Chapter 18

A terrible roar rose from the crowd of True Believers as Hep, Scroat and Pan turned and ran.

“I guess someone followed us, huh?” Pan said as they ran. He and Scroat half-carried Hep so he could keep up with them.

“Gee, do you fucking think?” Scroat answered.

Improbable though it was, the three of them were able to slightly out run the True Believers. They sprinted forward until they were a solid city block ahead of the screaming masses behind them. They turned right suddenly, and ran as fast as they could to the first alley. They leapt into the alley and paused.

They could hear the yells of the approaching True Believers, and a few seconds later they could hear their feet as they ran. Shortly, they saw the True Believers running past the alley they were hiding in. None of the True Believers seemed to notice the alley.

“Are we actually going to get away with this?” Pan asked.

Almost as if to answer Pan’s question, one of the True Believers turned and looked down the alley. He saw the three gods.

He yelled, “Hey, they’re over here!” and ran towards Hep, Scroat and Pan. He put his arms out as if he was going to tackle them and bellowed.

When he was close enough, Scroat stepped forward and punched him in the jaw. The True Believer fell like rotten tree. Pan clapped Scroat on the back, and the three turned to run again because the rest of the True Believers had overcome the mob’s inertia and charged down the alleyway.

Scroat and Pan nearly picked Hep up off the ground as they ran. Pan and Scroat knocked over garbage cans and any other obstacles they could get their hands on as they ran past to trip up the True Believers. Several of the True Believers did stumble, but it only slowed the mob down a little bit.

They emerged from the far side of the alley, turned left and kept running.

“What the hell did you and Bacchus do to Tim to get him all interested in us, anyway,” Scroat asked Pan.

“I don’t know,” Pan said. “I think he was just jealous because we didn’t invite him to our party. Or that we were getting all the hot girls, and he wasn’t. It seems like he only really attracts the track-suit-wearing power-whore types, anyway.”

“Yeah, right,” Scroat said. “Did you fuckers tell him that Santa Claus isn’t real?”

“Well, we might have let that slip, I don’t know,” Pan said. “We were pretty drunk at the time. Had you ever been to one of Bacchus’s parties?”

“Yeah, a while back,” Scroat said. He pointed at another alleyway. “Go down there!”

They ducked into the alley just in time for the first bunch of True Believers to see them. The far end of the alley was blocked by a fence, so Pan and Scroat let go of Hep, and all three of them started trying to open the doors along the walls of the alley. About halfway down the alley, Hep found one that would open.

“Here’s one!” he yelled to Scroat and Pan. They ran over and went through the door Hep was holding open. One of the quicker True Believers had just come around the corner.

“Fuck!” Hep said. He went through the door and slammed it shut behind him. He turned the deadbolt and backed away from the door. Seconds later, the door started shaking, and someone started pounding on the door.

It looked like they were in an abandoned warehouse. The space they were in was lit from the street lamps outside, and Exit signs over the other doors. There didn’t appear to be anything in the cavernous space, unless it was in the shadows.

“Quick, check the other doors and make sure they’re locked,” Hep said. They went around to the rest of the doors, and they were, indeed, locked.

The pounding on the back door continued, and soon they heard someone pounding on the other doors as well. The noise echoed in the open space. After a few minutes, the pounding on the back door slowed into a single, solid boom every few seconds.

“They’re trying to break the door down,” Hep said, almost amused. A few minutes after that, they heard a helicopter, and saw its’ searchlight illuminating the building. Every few seconds the bright light would sweep over a window, illuminating the space they were in. It was, indeed, entirely empty. There wasn’t so much as a garbage can in the building.

Suddenly they couldn’t see the spotlight anymore, and the noise from the helicopter got louder and louder. The walls of the building seemed to vibrate with the sound, along with the racket from the True Believers pounding on all the doors.

The noise from the helicopter got significantly louder, and light shone in from an opening in the ceiling. They saw a pair of men peering down into the space below, shining flashlights around the interior of the building.

“They’re on the roof,” Hep exclaimed. He expected them to toss a rope through the opening, and shimmy down to the floor. Instead, they slammed the door on the roof shut, and a few moments later the noise from the helicopter increased, then began to diminish.

The pounding on the doors, if anything, had increased in intensity, but the strong old steel hinges and frames weren’t about to let go.

Suddenly the pounding stopped. Hep, Scroat and Pan looked around in wonder.

“What the fuck?” Scroat asked.

Outside, they heard a voice over a megaphone.

“Gentlemen, please come out quietly. This building is condemned anyway, so we’re more than happy to blow it up with you in it. You have two minutes,” the voice said. The pounding on the doors resumed after the voice stopped speaking. The helicopter approached again, and circled outside the top of the building, shining its spotlight in the windows.

“Holy shit!” Scroat exclaimed.

“We’ve gotta find a way out of here,” Hep said, and started pacing the floor of the warehouse, looking for an opening that they perhaps hadn’t seen before. Every door had someone on the outside pounding on it. All the windows were out of reach, and there was nothing to climb in order to get to them.

“We are so fucked,” Pan said.

“What now?” Scroat asked Pan.

“Well, we can’t go out there, because they’re going to kill us. And we can’t stay in here because, hey, they’re going to kill us,” Hep said. “Have you got any bright ideas? Because now would be a good time for one.”

“Well, if we stay in here, we’ll get killed but we’ll end up back home,” Scroat said.

“Yeah, but we’ll have to wait for these bodies to deteriorate before we can come back incarnate again. By then, Tim will have killed everyone else we like, and all our stuff will be gone for sure.”

“You’re worried about your stuff right now?” Pan asked.

“No, but panicking never helped anyone. Lighten up,” Hep said.

“We are so fucked,” Pan said.

Hep’s mind raced. He couldn’t pop out and bring Pan and Scroat with him, because they were also gods and it just doesn’t work that way. They could bust through one of the doors and try to fight their way out, but it was likely they’d be overwhelmed.

The pounding on the doors ceased. They heard the voice on the megaphone again.

“Gentlemen, you have ten seconds,” the voice said.

“Holy shit!” Scroat said.

“Nine”

“Hep, we gotta do something,” Pan said.

“Eight”

“So do something. I can’t think of a damn thing!” Hep said.

“Seven”

They heard a trumpet call, and the ceiling began to glow with a warm, divine light.

“Six”

Three golden chairs dropped from the ceiling, suspended by ivy vines. The chairs were plush and very ornate. They landed softly on the floor near Hep, Scroat and Pan.

“Five”

“Well? Get on a chair!” Hep said, and hustled over to one of the chairs. Pan and Scroat did likewise.

“Four”

The chairs lifted Hep, Scroat and Pan out of the building, and away from danger. They were able to look down on the crowds below, the helicopter. They saw a man in the helicopter lean out one of the doors and launch several grenades into the building through the windows. They saw the flashes of the explosives, and then shifted from the mortal plain to the divine.

Still moving upwards, Scroat looked over at Hep and said, “Man, no one is ever going to buy this.”

Hep replied, “Yeah, Deus ex Machina is always a disappointing end to a story. But it works pretty well when you need to get your ass out of an inescapable situation.” He laughed.

“So what are we going to tell people when they ask how we got out of this predicament,” Scroat asked.

“Whatever the hell we want. We’re gods. If you want, you could say you rained angry, diseased squids upon them,” Hep said.