Accidental God -- Section 02

[Again, I'm sorry for switching projects on you, but this is a risk I take as an author, putting stuff up as I write it, and a risk you take reading it.

[The fact is, not everything I write will work. Not all ideas will stick. But I do enjoy writing it, and I want it out there for you to enjoy as well. So I'll keep at it if you'll hang in there with me.

[Actually, I'll keep at it, with or without you--but it's so much more fun with you.]

    Bradley woke up the next morning without a job or a headache.
    He wasn't too surprised about the job--he'd been there, after all, when his boss looked at him and said YOU'RE FIRED, so he'd realized that, after a good sleep, he'd still be fired. Bradley had a solid grip on reality that way.
    It was the complete lack of headache that he found disturbing. Bradley suffered from the less common variety of sleep apnea where on occasion, in the middle of sleep, a person stops breathing. That, actually, is the normal variety of sleep apnea, but Bradley was different because he was skinny, and sleep apnea is more common among the oversized.
    So, with his skinny sleep apnea, Bradley hardly ever felt rested when he woke up. Add to that the bizarre tendency his nose had to dry out and clog up within thirty minutes of falling asleep, and Bradley almost always woke up with a headache.
    But not this morning. He sniffed experimentally. Clear nose. He narrowed his eyes at the ceiling, extremely suspicious of this feeling. It was mellow. It was peaceful. It was calm and relaxed.
    It was very, very weird.
    He looked over at his clock: 5:30. Seriously? He just went to bed five hours ago, after consoling himself by spending money he didn't really have on ice cream he didn't particularly want to eat, but hey, it's not every day you get fired, right? And now, here he was, awake at an hour normally reserved for garbage collectors and the terminally insane individuals known commonly as 'joggers.' Why?
    Bradley rolled out of bed--still no headache--walked into the bathroom--even still, no headache. He looked in the mirror and proceeded to pretty much ignore himself, as usual. (See yourself there enough times and, honestly, there aren't too many surprises.) Instead of any kind of general perusal, he kept his focus on his nose.
    Still looked like his nose. Felt like his nose. He'd never been to any kind of doctor about it, to see if there were any convenient way to widen the inside, so it looked essentially the way it looked nine years ago when his body steadied out at age seventeen. His nose, the very same nose, and he could breathe through it.
    "My Kleenex budget is going to go down," muttered Bradley. Then, deciding it was the only sensible thing to do at five-thirty in the morning, he took a shower and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that said 'Not My Problem' in broad, apathetic letters. He still hadn't decided if that meant that nothing in the world were his problem, or if the girl who had given it to him was making a statement. Whatever way that went, she'd broken up with him three weeks later, and now, after a year-and-a-half, he was still broken-up-with. Such is life. He tried to be philosophical about it.
    Breakfast. That was a problem. Since Bradley was used to working late when he had to, and staying up even later when he didn't, he hadn't bought any real kind of breakfast food for years. He'd never had much of a relationship with oatmeal anyway, so it had been a revelation for him when he realized he could skip straight to lunch.
    But even after a long shower and more time than usual spent on his hair--a full thirty seconds with a stiff brush--the clock on the bathroom wall hadn't even made it to six o'clock yet. Bradley decided it was a lazy clock and wondered what to do about breakfast. It seemed wrong to eat lunch for breakfast. There was something about eleven-thirty that made pizza or ramen seem reasonable. Then it was like he had SKIPPED breakfast, not like he was replacing it with some kind of blasphemous dinner food. But you couldn't do that before six. You had to eat eggs, or Malt-O-Meal, or pancakes. At the very least, you had to go with bagels. What time did the place on Washington open?
    He decided it was worth a try and grabbed a jacket. He didn't think he'd need it, but September in Seven Cities could be unpredictable, and rain is rain: fun to feel on your hair and face, not so fun soaking through your shirt and down into your underpants.
    Bradley locked the door to his studio apartment behind him and jogged down the stairs. Feeling the chill coming up from below, he decided the jacket had been a good idea, and he pulled it on, nodding good morning to his neighbor.
    His neighbor in jogging leggings. His neighbor in one of those jackets that says ‘I’m so gorgeous I don’t even have to take off anything to prove it.’ Well, Bradley knew she wasn’t beautiful in the usual kind of beautiful. She was fit—obviously fit—but also a bit rounder than was exactly fashionable. Okay, a lot rounder, but Bradley didn’t mind. He didn’t have anything against skinny girls, but if he had his pick, he’d pick—well, he’d pick his neighbor.
    “Hey, Olivia.”
    She paused with her keys in her door. “Bradley?”
    “What’s up?” he said.
    Olivia looked down at her watch—a big, sporty thing that looked like it should be under water—then back up. “Bradley?”
    He glanced up at the ceiling and laughed, a little more nervously than he’d intended. “Come on. It’s not like I’ve NEVER been awake this early.”
    “Really?” asked Olivia, leaving her keys in the lock and crossing her arms. “When was the last time?”
    “It was just…like…yeah.” He stopped and Olivia smiled. Cool. “Been jogging?”
    “Absolutely,” said his neighbor. “Every day.”
    “Wow. That’s—wow.”
    “That’s what?” asked Olivia, her eyes narrowing.
    “No,” said Bradley. “I mean, jogging is cool.”
    She bobbed her eyebrows and turned back to her keys. That was too fast. There was supposed to be more talking. Shouldn’t there be more talking? Ask her about her work—did she work? Was she in school? She liked music—all kinds of music; he’d heard it through the floor on his nights off. He could talk about that. Or food. He had to eat, she had to eat, so that was something they had in common. All kinds of things to talk about.
    Bradley’s mouth opened and closed and opened again. Olivia pushed the door in and followed it.
    “See you later, Bradley.”
    “Nice apartment—I mean, sure, see you.”
    Olivia waved and closed the door.
    “I like your style,” whispered Bradley to the wood. “When I get a job, let’s go out for dinner. Or a bagel. Do you read books?” He sighed. “Because I read lots of books.”
    Bradley pulled on his jacket, put his hands in his pockets, and walked down three more flights of stairs to find a bagel.


