The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  “Cutting it close,” Tom Swift said. “We were getting set to start without you.”

  When I told him where I was, he said: “I’ll collect you directly.”

  The day turned cold. A dust devil whipped a cone of litter down the sidewalk. A cobalt blue van banked round the corner. Swift’s head popped out the passenger window.

  “Hop in. There’s work to be done.”

  Driving was Porter Rockwell. Swift looked pallid and sickly.

  “Wait a minute,” I told him. “I have to make another call.”

  Swift stared out the windshield. “To who?”

  “The Prophet. I can get him.”

  Swift’s fingers drummed the van’s door. “Why now, Jonah? Why the turnabout?”

  The answer came to me with ease. “You’re no worse than the rest of them. And Angela’s dead, so what the hell does it matter anymore?”

  Swift’s face betrayed a hint of emotion for perhaps the first time. “How?”

  “The Quints were involved.”

  Swift wiped the ichor seeping below the frames of his sunglasses. “I’m sorry to hear that. What’s your plan, Jonah?”

  “I’ll make a call. One call. Then I’ll take you to him.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “So make the call, Jonah.”

  I crossed to the phone and dialled the Acolyte-only dispatch. An automatic router clicked on after two rings, which should patch me through to the highest-ranking Acolyte remaining, which now that Hollis was gone should be—

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Murtag. Is this Brewster?”

  “Ghost from the ether.” Brewster sounded dead tired. “What do you want?”

  “I got him,” I said. “The guy behind it all. Wizard of Oz. I’m bringing him in.”

  Brewster said: “Great. You’re on your own. I got my own detail right now.”

  I knew what that detail must be—bodyguard detail for The Prophet. In fact, I was betting on it.

  “Why don’t you just kill him?” Brewster wanted to know.

  “Wouldn’t The Prophet want to see this guy himself?” I said. “Just so he could know for sure? I’ll bring him in. He’s harmless as a kitten.”

  I wish it were Henchel instead of Brewster. Henchel was an idiot. Brewster was at the very least possessed of baseline cunning.

  He said, “You sure it’s the guy?”

  “It’s him.”

  He gave me the address. “Come alone . . . just the two of you.”

  I hung up and said, “We’re all set. Almost.”

  Swift: “Almost how?”

  “They think I’ve captured you. But you wouldn’t have been taken in willingly.”

  He laughed. “You’re saying I ought to look a little worse for wear.”

  “You can have Rockwell do it, if you’d rather.”

  “No, I’d rather it was you.”

  He sat on the bumper as I tugged the laces free of my brogans, knotted them, wound the one long strand round the knuckles of my right hand.

  I said, “Take your sunglasses off.”

  Swift shook his head. “Avoid my eyes. They are, as you know, windows into the soul.”

  I laid into Swift as hard as I’d ever laid into any man. The ribs and gut and chin, shots that started out clean and tight before the adrenalin burned off and exhaustion turned them into sloppy gas-armed whiffles. The bootlaces unravelled from my knuckles leaving ribbed coils in my flesh but I kept hitting him. I slammed my fist into his ribs until he retched a thin stream of leaden gruel that had slid down his chest like quicksilver.

  It felt good. Really good. It was all part of the plan, but I would have done it for no reason at all.

  The Bunker

  Brewster was waiting when I pulled into the vacant Stadium SuperChurch parking lot. He stood with his arms folded while I popped the rear doors, grabbed Swift, and hauled him onto the macadam. Rockwell I’d dropped a half-block away.

  I threw Swift down in the parking lot. Brewster drew near. Moonlight plated the brutal planes of his face: a sheer cliff upon which nothing grew, that barren rock still kicking off some feral sense of intellect.

  “This the scummer, Murtag?”

  “Head termite,” I said. “Light his ass on fire, he’ll burn you a path right back to the nest.”

  “Looks like he’s been plenty burned already. Let’s go inside.”

