Fanatics: Zero Tolerance (9 page)

“Uh, speaking of moving, what are you going to do? Where will you go?”

“I’m not sure. I was talking to some of the Fellowship before this developed, and they think West might be a good direction;
Fermanagh, or maybe across the border.”

“I have a feeling you won’t be allowed to cross. Listen, I have a better idea. Hide out with your friends for a few weeks
; if everything settles back to normal, great. But if not, there’s someone I’d like you to contact. His name’s Philip Allen. He’s a decent Christian man, but he’s very quiet, keeps himself to himself - he hardly exchanges two words with his neighbours in a week, and he’s been involved in almost nothing out-and-out evangelical for as long as I’ve known him, so he should have a very low profile with the bounty hunters. But I happen to know he has a particular interest in what might be called the underground church. He’s the perfect man to handle a situation like the one that might be developing here. Have you got a pen? Here’s the address - I’m pretty sure it’s still standing-”

“Sorry, what’s that name again?”

“Doctor Philip Allen.”

*****

As soon as the flash died away, Lemuel Page realised what was happening. Oblivious to the pandemonium he could hear outside - rumblings, smashing noises, gunshots and screams - he continued steadfastly on his knees, praying as he waited to be taken supernaturally from the Earth.

He waited in vain; and after five hours of resisting doubts, he cautiously admitted to himself the possibility that the events of the past morning may not have fitted just where he thought they would into his neat and tidy eschatology.

But where had he gone wrong? Was it some unconfessed sin, perhaps? Surely not. He knew he was saved. He knew he was born again. He couldn’t have been left behind.

Well, then: why hadn’t the Rapture happened? Could the half-heretical opinions of the likes of John Andrews be correct, after all? Maybe there were another seven years to wait - or perhaps three and a half - or...

He took his Bible off the bedside table and thumbed through it desperately, hoping some verse would leap off the page at him. But it was no good; they all had something to say, and it was a serious mistake to ignore any of them. He should know; he had preached on this very subject recently.

He closed the Bible with a snap, stood up, and began to pace the room. He tried to approach the thing from the start again. He was sure the Rapture hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have; he would have been taken. So, this was obviously the wrong time for it. He had been wrong to attach it to a particular secular event - why should World War Three kick everything off? Why not World War Four, or Five, or even Six? He had been guilty of ignoring his Bible:
...wars and rumours of wars... but the end is not yet.

He fell to his knees again, crying to God for help. Concerning how many other things could he have been utterly wrong? He had spent his life painstakingly assembling the hardest jigsaw puzzle of all, and had finished up with a picture that was nothing like
what was unfolding just now. What was the point of it all? Never mind trying to sift through the details; perhaps the very notion of trying to discern the outline of events - some sort of timetable of the end days - was a mistake. Yet why had God strewn so much information about the topic throughout the Bible if people weren’t meant to study it? Why would He couch His words in such a way as to obstruct any clear understanding of them? It made no sense!

He opened his Bible again and his eye fell on the
verse which spoke of how the Holy Spirit would “bring all things to remembrance”; and suddenly, in a flash of inspiration, it came to him.

A passage in one of Paul’s letters
indicated that, in the end times, there would come what seemed like indisputable proof that Christianity - in fact, all the old religions - were frauds all along. A new, apparently rock-solid source of authority would refute all the old authorities with incontrovertible proofs, and “deceive, if possible, the very Elect.”

At that point, Believers
would begin to remember (as if God had whispered a reminder in their ears) that they had been warned about these things; they would recall the obscure parts of the Bible and say to themselves, “So that’s what it means!"

But - and here is the crux, thought Page - those things will not become clear
until then.

Now,
Page thought with a thrill of excitement,
if only there was a leader, a voice that could explain all of this to the people...

His spirits fell again as quickly as they
has risen. He had already tried to fill that role, and failed. There was no way he could recover from having been discredited so completely. By now, thousands had bitterly discovered how wrongly he had taught them; they would not believe him if he told them that snow was white and crows were black.

It took him another hour to summon up the courage to do what he believed must be done.

He hung himself.

*****

Carson did not see the body until it was too late to back away discreetly. He cursed himself for being stupid enough to approach the old house by dandering along the broad curve of its driveway instead of obliquely, through the abundant cover of the trees and shrubs choking everything else in the garden; now he was completely exposed to the view of whoever had killed the fellow in front of him.

His heart racing, he scanned the windows of the house, trying to see whether anyone was watching, then glanced around at ground level, every sense alert for the least hint of any threatening movement.

Holding his breath, he heard something he had not been aware of a moment before: the laboured respiration of the person lying before him.

The man lay in a vague approximation of the recovery position, in an amazingly large puddle of blood; Carson had not imagined there could be so much in one person. There was a wound in his back that did not seem big enough to account for the virtual swamping of his body, and from it little red bubbles were being sluggishly pumped. There was clearly no point, though, in trying to administer first aid; he would not be alive for very much longer.

Carson moved forward to where the edge of the puddle seeped away into the gravel of the drive, and crouched down, trying to see whether there was any awareness left in his eyes. He almost knelt on fingers which, by the look of them, had been run over by a car’s wheels. The man’s eyes were rolled right back in their sockets; it was evident that Carson would get no helpful hints about who or what he should watch out for.

He looked again at the wound in the fellow’s back. He was no expert, but it looked to him like a bullet hole. The massive blood loss was presumably from an exit wound much bigger and more ragged, but Carson could not manage to see one, and felt little inclination to step into the pool to examine the dying man more closely.