    “Why are we doing this again?” asked Tuck.
    “Is that a serious question?” asked his partner, Paul.
    Tuck thought about it. He was, in general, thoughtful. At least, he liked to think of himself that way. Sure, he wasn’t Nietzsche, or Calvin, or Bertrand Russell—though he’d been reading Russell, on and off, and had a few bones to pick with him—but Tuck was, at the end of the day, a man who considered his thoughts carefully, and his words even more so.
    So when Paul asked if it were a serious question, Tuck stood up from where he was crouched next to the body of a dead god, and he thought about it. Paul was looking at the angle of the shot, tracing back possible trajectories, so he didn’t notice his partner’s thoughtfulness until he turned around and the two almost collided.
    “Tuck!” Paul stepped back and raised his hands, exasperated. “Why do you DO that?”
    “Yes,” said Tuck.
    “Yes what?”
    “Yes, it was a serious question.”
    Paul rubbed at an eyebrow. “Then here’s a serious answer: because it’s our job.”
    “No,” said Tuck, crouching back down next to the body. “That’s not why.”
    “We got hired,” said Paul, walking over to where the bullet was lodged in the penthouse wall. “We’re getting paid. It definitely is our job.”
    “But we’ve turned down jobs before.”
    “But we didn’t turn down this one.”
    “But we could have.”
    “But we didn’t”
    “But—”
    “Shut up,” said Paul. “Come look at this.”
    Tuck took one last look at the body and sighed. It’s true, he hadn’t thought very much of this particular god—didn’t think much of any of them, in fact; Tuck looked to the big-G God and tended to ignore the little-g variety the way he ignored the celebrities with their lives splattered all over the tabloids—but he didn’t know that the man had deserved this. Fifteen-hundred years of divinity, and soon his temple would be the same size as pretty much everyone else’s: seven-by-three, and six feet down. He blew his breath out through flapping lips and stood up to join his partner next to the wall.
    “Do you see what I see?” asked Paul.
    “A fine example of post-impressionism,” said Tuck. “Notice the vivid yet unnatural colors and the distinctive brush strokes.”
    Paul stared at him. Tuck raised his eyebrows.
    “Seriously?” asked Paul.
    “Seriously. The bullet hole in the middle makes the tragedy of this night even deeper.”
    “I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” said Paul. “After seven years of working together, I still can’t tell if you’re joking. Now look at the bullet.”
    Tuck leaned in close, sighing again at the frayed hole in the canvas. “Traces of copper and a tungsten penetrator. Armor-piercing rounds.”
    Paul nodded. “One to take the window, the second for the kill. Think you can get anything from this?”
    “It’s possible,” said Tuck, “though if these are mass produced rounds, that doesn’t seem likely.”
    “Mass produced rounds? To kill a god?”
    “A valid point, though I still think the god’s security is our best bet. One of them has to be dirty.”
    Paul laughed like nothing was funny. “Of course one of them is dirty—at least one—but better to have more leads to follow than none. Besides, a lot of target shooters like to do their own ammunition custom, so I figure it’s an even bet we might get something specific from it.”
    Tuck shrugged and pulled off his glove. “It’s worth a shot,” he said.
    “Did you do that on purpose?” asked Paul.
    “Do what?”
    “That whole, ‘It’s worth a shot’ bit? With the bullet?”
    “What about it?”
    “Seven years,” muttered Paul, turning and walking away. “Seven years, and even now.”
    Tuck didn’t quite smile, looked back to the bullet, and put his hand into his inside suit-pocket. It came back out with his small, leather toolkit. He undid the snap and let it unfold into his left hand. Tuck ignored the lock-picks, thimbles, hearing aid from an Angry Old Man, and almost all the other odds and ends, and instead reached for a piece of chalk that had only ever been used by children. This kind of magic needed complete confidence, and no one has confidence like a five-year-old girl.
