Neither one was buying the bullshit.
Only then did Esther start to panic.
And that was, of course, when the screaming began…
Chapter Thirty-eight
The following things went down very quickly: feeding each other, as the hellwind fed the flames of Judgment Day.
First, there was Emmy, reaching up on her tiptoes, touching her fingertips to Mathias’s lips. She was almost done sobbing, almost done saying good-bye. But she was also nearly out of time.
“Forgive me,” she whispered. “Please forgive me for bringing you here.”
She lowered herself unsteadily, dragged her fingertips along his bloody chest, and steadied herself there, before turning to kneel in prayer…
…and the demon was there, directly before her: greasy-eyed, leering, reeking of sex and decay.
“So you like my son,” the demon hissed, running horrible hands down the length of its body.
Emmy shrieked, her worst nightmares confirmed.
And before she knew it, she had run straight past the cackling demon and into the curtained sliding glass door. Clawing at the curtains, still shrieking.
Then parting them, and running out into the yard…
The cops were now on red alert. Guns out. All hesitation gone.
“Time to tell us what’s happening,” LeGrange said. “Now.”
Esther wanted to warn them. She really did. But her mouth wouldn’t work, and no words would come out.
Evangeline heard the crazy, whooping sobs just outside and leapt to the window just in time to see Emmy running past. “Wait! HELP!!!”
At the front door, the cat was out of the bag.
“Fuck this…” Jake said.
Eddie tried to say, “No…”
Jake threw open the door, shoved Esther aside, and stepped outside, red eyes flaring.
“Someone lookin’ for me? Cuz I’m right here.”
The cops reared back at Jake’s approach: Peet in alarm, LeGrange in something like awe.
Peet dropped into shooting stance, aimed carefully at the dead center of Jake’s chest. “Stand down!” she hollered…
…just as Sheriff LeGrange dropped to his knees, chanting, “Oh dear God, sweet heavenly savior…!”
Peet’s jaw dropped. “Bill! What the fuck?”
Jake loomed over LeGrange—wrathful, yet amused—and reached for his face, as if to take him by the hair.
Peet shot Jake three times in the chest.
Each impact clearly stung him, but did not knock him back a single step. No blood came from his wounds. Packing foam floated out of the gaping exit wounds in his back.
Less in terror than despair, Esther screamed.
Jake staggered, but did not fall. He started laughing.
And the sheriff continued to pray.
Emmy ran around the front of the house, past the woodpile and chopping block, to the front yard. The light from the porch spilled out across the front lawn to touch the abandoned playground. She braced herself to run through it, when something like lightning struck three times, gunshot thunder right on its heels so loud it almost knocked her on her behind.
Now she froze. Hidden on the edge of the light, unseen by Jake or the police, unable to speak or to scream, or even to breathe.
Watching, as if none of it were real…
Peet turned and ran for the cruiser. The dead man shambled after her, audibly popping stitches, but gaining a yard on her with every stride.
Training told her to turn around and shoot, fire over her shoulder; but there were bystanders behind him, and three shots to the chest hadn’t even made him bleed.
Jake swiped at her. She dug in and threw herself forward, goosed by the pain of a hank of her hair ripping out of her head in his stinking claws.
She threw a wild glance behind her and saw LeGrange, still kneeling, now angled toward them as he took a careful marksman’s stance.
Thank God, she thought, pouring everything she had into the ten yards between herself and the cruiser’s open door. The shotgun was there, and if that didn’t kill this son of a bitch, it would at least cut him in half. Let him chase her with a bifurcated spine, scuttling like an accordion crab. See how goddamn scary he was then.
Nine yards now, and closing. She could feel him falling behind, could almost feel LeGrange drawing a bead on him. The sheriff was an excellent shot, especially under pressure; and even with the wind howling as it was, she was willing to bet her partner could take out Connaway’s legs from there with no problem.
