The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  Garvey said: “Used to be mice, but the pet shop’s gone. He’ll happily enough eat eggs. Quail if I can find them, but he’ll put away a chicken egg.”

  The phone rang. I trailed him into the kitchen and heard his side of a short conversation with someone—one of the Quints, maybe.

  Garvey said: “Yes . . . half an hour, okay . . . all glory to God.”

  He hung up and vanished into the bedroom. The door shut. Ten minutes later he came out in the tuxedo.

  He said: “How do I look?”

  “Your bowtie’s on crooked.”

  He allowed me to unkink his tie and centre it below his chin.

  Garvey holstered his revolver. “You’ll take good care of Duke?”

  “I will.”

  I trailed him down the stairwell. “Don’t do this, Garvey. Don’t be such a fucking . . . Follower.”

  He turned. His face was clouded with dull rage. He opened the apartment door and stomped out, down the stairs to the street. I watched him. He got in the van, which accelerated down the block, hit the corner and slued round the bend.

  Sometime later the air went as shimmery as a clean stretch of tarmac on a summer’s day. Hot wind buffeted my face. When the second Damascus Tower began to fall I turned away.

  Big Decisions

  I drove home. Duke the rattlesnake lay curled in its aquarium on the passenger seat.

  I entered the apartment foyer. Doc Newbarr must have stopped by; a brown bottle had been left in my mailbox. I opened the apartment door to find my mother and Amira on the floor playing Scrabble. They sat cross-legged, hunched over their tile racks. I set Duke’s aquarium beside Frog’s tank. We peered at the snake with a mixture of disgust and perplexity.

  “Gross,” said Amira.

  “Maybe he thinks you’re gross,” I said. “Not everything can be cute and cuddly. But it’s true. Finding something to love in a snake is an uphill slog.”

  The phone rang. I picked up on the tenth ring and just listened.

  “Jonah.”

  I said: “Swift.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Not really. They say when all’s said and done the cockroaches will be the last things left,” I told him. “How did you know they were going to bomb the Towers?”

  “A gypsy peered into her crystal ball and forewarned of a big bang in my future.”

  “The Quints won’t quit til you’re all pushing daisies.”

  “Let me worry about those hombres,” he said. “The gypsy also said you visited Murphy. She foretold Murphy would cough up his secret.”

  “I paid for it, same as you, I’m sure.”

  “Did it shock you?”

  “Time was it would’ve. Now, not so much.”

  “Do you really think the Quints are after me, Jonah? What am I, in end tally? An irritant. A thorn in the Republic’s side. The Quints—Quads?—wish me dead and I’ve no doubt they’ll have my head before long but tell me: who is the most valuable commodity in this city?”

  It took a while to twig.

  “Murphy and the Immaculate Mother’s bastard kid.”

  “Correct.”

  “So . . . the Quints are blowing the city apart just to steal The One Child?”

  Swift said: “A man may blow up an entire mountain under the belief there’s a diamond inside.”

  “But The One Child is a . . .” What had Murphy called him? Forty pounds of useless. “Not the miracle we thought he was.”

  “So long as only a few know that, the illusion is maintained.”

  “So why not just take him?” I said. “Take him and leave.”

  “I suspect your Prophet saw his son as a bargaining chip so stashed him away. A day will come where the Quints rip the location out of him by force—but they’ve got me to deal with first.”

  “And you—what do you want out of this?”

  Swift said, “Only an audience with your Prophet.”

  “Why?”

  A click, followed by the dial tone.

  “Who was that?” Mom asked me.

  “Telephone solicitor selling pocket devotionals.”

  Night fell. Amira and my mother bundled away to the bedroom. I sat by the window. When those first blue waves of dawn began to wash over the horizon I took up pen and paper and fired off a note to them.

  I have to go. Will not be gone long—today, back tomorrow night. If I am not back by then, call my friend, Mr. Newbarr; his number is below. He will wait with you until I return. I will be back. I promise.

  I taped it to Frog’s aquarium where they would find it when they awoke.