    With an inward apology to the artist, Tuck made his marks around hole, laying down the proper symbols to block outside influences and emotions and resonances within the chalk and magic framework. As usual, he finished it all off with his googly-eyed emoticon: (O.o). He smiled, reminding himself of his own lack of wisdom and how very, very much he had to learn—and nothing said that for Tuck like a pair of googly-eyes.
    He slipped the chalk back into his kit, tucked it all away into his suit, and concentrated. After a minute the sweat began to form on his forehead, but he ignored it. After two minutes Tuck admitted to himself that the suit would absolutely need dry cleaning, no way around it. After five minutes that felt like half a marathon, he stepped away from the painting, found an end-table made entirely of glass, and sat down hard enough to draw uncomfortable popping sounds from the furniture.
    “Whoa there,” said Paul. “You all right?”
    Tuck thought, and then nodded. “Will be.”
    “Get what we need?”
    “Answer my question first,” said Tuck.
    “Which question was that?” asked Paul, exasperated.
    “Why are we doing this? And don’t say ‘because it’s our job.’ That’s a dodge, not an answer.”
    Paul sat down on a chair that was a bizarre combination of steel and expensive dead animal. Tuck watched as his partner seemed to actually give thought to the question. Suddenly Tuck felt a surge of gratitude. It was good to work with a partner like this—a partner who moved ahead when Tuck might pull back, but who had a heart and a brain behind his action. Also, the fact that Paul was willing to wear matching suits never ceased to amaze. Two grown men, walking around the city in matched black suits with matched sunglasses. Could Tuck ever find a better partner?
    “We’re doing it,” said Paul, “because no man deserves to die like this.” Tuck agreed, but stayed still and silent. “And we’re doing it because it’s our job—and I know you told me not to say that, but it’s still a good reason, and I like making money, and you have your uses for it, too, so just keep quiet and let me say the third thing.” Paul took a deep breath, stretching his back, then slumped forward. “We’re also doing it because someone has just stolen the power of a god—and not just any god, but one who had hundreds and thousands of years to gather faith from his faithful, and who, by all accounts, handed out far less in miracles than he ever took in. In other words, someone just snatched away some serious mojo, and that, in the wrong hands, is enough to keep me up at night.”
    “You never have trouble sleeping,” said Tuck.
    “It was a metaphor.”
    “No, it wasn’t.”
    “Yes, it was.”
    “No. A metaphor is an analogy between two objects or ideas. If anything, your comment was hyperbole, which IS often confused with metaphor, but—”
    “Tuck.”
    “Yes, Paul?”
    “Did I answer your question?”
    Tuck thought. “Yes, you did.”
    “Excellent. Do you agree?”
    “Also, you used ‘mojo’ imprecisely as well—”
    “Stop, Tuck. Job or not, someone should be keeping track of where all that godly power has gone, don’t you think? And who better than us?”
    “No one,” said Tuck.
    “Exactly. Now what did you find?”
    “I found three things. First, that bullet wasn’t a normal bullet.”
    “That was already obvious,” said Paul.
    “Yes, but it was less normal than we had supposed. It is interlaced with, as best I can tell, bone, lead, salt, sulfur, and wood.”
    “Wood?”
    “Rowan.”
    “But doesn’t rowan have to do with protection?”
    “It was rotten.”
    “Aha,” said Paul.
    Tuck nodded. “Also, we’re looking for a man who is able, meticulous, extremely ambitious, an extraordinary shot, and fond of Twinkies.”
    Paul looked at him sideways. “Was that a…about the Twink…never mind. Anything else we should know about this man?”
    “Yes,” said Tuck. “He’s also dead.”