Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

The question of human edibility is a tricky one.

A is Jim hit slimy water with a splash and sank, he had a fleeting glimpse of the UFO above him. It was already nothing more than a tight cluster of colored lights in the sky, zigzagging away on an erratic and illogical course and vanishing into a gray overcast, just like they did in all the sighting stories and blurry handheld camcorder tapes. For an instant, he was filled with a burning if illogical outrage. He’d been used like the proverbial one-night stand, the universal tramp. He didn’t even qualify as an intergalactic whore: to the best of his knowledge, he’d received absolutely nothing in return for the bodily invasion except a residual burning in his rectum and the feeling that he had been victimized. As far as could tell, he’d been dropped from a chute in the underside of the saucer, dumped out like garbage, without so much as even the parting acknowledgment of metaphoric cab fare.

As he sank, his mouth, nose, and ears filled with slime, duckweed, and swamp water, and resentment gave way to the urgent necessities of survival. Jim hit bottom, or at least hit mud. He floundered up again, stumbling, splashing, drenched, with his previous fury returning. Not only had he been discarded and disrespected by the fucking aliens, but something magical had been interrupted by his fall. He didn’t even have a clear memory of what had happened. All he knew was that it had been important and now it was gone. A new and mysterious cake, not simply left out in the rain, but hit by a monsoon, the recipe irretrievable. A woman with dark Cleopatra hair hovered at the core of the fragmenting memory, but already he could no longer picture her. The drapes of perception were rapidly closing, like the falling curtains of dreamwaking.

Gasping, treading water, getting himself covered in mud, he discovered that the water in which he was struggling was actually only chest deep. At the same time he also heard a voice. “Over here, pal. There’s a few square yards of dry land where I am. I don’t know what good it’ll do you, but you’re welcome to join me.”

The voice was not unlike that of a frog in an animated cartoon. A cockney frog, to boot, with vowels decidedly British, and the kind of epicene vocal droop affected by Mick Jagger in his speaking voice. The frog, if indeed it was a frog, sounded dense but trustworthy, and for want of a better offer, Jim waded laboriously in the direction of the voice.

“Say something else, will you? So I can get my bearings?”

“Tossed from a flying saucer, were you? Give you the treatment and then heave-ho you into the swamp, did they? Those fucking aliens have a lot of fucking nerve, I’m telling you.”

Jim was now only up to his waist in water, pushing through the thick reed beds that flourished in the shallows. It was hard to see. The swamp was heavily shrouded in a gray drifting mist. The Anglo-frog seemed be leading him in the right direction, but he needed to keep it talking. “You get a lot of folks ejected from UFOs around here?”

The frog voice was blase. “Happens all the time.”

“All the time?”

“Maybe not all the time, but often enough to be noticeable. Local speculation has it that the aliens have this thing about the Jurassic. Maybe something to do with the Nemesis Asteroid.”

Now Jim was totally confused. “The Jurassic?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re saying this is the Jurassic?”

The frog voice croaked, perhaps to clear its throat. “Or a loving reconstruction of same.”

Jim halted in his squelching tracks. “Get the fuck outta here.”

“Surprised? Most folks are when they first fall out of the UFO.”

“I’m in the Jurassic era?”

“You’re in the Jurassic.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to, my old son. Plus there’s not very much you can do about it apart from trying to avoid being eaten. Bit of a difference in the old food chain back here. I can understand your confusion, though; it must be hard to go from Master of the Universe to a snack on legs.”

As if in confirmation of the point, the mist temporarily parted and a huge form became visible in the distance. It stood well over fifty feet tall, with a long serpentine neck and tail, a hunched body like a small hill, and a mud-caked hide wrinkled green and brown, with markings not unlike jungle camouflage. It stood grazing on the top foliage of a medium-sized tree, and even its slightest movement caused twenty inches of oily swell to roll across the swamp, threatening Jim with inundation. Jim Morrison stood frozen by the sight of his first live dinosaur. Suddenly he wished he’d never been so rash as to call himself the Lizard King. In terms of monarchy, this beast had him. Jim wasn’t sure if it was a brontosaurus or a diplodocus. He had always confused the two. The frog voice piped up helpfully. “I wouldn’t worry about her too much, pal. Strictly herbivorous.”

Jim became defensive. “I knew that.”

“Sure you did.”

At that moment, the creature raised its tiny head and never-ending neck to the sky and emitted a wailing but strangely harmonic cry, something between the call of the humpback whale and a mournful foghorn. It was immediately answered by similar calls from elsewhere in the swamp.

“They do like to sing of an evening.”

Even though Jim was fairly certain that the frog voice-and the human archaeologists of his own time-were correct in believing that such dinosaurs were harmless, he stood and waited for the giant beast to finish its song before resuming his struggle to dry ground. He recalled that a raging bull was also technically a herbivore, and he certainly had no idea what kind of red rag it might take to raise the ire of a diplodocus.

“Makes you nervous, does she?”

“Anything a few thousand times my size makes me nervous.”

Jim was now wading out of the swamp toward an area of coarse grass hummocks and tortured willows a few poor inches above the general water level. The mist was more patchy on this marginally higher ground, and off in the far distance he could see a dense plume of smoke rising from what he took to be an active volcano. He really did seem to be in some young Jurassic world. He looked around for the source of the frog voice, but could see nothing that qualified. “So where are you, friend?”

“I’m over here, aren’t I?”

The voice was coming from a tall clump of vegetation that ran rampant between two willows. The plant or plants were like nothing that Jim had ever seen before. Three elongated, open top gourds stood together in the middle of a base of fleshy green and yellow leaves, and a long, whiplike tendril extended from the mouth of each gourd. Jim could still, however, see no sign of the frog or any other creature from which the voice might emanate.

“Why don’t you show yourself?”

“You’re looking straight at me. I don’t know what else you expect me to do.”

Jim noticed that, each time the voice spoke, the lower leaves of the plant rubbed against the gourds in exact time to the words. A look of incredulity came over Jim’s face. “You’re the plant?”

“Why shouldn’t I be a plant?”

It was a reasonable question, and all Jim could do was shrug. “No reason, I guess. I just never met a plant that talked before. Also you sounded so much like a frog.”

“It puts the real frogs at their ease before I eat them. It gives them the illusion they’re dealing with one of their own.”

“You eat frogs?”

“Never met a plant that ate meat before?”

Jim nodded. “Sure. I had a Venus’s-flytrap when I was a kid, but-”

“Strictly small-time.”

“Are you telling me you’re a carnivorous plant?”

“You have a problem with that? A vegetarian or something? I have to tell you, vegetarianism looks very different from my perspective.”

Jim took a step back. “I’m not a vegetarian.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Jim took another step back. “But how do I know you’re not going to eat me?”

One of the tendrils made a gesture as though such a suggestion was close to insulting. “You really think I’d eat someone with whom I had just been talking?”

“You talk to the frogs before you eat them. You just told me that yourself.”

“Yes, but you’re not a frog, are you?”

“That’s true.”

“So come closer and tell me all about your adventures with the aliens.”

Jim didn’t move. “I think I’ll just stay where I am for the moment.”

The tendril stiffened as though offended. “You don’t trust me?”

Jim drew himself up to his full height and adopted a cool pedantic tone. “I seem to recall that most carnivorous plants I ever heard about feed by luring their prey into reach, either by the enticement of scent or color or by some kind of sugar excretion.”

“You think I’m trying to lure you to your doom with witty and urbane conversation?”

Jim nodded. “It’s a possibility I have to consider. I mean, you can hardly blame me for being cautious, can you? I may not be a frog, but I’m just as edible. More so, in fact, considering I’m larger. You’d be happily digesting me for a week.”

The plant sounded offended. “That does rather put me in the same class as tyrannosaurus rex.”

“Believe me. If I saw a tyrannosaurus rex, I’d run like hell regardless of what it might say to me.”

The tendril made a limp curling gesture; Jim would have sworn the plant was pouting. For such a rudimentary limb, it was able to manage a high degree of expression. “I have to tell you that your suspicion makes me very unhappy. Especially after I helped you find your way out of the swamp and onto dry land.”

As guilt trips went, this was pretty effective. Jim almost felt compelled to approach the plant as a sign of trust. Before he could take the first step, though, another voice came from behind him. “Don’t believe a word it’s saying. That overgrown weed is a consummate con artist. It’s been trying to get me for years.”

The voice came from a small mammal, about the size of a raccoon, that sat on its hind legs on one of the tussocks of coarse swamp grass. The creature resembled a lumpy combination of hamster, prairie dog, and potbellied pig. Jim looked down at the little animal. “You really think he’s going to eat me?”

The animal nodded. “If he gets half a chance. He’s trying to sucker you in with that phony Brit accent. He wants everyone to feel sorry for him, but the truth is, he’s like all the rest of us here, except the dinosaurs-another dead asshole one jump ahead of a bad reincarnation. I mean, take me, for example. My species doesn’t even have a name. Nobody ever found so much as a fucking fossil’s worth of us.”

Jim pushed his hair out of his eyes and scratched the back of his neck. The mud was starting to dry and his skin itched. “I’m sorry.”

The animal’s expression was ruefully resigned. “Don’t be. I wanted to be a giant sloth, but I miscalculated by a couple of million years and came out a distant ancestor. Sometimes I think I ought to let one of them eat me and start all over again, but then I think, fuck it, maybe I’ll wait for the asteroid to wipe them all out. I’d definitely like to see that.”

“The dinosaurs?”

“Who else?”

At this point, the carnivorous plant interrupted. “I’m sure you mammals have a lot to talk about, but-”

The odd little mammal looked bleakly at the plant. “You’ve had your shot, now can it,” He turned back to Jim. “My suggestion is that you head for the big house.”

“The big house?”

“The big old run-down mansion in the swamp, with the trees all around it and the Spanish moss. There’s a rumor that Elvis lived there for a while before he moved on.”

“There are people living there?”

“Sure there are people living there.”

“What kind of people?”

“Buncha weirdos. Kind of people you’d expect to be living in a big old spooky mansion in a Jurassic swamp.”

Jim didn’t know if he really liked the sound of this. On the other hand, first impressions could deceive. Doc Holliday’s little town had seemed pretty promising, until the Voodoo Mysteres had shown up and Doc had eighty-sixed him. Perhaps an uninviting mansion might have compensatory depths. While Jim was considering the idea, the carnivorous plant tried to butt in again. “Listen, this is all very nice but-”

The small mammal snarled at him. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up. You know you ain’t going to get your tendrils on either of us, so forget it.” The mammal glanced up at Jim. “Unless you want to get eaten and use that as a way to get back to the Great Double Helix and start over? I actually wouldn’t recommend it. I understand it takes him a day or so to digest something as big as you. Whether you’d be conscious or not is another matter. I can’t speak from experience, but-”

Jim quickly cut him off. “The matter of digestion already came up.”

The mammal glared at the plant. “Then that’s that, isn’t it?”

The plant’s leaves blushed; its tendrils quivered and retracted into the gourds. The small mammal shrugged. “I guess we’ve heard the last of him for a while.”

Jim had made up his mind. He would try to find this mansion in the swamp. From his standpoint it at least seemed like an even bet. The way his luck was running, it would probably be no cakewalk, but it might also provide a way out to a more convivial and civilized place. He needed time to ponder the encounter with the mysterious dark-haired woman, to work on salvaging his lost recall. Even though the memory was nothing but gossamer fragments, he was becoming increasingly convinced she was more than merely a random erotic hallucination. “So how do I find this old house? Preferably by a route that doesn’t involve too much wading through dirty water.”

“I’ll take you and show you, if you like.”

“You would?”

“Sure. Beats sitting around waiting to be a dinosaur’s breakfast.”

***

It had been more than a week, if such terms made sense anymore, and Semple had failed to send word back to her sister. To say the least, Aimee was far from pleased. On one level, she was actually concerned about Semple’s well-being; it was hard to shake the fear that her sister’s silence was the result of some mishap or accident. Although Semple was able to erect an impressive facade of bravado, and held in pretty high regard both her own beauty and her genius, she suffered from a lack of foresight that rendered her incapable of calculating the future effects of her actions. She was a total impulse victim, and her incurable habit of leaping without looking, just the way she had leapt the wind to Necropolis, had resulted in a history of trouble that had dogged her on the lifeside and in the time since their death and separation.

Recalling all the incidents caused by Semple’s impulsiveness, though, was usually enough to transform worry to fury, and Aimee soon began convincing herself that nothing was wrong with Semple at all. She was merely off on some self-gratifying adventure, with Aimee and her mission long forgotten. Even Aimee’s anxiety regarding Semple’s health and safety wasn’t without an ingredient of self-interest. They had never managed to discuss it, but both sisters were deeply obsessed by the question of what might happen should one of them be removed from this phase of the Afterlife, returned to the Great Double Helix, or suffer some other drastic fate. Whenever Aimee pondered the question, which had been often since Semple’s departure, she thought of those surviving Siamese twins who, when their lifelong companions died, were left with no will to continue.

Aimee’s dour mood may have had a second, more fundamental source. Semple’s absence had deprived her of certain fringe excitements, a backwash of tingling resonance from her sibling’s varied encounters, adventures, and random cruelties that served to satisfy latent appetites of her own. While she would never admit it, she had come to derive a sustaining enjoyment from these vicarious feelings and she longed to have them back in her life.

Semple’s silence, however, was only one of Aimee’s problems. Strange things had begun happening in her Heaven. Whether these incidents were somehow related to Semple’s absence was hard to say. They had started soon after her sister’s departure for Necropolis, but Aimee couldn’t see any logical connection even though she was well aware that, in the hereafter, logic could be highly twisted. Of course, there had been strange occurrences in her Heaven before, but back then she had been able to blame them on Semple and her nasty pranks. With Semple gone, Aimee was left with no one to blame-and also no solid explanation for all the bizarre extranormal phenomena. At first, when it had just been merely a matter of lights in the sky and unaccountable frogs, Aimee had thought briefly that Semple might be trying to drive her mad by remote control. Then the escalation had started. The sea monster had cleaved its way across the lake, rapidly followed by an all-day plague of six-inch-tall cartoon rodents wearing shorts, who walked on their hind legs and ate everything that wasn’t inside a locked cabinet. With that, Aimee was forced to abandon the long-range nuisance theory. Sea monsters and cartoon rats just weren’t Semple’s style.

