The Acolyte (32 page)

Angels. Angel.

Angela.

Something cracked. Not any bone, though I would have preferred it. This crack was inside my head and it brought forth a rush of horrible memories. . . .

Next I was drumming my hands and feet on the basin, shrieking, bellowing. I must’ve screamed myself into a blackout because next thing I knew the door was broken down and they were on me: Newbarr, Amira, my Mom.

They led me dripping and quaking into the bedroom.

“Get some rope, Amira,” I heard Newbarr say.

They lay me on the bed, swaddled like an infant. Amira returned with loops of yellow twine scrounged from God-knows-where. They fastened me down.

“Until he settles down,” Newbarr said, knotting a second loop round my hips.

How long did I lay there? Things slipped in and out of focus. I wept and sweated through the sheets, leaching the moisture from my body. At some point the ropes were loosened. Someone slipped into bed beside me. A stomach pressed my back through the clammy sheets; Mom’s chin nestled at the slope of my shoulder. Another body curled into my chest, young muscles settled tight to me.

None of us said anything. Our exhales aligned: three chests expanding and contracting at the same pace. I wanted to tell them it was useless, that I was beyond the redemption tendered in such gestures, but it felt so good—the warmth, the restful motions of their bodies against mine—that I didn’t say a word.

The sky had gone dark behind the shade when I got up. Mom and Amira were still sleeping. I left them in bed and went into the front room. Newbarr sat on the window ledge, smoking a cigarette.

“I quit years ago,” he said when he saw me. “Wife couldn’t stand it. Kissing an ashtray, she said. But they do calm the nerves.”

My trousers were neatly folded over a kitchen chair. I yanked them on.

“I need a few hours,” I said to him. “Give me until daybreak.”

“What now?”

In my pocket were two different telephone numbers to call when I was ready. I’d rub them together to see if they’d catch a spark.

Two numbers. Two maniacs. Two agendas. Play both ends against the middle. Give them what they were seeking. Everybody got what they wanted. Everybody died.

Article V:
He is Stripped of His Garments

Two Trains A-Runnin’

I walked down the street uncradling payphone receivers and hanging them up when only silence met my ear. The sky was greyed over with rolling thunderheads, this upside-down ocean flexing deep to the horizon.

I saw dogs—house pets, as they must have been at one time—roaming in feral packs. I passed through the gates of a cemetery ringed by empty homes, the windows cataracted with dust. The heads were busted off every angel monument.

I tried another payphone, got a dial tone. I fed it and dialled.

“You said whenever I was ready.”

“Cutting it close,” Tom Swift said. “We were getting set to start without you.”

When I told him where I was, he said: “I’ll collect you directly.”

The day turned cold. A dust devil whipped a cone of litter down the sidewalk. A cobalt blue van banked round the corner. Swift’s head popped out the passenger window.

“Hop in. There’s work to be done.”

Driving was Porter Rockwell. Swift looked pallid and sickly.

“Wait a minute,” I told him. “I have to make another call.”

Swift stared out the windshield. “To who?”

“The Prophet. I can get him.”

Swift’s fingers drummed the van’s door. “Why now, Jonah? Why the turnabout?”

The answer came to me with ease. “You’re no worse than the rest of them. And Angela’s dead, so what the hell does it matter anymore?”

Swift’s face betrayed a hint of emotion for perhaps the first time. “How?”

“The Quints were involved.”

Swift wiped the ichor seeping below the frames of his sunglasses. “I’m sorry to hear that. What’s your plan, Jonah?”

“I’ll make a call. One call. Then I’ll take you to him.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“So make the call, Jonah.”

I crossed to the phone and dialled the Acolyte-only dispatch. An automatic router clicked on after two rings, which should patch me through to the highest-ranking Acolyte remaining, which now that Hollis was gone should be—

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Murtag. Is this Brewster?”

“Ghost from the ether.” Brewster sounded dead tired. “What do you want?”

“I got him,” I said. “The guy behind it all. Wizard of Oz. I’m bringing him in.”

Brewster said: “Great. You’re on your own. I got my own detail right now.”

I knew what that detail must be—bodyguard detail for The Prophet. In fact, I was betting on it.

“Why don’t you just kill him?” Brewster wanted to know.

“Wouldn’t The Prophet want to see this guy himself?” I said. “Just so he could know for sure? I’ll bring him in. He’s harmless as a kitten.”

I wish it were Henchel instead of Brewster. Henchel was an idiot. Brewster was at the very least possessed of baseline cunning.

He said, “You sure it’s the guy?”

“It’s him.”

He gave me the address. “Come alone . . . just the two of you.”

I hung up and said, “We’re all set. Almost.”

Swift: “Almost how?”

“They think I’ve captured you. But you wouldn’t have been taken in willingly.”

He laughed. “You’re saying I ought to look a little worse for wear.”

“You can have Rockwell do it, if you’d rather.”

“No, I’d rather it was you.”

He sat on the bumper as I tugged the laces free of my brogans, knotted them, wound the one long strand round the knuckles of my right hand.

