The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  Rockwell removed a curious bundle from his pocket and handed it to Swift.

  DET cord. A grey plunger. That red button. Oh, God.

  Swift took one end of the DET cord and slipped it down the back of his pants. “I’m afraid,” he said, wincing, “there’s just no polite way to do this.”

  Jesus. I saw it now. The bulged, lumpen look of Swift’s belly. How many ball bearings had he swallowed; how much plastique was plugging up his innards? He sat gingerly. The DET cord curled round his hips, plunger swaying gently between his legs.

  “Before you go,” he said to me, “there is one last thing you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not the only abandoned child, Jonah.”

  He didn’t have to say the name. It’d been knocking around the corners of my mind a long time now. She was adopted, too. Never knew her real parents. The anonymous letters she received every month—someone trying to expiate their guilt. The first female Acolyte—who had pulled the strings? Always saying she led a charmed life—who sprinkled that fairy dust? Stacks of uncashed checks; Love you always written in the memo line.

  The Immaculate Mother saying to me, You’re her friend. My daughter’s friend . . .

  “Angela was my half-sister,” Swift said. “Unlike me, she wasn’t a child of adultery. They still gave her away, though.”

  I said, “Why?”

  But before the word cleared my mouth I knew why. She wasn’t born a freak. Angela had been born normal, and as such was worthless. So they’d secretly put her up for adoption and hid their parentage . . . almost.

  “Her mother did what she could for her,” The Prophet said. “From afar.”

  “She’s dead,” I said. “Your daughter is dead.”

  “All my daughters are dead,” The Prophet said. “And my dearest wish is that all my sons were dead, too.”

  Tom bared his teeth. “Oooh, we’re getting to that, Dad.”

  Endgame

  The wind blew at gale force as Rockwell and I cleared the Stadium SuperChurch. Flags adorned with the Republican insignia snapped at the end of their poles. I tugged Rockwell’s sleeve and, when he turned to me, I said, “I have to make a phone call.”

  He offered me Swift’s cell phone—a shiny silver dot in his mammoth bear claw—but I shook my head, thinking the Quints might recognize the number. We got into the van. A crumpling explosion rocked the SuperChurch as we pulled out of the lot. A flaming ball of gas barrelled out of the doors, debris raining out of the torn roof and pinging dully off the van’s roof. I looked at Rockwell. He was weeping. He did so for a good ten minutes. He wept silently, like a scared child, holding his elbows and swaying.

  I drove streets slicked with night perspiration, zigzagging down a switchback hill. I stopped next to a bank of payphones. I walked over and began picking up receivers: dead, dead, dead, dead . . . live. I rummaged my pockets for the second phone number—and dialled.

  No hello: only the hiss of an open connection.

  “I’m ready.”

  The Quint—didn’t know which one—said, “Ready for what, Acolyte Murtag?”

  “I know where The One Child is.”

  “Doooo you?” the Quint crooned.

  “If I tell you where, I want you to leave.”

  Noncommittal: “We could do that.”

  “You should do. Victor Appleton is dead.”

  Silence. Then: “How do you know?”

  “Because he is. The Prophet, too. There’s nothing keeping you here.”

  “Where is the Child?”

  “Will you leave? Do I have your word?”

  “If you’re lying about Appleton . . .” the Quint said.

  “Fuck you,” I said flatly, relishing the tension on the other end of the line.

  “Where is The One Child?” Biting each word off.

  “The Armoury. Take him and go to Hell.”

  I hustled back to the van. We were only a block away. We’d have time to prepare.

  The Republican Armoury was a series of eroded limestone barracks ringed by U-barns, shacks, and Quonset huts. It had gone unused for over a decade—all military matters were now outsourced from Kingdom City—but remained as a contingency: in case of a ghetto revolt, the barracks could sub as a containment facility.