  The bubbled dome of the SuperChurch was torn open in a dozen spots. Rain-bloated prayer booklets littered the mildewed carpet: they looked like pale blue toadstools.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” Swift said. It earned him a backhanded slap from Brewster. Swift just laughed through a mouthful of blood. Brewster led us backstage. Swift was singing in a froggy blood-choked voice:

  Plastic Jesus, you’ve got to go,

  Your magnet’s burst my radio

  Sitting on the dashboard of my car.

  But I won’t lose faith and I won’t lose hope

  ’Cause now I’ve got a pope on a rope

  Swinging from the dashboard of my car . . .

  We arrived at a steel door that fed into a dusty concrete hallway. Brewster shoved Swift through and I followed.

  I said, “What is this place?”

  Brewster said: “Upscale bomb shelter. Couple a rooms, cots, canned food. Not the Ritz.”

  I caught the hum of a generator. The lights buzzed at half capacity, staining amber the spider webs spun where wall met ceiling.

  “We got a CB radio,” Brewster said. “We’ve been trying to raise the alarm in Kingdom City.”

  “Any luck?”

  “None yet. Could be the signal isn’t clearing the bunker. Atmospheric disturbance.”

  He led us into a room stacked with boxes labelled HALLELUJAH ENERGY BOOST. A wooden chair sat amidst the boxes. Brewster slammed Swift into it—I had to give Swift credit; he was taking the rough treatment like a champ—and cuffed his wrists through the slats.

  “What’s your plan?” Swift wanted to know. “To teach me the true meaning of Christmas?”

  Brewster tagged him in the jaw—never one for trading verbal barbs, Brewster—and said, “Sit tight, Murtag—I got to check on something.”

  Once he was gone, Swift said: “Somehow I’d pictured it differently.”

  He couldn’t have meant the bunker, so I suppose he meant the circumstances surrounding his confronting The Prophet. He craned his neck around to nod at Rockwell, who had trailed at a discreet distance and let himself in behind us. Swift greeted casually his arrival, never in doubt. Rockwell took a spot behind the door.

  Brewster stepped back inside the room slapping a rubber hose against the meat of his palm. “Okay, Murtag, Let’s pluck this loon—”

  When Rockwell stepped up behind him, he came without a sound. Amazing just how massive he was—he dwarfed Brewster who was himself well over six feet tall.

  Brewster realized the threat too late. Knuckles met jaw, skin met skin. Brewster’s jaw broke in about ten places, the U-shaped bone cracking down one side of his face and up the other; with nothing left to moor it, the bottom half of his face collapsed into splintered mash. His soft palate went loose as raw chicken skin, bottom lip folding down as if it was full of lead fishing weights.

  Brewster crashed to the floor. Rockwell raised one boot and brought it down on Brewster’s face with a sound I’d have given my eyeteeth to have never heard. Rockwell rummaged the keychain out of Brewster’s pocket. Brewster’s teeth gritted like periwinkle shells under Rockwell’s boots. Once his cuffs were unlocked, Swift said: “Let’s go.”

  “Give me a sec,” I told him.

  I picked through Brewster’s pockets until I found his cell phone. I ran through the recently received calls, all of them t
o the same number and location: REPLCN ARMRY.

  The Republican Armoury. Where better to stash The One Child?

  I punched the redial button. A voice—Henchel’s—went, “Yeah?”

  I hung up. The three of us went back into the hallway, which continued down to a steel-plated door at the very end. Swift took Brewster’s keyring. The first one he tried slid effortlessly into the lock. Swift’s face was grey and greasy with some kind of sickness I could not guess at.

  “Moment of truth,” he said, and turned the key.

  The man sitting alone on the other side of the door was bloodshot-eyed and ragged of fingernail: a beggar in a bunker. Our Prophet. The Heaven-Sent Messenger.

  “Father,” Swift said to him.

  At first I mistook it as nothing more than a show of disdain: Father, Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. But he took off his sunglasses, fixed his gaze, and said:

  “But isn’t that a touch formal? Dad, is what I should’ve said. So wonderful to meet you, Dad, after lo these many years.”

