Empire of Dust (42 page)

"Of course," said LaPierre. "It's a great moment, to be preserved and shown to rally our cause. Think of what it would be like to actually witness St. Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland, or St. George slaying the dragon. Although those were lies of your papist church, Agent Luciano, the similarity between them and LaPierre destroying the Antichrist are clear. Only what I do today will be seen by millions."

"Thanks to the miracle of videotape," said Tony.

LaPierre nodded to the guards, who prodded their captives over to the cross and tied them to it, one by one, with strong nylon cords. The beam of the upright was a foot thick, and Laika was bound to the front of it, on the side facing the kiva, her back against the wood. Tony and Joseph were lashed to the sides, so that they could see the kiva by turning their heads, and Ezekiel, already tightly bound, was tied to the back, his face against the rough wood. Laika heard him laughing softly, his head inches from her own, and shuddered at the droplets that struck the side of her face.

"What's the cross for?" Joseph asked.

"Maybe a palliative the priests set up against the old magic," said Laika.

"Little did they know how useful it would be for Michael LaPierre," said Joseph.

Now LaPierre's troops were taking weapons out of the back of one of the trucks. Laika saw several flamethrowers and a number of machine guns. One of the men handed LaPierre a flamethrower, which he aimed toward the canyon wall and fired. A bolt of yellow flame shot through the air, scorching the dust of the stone wall. LaPierre turned back to his men. "Open the entrance!" he shouted.

Immediately two men went to a small crane and fired up a gas engine that ran it, while two more attached a cable to an iron ring in a slab that sat in the center of the stone circle.

"Yesss . . ." Laika heard Ezekiel Swain say. "Free him. Morons."

Slowly the slab rose until Laika could see the lead sheathing that covered the bottom of it. Several men shifted it to one side, and the crane lowered it to the ground, revealing a large rectangular passage to whatever lay below.

"Secure the prisoner!" LaPierre barked, and three men, one with a flamethrower and the others with machine guns, slid a wooden ladder down into the gaping hole. Then they lowered an electric lantern on a cord, and one by one climbed down into the pit. Laika thought they looked nervous as hell, and if what LaPierre claimed was down there really was, they had good reason to be nervous.

LaPierre walked to the hole and looked down inside it. "Is he there?" he called. Laika couldn't hear what the men below said, but it seemed to satisfy LaPierre, on whom the cameramen and photographers had fixed their lenses. "Open it, then," he said, "and tell the creature to come forth out of its hole!"

He stepped back and grinned in triumph at Laika, who had been working against her bonds, trying to loosen them, but to no avail. She heard from below a dull, heavy thud, as though something had struck the dirt floor of the kiva. Then, nearly a minute later, one of LaPierre's men appeared at the mouth of the opening. She could hear his words to LaPierre: "He's down there, but he won't come up. He says that the earth is his strength, and that the true servant of the Lord must meet him there, or be a coward all his days."

LaPierre straightened up, and Laika saw an angry, fiery look come into his eyes. "Very well, then! We will wage the battle on righteousness in the very den of evil itself! Descend!"

He gestured to his men, and half a dozen went down the ladder ahead of him, half with flamethrowers, and the other three with guns. A video cameraman and a still photographer followed. "Brave guy," said Tony. "I'm surprised he doesn't lob a couple grenades in there before he goes down."

"Now, Antichrist!" LaPierre bellowed. "Prepare to meet your master, the Devil, in the fires of hell!" With one final look of triumph at the prisoners bound to the cross, Michael LaPierre, a flamethrower in his arms, descended the ladder and disappeared from view.

I
t wasn't hard for Martin Reigle to evade the scrutiny of his co-workers at the Dead Horse Reservoir dam. Martin was the assistant manager of dam maintenance, which meant that when something went wrong, he was the first to try and fix it. If he couldn't, he knew who to contact. He carried a beeper so people could get a hold of him, but he didn't have to tell anyone where he was going unless he wanted to.

So, at 7:14 in the morning, Martin was at the center of the eight taintor gates, in the shelter of one of the large concrete piers near the dam crest. He knew that there was no way, with the small amount of dynamite he had, that he could blow the whole dam and make the entire contents of Dead Horse Lake roll down into the canyons south of the dam. But what he
could
do was blast apart the center gates, which would easily reduce the depth of the lake by twenty feet.

He didn't know exactly how much water that would release, but since Dead Horse Lake was nearly a mile long and a half mile across, he suspected it'd be more than enough to do whatever he hoped was God intended it to do.

He finished setting the dynamite sticks where their detonation would do the most damage, then looked at the sky one last time. In the east the sun was rising. It looked beautiful, and he wished he could see it over the lake, the sparkles of light dancing on its surface. But he wouldn't have that luxury. He didn't have a timing device, and there was no need for one, really. He could just set it off by hand. That meant, of course, that the last sight he saw would be the sun across the high desert, not the faces of his wife or his kids.

But he knew without a doubt that the next face he would see would be God's.

T
hey were such fools, such complete and perfect fools.

They had him, safe and sound and trapped under lead, and now here they were, opening his casket, offering him freedom. For the first time in centuries he had contact with the world again. There was nothing now between him and the outer air. The slab had been removed, and they had unsealed and taken the lid off the leaden casket.

Sensations flooded into him. He felt minds and souls and thoughts galore, as though they were pouring into his brain. Yet he was able to isolate and sort every single one, analyze it and learn how malleable it was. And there were many among these who were touchable.