I said, “Take your sunglasses off.”

Swift shook his head. “Avoid my eyes. They are, as you know, windows into the soul.”

I laid into Swift as hard as I’d ever laid into any man. The ribs and gut and chin, shots that started out clean and tight before the adrenalin burned off and exhaustion turned them into sloppy gas-armed whiffles. The bootlaces unravelled from my knuckles leaving ribbed coils in my flesh but I kept hitting him. I slammed my fist into his ribs until he retched a thin stream of leaden gruel that had slid down his chest like quicksilver.

It felt good.
Really
good. It was all part of the plan, but I would have done it for no reason at all.

The Bunker

Brewster was waiting when I pulled into the vacant Stadium SuperChurch parking lot. He stood with his arms folded while I popped the rear doors, grabbed Swift, and hauled him onto the macadam. Rockwell I’d dropped a half-block away.

I threw Swift down in the parking lot. Brewster drew near. Moonlight plated the brutal planes of his face: a sheer cliff upon which nothing grew, that barren rock still kicking off some feral sense of intellect.

“This the scummer, Murtag?”

“Head termite,” I said. “Light his ass on fire, he’ll burn you a path right back to the nest.”

“Looks like he’s been plenty burned already. Let’s go inside.”

The bubbled dome of the SuperChurch was torn open in a dozen spots. Rain-bloated prayer booklets littered the mildewed carpet: they looked like pale blue toadstools.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Swift said. It earned him a backhanded slap from Brewster. Swift just laughed through a mouthful of blood. Brewster led us backstage. Swift was singing in a froggy blood-choked voice:

Plastic Jesus, you’ve got to go,
Your magnet’s burst my radio
Sitting on the dashboard of my car.
But I won’t lose faith and I won’t lose hope
’Cause now I’ve got a pope on a rope
Swinging from the dashboard of my car . . .

We arrived at a steel door that fed into a dusty concrete hallway. Brewster shoved Swift through and I followed.

I said, “What is this place?”

Brewster said: “Upscale bomb shelter. Couple a rooms, cots, canned food. Not the Ritz.”

I caught the hum of a generator. The lights buzzed at half capacity, staining amber the spider webs spun where wall met ceiling.

“We got a CB radio,” Brewster said. “We’ve been trying to raise the alarm in Kingdom City.”

“Any luck?”

“None yet. Could be the signal isn’t clearing the bunker. Atmospheric disturbance.”

He led us into a room stacked with boxes labelled
HALLELUJAH ENERGY BOOST
. A wooden chair sat amidst the boxes. Brewster slammed Swift into it—I had to give Swift credit; he was taking the rough treatment like a champ—and cuffed his wrists through the slats.

“What’s your plan?” Swift wanted to know. “To teach me the true meaning of Christmas?”

Brewster tagged him in the jaw—never one for trading verbal barbs, Brewster—and said, “Sit tight, Murtag—I got to check on something.”

Once he was gone, Swift said: “Somehow I’d pictured it differently.”

He couldn’t have meant the bunker, so I suppose he meant the circumstances surrounding his confronting The Prophet. He craned his neck around to nod at Rockwell, who had trailed at a discreet distance and let himself in behind us. Swift greeted casually his arrival, never in doubt. Rockwell took a spot behind the door.

Brewster stepped back inside the room slapping a rubber hose against the meat of his palm. “Okay, Murtag, Let’s pluck this loon—”

When Rockwell stepped up behind him, he came without a sound. Amazing just how massive he was—he dwarfed Brewster who was himself well over six feet tall.

Brewster realized the threat too late. Knuckles met jaw, skin met skin. Brewster’s jaw broke in about ten places, the U-shaped bone cracking down one side of his face and up the other; with nothing left to moor it, the bottom half of his face collapsed into splintered mash. His soft palate went loose as raw chicken skin, bottom lip folding down as if it was full of lead fishing weights.

Brewster crashed to the floor. Rockwell raised one boot and brought it down on Brewster’s face with a sound I’d have given my eyeteeth to have never heard. Rockwell rummaged the keychain out of Brewster’s pocket. Brewster’s teeth gritted like periwinkle shells under Rockwell’s boots. Once his cuffs were unlocked, Swift said: “Let’s go.”

“Give me a sec,” I told him.

I picked through Brewster’s pockets until I found his cell phone. I ran through the recently received calls, all of them to the same number and location: REPLCN ARMRY.

The Republican Armoury. Where better to stash The One Child?

I punched the redial button. A voice—Henchel’s—went, “Yeah?”

I hung up. The three of us went back into the hallway, which continued down to a steel-plated door at the very end. Swift took Brewster’s keyring. The first one he tried slid effortlessly into the lock. Swift’s face was grey and greasy with some kind of sickness I could not guess at.

“Moment of truth,” he said, and turned the key.

The man sitting alone on the other side of the door was bloodshot-eyed and ragged of fingernail: a beggar in a bunker. Our Prophet. The Heaven-Sent Messenger.

“Father,” Swift said to him.