Six yards now, each thudding heartbeat racing her feet to the all-American strobing light show’s source. She was so close she could almost smell the leather interior, hear the radio chatter, taste the cordite of her shot-gun’s imminent muzzle flash.
Then LeGrange fired at last. Aim perfect, as always.
And her chest blew open from behind.
The impact and wet, meat-spackled momentum carried her another five feet before her legs locked, then buckled entirely. She dropped to her hands and knees, moaning and squirting, reaching out as if to find her badge, her name tag, the missing bits of her heart and lung.
Slowly, fighting for every inch, she sank down on her belly in the dry grass and bloodied dirt, still desperately crawling forward.
But the five-yard line now seemed a mile away.
And the footsteps were almost upon her.
The little girl had spunk. You had to give her that. Even as he dug a toe in her ribs and kicked her over, there was fight in her dying eyes.
Jake turned, took a look behind him. Eddie and Gray had joined the crowd: Eddie wrapped around Esther, as if to protect her; Gray jumpy and grim, about to go off on another of his bitchy amphetamine fits.
He looked back down at his hot cop-eroo. She knew she was dying, too. Still, she sucked in razored breaths, pushing gouts of blood out of her chest in anxious arcs, so she could try to tell him he was under arrest. Or a motherfucker. Or what ever.
Now faithful Sheriff LeGrange approached, Old Testament adoration in his eyes, the revolver in his hand quite forgotten.
Jake stared down at Peet, then knelt beside her. Shushing her, with sympathetic eyes.
“I got a funny feeling about you,” he said. “Like you got a little something. Like you might be back, too.”
LeGrange came up beside Jake, also dropped to his knees.
“All praise toward the Resurrection, Jenny,” he said. “We will meet on the other side, in glory.”
Jake whistled. “Now that’s a true believer. Gimme your gun.”
Without a twitch of hesitation, LeGrange handed it over.
Jake aimed it at LeGrange’s head.
“Do you believe that if I pulled the trigger right now, your life would not be over?”
“I do.”
“And would you devote your life—both here and hereafter—to serving the One True God?”
“I would.”
“Then pray for her to join us. Amen.”
Jake turned and shot Deputy Peet right in the heart.
“See you soon.”
Part VIII
Lisa And The Resurrection Rangers
Chapter Thirty-nine
The ribbon of road cut a yellow-lined stripe straight through the desert darkness. And thank God for that. Because even with his high beams up, Big Keith’s headlights had their work cut out for them, slicing through the whipped-up particulate wind.
It wasn’t a full-blown sandstorm yet, but it was enough to buffet the monster truck’s cab, and fill the air with the steady crackle of the great Ford F-700’s paint job getting eaten away, granule by granule, as if nibbled to death by gnats.
Jasper’s would-be date for the night—the lovely Lisa Fontana—was riding shotgun, in every sense of the term: hunched up in the passenger seat, loaded twelve-gauge at her side. Her dark-tressed angel face was not so sweet at the moment—all fierce, set features, and frightened eyes—and her short, stacked body was definitely not dress
ed for the occasion.
She had gone out to night in the hope of romance—or at least bodacious sex—and had dolled up accordingly. So there was a whole lot of leg showing between her black pumps and her short, tight skirt; and a whole lot of slender midriff above that, before the protuberant halter top kicked in.
Which meant that part of her felt like an action-vixen in a Russ Meyer/Quentin Tarantino film. An equal-to-larger part felt like an idiot.
And the rest of her was a little too freaked out to worry about stupid shit like that.
Lisa looked at Big Keith, who was true to his name—a whopping six foot seven inches of muscle draped in old, fading biker-and-prison tattoos—then snuck a peek at the speedometer. From where she sat, it looked like they were barely pushing seventy.
She wanted, of course, to go much faster. But he’d made the extremely good point that, unfortunately, they couldn’t.
