“Yet Apollonius was by no means an ultra peace man, for he strongly advocated the shaving and clothing of the Ethiopians, and their thorough chastisement when they refused to be combed and purified.
“When Domitian grasped at the imperial sceptre, the great Tyanean sided with his rival, Nerva, and having for this offence been seized and cast into prison, suddenly vanished from sight and reappeared on the instant at Puteoli, one hundred and fifty miles away.” – P.T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World
“He’s got stooges with him this time!”
47. (Atlanta)
Miami’s latest salvo of short range Golden Fires exhausted, the Caribbean God flashed forward at her, swinging away with purple glowing fists. Atlanta responded in kind, happy to get it on at short range. Despite her preparations, Miami still had more varied range weapons, and more potent ones, besides. As she traded mid-air left hooks and uppercuts with Miami, she carefully built a stronger ‘floor’ underneath her. They had passed beyond the farmland and now fought above a hilly Portland suburb. When she finished the floor, she shifted from boxing to Semper Fu, throwing her entire body at the idiot martial God, attempting to corral him with a scissors hold, to pin his arms at his side.
The move worked. “Surrender, dammit!” she said, bellowing at him after she immobilized him. He ignored her and worked his willpower on the world and her reality ‘floor’, sending them plummeting toward the ground, and with a vomit-inducing wave of willpower use bringing an entire hillside down upon them, complete with splintering homes and screaming civilians. Buffeted by thousands of tons of rock and soil and by the shock of the instantaneous Integrity hit on all of the 99 Gods due to Miami’s actions, Atlanta lost her hold on Miami.
Fuck!
Atlanta reality-distortion transported out from under the hillside, cursing because the transports wasted a large amount of her meager willpower supply, even when she went less than five hundred feet, and because they were supposed to be a means of pressing the attack, not a goddamned defense or utility. No Miami. She extended her senses and found the lunatic God bull-rushing his way out from under the rock and soil. She charged at his most likely exit point, and when he appeared, she took her second to last charged stave out of its concealment and swung it Ruthian at the side of Miami’s head. He didn’t duck, slowed by the exertions of escaping his earthen tomb. The charged stave detonated on contact, taking off twenty percent of his head.
To no visible effect.
Miami, in turn, whipped a hand toward the disturbed ground and remnants of houses below where Atlanta flew and let loose a thin white bolt of energy. The ground exploded when the white bolt hit, not a chemical explosion, but something atomic.
The analyst in Atlanta’s mind put the blast yield at about a seventh of a kiloton, but since it wasn’t a fission explosion or a fusion explosion she didn’t have a clue as to what Miami did or why the trick took hitting the ground to work (and why nothing exploded when the attack had passed through the air). The detonation’s shock wave sent her cartwheeling away, to find herself five hundred feet away from Miami on the far side of a miniature mushroom cloud.
Atlanta fought her way back to full consciousness and functionality, taking in the scene around her. This end of the subdivision looked nuked by something larger than Miami’s latest. From horizon to horizon, dozens of plumes of smoke of various sizes rose up from fires Miami had set with his attacks. Each civilian death sucked down the joint Integrity of the 99 Gods another notch, to where her own personal success scenarios faded to black from lack of group Integrity. The motherfucker didn’t seem to care if he took down all the Gods as long as he won.
Worse, every time she damaged Miami, she damaged herself as well. For a moment she feared this was a sneaky Miami attack on her, until one of her thought tracks sensed Miami suffering the same fate. No, they weren’t supposed to be fighting.
Miami used the now-decent separation between them to press his range advantage, repeatedly blasting her with flesh-rending Red and Gold Helixes, without pause. He had to be exhausting himself with this tactic, Atlanta decided. Going for the knockout. She retreated back to let the air between degrade his attacks, but her only avenue of retreat led her back to Portland’s estate. Or what little remained of Portland’s estate.
From the corner of her eye, she glanced at the fight below. She couldn’t tell which side prevailed, but she could tell the losing side: the estate. At least her marked Miami thug had done as planned. As Atlanta backed up, she clonked into a force field, a telekinetic shell erected by Ken, and realized she couldn’t retreat any farther.
She couldn’t let Miami get to the Telepaths with his Red and Gold Helixes. They wouldn’t last a second. She had one more charged stave left, so she took it out of its concealment and charged Miami at maximum acceleration. He got her three times with his Red and Gold Helix attacks as she moved, which removed a good inch from the front of her body. She refused to scream until she swung the stave into Miami, another head blow, a blow aided by her sound-barrier busting final approach speed.
Now only half of his head remained.
