God's Body: Book One - The Fall (The God's Body Chronicles 1) Read online

  “Sit down, Dylan,” said Grandma. “I need to call your father.”

  “Dad? Why?” said Dylan.

  “Just watch. I’m sorry, baby, I need to call your father.”

  Grandma went into the kitchen to use the phone. The warm smell of freshly-baked bread filled the house. It somehow seemed to make all the honking and shouting outside even louder.

  “Yes, Jan, we’re hearing that also,” said the lady on CNN. “On the phone? Okay, we’ve got with us now Martin Willis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Martin, are you there?”

  The picture on the screen didn’t make sense to Dylan. There were riots. He couldn’t tell where. People were beating each other, looting grocery stores and running wild. Cops lined up in riot gear. They had guns and tear gas and more guns and big hulking cars that may as well have been tanks. The tear gas canisters flew and bounded off the concrete. People didn’t care. They threw them back and acted like lunatics.

  The picture changed. An angry Asian guy shouted and pounded a big black podium, and in Russia, people chanted for their president to do something. Do something about what? In the kitchen, Grandma slammed the phone down and swore. She huffed, picked the phone back up, started dialing again.

  The CNN lady said, “Martin, is the CDC adequately prepared to quarantine God?”

  God?

  “God?” said the guy on TV. “Nobody said anything about God, Michelle.”

  “Why would they need to?” CNN Lady said. “And why is the Planter administration taking so long to confirm what the rest of the world already knows?”

  “Shit! All the lines are dead,” Grandma said. She jabbed at the buttons with her index finger.

  “What’s going on, Grandma?” said Dylan.

  The picture changed. Weird image, hard to negotiate. It was a shaky helicopter shot. Whatever it was, it was pink. And splotchy.

  “Grandma, what is that?” said Dylan.

  The cameraman zoomed out. Everything got blurry a few seconds, and then it became clear. Dylan saw a face, a man’s face. No wait, not just a man. God’s face?

  “Grandma, is that …”

  “It is,” said Grandma. “Yes it is.”

  “Why’s He bleeding?”

  “There was a fight. He got into a fight.”

  “How big is He?”

  Grandma blanched and stared at the TV.

  “Pretty fuckin’ big,” she said. “Sorry, Dylan, sorry.”

  Over the next few minutes, he got a sense of scale. Within the hour, he began thinking about existence like he never had before. What was happening? What did it mean? He felt like a deer in the headlights. A worm mashed to the flat side of a churning cart wheel. What did it mean? Really, seriously, what the heck did it mean?

  It definitely meant humans weren’t alone in the universe. Did it mean God was human? Was it even God? Was it? And the red one. Holy cow, it looked like the Devil! Were these things, these monstrous things, were they maybe aliens? Is that what they were? Did it mean God and Satan were really aliens and they were dead now and had beaten each other to death in a Godzilla-Mechagodzilla fight? It meant they were dead?

  Dead.

  Dead.

  They had beaten each other to death? That’s why everyone was screaming? That’s why the news lady couldn’t stop sobbing? Someone pounded on the front door. Dylan jumped. Grandma got up and went to look through the peephole.

  “Marcia?” she said. “Marcia, what’s wrong?”

  A muffled voice came from the other side.

  “No, I’m sorry, we can’t talk right now,” said Grandma.

  The muffled voice again. Dylan heard, “muffin tin,” and “butter knife,” and “existence is a lie.”

  Grandma said, “I know, sweetie but ... No, I’m sorry, we can’t right now. I need to look after my own family. My son’s in Los Angeles. Goodbye, Marcia.” And then she checked the deadbolt and lock to make sure they were secure.

  “What did she want, Grandma?” asked Dylan.

  “What? Nothing, honey.”

  “Is she having muffin problems again?”

  “Never mind, Dylan. It’s nothing.”

  “It’s L.A., isn’t it?” said Dylan. “We can’t help her ‘cause the Devil landed on L.A.?”

  He spoke the words but they didn’t make sense. Los Angeles had been flattened like a pancake. Torn up like cheap tissue paper. If Dylan had to draw the scene, he’d put word art beside the L.A.-sized mushroom cloud that went, KA-PRAHM!

