"Mortals can't fight gods," Logan pointed out, although it felt unnecessary. "They could kill us all with a sneeze. So how the fuck are we gonna do this?"

"We can't call in Bob," Helga replied. "I didn't say we couldn't call in other gods."

Scott fixed her with a skeptical look. "Will Moros help us?"

She scoffed. "No. But as long as I'm under his aegis I'm not going to die. He doesn't want me cluttering up his dimension."

Logan scoured his mind for any gods they knew that might help them - a small list to be sure - and remembered, "Rags. Holy shit, call him. He can bring the Gorgons in."

Wes nodded solemnly. "Yes, I brought that up. But there's a couple of problems with that. The first is that they can only tackle an area within their sight from whatever reflective surface they're manifesting in. Which means they could only help in small doses, and they have no way of weeding out the innocent from the afflicted - whoever is within their sight will be affected."

"The other problem is that Rags is in the hospital," Hel finished.

Logan stared at her in surprise. "The hospital? What happened?"

She sighed wearily. "Oh, the stupid shit finally did it. He drank so much he poisoned himself. He didn't show up at the Stone Temple one day and didn't answer his calls, and when he missed a liquid lunch date with Thrak, Thrak went to check on him. He found him comatose in a small pool of his own vomit. He's unconscious in the hospital right now, but he's expected to survive; he just needs to filter all the booze out of his system."

"Ah Jesus." What a perfect time for Rags's personal demons to grab him and throttle him. It didn't help that Logan always forgot alcohol poisoning was a possibility, because his own healing factor never even let him get drunk for long, if ever.

"Can someone else call up the Gorgons?" Scott asked. "He can't be the only one."

"He's the only Hierophant," Wes told him, nervously running a hand through his hair. "A lesser prelate could do it, though. The Gorgons are responsive to their worshippers, more so than any other gods. But the problems of before still apply."

"What is it with them and reflective surfaces?" Scott wondered.

Wes shifted into teacher mode, which he did a lot. It was a Watcher thing. "Two of the Gorgons can't physically manifest upon this plane. Their energies are so disruptive that they'd basically rip holes in the fabric of our reality if they did. Medusa, who has some mortal blood, can manifest in this reality without harm, but that's it, and usually she stays with her sisters. The three of them together are powerful enough that simply the energy funneled through their reflections can do massive damage."

Scott grunted, an acknowledgement of the facts without comment upon them.

Logan suddenly realized they had another ticket they could call in. "Degei. Hey, why don't we contact him? He always seems eager to help out Bob."

Wes nodded thoughtfully. "The snake god. I know for a fact that he's very helpful in a fight. Beyond you, he's the only being I've seen take down a Berserker. Well, his avatars took it down." Logan remembered him telling him about that - live snakes suddenly pouring out of a Berserker like its guts had been its nest. Totally fucking disgusting, and yet undeniably effective. "And he's a death god, technically, so he should be basically unbeatable. But I'm not sure how we get in touch with him. He's so obscure as gods go that there isn't much literature about him."

"Bob told me," Logan said, marveling that he had knowledge a Watcher didn't. Score one for him. "He said if you talked to any snake and mentioned Degei's name that he'd hear you."

Scott glared at him. "Talk to a snake?"

He glared right back. "I know it sounds stupid, but that's what he said. Supposedly all snakes everywhere are his avatars."

"Which is remarkable if true," Wes commented. "A few billion avatars. He must be incredibly powerful. It's a wonder he's so obscure."

"People generally don't like snakes," Helga said. "I don't think anyone would like considering the possibility that they might have real power somewhere." She crossed her arms over her chest and exhaled, as if letting out a breath she'd been holding too long. "Okay, I'll call the Stone Temple and see who they have taking Rags's place. Logan, you want to go see if you can contact Degei?"

Oh shit. "Why me?"

"You know how to do it," Scott pointed out. Was the bastard gloating?

"He knows your Bob's avatar," she told him. "He'll probably respond to you better than any of us. I think Bob might be his only friend, honestly. Even other gods get a bit creeped out by him."

Wes shrugged somewhat diffidently, although he was not disagreeing with her. "He is made of snakes. I imagine that can be ... disconcerting."

Hel smirked. "I bet that's what Bob liked about him. You know Bob and weird things. He's on 'em like ugly on Pat Buchanan."

Scott looked like he was struggling hard not to smile, and Logan glowered at him. He could guess just what he was thinking, and goddamn it, he was not weird! Okay, maybe he was - but weren't they all? Mutants, demons, and ghosts - none of them would win the normal sweepstakes at the moment.

"What about Ganesha?" Wes interjected, turning to Helga. "I was under the impression he was a good friend of Bob's."