The UFO that had risen majestically from behind the ice-cream mountains one singularly neurotic afternoon had been the most spectacularly disturbing incident to date. Although it hadn’t actually done anything more than descend and hover over the lake, it had filled Aimee with a fear that, far from being in any position to enlarge and improve her Heaven, she was at risk of losing control of the place. The thing had simply hung there, dark blue and metallic, an inverted dish with a turret on top and three hemispheres below, radiating a sense of unease and impending failure. Just to complicate matters, one of the white-faced monkeys from Golgotha had appeared on the terrace unbidden, hopped up onto the flat stone lintel of the balustrade, and then proceeded to make odd rhythmic hand signals to the UFO. At the same time, a strange fleeting feeling had come over Aimee, as though her entire postmortem nervous system had been immersed in warm water. For the first time in her life after death, Aimee found herself on the verge of despair. She sobbed in a quiet, mournful voice, so low that not even the white-faced monkey would be able to hear. “Semple, please phone home.”

***

“Semple, you have to get out of the pool right now.”

But Semple didn’t want to get out. She had managed to arrange herself so that the most abused parts of her battered body were positioned exactly in the path of the bubble streams from the whirlpool, and she didn’t intend to move until she ceased to feel, both internally and externally, like she’d been trampled by a herd of wild elephants. She also didn’t want to talk to anyone. In the warm, rose-scented water, she found it was almost possible to recapture the sparse remains of the unique sexual hallucination that had gripped her during that first time with Anubis, and the memory of the faceless man who had figured in it. “Just leave me alone, will you?”

Zipporah’s lips pursed. She clearly had no intention of leaving Semple alone. “I’m serious, we only have two hours before we leave.”

“Isn’t it enough that I have to fuck him until I can hardly walk? I don’t even want to see his miserable bomb go off.”

Semple had hoped that the seraglio of Anubis would be a place of idleness and overheated lethargy, a hothouse of women with time on their hands and sex on their minds. Before she arrived there, she had conjured a vision of scantily clad wives and concubines, lounging beside perfumed crystal fountains between marble pillars, draped with gold and sheer silk, eating bonbons, watching TV, exchanging razor-edged gossip, red in both tooth and claw. The reality turned out to be a little different. Sure, the fountains and the marble were there. Anubis missed no measure of architectural opulence. The bonbons were served on silver dishes and satin and brocade cushions made lying around and watching the many triangular television sets a far from arduous task. Superior cats slept, played, licked their paws, and stared from vantage points on the backs of sofas, revered as they had been in historical Egypt. The interaction of the women, however, transcended mere gossip, no matter how vicious. What went on in the seraglio was full-blown political intrigue, from elaborately planned character assassination to highly organized espionage and even the poisoning of rivals. With Anubis functionally crazy, always continually in the grip of some new tangential enthusiasm, the day-to-day running of the metropolis almost totally depended on influence, bribery, and corruption. Although the wives and concubines were supposed to have little or no contact with the outside world, all manner of petitioners from all castes and classes managed to find access routes to the God-King’s women in the hope that they might use their influence on their lord and master.

The ultimate power broker and wielder of influence in this sequestered world was Zipporah, the Deneuvian primary concubine, who at this moment was berating Semple for lying too long in the comfort of the seraglio pool. “You have to be there. There’s no discussion about it. Anyone who doesn’t show will need an impossibly good excuse.”

“I have a perfect excuse. The bastard has all but crippled me.”

The expressions of the other women as they overheard this final retort registered not only shock but also the kind of covert satisfaction that came with watching a possible rival drop herself into deep trouble. Every inmate in the harem acted on the principle that each word they uttered would be overheard, recorded, and relayed to Anubis, and Semple could easily be digging her own grave by mouthing off. To call the God-King a bastard was a near certain fast track to the oubliette: the “forgetting place”, a set of tiny cells in a damp subbasement so cramped that it was all but impossible to lie or stand. Concubines and courtiers could be confined without food, water, or even light in the oubliette, in some cases until they went mad, withered, died, or reached some other approximation of the terminal state.

As Anubis’s current favorite, Semple did have a certain leeway regarding her behavior; the flavor of the moment could get away with a lot. But Semple was also coming to understand that Anubis’s relationships with his women were exactly like his tastes in food. The God-King would obsess on a specific delicacy, gorge on it continuously for a period of time, but then abruptly tire of it and either go on to some new innovation or return to the tried and tested. Semple knew that her ability to get away with open blasphemy had a very limited shelf life.

Zipporah didn’t seem as shocked as the other women, but she stared down at Semple from the side of the pool with a knowing and world-weary expression. Without saying a word, she made it abundantly clear that she had seen them come and go, and Semple should take care while she could. “That won’t exactly qualify as a good excuse.”

“And what would?”

Zipporah smiled coldly. “Sudden discorporation might just get you off the hook, my dear. Short of that, I can’t think of very much else. Acting the spoiled brat because you’re the temporary favorite certainly won’t cut it. Remember this is only the master’s second atom bomb, and he’s very anxious about it. The scientists have all been threatened with slow extermination if it doesn’t go off totally according to plan, and I doubt if any of us would fare very much better if we failed to show up for the great event.”

The detonation of the second Necropolis nuclear device was Anubis’s current obsession. Although, as far as Semple could glean from the seraglio scuttlebutt, the thing was little more than a small and very dirty bomb, not even up to Fat Man magnitude, the dog-god was so taken with the idea of letting off his very own man-made sun that he was designing an entire holy event around the explosion: a religious festival of the highest order, a full, dawn-to-dark day dedicated to the glory of his divine cleverness.

“You’re not going to let me slide on this one, are you?”

Zipporah shook her head. “I doubt I’d let you slide even if I could. I want you out of that pool and into the dressing room in the next five minutes.”

“You really don’t like me, do you?”

Zipporah regarded Semple with a look that was, at the same time, both sharp and glassy. “No, I don’t much like you, but that’s hardly relevant. All that concerns me is that you’re difficult, time-consuming, and potentially dangerous. When you finally get yourself into trouble, as you eventually will, you’re quite likely to drop some of us in the excreta right along with you.”

“You seem to have formed a very precise opinion of me in the short time that I’ve been here.”

“You aren’t the first to try to test the limits of her position.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“Of course it is. And even though I don’t particularly like you, I will give you one word of cautionary advice. Once the gloss of your novelty has worn off, you’ll need all the friends you can get.”

Semple nodded and reluctantly lowered her feet to find the bottom of the pool. She knew that in her own way Zipporah meant well, but Semple was resolved not to be a part of Anubis’s harem long enough to find out what it was like to fall from favor. She climbed from the pool, waving away the handmaidens who were hastening toward her with a robe and towels. As she passed Zipporah, she communicated what she hoped was a certain measure of respect. “I’ll watch the bomb go off and make nice. I’m not looking to clash with you.”

Zipporah acknowledged this as something akin to an apology. “I appreciate that, if you mean it.”

Semple pushed her wet hair out of her eyes. “Oh, I mean it. There’s more to me than just overbearing self-indulgence.”

With that she padded away to the dressing room, dripping water and trailing handmaidens, wondering all the way what kind of lunatic constructs and detonates atom bombs for his own personal amusement.

***

“So, as you can imagine, I was feeling pretty bad by the time that kid shot me dead back there in that bar in El Paso. I mean, a man’s sunk damned low when he’s riding with a crew of pistoleers who can turn up at a wedding, gun down the groom, the best man, the bride’s father, and the priest, and then go on to rape the bride, the bride’s mother, the matron of honor, the six bridesmaids, and a couple of nuns who just happened to be passing, and then have no remorse or any real excuse ‘cept being in the fifth day of a week-long shitfaced mescal drunk.”

Jim nodded. He was aware that the small Mammal with No Name hadn’t had a chance to talk to anyone or anything but the carnivorous plant in a long time, and it didn’t bother him if he wanted to prattle on. “I kinda know how you feel.”

“Of course, those were hard days. 1869-”

Jim was amazed. “You’ve been in this swamp since 1869?”

“Sure have.”

Jim blinked. “That’s quite a sojourn.”

“I had a lot of guilt.”

“Even so, that means you’ve been here longer than Doc Holliday, and not had half as much fun, from what I can see.”

“There aren’t many who have as much fun as Doc.”

“You know Doc?”

“Sure, I know Doc. We come from the same territory.”

“I thought you got yourself shot in Texas. Doc was more around Arizona and Colorado.”

“When I say territory, I’m talking more about time and ethos than the geography. Me and Doc were both good ol’ boys who headed west after the War Between the States. There were hundreds of us on the move back then. Talk about an evil season. A lot of them who went out West were crazy as a shitbug to start with. Sick and insane with seeing too much death, and knowing fuck-all except kill or be killed. I mean, after Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, and Pickett’s bloody Charge, what did anyone expect? No one had ever seen a war like that, my friend. We faced miniballs that could rip off half your arm at close to a mile, canister that could blow away a platoon of men with one shot. The world had never witnessed such a mechanical fucking slaughter. The first fully organized carnage of the Industrial Revolution. They say boys went crazy in Vietnam, but I’m telling you, Vietnam wasn’t dick compared with Chancellorsville. We lost as many in a bad afternoon as they did in all twelve years of Nam. After it was all over, and Bobby Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, we had homicidals and spooked-out psychotics wandering all over the Frontier for ten years or more. Some went after the Indians, like Custer and Sheridan, thinking a taste of genocide would lay the ghosts. Others, like the James boys and the Youngers, just went right on fighting the war-”

“And others went on a mescal jag, gunned down the groom and raped the bride and her bridesmaids and all of the rest?”

The mammal grinned and nodded. “You got it.”

Jim and the Mammal with No Name were picking their way over the uncertain dry ground above the water level of the Jurassic bayous. While the mammal told its long and involved story, Jim was content to make the right responsive noises while gazing out at the new world in which he found himself. The worst of the mist had been burned off by a white sun that blazed in a mushroom-pink sky, and now he could see a great deal more of his new prehistoric environment. At the horizon, no less than three volcanoes belched smoke from a range of jagged, snaggletoothed mountains. Closer up, the place looked a lot like the Florida Everglades, though the plant life was further back down the evolutionary trail. The resemblance was, however, enough to remind Jim of all the trouble that had befallen him in Florida. Miami was where they’d arrested him for allegedly flashing his dick at the audience. The straight truth was, Jim couldn’t remember whether he’d done it or not. He’d been drunk and tripping, flying at altitudes so high that, if asked to testify on oath, he couldn’t have sworn in all honesty that he’d even been wearing pants, let alone deliberately unzipped them.

A dozen or more large herbivorous dinosaurs seemed content to loiter, partially submerged, grazing on trees and bushes, while other, smaller reptiles splashed in the shallows. To Jim’s great relief, none of them showed anything but the most casual interest in him and the Mammal with No Name, and made no attempt to approach them. What bothered him more were the pterodactyls that circled lazily overhead. Although he suspected the flying lizards were meat eaters, the mammal assured him that they posed no threat. “Their eyesight’s so rotten, they never go after anything smaller than a horse.”

Jim didn’t find this as reassuring as the mammal had intended. The little creature could well have been taking a speciescentric view of the situation. The pterosaurs might not have been able to see a furry little ground dweller, but Jim was considerably larger; a pterodactyl with decent vision might tag him as a tasty morsel. And so he scanned the sky to make sure none of the flapping leather-wings was drawing a bead on him, and felt a lot happier when their route took them under the shelter of spreading palms and conifers rather than along the exposed edge of open water.

Although the reptiles mercifully kept their distance and their own counsel, the same could not be said for the millions of insects that flourished in the Jurassic. Great dragonflies, with wings spanning eighteen inches or more, scared the hell out of Jim by buzzing him at eye level; only when they failed to follow through with anything worse was he able to relax. The clouds of mosquitos, gnats, and midges, on the other hand, took a great deal more getting used to. They dogged the steps of Jim and the mammal every step of the way. They didn’t seem to bother the mammal, with its thick furry hide, but by the time the sun had reached its zenith they were making Jim miserable. One settled on his exposed left forearm and he squished it angrily. As he wiped away the smear of blood, he smiled grimly. “Steven Spielberg isn’t going to reconstitute any DNA from you, you son of a bitch.”

The blood made him take yet another look at the pterodactyls aloft, and when he did, he noticed something decidedly unusual. The sun was moving visibly across the sky. Jim glanced down at the small mammal. “How long are the days in this place?”

The mammal looked puzzled. “How long should they be? Same length as anywhere else. The Earth isn’t spinning any quicker, far as I know.”

Jim stopped and peered into the sun, shading his eyes and squinting like Clint Eastwood at high noon. “Then why is it I can see the sun moving?”

The mammal stopped in his tracks. “Uh-oh.”

This was the third time that Jim had heard a warning “uh-oh” in much too narrow a time frame. Saladeen of the puffball Afro and jewel-encrusted teeth had uttered the first two, all too recently, when one of the Voodoo Mysteres had appeared in the distance beyond Doc Holliday’s town. Now Jim could only guess what was coming next. “Trouble?”

“We may have a slight problem with time.”

