Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (14 page)

²
If memory serves, I had She-Hulk looking out from the page and gave her a speech bubble that read, “Come and join in, big boy, if you’re ready.” Classy, eh? But also a doff of the cap to John Byrne’s run on
Sensational She-Hulk
which had the character constantly breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader.

³
Which doesn’t, I appreciate, make it sound any better.

16. CHINATOWN NAGA

AND THE SHUJAU SIEGE

F
OR TWO WHOLE
days I didn’t use the swipe card. Didn’t dare. It sat in a drawer in my room, radiating a terrible guilty heat. Every time I went near its place of concealment I could feel its presence register on the internal Geiger counter of my conscience.

I knew what I ought to do was give it back to Aanandi and be shot of the damn thing. I could even miraculously “discover” the swipe card and earn myself a few brownie points.
Honestly, Aanandi, it was just lying there on the beach, half buried in the sand...

But then my thoughts kept cycling back to
Watchmen
and the island’s hidden, forbidden layers.

A couple of times I bumped into Aanandi and nearly owned up to my crime on the spot. I would have made a terrible secret agent. Although we didn’t speak for that long on either occasion, the harder I tried to avoid using the word “swipe card,” the closer it edged to the tip of my tongue. To keep from spitting it out, I repeatedly spun the conversation off in random new directions, no doubt leaving her with the impression that I had turned into a babbling loon.

Did Aanandi seem unusually distracted? Like someone who had lost something important such as a Clearance Level Beta swipe card?

Not so as you would notice. She came across as though nothing untoward had happened. Maybe she had already logged the swipe card as missing and obtained a replacement. Maybe she hadn’t had to use it lately so still didn’t realise it wasn’t tucked safely away wherever it was meant to be. Either would account for why she was so apparently unflustered.

Come the morning of the third day I knew it was shit or get off the pot time. By now there was a very good chance that Aanandi would have noticed the swipe card’s absence. In which case, she would have taken steps to get it cancelled, rendering it useless to me.

Two things happened that day that made up my mind.

The first was the Dashavatara taking a casualty while on a mission.

They were fighting a naga in the scenic setting of downtown Los Angeles. The conflict raged through the streets, sending Angelenos and sightseers fleeing in all directions. The naga, ten feet tall and bright green, was as quick as any snake, and as elusive. Every time the Avatars seemed to have it pinned down, it slithered out of their grasp and retaliated ferociously. Its humanoid upper body had enough strength to throw a car; its serpentine lower half propelled it along like living mercury.

The Dashavatara pursued the naga from Little Tokyo to the Civic Center to El Pueblo to Chinatown. They finally cornered it on the central plaza there, but the naga broke free from their corral. A pitched battle ensued along the pedestrianised streets, among the bazaars, jewellery stores and eateries.

Narasimha was in the thick of it, growling, as was Varaha. Parashurama kept swinging at the naga with his axe and missing; the creature was too fast. Between them, Avatars and naga, they caused untold millions of dollars’ worth of property damage in the area. One pagoda-style dim sum restaurant was practically obliterated.

Eventually, almost out the other side of Chinatown, Vamana snatched the naga up by its tail, whirled it like a hammer thrower and flung it headlong into the West Gate. The landmark structure was more or less destroyed, collapsing into a rubble of camphor wood and shattered neon tubing. The naga, however, shrugged off the impact and launched itself back at the giant Avatar. Vamana shrank to normal size just in time, and the half-man/half-snake hurtled over his head and struck his teammate behind him.

This was Kalkin, who happened to be busy shepherding an inquisitive I-Ching fortune teller back into his shop. He didn’t see the naga coming.
¹

The naga collided with Kalkin and managed, while he was still reeling, to sink its fangs into his shoulder. The Horseman bellowed in pain and slashed backwards at the creature with one of his talwars, splitting its face open to the bone. The naga recoiled in a fury of hissing. Venom spurted from its maw, blood from its brow.

Rama shot it through the eye with an arrow, but the naga was still not quite done. It lunged again for Kalkin, who was on the ground, floored, rolling around in a paroxysm of agony. Kurma thrust his armoured self between them. Feet planted, he withstood the full brunt of the naga’s attack. It rebounded off him, straight into the clutches of Narasimha, who unhesitatingly tore the monster’s soft throat open.

The naga went down gargling on its own blood, its tail coiling and knotting.

Narasimha proceeded to pull it to pieces like a Christmas turkey. His face was distended in a leer of loathing, a primal disgust. By the time he was finished the naga looked like the floor of a particularly unhygienic abattoir. You could barely tell if it used to be man or snake or what.

Buddha knelt at Kalkin’s side, scowling with concern. Kalkin’s face was puffing up and turning black, foam poured from his mouth, and he was shuddering, going into convulsions.

