by Weston Ochse
“Where is here?”
“In the middle of the desert in Death Valley,” Preacher’s Daughter said. “Seemed appropriate.”
“De Cherge let us use one of his RVs. He said he’d prefer it if we didn’t come back. I think he was afraid you might burn everything down.”
“He certainly gave us enough,” Charlene said. “It’s also important that we be here.”
“What is it you know?” Boy Scout asked.
“I can’t tell you.”
McQueen harrumphed. “She’s like that. She does the I know all followed by the I can’t tell you.”
“And she enjoys it,” Preacher’s Daughter said.
“Do you really think knowing when everyone is going to die and when everything is going to happen is a blast?” Charlene asked.
Preacher’s Daughter leveled her gaze at the other woman. “I think you’ve made it your own.”
“Why were you two arguing?” Boy Scout asked.
McQueen held out his hands and patted the air. “Now, hear me out before you get mad, boss.”
“Why am I going to get mad?” Boy Scout asked, frowning.
“Maybe because you’re wearing a suicide vest rigged with explosives,” Preacher’s Daughter said.
McQueen spun to her. “Lore!”
Boy Scout looked down and for the first time saw what was weighing him down. It looked like a fishing vest that had pipes sewn into it, all with wires leading to a central point in the back. The weight he’d felt earlier had been the bombs attached to him. He flashed to the boy and his mother’s orange-scented fingers. Then he got pissed.
“Get this off of me!”
“I can’t,” McQueen said miserably. “I won’t.”
“What do you mean you won’t?”
McQueen held out a remote control that could only be the detonator. “The vest is stitched closed so that you can’t take it off. The wires all go to a receiver in the small of your back, which you can’t reach. This is the detonator.”
“I fucking figured that out, McQueen. Now I’m going to ask you one more time. Get. This. Off. Of. Me.”
McQueen shook his head and seemed about to cry.
Preacher’s Daughter stepped forward. “He really can’t, boss.” She held out her hands. “Now, hear me out. The yazata wasn’t fucking around. He had complete control of you and was ready to level all of us. You don’t have the power to do anything anymore. The only reason you’re back is because of the deal we made with it.”
“What deal?”
“It’s a gamble that McQueen made. I didn’t like it at first, but we didn’t have a choice.”
“What’s the fucking deal that has me in a suicide vest?” Boy Scout asked, almost shouting.
“The yazata gives us three days to see if we can get rid of it. The vest was our bargaining point.”
Charlene fidgeted with her phone for a moment, then held it up.
“I have a video of that too.”
Boy Scout watched the small screen as McQueen leveled the threat.
“The vest is rigged with twenty pounds of explosives. Pipe bombs filled with screws all linked to a central receiver. I’m going to blow you up. It will kill my best friend, I know that, but it will also knock you back into The White. You’ve probably been waiting an eternity to get your hooks into one of us. Do you want to wait another eternity? Or do you want to have a chance at possessing my friend?”
The view shifted to Boy Scout, tied to the chair and gagged. His eyes glowed supernaturally.
“I think you need to give it a yes or no question,” Preacher’s Daughter said from off camera.
“Blink once if you understand me.”
Boy Scout blinked once on the video.
“Give us one month to figure this out and if at the end we can’t, then you can possess Boy Scout.”
Boy Scout blinked twice.
“Fine, then two weeks.”
Boy Scout blinked twice again.
“Fuck. Then how many days?”
Boy Scout blinked three times.
“Three days? Three fucking days?”
Boy Scout blinked once.
Charlene pulled her phone away.
Boy Scout stared at his deadly new attire. “So, I have three days,” Boy Scout said. “What are we going to do in three days?”
McQueen looked even more miserable. “I don’t know. I just knew we needed time.”
“There really wasn’t any choice,” Preacher’s Daughter said, laying a hand on McQueen’s beefy shoulder.
“So the three of you made a deal with the devil and gave me three days to live.”
“Don’t count me as a part of this,” Charlene said. “I already know how this turns out.”
“And you’ll keep it to yourself.” Boy Scout said.
“Mostly,” Charlene said. “But I’m not just along for the ride. I do have a vested interest.”
“But you won’t tell us.” Boy Scout shook his head and pushed himself shakily to his feet. He felt dizzy and had to grasp the chair for balance. “Ain’t this great? We got a psychic who won’t tell anyone anything, and three operators who don’t know what they’re doing, but they made damned sure that one of their own was wearing a suicide vest so they could blow everyone the fuck up. Now, that’s what I call a plan.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Still in the Middle of Fucking Nowhere
THEY FED BOY Scout three cans of pork and beans. He hadn’t known how hungry he was until he smelled it heating up. He figured that later the legumes would do a number on his digestive system, but he didn’t really care at this point. He had roughly seventy hours to figure out how not to die and little information to go on.
He’d failed miserably in the astral plane. He’d intended to get to the daeva and try and communicate with it about their missing brother. Instead, he’d been distracted by the ghostly image of an astral whale. The more he thought about that, the more he wondered if it hadn’t been the yazata manipulating his emotions in order to draw power from it. Then he remembered that they had encountered another whale, and another after that. He couldn’t be entirely sure, but he felt as though he’d touched many more than just the one.
