to the usual Indigo hyperbole.

  Not counting Elise, the Indigo members here were all Founders, the older members of the Indigo’s inner circle, the ones who had been involved in bringing the Indigo together. Before the coming of the 99 Gods, they had been scattered across the continent, either leading groups of similar cultists, or being real world professionals and leading groups of similar nutbar fanatics on the side. None of them looked their age, at least the ones out here. They wouldn’t say anything on the subject, but she had tentatively decided they were in their 60s and 70s, save for Elise, despite their appearances.

  Unless this was all some form of elaborate charade.

  “I’ve got nothing,” Epharis said. Dana had been shocked to learn that Epharis, the mystical poet and novelist, would have anything to do with one of these ‘field missions’. The tall and ungainly woman didn’t appear to be the type. The only difference was that Epharis had changed from her elegant designer outfits to what Dana thought of as a gypsy outfit, complete with well-worn long skirt and far too much costume jewelry.

  Dana still hadn’t gotten an explanation for why, at least for public consumption, Epharis was officially dead, and had been for over a dozen years.

  “Pardon me for saying the obvious, but doesn’t this fall under your fourth Rubric?” Dana said. The Indigo had five Rubrics, of which the only one that made sense to Dana was the third: when in doubt run the other way. The fourth stated the smaller the enemy, the more dangerous; make it bigger to defeat it.

  “Well, yes,” Grover said. “Of course this…” Jan, from ten paces away, turned and glared Grover into silence, stopping his predictable nerdsplanation. He nodded and made a ‘zipped lip’ motion. All of the older Indigo members followed Jan’s lead, even Greg and Amanda Clover, the couple estranged from the rest of the group for over a decade before the arrival of the 99 Gods. The Clovers dressed like motorcycle gang members, which Dana thought an affectation until they showed up one day at the Café on their earache inducing Harleys. They were real-life successful private detectives, having raised an entire household of successful now-adult kids, and both looked to be about 40. Amanda, another of the Indigo’s impressively tall women, of which they had more than their fair share, was also the most buxom. When they first met, she had greeted the also tall Dana with a “You’ll fit right in” sisterly laugh and given her a most motherly (and, to Dana, socially inappropriate) hug.

  Above, the clouds covered the nearly full moon, plunging their little tableau into darkness. Dana switched on her willpower light, making sure not to make it too bright. Even with her willpower light dim, the shadows the light cast were different enough from the moon shadows to make the place, a muddy multi-acre partial clearing at the foot of Pine Mountain (a few miles to the northeast of Middlesboro, Kentucky), feel different, more polluted.

  “Have we wasted enough time, Jan, sensing nothing?” Jurgen said, and switched to his singing voice. “If you’ve got the time, I’ve got the rat. If you’ve got a crime, I’ve got a bat.”

  “It’s okay if you think you’re missing Jurgen’s references when he sings,” Lara had said, almost three months ago, when Dana had invited the Indigo in as her staff. “I don’t think even he catches all of the references he makes.” Silliness for silliness sake. The creativity bubbled out the Indigo unbounded and unceasing, always interfering with Dana’s ability to take them seriously. Jan was an impressive fantasy artist with an astounding number of book covers to her credit, Lara drew a long-running and successful science fiction webcomic, Jurgen and Grover were inventors, Epharis a ‘retired’ best-selling author, while Greg and Amanda supported their PI incomes with successful turgid paranormal-tinged mystery novels you couldn’t put down once you started reading them.

  “Do it,” Jan said, a smile flickering over her face at Jurgen’s sung comment. “Grover, be ready to get skeptica
l.”

  “Hon, I was born skeptical,” Grover answered, attempting to not sound like himself and failing. Dana had no idea who he attempted to imitate.

  His comment did elicit another glare from Jan.

  Lara and Epharis, on Dana’s right, conversed in whispers, a quiet near-argument. Epharis towered over Lara by half a foot, and in the dim light, by build, it appeared as if a short man was arguing with a tall woman. If Dana concentrated just right with her willpower senses, she could pick up the two punctuating their words with tiny bits of dim red stray magic. Only this wasn’t the magic of a Lorenzi style magician or the willpower-magic of one of the 99 Gods or one of their Supported, but something else, something quiet, calm and powerless. Despite being around the two, um, ‘Communicants’ for months, Dana still didn’t understand the uses of their witchy magic. Or whether their magic had any uses. Or whether she was sensing anything more than some unnatural version of static electricity.