The “Murdelator”—which was the ridiculous, obligatory moniker he’d chosen for this steroidal automotive nightmare, pushing the limits of street legality—was a giant pickup truck suspended high atop 55-inch Michelin radials, with 2.5-ton military axles required to keep those babies rolling.
It was built for lugging a dozen men to a work site, loading shit up, putting on occasional shows, and terrifying every other driver on the road. That, and getting ten miles per gallon.
But it wasn’t built for speed.
The good news was, they weren’t likely to be pulled over for speeding, and detained by inquisitive cops. Which was something they did not want to happen. Especially not with a shotgun in her lap.
The bad news was self-explanatory.
“So what do you think?” she asked. “Ten minutes?”
Big Keith shrugged, helplessly glanced at her legs. “’Round about. Fifteen, at the worst.”
Lisa groaned. It seemed too much like forever, and an awful lot like too late.
Big Keith nodded, grimly sympathetic, visibly resisted the impulse to pat her on her knee. “Honestly, darlin’? If you heard what you thought you heard, fifteen minutes isn’t gonna mean shit.”
“I know,” she said; and the second she said it out loud, the implications came crashing down again. She was ashamed of the quaver in her voice as she added, “And if not—”
“Let me put it this way. Either there’s a situation, and we have to deal with it. Which we will, if we have to. Believe me…”
“I know.” Fiercely nodding.
“…or nothing happened, and you get that nice hot date you’ve been dreaming about.”
Lisa allowed herself to laugh, a welcome emotional port in the storm. “I guess I made that pretty obvious, huh?”
“I’d say you got it just about right.” And this time, when he looked her over and whistled, the little twinkle in his eye made it clear how much he was rooting for Jasper, not himself.
She smiled. “Thank you, Big Keith. You’re a gentleman and a wolf.”
He chuckled. “It took me a long time, but that’s about the best I’ve figured out how to be.”
She laughed, and his eyes went back to the road. But she kept watching him, appraising him now, much harder than she’d ever felt the need to do before.
Up until to night, he’d just been the enormous, scary-looking guy at PJ’s Pub who liked to throw darts. They’d never exchanged more than a handful of howdy-dos and random bar-jabber, most of it raucous and harmlessly risque.
But that was before to night, and the murders, and that terrifying call.
Now, suddenly, he was the only backup she had.
Which made him, in a weird way, the most important person in her world.
“So you’re sure you know where we’re going, right?”
“Shit, kid. I’m almost sixty years old. I threw eggs at that fucking place in high school, back in 1971.”
“That was way before Jake, right?”
Big Keith snorted. “Waaaaaaay before Jake. That nitwit didn’t show up until, what? Three years ago?”
Lisa shrugged. “I guess last year was the first I heard of his show.”
“You ever actually try to watch that worthless piece of…?” He floundered for a word more descriptive than shit, couldn’t find one, let it go. “Swear to God, the only people dumber than him would be the ones who actually fell for his crap.”
“I gather you’re not a Christian.”
Big Keith grinned and shook his head. “Then you would gather wrong.”
Lisa’s eyebrows went up. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I am not. And that’s why people like him make me so sick to my goddamn stomach.”
Big Keith stepped just a little harder on the gas, appeared to steel himself.
In the rearview mirror, Lisa caught a glimpse of distant headlights. The only other lights on the road.
“You might’ve gathered, from the looks of me,” he said, “that I spent some time in prison. Did some shit that I’m not proud of. If I could take it back, I would.”
Lisa nodded. “I know the feeling.”
“You done some time?”
“Nope.” She grinned. “I pretty much always got away with it.”
He laughed out loud. “Well, you’re still young. Give it time. You’ll get hammered eventually.”
“I didn’t say I never got hammered.”
“Fair enough.” He laughed again.
“Just that I never went to prison. But you were saying…”
“I was saying, there’s not a whole lot of saints in there, although you might meet a couple. And all of them were sinners first. So the Bible is very popular.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“It gets passed around a lot, like cigarettes and larceny tips and AIDS and the Koran. But out of the batch, that was the one that spoke to me.”
