False Gods

by W. Glenn Duncan Jr.

  “I need to get to those huts,” I said, as I checked the M16. I re-inserted the full magazine (the previous owner hadn’t even bothered to cock the damn thing), chambered a round, cycled the charging handle and flicked the selector switch to burst. “Cover me.”

  “You got it, boss-man.”

  We edged our way to the end of the dormitory (was this the one where the boy was sleeping? would he still be asleep with all the gunfire?) then scampered across an open section of gravel to take cover behind a rusting water tank. In the distance a couple of automatic weapons rattled and rounds ricocheted. Closer, a deep, resounding crack rolled and echoed through the night.

  It sounded like thunder of the gods.

  I turned back towards Cowboy. He flashed me a grin.

  “Don’t you worry none, thas jes’ Mimi with her new toy.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “Barrett em-eighty-two sniper rifle. Damn gun’s bigger’n she is, but she shore is a sweet shot with it. Now you git goin’.”

  He stepped back and fired his Ruger around the corner of the tank stand. I swung the M16 to hang behind my back, tightened my grip on the Ithaca and bolted from behind the concrete and metal protection.

  The distance to the nearest hut wasn’t more than seventy-five yards.

  It felt like a million.

  I ran as hard as I could, hearing the Ruger boom behind me, hoping like hell it was enough to keep the bad guy’s heads down. I pushed harder, running parallel to the long wall of the church and trying to ignore the pain in my right ankle.

  I dived for cover at the corner of the hut as I saw puffs of dust appear at my feet and the chugging sounds of the automatic fire reached me. I hit the dirt, rolled and slammed up behind the hut as Mimi’s toy cracked again and the chugging stopped.

  I took a couple of deep breaths and stood up. The small square windows on the hut wall were too high to see inside.

  Poked my head around the far end of the hut and then retreated. No windows or doors on the end wall either. I’d have to expose myself by going to the far side of the hut, the one nearest to the shooters, to find the door.

  I hoped there was one.

  Worked my way around the end of the building, grabbed the M16 one-handed, took a deep breath and stepped out from the shadows. I fired a burst in the direction of the barracks, then turned and ran along the front of the hut.

  There.

  I spotted the doorway, loosed another burst across my body and crashed my shoulder into the door. The frame and door splintered and I fell inside, scrabbling to get away from the open doorway. I felt awkward there, pushing my heels against the floor and sliding my butt further into the shadows, while trying to not drop the shotgun, whip the M16 from side to side, and search for threats all at the same time.

  I’d fallen into an alcove, a vestibule I guess, with two doors opening from it. I leaned the shotgun in a corner, and stood, drawing the .45 from the holster, nestling the grip safety into my fist.

  A plaintive, “Hello? Who is it?” wafted from under one of the padlocked doors.

  It didn’t sound like the sort of voice who would be standing on the other side of the door with a machete, but you never know.

  In the end I knew I couldn’t wait there all night. I grabbed the Colt a little tighter and put my shoulder through the left hand door.

  Chapter 38

  I crashed through the door, stumbled a little with the impact. I got my feet back under me and had the Colt sweeping the room before I registered the source of the voice I’d heard.

  She was young—late teens or early twenties—pretty and blonde, in a downcast kind of way.

  Lying on the only piece of furniture in the room, a metal cot, leaning on one elbow and dressed in what had once been a white robe. The visions of my dream flooded back and a chill clambered up my spine.

  “Kimberly?” I said.

  My voice trembled and I hoped that she couldn’t tell.

  She shook her head. “I’m Bethany.”

  “Do you know Kimberly? Do you know where she is?”

  “Everybody knows Kimberly,” the girl said as she lay down again, on her back, stared up at the grubby ceiling. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  She’s here.

  “She’s the new girl. She’s his favorite now.” Flat voice. Monotone. “I used to be his favorite.” She turned her head to look me in the eye. “I did.”

  Automatic fire rolled across the compound again before Mimi’s Barrett cracked the night open and all was silent again.

  That won’t last forever.

  “Where is she? Where is Kimberly?”

  “If she’s not in her room, she’ll be in The Temple. Where I should be.”

  “The temple?”

  I stepped closer to the cot.

  A tear squeezed from the corner of her eye.

  “Is that the building behind the church?” I asked.

  She shook her head and rolled over to face the wall.

  “Where is she?”

  The room was silent.

  “Goddamn it, help me out here!”

  The figure on the cot shuddered and twisted her head to look back over her shoulder at me.

  “You shouldn’t blaspheme. Father doesn’t allow it.” She looked back at the wall again.

  I shook my head and stepped back into the alcove.

  I fired a shot into the night, to keep whoever was out there honest, then shouldered my way through the other closed door.

  I was starting to overdose on deja vu as I stepped through the doorway.

  Same room.

  Same girl. Almost.

  Same story.

  “If she’s not in her room, then she’ll be in The Temple.”

  I stepped out of the room and heard Mimi split the night apart with her rifle.

  And again.

  And again.

  Laying down cover fire.

