“Come on,” Jake bellowed. “Say it…”
“…and his repeated claim that he would demonstrate the truth of the Christian resurrection, by returning to life himself…”
“YES!” Jake howled, jumping up and down. “Do you see? Do you see why I have to make a broadcast to night? I HAVE TO! They are waiting on this shit!”
Everyone stared, a home-invasion version of the Last Supper, and none were more poleaxed than Gray.
“I AM THE PROOF!” Jake roared, throwing out his arms and thrusting his chest out as if something in it still beat and pumped blood. “I am the Truth, and the Light! And everything I’ve done has just set it all up! Bang! Bang! Bang! Like a string of cherry bombs! I AM THE LIVING SHIT, PEOPLE! Just TRY to argue with that!”
Nobody tried to argue with that. And what ever the newscaster said next was lost behind it. The TV cut to video of a funeral in Iraq with thousands of irate mourners in black robes, and then rock-’em–sock-’em footage of marines laying siege to a mosque in a wartorn city somewhere still a few shades healthier than here.
Only Gray was anxious to break the spell of the moment. “So what do you want me to do now?”
Jake looked at the women. Incredibly smug, now. If formaldehyde could bring a penis fully erect, than it was doing its distillers proud.
“Put them in the holding cell.”
“They’ll scream.”
“Let ’em scream all they want. I’ll get around to ’em when I’m good and ready.”
Then he turned to Eddie and Mathias. “You two stay with me.”
“Okay, sweethearts.” Gray peeled Esther and Evangeline off the herd with a flick of his gun barrel. The look in his eye might have given them a yeast infection. “Let’s skedaddle.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Gray herded the women out the sliding glass door and into the backyard. A huge, gnarled oak tree spread its bare branches out over the whole expanse of lawn, between the house and the swimming pool. The branches thrashed in the wind that roved out of the desert to beat down on the house.
Evangeline stared dourly at the padlocked gate on their right, the spiked steel fence blocking the path to the parking lot, the malformed tree looming before them, the bars on the window to the holding cell attached to the garage before them.
Evangeline’s heart sank into the bubbling bile in her gut. Of all the awful surprises of the night, this was the worst yet, somehow, because it was not a surprise at all.
She feigned stumbling into Esther, tried to grab at her arms, but they remained pinned at her sides.
Esther wouldn’t meet Evangeline’s eyes, but she caught a glimpse of what was about to come leaking out of them, and she finally knew.
She wanted to crow, You knew what he was, and you let him do it to you, because you thought you were the only one. Thought it was normal, thought it was love. Thought you could hold him.
She wanted to slap Esther, turn on Emmy behind her and knock their heads together.
You thought you were special…
And what did she think she was? She had fallen for his bullshit more often and awfully than anyone here. But now she didn’t feel so alone.
He had fooled them all, used them all.
Even God.
Christian’s jacket was from a vintage 1970s crushed velvet tuxedo. He liked to joke that it was haunted by the ghost of John Belushi, and sometimes by Cat Stevens, which was always good for a funny bar argument.
The shoulder seam was ripped out where Jake had whipped him around like he’d caught a fish not worth hauling into the boat. Jasper’s tacky blood plastered the sleeves to his arms, and he couldn’t get it off without resetting all the bones in his right hand. He almost hadn’t worn the damned thing, because it looked like rain. He almost hadn’t come here at all.
Bummer, dude…and how’s your hand?
It continued to pioneer new frontiers of hurting. The Advil or two he hadn’t upchucked hadn’t found his hand, and no wonder. His nerves were tied in a knot. His fist was studded with blisters, swelling up and turning purple, hogging a lot of the blood he needed to think straight, but none of the pain-feeling stuff. Come on, is this supposed to be shock? What a rip-off.
In another of his many awesome coats, Christian was pretty sure he had a foil bindle with two and a half Vicodin in it. Probably the red sharkskin blazer…
God, he wasn’t even drunk anymore. I sure hope my wake doesn’t suck like this…
He didn’t think about the outcome when he swung at Jake, but he’d do it again, maybe faster, and with a pickax or a Stinger missile. But he’d definitely do it again, first chance he got.