  Kidnapping

  At street level you could hardly see the dawn. What I first mistook for early morning mist yet to burn off was dust. A grey sheen of it hung in the air like overlapping silk curtains.

  The prowl car was coated in dust, too. I emptied the washer reservoir to clear the windshield. When I pulled away dust blew off the hood and roof and trunk, a gauzy rooster tail fanning out my wake.

  I stopped at a Puritan’s Pantry. Deserted, everything covered in ash. I arced a flashlight over aisles littered with junk food, sticky with soda pop. Corn chips crunched under my boots and the sound made me think of that tractor trailer, all those tiny avian bones. I stuffed a grocery sack full of beef jerky and Angel Cloud powdered donuts and bottled water.

  I walked behind the coolers and cut a length of refrigeration tubing with my utility knife, coiled it, headed back through the store, grabbing a buffing shammy hanging beside pine-tree-shaped car air fresheners on the way out.

  I drove east until I found myself behind Doe’s apartment. I pocketed the bottle Newbarr had left in my mailbox, popped the trunk, grabbed the crowbar, and made for the fire escape. I socked the crowbar into a window and set my shoulder to it. The latch popped. I walked through a vacant apartment to the hallway. Doe was the next floor up. I headed up the stairwell and knocked on her door with the well-soaked shammy tucked behind my back.

  “Doe. It’s Murtag.”

  The whisper of feet. The door creaked with her weight set against it.

  “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not buying.”

  “For God’s sakes, Angela. I got a question for you; that’s it.”

  “Ask away.”

  “We really have to do it this way?”

  The deadbolt snapped. The door eased open.

  “You could’ve chosen a more hospitable hour to—”

  I jammed my foot into the doorway and hammered the door back. Doe stood there in a fleece nightgown patterned with red umbrellas, eyes crusty with sleep. I caught a whiff of her place—the stench of a hermit’s shack—as I pushed the chloroform-sodden shammy into her face.

  She lashed out with her leg, foot catching me between the slats but I held fast. “I’m sorry, Angela,” I said, gagging on my own pain. “I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. I just need—”

  She ripped at my face with her fingers, nasty catlike scratches that went for my eyes. I couldn’t blame her. Who’s to say I hadn’t gone round the bend like everyone else in this blighted city?

  I said, “It’s okay, I swear it’s okay,” as her eyes clouded over, lids drooping, and she went limp.

  By the time she awoke we were well outside the zone of guaranteed public safety. The chloroform left a red stain round her nostrils and lips. She looked like a girl who’d gorged herself in a gooseberry patch. She kept silent. She wasn’t scared, just wary.

  I’d taken Doe’s car, thinking it’d go easier on gas. No stations between here and our terminus; I’d have to siphon from abandoned vehicles, of which there was no shortage.

  The land was flat, spare, quiet. Wind hummed against the car frame. Creosote bushes rose roadside; flat windswept rocks dotted the earth like cobblestones. A sharp-shinned hawk rode an updraft in the cloud-
scudded southern sky.

  Doe rattled her handcuffs. “Necessary?”

  “For now.”

  “I need to pee. Happy to do it right here if we’re on a tight schedule.”

  I pulled into the rough shale of the breakdown lane. I unlocked her door and released the cuffs from her left wrist then closed it round my own.

  She said, “You’re coming with?”

  “I’m not keen on chasing you.”

  I led her to a redberry bush over the roadside berm. She picked a path across the shale in her slippered feet. Hiking up her gown, she hunkered down like a baseball catcher.

  “You staying for the show?”

  “I’ll look away.”

  A dark trickle cut down the berm. She wiped and stood and we went back to the car. I didn’t bother cuffing her this time. I was going to need her help.

  “So where are we headed on this field trip?”

  I didn’t say. She already knew. She said, “Fine way to get us killed, dearie.”

  We were down to a half a tank of gas when I started scavenging. The first car was a late-model Chevy two-door; it lay nose-down in a spillway falling away from the road. I grabbed the jerry can and length of refrigerator tube from the trunk. A ripe stench—please God let it be spoiled food—hit my nostrils as I searched for the gas cap release inside the car. When I sunk the tube into the tank and sucked, it came up dry. Evaporated or harvested by highwaymen.

