Pears and Perils (11 page)

“Kitters is a pointer,” Thunder surmised, leaping into the bed of the truck without even a hint of fear despite the experience he’d endured less than an hour ago.

“This feels too easy,” Clint said.

Think of it this way: finding the pear is only half the battle. We still have to get it away from whoever knew enough to take it.

Clint stuck his index and middle finger to his forehead. “I guess that’s a fair point.”

“Who are you saluting?” April asked.

“No one; this is my way of saying I’m talking to Kodiwandae so you guys don’t get confused. It was Thunder’s idea.”

“It’s like the siggie you use when you’re getting chatty out of character mid-game,” Thunder called from the truck.

“Wait, what?” Clint stared at the man in the pink polo, uncertain he’d heard correctly.

“Nothin’, bro, don’t worry about it. Let’s vamoose!”

“We’re so sorry to impose on your generosity, but would you mind taking us a bit farther?” Falcon said, her old hippie eyes opened extra wide as she asked Mano. The tan man gave her a smile.

“You have the god and the King of my island with you. It is an honor to drive you wherever you need to go.”

Mano meant it, too, or at least he did if any of this was true. If it wasn’t, then these people were bat-shit crazy and the last thing he wanted to do was piss them off. Alone. In the woods. In the middle of the night. Without having told anyone where he was going. Had Kodiwandae been in full possession of his abilities, he would have felt Mano drop a prayer in his direction as the true weight of the situation fell upon those muscular shoulders. There was nothing to do but press on, though, so Mano pulled the keys from his pocket and sat behind the wheel.

“I’m sure we’ll find the pear and help you regain your glory,” Falcon said before getting into the cab.

“Plus, we’ll get rid of your little squatter,” April tossed in, giving Clint a warm smile. It might very well have been the first non-measured thing he’d seen her do since their meeting. He didn’t know if that made it more encouraging or depressing.

Squatter? You mortals have really let your understanding of respect slip since I’ve been gone.

“I’m sure she meant it in the nicest possible way.”

Oh, well, in that case I suppose I can let it slide.

Clint couldn’t really tell if Kodiwandae didn’t get sarcasm or was just screwing with him, so he let the question fall out of his mind. He walked over and climbed into the bed, bracing himself for another jarring journey. He wondered what happened if you died in a car crash while shuttling a god around. Maybe there was some special consideration for that scenario in the afterlife.

Clint almost smacked himself on the forehead. The afterlife! And why they were here, and why bad things happened to good people, and every other impossible question he’d ever faced. He’d been so stuck on the downside of his situation that Clint hadn’t stopped long enough to realize that he was plugged in to someone who could give him answers to the unanswerable questions mankind faced.

His face twisted into a very un-Clint-like smirk. So Kodiwandae wanted their help in returning him to power. He wanted to ride around in Clint’s head. He wanted them to go on some insane goose chase for a pear. Fine, fine to all of it. But Kodiwandae was about to start paying some rent.

* * *

The boat captain was uncomfortable with his new passengers. It could be the way they seemed to communicate without words, or how their eyes said quite plainly that everything they saw was beneath them. It especially might have been the way they’d simply walked up to him, held out a stack of bills, and told him where to go. In his experience, these sorts of enterprises almost always involved drug deals or body disposal, though he was fine with either so long as the body in question wasn’t his. These were the odd jobs one had to take in a tourist-driven economy. Sometimes people wanted to go watch dolphins swim among the waves, other times they just wanted to exchange cocaine for cash. The customer was always right.

“I still think we should have searched around for her more,” Dustin whispered to his brother, their conversation concealed by the splashing sounds of the boat pushing through the water.

“You heard the charter captain: a woman matching her description booked passage on the last ship of the day to Alendola.”

“The description was just of a tall, pretty island woman who seemed completely wasted. Besides, why would she take the pear to a neighboring island instead of where the temple is?”

“I don’t know, Dustin. If I did, I’d have a better idea of how to intercept her. She essentially has a doctorate in mythology, though; we have to face the possibility that she knows some use for the sealed power that we don’t. She was smart enough to grab it, after all.”

Thunder’s camera had captured more than just Clint’s apparent electrocution. As the spiky-haired youth had rushed forward to help his lighting-injured friend, his video camera had continued rolling. It had captured video evidence of their immediate panic and calling for the driver, it had documented them loading the unconscious body into the bus, and in a few key frames, it had recorded a thin, tan woman removing a pear that seemed to be emitting a soft glow from the altar and then stuffing it into her backpack.

The brothers Goodwin already knew what the others had wasted precious time in learning: the pear of Kodiwandae was no longer at his tree. Rather than burn time trying to backtrack to the starting point, Dustin and Justin had inquired after Kaia in the hotel bar, learning she had been tying off a powerful drunk for some hours before eventually being cut off and stumbling out into the night. It had taken some time on the phone and a few quick lies to the island’s only cab company, but they eventually learned she had been taken to the nearest port. They also learned she had talked the cabbie’s ear off about theology and puked her meager lunch onto the back seat. The office clerk was still yelling about getting someone to pay for the cleaning when they hung up the phone and headed for the docks.

Now they sat on a small fishing boat with a captain who kept glancing back at them and muttering something about “just keep it hidden” before checking his instruments and making necessary corrections.

“If she’s got some master plan then why is she apparently so drunk?” Dustin wondered aloud.

“Obviously she’s faking to keep anyone from getting suspicious. If you were trying to sneak away with something like that, what’s a better cover than acting like a blundering alcoholic grappling with an existential crisis? It’s quite brilliant; if we hadn’t watched her take the pear we would have never suspected her.”

“Cunning bitch.”

“Quite. Still, no need to worry. The locals said the kiddies are looking back at the altar and there is no way the girl knows we’re on to her. If we move quickly, we can recover the pear before anyone even knows we’re in the game.”

