End Time (34 page)

“
No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven.…”

Cheryl stifled a laugh; she'd had the Good Book thrashed into her by Sister Penelope back in Poughkeepsie, her pointer at the blackboard when it wasn't rapping your knuckles. Bhakti's soft Indian voice finished the passage:

“
Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women at the mill; one will be taken and the other left
.” Cheryl and Billy looked the Punjabi scientist askance.

“You think I wouldn't know it?” Bhakti asked. The scientist grinned at the other two. “Like Spencer Tracy says in the movie, ‘It's a good book. It's not the
only
book.' But it's a really good book.” So the Punjabi scientist could quote from
Inherit the Wind
too. Cheryl and Billy shared another glance, impressed, neither prepared to argue the point. Bhakti had probably read more books than both of them combined.

Billy's eyes strayed off the midway, past the motionless rides. A hundred yards away the silver van glinted back at him, and you could see the Iron Cross emblem of the Stuka Crew. The motorcycles were parked on the grass. Members of the Stuka Crew sat motionless on their bikes or stood near the silver cargo trailer.

The three started to hustle. Running now. In five seconds they were halfway across the field and zeroing in on those crap-hats. Billy could feel inside the van, inside the trailer. Oh, they were close, really close.
Just a few more steps, just a—

A blast of light hit him full in the head, like he'd walked right into the stitches of a wild pitch.
Wham!
stopping him dead in his tracks.

He sank to his knees.

Cheryl and Bhakti doubled back to help, but he couldn't move. The lady cop and the scientist tried to talk to him, but the Skin Walking thing had come on way too strong. A strobe light flashed in his brain; an opera soprano sang in his head. Oh yes, he could see what had happened now; he slid back in time as though through a tunnel, week after week. One month. Two months. He could see everything in that silver van very clearly. Seeing through the Chen Girl's eyes …

*   *   *

Stuck in a dark corner of the silver van, Lila Chen squinted past motorcycles and stowed show props; another girl huddled nearby. Panicked eyes stared back with fear; her body shivered uncontrollably. Her tongue darted out of her mouth to where she bled from a split lip.

Janet! They got Janet too.

Janet's eyes gleamed out of the dark, bulging out of her head. She was trying to scream, writhing and straining, but nothing came out. Mouth gagged, Janet mewed helplessly. Rough hands thrust a hood over her head.

Gagged and bagged.

A grinning monkey face leered right up at Lila. A guy named Pinky. And Pinky said, “You won't be needing this.”

His fingers pinched her ear. “But your folks will want it.”

And zip! A razor of pain sliced the side of her head. The ear.
They'd cut off her ear.
The blinding light, the blinding pain, and the screeching opera singer sang an aria as Lila screamed silently into her own gagged mouth.

She must have fainted, a long spell in the dark. How long? No way to tell. Now awake on the hard trailer floor, no real pain at first: a lump of damp bandages at the side of her head. Little slit windows showed the faint light of day. The van bumped on a bit of rough road; she hit her head and blacked out again.

Then the throbbing came. Throbbing that made her want to puke. Lila Chen oozed into a sort of syrupy delirium. Time passed.… Somewhere in the desert the van halted, one of its tires gone flat. While they fixed it, baked air poured in through the open door, blinding white light outside. The crew hit the road again.

In the bumping van Lila and Janet were stripped naked. The bag came off Janet's head; her eyes shone like two great spotlights. One of the bitch women kept slapping Janet's face till her eyes swelled shut, like they didn't want her to see. Again, the pain came for Lila, but not before she saw Janet curled up on a bit of foam padding like a punished dog. The trailer hit a bump, Lila's head touched the metal wall, and the lights went out.

When she came to, blood had seeped through the bandage. The air had become cold—a kind of clammy night cold, desert cold. Where was Janet?

Janet?

One of the crew towered over her in the dark:

“You missed LA. But we didn't stay long, just a delivery for the Magician and Hawaiian Gardens Chino Boyz. Those guys like their toys with all their pieces intact. So we sold 'em Janet instead, better looking than you. You'll just have to be satisfied with us.”

So they'd sold Janet like a pet parakeet for a couple of bags of rainbow junk, or just for the hell of it. And it sank into Lila that now she was really alone. All alone.