He didn’t give up, although he did scream as he tumbled away for a quarter second. Atlanta stopped herself faster than she had started, kicking up a giant spray of dirt as she used the tumbled up ground as a backstop and turned back to the fight.
The flesh-rending beams vanished, replace by Golden Fire blasts, one after the other. He had tried his Golden Fire blasts earlier, but gave up on them as useless. Atlanta ignored the Golden Fire, as he would need blast her for an hour with these to match the damage of his last Red and Gold Helix attack. She stepped into Miami and went after him hand to hand. When he didn’t defend, she took out two knives she had specifically constructed to damage God-flesh.
She knew they worked, as she had practiced on herself.
She sliced. He didn’t pass out, die, leak fake divine blood or even fall apart. He did back off, screaming and enveloping Atlanta in Gold Flame as he did so.
She didn’t have the power left to kill the bastard. Miami’s last pointblank Red and Gold Helix attacks had weakened her too much, and she didn’t have much willpower left. She kept on slicing. Miami kept on retreating and flaming her.
Atlanta gave the red signal.
Time to roll the dice.
48. (Nessa)
The instant Miami attacked Atlanta, Portland shouted “Run! Dammit, run!” to her invited media crew. Openness and transparency, Portland had said. Let’s see if they have the nerve to try any chicanery in front of the cameras, Portland had said. Nobody would be so stupid as to stage a fight now, Portland had said.
Soothsayer she wasn’t. The media had settled in for only a minute before Miami and Atlanta started jawing, and less than a minute later they turned from jawing to fighting. So much for Miami’s good sense.
“Go! Move that lazy ass!” Nessa said, shouting encouragement at the media people. She wanted to run, too. Dammit! For a moment she put up an ‘I am pregnant’ sign in front of her, before Ken bellowed “Crap! He’s got stooges with him this time!” at a hundred and thirty decibels.
Nessa panicked herself into total paranoia when she found Miami’s stooges swooping down without a word of warning at Portland’s estate. Where had they come from! These attackers, laden down with mundane weapons and other things Nessa couldn’t identify, were led by two thugs AK-ing down a blanket of covering fire ahead of them.
“Down, everybody!” Nessa screamed warning after warning as she picked up the attackers’ murderous intentions. They were here to kill everybody. The thugs landed at the edge of the estate and let loose with their God-enhanced weaponry. Portland, caught off guard and out of position as she protected the media crew on the way out, didn’t react as a half dozen God-enhanced rocket propelled grenades passed through Ken’s best teek shell unhindered and blasted open the back side of Portland’s estate like an exploding egg. Prep died instantly in the blast.
&
nbsp; Agony!
Nessa’s mind turned white with rage.
Death!
She reached out with her telepathy…
Whiteholemadnessdissolutionpain…
Focus.
Nessa overcame herself and subdued six of the eighteen, holding them in place. She had tried for all of them, but the twisty God-derived mental shields of the six she held constantly tried to sever the connection and cut Nessa’s control. The other dozen slipped from her grasp, her control stopped by the Godly mind protections, their natural cussedness, and in one case, because he was Mindbound.
For some unknown reason the Mindbound idiot surrendered anyway.
Nessa marked him for later deep analysis.
One of the six she subdued almost broke free, raping the sky with his AK for a moment before Nessa got him back. She blanked out on the rest of the world, making sure she held on to the six.
The battle continued around her, perceived in only minute glimpses. Ken by her side, they dodged the falling estate house – far too familiar, that – and flaming bombs to take shelter on the lee side of a brick fireplace. As the seconds and minutes passed, other blows rained down on her, wounds and mental blows, at first hers, then the deaths and injuries of dozens, then hundreds, of people.
Who? Where? Nessa found the strength to pry open her eyes and pay attention to the fight.
Horror grabbed her when she didn’t recognize the rubble around her. The fight had gone too far. She watched Ken take out one of the attackers with a multi-ton steel support recently part of the second floor of Portland’s estate. Alt knelt behind a mini-bar carved from a granite boulder, firing his subgun at the places Miami’s thugs fled after they dodged Ken-tossed high-speed rubble. None of the others save Melvin, Portland or Celebrity did anything more than scream, collect wounds, die or shoot weapons into the sky.
Nessa did so. She recognized the mental call as from Joan D’Ark, and the distant Telepath’s emotional support buoyed her. Joining with her in Nessa’s mind were a whole squad of the distant ones, including the old Telepath collective One Mind (appearing in her mind as a Tibetan martial artist), Nisita the Bangaldeshi seamstress (pissed off that anyone would dare attack such a wonderful God as Portland), and Ivory Mask and his harem of four women Psychics he stabilized into telepathic functionality (he appeared as a black-skinned princeling of South Africa in her mind). Today, an attack on one Telepath was an attack on all of them, even if they normally had a hard time getting along with each other, and would never ever be found in the same room together.
