Zach

I figured I'd tell a little about Zach today. He wasn't always a god, once he was almost an ordinary person. He had an argument with his god once, it lasted for years, many, many years. You see, Zach was winning the argument and his god wasn't too happy about that, he kept Zach around until the proud god could win. He was more than a haughty god, he was angry and vengeful and he not only kept Zach alive for centuries but kept letting him die, too. Here is one of those times:

...I was sick of dealing with gods and I figgered one life for the cause of the Four Twelves was enough for one person so I left. A couple months passed and the dreams began again so I looked for another fight. This time I found one on Mad Martin's. I followed Mad Martin's career on the news all his life. Seemed he got rich some way or another and then he got this idea. He was an Earth history buff and he was real big on Walt Disney. So he bought this planet and built this huge amusement park on it. Well, it wasn't really an amusement park, it was an amusement world. There were amusement worlds littered all over the known universe but this was the only one that had rollycoasters. No one but a few history nuts even knew what a rollycoaster was until Mad Martin came along. There wasn't just a rollycoaster there, there was a rollycoaster continent. Well, with that and all the other amusements, including gambling, prostitution and drugs, Mad Martin's was an extremely rich planet. And now there was a war going on for control of it.

It was the damndest fight I'd ever been in because on the surface of things it was business as usual but it was a war nonetheless. The tourists would be having their fun and then all of a sudden a battle would erupt in the middle of it. Thing was, this battle had one rule that all sides kept, tourists were off limits. If anyone even injured a tourist they were killed and the fighting in that sector ended immediately. The warring factors lost so many of their own people from tourist accidents that they began to hire sharpshooters to fight for them. I signed on with Mad Martin.

We were fighting off the Youn Tat clan from Lon Cu in an area called Loops. It was this whole bunch of looping coasters and the Youn Tat picked a peak time to make their move. I was there with my platoon because of an intelligence tip. Well, the tip was right but the intelligence was off a bit, they didn't have twenty shooters they had two hundred. The tourists were used to the war by then so when the shooting started hardly anyone ran, only the ones who didn't know the rules. The fun went on and amid the screams of the happy guests and the roaring coasters we shot at each other.

Excerpt from The Godz of Earth by S.E.Estes