  Daddy Issues

  There’s a phrase common in police detection that goes: More often than not, the simplest reason is the reason. When a wife murders her husband, it’s because she has grown to loathe him or seeks his fortune or discovers he’s fondling the babysitter. No deep underpinnings or hidden agendas. Humans are, at base level, pretty straightforward. Their motivations are often predicated on raw emotional states: greed, jealousy, rage.

  Revenge.

  “Dad.”

  An expression crossed The Prophet’s face—wry and resigned: the look of a man who’d been expecting this outcome in one form or another for years—and it was as though a cotter pin had been pulled inside my head: disparate facts and hints and assumptions slotted neatly, obviously, and left me to curse my ignorance.

  Again Swift said it: “Dad.”

  Had the word ever been spoken less lovingly?

  The Prophet took the measure of his son—the pigeon chest, the blood—and even in his own doleful state managed to express genuine distaste by way of a flippant shrug. For his part, Swift seemed to be struggling with the image of his father. I suppose he might’ve expected to find him as he was commonly recalled: the vanilla suit, the copper tan, the high-stepping gospel routine.

  Rockwell pushed a second chair in front of The Prophet. Swift sat on it. The two met face-to-face. The same sharpness of jaw. The same widow’s peak.

  “Lydia Cromwell. My mother.” When The Prophet failed to acknowledge this name or the life attached to it, Swift asked: “During your years on the road, just how many women did you fuck, Dad?”

  “Stop calling me that,” The Prophet said. “You’ve got no proof.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Swift went on, “every man has needs. So you fucked your way across the heartland, a horny ten-penny Bible salesman—so what? What I can’t quite square is why you’d order every one of your conquests dead after you assumed this office.”

  I was considering the possibility Swift was mistaken when The Prophet copped to it.

  “Those women might have exploited the situation,” he said simply. “Tried to impugn me. Unravel all the good works I intended to implement.”

  Swift nodded as if in understanding to this pragmatic stance. “Were you ever told how they were killed? Did you have the courage to ask exactly how it was carried out?”

  The Prophet said: “There was the matter of a new ministry to be founded in New Bethlehem. I needn’t concern myself, I was told; I had the Lord’s work to attend to. And He has long forgiven me my past trespasses.”

  Swift said: “My mother and I lived in an isolated farmhouse. It would’ve been safer if we’d lived closer to a city but my mother, your lover, was stubborn. I don’t remember much about her—I was four when she was killed, and at that age you don’t recall a lot about people: their voice, the way they smell. Mother always smelled of lilacs. I didn’t know then that I was the product of a silver-tongued revivalist preacher in line for The Prophet-ship of New Bethlehem. But those circumstances isolated her; otherwise she may have moved somewhere safer. Not to say it mattered in the end.”

  The lights dimmed. The generator coughed, ran smooth. The gas fumes made me dizzy.

  “One day a sedan pulled into the drive. Three men in white suits. My mother saw them through the window. She bundled me into the closet and told me shhhhh. In the dark with the smell of her wool coat, I peeped through the slats. One man took her elbow, softly, and led her down the hallway. She jerked free, told him she could walk on her own. The back door opened and for a long time, nothing. I stood in the closet, breathing the wool smell of her coat. Footsteps around the house. A voice said, ‘In this photo—a boy.’ They searched and found me. One man pulled me from the closet. He placed the tip of a knife under my eye and, as delicately as one could do such a thing, slit the skin down my cheek.”

  Swift removed his sunglasses. The wound looked as raw as it must’ve been all those years ago.

  “A cattle brand. Mark of shame.” He glanced at me and said: “But I was never ashamed of my mother. This wound will heal. But every time the flesh knits I take a razorblade and slit it open. It keeps the memories fresh. Yet I do wonder,” he said, “why those men didn’t kill me.”

  “I told them not to,” said The Prophet. “I said, not the child.”

  Swift scrutinized his father. “Liar.”

  The Prophet’s eyes ducked to an empty corner of the room.

  “The men got back into the sedan. I stood in the hallway, blinking, blood sheeting my face. It was getting dark when I went out to the shack in our backyard. I found her lying over sacks of peat moss. Her skin had gone purple, shiny. Dried foam caked round her mouth.

