Demon Download

by Jack Yeovil

  “Another dreenk?”

  O’Pray nodded, and Armindariz poured.

  “Always glad to oblige thee chorch, padre.”

  This time, O’Pray picked the glass up carefully, observing the surface tension of the whisky. The meniscus wobbled as his hand trembled slightly.

  “Careful not to speell eet, padre. That stoff, eet eats right through the varneesh.”

  O’Pray swilled the liquor around his mouth—this was Shochaiku’s vat-produced cheap firewater, not the Double-Blend good stuff—and defurred his teeth. He swallowed.

  He shook his head. It still ached like a bastard, but he’d had plenty of years to get used to that. At the seminary in Albany, an old priest had, in his cups, advanced the notion that you were closer to God if you were either drunk or had a hangover.

  That, he supposed, gave him twenty-four hours a day to be in communion with the Lord.

  “How are theengs down at thee chorch, padre?”

  “The church endures, Pedro. The church always endures.”

  “Eet don’ look so good seence thee Bible Belt trashed thee place.”

  The quality of the pain in O’Pray’s head changed minimally, moving from behind his eyes up into his forebrain.

  “The church is more than just four walls and an altar, Pedro. It’ll take more than a gang of heathen protestants on motorsickles to bring down the church.”

  “They geeve eet a pretty good try, padre.”

  “I’ll give ’em that. How much for the bottle?”

  Armindariz’ tooth glinted.

  “Thee usual.”

  O’Pray heaved the plastic gallon container up onto the bar. Water sloshed in it. It was about half-full. The only well within a hundred miles happened to be on St Werburgh’s property.

  “Water for whisky,” O’Pray mused. “I never thought that would be a fair swap.”

  “Eet’s a good theeng you dreenk yours straight, padre.”

  O’Pray managed a grim laugh. “The well is on consecrated ground, Pedro. That makes it holy water. Use it properly.”

  “I sure weell, padre.”

  O’Pray took the bottle by the neck and left the Silver Byte.

  II

  There was nothing broken inside Stack, except maybe his heart. He only had superficial burns. He shot himself up with morph-plus from the medkit, and requisitioned the dead cykeman’s machine. It was a good hog, with pump shotguns slung next to the handlebars for an easy draw. There were plenty of loose shells in the panniers, along with a Swiss Army Nunchaka, some back issues of Guns and Killing and a stash of ju-jujubes. It was unpleasant shaking the former owner’s head out of the helmet, but the job was over in a moment. With the pumps exploded and Slim’s gas reservoir still burning, he had to siphon juice out of the nearly dry tanks in the auto graveyard. It took five semi-wrecks and several too many mouthfuls of gas to fill up the motorsickle.

  He had figured it out. Either the cruiser’s system had developed some limited Artificial Intelligence and gone Frankenstein on them, or someone else had locked into the auto control and was using the machine as a catspaw. That was the trouble with smart machines. Sometimes they got too smart.

  It didn’t really matter. What did was that he had had to leave a Trooper—had had to leave Leona—in a shallow grave back at Slim’s Gas ‘n’ B-B-Q. If he were to take it through channels, he should get to a radio, call in and wait for the back-up to airlift him back to Apache. But the unwritten regs of the Road Cav only gave him one choice. He had to find the cruiser, and whoever was behind its freakout act, and settle the score.

  It was a hell of a pain in the ass being this macho all the time, but he had signed up. He was Cav. There were traditions.

  Nearly a hundred and fifty years’ worth of ghosts in blue stood behind him, and he was required to do them honour.

  His wrist tracer was supposed to help the cruiser track him down if he was in jeopardy, but it worked the other way too. The steady beep told him he was on the right trail.

  He had not eaten anything but N-R-Gee candies for too long, and it was cold at night, but the morph-plus shots kept the pain away, and the highly unauthorised speed-popsies he filched from the cykeman’s stash warded off sleep and fatigue. He was going to come out of this an honourable junkie if he didn’t watch himself.