***

Semple had known that Anubis’s nuclear fireworks display was being promoted as a big deal, but the size of the deal exceeded all her expectations. The actual detonation, as it turned out, was billed as the culmination of a twenty-four-hour Divine Atom Bomb Festival, throughout which Anubis intended to bask in the full glory of his own ego. The test itself was to take place in the desert some miles outside the city, but prior to that the God-King, his court, harem, retainers, praetorian guard, and half the Army of Necropolis would travel to the test site in spectacular procession, followed by more or less the entire population of the city: a public holiday had been declared to allow them to marvel at the triumph of their glorious monarch. Anubis, as fond of food as he was, had ensured that the entire event would be lavishly catered, all the way from the wine and delicacies that would be available during the course of the procession, through the picnic that would precede the detonation, to the massive al fresco feast and bacchanal that would follow.

Before Zipporah outlined the itinerary of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival, Semple hadn’t been aware that Necropolis was even surrounded by desert. Nor had she known that the environment extended so far that it would take a full two hours for Anubis to progress in beatific splendor to the city limits. She was accustomed to Afterlife environments that were as superficial as movie sets, all facade, illusion, and trompe l’oeil; a construction that encompassed two hundred square miles of downtown slums and suburbs took her completely by surprise. She disliked the dog-god no less, but she had to hand it to him for going all the way with his megalopolis. It was only when the procession actually got under way, and she saw both the slums and the suburbs for herself, that she finally grasped the extent of Anubis’s obsession. Like Aimee’s Heaven, much of the city was a scrapbook of its mad lord’s favorite things.

As was only befitting His Godhead, Anubis along with his immediate retinue was to ride in a special parade vehicle the size of a Greyhound bus, of a design that combined elements of an art deco railcar, Cleopatra’s royal barge, and a spacecraft from the Alex Raymond Flash Gordon comics. On the morning of the festival, as she and the other wives, concubines, and handmaidens walked through the huge and echoing hangar this preposterous craft shared with the God-King’s fleet of dirigibles, the chatter of idle conversation dwindled to an awed silence. Either none of the other women had ever seen the monster before in all its gold-plated glory, or it had been specially constructed and decorated for the Divine Atom Bomb Festival.

Anubis himself, who would, of course, be the last to arrive and board the craft, was obviously to take pride of place, seated on a throne on a raised quarterdeck at the stern of the machine, attended by the ever-present Nubian guards and handmaidens wafting long-handled fans and bearing the obligatory trays of culinary delicacies. The members of the harem would ride in front of their lord and master in the well of the craft, to gaze up at him adoringly. The prow of the ship, shaped like the vulture head of the lesser god Horus, was occupied by another squad of guards, police in full dress uniform, armed with far more serious weapons than the spears and scimitars of the ceremonial Nubians. Their heavy machine guns were capable of unleashing instant destruction on any section of the crowd who might prove threatening, unruly, or impious.

The harem boarded the royal carriage by means of a mobile flight of steps. Semple observed that, as the women climbed aboard, the craft swayed slightly; and that it seemed to be floating six to eight feet above the ground, supported, as far as Semple could guess, by some Nikola Tesla system or perhaps an antigravity fantasy reminiscent of the vimanas of Gilgamesh. The more Semple saw of Necropolis, the more she became aware that the entire place was a galactic collage of fanciful minutiae. Semple had little time, though, to ponder the inner mechanics of Anubis’s ceremonial craft. Zipporah quickly clapped her hands, indicating that the harem should assume its position. The armed guards on the prow, until now busy shooting covert glances at the diaphanously clad concubines, radiating random lust from behind the visors of their helmets, stiffened to attention. Anubis himself was coming.

The arrival of the dog-god constituted a mini-parade all by itself. Preceded by a formation of his Nubians carrying long gold-tipped lances, and followed by a gaggle of handmaidens, he rode to the craft in a litter borne by four strapping blond slaves. The Dream Warden walked beside the litter, and Semple groaned inwardly. She had half hoped their day out would be unencumbered by that potentially dangerous weirdo, but it was inevitable that the sinister robed figure should show up for the detonation of the Holy Bomb. As the dog-god climbed the steps, the women all adopted expressions of adoration. When he looked in Semple’s direction she smiled radiantly but muttered under her breath, “At least you can make the stairs unaided, you psychotic son of a bitch.”

When Anubis was finally seated on his elevated throne and his court was satisfactorily arrayed around him, the craft started forward with a slight lurch that had some of the women reaching for handholds. It nosed its way out of the hangar and into the hazy polluted sunshine of a Necropolis morning. As it traveled, the keel rose to a height of twelve feet above the surface of the raised highway the procession would follow all way to the test site. Anubis may have wanted his people to see and worship him, but he obviously didn’t feel any need to let the common horde get too close.

The procession itself was perhaps a quarter of a mile long. First up was a squad of the city’s rocketeer police mounted on big, smoke-belching Harley-Davidsons and World War II–Indians. The bike cops were followed by a massive sculpted bust of Anubis himself fashioned from reflective silvery material, borne on a float that moved under its own power. A human garnish of young women in Mylar bikinis and body paint was draped around the neck and shoulders of the bust, and crowded the plinth that supported it, beaming like beauty queens and strewing rose petals, coins, strings of good-luck beads, and other small trinkets over the heads of the organized multitude thronging the highway. The bust was followed by the first of four marching bands, short on tune but strong on cacophony. Comprised mainly of hammering copper-shell drums and big brass wind instruments, sousaphones and tubas, the bands produced a relentless metallic braying that seemed to set the tone for the entire holiday.

Semple had hardly expected that Anubis would forgo the chance to put on a display of military power. Whenever a hole presented itself in the order of the parade, Anubis had filled it with dress phalanxes from the various regiments of his army. The clatter of the hooves of his plumed and cloaked cavalry vied with the grinding roar of ornately gilded battle tanks. Neither the God-King himself nor anyone in the massed crowds seemed embarrassed that the style and weaponry of the Army of Necropolis should span some three thousand years, and Semple wondered if she was the only one to whom the parade looked like nothing more than a small boy showing off his toys. Even the air above the parade hadn’t been neglected. Formations of biplanes and dirigibles moved lowly across the sky, while small solo aircraft left trails of hieroglyphics in colored smoke. Flags fluttered, banners waved, and huge tethered balloons, in the shape of eagles, vultures, dragons, and one bulbous inflatable ankh, floated overhead, an old-fashioned communist May Day procession in chaotic collision with Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.

The drawback of actually being in a parade was that, once the procession was on the move, anyone actually taking part in it had only a limited view of the proceedings. After a while, Semple, between smiling and looking as radiant as was expected of the God-King’s current favorite, stopped craning her neck to see what was going on up ahead or back behind the ceremonial craft and started looking farther afield, at parts of the city that she had never seen before. At first it was very much what she had expected-large, bombastically imposing, Egyptian-style buildings, once magnificent, now run-down and in need of paint and maintenance-but as they moved farther out, the architecture started to change. The towering temples, commercial towers, and apartment blocks gave way to a seemingly endless sprawl of crudely constructed single-and two-story hovels, huddled together in what looked, from the elevation of the highway, to be insanitary and overcrowded neglect amid garbage, chaos, graffiti, and stands of wilted and apologetic palm trees.

This endless acreage of slums only deepened the puzzle for Semple. Why would anyone live here? What misery-prone spirit would leave the Great Double Helix to be ghettoized in such a depressing and degrading hereafter? The only conclusion was that Anubis had deliberately created the millions of souls it so obviously took to fill all this sorry real estate. Was he really so driven by the need for glory that he surrounded the place of his dreams with miles of wretchedness and underclass squalor? Semple wasn’t attempting any moral judgment. She accepted that her own personal history left no room for condemnation of another’s fantasy. What she totally failed to understand was what percentage Anubis gleaned from all the pointless work and organization.

***

“What the hell is going on?”

A huge dinosaur flashed past, sprinting backward at alarming speed. Only Jim and the Mammal with No Name seemed to remain in one spot. The rest of the world was in sudden and violent reverse motion. The sun whipped across the sky in entirely the wrong direction, so fast that the alternation of night and day was turned into the rapid beating of a huge black wing. The mammal, its eyes made eerie by the strobing sunlight, stared at Jim with metaphysical resignation. “I think we have a time fuckup.”

“A time fuckup?”

“Right.”

The mammal seemed to accept the situation as if it were eminently natural. Jim, on the other hand, had never experienced anything like it and didn’t like it at all. “This happen often around here?”

“Not often, but it happens.”

The sun was now traveling so fast that it was nothing more than a gray blur blending perfectly with an increasingly blurred landscape. The spectacle struck Jim as the visual equivalent of a deep and overwhelming depression. “Do these time fuckups always run backwards?”

“Only half the time.”

“So what happens? We stand here like idiots until we’re swallowed up by the Big Bang?”

The Mammal with No Name frowned. “I guess it would be more of an Ultimate Implosion than a Big Bang, seeing as how we’re going backwards. Usually it doesn’t get that far, though.”

“It doesn’t?”

The mammal shook his head. “Not usually. No.”

“So what does happen . . . usually?”

“Usually someone puts a stop to it.”

“Like who?”

Again the mammal shook his head, embarrassed at his lack of knowledge. “I don’t know.”

“You know how whoever it is stops it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“So what do you do when one of these happens?”

“I just keep my head down and wait.”

“I guess you don’t have any idea what causes these things.”

“Not really. I suppose I could hazard a guess.”

“Hazard away.”

The mammal avoided Jim’s eyes. “I’m not sure I like to.”

Jim was starting to lose patience. After all the mammal’s boasting about what a desperado he’d been back lifeside, his sudden passivity was decidedly irritating. Could it be a practical, small-animal caution was progressively eroding its former cowboy recklessness? “Why not?”

“You might take it personally.”

“Are you saying that I might have something to do with it?”

The mammal answered reluctantly, “It’s possible. You or the UFO. One or both of you may have caused a rupture.”

Jim started to grow angry. “I didn’t ask to come here.”

“There you go. You are taking it personally.”

Jim sighed. “No, I’m not. I’m just wondering what to do about it. Maybe if it was me that caused it, I could somehow stop it.”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t have any suggestions?”

“Not a one.”

“Damn.”

The world was now nothing more than a gray blur with twinkles and sparkles dancing in the middle distance and a faint blue line where the horizon used to be. Clearly something had to be done, but Jim had no idea what, and the mammal was no help. Jim thought for a moment, if, indeed, moments truly existed in their current predicament, but all he could come up with was the one thing that had stood him in reasonable stead since his death. “When in doubt, do the obvious.”

The mammal looked puzzled. “Say what?”

“I said, when in doubt, do the obvious.”

“And what might that be?”

Jim couldn’t help himself. “I’d have thought it was obvious.”

The mammal looked offended. His eyes were doglike in their reproach. “Now you’re fucking with me.”

Jim felt bad. He was a sucker for reproachful eyes. “Yeah, I’m fucking with you. I shouldn’t do that. You’re not the one responsible.”

The mammal nodded forgivingly. “That’s okay.”

“Let’s try something.”

“Try what?”

“Watch and learn.”

Jim took a deep breath, inflating his lungs to their fullest. He had always managed to achieve things with his voice. He turned and faced the blue line of the horizon and bellowed with all his might, “HAVE THIS STOPPED!”

And it stopped. Time reverted to normal, leaving them in the dark of night. Stars twinkled overhead, things rustled in the reeds and tall grass; in the distance, a dinosaur was singing. The mammal looked up at Jim with undisguised admiration. “Wow.”

“Pretty neat, huh? Pretty good?”

“I have to hand it to you.”

“Except that it’s now the middle of the night, and for all I know, we could be ten thousand years in the past.”

The small mammal thought about this. “Would it really matter?”

Jim nodded. “It would matter to me.”

“It would?”

“I’d be dead before I ever got born. I’d be a walking paradox.”

The mammal’s voice took on a tone of you-think-you-got-troubles. “I’m dead before I was born and my species doesn’t have a name.”

“So you really are a walking paradox.”

“I guess I am.”

“But that doesn’t really help our current situation.”

The mammal shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t. I was just figuring, since you’d already found yourself washed up in the Jurassic, ten thousand years either way isn’t going to make all that much difference.”

Jim looked around but could see very little in the darkness. “Maybe I could work the same trick again.”

He took a second deep breath. “NOW PUT US BACK WHERE WE WERE!”

Nothing happened except the dinosaurs paused in their song. The night remained impenetrable. Jim scowled. “Shit.”

The Mammal was philosophical. “I guess you can’t win them all.”

“So it would seem.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

“I guess we don’t get to go to the old mansion in the swamp after all.”

The mammal frowned. “Why the fuck not?”

Jim looked at the mammal. He really could be pretty obtuse at times. “Because we don’t know if it even exists in this time frame.”

Now the mammal looked at Jim as though he were the one being obtuse. “It exists.”

“It does? How do you know that?”

“You can see its lights.”

Jim peered into the black of night. “Where?”

The mammal extended a paw. “There.”

Now Jim saw it, a pinpoint of light way off in the distance. “Is that it?”

“That’s it. The lights are always on at night.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

Jim sighed. He supposed living in the Jurassic without a name would make anyone slow. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that before I started all that yelling?”

“You didn’t ask.”

***

As the parade finally arrived at the area where the detonation would take place, Semple saw that as much trouble had gone into the planning, arrangement, and construction of the viewing area and picnic site as into the procession that had brought them there. Necropolis might be sinking into ruin and decay, but when it came to one of Anubis’s pet obsessions, apparently no effort was considered excessive. Semple’s first impression was that the design of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival was a fanciful attempt to marry a medieval tournament with a hippie rock festival of the late 1960s. Long lines of covered bleachers had been erected so the rich, powerful, and well connected could idle away the event in varying degrees of luxury, sheltered from the bright, iron-gray sky and the relentless desert sun.

