That left Jesus, who was smart enough not to draw his weapon as Billy Ray stepped towards him. “Who are you?” Jesus asked. “What are you doing?”
“I told you, Jesus,” Ray said. “We’re looking for some scumbag kidnappers.” Ray got close to him, so close that he stumbled back a step or two. “That just happen to fit your description.”
“You a cop?”
Ray’s smile broadened. “If I was a cop,” he asked, “could I do this?”
He slapped him stingingly, left, right, left. Jesus stumbled back again.
“Come on out,” Ray called. “I think we’ve got it all under control.”
Yeoman and Ackroyd stepped out of the shrubbery. Ray turned his smile to them. He was genuinely happy, if somewhat disappointed in the short duration and easiness of the fight.
“You know, Ackroyd, you were right.” He nodded at Yeoman. “I do like this guy. Good shooting coupled with a nice sense of timing.”
Ackroyd shook his head. “You’re as crazy as he is.”
“Maybe,” Ray said. He looked at the groaning man. “Get rid of him.”
The man looked up, fear in his eyes. “No—no don’t kill me—”
“Wait a minute,” Yeoman said, as if knowing what was going to happen. “Let me retrieve my arrow.”
He strode over to the tree, grabbed the shaft and pulled hard as the man cringed. His victim screamed as it came out of the tree trunk and through his torn flesh. Yeoman looked at the shaft critically, wiped the blood off it on the man’s shirt, and put it back in his quiver.
“Maybe I can salvage it,” he said to no one in particular. He stepped aside. “Okay. Do your stuff.”
The man moaned again. He looked at Ackroyd, pleading in his eyes. “No. Please. Don’t hurt me no more. Please.”
Ackroyd gave him a tight smile. “Sorry.”
He clenched his right hand into a pistol shape, his forefinger pointing at the target, his thumb pointing straight up at the sky. There was another “POP” and he was gone.
“Jesus Christ,” Angelo said, panting for breath as he crouched on the ground clutching his broken arm. “What’d you do to him, man?”
“I sent him to a far better place,” Ackroyd explained. He looked at Ray and Yeoman. “What do you think? Him next?” He indicated Angelo with a gesture of his cocked fist.
Ray knew that Ackroyd had probably popped his first target off to the holding pen at Riker’s Island, or some other similar location. That was how his power worked. He was a projecting teleport who could send anyone, or anything small enough, any place he was familiar with. The gun that he made with his right fist was the mental crutch he leaned on to make his power function. He’d probably sent the second stooge to an emergency room somewhere.
Of course, the stooges who were still their captives didn’t know that.
“Hey man,” Angelo pleaded. “I’m hurt. My arm’s broke and I think you broke a couple of ribs too.” He grimaced convincingly.
“Is that all?” Ray asked in disappointed tones. “I was trying to crush your spleen.”
“My spleen don’t feel too good, either,” Angelo said placatingly.
Ray shrugged. “Waste ‘em.”
Ackroyd turned to him. Angelo tried to scuttle away, but he moved gingerly as if he did have several broken ribs. Ackroyd popped him away without any difficulty, as he did the fourth man, who was still lying unconscious on the forest loam.
Ray, Yeoman, and Ackroyd turned to Jesus. Jesus swallowed, audibly.
“What do you guys want?” he asked.
They advanced on him. “Answers,” Ray said.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
New Hampton: The black dirt
The afternoon heat had come, though in his astral form Fortunato couldn’t tell if it was a delightful seventy-five or a humid ninety. His insubstantial body was beyond all such considerations. He was worried that he’d been gone so long from his physical body that he might have trouble reintegrating with it, but he thrust that worry away as best he could. Other concerns took precedence.
He drifted aloft, keeping a watchful eye on the unfolding landscape as he scudded about like an unseen cloud. After all, he could get lucky and stumble upon the boy by chance, unlikely as that was. He couldn’t afford to ignore that possibility, however slim. He couldn’t afford to ignore any chance, no matter how slight.
The country below him was quiet and peaceful. Houses were dispersed among acres of farmland or forest or clung together in small groups of half a dozen or so on single-lane county roads. He drifted at one point over a hillside that was being eaten away by a gravel pit, which appeared to be the only sign of industrial activity anywhere in his sight. Ironically, right across the road from the pit was a small country church, closed up and silent.