  On the television they showed the two bodies side-by-side in split screen. God had fallen on Nevada, feet and legs splayed out, sort of stretched out wide. He was all bruised up and bloodied. Right eye black and blue. Dylan hated looking at Him. He hated it. Lip all swollen. Blood all over his mouth.

  The other guy, though, the Devil, looked much, much worse. Not much blood, but his neck had twisted all the way around. Neck muscles bunched up and all sick-looking. His big black forked tongue stuck out of his mouth. Los Angeles. Huh. Dad was there. Made no sense at all.

  The Devil’s arm had broken, and it’d kinked up at the elbow so that his hand sort of lay across the northeast face of the Hollywood Hills. The tip of a gnarled, cracked fingernail rested there atop the Y of the Hollywood Sign. His head—yup, twisted all the way around—it’d taken out Pasadena. He’d crushed Glendale, barely missed Dodger Stadium. He’d cut a long, angry doomsday gash through Altadena, China Town, East L.A..

  Debris and wreckage.

  Impact zones all over the city.

  Inglewood and Compton and Lakewood. Anaheim, Yorba Linda, Burbank. Studio City, Sherman Oaks, and Encino. Flames and smoke and ash and death.

  Dad. Dead people. Body bags on the news. Crying news ladies.

  Why hadn’t Dad called them?

  “What about Dad?” said Dylan. “He’s okay, isn’t he?”

  Grandma said, “I hope so, baby, I really do.” But her voice didn’t say that. Dylan would do her comic book thought balloon this way: NO, BABY. YOUR DAD’S NOT OKAY. NOBODY WILL EVER BE OKAY AGAIN.

  He didn’t like this comic anymore. Stop sketching, turn the page. Close the cover. Dylan got up from the couch and went to give his grandma a hug. She cried in his arms. He cried, too. Even so, he couldn’t hear their sobs over the shouting and honking going on out in the street.

  * * * * *

  President Bill Planter sat at the head of the White House Situation Room’s long mahogany conference table. At 5:30 PM, Washington time, he’d been engaged with his wife at dinner in the White House Residence. Nearing now the nine o’clock hour, deeply troubled to present himself in a shoddy manner, he toyed with the last few strands of gray hair that marked the encroachment line of his large oblong bald spot.

  “You look fine, Mr. President,” said his National Security Chief, David Walters. “I can’t even tell you haven’t got it on.”

  Bill hastily removed his hand from his head. He pushed away a bowl of peanuts he’d been fussing with but not eating.

  “How are we looking, Dave?” he said.

  Walters, baby-faced and habitually in the mood for work, leaned his seat back and snatched a yellow printout from the hands of an NSC aid. He read in silence.

  “The situation, Mr. President, is confused,” he said.

  “That’s a hell of a nasty undersell, Dave,” said Mitch Bolden, Bill’s silver-haired Texan Secretary of State.

  “It’s a snapshot, Mitch,” Walters replied. “We can’t calculate the dead at present, let alone combat—”

  “We’ve got more important things to worry about than a little rioting.”

  “The CDC, Mitch,” said Walters. “They’re declaring martial law in Atlanta. Then we’ve got directive assignment through DHS and every other damn—”

  “It’s an issue,” Mitch said, “but for god’s sake we could be under attack. Are you implying this administration hasn’t got the resources to handle the situation?”

  “Mitch, I’m impl
ying no administration—”

  “All right, that’s enough,” said the President. He grumbled to himself and stood from the table. White House staff bustled about, relaying communications, analyzing data, doing their best to stay out of the way. The room itself was small and bright. It was far too cramped. And it was always too cold.

  “Major General,” Bill said, “give me more on Damascus.”

  General Alan Pierce eyed Bill. He slid his chair back from the table and stood. “Mr. President, the word has just been received.”

  “Received by whom? What’s happened, Major General?” said Bill.

  The man pursed his lips. “Sir, regrettably, both Damascus and Baghdad have fallen.”

  The mood in the room plummeted. Bill’s grew nauseous, and the resounding gurgle in his stomach was fierce.

  David Walters gazed at the ceiling and slid his glasses off his face. “And what about the Russians?”

