Chapter Thirty Four

To himself, every one is an immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead. - Samuel Butler

Chapter Thirty Four

Hep was tired from trying to keep Ares under control. He’d thought keeping a hippie under lock and key would be easy, but he’d forgotten that hippies still talk. A lot. Especially if they’re locked up.

So, he told Ares that he wasn’t going to keep him locked up any more, and he wouldn’t have to go to anymore deaths if he didn’t want to, but that he would be very grateful if Ares stuck around for a bit.

“Will you apologize for locking me up?”

Hep rolled his eyes, and said, “Yes, Ares, I’m sorry I locked you up.”

“OK. I’ll hang out for a while,” Ares said.

Hep unlocked him and then asked him if he wanted something to drink.

Ares rubbed his wrists where the handcuffs had been and said, “Have you got any mint tea?”

“Um. No. I have beer. I have liqour. And, I guess, I have coffee.”

“Can I just have a glass of water?”

“Sure, come on,” Hep said, and led Ares out into the living room where Scroat was watching porn.

“Dude, do we have to watch this?”

Scroat looked at him.

“I thought you fucking hippies were all about, you know, fucking. Free love, right?”

“Yeah, but porn is just degrading to everyone.”

“Fuck. OK. Since you are our guest, I will watch something else. You want to see if the Care Bears movie is on cable?”

Ares didn’t answer. He sat down on the couch. Hep came in with a glass of water for Ares and a beer for himself.

Hep had just sat down when the phone buzzed in his pocket. He had set it to vibrate to keep Ares from freaking out and vanishing when it went off.

Hep excused himself and went in to the bathroom, where he checked to see who was due to die. It looked like he had to collect a guy named Floyd White from a nightclub. He was supposed to overdose on cocaine in the V.I.P. room. Hep put the phone back in his pocket and went out to the living room.

“Hey, anyone want to go to a nightclub?” Hep asked.

Scroat immediately said, “Fuck yeah!”

Ares, being too trusting for his own good, also agreed that going to a nightclub sounded like a fun idea.

Five minutes later they were on their way.

There was already a line down the block when they arrived outside the club.

“I didn’t know there were any decent clubs in Arizona,” Ares said.

“There aren’t,” Hep said. “No one here knows the difference, though.”

They waited for half an hour before the line moved at all.

“Man, I don’t want to hang out in line all night,” Ares said. “Maybe we should go find a different club.”

“No, we definitely want to get in to this club,” Hep said.

“Why, I thought there weren’t any decent ones here anyway.”

Hep thought quickly and said, “Yeah, but the other ones are even worse than this one.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Scroat said. “Come with me.”

He walked towards the bouncer standing at the velvet ropes. Before they had even stopped, the bouncer said, “Wait in line, gentlemen, there’s no room inside.”

“Aw, come on, don’t you remember us? We went to school together,” Scroat said, and flashed a one hundred dollar bill at the bouncer.

“Oh, hey, yeah. It’s been a while fellas,” he reached to shake Scroat’s hand, and Scroat deftly handed him the cash. “Come on in, no cover charge for old friends.”

“Thanks man,” Scroat said.

“Yeah, thanks,” Ares said. Hep said nothing, but went inside with the other two.

As soon as the door was shut behind them, he asked Scroat, “Where did you get that?”

Scroat laughed and said, “out of the pocket of the douchebag in the blue suit back there.”

“Oh,” Hep said, and considered this for a moment. Then he said, “Nicely done.”

“Thank you.”

The three of them went in to the club. Hep was immediately overwhelmed with disgust by the level of douchebaggery in the club. Every which way he looked was another asshole with goofy, gelled hair and a tacky t-shirt with metallic art on it or a silk jacket. Or both, in many cases.

“Wow,” he said.

Ares was equally disgusted by the macho posturing of the clubs patrons, as well as the equal slutty posing of many of the women present.

“Do these people act like this all week?” he shouted to Hep over the BOOMBOOMBOOM of whatever crappy dance track the DJ was spinning.

“No,” Hep said, “the rest of the week they pretend they aren’t assholes.”

Some guy with bleached tips and pumped arms (with no chest muscles to speak of) ran into Ares.

“Watch it, fuckhead!” he said to Ares.

Ares stared at him, incredulous. “You ran in to me!”

The asshole grabbed Ares shirt, “You got a problem? I’ll wipe the floor with you, asshole!”

Several of the bouncers were now paying attention to the douchebag picking a fight with a gigantic hippie.

“No problem here,” Ares said. The asshole smirked and let go of Ares.

“I didn’t think so, pussy,” he said, and wandered off.

Scroat was staring at Ares with his mouth hanging open.

“Dude, who the fuck are you?”

Ares said nothing. Scroat wasn’t sure, but he could swear that Ares had been wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt when they came in. But now it was black.

They continued through the club, Hep leading the way, trying to reach the V.I.P. room.

They passed a couple more douchebags who looked just like the first douchebag. One of them shoved the other and shouted “Stay the hell away from my woman.”