He was within a mile of the camp, but the terrain had changed. It was much more open, with tiny copses of forest stranded on isolated hills. The land generally sloped downwards to form a large, open bowl, like the bottom of a waterless lake. This area was squared off into fields planted with various crops. Fortunato could see corn and tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber, and, mostly, row upon row of onions sprouting from the thick, rich soil that was blacker than his own skin. In the near distance, less than two miles away, the silver ribbon of a small river ran through this rich black dirt.
He could feel the energy entrapped in the soil even from his vantage point thirty or forty feet in the sky. It was opulent, fertile earth, unlike the thin city dirt which supported the concrete and steel environment that he was much more familiar with.
Energy...
He dropped to the Earth like a bullet, coming to rest in a field that was planted half in cucumbers and half in onions. The soil was soft and crumbly, full of brown clods of organic material that also testified to its richness. It radiated energy it had drunk that day from the sun, and ancient, even more potent energy seemed to infest its every particle. Fortunato couldn’t feel the warmth it threw off, but he could see it dissipate into the air like shimmers off a mirage. The older energy seemed an integral part of the soil. Fortunato put his face into the dirt and saw the tiny pellets of power being drawn up the roots growing in it. He could see the dirt nourish the plants as they grew to their full richness.
If this energy feeds crops planted in it, Fortunato thought, it could feed much more as well.
Fortunato sank through the dirt as if it were the sky. He felt no sense of claustrophobia when it closed over him and he was fully interred within it as if the field were his vast grave. He sank lower and lower. Ten feet into the soil, the energy was more abundant, more vibrant, as decades of farming had only leached away bits of it. Twenty feet down it sparked and coruscated like alien-looking sea creatures living in the ocean depths. Thirty feet down Fortunato hit bedrock and stopped.
Floating in the dirt as if it were the sky, he emptied his mind until it was a complete blank. The void of him begged to be filled.
And so it was.
Suddenly he stood on the surface of a great lake whose shores lapped the slopes of what were hillsides in his own time. The land around him was lush and wild. Man had never drunk from this lake or boated upon it or polluted it with his waste and industrial run-off. It was pristine and free. The forests surrounding it were impenetrable, except for the great mammoths and other immense beasts that roamed the lake’s margins and rocky beaches.
Fortunato realized that he was seeing this land as it was thousands of years ago, before the coming of man. The lake seemed as if it would go on forever. But even landscapes change with the millennia. The Earth subsided, twisted, and moved. The climate turned drier, hotter. The lake started to shrink. The forests around it, the plants that grew in it, all died. They surrendered their richness and metamorphosed into thick black dirt that accumulated over the thousands of years it took the lake to die.
But the lake hadn’t really died. It had simply changed. It had transformed from a fluid state to rich black soil. The clumps of organic materia
l in the soil were plants compressed into layers of peat, then broken up thousands of years later by man’s plows.
But Fortunato was down with the energy that had lingered for millennium. For longer than man had been on this continent. In the upper levels of the black earth it had slowly been leached away by farmers for two hundred, two hundred and fifty years. Down where Fortunato lingered, it was still pristine.
And, like most energy, it was begging to be used.
He embraced it. He drank it in. It filled him fuller than the sexual energy of the Tantric rituals ever did. He could feel it coursing through his astral form like lightning contained by the invisible shape of his insubstantial body. When he could drink no more of it he burst out again into the sky.