  “I was sent to a Republic orphanage,” Swift continued. “God’s Children, in Kingdom City. I knocked around until I was adopted by a man and his wife. The man’s name was Elwood Chalmers. It was a publicity stunt; he adopted three of us at the same time—Chalmers’ Children, as we were known. He wasn’t seeking an office, not then, but knew such an act of largesse would feather his nest down the road.”

  Elwood Chalmers had once been the chief fundraiser and bulldog lobbyist for the Christian Family Coalition. After the dawn of the Republic he continued to work on behalf of state-selected candidates and was later confirmed one of the five Fathers of the Divine Council.

  “Chalmers knew how I’d gotten this”—trailing a finger along his eye-wound—“and realized I might be an asset. He taught me statesmanship, the use of faith as a tool: a mallet, a placebo, a balm . . . a bomb. I was a quick study.”

  So Elwood Chalmers had taken young Tom Swift—Tom Cromwell?—under his wing. Groomed him for a future contingency. That contingency was now almost fully realized. But why?

  “Do you think they didn’t know, Dad?” Tom said. “The graft, the money-hoarding? You’ve been keeping tithes to yourself, sending only a trickle to the Kingdom City coffers. You made the mistake of bilking the boss. The boss was not impressed.”

  “But why eradicate us all?” I had to ask. “Make a laughingstock of our Prophet, okay; kill him. This . . . you’re talking tens of thousands of innocent people.”

  Swift said: “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Controlled burn,’ Jonah? Forestry term. The best way to rehabilitate a parcel of land is to burn it. Dig a trench round the perimeter, soak it in flammables, and light it. You could trim all the scrub, weed the valuable trees from the junk, but it’s not economical. When things are that overgrown and unruly, it’s expedient to get rid of it. Start over. That’s what happened in New Beersheba.”

  “Why destroy New Beersheba? They did nothing to you.”

  “That was the Divine Council’s choice,” said Swift. “I had to do that in order to do this. It was a deal we struck.”

  “So you went into New Beersheba,” I said, “backed b
y the Divine Council. They outfitted you with the explosives. You co-opted people like Lucas Hogan, his wife and daughter, deceiving them while ingratiating yourself. The higher ups in the police force were in the bag. You knew everyone’s secrets, their histories—everything the Divine Fathers knew. The local Prophet was clueless.”

  Swift was nodding, nodding to everything I said.

  “Then the Quints were sent in, ostensibly to stop you but really you were both working in cahoots to destroy the city.”

  “They do want to kill me,” Swift said of the Quints, “and I’m sure they’ve been promised the opportunity by someone—maybe even Chalmers. But before that, we each had our jobs to carry out. Destabilize the populace, tear the social fabric apart, then send in the wrecking balls.”

  “The morning the Damascus Towers were bombed . . .”

  “A Quint warned me to get out beforehand. I did. Rockwell did. Others didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you warn them?”

  “He had no need of them anymore,” said The Prophet.

  I said: “I’ve seen New Beersheba. There’s nothing left.”

  “Soon this city will be carpet bombed, too,” Swift told me. “Planes will lift off from Kingdom City to deliver their payload. They’ll leave a black scar behind.”

  “But they’ll take The One Child first.”

  “Of course,” Swift said.

  I imagined it right from the beginning. Lydia Cromwell meeting The Prophet’s gaze through the dust-thickened air of a striped tent pitched in a summer field. Lydia fanning her neck with a prayer booklet; The Prophet sharing the stage with a wife who opened her legs to a dwarf who’d poke his shrunken head into a soap bubble to amuse her: a trick called the Astronaut’s Helmet, back when there were such things as astronauts and space shuttles. No more than a casual glance, random chemicals firing in a pair of brainpans. Years later, men in white suits would leave a young boy with wet britches and a knife-opened face to find his mother gone purple in a dusty shack. Now, many more years later: two cities torn apart. Thousands dead. Lives ruined.

  Angela . . .

  All sparked by two pairs of eyes meeting across the dusty air of a revival tent.