Wait, that was useful—
Cradling his right hand against his chest, he knelt down and threw open the cabinet doors under the sink. Hair spray, cologne, insecticide, and precious little else.
Then it hit him. The vintage tuxedo jacket wasn’t, technically, strictly authentic vintage, since he had his tailor put in a pocket above the hip on the inside left panel, for his cell phone.
It was easy to slap his forehead, but harder to get the phone out of the pocket with the wrong hand. Setting it on the counter, he pinned it with the back of his broken hand and tried to steady it to punch in 911.
Oops. He’d turned the damned thing off before they went in to the wake. He turned it on, wincing at the retarded corporate jingle noises it made to announce to all and sundry that Christian was about to spoil the movie for the whole theater.
Come on baby, Christian silently urged, as the chirpy phone searched for service. Give me someone real to pray to…
The awkward silence in the studio stretched out and flexed its claws, as Eddie and Mathias waited for Jake to make his move.
The man of the house sauntered around the studio, tweaking knobs and fiddling with the cameras, restless. He stopped before the oversized cross, head bowed in silent contemplation, for a long minute.
Finally, he threw a cruel smile at Eddie.
“So you’re fucking my wife. How is that? Cuz my experience is, you really have to work her hard. But once she gets going, she just never wants to stop. You know what I’m sayin’?”
Eddie glared at him, trying hard to hold it in. He couldn’t hide his fear, but he wouldn’t look away.
“Maybe you wanna throw a punch, now, too?”
In spite of everything he’d seen, he wanted to, very much. He would have, knowing what would happen, if it meant a chance for Esther to escape.
Not now. He didn’t know this part of the house, but if he could stay upright, the chance would come. Jake might walk and talk, but Eddie would bet his left nut that this was not God’s work.
That was the only hope he could hang their survival on: that sooner or later, the Devil always breaks his promises.
The storage room behind the garage was dank and reeked of paint thinner and mildew, in spite of the arid bite of the desert air. A terrible place to store anything you might someday want to use.
It was, however, a great place to store people.
The tiny, terrifying room had one door and one window, both barred, and a bare bulb light, long since burned out. All the old paint cans and ancient school desks that once filled this room had gone to the dump when Jake moved in.
The room was left barren, except for a mattress and some shackles. Even the playpen stuff was gone now.
But the big Yale lock on the outside of the door still worked.
The three crying women filed in without a fuss, but Gray ripped Esther’s handbag out of her white-fisted grip as she minced into the cell.
“Oh, please!” she bawled. “Please! Let me keep my flask!”
Gray dumped out her bag, held up the sterling silver hip flask with a flowery, unreadable inscription. She licked her pretty lips, shaky and sick with thirst.
“Sure.” Gray unscrewed the lid and took a deep, satisfying swig. True to form, the package might be fancy, but it still tasted like a case of the clap.
Gray t
oasted Esther with her flask.
Spat in it.
Then handed it back.
“Live it up. Get your little party started. Can’t wait to see who wins.”
Gray slammed and locked the door.
Strolling back across the lawn in the wind-whipped gloom, he smiled as he heard them tuning up, already. He certainly heard someone screaming and moaning, out there…
Christian’s phone walked him through its wondrous array of features, then settled on its ready screen, which told him there were fewer bars available than in the depths of Mormon country.
“Shit,” he hissed, but started to punch in the number.
Three Missed Calls, said an alert screen, with a chipper chirp that made his fillings jump out of his teeth.
“Come on, come on…”
Out of habit, he hit Enter to look at the calls. All from Lisa, Jasper’s date for the night.
Christian sighed as he cleared the phone. He barely knew her, but Jasper’s women tended to latch onto Christian if they hoped to stick around. They thought that, because he was gay, he was a reliable double agent.