  I grabbed the Ithaca—no way I was leaving it behind—and burst from the alcove with the M16 spewing cartridges as I fired a couple of three round bursts. I cut left and back to the shadows at the end of the hut.

  I held my back against the wall, took a deep breath, then sprinted through the uncovered gap between huts, taking a knee in the shadows behind the corner of the nearest one. Cowboy crashed out of the night and landed next to me.

  “Thought you might want some back up. Meem’s gonna keep everyone’s heads down so’s we can move about a mite easier.”

  “Okay,” I said. “There are two girls in that first hut. Neither of them are Kimberly.”

  He nodded in the darkness.

  “Any word on where she is?”

  “She’s here. In her hut or the temple. That’s probably the square building at the back, behind the church.”

  “Let’s git goin’.”

  I nodded and squeezed out from behind the hut to lay down more fire. Far away, the Barrett cracked again, echoing over the gunfire from the other side of the compound.

  Cowboy ran around the end wall and I heard the familiar crunch of a door being shouldered in. Another, duller, thump, followed by a few minutes of silence.

  Another thump, silence, then a shout.

  “Comin’ out.”

  I let loose another burst and felt Cowboy slam against the wall near my shoulder.

  “No good,” he said. “Dianne and an empty room. Said the same thing you heard. ‘In her room or the temple.’”

  “She ask to come with you?”

  “Nope. Just lay on her lil’ metal bed and stared at the ceiling. Kinda sad.”

  I didn’t have the time to think about it right then but, looking back, that night was all different kinds of sad.

  We worked our way through the next row of huts with no better results. More broken doors, another blonde girl and no help.

  Four of the huts were empty.

  We found ourselves at the opposite corner of the collection of huts from where we had started, looking across twenty yards of unprote
cted gravel to the building we’d seen the girls walk to.

  The temple.

  The sound of automatic fire near the tunnel intensified and I thought I heard the roar of a car engine. Whatever it was, it was drowned out by another deep, echoing crack from the Barrett.

  We would be shielded from Dariell’s would-be soldiers by the bulk of the church, so Cowboy and I were a little more relaxed as we shuffled across the gap and crept along the side of the building, looking for a way in.

  When the shots rang out from behind us, they surprised me almost enough to stop and stare.

  Almost.

  We hoofed it to the corner of the building and dived into a corner between the front of the building and the low, unpainted, wooden porch.

  “Who was that?” Cowboy asked.

  “Don’t know. Haven’t seen anyone following us. You?”

  “Nope.”

  I snuck a quick look back around the corner, keeping my head down at ground level, hoping it would throw off whoever was now shooting at us. Maybe they’d snuck around behind the temple building and we’d missed them.

  Nothing.

  No-one moved out there.

  The singing was louder now.

  I drew back and stood up. Peered out again, squinting hard to see anything moving in the shadows.

  A spot in the sky flashed and a chunk of wood siding above my head went spinning away.

  Huh?

  “You get him pegged that time?” Cowboy whispered.

  “It looked like it came from up in the … Oh, fuck.”

  “Boss-man?”

  “It was from the rim of the bowl. It’s one of Steve’s guys. They might be getting up their collective courage to come down and join the party.”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “I know. We’ve got to find Kimberly before Steve turns this whole thing into a shit-storm.”

  “Aw, it ain’t that.”

  “What is it?”

  “Those guys.” I followed the nod of his head and saw three men with automatic weapons stalk around the far corner of another building. They saw us at the same time and one shouted.

  We were up and scaling the steps to the porch as they raked it with fire. I pressed the trigger on the M16, holding it one-handed and hoping like hell I could hit one of them. Or at least keep them nervous.

  Then it chugged one last time and ran dry.

  Shit!

  I let it fall and lunged for the set of double doors in the center of the building’s front, which looked like the main method of entry and, at that point, our only option.

  Cowboy and I hit the doors together as more bullets tore up the porch behind our feet. We sprawled full length on the floor inside and rolled to kick the doors shut again. The shooting outside stopped.

  Everything went quiet.

  I lay on my back on the dark wooden floor, with my heels pressed against the door, looking up at the ceiling of a small foyer.

  A glass chandelier over my head cast miniature rainbows on the white painted walls. A small wooden table along one wall was draped in bright purple fabric and supported an armada of flickering candles.

  The smell of scented wax coated my throat.

  The front doors didn’t look strong enough for my liking, so I wriggled to one side to get out of the line of fire, in case the two remaining guys decided to try shooting through them. I was set and breathing hard before I realized that Cowboy had done the same.

  “You keep on goin’ boss-man,” he said as he jammed a speed loader into the Ruger. “Find your girl. I’ll stay here and slow these good ol’ boys down a mite.” I handed him the shotgun and all the shells I had in my pockets. Took a moment to refill the .45’s clip. I duck-walked across the foyer to a second set of double doors opposite the first.

  I gripped the Colt in my fist and reached up, grabbed the doorknob.

  I nodded at Cowboy.

  He nodded back.

  I wrenched the door handle, pushed it away from me and sprang into the room beyond in a roll, came up in a kneeling crouch, and looked down the Colt’s sights as I scanned for threats.

