Chapter 2

Imagine God Himself, hanging upside down, like a bat, dangling and doing sit-ups from the leg of a flying helicopter.

The wintery sky hung low, hazy, and bleak. A darkening smudge was spreading. Banks of inky clouds swept along by fierce and frigid gusts of wind. The heavens above committing a kind of frotteurism.

“Comb your hair, put on your shades, and dig your bunkers. It was the Year of the Rat, after all ... It was endless stretches of greenery, soaring walls in the Kingdom’s Garden ... Yessir, all the cadres at that banquet had a reclining seat...

“Comrades, cadres at the Gala, smiling and dancing in bursts of illumination. Everything painted red and gold, with bestiaries decorated in grinning rats. Everyone at the Gala, collared in cangues, blissfully unaware of the pedo lurking by the playground.”

Santa felt a tremendous force, a searing pain ripping through his chest, and he unloosed a series of dry, hacking coughs. His eyes stretched wide when he remembered that coughing, once, was worse than saying the n-word.

“Throw your head up to the sky and imagine God Himself, hanging upside down, like a bat, dangling and doing sit-ups from the leg of a flying helicopter. God Himself, the real Patient Zero. God Himself, smoking on a mary-joo-wanna cigarette.”

The darkening smudge in the sky started spreading quicker, spilling across the horizon, like an ink stain, racing rapidly in every direction.

“There can be no murder in paradise. I’m telling you. It’s incomprehensible. Inconceivable ... Brother Snake God got that smoldering intensity bright in the whites of his eyes, yeah? And he corrected the wrong ideas, right?

“Metastasis? No sir, not in paradise! In paradise there’s only virgins, green grass and positivity...”

Santa had been licking his wounds, was pulling on a Snoop-sized blunt. The fat man had his meaty hand gripped over the width of the steering wheel, and his knuckles were scraped and bleeding.

As Santa was sitting back in the bucket seat, he steered the Caddy with one hand, and a faint clanking could be heard from the trunk, sounded similar to metal hitting a human skull.

Santa coughed out a plume of smoke, clicked his tongue, then went on, “A maze of limestone caves. Sure paid off like a winning slot machine. We had Ron Varra running around with his hair on fire. But he wasn’t credible. He was a crank. A ‘conspiracy theorist.’ Then God Himself, in the gold chair by the fireplace, told us the dead were coming back to haunt the hospitals.”