  Amanda took a tiny white lab rat from one of the backpacks and, holding the February-cold and unhappy rat by the tail, walked the poor beast over to the place of the Hell dust. The others, tense, had their firearms out, save for Jan, who now brandished her large sword.

  I will not laugh, Dana ordered herself. I will stay calm and not get annoyed if this turns out to be a big nothing and they come up with some big conspiracy theory to explain their failure. I will not toss the Indigo out of my life just because they believe in stupid impossible…

  Dana’s mental diatribe ended with a mental “Holy Shit!” as, in her borrowed willpower senses, the lab rat landed in the dust and grew, her willpower senses screaming evil ick, while to her unaided eyesight, nothing happened to the miserable rat, huddled out of sight in the brown weeds.

  Well, they had warned her she was a natural Skeptic.

  As she watched, the transformed lab rat became visible piecewise in her unaided eyesight to match what she picked up with her willpower senses. To her eyes, the Hell-beast was a cross between a polar bear and an oversized white rat. Lara had warned her this would happen as well, Dana’s natural skepticism ruined by her months of willpower use. She believed in the borrowed willpower of the 99 Gods, and because of her belief, the Hell-beast now became dangerous and real to her.

  “Now!” Jan said. The Hell-beast, slowly stomping toward Jan, stopped and screamed, its image flickering in the night. The Hell-beast didn’t vanish, though. “Okay, Grove, what’s going on?” Exasperation filled Jan’s voice.

  “Dunno,” Grover said. “I’ve stopped this piece of induced mass insanity, but something in the dust is keeping it real to me. Despite the obvious.”

  Right. The Hell-beast had gotten to the end of the dust patch and stopped. The flickering was due to Grover’s skepticism projection trick. He was only able to skeptic the Hell-beast away momentarily before the Hell-beast flickered back in. He, of course, didn’t believe in its existence at any level save as a, in his words, meme-induced hallucination. She had needed to look up the reference to ‘memes’ to understand the crazy Indigo lingo; ‘memes’ in this case being a forty-plus year old mostly ignored idea needlessly extrapolating the ‘song-stuck-in-your-head’ earworm phenomena to all areas of culture. What this had to do with Hell phenomena she still wasn’t sure.

  “Dana!” Epharis and Lara said, together. Dana turned toward the two Communicants. They now held hands, and were, strangely, one. “It’s feeding off of your willpower light,” they said to her, improbable twin sisters of the weird. “Turn it off!”

  “Uh oh,” Elise said, backing toward Dana. Dana turned off her willpower light, plunging them into darkness. Flashlights came on, not an improvement. Dana took a step back in fear; in the artificial light the Hell-beast was a ravenous nightmarish monster, tendrils of darkness seeping from its mouth, paws and tail. “Ratty here’s a trap for the Gods,” Elise said. Dana didn’t know how Elise knew this, save for the fact the trick Elise used was named ‘inseer’, and that, confusingly, ‘inseer’ worked differently for everyone who knew the trick. As far as Dana was concerned, ‘inseer’ puked out ‘information from nowhere’ on a regular basis, information occasionally even correct and useful.

  The insight about the Hell-beast wasn’t a surprise, in the overall scheme of things, just early. The Indigo feared that once the Hell-Gods realized the 99 Gods existed they would lay traps for the 99 and their Supported followers. They didn’t think the Hell-Gods would figure this out until one of the 99 smashed one of the Hell-Gods’ invading toys, one of the reasons they wanted to destroy the problem instead of handing it off to Akron, the Territorial God who ‘owned’ this patch of real estate. According to the Indigo, the Hell-Gods didn’t want to destroy Earth, but to strip-mine Earth’s magic. They fed on Earth’s magic, and would consider any the 99 Gods a rare delicacy to consume. Dana had nodded when she heard this, never saying what she thought of their commonly paranoid fantasies: bunkum.

  Now she began to ease back, her fear amplified by the duck on her shoulder, the Kid God whimpering “No! No! No!”

  “Stop. Don’t panic.”

  The Godslayer’s voice. Dana stopped. She had never seen the Indigo’s ‘guardian angel’, but after seeing Jan’s Apotheosis picture she often heard the Godslayer through her willpower senses. “Kara, what’s going on?” Dana said.

