Lucky's Girl (41 page)

Kenny walked down the middle of the road, the yellow painted dashes only becoming visible when he was practically on top of them. He wasn’t alone. The Faithful were with him, whispering the mantra he’d come to know by heart.

Ket-mat-na-roz, keh-pi-uh, ja-quey, tae-lae, bas-nef-tek.

It sounded like something you’d hear from the minaret of the mosque. He’d travelled to a lot of places working for oil companies. Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil. He’d heard a lot of native languages, and this didn’t sound like any of them, but yet all of them at the same time, as if it were an ancestor language.

They whispered in unison, never seeming to stop, as if they needed to do it. As if it was a drug they needed a fix of, or a channel they needed to maintain with the fucking mothership.

He took a swig. Old black coffee diluted with water to resemble whiskey, or close enough at least. Maybe Lucky and his psycho Sunday school mob would think he was just going to go home and drink it all away, and just maybe the ruse was working. These shit-smeared fucks didn’t seem all that observant, just blank. Drones.

He took another swig. Nasty. “You want some, Asshole?”

The nearest one, close enough to see fully, merely looked at him, without once stopping his whispering chant. Kenny knew that he smelled bad, it had now been days since he’d bathed, but this guy, Mr. Shitsmear, well, he was covered in shit. Covered in it. Like he’d shat repeatedly, stripped naked and smeared himself down then rolled in it. Sticks and leaves had been woven into his hair, held in place with plastered shit.

He’d seen this before. Nigeria. South of Lagos. He’d arrived during the middle of a spat between the Muslims and Christians. The Muslims had wanted to wipe the animists off the map and the Christians were trying to prevent it. He saw one of the animist’s witch doctors. He was in a trance, covered in feces, eyes rolled back in his head,
channeling something.
At the time, he’d thought it the most pathetic superstitious nonsense he’d ever seen.

Now he knew better.

He had to stop this, had to stop Lucky or die trying. And right now he didn’t give a flying fuck if he did die in the trying. He’d welcome it. It would make him a more useful person than he’d been since his wife had died.

He knew the way. He’d walked this track over and over as a child, to and from Lucky’s house. About a two mile walk to Lucky’s, about a mile from the church and the cop shop. The road passed the church at the edge of the woods, followed the lake shore before curving back out into the woods and hitting the highway about a half mile past that. At the end of the curve was his uncle’s cabin, about fifty yards back into the woods, and about fifty yards past that was the pier and the now empty Lake Elton.

He left the center of the road, walking along the left shoulder, and soon he hit the gravel of his uncle’s driveway. He followed it and the Faithful followed with him.

This was going to be the tough part. He’d figured they wouldn’t do anything so long as he didn’t try to leave. So long as you didn’t interfere and you didn’t try to escape, they wouldn’t do anything. He’d counted on that being the case. They would just follow, forever whispering their mantra.

He reached inside his pocket for his keys and the auto-lock controller on the key ring. He hit the button to trigger the locks on his car, the lights only flashing dimly in the Darkness. He hit the button one more time to make sure, hearing the telltale chirping, deadened by the unnatural Silence.

The doors were locked, and that’s how he needed this.

He’d counted five of the Faithful, one up close,
Mr. Shitsmear,
and four hanging back in the shadows. Their outlines were barely visible and he’d had to focus hard to distinguish the four separate sets of voices.

He walked to the passenger side door of the Yukon, pulled the keys out, and opened it wide. Mr. Shitsmear was at his side. He had his full attention now. “Get in stinky. Don’t you wanna go see Lucky? I need to go be part of my daughter’s wedding.”

The shit-man’s face was a blank, but a suspicious blank all the same.

Kenny motioned to get in the truck.

The man slowly got into the passenger seat. Kenny reached over and put the seatbelt on him, climbing up on the running board to strap his new pal in.

“There you go, Shitsmear, snug as a fuckin’ bug.”

Then he climbed over him to the driver’s seat, reaching over and closing the door. Just him and Shitsmear. He made sure the locks were in place just as the other four started pressing their faces to the glass.

“So, we’re gonna drive out this way behind the cabin and across Lake Elton.”

The shit-man just looked at him.

He reached into the back, folded the bench seat down so there was nothing between the front seats and the back bed area. He turned the keys and left it in park.

He put on his seatbelt then turned to his passenger. “I’m sorry for a lot of things, you didn’t deserve what’s happened to you, maybe none of us did.”

In the little compartment on the driver’s side door was a tire iron.

His left hand transferred the tire iron to his right, his arm swinging it into the shit-man’s trachea. He gurgled a wet and crunchy
glucking
while holding his neck. His bulging eyes stared out at Kenny, blood bubbling from his lips. Kenny’s right arm swung out again and the tire iron took him in the forehead.

And again, and again.

The shit-men outside began flailing on the windows.

Kenny spun the wheels as the shit-men outside began to crack and splinter the glass. One more second and they would have been through. The front window was a spider web of cracked glass already.

He tore through the overgrown path to where the boat launch would have been if his uncle had ever fished anywhere else but his lucky spot out on the river. His wheels left the ground, after which he felt a second of weightlessness as the truck launched onto the empty lake. If there’d been water he’d have been in up to the door handles. He hit the brights and gunned the engine, bouncing crazily across the rough open expanse of empty Lake Elton.

***

The Big Tree was the only one left on Grove Island. Its subterranean writhing and what lay beneath had unseated the rest from their moorings. They’d been hauled away and chopped up for the bonfires. Now only a small campfire lit the island, but the full assembly of the Faithful were there, along with every other citizen of Elton.