  I nudged the van’s grille against the chain-link gate, snapping the lock. We parked amidst a few derelict vehicles in the lot and crept a circuit of the compound. We came upon an outlying U-barn. Weak fingerlings of light edged under the corrugated tin walls. I followed Rockwell to a dark wedge cut between two barracks. Clean sightlines to the U-barn. Rockwell dipped into his pocket, pulled out a grey brick: C-4. He kneaded and rolled. It popped between his fingers, tiny air pockets bursting.

  We waited. Wind curled down the limestone and licked the hems of our dusters.

  “State of Grace.”

  As I’d heard very few words come out of Rockwell, his voice momentarily startled me.

  “He didn’t believe,” Rockwell continued. “Swift, I mean. I do.” Rockwell’s eyes swivelled Heavenward. “When you die, you must die in a State of Grace.”

  A Catholic term. To exit this world in a state of divine sanctification.

  “Do you think that’s possible?” I had to ask. “After all that you’ve done?”

  He said, “Once the Quints are dead.”

  Motor-roar washed over the garrets. A familiar grey Buick Roadmaster prowled past the U-barn, braked, backed up. The edge of light skirting the U-barn broke fitfully: whoever was guarding The One Child—Henchel for certain, possibly more—had heard.

  The Buick parked round the front. A single Quint exited. I couldn’t make out the number on his neck.

  A shotgun boomed inside the barn. Holes peppered the corrugated tin. The Quint drew his revolver and dug off two shots. Canned-ham-sized holes punched through the barn’s metal wall. The shotgun barked again. The Quint raced forward and peeped through one of the gaping holes in the metal. Then kicked the door open and blazed on in.

  Rockwell started toward the car. I caught his wrist.

  “You can’t do that. You’ll kill the kid.”

  He shook his head. “Concentrated blast.”

  He loped out to the car as gunshots sang out inside the barn and slid beneath the undercarriage. He was there less than half a minute. The gunshots died away, replaced with choked screams. Rockwell hauled himself out and hustled back.

  A piercing, pain-filled screech from inside the barn. One more gunshot. The Quint emerged with a bundle clutched to its chest. Rockwell telescoped the antennae on the remote. Thin noises carried across the compound: sweet, musical. The One Child was crying.

  After placing The Child securely on the passenger seat, the Quint slammed the door and went round the driver’s side. He settled behind the wheel, gunned the engine—

  Rockwell hit the button.

  The explosion was mild. The car hopped off its front wheels five inches or so. The windows blacked out as ash painted the glass. Smoke bristled through the door seams.

  The driver’s door swung open. The Quint crawled out. He was all black. His hair smoldered. Exposed to fresh oxygen, flames rekindled atop his head, frizzed-out strands igniting from tip to root. He fell onto his back and stared at the sky. Something was sticking from his gut.

  We approached cautiously. He didn’t hear us. One of his eyes was burned out but he caught sight of us with the other and reached for his revolver. A baffled expression crossed the wreckage of his face. His gun-hand was gone: he was reaching with a stump. Not that it would’ve mattered, seeing as his pistol was heat-bonded to the flesh over his ribs.

  He smiled at us. I noticed what was sticking out of him: the brake pedal. Shorn off in the explosion and driven into his belly.

  Rockwell raised his foot and slowl
y, deliberately, pressed down on the brake pedal. The shaft sunk deeper into the Quint’s stomach.

  That Quint’s smile persisted. Widened.

  I peered into the car. Dark smoke billowing. The Quint’s severed hand clutching the gearshift.

  From the passenger’s side: noises between singing and hacking.

  I burned my fingers on the door handle. A swaddled bundle sat in the passenger seat, black like everything else. I picked The One Child up—so goddamn light. I hugged him to my chest to feel the rapid palpitations of his heart. Miraculously, he was unhurt. Perhaps he truly was the blessed one.

  When I came back around, I saw Rockwell still pushing his foot down on the brake pedal jutting out of the Quint’s belly. Blood crawled in the chinks between his teeth but he wouldn’t stop smiling. When he was dead I handed The One Child to Rockwell. The Child was crying. The most beautiful sound on earth. We both stared at him in awe.

