Chapter 34
BEING IN FOUR places at the same time would be absolutely incredible if you could simultaneously watch a movie, catch a concert, eat a pizza, and, I don’t know, scale a rock wall. It’d even be great if all you could do was go to the multiplex and watch four different movies at once.
But heading out to do battle with an archfiend in four different geographical hot spots?
Not so much.
Besides being a space-time aberration, it was a total multitasking nightmare. I was afraid my brain circuits would either fry or freeze up. Visually, it reminded me of that time I had turned myself into a housefly. But this time I wasn’t just seeing kaleidoscopic images of the same thing repeatedly stacked up on top of itself.
Having achieved four-way-split teleportation, I was now seeing four very different real-time scenes simultaneously.
In London I could see Number 2, dressed in a tattered black cloak like the grim reaper. He was carrying a crossbow and charging across the far horizon on the back of a white steed (I could tell the horse wasn’t Xanthos because my spiritual advisor’s eyeballs don’t glow like red LEDs).
Number 2 must’ve just looted the fallen ruins of the Tower of London, because on his hooded head I could see the glistening diamonds, pearls, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies he had obviously stolen from the Tower’s Crown Jewels collection.
“I have crowned myself your conqueror!” he cried out to the masses scurrying through London’s narrow lanes. “Serve me and live. Refuse me and die!”
Across the ocean, on the island of Manhattan, I couldn’t catch up with Number 2 as he rode a fiery red horse up Broadway and, swinging a sword over his head, helped his scorpion-tailed henchbeasts cattle-prod a herd of terror-stricken New Yorkers up the street to the nearest subway entrances.
“You are the spoils of war!” he shouted. “Serve me!”
He was also on horseback in China, where the galloping stallion was black. For some bizarre-o reason, in Beijing Number 2 carried a pair of market scales instead of a weapon and cried out, “Slaves will find food in their bellies; resistors will starve!” Hungry multitudes raced after Number 2’s minions and followed them down into the Beijing subway stations.
Moscow was even worse. For just an instant, I saw Number 2 as he trotted through what was left of Red Square. The spiral onion-dome towers of St. Basil’s Cathedral lay atop a heap of rubble like multicolored swirl cones somebody had dropped on a litter-strewn boardwalk.
In Moscow I could also smell Number 2 something fierce.
The black-caped creep carried the scent of a rotting side of beef jammed into a refrigerator that had stopped working weeks ago.
He smelled like death.
To complete the death theme, the pale horse he rode through the Russian wreckage was the color of a corpse—a sort of sickly yellowish green with pus-colored blotches all over its hindquarters.
“I am death to those who do not heed my call!”
The me in Moscow didn’t chase after the extremely grim reaper as his horse leaped over the shattered red star that used to top the turret of the Vodovzvodnaya Tower.
Because there was another problem within spitting distance.
A gopnik.
A street gang of tough young males with razor-cut hair and glazed “I don’t care” eyes. They were decked out in jogging suits and had just circled a babushka, a little old lady with few good teeth and a headscarf tied under her chin.
I sensed what was about to happen.
This Moscow street gang was going to have some end-of-the-world fun by mugging, and maybe murdering, somebody’s grandmother!