She nodded. "He is, but he's not easy to get a hold of. I can try, but even if he did show up, what he could do for us would be limited. He doesn't use his powers for destruction, ever. He likes to say he's a lover not a fighter."

"But his power is suppression of entropy and chaos, yes? It's possible he could slow the spread of whatever it is that's afflicting the city."

She considered that and then slowly nodded. "Yeah, maybe. Okay, I'll put in a call to him, but I have no idea when he'll get back to me."

"Are there any other god friend of Bob's that you can think of that might pitch in here?" Logan wondered.

She both shrugged and shook her head. "Not that I can think of. But we still have another avenue open to us: Ressiks."

Scott groaned in distaste at the thought of the hyperviolent, thuggish reptilian demons, but Wesley nodded thoughtfully. "God killers. It was what they were made for. It's a shame they're about as trustworthy as a starving vampire in a blood bank."

"I know of a mercenary crew working out of Venice Beach that we could probably hire," Helga continued. "If they want their pay they'll do as we say, and besides, they piss me off, I'll cut off their heads and stick 'em on pikes around the bar. My reputation should help me when dealing with them."

Suddenly, surprisingly, Scott said, "I'll do it."

They all stared at him in varying degrees of shock. "What?" Logan asked first.

Scott seemed uncomfortable with the scrutiny, and his shrug came off as a partial fidget. "You all have something to do except for me, and I'm going crazy just sitting on my ass. I need to do something."

Helga and Logan exchanged skeptical glances, and Wes said, “I’ll go too.”

Scott frowned at him, but didn’t protest, as what could Wes do in his current form? Basically all he could do was talk. Manipulating objects was difficult, and ghosts weren’t known for their fighting skills. All Wes would be was well informed company. Scott eventually sighed and nodded, accepting it without a fight.

So they all had their little jobs to do. Now how the hell was he gonna find a snake in downtown Los Angeles?

5

Angel fought them off as best he could, but eventually the simple crush of bodies was overwhelming. A couple of them had him by the legs and dragged him down, and someone grabbed him from behind and started digging their thumbs into his eyes. He grabbed their arms and tried to rip their hands off him, throw them by their wrists, but he didn’t have the proper leverage for the move and couldn’t get up to achieve it. The pressure against his eyeballs was excruciating, the lights exploding before his eyes, and he was about to break their thumbs when he heard a sickening crack, and the person’s hands slackened suddenly. Angel heard the corpse fall to the floor, and he heard a dull, meatier thud followed by Bren cursing, “Would you fucking zombies just give it up already? We’re not even edible! We’re like the last piece of jerky in the jar.”

It was an odd statement, and Angel felt almost insulted at being compared to jerky (he wasn’t perfectly inedible …), but he jumped up to his feet and rejoined the fight as the corpses swarmed Bren, who had successfully distracted them. One of them had grabbed Bren by the neck and looked like they were trying to rip his head off, so Angel drove the flattened palm of his hand so hard into the side of the corpse’s head, right where the jaw bone met the skull, that he felt the bones collapse under his hand like he’d hit an overripe pumpkin. It was disgusting, and yet disturbingly satisfying.

Then there was a sound that hit them like a sonic tidal wave. It was a word that wasn’t a word, something not quite heard by the ears but felt in the body, and Angel was suddenly overwhelmed by the instinct to run. But he recognized the noise, the inexplicable burning feeling in his chest, and he forced himself to stand still as the animate corpses around him suddenly staggered, as if physically hit with something no one could see. Bren grabbed his arm, and he allowed him to pull him back farther into the apartment as the corpses began reeling backwards towards the door. Bren kept his hand on his arm, as if trying to physically anchor him to the room, and it actually helped as the noise continued.

Angel could see that Ana was using her necromancer talents again, but this time Giles held her hand, and their clasped hands were glowing with energy. Giles had his eyes closed in intense concentration and was sweating rather profusely, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening, even if Angel wasn’t sure of the logistics of it. Ana’s first attempt to repel the dead was too weak, so Giles was using his power to augment it, and this time it was like a tsunami, overwhelming the most insistent defenses. Angel assumed that having a soul was probably the only thing keeping him resisting the sound, but it wasn’t easy. Maybe it was just that he was accustomed to fighting his own impulses at this point. He was aware Bren was bleeding, he could smell his blood, but it was half-tempting and half-disgusting, with that sour Brachen undertone corrupting the nicer Human bit. The dichotomy was also helping him focus.

Finally the corpses had retreated, obeying orders, and Ana pulled her hand out of Giles’s grip, shaking her hand like she’d touched a hot stove. “Goddamn it, Grandpa, you trying to fry me?”