Krishna descended in his chariot, and Parashurama loaded Kalkin aboard.

There was a hurried, anxious discussion among the Avatars. Should Kalkin be taken to a local hospital, Cedars-Sinai perhaps? Or should he be transported back to Mount Meru?

Parashurama was adamant. “People, there are established protocols. In the event of casualties, it’s immediate medevac back to base.”

Matsya raised his voice to object. It was seven hours from here to Mount Meru and Kalkin might not last the journey.

Parashurama interrupted him. “No buts. We can dose him with amrita in flight, which should help keep him stabilised. What we cannot do is allow a bunch of ER docs to tend to him. They have no idea what they’re dealing with. The guys at Meru do. Avatar physiology is not normal physiology. Also, we operate under strict need-to-know conditions, and there’s a heck of a lot about us that civilian medics do not need to know.”

“Maybe we should put it to a show of hands,” said Kurma in his soft Swedish accent.
²

“This is not a goddamn democracy, Lindström!” Parashurama snapped, before instantly correcting himself: “I mean Kurma. We are combatants. We have orders. We follow them. That’s all there is to it.”

The
Garuda
was parked off Long Beach, in San Pedro Bay. The chariot got there in minutes, with all ten Avatars on board and the remains of the naga too. The
Garuda
itself was airborne not long after.

At Mount Meru, the Avatars’ return was awaited tensely. An emergency medical team were on standby at the slipway from the
Garuda
’s hangar. For hours a nervous atmosphere prevailed. Updates on Kalkin’s health kept filtering through, relayed from sources higher up. He was doing okay. He was holding on. The amrita was doing the trick.

What amrita actually was, I hadn’t the foggiest, and nobody I asked knew either. Some kind of special Avatar medicine, was the general assumption. Until Parashurama had mentioned it on air, none of us in the lower ranks had ever heard of it.

When the
Garuda
was less than an hour out, a second crisis arose.

One of the domestic staff, a chef called Shujau, had locked himself in his kitchen and was threatening to turn on all the gas rings and blow himself to kingdom come, along with several of his colleagues and a large section of the complex.

The security team responded by shutting off the electricity to the kitchen at the mains and the supply of propane from the external storage tank.

Shujau, undeterred, set all of his workmates free save for one, a female dishwasher whom he had been holding hostage at knifepoint.

His demands were as simple as they were untenable. The Dashavatara must halt their activities immediately and permanently. They were an abomination, he declared, an affront to the Prophet and to the One and Only God, praise be to His name. They must deny that they were gods themselves. They must renounce all claim to divinity and submit to the will of Allah. If not, Shujau would slit the dishwasher’s throat, then his own.

It might appear that Shujau had become radicalised. That was how the security team read the situation, at any rate. They assumed he had not been properly vetted during the screening process, had somehow kept his extremist tendencies hidden from his interviewers. A Human Resources error. The upshot was a fundamentalist terrorist in our midst.

In hindsight, though, I think the likelier explanation is that Shujau just went a bit nuts. He had been on the island too long, and had gone stir crazy. He was, like many Maldivians, a devout Muslim and had been having trouble reconciling the Avatars’ avowals of godhood with his understanding of the Qur’an. He had wrestled with this dilemma until finally he couldn’t take it any more and flipped.

The security officers tried reasoning with Shujau through the kitchen door. They promised him that if he let the dishwasher go there would be no repercussions. Shujau would be allowed to leave the island and nothing more would be said about the incident.

Shujau refused. He didn’t trust them, he said. They would surely kill him.

In truth, that was pretty much what the security guys were planning to do, should things turn really ugly. They had the Trinity’s permission to resolve the hostage crisis by any means necessary, and several of them had accessed the onsite armoury to equip themselves with handguns. The Trinity insisted, however, that lethal force be used only as a last resort.

The negotiations through the door dragged on, Shujau becoming ever shriller and more stubbornly entrenched. Eventually the security team had heard one too many panicked cries for help from the dishwasher. In a pincer movement, a group of them broke through the grille on the serving hatch between the kitchen and the dining area, while another group kicked the door down and barged in.

Shujau was on the brink of drawing the carving knife blade across the dishwasher’s throat, when one of the security officers tagged him with a taser and electrocuted the fuck out of him. After that Shujau didn’t do much except wriggle on the floor and wet himself.

All this chaos and confusion was a sign; a sign that said, “Now’s your chance. You’re never going to get a better one. While everyone’s distracted and flapping around with their knickers down, now is the time to grab that swipe card and use it, see how far you get with it, find out what you can.”

So I did.

¹
Neither did the fortune teller, which some might say shows a surprising lack of clairvoyance.

²
Secret Origin:
Real name Eric Lindström. Caver, mountaineer, long-distance skier, all-round Nordic daredevil.

17. A COLLAGE OF DEVOTION