  The One Child was naked. Perhaps he’d been naked the whole of his existence. Rockwell was inspecting his body for injuries; for dignity’s sake I folded the blanket over those shrunken banjo legs but not before glimpsing the peppering of scars: places his father, Caleb Murphy, Pliny the Pinhead, had stabbed him with a needle. His chest was soft and babyish. The skin hung in the loose folds of an old man. His face . . . God, his face. No rhyme or reason. One eye was planted halfway down his cheek; the other, cataracted, was swung round to his temple. No nose; a pair of gasping nasal holes. His mouth, where the sounds came from, was set high up his forehead, a toothless vertical slit ringed by downy hair.

  Two cities, thousands of lives, had been destroyed for this.

  I took the Quint’s bloodied duster off his body. Then I took The One Child from Rockwell.

  “I’ll need your van.”

  Rockwell said, “You’ll need what’s in the back, too.”

  “What’s in back?”

  “What you’ll need,” he said again. “For what you will do.”

  I left him beside the wreck of the Quint’s car. The interior had caught fire. Flames lashed the windows. Rockwell knelt beside the Quint’s body. Evidently they still had business together.

  I could have told Rockwell that the car’s backseat was full of teddy bears and Raggedy Anns rigged with grenades. I could have told him they were bound to explode in the intensifying heat.

  Yeah, I could have.

  Escape

  “We’re leaving. Now. Right now.”

  I stood in the apartment door, panting from a breakneck sprint up the stairwell. It was just past four in the morning. The van was at street level: I’d jounced it over the curb, flung the rear doors open. The One Child was belted into a baby seat strapped to the passenger seat.

  Mom and Amira emerged from the bedroom. The adjacent apartment door opened; I leaned out into the hallway to catch sight of Newbarr. Dighet the goat clip-clopped up to his side.

  “We’re hitting the road.”

  Newbarr said: “Nice to see you, too.”

  I grabbed Bird’s cage and carted it downstairs and stashed her in the van. I scoped the street in both directions. Three more Quints were still prowling a city slated to be carpet bombed.

  I hotfooted it back up the stairs and almost ran over Amira, who was carrying the peacock on his styrofoam raft. I hustled back to the apartment, past Newbarr and Dighet, past Mom and Hoppsy the rabbit. I hefted the aquarium containing Garvey’s rattlesnake, Duke. I carted it down to the van. Newbarr and Amira and Mom were all staring at the passenger seat.

  “Is that—?” Newbarr said, awed.

  “It is,” I said simply. “The One Child.”

  The One Child burbled and chirped, happy enough sounds. Mom said, “He’s beautiful.”

  Three more trips had the van weighted down with everything it could carry: all the animals, plus their food, plus bedding material and a box of tinned food for us. Newbarr pulled his car around front of the apartment.

  “How much gas you got?” he asked.

  “Almost a full tank.”

  “Should do us.”

  Mom had taken the One Child out of its child seat; she sat on the rear bench seat with the child on her lap. Amira had stowed the child seat in back and was sitting in the passenger’s seat. The interior ricocheted with squawks, chirps, hisses and bleats.

  The streets were dark, the sky dark. My nerves were wadded into hard-packed bundles beneath my skin; I drove slowly, eyeing the road for spike strips and busted glass. It seemed to take forever to clear the city limits but once we did a huge tension lifted from my chest.

  Dawn came as a thin red line over the curve of the earth, a natural red unlike that of Newbarr’s guiding taillights; this was the red of desert rocks or autumn leaves at the moment of their shedding, red with traces of night yet clung to it or the red of a vein, our planet’s femoral artery pulsing, swelling with daylight, and I drove headlong into that redness with the feeling these marked my last hours on earth.

  Newbarr’s brake lights flashed. He pulled over, waved me out. Together we hauled away a brittle deadfall to reveal a rutted corduroy road. The van was awakening by the time I reseated myself. We drove two miles into a willow thicket, which emptied into a sun-dappled clearing.