Days passed, and nights. Hot then cold.

Easy to lose track of how long she'd been in there.

They kept her watered up pretty good, threw her whatever they didn't finish from the take-out joints, which she gobbled out of greasy Styrofoam. A tiny porta-potty sat in the corner to squat on. Her ankle was handcuffed to a bicycle lock with a combination cylinder, cabled to a ring in the floor of the van. They were such idiots they even left the numbers visible on the combination cylinder of the bicycle lock—666, how freakin' original—but she was too wiped out to unlatch herself from the metal floor and make an escape. Truth was, after the first couple of days all the fight had been knocked out of her.

Time became a slow descent, endless falling.… While in a corner of her mind, she knew the reason they'd let her live. They'd let her live for fun.

Every couple of hours they pulled over to do that rainbow stuff, sticking their faces in it. Then they came at her; sometimes in tag teams and sometimes individually, rubbing that rainbow dust on her privates when they did her there too. The times they didn't sex her, they'd pull off to some back road so she could empty her porta-potty—always at night so they could see cars coming.

Queen Bitch always went first, sponging off her armpits and snatch, while Lila squatted beside the trailer. Afterward, Lila waited her turn to wash herself out of the same bucket while the men and women leered. She could hear the others as they roamed around their patch of back road nowhere, taking leaks, drinking beer, or looking for something to shoot.

Once during one of these uncomfortable rest stops, the familiar face of Janet's dad, Mr. Singh from across the street, floated across her mind. Floating out of the dark and hovering before her eyes … Mr. Singh smiled kindly at her, quietly whispering,
We're coming. Hang on.…
No, not her parents; her house engulfed in flames flickered behind her eyes. Mom and Dad weren't ever coming. Just Mr. Singh.

Queen Bitch clapped Lila on her bare arm, hoisting her roughly off the ground. “C'mon, we're done.” And Lila's hallucination vanished to nowhere.

Back in the trailer, back on the road.

Sleep, potty, sex slave, sleep; sometimes the men went first, sometimes the women. No rhyme or reason to it. More travel, more food, sleep, potty, and sex service all over again. They'd been climbing for a few days. Pausing very high, where it got very cold one night and they threw her a blanket.

Back on the highway she felt the van wind down out of the mountains. Long flat stretches of road like an interstate. Then suddenly wheels bumped off the asphalt onto some dirt or grass. Lila heard the noise of a lot of people doing things, all talking at once; metal clanking, and winches cranking. It reminded her of a carnival. The caravan halted some distance from the human rumble. Quiet descended on the van, and for a spell nothing happened. Lila sat in the dark on her foam pad, amongst the motorcycles.

A day, half a day? Impossible to say.

Suddenly the back of the van slammed open; the Stuka Crew unstrapped their bikes and rolled them down the ramp. Lila held her hand up against the light, unable to rise. Queen Bitch's voice: “I thought we were going to take off her bandage.”

Pinky's voice: “I like the way she looks in it.”

The woman again. “I want to see you do her.”

Now Pinky: “Get your freaky dyke on and do her yourself. We have to set up for a show tonight—”

The sound of tires scrunched on the grass. Someone had driven up in a large car, a limousine? Suddenly everyone went dead still. Queen Bitch slapped a gag around Lila's mouth, gagged and bagged, and the van door banged closed again. But Lila could hear perfectly; she felt the Stuka Crew measuring this newcomer. A man mighty put out at having to deal with idjits, the voice of authority—

“So this is the master race,” he said. “The Four Horsemen? What a waste of human skin.”

Pinky with the mouth on him: “Look, Slim, shove off. The Four Horsemen got a show to put on.”

Slim's stern voice rattled around the metal van: “What's your name? Pinky? That's your name? Pinky?” Then with pure contempt, “Well, Pinky, I know the Horsemen. And the other three are nothing like you. They speak and read Aramaic, Babylonian, and Assyrian. Can you? Can you even
read
?”