The other one was coming back, when Ares stepped between them and said “Fellas, you can handle this reasonably.”

The one who had been shoved punched him in the jaw, to his own dismay. He clutched his hand in pain and tried to keep looking tough.

“That wasn’t cool,” Ares said, and stuck a finger in the douchebag’s face.

The other douchebag, the one who had started the fight, shoved Ares then. Ares turned around and grabbed the guy who had shoved him. He picked him up by his shirt, and pulled him close to his face.

“Dude, did you really wax your eyebrows? Shameful.”

He then tossed the guy back to the floor, and walked away. The jerk tried to keep looking tough as he got up off the floor, having been overpowered by a hippie. His friends were looking away and trying not to laugh at him.

Ares caught up with Scroat and Hep. Scroat had turned to ask Ares something when he noticed Ares was wearing a couple of leather cuffs around each wrist. He was certain Ares had not been wearing those earlier.

“Man, a lot of assholes here tonight,” Scroat said.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Ares said and cracked his knuckles.

They had nearly reached the V.I.P. room, and Hep was trying to formulate a more elegant plan for getting in that just braining the bouncer with the nearest convenient object and rushing in, when the first douchebag who had bumped into Ares, unbelievably, ran into him again.

“Hey, fuckhead, I told you to watch yourself,” he said.

This time Ares grabbed the douchebag by the hair and said “You had better check yourself, friend, before I wreck you.”

He then pulled the guy by his hair and sent him stumbling into a crowd of look-alikes with spiky hair and big biceps.

Hep had turned to ask if Scroat or Ares had any ideas for getting into the V.I.P room, when he saw Ares wearing a black t-shirt, black leather cuffs, black pants and black boots. He was about to comment on Ares’s new attire when the jerk he’d just tossed came running back at him. Ares wasn’t looking, and the douchebag punched Ares in the back of the head.

Hep saw fire blaze in Ares’s eyes, and then Ares turned around to confront the guy who had punched him.

“You’re gonna be in a world of...” the douchebag began saying, when Ares seized him by the head with both hands. The guy grabbed, uselessly, at Ares’s hands.

“Pain?” Ares asked. The douchebags eyes went wide, and Ares pulled his head down and lifted his knee, driving his knee into the douchebag’s face. He then pulled a bloodied douchebag up and twisted his neck around until he felt something snap and the douchebag went limp.

The guys friends watched all this with horror, and decided that there was no time like the present to get the hell out of there.

The V.I.P. bouncer hustled over, being the closest, to try and get Ares under control. He tried to put Ares in a choke hold, with disastrous results. Ares pulled the bouncer off of him and flipped him up over his back. The bouncer landed flat on his back, knocking the wind out of him.

“Where the hell were you when that asshole was trying to bully me earlier?” he asked the gasping bouncer, and walked away.

Scroat was impressed Ares hadn’t killed the bouncer, until a keg came flying from behind the bar amid various screams and landed on the bouncer’s head. So much for not killing the bouncer.

Hep felt it would be an excellent time to get in to the V.I.P. room and find Floyd. He was easy enough to spot - he was the one sprawled backwards on the couch, dead. Floyd’s soul stood next to his body looking very embarrassed. Hep could now also see the souls of the douchebag and the bouncer, and it looked like he was going to have one hell of a collection to bring to the other side, at the rate Ares was going.

Scroat came over to where Hep was, partly to see if he could help, but mostly to get out of the way.

“Is that what a murder pumpkin looks like?” he asked Hep.

“Yes.”

“Man, you were right, then.”

Ares was twirling a guy in a silk jacket and a t-shirt over his head. Scroat was pretty sure it was one of the guys who had been fighting over a girl earlier.

“What? Don’t you like playing airplane?” Ares asked him. The guy responded by throwing up.

“Oh, fuck. That’s nasty, dude,” Ares said. He threw the guy across the dance floor, where he knocked over a large number of people and came to rest when he slid headfirst into the bar.

The club’s patrons then learned that, strictly speaking, the club shouldn’t have passed the fire inspection, as there weren’t nearly enough doors for everyone to safely exit. Several people were trampled as glammed up women and men pushed and shoved to try and get out of the club before Ares’s wrath turned upon them.

After about fifteen minutes, the club was empty except for Hep, Scroat, Ares, and about twenty bodies (and their souls). The music had stopped, and they could hear sirens approaching.

“You guys might want to split,” Hep said to Scroat and Ares. “I’ll catch up with you at home later.”

“Right,” Scroat said, and he and Ares slipped behind the bar in search of a side or back door they could use unobserved.

“Now, you guys,” Hep said to the twenty souls, “come with me.”

One by one, the souls slowly walked away from their bodies and over to Hep. They were in a large group around him when the police and firefighters burst in to the club.

“Hold it right there!” one of the officers shouted at Hep.

Hep smiled, and said “See ya later.” He and the souls then stepped out of this world.