Lisa was afraid Jasper was hung up on Evangeline, and didn’t want to get used as a rebound. She really liked Jasper. Everyone really liked Jasper—
Wiping his eyes, he hit the 9. The 1—
Jasper’s phone rang.
Loud as fuck, and right here in the room with him.
Jake pointed at Mathias. “Or hey, maybe you can gang up on me, get a little tag-team action going. Whaddaya think?”
Eddie trembled with helpless rage. Mathias just trembled. Eddie shot a glance at the kid, but his eyes were pinned to the ceiling as if it were the Sistine Chapel.
“Didn’t think so. So I guess we’ll save it for your confession. After Bible Boy, here.”
Mathias snapped out of his trance, looking more shocked and helpless than ever. He must have thought his prayers would do something about this, like wake him up.
The silence curled around them again, not awkward, now, but a huge, predatory presence, breathing in time with the purr of the idling studio gear.
And then, muffled by distance and heavy acoustics, someone started wailing hair metal licks on an electric guitar.
Christian was dumbstruck.
Dropping his own phone in the sink, he knelt beside his friend’s corpse. “Shit! Shut up, shut up—”
Jasper never turned off his phone, but even when his phone went off in the movies, people just laughed. That it sounded like Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen dueling over the last bottle of vodka on a transatlantic flight only made it more ridiculous. Even if they didn’t know he was a boxing champ, nobody could stay mad at Jasper—
“Shit!”
The guitar solo continued, looping over and over.
“God damn it!” Jake got between the door and Eddie and Mathias, who looked ready to bolt. “Did you let him keep his phone?”
Gray appeared in the doorway. “I got it,” he snapped, and jumped at the bathroom door.
Stifling a swell of nausea, Christian laid open Jasper’s blazer and dug into the pockets, but it wasn’t so easy with his left hand. Jasper’s pockets were stuffed with a pack of Camels, lighters lifted off anyone who’d ever offered him a light, receipts, and loose cash, all of it drenched in cool, clotting blood like cranberry sauce.
In the other pocket, Jasper’s phone shivered and screamed. Slimy with blood, slippery as a fish, the phone almost jumped out of his hand when he dug it out.
Cursing himself, he flipped it open.
“Hello…?” A woman’s voice, compressed shouting over a muddy wall of music.
“Lisa!” Christian whispered, loud as he dared. “Jasper’s dead! He…”
“What? I can’t hear you. Jasper…?”
The door slammed open. Gray stepped in and showed Christian his gun. “You got less than a second to hang up that phone.”
Christian hung up and handed over the phone. Gray tossed it in the toilet and flushed. Christian stood to block the sink, but Gray shoved him back down on his knees beside Jasper.
The gun brushed Christian’s ear. He closed his eyes.
Chuckling to himself, Gray turned on the tap and ran cold water over Christian’s phone.
Chapter Twenty-three
Jake plucked a baseball bat from the umbrella stand by the door as he strode toward the bathroom. It was unsurprisingly burnished black, with Sammy Sosa’s ersatz signature engraved in white upon it, like bone peeking out through meticulously ruptured flesh.
“Get in here and watch these guys,” he barked. “I wanna have a word with the sodomite.”
Down the hall, on the bathroom floor, Christian could not help but laugh. “Which one?”
Gray cocked his foot to kick him, but Jake bellowed “NOW!” from the other room.
There was no mistaking the way he jumped. Not like a friend. Not like an employee. Not like a legitimate partner in crime.
Just exactly like a prison bitch.
Christian laughed some more. It felt powerfully good. It felt…accurate. He might be doomed, but he at least had a handle on what was going on around here.
If he had to die—as he’d always known he would, eventually, at the hands of some psycho closet case—he could at least die speaking truth to perversity.
He’d been training for this moment all his life.
“Your master’s calling,” he said, as Gray shuffled glumly toward the doorway. “Take it hard up the ass once, for me.”
“You’ll be shuttin’ up soon,” were Gray’s famous last words.