  I drove on. I caught sight of a vehicle behind me—a dark speck in the rearview growing larger as it gained, taking on make and colour: a hunter green Ford Explorer. The paintwork was scarred to bare metal. A sticker on its front bumper read: MY KID IS AN HONOUR ROLL STUDENT! I kept the needle steady and drew my revolver, cocked it, laid it cross my lap.

  The Explorer nosed into the passing lane and inched up until we ran even. Its windows rolled down—the highwayman didn’t quite look like a highwayman. More a stockbroker who’d slogged through a rough day on the trading floor. He wore a white pinstriped shirt gone yellow under the arms.

  I flipped my badge over the window frame, let it hang. He turned to inspect it. The left half of his face was all but torn off. The flesh under his eye and down his cheek was missing; a thin web work of scar tissue had tightened over the bare muscle. He saw the badge. His hands lifted from the wheel in mock-fear: Ooooh, scary mistah policeman! He hammered the brakes and trailed us for a while before cutting down a corduroy road leading into the flood plains.

  The sky was darkening toward dusk when we came upon an Oldsmobile. A well-appointed model, the sort a Minister might’ve been ferried about in by a liveried chauffeur.

  It was parked in a gravelled crescent cut away from the road. In the backseat was a child’s backpack bearing the image of Saint Ignatius O’Reilly, the popular Saturday morning cartoon character.

  “Door’s locked,” I called to Doe. “Grab the tire iron.”

  She’d changed into the spare clothes I’d brought: a pair of jeans torn at the knees, drab wool sweater draped over a white t-shirt, steel-toed boots. When I smashed the window, new-car smell hit me. Glossy leather and the odometer reading under 2,000. A Republic registration sticker on the dash. I clawed under the driver’s seat for the gas cap release; the first lever my fingers closed on popped the trunk. I kept hunting about until Doe’s voice stopped me.

  “Jonah.”

  Doe’s stricken face swam in a pool of light cast by the dome light.

  “Oh, God, God, God . . .”

  There were two of them. A woman and a girl. A Minister’s wife and child, maybe. Perhaps she’d stolen her husband’s car, taken her daughter, set off for in hopes of escape.

  They lay, daughter curled into the mother’s chest, inside the trunk. The industrial fabric on the trunk lid hung in rags, bare metal underneath blood streaked strands. Their bodies shrivelled, flesh shrunk round the bones and faces heat-wizened. Apple dolls were what they looked like. Life-sized apple dolls. That they appeared to be smiling was a trick of bodily corruption, skin curling from their teeth, which were straight and white and emphasized the probability they had been mothers and daughters of privilege.

  “How do you figure they ended up in here?” I said, looking away. “Highwayman?”

  “That, or whoever was driving.”

  “What—husband? Father? Why?”

  “Why any of it?” Doe said simply.

  When I went to close the trunk Doe asked what the hell was I doing. “We can’t leave them there,” she said.

  “We don’t have much choice. Moving them’s going to be . . . messy.”

  Doe set a hand on the woman’s shoulder and gave an experimental tug. Some part of the woman’s anatomy gave way; a substance too thin and black to be blood, some noxious serum, soiled the carpet round her head.

  She only said, “You’re right. But we’re not taking the gas.”

  “I don’t see’s we got a whole lot of option in the matter.”

  “It’s ghoulish. We may as well crack into a coffin to steal the coins off a stiff’s eyes.”

  “Well,” I said evenly, “you don’t have to help.”

  In the end she helped.

  The dashboard clock read 10:32 when our hi-beams illuminated a sign reading NEW BEERSHEBA CITY LIMITS. Below that: POPULATION . . . but someone had spray painted over the number and left a black devouring mouth, a zero, in its place.

  The Lone Lookout

  The watchtower stood on wooden posts thirty feet above the grasslands overlooking the eastern outskirts of New Beersheba. A fire-spotter’s tower of a sort you’d find in the forest. A spotlight made a slow strafe of the city perimeter. A Bronco was parked beneath it.