There was definitely something wrong with this picture, though; there was far too much blood.
Think,
he told himself,
think. One body, but enough blood for two...
Yes; whoever had done this was still around, and would shortly be back to dispose of the remaining body.

Carson stood again, and was suddenly aware that the gravel under his feet was crunching all too audibly. He crept on tiptoes towards the open front door, unable to avoid stepping in a half-congealed pool of red, and the reaction of his unruly stomach to this almost caused him to miss the footprints inside the doorway.

The sensible thing to do at this point would surely have been to turn and retreat into the nearest bank of shrubbery, since the killer was bound to be in the house; but a shockingly indiscreet rustling of leaves like someone brushing carelessly against a hedge somewhere nearby made Carson freeze for a moment. Walking as if on eggshells, he went into the house, trying to look in every direction at once.

It was a lot dimmer inside; though even before his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he could make out a little of the detail around him, as slim wedges of light were breaking through the open doorways to his left and right. He could hear no movement except his own, and holding his breath, squinted through the gap at the hinges of every door he passed.

The last door was the kitchen. He pushed the door open very gently, flooding the hallway behind him with light, and leant forward just far enough to satisfy himself that it was empty. A rather stale-looking loaf and a block of butter on a saucer caught his attention, reminding him he had not eaten since before the Big One; but his stomach rolled unpleasantly at the thought, and he had to lean back against the doorpost with his eyes closed until the queasiness eased off. He didn’t really need food, he thought; what he really needed was to lie down for half an hour. He was sure he’d feel better after a bit of kip. He hadn’t rested properly since... Since...

A muffled noise snapped him back to alertness. What on Earth was he thinking of? How could he have forgotten that his life might be in danger?

He moved carefully back to the foot of the stairs and took the first step, thinking uneasily about what had happened to the detective Arbogast in Norman Bates’s house and wondering why he was being stupid enough to follow suit. After a moment, he remembered: he couldn’t properly avoid the murderer if he didn’t know where he was. He had to find out, didn’t he?

Almost halfway up, it occurred to him that the stairs in the middle always squeaked. The only houses where middle stairs don’t squeak are bungalows; no matter how young or how old the house, everyone knows that if you come home very late and don’t want to disturb anybody, you either sleep on the sofa or step over the middle of the staircase. So, balancing himself carefully, Carson took a very long step over the next three stairs. He took hold of the banister and pulled himself up. The tread bowed perceptibly and gave a horrendous creak.

For an instant, Carson considered running for it, but something made him hesitate instead, and in the end he just froze and waited to be caught.

To his surprise and relief,
no-one emerged from the shadows at the top of the stairs. For a moment he could have sworn he had heard the smallest of thuds coming from somewhere upstairs; then he decided that it - and the first sound, too - must have been birds or rats moving in the roofspace. If someone was going to attack him they’d surely have done it by now.

Upstairs, the same gloom prevailed as below: doors were shut and the landing curtains were drawn. Carson tried the nearest door and found the box
-room, undecorated and filled with all kinds of clutter. The next was the bathroom. The one after that was a nursery; it seemed to be pristine, so clearly the Happy Event had yet to transpire when the mother-to-be had vacated the house. Carson wondered whether she had made it to some safe haven before chaos descended; a heavily pregnant woman on the road just now would be in a pretty pickle.

The next door opened onto a room that was nearly as characterless as a hotel room; it was obviously the spare. Carson shuffled in and tumbled onto the bed. The springs squawked and twanged.
I’ll have to complain to the management about this when I wake up,
he thought, and knew no more.

*****

Tony Bannister picked up the shotgun, trying not to get blood on his hands. He didn’t know much about guns, and wouldn’t really have felt comfortable with this one, even if it hadn’t been fouled by dollops of blood; but he knew that many people out there would be itching to acquire something like this just now, so even if he had no use for it himself, it could still earn him a tidy profit, or at least favours. Tony was a man who kept his ear to the ground, and a sharp eye out for opportunities; every instinct told him that there were some big battles looming. Even if he was wrong, though, there were still any number of folks taking a belated interest in survivalism; anybody selling weapons would have queues of customers.

He was rummaging through the dead man’s pockets for shotgun shells when he heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel. He briefly considered waiting to see who was approaching, then thought better of it, and hopped over the body into the house. He realised that he might be walking straight into the killer by doing this, but it didn’t trouble him; he was the one with the gun. That it might or might not be loaded didn’t matter. He had a talent for bluffing. He ran up the stairs, taking them three at a time, and without hesitating, headed for the furthest bedroom.

It was occupied by a sleeping pregnant woman.

Holding the gun with one hand, he approached her slowly. When he was by her head, he clamped his hand over her mouth firmly enough and suddenly enough to wake her up. “Don’t move,” he said in a low voice as he watched the door. “I’m not going to harm you.” She didn’t budge.

He was just about to shake her when he realised that her face felt very cool and damp. He looked at her again. Her eyes were still shut. He could not feel her breath against his palm. He snatched his hand away, exhaling sharply, stumbling back against the nearest wall, his composure momentarily cracking to the point where he was a whisker away from screaming. His knees felt as if they were made of rubber. He wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans, trying not to retch.

A sound from downstairs, near the front door, brought him to himself once again. He was not together enough yet to talk his way out of difficulty; he realised he would simply have to hide until whoever it was had gone. His options were extremely limited: either in the old wardrobe on the other side of the room, or under the bed. He dismissed the wardrobe instantly; it could become his coffin if it’s door snapped shut too firmly. He lowered himself to the floor as quietly as he could and wriggled under the bed, trying not to churn up the little knots of fluff more than he could avoid.