  “Eyeing us like prize-winning borsht, just like I told you,” Bolden drawled. “We have got to get off our asses—”

  “Mitch, do me a favor and cool the attitude,” said Bill.

  “We can’t count on the Russians, sir,” said Lizzy Saunders, Bill’s pretty, no-nonsense Homeland Security Adviser. “We should operate under the assumption they’re reeling like we are. Mr. President, we’ve got nothing to go on and millions of tons of raw dead flesh.”

  Bill glared at the bank of screens on the far wall. He pointed at the image of the one that looked like the Almighty, refusing to use the word God in his internal reckoning.

  “What the hell are those things?” he said. “And how the hell did they get here?”

  “Millions of tons of shit knows what,” griped Mitch Bolden. “Look, I got family in Nevada, Bill. All over this country, all over this world, people are about to eat each other alive.”

  Bill frowned at him. “Mitch, pessimism has no seat at this table. I need to know, are you on board or not?”

  “As long as we get off our—”

  “Yes or no, Mitch?”

  The Secretary of State screwed up his face. “Of course I’m on board, Bill.”

  “Good,” the President said. “Keep it together. That goes for everyone. The world is looking to us for solutions.”

  He pressed the line-open button on the tabletop conference phone. It beeped twice, then a wavering female voice came over.

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Nancy, get DHS back on the line. Also, any word from the Governors’ people yet?”

  “Not yet, Mr. President,” Nancy uttered. She blew her nose loudly, clearly having been crying only a few moments before.

  Bill stared at the phone. He felt his fingers twitch, suddenly overcome by the urge to touch his bald spot again. “Evidently we’re on our heels, Nancy. Slow and steady, now. Slow and steady wins the race.”

  Three

  It wasn’t so much a crowd as a million-tongued monster. Melissa Atwood could tell the difference. Crowds were made of people. They were usually formed for cool stuff like concerts and movies and the odd tenuous growing pains of global democratization. That right there? Those folks packed in around every square inch of God’s twenty-six mile perimeter? That was what happened when crowds formed for bad reasons. Evil reasons folks should probably just keep to themselves. Zealots, fanatics, every last one of them.

  That is not God! went their refrain. God is not dead!

  By the thousands, the tens of thousands, for all she knew. Her CDC disaster assessment team had climbed a mountain of mud just to get close to Him. These people, though, they wanted nothing less than God’s heart and blood. Everyone was right. No one was right. It was all just ideas, superfluous. But the anger here, the rage of the million-tongued monster, it humbled her.

  “Come on, Melissa, let’s get back to work,” said her unit partner, Danielle. Melissa nodded and held up her fingers. She put tips of thumbs to tips of pointers. “Hang on. I want a mental snapshot. Hold it … hooold it … click.”

  “Quit fucking around, Mel.”

  “You think it’s too late to become an actress?” said Melissa. “I always wanted to be on a classic sitcom or something. Nanu Nanu, Earthlings. You know what I mean?”

  Melissa was blonde, tall, fit, and generally considered off-beat and quote, unquote, idiosyncratic. Some admin had once derided her as a ‘fucking odd duck’.

  Quack, quack, quack.

  It’d been over ninety hours since the fall of Body One and Body Two. The government had deployed resources sluggishly, and boy was everyone in the country pissed about it. Operating under directive of Homeland Security, her crew and others like it were tasked with assessing God and Satan’s biological threat potential. In other words, it was their job to find out if even more people were in danger. Item one on today’s itinerary, collect samples from Body One, God.

  Danielle had scoped out a good spot for them to work at Zone Fifty-Four, a large lateral section of the robe about three-quarters of a mile from the quarantine line and rabid protesters. Take samples, label samples, store samples, that’s all they had to do. Too bad the view was mind-numbingly awesome, spiritually terrifying, too much to process at once. She’d never had reason to believe in Him. Not even a little. Definitely not as a kid. Yet there He was, in the flesh. A living being this large should not exist. Physically, metaphysically, it should be impossible.