Giles wavered unsteadily on his feet, and Bren let Angel’s arm go so he could catch him before he could hit the floor. “Would you just shut the fuck up?” Bren suddenly snapped at Ana, reverting to Human face and wiping the blood off his face with the back of his hand. “If it wasn’t for him we’d be zombie chow right now. So let’s say we get the hell out of here and you can the smart ass insults, huh?”

Ana’s head snapped back as if he’d punched her, and she stared at him for a long moment, expression stony, before her face cracked in a smile, and she chuckled. “Damn, kiddo, I got you wrong. Here I thought you were just a cute WeHo twink, and you’re some kind of macho demon hunter type who hangs with a bunch of others. So you guys are what, like the Ghostbusters, only … Vampbusters? Zombinators?”

Giles wasn’t unconscious, but being an energy conduit had left him so wiped out that keeping his eyes open was about all he could do. Angel draped his arm over his shoulders and held him up as he told her, “We’ll explain on the way.”

She shrugged and retrieved a pair of rhinestone encrusted sunglasses from beside her sink. As Angel helped Giles out the door and Bren followed, Ana pulling up the rear, she asked, “So who’s gonna replace my futon?”

They could have come across a more annoying necromancer. But it would have been hard.

*****

For all its negatives - and there were so many you had to give up counting at some point - Los Angeles did have some good points. Namely, nothing was too weird for it not exist somewhere in this city. Case in point: a pet store that specialized in snakes and reptiles only, the more exotic the better. Logan found it in the phone book, and briefly wondered if it could possibly still be open.

Yes, it was. It was on Hollywood Boulevard, and was small, cramped, and claustrophobic, a store in a tight space that would have been better suited to something more minor, like tchotchkes or grade A tourist crap. It smelled fusty, like too much reptile pee. The clerk was a twenty two year old kid with a yellow streaked faux-hawk and a nose ring big enough to have been a link of a chain, with a spider web tattoo taking up most of the left side of his neck. He asked if he could help him, and he told the kid he was just here to look at some snakes.

This led to the kid to suddenly list what sounded like every snake known to mankind. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care about the dirty look he was giving him, so Logan rolled his eyes and picked king snake at random. That was a small snake, right?

The guy led him to a back wall full of glass tanks, in which were all sorts of snakes curled up under heat lamps on rocks, or inside fake plastic hollow logs. The king snake was bright red, with yellow and black bands, curled up like a waiting lasso on a flat fake rock. “Can I handle it?” he asked the kid, not sure if the thing could hear him through the glass. Wait a minute, did snakes hear at all? How did that work?

The kid looked at him funny for a second, then shrugged and went through a door marked “Employees Only”. He was soon on the other side of the wall full of tanks, where he took the lid off and pulled out the snake. He came back through the employee’s door, and held out the snake.

It was longer than he thought it would be, but still slender and not at all near boa size, and as he took it, its scales felt dry and warm under his fingers. He held it up to eye level and turned his back on the kid as the snake’s tongue darted out to taste the air. “Degei, listen, I’m Bob’s avatar and we need your help now,” he said in a low voice, hoping the hum of the air conditioner drowned him out.

“Are you talking to it?” the kid asked.

Oh god, he felt like an asshole. But still he continued. “I wouldn’t ask, but it’s an emergency.”

“You’re not a snake handler, are you?”

Logan turned back to the kid, not sure what he was asking. “Huh?”

“You know, a snake handler. One of those religious people that handles snakes.” He reached out to take the king snake back, but it suddenly wound its way around Logan’s arm and dropped down to the floor. The kid bent down to get it, and that’s when a whole bunch of other snakes started pouring out from underneath the crack in the inner door. “Whoa!” he exclaimed, startled. “Benjy! We got a situation out here!”

The snakes started gathering together into a pile, and the kid backed up towards the employee door, carefully stepping over the snake river, while Logan just waited where he was. That was a quicker response than he thought, but hey, he wasn’t going to knock it.

The pile eventually formed into the shape of a man with black and red scaled skin marked with silver diamond shapes, his face forming last, starting from the lipless mouth and ending with the opening of two tangerine sized, slit pupiled yellow eyes. “Oh yes, Logan,” Degei said. “I remember you.”

“Holy fuck!” the kid screamed, completely scared out of his mind.

Degei gestured vaguely towards him, and said, “Forget.” The kid blinked for a minute, looking deeply confused. “So what is the emergency?”

Logan gestured up the aisle towards the cloudy glass door. “I’ll show ya.”

As they walked out of the store, the guy who must have been Benjy came out of the back, and asked the kid, “What the hell were you screaming about?”

The kid answered, in genuine confusion, “I have no idea.”