Had he drawn power from many whales?
How many were they?
Had he killed them all?
Maybe that’s how the yazata had gotten so powerful. If it had been able to siphon off the life force of so many of the creatures, it might be unstoppable now. They’d gotten lucky with de Cherge and his stun gun. As much as Boy Scout hated to admit it, using the suicide vest was mad genius. The yazata needed Boy Scout to be alive and the threat of death would ruin all its plans.
When he finished eating, McQueen came back inside and sat heavily on the couch.
Boy Scout didn’t know what model RV this was, but it had two couches, an easy chair, granite counters in the kitchen area, a table that could seat four people comfortably, and a bathroom off a back bedroom.
“You put the bombs together?” Boy Scout asked.
“With a little help from Radio Shack and Home Depot.”
“Where’d you get the gunpowder?”
“This is California. They barely even sell guns, so gunpowder was out of the question. I used ammonium nitrate from fertilizer, and sodium azide from vehicle airbags. Took about a day to construct them.”
“And they’re not going to go off anytime soon?”
“If they do then we’re all in trouble. Frankly, I’d keep my eye on Charlene.” McQueen smiled grimly. “If she starts edging away from you, then you know shit’s about to blow up.”
“Literally.” Boy Scout glanced at his watch. “What gets me is that this thing is listening to us right now. It could take me over any second. What’s to stop it from coming out and just killing you?”
“Because of the dead man’s switch. All three of us have transmitters. Any one of us can activate it in a moment and none of us care if we die.”
“What about d
uring the night?” he asked, absolutely horrified.
“We sleep in shifts.”
“Like you’ve never fallen asleep during guard duty,” Boy Scout said. “This entire situation is not making me happy.”
Preacher’s Daughter came in from the back. “Nor should it.” She stood in front of Boy Scout, crossed her arms, and waited. “Well?”
“Well what?” he asked. Then he realized what she wanted. He shook his head and stared at the floor. “I was trying to save you,” he said.
“I get that.” Her foot began to tap. “And?”
“I didn’t want to see you die.”
“And?” Her foot tapped faster.
“And I’m sorry.”
The tapping stopped and she took a seat beside McQueen.
“There. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”
Boy Scout felt an almost overwhelming feeling of friendship, of the bond that had formed between the three of them. Where he’d been close with all of his team members, these two were at the core and had always seemed to be there. McQueen especially. A scene from the movie Heathers flashed through his mind and he couldn’t help but smile.
“What’s so funny?” McQueen asked.
The moment in the movie he’d remembered was when the father of one of the two jocks killed by Veronica and JD, played by Winona Rider and Christian Slater, stands up at the funeral of his son and proclaims that the two dead boys were gay, based on the evidence that JD and Veronica had planted at the scene of the murders. They hadn’t been, so what the pair had done was doubly horrible because they changed the way the dead boy would be remembered by his father. Although the movie was about high school and mean kids and cliques, it could have been about the military, which was why so many military folks loved the deadpan, gallows humor that the screenwriter had infused into the script.
“I’m thinking of Heathers,” Boy Scout said.
McQueen groaned. “Talk about clichés.”
Preacher’s Daughter’s grin grew wide. Then in a melodramatic voice, she turned to McQueen and said, “I love my dead gay son!”
“I’m going to punch you,” McQueen said flatly.
She put her hand over her heart. “My son is a homosexual and I love him. I love my dead gay son.”
“I’m really going to punch you.”
She grinned madly. “Do you know there’s even a Broadway musical called Heathers? They have an entire song about that.” She pulled out her phone. “Let me see if I can pull it up. We can sing it together.”
“Boss, can you please tell her to stop?”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
She held the phone up and began to read. “Oh my God. This is fabulous. Listen to this, McQueen. They were not dirty! They were not fruits! They were just two stray laces in the Lord’s big boots. Oh my God,” she said again. “I need to memorize this!”
McQueen got up and left the RV, the door slamming behind him.
Preacher’s Daughter was busy reading the lyrics of her new favorite song.
Boy Scout got up and followed McQueen outside.
The heat slammed him in the face. It was late afternoon and the temperature was still over a hundred. The Mojave Desert was a flat canvas as far as the eye could see. The RV was parked along a dirt road. No other vehicles were present.
He found McQueen on the other side of the RV in the shade, where the temperature was remarkably cooler.
McQueen stared into the distance.
“She was just joking,” Boy Scout said.
McQueen wiped at the corner of one eye. “Oh, I know. It didn’t bother me. She fucks around like that all the time. It just reminded me of something.”
Boy Scout turned and gave McQueen his full attention.
“Do you remember what I told you about? How when I first came in I pretended to be a homophobe like everyone else?”
Boy Scout nodded.
“I’d laugh at their jokes. I’d laugh at their comments. I didn’t want anyone to know. And then I did the most terrible thing one could do to another human being.”
“I remember. Billy Picket was his name.”
