Part Three
Three mighty skiffs pierced the desired fold in Time’s Omniscience and appeared, three darker sparks of night above the Uinta Basin in Northern Utah. Phoenix and Atlas Khron had hunted here aforetime, had taken the outliers of the feral human herd for breed stock.
Atlas stood beside Geryon Baal, senior of the Deathless Ones. Geryon was two heads taller than Jack and two hands wider at the shoulders. The Deathless Titan, all of whom were said to have ichor for blood rather than the Ageless Titans of Sirius, who were merely long of life, was black-eyed, blonde-haired, gauntly muscled with skin the pallor of alabaster, and seemed the very ghoul of his kind, his close-cropped head suggestive of a sheared lion’s mane, his perfect flesh-tearing teeth all sharp across the front—pointed. Geryon and his ilk were not really larger than Atlas and his. They were higher, were said to have powers, did not suffer sadness like the Titans and though they might be injured or even killed, they could be repaired.
The skiff was three ells wide and nine ells long. Bill shrank back behind the God and the Titan, standing wan and willowy between Geryon’s hoplite half-titans, as Blue appeared beneath them through the void shield.
The vantage was all Jack’s for he could see between his Master and Circe, a lithe golden-skinned, and golden-haired beauty, no taller than Jack, to whom two she-wolves clung as if puppies of hers to her ankles, beneath her opalescent dress. Circe was so beautiful he did not desire her. Her swordsmen flanked Jack, grim half-titan killers possessed, unlike Geryon’s guards, of a grim humor.
Jack could not wait for the lower world to be breached through the heavens so that the void shield might be retracted and he could take to one of the outer skiffs, prepared to leap to the chase, to retrieve quarry and to return with heads for Pan Khron.
Pan’s skiff was central and behind, for it contained Her, their sacred cargo, formerly Titaness Bethal Brawn, now Madam Bethal Khron, a tall blonde beauty who had somehow taken on, gradually, more depth of character, more allure of eye, more pleasing shape, longer, thicker and more lustrous hair, to have developed the very scent of roses waving in full bloom in the wind in great profusion.
Something about this journey had improved her, had made her more beautiful than Deathless Circe but, unlike the deathless nimbus of evil that damped the adore of men and even titans in her sibilant presence, all of them, temporary man-hounds, Titan guides and guards, and even the two evil Sons of Baal, possessed a palpable desire to ravish Madam Bethal Khron...and this she knew, it was clear on her shrinking violet face of perfected form.
This confused Jack as he glanced sidelong at her and a stark, hissing thought rose from within his inner parts, “Protect her, Jack, My Savage Kiss—do not think back. My Deathless kin and your ageless masters must not know that you are guided by a Deathless Conscience. We are bad—twisted under Time’s great weight—we are...we need your dearth of hate. Do not think: observe and act. Do not cast a thought or Geryon will eat your heart.”
To the left, where the small yellow sun could be seen disappearing behind Blue, seeming to sink in the distance into a vast ocean, rode the skiff of Amycas Baal. Amycas was armored in great gauntlets, wore throwing axes crossed behind him in his great belt, carried a great sword across his back and was impossibly broad. Built almost like some troll of legend, Amycus had shoulders as wide as he was tall, a head that weighed near as much as old skinny Bill, and was brutishly ugly. His black hair was bristly like that of a boar, his beard coarse and forked, his hands so broad that Jack wondered if he could break the pinkie finger with his hand. Slow of mind and fast of body, quick to ire and bright blue of eye, Amycas Baal was fiercesome to behold, and when he glanced at Circe, she laughed like all of the orchestras of Automatonry, and when his gaze fell upon Bethal, she shrank.
‘What a turd of Titanry!’
As warned, his concourse with Madam Hate had cursed him with casting thought. Master Pan had ever communicated with him on the hunt with pure thought, directing Jack unerringly. Jack did not realize until now that was in part because, when Jack received a thought from Pan, his own thoughts opened up to his master and enabled questions to be answered as they rose. The inner lark on the way to The Temple of Sirius about Madam Brawn being too tall, had been no coincidence. Jack felt Her shiver and shake inside of him, warning him that he was in peril with all of the wisdom of Deathless Hate forged in Time’s remorseless forge.
‘Jack! My betters are your betters. Keep your mind’s eye on the hunt.’
The force of those thoughts let him know, in his very bones, that although his master was chided for being a lover of temporaries, that he would not hesitate, under the ire of his betters, to put down his favorite hound.
‘Yes, Master,’ thought he obediently.
‘Jack, this must stay between you and me. A temporary shalt not cast thought, your portion being The Word. Be careful.’
Her hiss sounded deep in his inner abyss and Jack resisted the temptation to make his master feel like a suck-up to the Deathless Ones and held her hissed warning as counsel.