Before they'd come and opened the casket, he had been starved for contact. There had been the single strong one at first, but then, just as he was in the middle of pushing at him, bringing the mortal's mind to bear on where he was so that the man might come and free him, the contact had been violently broken.

Frustrated, he had pushed out harder, weakening himself in the process. But there'd been nothing there. He felt only the woman, whose power was far weaker than the man's. He tried to reach her, but it was agony, like one of these mortals trying to push over a tree with only his hands. They might be able to make the leaves tremble, but to crack the bark and splinter the trunk? Never.

So he searched, searched until he found the man again, the one whose dreams he had managed to breach before. But he was difficult to reach. Disbelief was a strong boundary.

Then there was the girl, who seemed ignorant of his existence, never responding to his mental touches, but still moving toward him as he'd instructed her, like a sleepwalker, oblivious to all.

And then at last the man nearby, who had made this desert land his home. The ties must have been close with this one: he was so obedient, so simply accepting. When he told the man what he wanted him to do, there was not a mental pause or a question, only pure submission. The prisoner had thought that if the water did nothing else, it would at least draw attention to this barren area to which they'd brought him. It might also cause chaos and death, and that was not to be slighted. Maybe some of these very priests who had imprisoned and guarded him would be drowned, and that would be a delectable outcome.

But now, as it turned out, he didn't need that oh so pliable man. For here were fools opening the cage door so the bird could escape without any bursting dam or floods of water. He sat up in his casket, glad for the chance to stretch his false human form, and probed the nervous men around him, sensing which of them he could use, could bend to his will.

Then the legs of one more man appeared through the opening to the world, and the prisoner watched as his liberator descended the final steps of the ladder, stepping into a hell which he would never leave alive.

S
o this, at long last, was the Antichrist. Michael LaPierre stood at the foot of the ladder, his throat feeling suddenly dry, his stomach churning with fear.

The creature was not what LaPierre had expected. He had thought he would look demonic and evil, while this man sitting up in the casket appeared to be almost angelic. He was clothed in a simple white shift, and his long hair and well-trimmed beard were a light brown. His eyes were blue, and his light-brown flesh was perfect, with not a blemish. As the man turned his head and LaPierre saw him in three-quarter profile, he realized that he was nearly identical to the standard pictures of Jesus that hung on every Sunday school wall in the country.

"Impostor!" LaPierre shouted, and the man's gaze slowly moved back to him. This Antichrist looked entirely unconcerned about anything that LaPierre might say or do, and that infuriated him all the more. "You are the Antichrist!" he said. "We see you for what you are, a vile servant of the Devil! And now our sacred fire shall cleanse the earth of you, so that God's people may take possession of this land and God's law may rule it!"

The creature only smiled at him. No, it wasn't a smile, it was a smirk, and in it LaPierre saw all the evil that dwelt in the monster's soul.

"
Die!
" he shouted, turning the flame on full and directing it straight at the Antichrist, only a few feet away. A thrill went through LaPierre's heart as he saw the white clothing burst into yellow ribbons of fire, and with a laugh, he shut off the flame to see what damage he had done. He hoped the video camera had caught his expression of righteous indignation.

The creature still sat there, smiling. Not a hair on his head had been singed, although what was left of his clothing hung on his flesh like black scabs. Slowly he raised his hands and brushed the charred and still burning cloth away. Then, for the first time, he spoke to LaPierre.

"Has that flamethrower, by any chance, been blessed by the Church of Rome?"

The mockery infuriated LaPierre, and he turned to the nine men huddled against the wall behind him so as to avoid the flame from his weapon. "Kill him!" he shouted to them, and they fanned out into a half circle around the Antichrist, shooting their weapons and turning on their own flames to bathe the monster in a storm of bullets and fire, while the cameramen recorded it all. The kiva burst into savage light amid a cacophony of gunfire.

Y
ou
, the prisoner thought, giving commands faster than the velocity of the bullets that passed through his body like fish darting through water.
You, you, you, you, you, you
.

There were seven of them, seven of the ten soldiers down there he could reach, men with already violent natures whom his blood had touched, and though he did not touch their minds with words, not even
you
, his powers sought them and made them his own, and he used them like a man would his fingers, and turned them on the others.

S
o it was that Michael LaPierre was amazed to see John Bowman, one of his trusted inner circle, turn on him with his machine gun and fire at his legs, literally cutting them from beneath him so that LaPierre fell to the dirt floor of the chamber in agony, his blood soaking the earth. LaPierre, unable to rise or use his own weapon, looked in disbelief at the Antichrist, who smiled disingenuously and gave a theatrical shrug.

Boys will be boys
.

Although LaPierre saw the Antichrist's lips move with the words, he heard them only inside his head, for the gunfire and the roar of the flamethrowers would have drowned them out had they been simply spoken. The flames shot through the small chamber. His men were shooting and turning their torches on each other. He had been wrong: this creature's power was greater than he had thought. Perhaps it wasn't the Antichrist at all.

And as the fire from David Richardson's flamethrower leaped out, blinding and searing him, Michael LaPierre had just enough time before he died in agony to realize that he had been fool enough to come into the lair of Satan himself, and that the flames of hell now burned him and would burn him forever, for his terrible sin of pride.

"S
omething," said Joseph Stein, hearing the streams of gunshots and seeing smoke and stray gouts of fire tear upward from the opening of the kiva, "is not going according to plan."