  A cottage. A pond.

  Heaven on earth.

  Nirvana

  “We built it together, my wife and I. God rest her soul.”

  Newbarr stood in the cottage’s kitchen: a wood stove, thrift-store butcher block table, hotel fridge. Two bedrooms, a bookshelf, a stack of board games. The Monopoly game was the Ecclesiastical edition—the only edition they made anymore.

  Go straight to Purgatory. Do not pass Redemption. Do not collect 200 shekels.

  Amira and Mom carted the animals inside. Newbarr and I pulled layers of burlap sheeting and plastic tarpaulin off the generator. Newbarr unscrewed the cap, poured in gas. A few yanks of the starter cord got it cranking over.

  “We’ll siphon what’s left out of the van,” he said. “That should last us a long time.”

  “I’m sorry, but I need the van.”

  “For what?”

  I waited patiently as the connections knitted together in his head.

  “Why do such a thing, son?” he said. “Everything you wanted, everything you worked for, right here. You earned it.”

  “I didn’t earn it,” I told him. “Or if so, I earned other things, too.”

  “It won’t change anything, you know,” he said. “I know it’d be nice to think so, that whatever you do is going to trigger an upheaval, but it won’t happen.”

  I thought of that mantra I’d heard all the time as a kid:

  I am just one man. Just one woman. One man cannot stand in the path of tomorrow.

  So tomorrow came. Tomorrow became today. Tomorrow just kind of happened.

  And for a moment there—just a flash—I hated Calvin Newbarr.

  I said: “I’ve got what they want. How much farther to Kingdom City?”

  “You’re going to leave me, an old man, here in the middle of the woods?”

  “You’ve been taking care of people your whole life.”

  “Dead people!” he reminded me. “What help do they need?”

  “Thank you for everything you’ve done, Calvin. I mean it.”

  He shook his head. “I know why you’re doing it. Same reason I brought you out here, I’d say. That martyring instinct—drilled into all of us. Well, go speak to them first. Look them in the eye; let’s see you do that.”

  I walked behind the cottage, down the bank of the pond. I heeled off my shoes, socks, rolled up my trousers and dipped my feet. Amira came and sat next to me. She’d brought Frog in his aquarium. She kicked off her shoes and dipped her feet.

  “You’re not staying,” she said. So she knew, somehow.

  “I’m not. That’s true
.”

  Newbarr was right about the whole “look them in the eye” bit. It was rough.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Oh,” I said breezily, “Here, there, everywhere.”

  We twiddled our toes. Water boatmen skimmed across our ankles. And I thought: What if I didn’t? Thought: What if I stayed?

  The notion came to me, insupportable in a thousand ways, that we could plant a garden. Tomatoes, potatoes, peas in the soil feathering the water. The future seemed unshackled in a way it had never been—a new optimism percolated through me.

  I nodded at Frog. “You going to let him go?”

  “I think he’d rather go with you,” she said. “See whatever you’re going to see.”

  “I’ll take him, then.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Take him? Or go?”

  “Go.”

  She rested her head on my shoulder. The pressure of that girl’s head on my shoulder—satori, was what Hindus called it. Happiness.

  “Come on.” I gave her my hand. “Let’s say goodbye.”

  We walked to the van. Mom was with Newbarr; she cradled The One Child, who snoozed in her arms.

  “I have to take him with me, Mom.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “We have things to do.”

  “Things.” The One Child slipped out of her arms into mine. “What things?”

  “I won’t be long. I’ll be back.”

  She said, “No, you won’t.”

  I nodded. “You’re right, Mom. I won’t.”

  I belted The One Child into the passenger seat, which I’d gotten out of the van. I took Frog’s aquarium from Amira.

  “I suppose this is what you consider bravery,” said Mom.

  Was I being brave? Don’t know I’d ever been. Struck me that all possible paths had winnowed to a single thread. Bravery had fuck all to do with it now.

  Article VI:

  He is Nailed to the Cross

  Church