  It was the largest of all the rooms I’d seen, and the most opulent.

  The space was maybe forty feet to a side, painted white and decked out around its perimeter with religious statues and murals on the walls. The floor was tiled with marble. Candles guttered on wall shelves, in niches and even on the floor. There must have been hundreds of the damned things.

  Doorways on each side of the room led to places unseen. I hadn’t noticed other doors on the outside walls, so I assumed there were rooms behind those doors. Two more doorways lurked on the back wall, opposite where I’d come in.

  Deep, rich red rugs led from each of the doorways toward the center of the hall, where a circle of columns flanked a raised platform. A big beam, detailed with curlicues and writing, connected the columns up at the ceiling line, creating a sort of circular room within the hall.

  The writing I could see proclaimed OU MUST GIVE YOURSELF COMPLETELY TO YO

  Bright coloured fabric draped between the columns and the ceiling within was domed upwards, painted with a twilight sky scene.

  The platform inside the columns was raised above the floor below with three wide, marbled steps circling the whole shebang. Plush cushions littered the platform with mountains of fabric and pillows scattered on top.

  The whole thing looked like some weird-ass hybrid of a Greek temple and Turkish sitting room, put together by an Italian decorator in the middle of a Texas desert.

  Jolting me from my amateur architectural critique was the sight of girls sitting amongst the fabrics. Five of them sitting in a group, like a group of high-schoolers gossiping and laughing their way through a spring lunchtime. But these girls weren’t gossiping. Or laughing. Or talking.

  Or smiling.

  What they appeared to be doing was working hard to ignore the sixth girl, lying on the other side of the platform, her legs drawn up to her stomach. She sobbed and keened and sniffed, and wrapped her arms tighter around her knees. I took a step towards the knot of girls and they looked up as one.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised by now, but I was. They all looked like Kimberly. And Lucy. And each other.

  What is it with this psycho and young blonde girls?

  “Kimberly?” I asked.

  One of the girls looked at my gun, raised her arm and extended a trembling finger towards the back wall of the room. The others shot her sideways glances and one reached up and forced her arm down into her lap. The sixth girl moaned softly in the background.

  The shotgun boomed behind me, kicking me back into gear.

  I stood up and walked around the central columned space to the doors on the rear wall.

  The first room was much smaller and decked out like the main room. Marble, bright fabrics, a mess of flickering, candles with a large bed in one corner covered in pillows and soft fabrics. Another Kimberly-look-alike lay naked on the bed, with legs spread wide and a blank look on her face.

  I stepped into the room.

  “Father. I’m ready for communion,” she said in almost no voice.

  “Communion’s cancelled,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t resist as I tore a piece of purple fabric off the wall and draped it over her. Her hand was cold and dry in mine as I helped her up and we walked back out to the other girls.

  “All of you,” I said, “go hide in one of the other rooms. Keep the door closed and stay quiet.”

  “Ana will want to know why we aren’t here to serve Father,” said the girl who pushed the traitor’s arm down.

  A thousand things to say ran through my mind. I decided that none of them would make any sense right then.

  “This is how you need to serve Father,” I said. “Go. Now.” Weak, but it got them moving towards the far corner of the hall.

  As I settled myself in front of the second door on the back wall, I could read the rest of the writing abo
ve the columns from this vantage point.

  The entire slogan read, YOU MUST GIVE YOURSELF COMPLETELY TO YOUR FATHER TO REACH THE WAY AND THE TRUTH.

  I wondered if Dariell would be ready to give himself when I reached for him.

  Then I put my boot through the door.

  Chapter 39

  I followed through on my kick to the door and ended up a couple of steps into the room, with the Colt up.

  One of the two people on the bed scuttled sideways like a crab while he tried to cover himself, get off the bed, think about getting out the door, realize he was trapped, and assert his power all at the same time.

  He didn’t do any of them well, though he tried hard on the power thing.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” he bellow-squeaked. “You’ve violated the Inner Sanctum of The Temple.”

  I’ll give him this; the words sounded powerful.

  That they were being squeaked by a short, skinny, naked man with a shrinking erection kind of ruined the effect I think he was aiming for.

  I blinked twice, trying to reconcile the pathetic sight in front of me with the death and destruction outside, but it didn’t match up. He started up again.

  “You shouldn’t be in here …”

  My trigger finger itched.

  “… Inner Sanctum of …”

  I kept it together for about half a second more, then I pistol-whipped him across the face.

  The gun-sight must have caught him over the eye because a nasty-looking cut appeared and a line of blood headed downwards. His knees started to go. I grabbed him under the armpit with my left hand and hauled him upright.

  I pointed the Colt at his left eye.

  “I swear Dariell, give me a fucking reason. And, in case you’re wondering, yes, passing out is a fucking reason. So is saying or doing anything I don’t tell you to.”

  He declined to respond.

  While I’d been helping Dariell understand the rules of the game, Kimberly hadn’t moved from her position on the bed. She was naked, on elbows and knees, with her butt in the air and her legs spread but, based on her reaction, I might have walked in on her reading her bible.