  Even if he hadn’t had the tracer, he could have tracked the cruiser. The machine left a trail of still-burning ve-hickles and still-warm corpses along the roads.

  Driving through the night, flames stood out in the IR shield of his helmet, writhing purple against the velvet dark. A whole chapter of The Sons of the Desert were scattered either side of the highway, lased full of holes, cars carved in sections, fezzes flattened.

  The dead cykeman had subscribed to the whole biker bit. His in-helmet sound system was stocked with grand opera. Stack had been through most of the Ring Cycle on the cruiser’s trail. The music gave him something he could fix on.

  The quality of the desert changed as the road rose. The flat expanses of sand and the parched river beds gave way to standing rocks, sugarloaf mountains, towering mesas and squatting buttes. The highway weaved between monolithic clumps of bare rock. This was perfect ambush country. The Maniax might have gone the way of the Mescalero Apache, but there were plenty more wannabe savages ready to take to the rocks with their longbows or their laser-sighted sniper rifles.

  In the middle of Act Two of Twilight of the Gods, just as the world was gearing up for the Last Days and all the sins of the past were about to come home and kick ass, Stack thought he had found it. There was a cruiser overturned and burned out in the middle of the hardtop, tyres melted off the durium spokes, Cav colours burned out of the paintwork. Perhaps the mean machine had met its match?

  Then he saw the corpses. A horned, doglike thing with a swollen, dragging belly was chewing at a blackened manshape sprawled in the ruin of the ve-hickle. Stack took a shot at it, and it sped up towards the Mogollon Mesa. He sighted properly, and brought it down. He remembered Slim Pickens’ complaints about “mew-taters.”

  He got off the cyke and walked over to the wreck. There were two dead people, one dripping out of the shattered window, pink flesh showing through the baked-black skin where the coyote creature had been worrying, the other hanging by his seatbelt from the driver’s position.

  Chalk up another couple of casualties for the runaway.

  He’d buried Leona. He had to bury these unidentifiable Troopers.

  By mid-day, he was back on the trail.

  III

  St Werburgh’s didn’t have much of a roof, but since the Lord hadn’t made it rain in fifteen or twenty years that didn’t really matter. The lack of doors was a bigger problem. O’Pray was always having to pay one of Armindariz’ brood of children to sweep out the sand that drifted in. And when there was a sandstorm, the whole community had to turn out to shovel the church empty.

  And yet St Werburgh’s was still standing. Its windows might be burned out, Christ on the cross might be less three out of four limbs and no two pews were alike, but it was still a church, still a centre for the town.

  It was the well, O’Pray knew. The church had originally been erected in the 1860s by settlers astonished to find a deep, clearwater well this high in the mesas, and they had built it to last. Most Western towns made do with wooden churches, but the hardy stock who made Welcome built with stone.

  Miguel O’Pray, although New York City-born, epitomised the original fathers of Welcome. Half-Hispanic, half-Irish, bedrock stubborn, and with no place else to go.

  He took a swig from his bottle and looked up at the sky through the remains of the church roof. There was still a bell in the tower. It had sounded during the long-ago Apache attacks. It had rallied the people of Welcome that night the Bible Belt had come into town looking to smite the papist infidels. O’Pray still tolled it every Sunday morning before mass. His hands, once city-soft, were red and ridged with the friction of the old hemp rope.

  The
Shochaiku burned his throat, and warmed his insides. Behind his back, Armindariz called him Padre Burracho. Father Drunk.

  “Father forgive me,” he said aloud, “for living up to the stereotypes of the drunken Irishman and the lazy Mexican…”

  He couldn’t remember much about last night. He had been at the Silver Byte, and in the back room at Tiger Behr’s. He had woken up in the yard of his shack, under a canvas sheet, his body bent into an unusual position.

  He set his bottle down next to the altar, careful not to let the liquor come into contact with the holy object, and ran his hands through his grimy hair. He wished now he hadn’t given away yesterday’s leftover water. He could have done with a wash.