Celebrity, appearing as Nessa, drew fire, faked life-threatening wounds, and did zap-I’ve-got-your-mind gestures at Miami’s thugs. She got two with her sexual charisma before catching an RPG in the chest. That ended her disguise, the grenade blast reducing Celebrity to her native mottled silvery God body.
Portland either chickened out or plotted something sneaky, Nessa couldn’t tell which. As Miami forced Atlanta back into Ken’s teek shield Portland appeared on Nessa’s far right, at the other end of the estate house rubble, with Melvin at her side. God help them if they had to face Miami straight up with what he could shoot these days, Nessa thought. Portland and Melvin did a joint willpower blast at the remaining attackers, nothing Nessa was able to sense after the attack left the pair. Most of the remaining enemy thugs fell, but one fired back.
Ivory Mask sent, a round the world comment in heavily accented English echoing terror through Nessa’s mind. She winced and covered up before the blast got off, which although Ken stopped it, still rumbled through her body like a punch in the gut and dazzled her blind. When her eyesight recovered, she saw the blast had taken out the other end of the estate house, the swimming pool, the garage and the bathhouse, leaving only Portland standing, as mottled and silvery as Celebrity. Then Portland liquefied and sank into the rubble.
“Shit!” Nessa said, but she wasn’t able to hear herself. Ken pointed at the enemy and Nessa counted. Only two attackers remained. Shaking in fear, she grabbed Ken’s shoulder.
“Combined mental blast,” she said, her voice cracking, ignoring the tears carving river valleys through the dust on her cheeks. With only two enemies left, now Nessa and Ken could chance a joint attack. Otherwise, the combined blast left them far too open to retaliation.
Ken nodded.
One of the two remaining attackers found an angle and stitched air through Giselle. Nessa felt Giselle’s agony, which took Nessa out of her battle rationality into full berserk. The second attacker shot another RPG into the estate’s remains, flinging rubble from the sidewall over them and those who had already fallen.
She and Ken linked their minds together, daunting and complex because some of the distant ones were with Ken as well: One Mind, a silent and surprisingly helpful Korua, and three others Nessa didn’t have time to recognize. She and Ken pressed home the mental attack on the last two, steadied by the distant ones. The divinely enhanced cussedness of the last two enemies kept Nessa and Ken’s attack at bay for a good ten seconds before their mental defenses failed.
When their mental shields failed, the last of Miami’s two attackers fell dead where they stood.
Nessa bent over and vomited, body shaking, while Ken screamed triumph. After she finished vomiting, she dove into Ken’s arms and buried her eyes. He collapsed exhausted to the ground, holding her in his arms. They panted and shook for at least a half minute, exhausted by their linked attack. Deep in her mind, all the distant ones save Korua whispered and argued about something Joan D’Ark had almost nerved herself up to do, before she backed off in self-induced terror. Nessa sent, in support.
“Look,” Ken said, after he found his thoughts again. “That’s insane.”
Nessa recovered enough to follow Ken’s gaze.
She couldn’t believe what she saw, either.
49. (Dave)
Dave cheered as his son tackled the opposing team’s runner, and then sat back down. Beside him, Shannon texted on Dave’s cell and Stacy colored princesses on hers, with Lias burbling Disneyesque tunes in the background, both oblivious to the excitement of Pop Warner football. He, on the other hand, was hooked. Watching his son play miniature lineman, dwarfed by his pads, made the silly game exciting. He still marveled at such a thing. He couldn’t believe he had argued against this, once upon a time, only giving in to Tiff’s own athletic experiences. To her, kids’ sports had been a necessity.
One of the parents two rows in front of him answered her smartphone, and started to fiddle. Her actions prompted his thoughts to turn to the problems of his friendships. Earlier today he had again tried to patch things up with Steve and Mirabelle. Steve had not only refused to answer his cell, but he had set up his phonemail with a message especially for Dave.
“I once had a friendship with a man named Dave,” Steve’s recording said. “It’s become the memory of pain. Terminal illness claimed him, and he’s gone.” Click. Dave couldn’t help but smile ruefully at Steve’s intentionally allusive ‘memory of pain’ comment and the rest of his poetic prose, so telling on so many different levels. Nobody was able to remember pain. Or, in Steve’s case, Dave.