Once out on the street, no one gave him and the five foot five naked bald guy made completely of snakeskin a second glance. Only in Los Angeles, huh? Oh, well, maybe New York too. (In deference to modesty, Degei didn’t bother to manifest genitalia … or what he had didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before. Which, he now realized, was not something he wanted to think about.) Degei looked around at the ghosts and animated dead amongst otherwise unconcerned and unnoticing people, his nictitating membranes sliding over his eyes with the slightest dry clicking sound. “Oh dear. What’s happened here?”

The weirdest thing about this? Although there were many things to choose from, Logan found the fact that he had an accent more reminiscent of New Zealand than Fiji a bit more disconcerting than everything else, and he wasn‘t sure why. “We think that -”

Degei faced him and held up a finger, making a shushing noise that sounded like a hiss. He stared at him for a long moment with those alien, reptilian eyes, and he had the impression he was being stared through like he was a ghost. Finally, Degei lowered his hand, and those see through membranes clicked over his eyes again. “This is a bit of a pickle, isn’t it?”

A bit of a pickle?! What god used that kind of language?!

Wow. It was one of those moments when it struck him how fucking bizarre his life was.

The ghost of a middle aged man in a Brooks Brothers suit attempted to walk through them, but stopped cold and looked at them in confusion. “You can’t walk through me, son,” Degei told him. “I’m a god.”

Now see, Logan didn’t know that. Ghosts could walk through everything but gods?

The man did a bit of a double take, which was extremely comical when a ghost did it. “God? You’re god? Oh my g … shit, is this the Rapture?”

Degei looked at him with naked curiosity. “The what now?”

Logan scratched his head and tried to remember what it exactly was. “It’s … uh … some people believe it’s … uh … it’s something like the souls of believers or the righteous or some such bullshit are taken up to Heaven while all us heathen sinner assholes get left behind.”

“Which heaven?” Degei asked innocently.

Logan shrugged - he had no idea - and the ghost exclaimed, “What do you mean which heaven?”

Degei gave him a strange look, like he feared the guy was brain damaged and unstable. “What do you mean which heaven? And why would a god want souls? Unless they ate them.”

The ghost looked shocked, appalled, and horrified. “What?” he finally sputtered.

Logan had enough of this bullshit. “Accept, adapt, and move on, Casper. We have a world to fix, ‘kay?”

The ghost looked between them, his look vacillating between real fear and genuine shock. He took several steps back, almost phasing into the storefront, and said, “You’re Satan, aren’t you?”

Neither he nor Degei knew who he was lobbing that at. Logan was about to say yeah, he was, but Degei said, “Satan is a concept, not a proper physical manifestation.”

The ghost glared at them both, made the sign of the cross at the both of them, and walked off. Degei, assuming it was some sort of parting gesture, made the cross back at him. Logan almost laughed. The serpentine god turned back to him with the most bizarrely innocent look on his face. He hadn’t dealt with Humans for a long time - possibly ever - and he clearly found them more than a bit baffling. “Are they all like that?”

“The ghosts? Nah. Some are even more annoyin’. Look, you got any idea who might be doing this?”

“I have several ideas,” he said. “But I will need to know how this started to narrow things down.”

“We don’t know how it started. It just did.”

“Hmm.” He glanced down at the sidewalk, and stood in that posture for about a minute, neither moving or reacting to anything going on around them. Logan cleared his throat loudly, and almost touched his arm, but Degei radiated a palpable power that surrounded him as snugly as an aura - you couldn’t really feel it until you got very close, and then it was like trying to touch an open flame.

“Uh, Degei?” No reaction. He waved a hand in front of his huge eyes. Again, no response. He was getting nervous when suddenly Degei moved, springing to life so suddenly Logan almost jumped.

“One of my snakes has seen something interesting at a cemetery just north of here,” he proclaimed, and then started walking down the street like he knew where he was going. Logan had to scramble after him. He supposed he should take some comfort in the fact that he had taken the job so readily, but there was some question as to what Degei could actually do here. Yes, if they needed snakes to attack or eat people, they had that covered … but what else could he actually do? He was a good ally to have, but what he could do to turn the tide of dead was an open question, and he hadn’t volunteered any solutions yet. Mainly, he was good for striking fear and unease in the hearts of almost everyone. Okay, it wasn’t the best plan in the world, but that’s how desperate they were.

“What is it your snake saw?” Logan asked, and suddenly felt like a complete dick. Well, he was a snake god - he should have expected that he’d soon say something like that to him.

“Demons crawling out of a hell pit,” he replied, almost cheerfully.

It was L.A. - there was a small possibility that was normal. But he wasn’t about to bet on it.