Each section of these bleachers came with its own attendant clustering of tents, marquees, and pavilions, where food and wine were served and musicians serenaded the drinkers and diners. Blue smoke and a variety of cooking smells rose from al fresco barbecue kitchens, where sweating chefs basted the browning flanks of whole roasting steers or labored over broiling racks of smaller delicacies. Bunting tossed and fluttered in the afternoon breeze above open-air stages on which jugglers and illusionists, fire eaters, and escapologists performed, and dancing girls and young men displayed both their moves and their bodies. Flag-draped booths hawked all manner of mementos, from commemorative plates to souvenir dark glasses, all of which bore the black and gold mushroom cloud that was the Divine Atom Bomb Festival merchandising logo. For what seemed to Semple a highly unnecessary additional diversion, wild animals were displayed in cages, human criminals had their bodies bent out of shape by creatively crafted sets of mobile stocks, and here and there bottom-feeding slave dealers with wheezing, vapor-leaking portable steam computers were running fast-bargain, knockdown auctions of fetch-and-carry domestics, disposable body serfs, and low-grade sex objects.

It was, however, only the rich who got the goodies. All of these treats, diversions, and spectacles were exclusively lavished on the extended court of Anubis and the invited guests from the affluent elite. The city’s rabble of poor were expected to devise their own protection from the sun and provide most of their own predetonation amusement on a large and increasingly dusty tract of open land, well in front of the facilities provided for the aristocracy. Here, despite considerable discomfort from heat and insects, the proles were hunkered down, waiting for the Holy Explosion. The lower classes had largely provided their own refreshments, although beer, soda, and junk food were being dispensed by pushcart vendors each with his own teakettle computer running the barcode scanners.

The most popular prebomb recreations for the proletariat seemed to be sex and gambling. As the procession passed through the area set aside for the poor, Semple had noticed couples unselfconsciously copulating on the open ground without any apparent shame. Men huddled around dice games, while professional card cutters spotted and isolated their marks. Larger groups gathered around pairs of fighting animals. Roosters, pit bulls, and small bipedal lizards snarled and slashed at their opponents while spectators yelled and cursed.

As Semple and a dark-complected concubine called Parsis looked down at a lizard fight just below the passing carriage, a question occurred to her. “If the barcode is the only means of exchange here, how do these people make their bets?”

Parsis looked at her as though she were the epitomic idiot outlander. “They swap markers, don’t they?”

In another part of the well deck of the royal carriage, some of the handmaidens had spotted a threesome-two men and one woman, all having sex together. The sight had inspired an outbreak of smothered girlish giggles and whispered lewdnesses. Semple looked briefly in the direction of the mini-orgy and turned back to Parsis with a frown.

“What do you mean, markers?”

“Slips of papyrus with the bets scrawled on them. When the fight’s over, they’ll all troop off to one of the pushcart vendors and he’ll settle up for them on his computer for a percentage of the action.” Parsis pointed. “Look, there go some of them now.”

A fight had just finished. One green lizard lay bloodily dead in a small temporary arena of banked dirt, and the owners of the badly mauled victor were placing it carefully in a wicker basket. A small crowd, moments earlier baying and catcalling at the combatants, were now marching as one to the nearest pushcart. The vendor was already waving away the people standing in line to buy soda and candy, anticipating his more lucrative wager settlement commission.

Semple shook her head. “I guess folks will always find a way to get a bet down.”

Parsis half smiled. “You want to see them when our lord and master falls into Caligula mode and decides to stage the Games. That’s when the plebs start getting their bets down in the worst possible way. At the end of a good long all-day session at the Games, you get nearly as many killings among the spectators as there are in the stadium.”

Something in Parsis’s tone made Semple look at her thoughtfully. Semple had already noticed that Parsis was something of a kindred spirit; she didn’t quite go with the flow inside the seraglio, tending instead to stand aloof from it, not making waves, doing what was expected of her but otherwise keeping to herself. “You don’t exactly fall down and worship our lord and master, do you?”

Parsis eyed Semple warily. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but I sure as shit ain’t going to court disaster by admitting anything out loud and in public.”

Even this reply set her apart from the mainstream of the dog-god’s women. Precious few of them, even versed as they were in advanced debauchery, would casually employ a phrase like “sure as shit.” “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

Parsis shrugged. “I don’t know. It’d depend on the question.”

“You weren’t custom-created for this place, were you?”

Parsis stared at Semple as though she were about to take offense. “Hell, no, girl. Do I look like one of those?”

Semple quickly tried to reassure her. “Not in the least. That’s why I was asking. I was wondering, if you’re your own person and not one of the dog-god’s fabrications, why do you continue to stay in this place?”

Parsis was still suspicious. “I could ask the same of you.”

Semple glanced around to see that none of the others, particularly Zipporah, was paying any attention to their conversation. No one was. In fact, most of the rest were hanging over the rail looking for rutting couples among the masses of the poor. “I blundered in here by mistake and only just avoided getting branded and sold on the Fat Ari show. Believe me, the moment I see an opening, I’m out of here.”

Parsis slowly nodded; for one moment, Semple wondered if she had made a terrible mistake by confiding her intentions to this woman. Parsis must have sensed this because she suddenly smiled. “Don’t worry, honey. I ain’t going to repeat what you just told me.”

“I’m grateful for that.”

“On the other hand, you’ll have to be content if I tell you that I ain’t looking for no way out just now.”

“You like it here?”

Parsis gestured around at the opulence of the carriage. “It’s easy enough.” She stared significantly at Semple. “And I ain’t his favorite, so I really don’t have to have that much to do with the dogheaded son of a bitch. Besides, you should have seen what I was lifeside.”

“What was that?”

Parsis grinned. “Baby, you really wouldn’t want to know.”

Before Semple could say anything, the carriage came to a stop with a slight lurch. Zipporah was suddenly bustling around, directing the women of the harem in the direction of the steps that were being moved alongside. “Everyone off as quickly as you can. Hurry it up. We don’t want to keep our lord waiting to make his grand entrance.”

The golden carriage had come to rest beside the royal pavilion and viewing box. In an area totally covered in lavish and exotic creations of canvas, brocade, and silk, the royal pavilion outdid all rivals by a power of ten. It consisted of a tall pyramidal structure of huge tapestry panels showing scenes from the supposed life of the god Anubis. In front of the pyramid itself was an elaborate construction of risers and platforms, made from gold-tinted Lucite and polished steel, at the apex of which stood the divine throne from which Anubis himself would watch the detonation. Its backdrop was a giant sun symbol with a mushroom cloud superimposed over it. Surrounding the dog-god’s perch were smaller thrones and couches, arranged for the accommodation of the court and Anubis’s favored guests. When they arrived, the intention was for the women to hurry off first, preceded only by the soldiers from the prow, and fan out at the base of the steps to form a human background for the ceremonial arrival of the God-King at his nuclear celebration. Things didn’t quite go according to plan, however. As the women attempted to arrange themselves decoratively, they found they were immediately brushed to one side by sweating, unshaven men in rumpled clothes, booze on their breath, laden down with multimedia equipment and aiming bulky, shoulder-mounted TV cameras or big Speedgraphics at the top of the steps where Anubis would first appear. Apparently Necropolis was possessed of its own press corps and paparazzi. Who knew?

As Anubis stepped into sight, Semple realized that, until this moment, she had never seen the dog-god in public before. While the flashbulbs popped, TV cameras zoomed in, and his image was relayed to the half dozen triangular, billboard-sized screens dotted around the festival site, Anubis posed like the god he’d made himself. He squared his perfect shoulders, turned his head, regal from snout to ear, first to the left and then to the right, offering every lens all the conceivable variations of his divine profile. He concluded the display by flexing biceps, triceps, pectorals, and deltoids like a contestant in the Mr. Universe contest. For Semple, widely recognized as his current favorite, the display was embarrassing in the extreme.

When Anubis finally decided that his subjects had been allowed their fill of his static perfection, he started down the steps in studiedly unhurried majesty. This was the cue for the cameras to pull back and the wives, concubines, and handmaidens to move into shot, to bow low in supplication and gaze adoringly on the wondrousness of his being. Anubis even paused for a calculated moment, as though weighing whether the very ground was worthy to bear his amazing grace. Having taken this one short step of faith, Anubis halted for a reprise of the Charles Atlas routine, this time with the leading lights of his harem draped about him in hypnotized devotion. Semple, as the choreography dictated, hung on an upper arm with an exaggerated expression of swooning ecstasy, all the while wondering just how long dogboy could spin out this orgy of narcissism.

Fortunately, another of Anubis’s driving passions distracted him relatively quickly. Whether it was the smell of exotic cooking coming from the elaborate field kitchens or merely the demands of his holy metabolism, his attention suddenly shifted from self-aggrandizement to food. He shook himself loose from his women and strode purposefully into the main area of the royal pavilion, directly behind the viewing boxes, where a buffet had been laid out of an extent, a sumptuousness, and a variety that verged on the insane. While chefs and courtiers alike watched anxiously, Anubis advanced along the heaped-up yardage of groaning board, sampling morsels at random, judging every bite against the high gourmet requirements of a god.

After considerable snuffling and lip smacking, the God-King finally rendered his verdict. He nodded curtly to his Lord Victualer, his High Butler, and Head Chef, and a whisper of relief spread through the pavilion. All was well, at least with the food; the culinary staff would live to slice, dice, and fricassee another day. Immediately a circulating army of waiters moved out en masse, bringing drinks and finger foods to the multitude. Anubis remained, content to feed himself directly from the buffet, beckoning to selected courtiers to join him. He started with the hooded Dream Warden and a procession of his techno-priests, subjecting each new arrival to what, from a distance, looked to be an intense and urgent interrogation.

Semple could only conclude that he was checking that the countdown to the atomic blast was proceeding without a hitch. The situation suited Semple perfectly. As long as Anubis was fully occupied with his scientists and atomic advisors, he wouldn’t be bothering his women. Semple imagined he would certainly demand sex once the bomb had been exploded, however it turned out. If the blast was a success, he would undoubtedly feel the need for carnal confirmation of his genius, and if it failed, he would require a violent venting of his rage. Semple didn’t want to think that far ahead. In Necropolis life could only be lived moment by moment, and at that moment she was happy to be left alone.

She accepted a glass of a pale gold sparkling wine that tasted like overvoluptuous champagne: even though she normally had only the most meager interest in recreational eating, she couldn’t resist sampling some of the hors d’oeuvres. She surprised herself by taking an immediate and almost gluttonous liking to some tiny, wood-skewered cubes of marinated and stir-fried meat in a peanut butter sauce. At first Semple had assumed it was pork, but even through the heavy flavor of the marinade, it somehow tasted sweeter and had a somewhat different texture. Almost without thinking, she ate a full six servings and then felt a little guilty at her self-indulgence. She wondered, slightly horrified, if the ways of Anubis were starting to rub off on her.

In addition to the food and drink, waiters were also making the rounds with baskets of dark-tinted visors and handing them out to the guests. Some, like Semple, simply held their visors, not wanting to wear them until they were needed to protect optic nerves from the first nuclear flash. Others, on the other hand, put theirs on, lending the gathering the air of an impromptu masked ball. One of the first to don a mask was Dr. Mengele, whom Semple had spotted across on the other side of the royal pavilion, and avoided to the extent of moving if he showed the slightest sign of coming in her direction. As a further reminder that the moment of detonation was coming, a fanfare of discordant trumpets, like those in the parade’s marching bands, seemed to come out of nowhere, followed by a booming voice that brought all conversation to a stop. “Zero minus sixty minutes and counting.”

***

Hiking through the swamp in darkness was far harder than it had been in daylight. The Mammal with No Name seemed to have good night vision, but Jim found himself constantly stepping onto what he thought was dry ground, but turned out to be viscous sucking mud from which he had to carefully extract himself without losing his boots; every so often a reed bed would part under his weight, plunging him hip-deep into rank, brackish water. Fortunately, after about an hour of this stop, slop, and go progress, a full bulbous moon had risen from behind the broken teeth of the volcanic mountain range and given him a visual fighting chance. With the rising of the moon came the dinosaur chorus, a keening, booming, atonal calland-response that rang from one end of the swamp to the other as long necks, silhouetted against the skyshine and starfields, rose to their fullest stretch.

Jim scrabbled, gasping and winded, up a fairly dry slope, and sat gratefully down on a fallen trunk. The mammal stopped in front of him and looked him up and down. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m not only dead, but I’m starting to realize that I’m seriously out of shape.”

“It’s not much farther to the house.”

“Thank God for that.”

The mammal was staring off into the distance, and Jim turned, following his gaze. The dry area, elevated well above water level, afforded a good nighttime view of the house and its surroundings. As far as Jim could tell, the structure stood on a similar raised area, surrounded by a grove of primal oak and plants that resembled giant celery, a half mile away across an expanse of iris, swamp grass, and black water. For the first time, Jim realized that the light he and the mammal were following was, in fact, a combination of five lighted windows, three down and two up, spilling their yellow radiance into the night and illuminating parts of the surrounding land and trees. There were figures moving around the outside of the place, and although Jim had no idea what kind of reception he might receive when he reached the place, he was at least reassured that someone was home.

***

Anubis had finished, for the moment, with the Dream Warden, and now the hooded figure was engaged in a conspiratorial head-to-head conversation with Mengele on the opposite side of the royal pavilion from Semple. That her two archenemies were consulting wouldn’t have bothered her if they hadn’t repeatedly glanced in her direction. Their covert glares were more than enough to make Semple uncomfortable. The tied-back tent flaps of an exit conveniently presented themselves to her right, and she turned and walked toward them. She didn’t look back to see if Mengele and the Dream Warden were watching, but deliberately swayed her hips as she walked, in an obvious display of physical insolence. Let the bastards plot all they wanted. She was the dog-god’s favorite for the time being, and she would do her level damnedest to see the pair of them brought down before she was through.

The exit she’d chosen led out into the open air, to a part of the exclusive royal enclosure right by the al fresco meat kitchens. She found herself amid the overpowering smell of roasting oxen, pigs, sheep, cattle, and other creatures that Semple didn’t recognize, plus entire racks of ducks and chickens, slowly turned on automatic chain-driven spits above glowing beds of coals. More buffet tables had been set up beside the field kitchens and one of the first people that Semple saw there was Fat Ari, awesome in one of his tentlike costumes, helping himself to a whole leg of roast pork.