They broke the ring of magnetic sky and plunged down towards a light-rimmed mountain range, over a continent so brightly lit at night that Jack wondered how anyone hid from his hunter.
The voice of Atlas Khron, charged with insuring the uplift of brood stock to Sirius, for breeding out to Pleades, sounded within their various helmets, making only Bethal dumb to the announcement:
“Automatonic analysis indicates a peak warm period, post-mechanical population of 350 million already in solar minimal decline. 20 million head of chattel have social control function. 2,000 uplifting to The Temple of Sirius while the portal is open. Automatonic Shroud psychically imploding the inferior stock.”
“Three, two, one...done.”
2,000 streaks of light, converging on their wake, which when they neared the skiffs turned out to be shadow-shrouded humans in all manner of strange dress, postures of activities, and expressions of sleep, waking, trance, anger and distress, darted wingless past them, into the portal to The Temple of Sirius.
…
Lisa had just entered The Phone Store, astounded at the commercials on the kiosk that showed the most beautiful, handsome and stylish people of color using smart phones, palm phones, wrist phones, ear phones, eye phones, dental phones, ‘are you kidding me!’...and, of course, no flip phones.
She checked her pants pocket and found her wallet with her card and I.D. on her left side and her clip with her cash—tip money, mostly—on her left side. She really hated how her butt rounded out in such a way as to warp her cash and bend her cards. ‘What a pain in the butt.’
There were three intake lines, and she looked outside at Deb, standing beside her tractor-cart, who pointed avidly at the Summit County Police Officer standing politely in line, a tall, great looking alpha male, who turned and looked at Lisa even as Deb gave her a hearty thumbs up, which Lisa assumed meant, ‘Real man located on Planet Disappointment.’
Deb was also waving to a firetruck, a hook and ladder, with large crew, who had pulled into the parking lot to use the attached gas station-mega mart, seeming to be returning from a long day doing some kind of tourist search and rescue work.
The policeman’s voice was friendly, confident and assuring, “Miss, take my place in line, please. I’m off duty and just need an app removed.”
For the fourth time in a brief period she blushed, “Why thank you,” and stepped ahead of the broad-shouldered and good looking man who seemed to have stepped out of Deb’s do-the-right-thing past.
‘I wonder if he will ask for my number—darn, he’s probably a Mormon—married with kids.’
Someone screamed, it was Deb, outside, screaming, “No, no, Oh My Hell!”
Everyone at the counter and the kiosks and in line turned to see that the driver of the hook and ladder, the fireman driving the rear car, and the three firemen riding on the runners and the one in the passenger seat in the front cab, were all having seizures of some kind, violent, eye-bugging, mouth foaming epileptic attacks!
“Oh, no!” said the policeman to himself as he noted that the truck was headed for the gas pumps and began to run through the door and out towards the slow-rolling fire truck while Deb cheered him on, “You can do it, Grant!” as if she were watching the local high school quarterback making a play.
The firemen were all apparently dead, just like that.
“Oh no,” groaned a woman.
The hunk policeman named Grant stopped—as if something, some force, had stopped him—spasmed to a stiff standing posture, looked up, his hands stiffly by his side, shook like a leaf, seemed to be surrounded of a sudden by some gelatin mold, and then took off, shot into the night sky like a human firefly.
Deb was waving her hands over her head and lurching for the slow rolling fire truck, hobbling along like crazy to do what she could to stop it, and Lisa was running to beat her there, afraid for her new old friend, wondering not if she could stop the fire truck from rolling into the gas pumps, but…
‘Is this Jubilee? Is this the Second Coming?’
In urgent answer to her question, as the tall old cowboy who had held the door for her seemed to be having a heart attack and sitting down, Deb shouted, “Girl, the world is going to shit—and to boot, God took the only worthwhile men right out of the game...the shit is hitting the fan!”
Lisa, a pretty good runner, grabbed the slowing truck and realized that it wasn’t going to hit the gas pumps, but the old cowboy having the heart attack. Without a thought Lisa pulled herself up into the cab as she swung the door open, sat on the dead driver’s lap, grabbed the wheel, straightened her out, and pressed her foot to the break.
“Oh my Hell!” exclaimed Deb, “this is crazy. I’m glad I have you with me or I’d think it was my medication acting up!”
Lisa could not get off the man’s lap fast enough, as the still warm vomit stained the back of her blouse, and slid down out of the fire truck and went to hug Deb, who was going to hug her, then wrinkled her nose and said, “Oh no, dead man’s puke. I have a hoody in the tractor. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Lisa staggered in a maze towards the phone store, seeing that the old cowboy was now wide-eyed dead and felt herself going numb, as the other dozen or so customers and employees got on their phones and started texting, calling, and, yes, videoing…
‘The world is going to hell—or…’