  Once, The Gaschuggers—the gangcult who hung out over at Tiger Behr’s—decided it would be a good idea if they took the town’s central resource into their own hands. That was back in the days of Exxon the Elder. They had come out behind Exxon the Elder and demanded O’Pray turn over the well to them.

  Behr had given Exxon the Elder the elder both barrels of his favourite shotgun in the back. The blast had pushed the panzerboy the full length of the aisle and dropped him a yard from the altar.

  “You gotta have respect for somethin’, or else you’re just a breadhead pig,” Behr had said, and The Gaschuggers had elected a new Exxon and gone back to the Silver Byte.

  “Radical,” Behr had said at the funeral, “radical in a tubular sort of way.”

  The church was something. Maybe it was all that Welcome had left to distinguish it from the other sandratholes. There was no school, no police station, no library, no real estate brokerage, no Studebaker dealership, no movie-house, no gas station, no post office, no proper brothel. Just the motel, the saloon, and the church. It was the church that made the difference.

  O’Pray folded the altar cloth and put it away. The altar came to life.

  “Good morning, Father,” it said in the computer-generated voice he found so strangely reassuring. This was how angels, unused to the flesh, talked when they were upon the Earth.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “I am sorry. You have not adjusted my internal timepiece since the last temporal displacement.”

  The altar was right. O’Pray made the necessary alteration.

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “My pleasure.”

  O’Pray ran a check. The altar was linked to a net of other altars, in churches throughout the Western United States. This was the true Church Invisible.

  “There has been further clarification of Vatican LXXXV.”

  O’Pray snorted. The new church was increasingly difficult to get used to.

  “Aren’t you interested?”

  O’Pray wondered if the altar would notice if he took a drink.

  “According to the Pope, you can now get married.”

  It was hard not to laugh. “And will Pope Georgi provide a nice little nun for me to get married to?”

  “That has not been clarified.”

  “Fifteen years ago, I might have cared.”

  O’Pray had seen the church change a lot in thirty years as a priest. He had been in Rome when Pope Mandela I gave his St Peter’s Square address. “Information is power,” he had said, “power to work unspeakable evil, power to do great good.” So many of the old church’s prohibitions had been thrown away. In the light of the Third World’s population problem, contraception had been first tolerated, now endorsed. Monogamous homosexual relationships could now be confirmed in church weddings. And Mandela had pioneered the Vatican’s involvement in any political conflicts where a simple distinction could be made between Good and Evil. O’Pray had been with the socialist rebels when El Salvador fell in 1974, and had been one of the go-betweens in the negotiations between Mandela and President Goldwater that staved off a full-scale US intervention in Central America and led the way to the formation of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala into a Central American Confederation. O’Pray, finally winning his Irish Republican father’s approval, had taken up arms when the CAC threw the British garrison out of Belize and helped supervise the referendum that brought the former colony into the Confederation. He had been a good soldier for his pontiff.

  The altar hummed, waiting for his daily input.

  But, in the early ’80s, he had begun to have doubts. He had never held any official position with the CAC, and found himself spending more and more time on missions to Mexico. Here, even the formidably confident Mandela couldn’t find a clear distinction between Good and Evil, and he had found himself shuttled between faction and faction as Rome tried to pick a side in the permanent civil war. He had seen men who called themselves Good Catholics loot, rape and murder while trying to solicit the aid and succour of the church, and his indignant reports to Rome and Managua had been spiked. Priests couldn’t marry back then, but the restrictions on clerical chastity had been relaxed. And with his roman collar, black suit and bandoliers of ScumStopper rounds, he had undeniably cut a glamorous figure. After Belize, he had made the cover of Guns and Killing magazine, and the story had inaccurately tagged him as “the Pope’s top gun.” He had been with Sister Maria Concepcion all through the jungle fighting. And in that stone-age Indian village up in the Sierra Tarahumare as the drunken doctor tried to deliver their child, he had been there at the end.

  He began his routine reprogramming. It was a task he could easily carry out with no real thought.

