Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (32 page)

“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?”