Divine Misfortune

11

Phil stopped at a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket on the way to work. He didn’t normally waste his money but decided it wouldn’t hurt to check the benefits of his new god. He figured that a lottery ticket was a good test for a minor prosperity god, and Phil wasn’t taking anything on faith.

He won twenty bucks.

In the interest of science, he bought another five tickets. Three of them were winners, and one broke even. He ended up with an extra hundred dollars. Under ordinary circumstances, he would’ve walked away, but he continued the experiment. He spent the winnings on tickets. Some won. Some lost. And he ended up maxing out at the hundred-dollar threshold.

Phil would’ve purchased another round of tickets, but he had to get to work. His understanding of the god/follower relationship told him there was a limit to the good fortune Lucky could provide. There was only so much prosperity to go around, and until he earned more favor to raise his share, he figured a hundred bucks wasn’t bad. Just a little help. Exactly what Lucky had promised.

There was a traffic jam on the expressway, and the navigation charm pulled off on its own. He didn’t fight it. The eyeball hanging from his rearview mirror seemed to know what it was doing. It guided him down side streets and alleyways on a route he would never have picked on his own. But it worked. Whatever lane he was in was the fastest. Every light was green. And his car merged so smoothly, it was almost as if the other drivers had all signed an agreement to let him pass. Phil’s only complaint was that the charm did such a great job that he found himself a little bored by the end. He’d remember to bring some reading material tomorrow. Maybe he could get a DVD player installed.

There was a new computer waiting in his cubicle. He ran his hands along the monitor.

Elliot’s head appeared over the cubicle. “They found it in the back of a storeroom. Nobody even knew it was there. Must’ve been misplaced. They offered it to Bob, but it’s kind of old so he turned them down. So lucky break for you, huh? And since my car showed up at my apartment yesterday, all polished with a full tank of gas and a two-for-one coupon for Applebee’s pinned under the wiper, and your shirt is devoid of jelly doughnut stains today, I can only assume that you’ve straightened things out with your new god.”

“Yup. From now on, it’s smooth sailing.”

Phil leaned back. His chair collapsed, and he fell on the floor.

Elliot couldn’t stop laughing.

“That’s priceless,” he wheezed between guffaws.

Phil inspected the chair. The screws had all fallen out.

“That’s weird,” remarked Elliot needlessly. “You didn’t do anything to anger your god, did you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Eh, probably just a prank. They’ll do that sometimes. Or it could only be a coincidence. Things like that happen, even with luck on your side.”

Phil inserted the screws back into place. He rattled the loose chair.

“Here, dude, this might come in handy.” Elliot reached over the cubicle wall and held up a screwdriver.

“Thanks,” said Phil. “Where did you get this?”

“Had it in my desk drawer. It was there when I moved into the cubicle. Funny coincidence, huh?” Elliot smiled devilishly. “Or is it?”

Phil smiled as if amused, but the smile was accompanied by the dawning realization that perhaps life wasn’t so simple when you followed a luck god. The idea kept popping into his head. It was easy to ignore at first, but as the day progressed it started occupying more of his thoughts until it proved to be a distraction noticeable not just to him but to those around him.

Without a god watching over you, it was safe to assume that things just happened. Finding twenty bucks on the sidewalk was good luck, and having a pigeon crap on your shoulder was merely ill fortune. There was an advantage to being subject to the whims of an indifferent universe. You didn’t have to interpret every little thing that happened to you during your day.

If Phil had picked a patron of gardening then it would be a lot easier to blow off these little occurrences unless they involved making sure the tomatoes grew properly or keeping gophers from eating the carrots. If his deity’s domain had been automobiles, Phil could know a leaking radiator was probably a sign he’d fallen short in his tribute and a lack of bugs on his windshield was a divine thumbs-up. In either case, it would be easy to ignore a sprained ankle or a cracked foundation as just a random event.

Phil’s god was a god of luck, and everything was in his province. All the little things, anyway. And Phil was beginning to understand that life often hinged on those moments.

The support of the gods wasn’t absolute. At least once a year a foolhardy disciple of Zeus was struck by lightning on the assumption that he was immune to thunderbolts. The truth was that with Zeus on your side, the odds of getting zapped went down significantly, but no god, not even a big leaguer like the King of Olympus, could immunize all his followers against every stray bolt of lightning from the sky. And Lucky couldn’t protect Phil from every possible bit of bad luck.

But Phil couldn’t help but see a conspiracy of heavenly disapproval behind every touch of ill fortune. The supreme irony was that with Lucky at his side such moments were rare, and that just made them more obvious. And it wasn’t Phil’s imagination that those unlucky moments were a bit more unusual now.

For five minutes, he couldn’t find a working pen. Even the pens given to him by coworkers were inexplicably dry once he took them in hand.

At lunch, the waiter dropped Phil’s food three times and had to send it back to the kitchen. The waiter apologized. The restaurant waived the check. But Phil wasn’t certain their incompetence was the problem.

For about an hour, his shoelaces kept coming untied. He tried knotting and double-knotting, but nothing could stop them from hanging loose. He didn’t trip, but he came close a few times.

He ignored the pen incident, and he tried not to make too much of the dropped food. But after the shoelace problem he nearly called Lucky. Phil didn’t follow through on that impulse. He did not want to be one of those people who saw the work of divine powers in every little thing. Or even worse, one of those other types of people who appealed for divine intervention at the slightest inconvenience. Favor was supposed to make his life easier, but only an idiot expected it to solve all his problems.

He resolved to stop thinking about it. He couldn’t quite succeed, but he did manage to stop focusing on it so much. By quitting time, it occupied only a little corner of his mind, and he was able to ignore that corner for the most part.