Lila could feel the dipshits of the master race bristle, especially Pinky with that smart mouth. “Shut the
uck fup,
Mr. Bones. We don't answer to you. We don't answer to nobody—”

Lila thought she heard that Mr. Slim smile; it sure sounded like a smile, the voice dripping sincerity: “Well, we can't have a posse of mouth-breathing jizz-wits roaming the peaceful countryside ejaculating over our virtuous Texan maidens, now can we? Not when I'm getting ready to heal the planet. High time to Rapture your ass, Pinky. To afflict the afflicted. To tribulate you and your crew out of existence.”

From outside the trailer came the gust of dry wind. The van rattled as the Piper's evil will blew across the fairgrounds. A sudden breeze, a single breath, a wispy hiss of evaporating moisture sucking bodies dry and leaving soulless plaster behind. The trailer walls shimmied, then fell dead silent. The van door opened, and somebody snatched the bag off her head. Light streamed into the van, and Lila shut her eyes. The stranger's hand touched her shoulder.

“C'mon, Chen girl. You're coming with me.”

Lila felt the steel cuff at her ankle fall away. She rose on unsteady feet, leaning on the gaunt man; he smelled of puppies, peanut butter and jelly, chamomile tea.… But the sweet odor caught in her nostrils as he helped her shuffle to the blinding doorway of the trailer. And Lila felt something else she didn't expect: a deep sinking feeling. Despite the comforting scent, despite the fact that he'd let her out of her shackles.

Not relief,
not gratitude
.

Fear.

And it struck her as a certainty, like the Rock of Ages: If the “Stupid Crew” were jizz-wits, this Mr. Slim was the master of the master race.

*   *   *

Mr. P. lay back on the long expanse of couch inside the darkened limo and brushed a clammy hand across his brow. His head throbbed, and gritty sparkles of light danced behind his closed eyes. Rapturing the entire fairgrounds, evaporating souls and leaving plaster mannequins behind, had exhausted him. He'd gone a tad overboard, shoving the whole crowd into the kiln instead of just the nitwits. That's what rats, red ants, and mosquitoes were for, though once in a while he craved brimstone, the scent of sulfur. Now they had finally reached the rally point and were paused for the final assault. So far, so good; everything necessary for total domination had been achieved.

Beside him the lanky lad had poured himself a 7-Up from the limo bar and sipped it noisily through a soggy straw, his nose buried in his laptop. The young man was getting ready, preparing himself to make America safe for Mobocracy. Mr. P. smiled inside; what a finely tuned instrument of psychological warfare he had created, a master of targeted chaos.

In another cushioned corner of the limo the Piper could feel Little Maria using all her powers to probe his mind, to see what he saw, know what he knew. But what could Maria really do? She was only a child. Access Denied. And when she realized the hopelessness of penetrating the gaunt man's consciousness, the little fortune-teller girl gave up, staring at him with wide eyes, scared there'd be some punishment due. He let her wonder.

Last of all, his mind reached out to Lila Chen. The gaunt man could feel the Chen girl's head throbbing; the sudden shift from the sweatbox of the skanky motorcycle van to a cool air-conditioned limousine had been quite a shock. The bandage was peeling away from her scalp, revealing a swath of raw meat. Lila Chen nodded her head, almost to her breast, the soft couch cushions sucking her into sleep. He felt her regenerating, but she still needed a hospital. Too bad they didn't have a first-aid kit, but he'd get the young lady sorted out soon enough.

Definitely not the moment to introduce her to those outbreeding techno geeks at Pi R Squared. Who knows if those Jekylls could be trusted with the twin prizes of Lila Chen's miraculous triple helix, or with Little Maria the innate seer?

Each female possessed powerful, nearly divine qualities—qualities he himself possessed. And such pearls weren't to be cast before swine. The twisted sisters at Pi R Squared would have to do a good deal of genetic grunt work manipulating the species before the Piper would allow them access to two of nature's miraculous accelerants like Lila Chen and Little Maria. You don't let children run with scissors.… Besides, he had to study his two new acquisitions before knowing how best to use them.

The sparkles faded behind his closed eyes, and Mr. P. felt the hapless searchers gaining ground, approaching them: the pathetic Aerogel scientist, the nightshade copper, and faithful Tonto. Two had become three, but it wasn't going to help. The searchers were half a day late and a dollar short; let them wander in the wilderness a while yet, purify their souls.