Lisa nodded, looked back at the speedometer. Surely at least a minute had passed.
“And I gotta admit, I always had my problems with the whole Jesus thing. The big one being that I was never gonna be like Jesus, any more than I was gonna be like Einstein, or Steve McQueen. You know what I’m sayin’? I was never gonna be great. I was always gonna be this big dumb asshole who never did anything right.”
“Wow,” Lisa said.
“Then one day, I was reading Matthew 27—the crucifixion scene, in all its mockery and horror—and all of a sudden something hit me, the way it must have whacked St. Paul off his horse.
“And let me say, just so long as we’re at it,” he continued, clearly on a roll, “that St. Paul was NO FUCKING JESUS, okay? He was just another asshole, like me.”
“But…”
“No. There’s no real ‘but’ about it. He was an asshole. I was an asshole. We had a lot in common.
“But as for me, what happened was: I’m trying to find myself in the crucifixion scene. Trying to figure out where I fit in. Am I Jesus? No. Am I one of the people standing around, crying and lamenting? Well, maybe. Although—knowing me—I woulda died trying to kill those stupid fuckers. But evidently, that didn’t happen.”
“Wow,” Lisa repeated, having nothing to add but her full attention.
“And that was when it hit me: I didn’t try to stop the fucking centurions because I was one of the fucking centurions. And if it wasn’t me, it was someone just like me.”
She was amazed to watch a tear slide down his cheek.
“I was one of those ignorant goons that got paid to nail him down, then hoist him up, then stand around and laugh about it.”
“Oh, I don’t think so…”
“I don’t think so, either. I know so,” he said, and shot her a glance that carried all his soul behind it.
It shut her mouth faster than a sock to the jaw, though there was no violence in his eyes. At least not for her.
“And that was what Jesus gave me,” he continued. “Just like he did for those dumb-ass Roman soldiers who, by the end of it, came to see the light.
“All of a sudden, I realized that I didn’t want to be
that guy. Couldn’t be that fucking guy anymore. Couldn’t bear it for one more second.
“Which is to say: Jesus made me want to be a better person. Not perfect—cuz that was never gonna happen—but maybe just good enough.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do.” One tear of her own was rolling, too.
“Good enough to deserve to be here, on this beautiful planet, with all of God’s gifts all around me. Good enough to know enough to help other people, given half a chance…”
“Exactly…”
“So that when I die, I don’t have to crawl before the Lord like a grub on its belly, begging for forgiveness I never even tried to earn.”
“Amen,” she said, wiping away the tear.
“Amen, indeed.” Wiping away his own. “That’s why pissants like Connaway are the lowest of the low. He’s not a real televangelist, and he’s sure as hell not a real Christian.
“You know what he is? He’s a cable access cult leader, with this batshit battalion of resurrection rangers that spend half their lives lazin’ around on their fucking couches, thinkin’ that by throwing him money and blow jobs, they’re somehow gonna live forever. Which, incidentally, has less than nothing to do with anything Christ Jesus ever said or did.
“That’s why part of me actually hopes that he did fake his death, like some people have been sayin’; and that he’s standing there, pulling his shenanigans, when we walk in the goddamn door.
“Cuz I would gladly knock his lying ass straight out his forehead, just on general principles. Not to mention the thought of him even thinking about fucking with my bro.”
The temperature in the monster truck cab had just gone up ten degrees, without anyone touching the heater. Lisa watched him pause, mopped a little sweat off her brow, and thought to herself how lucky am I to have him with me…?
A half hour ago, back at the bar, it had been a different story.
The redneck crowd at PJ’s Pub, on the outskirts of town, had been rowdy to night. Nothing unusual there. Lots of loud banter and rip-roarin’ laughter, poking out like rebel flags of many nations over the steady soundscape blare of George Thoroughgood, Kid Rock, and Kenny Chesney.
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