The mob was armed with weapons of war. These self-made gods who walked the Earth commanded gangs of bodyguards, but the bodyguards, tho they were loyal and swole, were useless against thousands of dignity-panged and hangry mortals with handguns and long guns and revenge within reach.
The concrete shelter where the gods’ quietly-upgraded cars met the stadium doors would absorb the blood and gush of their bodies. The crowd appeared at once and drew all breathable air. The gods were caught. There were two clear volleys of weapons fire, and one mortal man dead, a fellow named Oscar, and with his last thought Oscar was glad to have died first in this thresher of righteous rage.
All of the bodyguards fell to the ground. The one named Tyko was broken at the knee, and the one named Yuri on his face, and the one named Peter was gut-punched in a rush so wild he couldn’t see whose fist had struck him. A man in denim from hat to heel shot each of them, like a patient janitor cleaning up, as the crowd surrounded the gods and pulled them from their shimmering bulletproof vehicles.
The mob held two gods within their hands: the god of Impulse and the god of Disdain. These masters of the mortal universe made the mistake of appearing together; their proximity resonated through air, a sound like a piercing electronic cry, and the humans set out, weapons in hand, without organization or agreement, to find the source of the unbearable noise. No other god would be so foolish, except perhaps the god of Greed, who matched Impulse and Disdain in their hubris.
A rage-disfigured brown-haired teen ripped from the freckled wrist of Impulse a shining marvel, a timepiece worth millions, and crushed it on the ground under her boot heel, worthless glass.
A ragged hand with chipped red nails tore at the hair of Disdain, uprooting it in plug shaped chunks dripping with blood. A hefty blond woman threw the chunk of scalp to the others, her laughter of triumph gurgling into a cathartic scream, a war cry.
Unplanned, unforeseeable, un-organized, un-coordinated, unexplainable, and uncontrolled: this is how the gods died.
The book I’m writing, THE DOORS OF JANIS, is fantastical and farcical but, like most of what I do, it works as a way of grappling with the post-human world — in this case as a world of (inhuman) gods, in conflict with those who do not wish to be gods, who wish to be human, who celebrate humanness, for its faults as well as its potential for beauty, what weirdos. These mortalists mobs are maddened by those who cannot resist the pull of transformation, and the puppetmasters who seek out total knowledge and power out of sheer solipsistic, narcissistic ego. Whatever it becomes, it’s just a story, like we all! Cheers! -Amy