Semple’s first reaction was to avoid the slave dealer just as she had avoided Mengele and the Dream Warden. She was about to reverse course and move off in the opposite direction when she thought, what the hell? She had nothing to fear from Fat Ari. Why not sashay past him, demonstrating what she’d become since she’d been removed from his clutches? Too few chances for fun presented themselves in this benighted city; why not grab a few rosebuds of payback while she might? She drew herself up to her full height and assumed the carriage of the acknowledged favorite of the God-King. She sauntered toward Fat Ari.

He recognized her right away. To Semple’s mild surprise, Fat Ari showed absolutely no sign of resentment. He looked up from his pig-leg meat, nodded, and smiled with only a hint of regret. “Guess you lucked out, huh?”

Semple treated Fat Ari to a bright but slight favorite-concubine smile. “I guess I did.”

Ari took a fresh bite out of his roast pork and continued to talk, generating a fine spray of spittle and fragments of flesh. “I would have sold you to some son of a bitch in the slums.”

“I kind of gathered that.”

“No hard feelings, though, right?”

“None on my part. Did Anubis ever pay you for me?”

Fat Ari swallowed what he was chewing. “Did he fuck. That psycho bastard never pays for anything he takes a fancy to. Claims it’s his divine right to help himself.”

A number of passersby overheard Fat Ari’s heretical last statement and looked around in horror, but the slave dealer didn’t seem to care. His position in the hierarchy must have been so well entrenched that he believed he had nothing to fear. At that moment the trumpet fanfare rang out again, and the same booming voice intoned the countdown. “Zero minus thirty minutes and counting.”

Semple supposed she ought to be making her way back to her assigned seat in the royal box. It hardly made sense to antagonize Zipporah by showing up late for the bomb. Right at that moment, though, she would have been quite happy to stay and gossip with Fat Ari. With the possible exception of his table manners, Semple found that she was starting actually to take a liking to the man. He might have been an overbearing bully, without consideration for anything but his profit margins, but at least he was honest about what he was; he seemed free of the usual Necropolis delusions and affectations. Raising the leg of pork to his mouth, he treated Semple to a calculating look. “In fact, I figure you probably owe me one.”

Semple planted a hand on her hip and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Oh yes? And how do you work that out?”

“If it hadn’t been for me, you might still be rotting in the city jail.”

“That’s one way of looking at it, but I’m not sure it would be my way.”

“So if I was to ask you to put a helpful word in the doghead’s ear, you wouldn’t be willing to do it for me?”

“That would depend on the word and how I was feeling at the time.”

Fat Ari looked at Semple as though she were a major disappointment to him. “You’re not forgetting where you came from, are you?”

Semple was about to tell Ari that he wouldn’t believe where she came from, when she suddenly noticed that the crisp, slightly charred skin of his leg of pork was decorated with an indistinct but unmistakable tattoo, a faded scarlet heart above three hieroglyphs. Shock made her speak without thinking. “What the hell are you eating?”

Fat Ari looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. “Roast teenager, gorgeous. That’s the one redeeming feature of doghead’s compulsory parties. There’s always some human on the menu.”

Suddenly Semple’s mind flew back to her recent feast of marinated mystery meat. Why the hell hadn’t she paid attention to Aimee back in Golgotha? “I’ve also heard he encourages the practice of cannibalism.”

***

“I think I’m going to have to leave you here.”

Jim looked at the mammal in amazement. “What are you talking about? I thought we were partners. I thought we were sticking together for the duration.”

The final half mile to the old spooky mansion in the swamp had been the hardest part of Jim’s whole Jurassic journey. He had to stop and rest four times, and it was during the last that the mammal made his startling announcement. Jim’s immediate thought was that he’d done something to offend the creature. “Do we have a problem?”

The mammal shook his head. His eyes were sad. “No problem. But I smell something that makes me think I ought to make myself scarce.”

Jim looked around in alarm. “Smell? What do you smell?”

“VC.”

“VC?”

“Viet Cong.”

Jim couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You smell Viet Cong in a Jurassic swamp?”

“There are groups of them all over this swamp. They seem to like it here.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not. I figure either they’ve made a camp close to the house, or they’ve been hired on to guard the place.”

Jim was at a loss for words. “Why would the Viet Cong want to live in a Jurassic swamp?”

The mammal gestured with his paw, the equivalent of a shrug for an animal with no noticeable shoulders. “You should know by now there’s no accounting for what folks do in the Afterlife. I mean, look at me.”

Jim thought about this. “If there’s VC around, maybe I should get out of here, too.”

“I doubt they’ll bother you. They only mix it up with the ghost grunts.”

“Are there U.S. soldiers here, too?”

The mammal nodded. “I’ve never seen them, but they leave their crap all over. Wherever they bivouac there’s a mess of cigarette packs, Coke bottles, empty Spam cans, and used needles. Of course, they could be fabrications, set dressing for the VC. Or they could both be third-party creations.”

Jim felt bemused. “Why in hell would anyone in their right mind want to reproduce the Vietnam War in among the dinosaurs?”

The small mammal’s lip curled. “Like everyone here’s in their right mind?”

Jim sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, but why are you so worried about them?”

“They might eat me. The story is, they look on my kind as a special delicacy.”

***

Later, in retrospect, Semple was willing to accept that she may have overreacted to the sudden confrontation with cannibalism in Necropolis, but right then, in the shocking heat of that moment, revulsion boiled and overtook her reason. Fat Ari, however, was so engrossed in his disgusting snack that he failed to notice the expression of pure horror on Semple’s face, and he continued to talk with his mouth full. “You should try the marinated infant in peanut sauce they’re serving inside.”

Semple’s horror doubled. Infant? Bile rose in her throat; choking it back, she spun away from Fat Ari, who looked up and blinked. “What’s the matter with you?”

She was too near gagging to answer. Fat Ari stared after her in confusion as she stumbled blindly across the royal enclosure with a fist pressed to her mouth. Her eyes watered and she had trouble forcing the unholy contents of her stomach to remain where they were. The Necropolis elite stared at her curiously as she staggered past, but no one spoke or tried to intercept her, and most turned back to what they had been doing, assuming that she was nothing more than an early emotional drunk. It was only when she approached one of the guarded entrances to the enclosure that anyone did anything to arrest her mindless flight. One of the huge Nubians, assigned to keep the common herd from mingling with the God-King and his aristocracy, lowered his spear as Semple approached, barring her way with its polished wood shaft. “You can’t go out there, my lady.”

Under more normal conditions, Semple might have been intimidated by the Nubian, seven feet tall and rocklike in his muscular perfection. Now the only thing that could replace Semple’s unthinking horror was unseeing rage. Her voice came out somewhere between a sob and a scream. “I’m Semple McPherson and I can do exactly what I want. And right now I want out! I want away from all these fucking cannibals!”

At a loss, the Nubian decided the best thing was to repeat himself. “You really can’t go out there, my lady.”

“I’m the Lord Anubis’s concubine. I’m his fucking favorite. Are you intending to stop me?”

The spear remained in place, but the Nubian shook his head. “I can’t stop you from going out there. I will have to stop you, though, if you try to come back in. Admittance to the royal enclosure is strictly according to barcode. One may only enter the royal enclosure from outside if one’s barcode is on the list. And obviously . . . ”

He nodded in the direction of Semple’s forehead. The goddamned barcode again. That thing was going to dog her every move until she was out of Necropolis entirely. But that was okay. Suddenly resolved, she snarled at the Nubian, “Remove that spear and let me pass.”

The Nubian must have sensed that she was at the end of her tether, because he quickly returned the spear to it’s upright parade position. “I can only warn you again: you will not be readmitted.”

Semple managed to get her voice under control. “That’s perfectly okay. I’m not coming back.” She glanced a last single time at the royal enclosure. “I think I’d rather have my eyes burned out than come back in here.”

The Nubian’s face stiffened and he stood at rigid attention. Semple guessed he was less than comfortable around what he saw as a harem girl having a neurotic outburst and his only defense was to turn robot. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.”

She stepped past the Nubian and, as far as she was concerned, detached herself from the court of Anubis. At the same moment, the trumpets blared. “Zero minus twenty minutes and counting.”

***

The mansion was close, and even in the moonlight Jim was able to make out some of its architectural details. Whoever designed the place had gone all the way with the Old South. A tall, porticoed, Gothic Graceland with flying buttresses and narrow conical turrets rose like a warning from its attendant grove of trees. Up close, the place was so threatening that Jim started wondering why he’d allowed himself to be talked into coming there. He was beginning to feel like Jonathan Harker approaching a Dixie Castle Dracula, and he wondered if the mammal was in fact some kind of elaborate serial prankster who, for his own mysterious satisfaction, took total strangers into the worst part of the swamp and then abruptly abandoned them. At first Jim had been saddened by the little creature’s departure, but as he drew nearer to the mansion and saw its forbidding exterior more clearly, his mood rapidly soured and he became sorely pissed off. Even the yellow light spilling from the windows was cold and unwelcoming. Folks who chose to live in the darkest depths of this ancient swamp hardly seemed the kind who would embrace a passing stranger.

Jim caught his foot in a knot of submerged roots and nearly went sprawling again. He was about to start cursing when he heard a rustling in the reeds only a few yards away. Jim looked carefully around, but could see nothing. Then the rustling came again, and at once he knew it was being made by a human or animal uncomfortably close to him. He bent his knees and lowered himself, as silently as he could manage, until just his head remained above the water. The move didn’t come a moment too soon. Almost immediately, dark figures broke through the undergrowth in front of him, wading purposefully through the swamp water, weapons held high, with easy precise movements that only come from absolute knowledge of the terrain. The worst part was, they were coming directly toward him.

***

As soon as Semple was outside the Nubian-guarded entryway to the royal enclosure, she found herself assaulted by the sounds and the smells of the masses. Out there in the poor people’s area of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival-in what might have been called the cheap seats, had there been any seats-the stench was a physical presence. Unwashed bodies, the halitosis of a multitude, the urine-feces-vomit stink that wafted from the improvised latrines, and the sour-grease reek of bad junk food all conspired in olfactory assault. To make matters worse, Semple immediately found herself an instant curiosity about to be elevated to sideshow status. A ragged, swarthy, and very drunk man in a filthy kilt and bolero lurched up to her and attempted to grope her. “Bitch, if you wanna go slumming, you could do a lot fuckin’ worse than go slumming with me.” The man seemed to assume she was some courtier looking for rough-trade thrills out in the country of the proles.

Semple didn’t bother to disabuse him; her intention was to simply sidestep and hurry on. But hurrying on presented something of a problem, since she had no idea where she was going. This made it difficult to carry off her usual air of command. She slipped past the man, who yelled after her, “Stuck-up whore! What’s your fucking problem? Think you’re too good for my kind?”

Semple, who was having enough problems with the human flesh in her digestive tract, tried to keep walking, but the man wasn’t finished. “So what are you doing out here if you think you’re so fucking good?” He started to follow her, yelling at her retreating back. “You get back here and talk to me! You fucks from the palace ain’t no better than the rest of us!”

The man’s tirade had the unfortunate effect of causing everyone within earshot to turn and look at her. At first these gawkers were merely curious. Up to that point, Semple had been too freaked to consider the impact she might cause, but with a hundred or more of the ragged, dull-eyed Necropolis poor staring at her, she suddenly realized just how sorely she stuck out, a painted and perfumed butterfly misplaced in a realm of deprived and disgruntled roaches and scorpions.

It didn’t take long for simple curiosity to transmute into dull, lumpen anger, and the randomly loitering began to gather into a loose knot of resentful faces. Semple could almost hear their thoughts. What could they do with this strange apparition, this gratuitous visitor from a world that they could only imagine with envy? At first the crowd kept its distance, moving with her but staring with growing hostility. The first to break ranks and actually advance toward her was a full-breasted woman in cheap and disheveled holiday finery, who had come from rutting in the desert dirt with two well-developed young men while a third took instant photographs with a cheap plastic camera. The woman halted a couple of paces in front of Semple, barring her way. She dusted off her hands and slowly looked Semple up and down. “So what happened, lovey? The doghead throw you out of paradise?”

Semple was forced to stop, but she didn’t think the woman’s sneering question merited an answer. She looked around for an avenue of dignified retreat, but none presented itself. The ring of poor had closed and she was surrounded. Fear hovered on Semple’s horizon of emotional options, but she knew that any hint and the mob would be on her in an instant. As far as she could assess the situation, the proles had decided she was Marie Antoinette and they wanted their cake. Emboldened, the woman took another step toward her. “What’s your problem, girl? Think you’re too good to talk to the likes of me? You’re on our turf now and you’re going to have to learn a new set of manners.”

Semple treated the woman to a look of what she hoped was sufficiently withering contempt. “Are you suggesting you’re going to teach me?”

The woman laughed and turned to the crowd of spectators. “You hear that? The bitch still thinks she’s safe on the inside.”

The woman was now close enough for Semple to smell the combination of booze, sweat, and the earthy body stink of recent sex. As the woman faced her again, Semple glared warningly into the smeared makeup of the gaudily painted face. “You’d be well advised not to start anything with me.” In fact, she wasn’t as confident as she sounded. This harlot from the slums had a mean scar over her left cheekbone, but Semple refused to be intimidated.

The woman’s eyes glinted dangerously. “Well advised? You’re telling me that I’d be well advised? You think some gang of Nubians is going to come running out and rescue you?”

Two other women had left the circle of watchers and were moving to join the first. Semple knew the situation was already on its way to becoming a class war flashpoint, and she was at a loss as to how to handle it when it turned ugly. To her dismay, the crunch came even sooner than she expected. The woman extended a dirty hand with chipped purple nails, trying to grab the jewel-encrusted gold collar from around Semple’s neck. “So what about this thing? You may have a dozen of them, but, out here, that could keep a family for a year or more.”