  She carefully shifted her weight, setting herself into a wide stance so she wouldn’t slip and fall in the stinking, knee-deep mud. Area visibility was better than she’d expected. Body One had kicked up a tremendous sand storm that had lasted two days. Heavy winds had dispersed it for the most part, which was not at all the case in California. Aptly so, Melissa reckoned, Los Angeles looked like Hell. City of Angels, meet your new neighbor, the Devil.

  A cold, stiff breeze rustled her hair, and she scrunched down into her hazard jacket. For a moment, she considered the essential properties of a ten-square-mile, biblically defined male’s woolen dress robe.

  ● The wool was thick as a basketball court was long.

  ● Its fibers were exactly to God’s scale—exactly to His scale—which seemed to suggest the existence of enormous, pan-galactic, wool-producing Heaven sheep.

  ● She let that one sink in a moment: enormous, Pan-Galactic, Wool-Producing Heaven Sheep.

  ● The robe appeared well-made, with stitch marks tight and swift and barely visible at a distance of several miles.

  ● Perhaps Body One had had an equally massive seamstress?

  ● From a special alternate dimension like on Star Trek?

  ● Also that the wool fibers formed a matrix-like super structure that bore visual resemblance to rather large tropical tendril and creeper vines. It was not one color but many. At a distance, yes, it looked white or off-white, but up close, the fibers, fat and snaking, were yellow and brown and white and red and all sorts of shades and variations therein. Wild to stare at. Kind of pretty.

  “Why did they come?” she asked, admiring the variegated colors. Down the towering, seemingly endless woolen wall, the rest of their team—Martin, Greg, Amy, and Tim—worked diligently. They were all good folks. Melissa liked them.

  “Maybe it was meant as a warning,” Danielle said. “Time’s up, you’re all done here. You figure we’re screwed?”

  The body was approximately half a mile high at the flat part of His stomach. He was thin. Not frail, but wiry and well-toned. Initial field tests performed by Greg and Amy had yielded surprising models. Though enormous, the skin cells were remarkably human, with what appeared to be human DNA. The thing had body hair, blemishes, testicles. It was a guy, a man. What more was there to say?

  “Do you realize He could very well be a genetic seed species?” Melissa said. “Wouldn’t that be crazy? Like He begat us. Any way you slice it, He’s probably our creator.”

  Danielle crouched and undid the latches on a fiberglass equipment case. She flipped the lid open and hefted from it a compact chainsaw.
She then handed it to Melissa and bent low to strap on a pair of climbing boots.

  “He begat us,” Danielle said. “That’s awesome. That’s neat. One problem, though. God doesn’t have a body.”

  “What? He doesn’t?”

  “No. When you ask Him for something, He’s not listening with massive fucking King Kong ears. It’s stupid. It’s fucking rigged, is what it is.”

  “I’ve never asked God for anything,” said Melissa. “My parents raised me agnostic.”

  “Raised you agnostic? Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They did? Sounds time-consuming. And ineffectual. Ready to work?”

  Melissa nodded. “Let’s make it happen, cap’n.”

  Danielle slammed her climbing axe into a massive wool fiber. Slam of the axe, pound of a spiky boot crampon. She began her ascent. CDC regulations dictated operationally obligatory procurement of clean field samples. The pickings here in the mud would be contaminated, so Danielle had to get higher.

  “You doing all right, girl?” Melissa called. Danielle flashed a thumbs up.

  Melissa gazed into the wilderness, the vastness beyond the million-tongued monster. Out here it looked like the world before oxygen. Like carbon, water molecules, no photosynthetic chloroplasts, nothing in harmony. Origin meant so many different things to people.

  “Nanu Nanu, Earthlings,” Melissa uttered. “We come in pizza.”

  * * * * *

  By the time the team’s day was done, the million-tongued monster was practically frothing at the mouths. The team had secured their samples, packed their gear, and had filed into their big white van. Melissa and Danielle in the back, Greg, Amy, and Tim in the middle, and their team lead, Martin, in the passenger seat next to their driver.

  Bad news from the start. A National Guardsman waved them through the quarantine. As soon as the van passed into the crowd, the crazy bastards put their hands on it and started rocking. They pounded on the windows, screamed angry nonsense no one with their sanity intact could hope to understand.