One moment he was at the bottom of the Pleistocene lake. The next he was in the sky above the camp. He willed to be there the night before, and he was. He heard the commotion and saw his son. He saw the detective protect him from the kidnappers, witnessed their flight into the woods. He followed them as they moved like actors in a tape set in fast forward, burning minutes of time in seconds, hours in minutes. He went with them as they wandered lost in the woods. He saw the detective’s bravery during the brief firefight. Saw the unexpected arrows lance out of the night and thought, My God, it’s Yeoman!, saw his son stumble back into the forest. He followed him dodging and hiding, watching as he discovered the small church and spent a fitful night there. Then he saw him cautiously go out the next day, find the store at the foot of the hill and buy some bread, cold cuts, ice cream and soda which he took back to the church. Fortunato could understand the agony of the boy’s indecision, unsure of which hand might be raised against him, cautiously waiting for help, eventually deciding that he had to go find it himself. He went back to the store to ask to use the phone, and immediately tried to leave when he recognized that the others in the shop were enemies. They went after him. He tried to run but Fortunato knew that they would catch him, and he was in his astral form unable to touch anything upon the corporeal plane. The men were closing around his son and Fortunato knew that his only slim hope was to reach out and touch a receptive mind, to find someone who could understand his pleas and come to help the boy.
Fortunato shouted for help, but he was afraid that no one would hear.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
New Hampton: the woods
Jesus hung tough for awhile, but once they got him talking he wouldn’t shut up. It was Jay’s threat to teleport his gonads to a subway stop somewhere in the Bronx that broke him. Ray didn’t think that Ackroyd could actually do it, and he was pretty sure that he wouldn’t even if he could, but it was Ray’s experience that macho shit bags like Jesus were quite attached and often abnormally concerned about the state and condition of their gonads. Jesus started singing like the Jokertown Boys after Jay’s threat, revealing some items of interest, as well as some things that Ray already knew.
“It’s not like we’re committing a crime or anything,” Jesus confided, splitting his attention between Jay and the razor-sharp broad tip arrow that Yeoman was playing with as he looked on with dark, unrelenting eyes.
“Kidnapping isn’t a crime?” Yeoman asked flatly.
“Well, sure. If we were actually kidnapping someone. That would be a crime, sure. And a sin. But since we’re working for the church, what we’re doing can’t really be a sin, can it?”
“Wait a minute,” Ackroyd said. “The church?”
“Sure,” Jesus said confidently. “I am an obsequentus in the Allumbrados. We take our orders from the Cardinal. Directly.”
“You want to translate, that, please?” Ackroyd said.
Jesus shrugged. “Of course. Obsequentus—an ‘obedient’ in the Order of Allumbrados, The Enlightened Ones. That’s the middle rank in the Order, between credenti and perfecti,” Jesus added helpfully.
“You do this full time?” Yeoman asked in disbelief.
“Well, it’s more of a part-time thing—”
“Between drug sales,” Ray put in dryly. He had seen Jesus’ type often enough. He recognized his probable affiliation with the Colombians like a street-savvy cop could spot a pickpocket working the crowd in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Jesus shrugged. “Hey, a man’s got to eat. But you guys, you ruined my chance. If I found the kid I would have been promoted to perfectus.”
“Enough,” Ackroyd said. “What’s all this about the church? You’re talking about the Catholic Church?”
“I’m not talking about crazy-ass Protestants,” Jesus said. “I’m talking Mother Church. Rome. The Vatican.”
“What do they want with John Fortune?” Ackroyd asked, obviously having a hard time believing all this.
“I’ll tell you,” Jesus said, leaning forwards conspiratorially. “Then maybe you let me go.”
Yeoman snorted. “Yeah. Maybe.”
Jesus made gestures for them all to come closer, and Ray found himself leaning forward as if Jesus were telling ghost stories around the campfire. They all did. “John Fortune ain’t no kid. He’s the Anti-Christ.”
“Anti-Christ?” Ackroyd repeated.
Jesus nodded. “It’s true. He’s the Devil.”
“Jesus Christ,” Yeoman said.
Jesus pointed at him. “Exactly. Jesus Christ is coming. The End Times are upon us. Jesus and Satan will battle for the fate of the Earth. Jesus will win of course, but the Allumbrados have been doing all they can to smooth his way for him.”
“Like... kidnapping... John... Fortune,” Ackroyd said slowly. He and Yeoman exchanged glances as if this was the first time they’d ever agreed on anything.
Ray himself would think the whole thing was nuts if he hadn’t Barnett’s solemn assurance that John Fortune was actually Jesus Christ in his Second Coming. He wasn’t sure that he believed Barnett, but at least he was on the side that was trying to rescue the boy, not the one trying to drag him in front of some inquisition. For now his seemed to be the right side in this crazy affair. For now.