Semple jerked the collar out of reach. The piece didn’t even belong to her. It was merely on loan from the seraglio strongroom. As a possession of Anubis, she had no personal property, but she couldn’t expect the crowd to understand this. All she could do was maintain a bold front and hope for the best, and so she quickly snarled at the woman, “Keep your fucking bitch prole hands off me.”

A voice shouted from the crowd, “Strip the stuck-up cow!”

Semple’s lip curled. “You may find I’m not as easy to take as you imagine.”

Another seconded the motion. “Yeah! Strip her naked!”

A ripple of laughter ran through the spectators, followed by another shout. “Six to four on Suchep the Whore.”

Others picked up the phrase like a chant. “Six to four on Suchep the whore.”

Semple assumed Suchep the whore was the woman in front of her still eyeing the gold collar.

“Six to four on Suchep the whore.”

At the prospect of betting, men in the crowd were instantly galvanized. “I’ll take a piece of that.”

Some laughed at the double entendre, but the more serious gamblers eyed Semple with appraising eyes. The way Semple looked right then, in all her harem finery, straight from Anubis’s parade, she couldn’t imagine anyone giving six to four on her in a no-holdsbarred, straight fight.

“Who’ll give odds on the harem broad?”

“Four to one against.”

“I’ll double it if Suchep kills her.”

The bookmaking faltered for a moment as the trumpets sounded and the voice boomed. “Zero minus fifteen minutes and counting.”

Fifteen minutes was plenty of time. The mob’s attention returned to the fight at hand. “I got twenty says the aristo ain’t as soft as she looks.”

Semple was amazed. They were starting to exchange markers, getting bets down on the dragout between Semple in the god’s gold jewelry and Suchep with the big tits and purple nails. It was as if they were a pair of pit bulls or fighting lizards. Merely one more excuse for the movement of money. There was one consolation, though. A catfight might have been the last thing that Semple needed, but a crowd busy wagering wouldn’t so easily turn into a ravening lynch mob. Unfortunately, the two other women now standing a little behind Suchep the whore missed this point. Their lupine grins and clenched fists suggested they were eager to help take Semple apart, and maybe share in the proceeds. Semple knew her first move should be to put them straight. “You two better keep out of this if you don’t want to be blamed for screwing the odds.”

The two women laughed as though Semple were bluffing, but then Suchep shot them each a warning look and they got the point. As the two retreated, she turned back to Semple. “So you think you can take me, do you?”

Semple smiled sweetly. “Don’t be deceived by appearances.”

The woman smiled. “I’m going to rip your prissy fucking face off.”

Semple gestured to the scar on Suchep’s cheek. “Where did you get that from? A pimp?”

That was enough for Suchep the Whore. She lunged once more for the collar around Semple’s neck, and Semple jumped back again. This time, however, she came straight back, fully on the offensive, and punched her adversary hard in the face.

***

As the VC came at him, Jim’s muscles locked in panic. He found he could neither run nor completely submerge himself in the brackish water. Long seconds passed before he managed to regain his control, and by that point it was altogether too late. The dozen of them were so close that he could see their flat, stern faces, clear proof of the Nietzschean axiom of the Afterlife: “That which killed them also made them stronger.” He found he could make out the fine mechanical details of their AK-47s. He could even read the slogan, THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, on the T-shirt one of them wore under his black pajamas. Nearby a dinosaur coughed and snuffled and the VC column silently halted, instantly alert. With weapons at the ready, they carefully scanned the surrounding area. At least one of them looked directly at Jim, making what seemed to be complete eye contact, and yet he showed absolutely no reaction. It was as if the guerrilla couldn’t see him, as if he were somehow invisible to the man.

The dinosaur coughed and snuffled two more times and them started to move off, away from Jim and the Viet Cong. The swell created by its departure all but swamped Jim, his mouth and nose went under, and he rose spluttering, right in front of the VC with the TRUTH IS OUT THERE T-shirt. Again, the impossible happened. The man seemed to have no idea that Jim existed. He moved on past him as though he weren’t there, only missing him by a matter of inches, and the rest of the column went right along with him. Jim got back to his feet, wiping the water out of his eyes, wondering what the hell had just happened. He knew well enough that weird shit could come to pass in the backwaters of the Afterlife, but this brief encounter was more than passing strange. Perhaps the VC’s inability to see him had something to do with the time disturbances that had occurred earlier. If somehow the VC had been slightly in the past and Jim had been slightly in the future, it might just be possible that he could see them while they could not see him. He had to admit it was a pretty threadbare piece of reasoning, but it did cause him to wonder what would happen when he reached the mansion. Would anyone see him at all?

One thing Jim knew for sure was that he wouldn’t learn anything by standing around, up to his waist in dirty water. He had no real option except to press on, so he once again dragged one boot and then the other out of the glutinous sucking mud and toward the yellow lights.

***

Suchep went sprawling, then pushed herself up on one elbow and put a hand to her nose. Blood was on her palm. It also ran down her upper lip and into her mouth. “You broke my fucking nose.”

Semple wagged an index finger at her opponent. “Never judge a book, bitch.”

Without warning, Suchep’s legs flashed out in a scissors move, a sneak attempt to throw Semple to the ground, and Semple only eluded her in the nick of time. Semple’s sideways retreat also gave the woman the chance to scramble back to her feet, and she came at Semple half crouched, hands reaching, fingers clawed. Semple knew in an instant that she had no chance of besting Suchep in a fair fight. She had neither her adversary’s down-and-dirty skills nor her stomp-and-gouge reactions. Her only hope was to think of something tricky, and fast. If she couldn’t fake out this incarnate piece of lewd aggression, she’d be toast.

The two women circled each other while the crowd bayed, teeth bared, faces stretched and ugly. Markers were changing hands at a furious rate now that Semple had unexpectedly drawn the first blood and the odds had radically shifted. The more money that went down, the more the crowd’s natural bloodlust was amplified by personal financial involvement. “Go get her, baby! Kick her in the cunt! Rip her tits off. We’re counting on you, Suchep!”

Suchep looked for an opening and Semple thought furiously. As the woman lunged, hoping to twist her talons into Semple’s long hair, Semple again ducked out of the way; suddenly an idea occurred to her. Her hand went to the fastening on the jeweled collar and she yanked it free. She smiled nastily at the Suchep, holding the collar at arm’s length. “You wanted this, didn’t you? What was it you said? This thing could keep a family for a year or more? So why don’t you come and get it? Take a chance on a year’s pay.”

Suchep frowned. Her blood and makeup were blending with the dust of the desert, which had been trampled fine by hundreds of feet, and sweat was washing the mix into dirty rivulets that snaked from brow to cheek. Suchep knew Semple was up to something, and was trying to figure out what. Semple sensed she had the upper hand, and she liked it. “So, are you going to come and get it?”

The woman lunged and Semple sidestepped, laughing. The confrontation was taking on the aspects of a bullfight. “Better still, why don’t you run and fetch it like a dog?”

Semple tossed the collar so it landed a few yards from where the two of them were facing off. Suchep was transparent. She knew she shouldn’t take her eyes off Semple, but she couldn’t resist looking to see where the precious piece might be lying. She glanced around and Semple punished her by punching her hard in the side of the head, just below the ear. Suchep staggered but at least had the presence of mind to move closer to the collar. Unfortunately, this was exactly what Semple wanted. As she’d hoped, her throwing the collar had brought the two other women back into the picture. When the betting had started, they had wisely moved back to give room to the designated contenders. With the jeweled collar on the ground for the taking, the picture instantly changed. The pair were now eyeing the prize, wondering if it was worth interrupting the fight, and how they could beat the wrath of the crowd and make off with the treasure. Suchep also saw what was happening and, probably against her better judgment, jumped back and attempted to snatch up the collar.

Semple was on her in an instant, kicking her in the side as she bent over. Suchep grunted and rolled over in the dust, winded and hurting. Semple kicked her again, and again Suchep rolled, but this time she came up with the collar in her hand. Semple backed off, grinning. “So what are you going to do now? Fight me with one hand or let go of a fortune?”

It was in this moment that Semple overreached herself, though she didn’t realize it until Suchep’s left hand came up and shot a well-aimed cloud of dust into her face. In the instant that she was blinded, the trumpets brayed a new updated warning. “Zero minus ten minutes and counting.” But Semple didn’t hear them. Now she was the one taking the punishment. Suchep’s experienced fists were pounding her chest and stomach. The woman had wrapped the collar around her right fist and was using it like a set of gold knuckles. Semple staggered back, giving ground in the face of the onslaught. She could taste blood in her mouth. The crowd was roaring and the odds were in motion again. A few moments earlier, when Semple had looked so good, a newcomer couldn’t have hoped to get into the action at better than evens. Now it was anybody’s guess. Semple took a stunning blow to the side of the head and, as her knees buckled, Suchep grabbed at her skirt and tugged. Before it pulled free, the skirt acted as a hobble around her legs, and Semple fell heavily. Even her blurred vision told her that Suchep was standing over her with a look of triumph on her face.

“Now I’m going to finish you, you stuck-up harem bitch.”

***

The first gray streaks of a false dawn were beginning to show in the eastern sky as Jim moved gratefully up onto dry land. His boots squelched water and more trickled down the inside of his leather jeans. He was soaked to the skin, but since the night was as oppressively warm and humid as Orlando in high summer, it hardly mattered. A clean crisp shirt would have been turned into a damp dishrag in a matter of minutes, even without repeated immersion in the swamp. He was just pleased to be able to walk without having to drag every second step from seven inches of suction. The trees that surrounded the old spooky mansion were directly in front of him, but before he could reach them he had to struggle through a fringe of undergrowth where the water met land. Primitive mangrove and a tangle of some kind of organic barbed wire-with wicked two-inch and toxic-looking thorns-represented the worst and final obstacle. As he gingerly eased and squirmed his way through the flesh-threatening foliage, he rejoiced that he had never abandoned the Lizard King affectation of leather pants. He only regretted he didn’t have the matching jacket. Although his legs came through unscathed, the thorns ripped his shirt and drew blood from long scratches to his hands, arms, chest, and back.

When he’d finally battled his way through these defenses, he found that, once under the trees, he was walking on a soft carpet of shaggy moss, growing lush on the mulch of fallen leaves and pine needles. More signs of humanity presented themselves. Over to Jim’s right, the rusting remains of a huge automobile lay stranded without wheels like a beached whale, perhaps a Lincoln or a Pontiac or a Buick Rocket 88 that, in its heyday, must have been equal in magnificence to Long Time Bob Moore’s Caddy. Most of the hulk’s paneling was now nothing more than red, flaking rust, corroding away from the chassis, but here and there patches of faded pink paint were still visible. His first thought on seeing the remnants of a pink paint job was the mammal’s remark that Elvis might once have occupied the house. The immobile hunk had surely rested there for sixty or seventy years; a fairly substantial conifer had grown up through the interior, punched through the sunroof, and continued to grow for another forty or fifty feet. Logic suggested it was some long time since Elvis could have graced this sector of the Afterlife, except this Jurassic was in such a state of time flux that logic could not easily apply.

His main objective was still the dark bulk of the mansion, but Jim made a detour to take a closer look at the remains of the car. Even the outside chance of an afterglow Elvis presence wasn’t something one happened across too often. When he reached the dead two-door, he placed the flat of his hand on the pitted and discolored hood. Right then, worn out as he was, he could have used a strong jolt of Elvis magic, but the ruin of the car failed to deliver even the faintest residual slapback. More than a little disappointed, he turned his attention back to his primary target. One of the ground-floor lighted windows was on the side of the building directly facing him. An elaborate bay was surmounted by stone gargoyles with sculpted fangs and scales, holding up a heraldic relief, a coat of arms that bore the insignia of a key and an open hand with an eye in the palm. No detail seemed to have been spared in this homage to the intricate conventions of the Morticia Addams school of architecture.

Jim approached the lighted bay window with caution. He definitely wanted to see the inhabitants of the house before they saw him. He covered the last few yards to the house in a full crouch; then, with one hand on the carved stone of the sill, he slowly raised himself and looked inside. The spectacle that presented itself was hardly one of domestic tranquillity. The walls of the room were paneled in a dark walnut and hung with a half dozen paintings of grimly aristocratic men and women in flowing robes, posturing with dogs and falcons, against backgrounds of storm clouds and mountains. Aside from the paintings and the paneling, the room itself was dominated by a huge and magnificent fireplace, an edifice in black marble streaked by veins of yellow and green and with carved basilisks supporting a wide mantel. A log fire blazed in the grate, which might have invested the room with a modicum of hominess had it not been burning with bizarre blue-purple flames. Even more bizarre was the single figure standing motionless in the corner farthest from the fire. Jim couldn’t tell whether it was a man, woman, or even a lifelike replica, since it was covered from head to foot in a swarm of moving, jostling live bees.

Jim let out a low whistle. “What the hell do we have here? Jean Cocteau meets Edgar Allan Poe?”

As if his low whistle had triggered it, a door just within Jim’s field of vision opened and a woman came into the room. Jim instinctively ducked as the woman glanced in the direction of the window, even though he was convinced that, all other things being equal, she would be unable to see him lurking in the twilight beyond the light reflected in the window glass.

“Maybe Jean and Edgar meet Leopold Sacher-Masoch.”

Although she wore no furs, the woman was unarguably Venus. She was dressed-encased-in a cat suit of scarlet leather, pulled skin-tight to accentuate her decidedly statuesque figure by sets of lacings that ran from armpit to ankle on either side of her body. The ensemble was completed by a matching pair of platform spikes that elevated her height to well over six feet, long cocktail gloves with similar lacing, and a voluminous chiffon bridal veil in the same color. Her hair was jet-black with a bluish sheen, styled to recall the coifs of Jane Russell and Wonder Woman. As she turned to face the window, Jim saw from her ghost-pale face, with somber eye shadow and imperious scarlet mouth, that innocence had long been displaced by hard-won experience.

