“You are alive,” Hot Sauce agreed slowly. “But you were dead. I saw it. Some of your brains came out.”
“Yuck. I didn’t know,” said Nona, deeply embarrassed.
The Angel said, “Hot Sauce, I think you should come here and talk to me for a while.”
“Shut up,” said Hot Sauce, and Nona was outraged, Nona was amazed: that Hot Sauce should talk to her deity—the reason for her existence—talk to the Angel that way. Before she could get any more shocked though, Hot Sauce raised her other hand, and the gun with it.
She pressed the muzzle up against one of Nona’s temples. Nona dragged her eyes up to Hot Sauce’s face, stunned.
“You’re out of the gang,” said Hot Sauce, and squeezed the trigger.
JOHN 5:1
IN THE DREAM he took his time approaching the concrete building. He seemed afraid to. When night fell he scrabbled around and found a canister full of petrol, smelling hard and strong, and he sloshed it all around the car, and he lit it on fire. She didn’t like the smell. They sat away from it. At this altitude the wind kept whipping hard into the flames, licking them redly higher, sending sparks with every blast of air.
And she did not ask him, but he said: In the end we got patted on the shoulder and they expected us to be happy. They said, you won’t have to go to jail—just keep behaving and no more cow stunts, please. Also, I have chronic sinusitis, can you do something about that?
He said, All the powerful friends we’d made, all those people said I would’ve been a good thing if they’d had time to present us the right way, that we were something mystical and wonderful but they were too busy for miracles, that if we’d behaved better or been more attractive—I don’t even fucking know anymore—then they’d have listened. And, like, at some point, you stop wanting people to listen, you want people to do.
He said, We got together one night in the kitchen. And, like, it was beef again, so we felt bad, man, but at least none of us was vegan. The meat couldn’t go off, because I was there. There was a lot of it, but we had a lot of people who needed a feed. We sat there with the window cracked so G— could hear us while he manned the barbie, which in the dark gets unwholesome as hell, and we ate off paper plates, and I told them …
I told them, This is it. We were put here to save the planet. We’re going to save the planet. We’re not going to let them run away. We’re going to fix this.
And they were all, Yeah, John, because they were my friends and they loved me. But because they were also dicks and most of them had multiple tertiary degrees, they were also like, How though. We know you can do X and Y and Z. That’s still not A or B or C. We love the bone magic, but how are you going to pull this off?
And it was P— of all people who said, First things first. If they’re going to let us fix the world, you’ve got to make them take us seriously. Get some leverage. If they want to make you into a bad wizard, be a bad wizard. We can write the history books to say you were a good wizard. Or at least an okay wizard. They’re not going to listen because we talk nicely, they’re going to listen because we scare the shit out of them.
He said, Which just goes to show that only getting to NCEA Level 2 isn’t going to stop you making waves in life, right. You can still eat steak, talk to wizards, and take down the government.
She did not say anything. In the end he wasn’t really talking to her. He was talking at her. All she had to do was wait for him to say: Then we got an opportunity.
He said, Soon after that we got visited by a big black car with a bunch of suits in it. We didn’t want to, but they had a chat with us over the phone to promise they only wanted to talk, they were representing someone else. I was more confident by then that I could handle anyone coming to ambush us—I had Titania and Ulysses with me all the time too—but they really did want to talk. They were very vague about who they were with, but the upshot was that their organisation was having a bad time because their leader had recently been indisposed and that was going to make them have a worse time pretty soon. When we pushed on how indisposed, they admitted he was dead. And I was all, I cannot help you there, that’s beyond me right now. And they were all, No, no, what we want is for him to not look dead. We can do the rest. In fact, we prefer it this way. Could you give him a permanent pulse? Could you make it so he bleeds if he gets hurt? Could you fix any current degradation to his corpse? Could he talk, if we wanted him to?
I thought it was an interesting project. I was all, Probably, let me work on it. I’m going to have to do some long-range tweaking. If you want him to speak you’d need me on call, this couldn’t be a one-off. I kept trying to push to find out who the hell they were and who this guy was, but they were immovable. They were all, Here’s what we’d pay up-front. Here is what we would pay every month you kept him looking alive.