Then he was out the door.
Christian heaved a whickering sigh of uncertain relief. Gray would have flat-out executed him. Jake liked to play games.
Maybe there was a way out of this, after all.
The bathroom doorway was yawning, empty. Across the hallway, Jake’s bedroom loomed. The only window was at ceiling height, barely deep enough to crawl through.
But the hallway was right there.
There was a part of Christian that thought what if I just run right now? Grab Jasper’s keys, and motor on out? Call the cops? Call the National Guard? Call whoever it takes to take this fucker down forever?
It was a beautiful thought, but it was not the truth.
Jake stepped into the doorway.
And Christian got ready to die.
Even without the baseball bat, Jake would have been terrifying. He was six feet and change of muscle-bound, weight-trained, reanimated corpse-flesh: a still-handsome man-mountain that filled the doorway like a portrait barely squeezed into the frame.
And then there were his eyes: smoldering coals that flickered from black to red, then black again. They did not look real, but they were painfully expressive.
Jake smiled, and it would have been a winning smile, were it not for the red-black agitation in those eyes.
Was it shame that Christian saw there? A little homosexual panic, cutting into his godlike confidence?
Jake stepped forward, feigning nonchalance as he stepped over Jasper’s body, took a lazy check-swing with the bat. “You were saying?”
“Oh, faggot, please.” Christian rallied inside, whipped up his best no-nonsense smile, made a point of looking Jake right in his nightmare eyes. “I mean, I know you’re the biggest swinging dick in these parts, and all the ladies just swoon, and cock-a-doodle-doo for you…”
“But…?” Jake was bridling, no matter how hard he tried to keep that check-how-cool-I-am smirk etched into his face. He did not like the look in Christian’s eyes, did not like being seen that clearly.
“But let’s face it, sweetheart. You’ll fuck anything that walks or crawls, if it’ll get you what you want. You’re proud, but you’re not that proud. Are ya?”
The words stung. It was amazing to watch. Knives hadn’t worked. Embalming hadn’t worked.
But calling him a faggot?
Now that hit a nerve.
“You don’t know me,” Jake sna
rled: smirk gone entirely, body tensed to strike.
Christian just laughed. It was all he had left.
But it felt so goddamn good.
“Again: bitch, please!” Leaning into it now. Savoring those final moments of bliss. “If I kept that much secret pet man-ass in my closet, I’d have to change my name to Karl Rove…”
That was when Jake swung the bat.
Christian automatically threw himself backward, raised his right arm up without even thinking. A dull double-crack resounded, and the arm went all floppy as the bones inside it shattered.
Christian screamed—the good part over—sagging against the toilet as Jake brought the bat up. Utterly demolished, his right arm fluttered on the tile, leaving him wide open.
Jake hit him again. Ribs cracked and splintered in his chest, crushing the breath out of him in big, blood-misted gusts. The pain ratcheted way past unbelievable.
The bat came up again.
Then wavered in midair, as if thinking about it.
Please, Christian thought, but could not bring himself to say it.
That was when Jake started smiling again.
And lowered the bat, ever so slowly.
“You don’t know me at all,” he said.
It wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter. History was always written by the winner. The last one standing. And that would be Jake.
Christian hung in for as long as he could before keeling over on his good side, hacking up blood from deep within. One of his lungs burned and bubbled when he tried to take a breath. More deep red liquid upsurged.
Jake hovered for a long, awful moment, tapping the tip of the bat on the floor beside Christian’s skull.
“And you don’t get off that easy,” he added.
Then he rose up and shattered the overhead light.
Glass ricocheted off the porcelain and tile, cascading down onto Christian and the floor. A couple stray pieces bit into his cheek, his useless arm. But there was nothing he could do.
“You better hope I’m wrong,” Jake continued, “while you’re listening to the others die. Cuz my hope is that—a couple of hours from now—you’ll still be puking up your own lungs, and I’ll have nothing better to do. Kinda like stompin’ a bug.”
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