  I eased up a quarter-furlong from the tower and cut the headlights.

  “What do you think?”

  “Ought to announce our intentions,” she said.

  I stood outside the car and laid on the horn. The spotlight pinned us; I squinted into the glare with arms raised. “We’re Acolytes! New Bethlehem!”

  The spotlight made a circuit round the car. A bullhorn-amplified voice said, “Come on if you’re coming.”

  We picked our way across the salt flats. Tips of salt-crusted weeds sparkled like diamond dust. A rope ladder had been lowered; I followed Doe up it to a trapdoor cut out of the watchtower’s floor.

  The tower was the size of those panic rooms well-to-do families used to have installed way back when. A pane of plexiglass running each of the four walls gave the place a fishbowl feel. A military-style cot hugged the far wall. Hotplate, a few sacks of rice. Two radios, CB, and a transistor hanging from a nail not far from the spotlight, which was set up beside a pair of binoculars on a swivelling tripod. Leaning on the wall next to the specs: a long-bore sniper rifle fitted with a starlight scope. I clocked the photos of a woman and a young girl beside the cot.

  The watchman appeared too old for active duty, though one might argue there wasn’t much active about this duty. He wore an out-of-date plainclothes uniform with the insignia of the New Beersheba PD. His face had the mournful aspect of a basset hound, and the skin under his dark brown eyes was thin as onionskin in the lamplight.

  A folding card table was spread with wires and soldering gun and a green fibreglass circuit board; the sight brought to mind Garvey’s coffee table spread with disassembled crap.

  “I’m building a crystal radio,” the man said. “Gets so god-awful lonely out here you want nothing more than to hear a voice not your own, even if you gotta pull it outta thin air.”

  He gave his name as Jeremy. He didn’t ask our business, but he did asked if we wanted to take a gander at the city and when I nodded, he unscrewed the starlight scope from the rifle.

  “Range of fifty furlongs,” he said. “See clear to downtown. What used to be, anyway.”

  Images formed out of the green phosphorous. Bui
ldings staggered over what was left of the downtown core, black obelisks and razed apartments stabbing up like canine teeth. No movement; a city still and static as mausoleum shadows, coldly austere as a moonscape.

  “My granddaddy fought in a war they used napalm,” said Jeremy. “Brutal stuff. Said when the flyboys dropped it, looked like a fat tongue of fire lickin’ over the jungle. Left a jet-black scar. Seems like the same thing happened to that city there.”

  “And your job is to what,” Doe wanted to know, “keep everyone inside?”

  “Keep the information inside,” Jeremy said. “It’s not the people who’re dangerous, not after everything that’s happened—it’s what they know. Can’t leak what happened, who did this ’n’ that, how it all fell apart. That’s gotta stay in the city.”

  I said, “So what do you do to make them stay put?”

  “I don’t do much.” Jeremy shrugged. “Me? I’m old.”

  He walked to the plexiglass that looked out over the city.

  “That in there, that’s Hell. You’re thinking I overstate myself; I can tell. But you go on in. You’ll see. A little piece of the world fell away and a little piece a Hell pushed itself up in its place. Every day I stare into it; every night I struggle to sleep at the foot of it. Sometimes I think of the people still inside and figure it’s only what they deserve—broke the Lord’s Commandments, fell away from the path. They earned their ails. So what’m I gonna do? Shoot some poor bastard who found themselves a way out of Hell?”

  I said, “We’re going in tonight.”

  “Day or night, it’s all the same,” said Jeremy. “Night may be better. Less scavengers.”

  “What neighbourhood’s closest?”

  “Two furlongs straight on you hit the Minister’s district. Million-shekel homes crumbling away. Why do you have to go inside? You don’t need to stick your head in an old tiger’s mouth to know it’s fulla rot.”

  When it became clear we were not to be dissuaded, Jeremy sent us off with an Inova T5 tactical flashlight—good, he assured us, to a furlong—and a Coleman Krypton lantern.