The boat captain was beginning to lean his suspicions toward drug deal, though why they kept using such a ridiculous code word as “pear” was beyond him. Then again, he was getting on in years and couldn’t keep track with all the phrases today’s youth used. Just last year he’d tried to score some of this “Twitter” everyone kept mentioning. The dealer, his nephew, had stared at him for some time before reaching into his bag and pulling out a small bag of green, leafy product. It hadn’t been bad, but the captain hadn’t seen what all the fuss was about.

“How much longer to Alendola?” One of them, the chattier one, was antsy.

“Two hours with a good wind.”

“And what about if we get a rough wind?”

The captain smiled at him, his normally easygoing nature stretched especially thin by the night’s bullshit. “This is a small boat on big seas. We get too rough a wind and your arrival time depends on how well you can swim.”

“Sit down,” the other brother commanded the fidgety one. “We’re in no hurry. She’ll have let her guard down by the time her vessel lands. We can afford to be calm and precise.”

The captain shook his head as he adjusted his bearings. One day he was going to get out of this business and take up a career with fewer skullduggeries and under-the-table dealings. Maybe he’d try politics.

* * *

How should I know?

“What do you mean, ‘how should you know’? You’re a god; isn’t this the kind of stuff you folks are generally keyed in on?”

Clint wasn’t bothering with the forehead touching as the rusty truck bounced along the unpaved roads. Thunder had momentarily dozed off, lulled by the unsecured truck bed’s gentle rocking, and there was no way the others could hear him in the cab over the guttural screech of the engine doing its damnedest to hold together.

Well, some stuff, sure, but how would I know where you all came from
?

“Didn’t gods create us?”

Probably not. Not my kind of gods anyway.

“There are different types?”

Yes and no. My kind is comprised of gods who are formed and shaped by the Beliefs that you people have. Humans might be weak, surly little creatures, but that capacity of yours to put stock in something unseen and unproven is a magic like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

“So, wait, you exist because people think you exist?”

That is an incredibly simplified way of putting it, but yes. Mortal’s Belief is what manifests us initially. Their Wants direct and power us, showing us the greatest desires they have. Spending our time and power to grant some of them leads them to have even stronger Belief. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

“Okay, so what about the other type?”

Those are the ones who might be shaped by Belief, but they’ll exist whether humans are here or not. Nature, Time, Life, Death, even Fate. Those are things that keep the entire world in running order. Probably more worlds than just ours, though that’s merely conjecture. Hang on; let me find a good analogy.
Clint felt that strange digging sensation in the back of his head again. He was beginning to get used to it, and that worried him more than the feeling itself
. Here we go. Think of it as humans are office grunts and my kind is middle management. We’ve got more freedom than you do, and you’re generally subject to our whims, but if you all quit we’d be up shit creek.

“I see. So the others are upper management?”

No, the others are the building.

“How does that work?”

Look, if all the grunts quit, middle management would be fucked; this would in turn leave upper management screwed and so on and so on because they all exist in a relationship that depends on one another. The building doesn’t need any of them, though. The building will be there whether it’s full or empty: it is constant.

“If it’s empty long enough, someone could tear it down.”

Follow that train of thought, let me know how those sleepless nights work out for you.

“Okay, fine; so whoever made the world would have predated you, since you didn’t exist until humans thought you up.”

Bingo.

“What about these bigger beings? The constant ones. Didn’t you ever get curious and ask one of them?”

The last time I met one of those beings she ripped me from my power and stuck me in a tree.

“I thought that was a local goddess?”

No, they have a local name for her, but it was Nature. Every earth goddess is Nature; they just use different terms for her.

“Sort of like how every culture has its own version of the Grim Reaper?”

You catch on quick. Yeah, those are all Death.

“Seems like it would get confusing.”

Only because names matter to you. They don’t give a damn what you call them anymore than they care if you believe in them.

“Because they are Constant.” Clint was finally wrapping his head around this unexpected divine hierarchy.

The lucky fucks.
Clint didn’t hear the bitterness in Kodiwandae’s voice as much as he felt it, rippling through him as though it had come from his own frustrations. The emotions Kodiwandae felt were unsettling to Clint, much more tumultuous and quick-changing than his usual monochrome pallet. Clint had endeavored all his life to avoid these spurts of anger and annoyance, yet here they were, raising his blood pressure all the same.

“What about the bigger gods? The ones whose religions have billions of followers?”

Most of them are nice enough, though a bit full of themselves. In all fairness, when you’ve got that many people kissing your ass it’s sort of hard not to develop an ego.

“I meant-”

I know what you meant. Gods, even big gods, come and go. There have been others before and there will likely be different ones in the future.

“Okay, different subject; what about the afterlife?”

Can’t tell you
.

“You don’t know about that either?”

No, that one I know all about. I can tell you what the rules of my religion state, but I can’t give you any inside information on it.

“Why not?”

Just one of the rules for gods. Part of living is the uncertainty of not knowing what comes next. The Constant in charge laid down that law long before I came around.

“I thought gods were above the rules.”

Then you haven’t been listening. Nature did this to me for picking a flower she said not to. What do you think Death would do if I broke his cardinal commandment by spilling the beans?

“Oh.”

‘
Oh’ is right.

“Geez, is there anything you can tell me I don’t already know?”

There are five individual species of squirrel living on Kenowai.

“Not exactly what I meant.”

Then maybe you should start being more specific.

Clint turned his head and looked at the shoreline they were steadily drawing closer to. He’d been all jazzed up at the idea of getting to peek behind the metaphysical curtain, and now he was finding out the universe worked on as much bureaucracy as the companies he got fired from. The most depressing part of that revelation was when Clint realized the he wasn’t even all that surprised.