  Kara the Godslayer chuckled. “Reality is what’s going on. Keep my voice in your heads, both of you. My voice will keep the terror away.”

  For terror was what this was. Adrenaline shaky and fighting her own body, Dana stopped. She looked back at the Hell-beast and almost took off again, her skin itself physically repelled by the disgusting horror.

  “Son of a bitch!” Jurgen said, skittering away. Dana had lost track of the rest of the Indigo; they had been trying things, not firing their firearms (firearms wouldn’t work against something entirely magical, or so they said) but tossing various objects at the Hell-beast, or, in Lara and Epharis’s case, spells or something similar. Jurgen’s hands were aflame with Hell-fire, at least in Dana’s willpower senses. He buried them in some backpack contents Dana didn’t recognize and the unnatural flames went away.

  The Hell-beast began to claw at the invisible barrier keeping it in place, and as the beast did so, it opened its mouth.

  Dana froze in place, and beside her, the invisible Godslayer hissed, angry. Inside the beast’s mouth was a den of snakes the size of houses, a campfire surrounded by black feathered bipedal birds chanting an evil song, and a pyramidal tooth with an impossible nine visible sides. A mouth far larger on the inside than on the outside. Just the sight of this bit of distorted reality made Dana’s knees shake and her stomach upset. This was stranger and more impossible than anything she had witnessed from any of the 99 Gods.

  “Cover me,” Jurgen said to Jan, and strode toward the Hell-beast. He puffed out his chest and bellowed “Imagine if anime was done webcomics style.” Lara groaned in response, as loud as Jurgen’s voice.

  Grover snorted and answered, similarly loud. “I wouldn’t call that an improvement. Everyone would be gender-bending stick figure furries with tails, working in coffee shops, video rental stores and toy stores. You would have to suspend your disbelief just to conjure up a semblance of a plot!”

  Dana had no idea why Grover and Jurgen were talking in gibberish, but the Hell-beast lurched back, as if stung. The Hell-beast physically shrank, losing a foot of its height.

  Jurgen cleared his throat and began to sing, his singing voice as always harsh and off key. “Read them backwards, read them upside down. Read them randomly, read them haphazardly. It makes no difference, it changes nothing. The plot is just the same. Change the language, invert the colors. Cut and paste strips four years apart. It makes no difference, it changes nothing. The plot is just the same.”

  “And let’s not forget,” Grover said, in a sing-song voice. “Old webcomics never die, they just go on hi-a-tus.”

  Jan sheathed her sword and clapped along with Jurgen’s song as she mov
ed toward Dana. After Grover’s groaner, Dana found Jan less than ten feet from her. “Dana? Repeat the klutz question you whispered to me earlier. Now!”

  This wasn’t something she wanted to say in public, far too impolite and insulting, but Jan was now unstoppable, all indigo-tinged in Dana’s willpower sight. “I said,” she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth as if Jan yanked them out by the verbs. “Why is Grover involved in this at all? He’s a klutz, he’s brain damaged and he’s clinically insane. How can he be of any help to you?”

  “But he’s the only one of us with a real superpower,” Jurgen said, still balking the still shrinking Hell-beast with caustic comments about needless kickstarter projects to replace supposedly broken computers, answering Dana’s question. “Only his superpower is bad luck!”

  “I thought you called it skepticism?” Dana said, loudly, beginning to get a feel for what was going on. They were beating the Hell-beast with illogical creativity.

  “Grover’s so skeptical he negates all the good luck us real humans have innately,” Jurgen said.

  “So, how bad is your luck, Mr. Grover Sir,” Elise said. She said this with her back to the conversation, keeping her eyes on the Hell-beast.

  “It’s so bad,” Grover said, an unbelievable smile on his face, “that when I entered a well-known blog’s ‘Identify this location’ contest for the first time, after miraculously finding and identifying the location, they cancelled the contest because of a technicality; half the world had accidentally gotten the contest picture six hours early!” He paused. “My luck’s so bad that when I asked Lara where we could find some good bacon in Macon, her smartphone startled me by answering ‘it’s taken’, and froze. They had to send Lara a new phone to replace the one I bricked!”

  “I think Grover’s bad luck even took out the cell tower,” Lara said, with a merry chuckle.

  Grover bent over and put his hands on his knees, almost as if exhausted. “Shit. There’s a reason I’ve been avoiding these field exercises,” he said. He turned his eyes to Dana. “Take a look.”