He would have been a lot happier about the jape if he hadn’t been Steve’s target.
Mirabelle had been just as frustrating in her own way. She at least would talk to him, but she wouldn’t come over to his place or invite him over to hers or talk about any form of reconciliation. Socially outmaneuvered and buried by mindless small talk, he had given up in disgust.
Two other parents started to fiddle with their phones, frantic. A third put his hands to the side of his head, a standard command to put his Apple wearable in full-immersion mode. Adrenaline hit, as he knew the panicked responses quite well, and he retrieved his smartphone from Shannon and clicked over to the internet.
He focused, dumbstruck, on what he saw, a live feed of two Living Saints in battle, laying waste to a subdivision. The tiny tinny voice of s
ome announcer gave the basics: Miami had attacked Atlanta outside of Portland’s estate headquarters.
The live feed panned to the rubble of Portland’s estate and flipped back to something from a minute or so earlier, an explosion with a mushroom cloud. A nuke! A small nuke, but enough to worry the announcer about her comrades less than a quarter mile away.
Dave choked back vomit, fighting the urge to scream “No!” at the heavens. The Living Saints had come to end wars, not start them! “So ends the God’s utopia, with the destruction of the Forest Harbor subdivision and the deaths of an unknown number of civilians,” the angry woman announcer said, echoing Dave’s thoughts.
A male colleague of hers disagreed. “The evidence points to one of the Gods going rogue, not a flaw in all the Gods,” he said. “If you’ve noticed, not a single one of Atlanta’s attacks hit anything other than Miami. Miami’s indiscriminate attacks are the ones which killed the civilians, not hers, along with Miami’s soldiers’ attacks on Portland’s estate.”
Please be just that, Dave prayed. Please be just that, one rogue God.
Old Testament stories of the wrath of God circled in the back of his mind, God ordering the Israelites to slaughter yet another village, yet another town, yet another tribe. Justice and war had been different to God then. Were they still different now? What form of justice could this be?
If he had taken Portland’s flunky’s offer, would he be down there, witnessing this first hand? Would he already be dead, lying in the rubble of Portland’s destroyed headquarters?
His gut said ‘yes’. He had been right to turn down Portland’s offer, another screwy coincidence in a life filled with screwy coincidences.
The screen flashed to a short clip of Dubuque, standing in front of the press, with an ‘earlier comment’ caption underneath. “Miami came to me first, and we discussed the situation and his grievances,” Dubuque said. “I thought I talked him out of his insane battle idea. Mistakes were made. I cannot say otherwise.”
The screen flashed back to real time, the actual fight, Miami shooting golden laser beams or something else insane at the clearly overmatched Atlanta. Dubuque had failed. Dave choked back a sob and nascent tears. Tiff had been right; the Living Saints could fail. How could any of this happen? How could any of the Living Saints go bad?
“Wait, John,” the woman announcer said. “Unbelievable. We’ve got something else…”
The tiny smartphone screen split, the feed showing a chaotic news conference, where the camera panned back and forth between a nervous fiftyish woman dressed in a black S&M style leather outfit, covered improbably by a black hand-knit shawl, and a couple of reporters drawing pictures on each other’s foreheads with Sharpies. “…not a God, I’m a Telepath. We’ve always been with you, mostly among the young, but on very rare occasions, as adults,” the dominatrix said. The feed at the bottom identified her as, improbably, Joan D’ark, telepath. As he watched the feed, her last name changed to D’Ark. Telepaths? Dave couldn’t believe his eyes. Why in the hell had the cable news put this crap on during a televised fight between two Living Saints?
Because she made them.
He discarded his hunch as too crazy for words, but he got all goosepimply anyway.
“I’m more terrified of you than you are of me, despite what I’ve showed you to be true,” she said, waving at the sharpie-wielding reporters. “The only reason I’m willing to show myself to you at all is what’s happening right now in America. For reasons that escape all of us, some of the Gods have turned on us Telepaths, and they have decided to hunt us down like dogs. Portland, bless her soul, has a group of Telepaths under her protection. Her refusal to hand them over to Miami for extermination started this fight. I don’t have any choice in what I’m doing here. Going public’s the only thing that might possibly save us from the Gods, despite the dangers inherent in revealing anything of ourselves. In past ages, we’ve been hunted down and killed as witches.”
Insane. This had to be a hoax.
Dave turned back to the now soundless upper picture, the live feed of the ongoing fight between Miami and Atlanta. “No,” he said, watching in disbelief at the latest turn of events in the fight, his smartphone shaking in adrenaline fear. “How in the hell…”