Jim stared mesmerized as the woman glanced once at the motionless, bee-covered figure and then walked to the fireplace and halted, looking down into the flames. He was sure that somewhere, somehow, he had seen her before, either lifeside or in the hereafter, but he was unable to dredge time, place, or circumstance from his fragmented recall. His first thought was of the strange and hazily recalled woman in the hallucination during his alien sex encounter, but no, it couldn’t be her. He knew instinctively that she had been fundamentally different.

The woman inside the room contemplated the fire for a few moments, then straightened her shoulders and turned. Jim was just able to catch the expression of weary sadness that preceded this visible hardening of her resolve. She moved with the air of a woman following orders. In the exact center of the room, she positioned herself facing the fire and stood very erect. Her hands moved in a series of ritually complex motions. The air in front of her shimmered and then a dark circular walnut table suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The table was a pretty neat trick on its own, even without the simultaneous materialization of a number of objects arranged on its surface in what looked like a symbolic pattern. All the kinetic materialization Jim had ever managed was a less than reliable ability to pluck the odd, usually stale cigarette out of thin air, and that didn’t always work. The woman in red leather was clearly a past mistress in the art of raising objects from nowhere.

The stuff on the table struck even Jim as a little strange, although hardly out of character with what he’d seen of the place so far. A long rapier, resting on a needle point and with ornate hilt, bisected the table. To one side of it lay a coiled cat-o’-nine-tails, with a Lucite handle, made from translucent optical fibers and with a tiny glowing sphere at the end of each individual lash. A branding iron in the shape of a curlicued letter S reposed on the other side of the sword, along with three square-headed iron nails at least nine inches long, a cell phone, and a clamplike device constructed from solid chrome. Jim had no idea of the purpose of this last object, except a suspicion that it was intended to cause some manner of protracted pain, likely as not to human male genitals. An earthenware jug of the kind that traditionally contained corn liquor was set slightly apart from the other items. The woman considered these objects for a few moments, then picked up the whip and flicked it experimentally, spreading the plastic thongs. As the scourge swished in the air, the tiny spheres glowed brighter, but the effect didn’t seem to please the woman. She recoiled the whip and returned it to the table. Now she picked up the sword, and as with the whip, she swung it testingly. The cold steel seemed more to her liking, and with the sword still in her right hand, she reached for the cell phone, at the same time glancing toward the door through which she had entered. Jim could hear her clearly as she spoke into the phone. “Inform Morrison that the Lady Semple has readied herself for his attendance.”

Jim twitched. Morrison? Was she talking to him? He quickly looked around, but no sign indicated his presence had been detected. He turned back to the window and saw that a third figure had come into the room. This one Jim recognized instantly. It was him. Out of shape, with half a beard, a flabby beer gut hanging over the concha belt of his leather jeans, and the ravages of depravity and dissolution clearly showing, it was unmistakably an older version of himself.

The older Morrison halted beside the table and stood looking down at the floor. The woman in red put down the cell phone and flexed the blade of the rapier into a tempered steel arc. “So you haven’t changed your mind?”

The two so clearly knew each other that Jim, outside the window, wondered if his foggy recognition of the woman was some kind of displaced front-end memory at work. Inside the room, the older Morrison raised his head and met the woman’s gaze. “No, I haven’t changed my mind.”

“There’s still time.”

“I know that.”

“But you’re determined to challenge my cruelty?”

“Do I really have any other choice? We’ve come too far to turn back now.”

The woman shrugged slightly. “Then you’d better remove your shirt.”

The older Morrison was wearing an embroidered Mexican wedding shirt and, as he slowly stripped it off, any doubts that Jim might have had that this temporally advanced version of himself drank too much and got virtually no exercise were put to rest by the sight of his bare torso and fish-belly flesh. The woman in red again flexed the sword. “Then you know what to do, don’t you?”

The older Morrison sighed with almost overwhelming world-weariness and reached for the jug. As far as Jim could gather, the upcoming ceremony was now so routine it was approaching a tedious normality. “Yes, I know what to do.”

The woman flicked the sword, creating an impatient staccato whoosh. “Then you don’t need a drink first. Just do it.”

The older Morrison put down the jug and moved to face the fireplace. He placed his hands well apart on the mantel, his arms all but fully extended. He leaned forward slightly so his pants legs wouldn’t be scorched by the flames. In that position, the mantel came to just below his chin. He moved his feet slightly apart as though starting to brace himself. His head was lowered; he might have been staring down at the flames, or perhaps his eyes were closed. Jim couldn’t quite see. The woman put the sword down on the table again, then picked up the branding iron and examined it, turning it over in her gloved hands. “My first thought was that at last it was time for me to brand you.”

The older Morrison’s shoulders tensed. “So brand me. You, if anyone, should know enough to follow your instinct.”

Two Viet Cong appeared in the doorway and stood silently watching. One was wearing a THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE T-shirt; Jim could only assume it was the same Charlie he had seen in the swamp, unless X-Files shirts were a trend among the Jurassic VC. Either the woman was ignoring the two guerrillas or she was unable to see them. She returned the branding iron to the table. “But then I changed my mind. I decided branding was a little too, shall we say, final. It would constitute a fresh benchmark in our relationship.”

“Avoid fresh benchmarks at all costs.”

The woman picked up the sword again. “Are you being funny?”

“As funny as it’s possible to be in this position.”

“Then that settles it.”

Jim on the outside and the VC on the inside watched as the older Morrison turned his head slightly. “Settles what?”

“I’m going to carve my initials on you.”

“You’ve done that before.”

The woman extended the point of the blade so it was not quite touching the skin of Morrison’s back. “So it’s no benchmark.”

The older Morrison’s flesh crawled visibly as though anticipating the slicing kiss of cold steel. Perhaps he wasn’t quite as jaded as he first seemed. He sighed, either in sadness or surrender. “That’s true.”

For a moment the woman sounded almost as wistful. “It’s sad, really. The mark of the last time is all but healed. You can only see the faintest white shadow of a scar.”

“Maybe you didn’t cut it deep enough or write it big enough.”

Her voice hardened. “Then this time it’ll be written large, you son of a bitch. Are you ready?”

The older Morrison lowered his head. “Yes, I’m ready.”

The woman in red took a deep breath. “Close your eyes. Don’t look at me until I’m finished, and don’t make any noise.”

With a swift, deft movement, she traced an arching curve with the rapier point all the way from slightly below one shoulder to slightly below the other. Blood immediately welled through the lacerated skin, holding the shape of the mark for a moment and then trickling downward. The older Morrison bit his lip but, as instructed, made no sound. Outside the window Jim felt his own spine tingle. Without faltering, the woman in red reversed the path of the blade and brought it diagonally across the small of the older Morrison’s back. Then the blade curved back once more, just above the waistband of his jeans, and she finished with a small circular flourish. It was the mark of Zorro in reverse, all in a single complex stroke.

The second initial started with a firm downstroke, but Jim would not see it finished. As the woman in red completed the first stroke, a hand fell on Jim’s shoulder, creating an ice-blue plasma flash of time distortion. Doc Holliday’s bloodshot, heavy-lidded eyes were looking into his. His face was arranged in the deceptively mild half-smile of his diamond foppishness, and when he spoke, it was with the drawl of gentlemanly decadence. “This is really not a good place for you to be, my young friend. Really not a good place at all.”

***

“Zero minus five minutes and counting. All spectators must now be in their places and protective eyewear should be ready.”

With only five minutes to go before the detonation, the onlookers were torn. Obviously they didn’t want to miss the end of the cat-fight, but their God-King’s atom bomb was calling; the outcome of the confrontation between Semple the Concubine and Suchep the Whore had looked like a foregone conclusion from the moment that Suchep had stooped down and picked up the rock. Now she stood astride Semple in primitive triumph, naked but for the tatters of her skirt, body smeared with dirt, blood, and sweat, the golden collar wrapped around her wrist like a trophy, and the rock raised above her head in both hands, ready to bring it down to crush Semple’s skull and send her back to the Great Double Helix by the most direct route. Semple could do nothing. She was dizzy and her strength was gone. When Suchep had looked around for a suitable rock with which to administer the coup de grace, Semple had seen her opening, but her legs had refused to work. Now all she could do was close her eyes, accept the inevitable, and hope that any pain would be over in an instant. Acceptance wasn’t that easy, however. A part of her was still seething, resenting that she had come so far only to fail so ignominiously. When she finally returned from the pods, she doubted that she could ever face Aimee again. That is, if Aimee even existed in whatever sector of the hereafter Semple eventually emerged. Only time would tell what might happen if one of them died a second time.

“Zero minus four minutes and counting. Protective eyewear should now be in place.”

At the blare of the trumpets, Suchep, rock still poised, hesitated for a split second. The crowd was now yelling, goading her to finish Semple so they could settle their bets before the bomb went off. In that instant, Semple saw the last possible chance of a reprieve and took it. With an effort she would later consider superhuman, she simply kicked straight up. Her shin hit Suchep hard and squarely in the crotch. The woman gasped and staggered, and the rock dropped from her hands. One victory was all Semple needed. The magical, last-ditch burst of energy extended itself long enough for her to quickly twist and trip her off-balance opponent. Now the crowd was really torn. The catfight had taken a new lease on life, but the main event would go off in three minutes and a diminishing number of seconds.

Semple crawled to where Suchep lay face down in the dirt. She was attempting to push herself up on her arms, but she appeared even more exhausted than Semple. Semple grabbed her by the hair and jerked her head backward so Suchep was staring straight into her face. “So you thought you were going bash my head in with a rock, did you?”

The tables had turned so suddenly that Suchep seemed to be having trouble grasping what had happened. “I-”

Semple slammed the woman’s confused face hard back into the dirt and then raised it again. “Thought you were going to score points with the boys by killing me, did you?”

This time Suchep didn’t even attempt to answer. She seemed almost as resigned to her fate as Semple had been a few moments earlier, and Semple took a perverse delight in ramming her face once more into the dirt. When Semple jerked her head up again, Suchep’s nose was again bleeding. “My name is Semple McPherson, sweetheart. You’d best remember that. You made a serious mistake when you tagged me as some fragile harem pet.”

To emphasize her point, Semple twisted her fingers viciously in Suchep’s hair. “I could kill you right now if I wanted to.”

Because of her bloody nose, Suchep’s breath was coming in short harsh grunts. “No, please . . . don’t . . . ”

“Are you begging me?”

“Don’t . . . kill me . . . I . . . ”

“Zero minus three minutes and counting.”

Even though she was enjoying hurting this bitch who had tried to put the hurt on her, Semple realized she had to finish Suchep or let her go. She toyed with the idea of making a theatrical appeal to the crowd for a thumbs up or thumbs down, but decided they hardly merited that much respect or display. Also, she wasn’t in the mood for murder. To remain angry with this woman for long enough to beat her to death seemed a misuse of energies. Semple leaned forward and breathed into Suchep’s ear. “Just let me hear you beg.”

Suchep’s bruised mouth twisted. “Okay, okay, I’m begging.”

Semple had to give the woman credit for managing to retain a shred of defiance in her tone, even while begging for her life. She lowered the woman’s head slightly. “If I let go of you, you’ll just lay there, okay? No tricks? No double-cross?”

“I swear . . . ”

“The damned bomb’s going to go off any minute.”

Suchep groaned. “No tricks. I swear.”

Semple let go of Suchep’s hair, straightened up, and got wearily to her feet. True to her word, Suchep lay face down on the ground, not moving. Semple unwound the collar from the woman’s wrist. “I fear you’re going to spend the next year on your back, earning your living the old-fashioned way.”

Semple faced the crowd as the victor, but the crowd had no time for applause. Self-interest was their only concern as they jostled to cash in their markers before the explosion. Even though many of them had made money off her at long odds, no one thought so much as to offer her a blanket with which to cover herself. Both she and the fight were history.

“Zero minus two minutes and counting. All monitor and bunker crews must be in place. All loose objects must be secured.”

Semple slowly turned, totally at a loss for what to do. She was beat up, dressed only in a thong bikini, and on the lam. The remnants of her skirt lay in the dust where Suchep had ripped it off her. She gathered up the tatters, wrapping them quickly around her waist as a makeshift kilt. Most of the crowd had started to move back. With the detonation so close at hand, the air of festivity had wilted, giving way to an anxious anticipation. The majority finally seemed to have grasped that Anubis’s atom bomb might be no more efficient than anything else in Necropolis. For all any of them knew, it could just as easily set fire to the atmosphere as go off as planned.

“Zero minus ninety seconds and counting.”

Semple noticed the protective visor she had been given in the royal enclosure was on the ground where she’d dropped it at the start of the fight. She quickly picked it up and put it on. After she’d run from Anubis and battered Suchep bloody, she saw absolutely no point in being blinded by the nuclear flash. She also looped the collar around her neck. Maybe next time around it could buy her some luck instead of provoking trouble.

“Zero minus seventy-five seconds and counting.”

Semple knew she must have presented a decidedly odd figure in her improvised loincloth, wild disheveled hair, and black plastic visor, wearing a gold collar that was worth a small fortune, but this was no time to worry about how she looked. Almost all of the crowd had now donned various forms of what the countdown voice had called protective eyewear, investing them with a strange zombie uniformity that reminded Semple of the audiences at one of the those 3D movies back in the lifeside 1950s. The atomic explosion obviously represented something beyond mere B-movie special effects, though. The act of putting on their souvenir visors and sunglasses seemed to have helped convince the crowd that the bomb constituted more of a threat than they had previously imagined. A low-level mass apprehension was creating a general retreat toward the barriers around the royal enclosure, and a line of Nubians-with spears tipped with functional steel instead of ceremonial gold-had moved out of the enclosure to reinforce the wood and canvas barricades against a sudden nervous rush by the lower orders. The Nubians were soon augmented by rocketeer police in full riot drag, who emerged from the enclosures at a dead run. Like so much else in Necropolis, the Divine Atom Bomb Festival was now threatening to turn ugly in its final seconds.