McQueen turned to look at Boy Scout.
“You do remember.”
Boy Scout reached up and cupped the other man’s cheek. “Of course I do. And you’ve spent your entire life trying to make up for that crime.”
“Just like you do, for killing that pedophile,” McQueen said. “God will treat you better than me.”
Boy Scout lowered his hand. “What’s the connection to Heathers?”
“We’d just got done watching it when Billy said something that was so outrageous, I gave myself away. That’s when he began to make fun of me, when he began to call me names.”
“I’m sorry to even bring it up,” Boy Scout said. “I was thinking about how much I love the two of you and that scene popped into my mind. Of all the scenes in all the movies, I don’t know why that one.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
Boy Scout glanced around and saw nothing but desert and scrub. “Where exactly are we?”
“Ten miles north of Jimgrey,” McQueen said.
“Where the hell is that?”
“Tiny town off Highway 58. We’re southwest of Fort Irwin and roughly west of Barstow. Death Valley.”
“Why out here?”
“In case you blew up. We didn’t want anyone else getting killed.” Then McQueen asked, “How does it work?” He waggled his fingers around his head. “Astral projection, I mean.”
“You just have to clear your head and imagine your whole being leaving your body through your crown chakra, or third eye.”
“If it’s so easy, why doesn’t everyone else do it?”
“It’s not so easy. I don’t know.”
“Did you see anyone else up there?”
“Not really. I saw the other travelers, but no astral travelers like me.”
“I wonder why that is? There’s seven and a half billion people on the planet. Odds are you would have seen someone. I wonder if they can they hide from you.”
“If they can, then they know where we are,” Boy Scout said.
He spied a plume of dust in the distance.
“We’re going to have company,” Boy Scout said.
McQueen nodded. “That’s fine. We have plans for that.” He banged on the side of the RV. “Lore. Char. Prepare for Operation Boom Boom.”
“What the fuck is Operation Boom Boom?” Boy Scout asked.
McQueen grinned. “Just you wait.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Astral Plane
“TIME FOR YOU to get inside, boss.”
McQueen grabbed his shoulder, but Boy Scout resisted.
“I’m not going to let you two handle this alone.”
McQueen pointed to the vest. “A stray round might do more damage than we want right now. Just go inside. We have a plan.”
Boy Scout considered arguing, but there wasn’t any reason to do so. McQueen was correct. Right now he was a liability. He glanced once more at the approaching dust cloud, then hurried inside.
Preacher’s Daughter escorted him into the back of the RV. Sheet metal had been placed around the inside of the walls.
“Not going to keep out anything large caliber,” she said, “But it should stop anything smaller. Just avoid the windows.”
“How am I going to see what’s going on?”
“You’ll have to trust us,” she said. She flashed him a grin, then closed the door to the back.
Full on frustration set in. His troops were about to battle without him. He’d never been good sitting on the sidelines. Boy Scout briefly considered finding a way to get out of the suicide vest, but dismissed it. As soon as the threat was gone there would be no reason for the yazata not to take him over. Although if the yazata did take him over, it might fire light rays from his mouth again and help take out the encroaching enemy in a bid of self service. He filed that away as a future possibility, but dismissed
it in the here and now. He figured they had about ten minutes before the dust cloud arrived. He would never know who or what was coming unless he was able to get out of the RV.
Then an idea came to him.
His only trepidation was possibly confronting the yazata. He’d just have to ignore it and hope the thing would leave him alone. But then he remembered that this same yazata had consumed Sister Renee, and anger supplanted any concern he might have had.
He lay back on the bed. At first, he was hyperaware that he was in an RV in the middle of nowhere and wearing a suicide vest. But he pushed all of that aside and concentrated on his breathing—the same slow in and out that allowed him to hit a five-hundred-meter target.
In and out.
In and out.
In and out.
He began to unlock his chakras.
From bottom to top, each one snapped open, releasing more and more of him, until he opened his crown chakra and he sizzled out of his third eye.
It was like waking up from a dream.
Gone was the RV.
Gone was the constant tick of the air conditioner.
Gone was the weight of the vest.
Gone was everything.
The only thing there was the pulsing darkness of the dark sun and the bright evil of the yazata.
Which was looking right at him with maniacal glee.
A light in the darkness that might as well be an oncoming train.
It took an effort of will to turn his back on it.
But he had to.
He spun away and searched the ground beneath him. He spied four figures. One was a good distance away from the RV, of which he could just make out an outline. One was in the back of the RV, so that could be only him. One was in the front of the RV, and the final one stood beside the RV.
Boy Scout conducted an astral search of the perimeter, but other than three vehicles, there was nothing else within miles.
He surged towards the oncoming vehicles and was able to distinguish twelve figures, four in each vehicle.
He decided to try something. He moved lower towards the first vehicle and matched his speed with theirs. Then he reached out and touched the light of the figure who was in the driver’s seat. He felt a white heat at the site and a flash of memories that went too fast for him to latch on to. The man’s hands came off the wheel and went to his head. What was interesting was that the car slowed, its speed decreasing until there was nothing.