Dragged screaming from their homes, they were kneeling in the alien darkness, most unable to see their hands in front of their faces. The air was filled with the soft sobbing of terrified neighbors, the continuing whispered chants of the assembled congregation, and the abominable voicing of the Most Faithful. None had any reason to believe they would leave in possession of their minds or their bodies.

It was either to become one of the Faithful or to be dead. No one had told them this, but no one is dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and forced to kneel for any other reason.

Lucky’s beautiful voice came to them all. “I’m so sorry it’s worked out this way for you, but no one ever said that our Mission was to be easy, or painless, or without the sorrows that come with all great works.”

He paused to let them ponder. “You ran, you hid. But you can no more hide from a real God than you can hide from yourselves. He sees, and he knows. Every guilt, every failure, everything that could have been but wasn’t. Every white lie, every compromise every time you said ‘never again’ but were at it before the end of the day.”

Their knees hurt but Lucky’s words were like water soaking into parched earth. They were nearly impossible to resist. Other men’s words could be rejected outright, but not Lucky’s. And now, in the place of His God, he was like a voice inside the mind of the listener, welcome, normal, natural. “And you tried, didn’t you? You tried to be someone else. You tried to be anyone else, because your best just wasn’t good enough. From the cradle to the grave, you never even rated second best.”

But they’d never been able to escape it. Wherever they’d gone, there they were, but they’d never even gone very far in the first place. Maybe to a seasonal job logging, or maybe to Frankie’s to spend money they didn’t have in hopes of striking up a conversation that wasn’t worth having, or maybe to the Church to hear the Rev’s assurances that life could be better.

Nobodies in their own lives, not even worth it.

And here they were.

And Lucky was offering a way out.

“You keep fighting for the next breath, without asking whether your life is really worth living. And I’m here to tell you; it isn’t. Not here, not now, not with the way it is, not the way it’s been made to be. Not on the terms of the System.”

The sobbing was real now, all of them, weeping and knowing; there was no way out and there never had been. It wouldn’t matter if they died because they were nothing, nobody, less than dirt. The refuse of the System.

“The Great News is that there
is
a way to win this game. In any game there’s a victim, a perpetrator and a rescuer. You’re the victim. That’s all you’ve ever been or ever will be. There’s the rescuer. Pigs are a disguise to get you to breathe in and out so you can continue the violation. Then there’s the perpetrator. That’s the System. Violation. Violation of your true nature, violation of your soul. Well the Great News is that you can win the game, but only by quitting. Giving up. Surrendering. You win the game by not playing.”

Lucky took a deep breath. “Tonight we can be one. You can give up. Give up on yourself, that terrible image you’ve been made in. Give up on your God, the one who never protected you or lifted a finger. Give up on the System. Join us…”

And the Faithful began their chant.

“Tonight I take Jenny as my wife amongst wives…”

The light increased until all could see the group standing at the base of the Big Tree. Lucky, Blackie, and the four remaining wolves of the Pack, standing together with the Most Faithful. All but one, that was. She lay on the ground in human form, riddled with bullet holes.

Ellen.

Errol, Jerry, and Jake lay next to her, bound and gagged.

Jenny walked around the fire, to face her husband to be, in full sight of everyone.

She was naked, covered in filth, with her hair a weave of sticks and leaves.

She stood before Lucky and turned to the crowd.

“I take Lucky as my Alpha, my man amongst men, in the sight of Our God and the congregation of the Faithful, I reject the System and its lies!”

Jenny turned to face Lucky, who bent down to pick her up so that they could be face to face. And then he kissed her.

***

Blackie felt the new life growing in her. All the promises of the Big Tree had been fulfilled, but were still unraveling before her eyes. Lucky was to be her alpha, with no other females before her.

But here he was, with the Usurper… again.

She knew these things, and he knew these things, yet every time she confronted him their roles would become reversed and she couldn’t understand why. He ended up mounting her and they ended up mating.

She now understood why he’d only kept the Usurper at the house, and never at the church except when he was there.

To protect her.

Most of the Pack had been killed in the pursuit of one small group of humans he had feuded with. And now he had the Most Faithful to protect him.

She was being replaced, pushed aside.

Exiled.

She crouched down to spring, a warning rumble in her chest. Her four remaining males followed her cue.

The Most Faithful turned away from Lucky and the Usurper to face her, snarling and baring teeth. Out of the corner of her eye, dim and faint from the Darkness and Silence given unto them by the Big Tree, a truck bounced and wove, gunning its engine across the lake bottom, heading out to the dry tributary to the river which had been blocked up by a small concrete dam.

***

Kenny slammed on the brakes at the end of the strange little tributary, enough to slow him down, but not to avoid crashing into the dam. His passenger, face and neck pulverized by his tire iron, slapped limply against the dashboard, leaving a face print in the plastic.

If he hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt he would have gone through the windshield.
Just one more time
.
Just one more.
His aching, bloody, and bruised frame was at its limit. But he needed one more.

He slammed the truck into reverse and cut the wheel, forward, and cut the wheel again. He had a good thirty feet of clearance. He floored it, bashing the rear bumper into the damn. The cargo in the back bed of the truck slid forward even though it weighed several hundred pounds. It was an underwater acetylene welding rig fed by four tanks. It gave him plenty of time to weld underwater and, since all four fed one outlet, he never had to switch tanks.

The truck stalled.

He turned around, wincing in pain. He turned the four valves, hearing the hiss of the outlet tank pressurizing. He took a deep breath and held it. Then he pulled the purge pin and the acetylene hit him, burning his eyes. He stuck the tire iron in the gap to hold the purge pin out of place. The truck quickly filled with gas. If he breathed he’d be dead, very fast. He opened the door and slammed it, then ran thirty, forty feet up onto the embankment of the tributary. He pointed the flare gun at the windshield and for his pains was launched into the trees by the shockwave.

CHAPTER 21