Ackroyd and Yeoman looked at him, and he shrugged. Now was not the time, Ray decided, to open up. “Sounds nuts to me,” he said.
“Got any more questions?” Ackroyd asked, looking from Ray to Yeoman.
“How many teams are out looking for the boy?” Yeoman asked.
“Three others, as far as I know.” Jesus paused. “They’re not all Allumbrados, though. Most of the guys on my team weren’t, though a couple were credenti.”
“Running short on nutcases?” Ackroyd asked.
Jesus looked very badly like he wanted to say something, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Bye-bye,” Ackroyd said, pointed, and popped.
Jesus had time for one startled, betrayed look, then he vanished.
“Where’d you send him?” Ray asked.
“Where he belonged. Bellevue.”
“Probably not a bad choice,” Ray said innocently.
Ackroyd sighed and looked around the forest clearing. “Not what do we do?”
“Pray we find the boy,” Yeoman said, “before these nutcases do.”
Amen, Ray thought, but just nodded.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
New Hampton: The Snake Handlers’ Commune
Jerry and the Angel helped three of the commune members, Josaphat, Josiah, and Jehoram, carry the bushels of produce into the kitchen. It was hard to be so close to so much tempting food, because Jerry had a bad case of the munchies from the contact high he’d gotten off Mushroom Daddy. He didn’t think he could wait for dinner.
Hungry as he was, it was clear that Angel was hungrier. Ravenous, in fact. The boys left them in the capable hands of Hephzibah, an old woman who looked like an extra from The Grapes of Wrath, who ran the commune’s kitchen. When she learned that they were both hungry she put out a supply of leftovers—cold fried chicken, home-baked bread, mashed-potatoes, corn on the cob, green bean casserole, tomato and cucumber salad, and a couple of apple pies—and watched in awe as Angel packed away enough food t
o feed a platoon. Jerry was getting a little embarrassed by Angel’s gustatory display, but the food was so good and he was so munched out that he really wasn’t all that far behind her in the leftover demolition. To assuage his conscience he slipped Hephzibah a couple of twenties that Ackroyd had given him earlier to cover the cost of their generosity.
Jerry was so taken with the simply prepared, yet unbelievably fresh and tasty fare that he didn’t even think of pumping Hephzibah for information on John Fortune’s whereabouts. Neither did Angel. They were both surprised when the sounds of an electric guitar wafted through the air, penetrating even Jerry’s dazed consciousness that was threatening to slip into a digestive torpor after he’d polished off the last of the potato salad.
“That’s the call to worship,” Hephzibah said. “I hope you’re both satisfied for now.” She looked at Angel, who had glanced up disappointedly from the fragments of the apple pie she’d just devoured. “Supper will be after service. If you’re still hungry.”
A loud belch escaped Angel. “Excuse me. Please.”
At least, Jerry thought, she had the grace to look mortified
Hephzibah waved it away. “That’s all right, honey. Long as you enjoyed everything.”
Angel looked down guiltily at the empty platters and plates and pie tins, as if aware for the first time of the devastation they’d wrought. Jerry wondered if she actually enjoyed anything in life.
“It was great, all of it.” He looked at Angel. “I guess we should mosey on up to the, uh, services. Right, Angel? We have to thank Uzziah”—he was the commune’s leader—“for your generosity to a couple of strangers.”
“Friends of Daddy are friends of ours,” Hephzibah said. “Besides, the generosity you receive is equal to the generosity you give.”
Jerry frowned. “Wasn’t that a Beatles’ song?”
Hephzibah leaned forwards as if revealing a great confidence. “Close. You can learn much from the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney. Almost as much as from the Book itself.”
Jerry nodded. “I’ll remember that.”
Angel seemed sunken even deeper in a digestive stupor than Jerry. Not unlikely, Jerry thought, if this was the first time she’d experienced a marijuana high. Which was probable. First-time users usually didn’t get off much, but Jerry suspected that just as the Daddy’s vegetables were so tasty, his other produce, as it were, was probably as potent in its own particular way. Jerry took her by the arm and helped her step away from the table.
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