  The counsellors at the retreat had called his lapse a “nervous breakdown,” and assured him his faith was still sound. He had no idea that modern psychiatric practices could put an exact measurement on Faith. Fatigue, bad diet and shellshock had worn him down. He then spent time on the Pampas, as priest for a nomadic community of rancheros. He had started to be Padre Burracho, and nobody much minded. The boy, his son, was still alive, he believed. The church would bring him up. It would be all the family the lad would need.

  Thank you Papa Georgi. Thank you for being fifteen years too late in saying I can get married. Thank you so much.

  The altar sorted through the business of the day.

  At the time, laymen had found it unusual that the Pope would sanction carnal relations for the clergy before allowing marriage. O’Pray smiled bitterly. All Catholics understood that one. “The Lord thy God is a jealous God.” Priests had been as married to Christ as nuns, and the Lord would rather tolerate a little recreational infidelity than allow bigamy. O’Pray understood that married nuns and priests often suffered psychologically because they subconsciously believed themselves guilty participants in a menage a trois.

  O’Pray. It was a hell of a name for a priest. The nuns at his school had his vocation picked out before he could do joined-up writing. His father was a cop—the son of a cop and the grandson of a cop—and his mother, when she was around, had been euphemistically a dancer. The Hot Enchilada, they had called her.

  He had had some career. He had been a scholar, a diplomat, a politician, a spy, a soldier, a nutcase and a drunk. But he had been a priest first, and now he was a priest last.

  “A routine cross-check with the US Cavalry database at Fort Apache suggests a malefic presence in the area,” the altar said. “Code BELIAL, Code BELIAL.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  O’Pray didn’t know BELIAL. It hadn’t come up before. He sorted through the software in the rack on the wall and found a disc marked BELIAL. It was still shrinkwrapped. He bit through the cellophane, and slipped the disc into his hand. He wasn’t familiar with the configurations. He pressed it into the altar’s slit. It hummed.

  “BELIAL, copyright Vatican Software Systems, 1994. Use is restricted to registered employees, affiliates and officers of the Church of Rome. You will identify yourself.”

  O’Pray punched in his serial number, this week’s override codeword and the St Werburgh’s signature pattern. He put his eye to the retinal reader. The altar confirmed his identity and his right to BELIAL.

  The altar
scrolled up a Latin text, too fast to read.

  “BELIAL,” the altar said, “is a package designed to help you deal with incursions of the diabolic into the physical plane.”

  The screen showed him a menu.

  1: Exorcism

  2: Binding

  3: Interrogation

  4: SANCTUARY

  “Altar, please specify. I have no information to help me make a decision. What’s the problem?”

  The church seemed colder now, darker. O’Pray’s hands were shaking a little. There was a rumble in the air, as of distant thunder. Thunder. That was unlikely. It didn’t rain in Arizona.

  “There is a diabolic presence in the immediate vicinity, closing fast.”

  “A demon?”

  “A diabolic presence.”

  O’Pray was flustered. This wasn’t his speciality. He had fought the church’s temporal wars. He had known, of course, about the greater conflicts, but he only had the basic skills.

  “Please specify. What form does this… diabolic presence… take?”

  The altar thought it over. The sun had passed overhead, and the church was shadowed. The greenscreen still glowed, flashing the BELIAL menu at him. There was a definite noise, a low grumbling hum. O’Pray thought of tidal waves, earthquakes and hordes of soldier ants.

  “The diabolic presence is in the form of a sub-sentient computer virus. Currently, it is inhabiting the central control and weapons system of a Model Nine 1998 Ford, especially adapted for military use.”

  “A car? It’s in a car?”

  “A United States Cavalry-issue road cruiser, equipped with dual laser cannons, phosphorus grenade launchers, roof-mounted chaingun, hub-mounted fragmentation charges, rear-mounted…”

  “Enough. I understand.”

  There was a cacophony outside now. Engine noises, gunfire, and screaming.

  “What’s it here for?”

  “Purpose as yet unknown. 99.999998 percent probability of hostile action. 76.347801 percent probability object of hostile action will be Church of St Werburgh’s.”