Elliot and Phil were leaving at the same time. They ascended the stairway to the top level of the parking garage, where they parked out of habit. They weren’t really friends so much as two guys who spent eight hours beside each other five days a week. Neither disliked the other, but they never saw each other outside the office.

“One more day closer to death,” remarked Elliot with a grin. “At least when I get to Tartarus, I’ll be used to the grind. Pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity almost sounds relaxing compared to another boring meeting on”-he shuddered-“teamwork dynamics.”

Phil chuckled as they exited onto the garage roof. Half the spaces were empty, leaving the place wide open. The fading heat of the day rose from the black asphalt. A flock of finches perched on Phil’s car. And only Phil’s car.

Every bird was red with black spots and bright blue eyes. They were eerily silent and almost unmoving. They’d also caked his car with bird crap. Elliot’s car, right beside Phil’s, was untouched.

As one, the birds turned their blue eyes in Phil’s direction. Then, without a screech or a warble, the flock launched itself in Phil’s direction. It whirled around Phil and Elliot like a cyclone. The chirping grew into a ghastly chorus. Phil covered his ears. But it wasn’t the sound that drove a wedge into his brain. It was something supernatural underneath it, a psychic assault. The static made it hard to think, but it didn’t stop him from pondering just how painful it would be to be pecked to death by a hundred little bird beaks.

Phil and Elliot made a break for it. Phil’s car was closer, and it obligingly opened its doors for them. They jumped inside, and the doors slammed shut again. By a stroke of luck, none of the birds made it in with them. The car shielded them from the birds’ deafening chirps.

Phil slouched in his seat and exhaled.

“Thanks,” he told the navigation charm hanging from the mirror.

The eyeball bobbed at him.

The finches settled in a circle around his car. They went silent again.

“Thank you, Lucky.” He turned to Elliot. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

Phil checked himself for any cuts or bruises, but miraculously, the birds hadn’t laid a beak on him.

An especially large finch glared at him through the windshield. Then, in an instant, they were gone, launching themselves skyward and disappearing.

The navigation charm hanging from Teri’s rearview wasn’t perfect. It had trouble parallel parking. And while it was pretty good at avoiding traffic jams, it wasn’t able to perform miracles.

A series of fender benders, a serious accident, and a tractor trailer jackknife had reduced traffic to a crawl. There was nothing to do about it but sit it out. The charm made it easier. She didn’t have to pay attention and could while away the time reading.

It was probably why she never saw the truck coming.

Her car was passing through an intersection when a cement truck barreled along and smashed into the rear half of her coupe. She spun out like a top and bounced off another automobile, coming to a stop across two lanes.

It happened so fast that it was over before she even realized. But it was only the first part of the accident.

Brakes squealed as another car plowed into the coupe. She was knocked a few feet more and into the path of another truck. She yelped as it moved forward. Its bumper was higher than her hood, so the truck bounced onto the coupe. Its huge front tire rolled across the hood and right toward the windshield. Teri ducked into her seat, as if that would prevent her from being crushed.

But the coupe didn’t crush. Even as the large vehicle came to a halt with its tire resting on her roof.

It took her a few seconds to realize she wasn’t hurt. Another few seconds to remember that she was riding in an invulnerable car. There wasn’t even a crack in the windshield. She was a little shaken up, but even that seemed minimal. Maybe there was some kind of enchantment that protected the passengers from the worst of a collision.

Lucky had saved her life.

She rolled down her window and peered upward at the truck perched above her. Cautiously, she exited the coupe and moved to a safe distance. The intersection was a pileup of automobiles. The cement truck that had caused the chain of vehicular carnage had plowed into a storefront. The driver peeked from the open door. He glanced around the scene. His eyes met hers, and he frowned.

He jumped to the sidewalk and ran away. She lost sight of him in the crowd.

A trio of red spotted pigeons landed on the truck. They were strangely un-pigeonlike in their movements. Their heads didn’t bob, and they just perched on the truck, staring down at her. And just her.

A shiver ran through her, but that had to be because of the accident, the noise, the chaos. The pigeons were just something weird for her to focus on. But she had a winged serpent sleeping on her couch and her best friend was dating a raccoon, so Teri’s definition of notably weird had changed over the past few days.

Still, the oddly colored pigeons qualified.

A siren drew her attention, and she glanced away. When she looked back, the birds were gone.

But she couldn’t get them out of her mind.

Bruce made it back to his home without getting caught.

It’d all seemed so simple. Steal a truck, wait for the right opportunity, and then crush Teri Robinson under his bumper. He’d picked Teri rather than Phil because she was a woman, and that had made her less threatening in his mind. Irrational, he knew, especially since his weapon of choice was a twenty-ton vehicle. But this would be his first human sacrifice to Gorgoz. He’d slaughtered a small menagerie in his dark god’s name, but humans were a big step. Still, when the order came down, he was ready for it. This was his chance to prove himself to Gorgoz, to rise up in the ranks.

And he’d blown it.

But he was safe. Nobody had seen him. Except maybe Teri, and it was a fleeting glance at best. She’d see him again. And next time, there would be no miracles to save her.

“Hello, bug.”

He jumped at the voice.

The spotted rat on his sofa stared at him.

Bruce knelt. “Master, I have failed you.”

“Yes, you have.”

“It won’t happen again,” said Bruce.

“No, it won’t.”

The scampering of dozens of tiny rodent feet filled the room. And Bruce knew the time had come to pay the piper. He regretted that it was going to end like this, struck down before he even had a chance to rise up in the ranks, before he’d gotten his chance to at least get something worthwhile from all the blood he’d spilled in Gorgoz’s name. But, honestly, he wasn’t surprised.

The swarm of squirrels, rats, and one ravenous, red-speckled wombat pounced on him and devoured him, and Bruce’s career in Gorgoz’s temple came to a bloody end.