“Zero minus sixty seconds and counting. The subclass will prepare to prostrate itself.”

Semple wondered if now, by default, she qualified as one of the sub-class, but she had no intention of kneeling or otherwise humbling herself. Much against both her will and her good taste, she had found herself on her knees in front of the dog-god more times than she cared to dwell upon. As far as she was concerned, that had ceased for good when she’d fled the royal pavilion.

“Zero minus fifty seconds and counting.”

Even Suchep had managed to get to her hands and knees and was crawling after the rest of the crowd. Semple, who had so far refused to retreat, now found herself close to the front ranks of the spectators.

“Zero minus forty seconds and counting.”

She could feel the fear that was permeating the mob, but there was no way she was going to give in to it. To move away from the bomb was to also move toward Anubis, and that was out of the question.

“Zero minus thirty seconds and counting. The subclass will now prostrate itself.”

To Semple’s amazement, the majority of the crowd was dropping to its knees.

“Twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight.”

She had expected the Necropolis underclass to be more rebellious. Even in the mire of dog-god religious repression and poverty, she could hardly believe that a strata of old-time anarchy or drunken bolshevism hadn’t evolved. It looked as though the majority were lacking even the balls of a whore like Suchep.

“Twenty-seven . . . twenty-six . . . ”

The invisible trumpets now maintained a constant scream under the hectoring voice. “Twenty-five . . . twenty-four . . . at twenty seconds all knees will be bowed, all souls will grovel before the might of Anubis.”

The voice had taken on a chanting, liturgical measure. Anubis or maybe his Dream Warden seemed to have decided that the big bang would take place in an atmosphere of worshipful devotion.

“Twenty . . . ”

The crowd was on the ground.

“Nineteen . . . ”

Semple was one of the very last to remain standing.

“Eighteen . . . ”

“Fuck this.”

“Seventeen . . . sixteen . . . ”

With the crowd all prone, Semple had a clear and perfect view of the chrome obelisk, at the very tip of which lurked Anubis’s sacred nuke.

“Fifteen. All praise be to the mighty Lord Anubis.”

A celestial choir intoned a rising atonal cadence and the low rumble of a Bach organ was mixed in with the trumpets.

“Fourteen . . . thirteen . . . twelve . . . ”

Semple was finding it all too much. Rather than stand around, knee-deep in prostrate proles, she decided she needed to be positive, to go boldy against the flow of this Necropolis lunacy, to counter it with some lunacy of her own.

“Eleven. Laud and magnify the Lord Anubis and his mighty weapon.”

She started to walk toward the obelisk, carefully picking her way through the mass of huddled grovelers.

“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . ”

She was nearing the front of the crowd. She started to hurry. She wanted to be alone with the bomb.

“Six . . . five . . . four . . . ”

She stopped dead at three. She was a very long way from the obelisk, but at least she was clear of the crowd. She stood upright and spread her arms. The Divine Atom Bomb could take her if it dared, and damn the gamma rays.

“Two . . . one . . . ”

In the first nanosecond, it was nothing more than a point of infinitely bright light.

“Ignition!”

But this grew into a ball of cosmic fire, as though a piece of the sun had been touched off at ground zero, so impossibly, searingly bright that, even from behind the visor, Semple could feel her retina commencing to bum. Beyond the realm of visible light, she could also feel the lashing waves of radiation ripping and jackhammering at every cell of her body. Her very molecular structure seemed to be at risk; her skeleton was clearly visible, glowing with a dull red fire, beneath flesh rendered translucent by the nativity of this new sun. At any moment she felt she would melt away, blasted back to Great Double Helix by the awesome solar wind-and, right then, Semple didn’t care. The chips could fall where they might. And she was surprised to find the experience was far from unpleasant. The intensity of the screaming protons, neutrons, and electrons that howled through her transcended by quantum factors any experience she had ever known. It was worth everything that had gone before and anything that might come later. Semple was seized by a mind-bending awe at the infinity of this bliss.

“Oh! No! Yes! Oh no! I don’t believe this! I can’t conceive this!”

And then the heat and blast hit.

***

Aimee McPherson let out a small shriek. For an instant she had been blinded by clear white light, and nothing like that had ever happened to her on this side of the veil. Migraine? Brain tumor? Surely such things were impossible here in her perfect Heaven. In that instant of questioning, she knew instinctively that it was a print-through from Semple. As if in confirmation, her body was suddenly racked by a surge of feeling that doubled her over and forced a gasping groan from her lips. “Oh my . . . ”

She was about to appeal to God, but by now she was so far on the outs with the Almighty that she couldn’t bring herself, even in this extremity, to utter his name.

“Oh my”.

The nuns who were accompanying her on her walk on the terrace quickly gathered around, the cartoon bluebirds milled anxiously in the air, and a small winged Pegasus whinnied nervously. A novice stood beside her, wanting to put a comforting arm around her, but was too paralyzed by reverence to do so. “Are you all right, Mother Aimee?”

The sensation coursing through her body wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but she wasn’t about to admit that to the nuns. “Of course, I’m fine . . . except I’m wondering what in the hereafter my sister is up to.”

***

Jim all but jumped out of his skin. Doc Holliday was the very last person he’d expected to see in the Jurassic, although later he’d realize that Doc was more than capable of being in any time or place he wanted to be, and on occasion in more than one place at a time. “What-”

Doc put an amused forefinger to his lips. “For mercy’s sake, be quiet, boy. They’ll hear you inside.”

Jim dropped his voice to a whisper. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Doc was dressed for traveling. His boots were caked with mud and his long duster coat was stained with algae from the swamp. His pale face had a three-day growth of stubble and he appeared cumulatively hungover. He regarded Jim bleakly. “I’m getting you out of an entire mess of shit that, as of now, you’re not even aware you’re heading into.”

Bewilderment seemed to be Jim’s only option. “Mess of shit? What are you talking about?”

Doc indicated the deviant tableau in the room beyond the window. “That guy getting his back carved by the fire, that’s you, only older, am I right?”

Jim nodded. “It sure looks like me.”

Doc was becoming impatient. “It’s you. Take my word for it.”

“Is it really me, or is it another me?”

Doc pushed back his hat and looked sourly at Jim. “Don’t get cute with me, boy.”

“I was just asking.”

“It’s you. Accept it.”

“And who’s the woman doing the carving?”

“That’s Semple McPherson.”

Jim couldn’t help but smile. “Are you telling me the initials were S and M?”

“You don’t know her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So you haven’t met her yet?”

“Not that I can remember, and I think I’d remember her.”

Doc thought about this. “Then I guess you’ll meet her later. Or maybe you won’t. Your alternate paths of destiny seemed to be busy tangling themselves in a highly untidy manner.”

“So what’s all this shit I’m about to get into?”

“I thought you might have learned better by now, but I guess you haven’t.”

“Learned better about what?”

“That it’s a terribly bad idea to be meeting face-to-face with an older version of yourself. Most times, the results are messy for the bystanders and apocalyptically ugly for the two directly involved.”

“Are you saying we ought to get out of here?”

“Right now, boy. With all the haste at our command.”

“How are we going to do that? Dematerialize or something?”

Doc sighed. “You’re getting a mite fancy, aren’t you? We’re getting out of here by boat. I’ve got one hidden under the trees. A motorboat of some power.”

“A motorboat?”

“That’s what I said. You have some problem with boats? You don’t get seasick or anything unseemly like that, do you?”

Jim shook his head. “It’s just that there are Viet Cong all over the place.”

Doc frowned. “You’re not telling me they can see you? You’re not telling me that, are you?”

“No, they can’t see me. I was just wondering if they could maybe see you.”

Doc’s face hardened. “Are you trying to insult me?”

Jim quickly changed the subject. He wasn’t sure he and Doc were speaking in the same tongue and he decided it might be wise to stick to simple topics. “So shall we head for this motorboat of yours?”

Doc nodded. He and Jim straightened up and moved silently away from the window. Jim was about to turn for one final look back at the strange scene inside the room, but Doc shook his head. “It’d be best if you didn’t.”

“Pillar of salt?”

“Maybe worse.”

The two men walked carefully through the grove of prehistoric trees, watchful for VC or anything else that might jeopardize their departure. As they were passing the rusting hulk of the car, Jim glanced questioningly at Doc. “Here’s one thing I don’t quite understand.”

“What’s that, my friend?”

“Why are you doing all this? Why are helping me like this?”

Doc was surprised by the question. “I figured after what you did for me, I owed you the courtesy of at least one favor. When one of the Mammals with No Name told me you were headed on out here to this godforsaken pile on your own, with no idea that the Old Jim was here already, I decided I’d better follow you and make sure you didn’t get yourself blended or warped.”

One confusion seemed to be progressively layering on the last. “After I did what for you? What did I do for you?”

Doc raised his eyebrows as though he still couldn’t quite believe Jim didn’t know what he was talking about. “When someone saves Doc Holliday from a room full of aura-tweaking Selenites, I generally consider I owe that man a personal debt of gratitude.”

“I saved your ass from a bunch of aura-tweaking Selenites?”

Doc grinned. “Indeed you did. I thought I was pod-bound before you came gallantly walking into that misbegotten gin mill with a blaster in your hand.”

Jim sighed. Once again, the world in which he found himself was shedding its resemblance to reality so rapidly, it was making his head spin. “Are you sure about all this?”

“It’s hardly something a gentleman makes an error about.”

“As far as I’m concerned, the last time I saw you, you were throwing me out of town.”

Now it was Doc’s turned to be confused. “How is it I have no recollection of that?”

Jim shrugged. “Like you’ve been telling me. Time and memory can get weird on you.”

“So what do you think happened?”

“We were in this town you seemed to own. You came out of Sun Yat’s opium den, then went into the cantina. When you came out, you told me to leave town.”

Doc nodded. “That sounds like me. What happened next?”

“I protested some, and then Long Time Robert Moore offered me a ride . . . ”

Doc seemed not to recognize the name. “Long Robert who?”

“An old blues guy with an alien connection.”

Doc considered this. “Curiouser and curiouser, as Dr. Dodgson used to say.”

“It’s too late to worry about it.”

“So what did I do when you protested?”

“You very pointedly showed me the Gun That Belonged to Elvis.”

In almost a reprise of the night in question, Doc allowed his duster coat to fall open. The selfsame weapon nestled in a well-oiled shoulder holster. “This one?”

Jim nodded. “That’s the one.”

“At least something’s consistent. So what was it you did to awaken my ire all the way back in Sun Yat’s Palace of Mirrors?”

“It wasn’t exactly what I did . . . ”

“It hardly ever is, in retrospect.”

“These three Voodoo Mysteres came burning into town in a ball of fire and-”

Before Jim could finish, Doc’s face darkened. He suffered a brief coughing fit, and when he was over it, his flamboyant and slightly inebriated tone dropped away. “Are you telling me the truth, boy? Voodoo Mysteres are no joking matter.”

Jim was losing his own patience. “Of course I’m telling the truth. There were three of them, Danbhalah La Flambeau, Dr. Hypodermic, and Baron Tonnerre-”

“Jesus wept, boy. Are you crazy? Don’t say their fucking names out loud. We don’t need that trio showing up. The Mysteres have a nasty habit of coming if called.” Doc halted and looked around as though he expected the unholy three to instantly appear out of nowhere. “Dr. Hypodermic visits this place enough, anyway. I half expected to cross his path on the way here.” He scanned the horizon. “In fact, I still wouldn’t be surprise to see one of his hearses rolling across the swamp.”

Jim was now progressing from mystified to perturbed. “I really don’t understand.”

“No, you probably don’t.”

“Dr. Hypodermic rides a hearse?”

“He enjoys all manner of transportation. Although the old Rolls-Royce is among his favorites.”

Doc paused for a moment, but when nothing happened, he took Jim by the arm. “Let’s get to the goddamned boat. I have a nautical bottle stashed.”

The boat turned out to be a solidly constructed heavyweight powerboat from the 1930s, with beautifully maintained and varnished timbers, tied up to a small dilapidated jetty. Doc went ahead to climb aboard first. He steadied the slight rocking of the craft as Jim followed close behind. Jim was about to step into the boat when a sudden flare of light appeared silently, low in the western sky, as though reflected from someplace beyond the horizon, a white-through-red pulsation, accompanied by a strange twinge of unease. With the Voodoo Mysteres still on his mind, Jim looked quickly at Doc, who was attempting to start the boat’s engine.

“What was that?”

Doc turned the key in the ignition and the boat roared into life. He didn’t seem unduly bothered. “It looked like a nuclear explosion in another quadrant.”

“A nuclear explosion?”

“It’s nothing to bother us.”

Jim wasn’t so sure. “A nuclear explosion?”

“There’s no knowing what some folks will get up to.”

“Is it my imagination, or are things getting out of hand?”

“My young friend, things have always been out of hand. It’s just that, now the Afterlife is so goddamned crowded, we tend to notice it more.” Doc gestured to the boat’s mooring rope. “Cast off that line, will you?”

Jim did as he was told and then settled into the seat next to Doc. As soon as they were under way and heading out into the open water of the swamp, Doc brought out his nautical bottle of bourbon, took a pull on it, and handed it to Jim. “Have a drink, young Morrison. I think we got you out of there not a moment too soon. I shudder to think what might have come to pass if you and yourself had come face-to-face.”

Jim gratefully accepted the bottle. “There is one other thing that’s still puzzling me.”

Doc adjusted the boat’s course to avoid coming too close to a group of foraging diplodocuses. “What’s that?”

“What was the story on the guy covered in bees?”

Doc blinked as though the story were stupidly obvious. “He’s a guy covered in bees. What else? A lot of people keep one around.”

“why”

Doc looked at Jim as if he were a total moron. “For the honey, of course.”