Redemption Song (Daniel Faust)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Why do you need to be like him?” I asked. “What’s so bad about being who you are?”

  In a heartbeat, his eyes had gone the color and consistency of rotten egg yolk, his face and hands blemished with scabs and acne.

  “Look at me!” he shouted. “This is the real me! I’m filthy on the outside because I’m filthy on the inside. I was born in sin. I’m stained. Ruined.”

  “I know a few cambion who lead happy, healthy lives, just like anybody else. I could introduce you, if you wanted. Heck, one’s a girl around your age, and she’s pretty cute. You never know what could happen.”

  He took a step backward, shaking his head, back in his human mask.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” he said. “Sullivan warned me you’d try to get in my head, try to confuse me.”

  I sighed. “What’s your name?”

  “Tyler.”

  “Tyler,” I said, “you seem like a good kid. Normally I wouldn’t do this, but I’m going to offer you a deal. Walk away. Get in your car, drive out of here, and never come back. Do it right now. Go find a life for yourself, a real life, far away from this nuthouse.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  I looked him square in the eyes.

  “You’re standing between me and that door. Which means I’m going to have to kill you. I’ll feel bad about it, believe me, I will, but that won’t stop me from putting you in the ground. Leave now, or die. Those are your only options.”

  He gave a nervous laugh.

  “I’ve got the gun.”

  I just shrugged. He backed out of the room. The bolts on the door slammed shut while I chugged the entire bottle of lukewarm water and started on the second one.

  I had thirsty work ahead of me.

  Sixteen

  First, I listened.

  Tyler patrolled the hallway outside my makeshift cell once every twenty minutes, on the nose. I recognized the sound of his flip-flops slapping the flagstone floors. Once I pinned his movements down and figured out when it was safe to make a little noise, I went to work. I hauled one of the shipping crates across the room, putting it directly across from the door. Then I laid the antique mirror on its back, held my breath, and stomped down hard in the middle of the glass. It cracked under my heel, shattering into a constellation of glittering shards.

  I wasn’t superstitious about these things. Bad luck was something I gave to other people.

  I fished out a fist-sized chunk of the broken mirror and started looking for an angle. The merciless sun was my best friend now, and I squinted as I caught its glare in the glass like Prometheus stealing the secret of fire. Timing was everything, and the clock wasn’t on my side. With my heart thudding against my chest, I turned the mirror and angled the ray into the open crate.

  After five minutes I was sure my plan was a bust, but I kept at it, holding the hot mirror as steady as I could. Slowly, a wisp of black smoke rose up from the heap of mildewed monks’ robes. The wisp became a plume and then blossomed into orange flame.

  Almost time for the next patrol. I watched the flames spread, hoping this wasn’t time for Tyler to knock off and get some lunch. With the crate itself starting to ignite, fire chewing into the old and splintery wood, the growing cloud of black smoke could kill me as easily as Sullivan himself.

  I heard footsteps. My muscles tensed, going into fight-or-flight mode. I grabbed a robe from the other crate and flapped it toward the door, guiding some of the smoke so it’d drift under the frame and into the corridor outside.

  “Fire!” I shouted, dropping the robe and getting ready. “Help! Fire!”

  The doorknob rattled. Tyler burst in, gun ready, his eyes instinctively drawn toward the burning crate. It was a momentary distraction, the heartbeat of confusion and fear that I needed. That was when I ran up, blindsided him, and drove a jagged seven-inch shard of broken mirror through his throat.

  His eyes bulged. He fell, clutching his throat with one hand while dark blood guttered down the front of his concert T-shirt. He tried to shoot me, but his gun arm flopped like a fish. I plucked the pistol from his grip, easy as taking a rattle from an infant. Tyler’s legs kicked spasmodically as he stared up at me. He was just lucid enough to understand he was dying. Maybe he hoped I’d change my mind. Maybe I’d grab some of those robes, bandage up his neck, stabilize him, and call for help. Maybe he’d survive this.

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry, kid,” I told him. There wasn’t anything else worth saying. I left him to die.

  I forced my feelings into a little box in the back of my mind. Guilt was a luxury for later. Right now, I couldn’t afford to think about anything but survival.

  The corridor outside the cell rounded a bend in either direction. Coin toss. I remembered the way they’d brought me in, but that would take me out into the courtyard. I’d be a sitting duck out there. Besides, I needed wheels to get back to Vegas. If I ran out into that desert on foot, I’d be vulture food by sunset. I jogged the opposite direction from the courtyard, hoping I’d spot something useful.

  I ducked into an alcove and pressed my back to the hot adobe wall when I heard voices coming my way. The gun was an equalizer, but only when it came to the cambion. Sullivan would just swallow the bullets and spit them back out at me.

  “—think he’ll really help us?” one of Sullivan’s followers said, lugging grocery bags down the hallway. Her companion nodded.

  “The father’s a good man. He’s been in the chapel with Sullivan all night, talking. They’re in there right now.”

  Damn it. There went my hopes of a rescue operation. The demon was keeping Alvarez close to his side, which meant I didn’t have a hope of stealing him back. I might have felt better if I knew exactly what Sullivan’s scheme was.

  Then again, maybe not.

  The translation had to be the key. If I could reach the church before any of Sullivan’s minions and get my hands on that text, at least I’d have some kind of bargaining chip. I hoped Alvarez had kept his mouth shut.

  Once the coast was clear, I cut through an empty sitting room, keeping to the shadows and under an overhanging balcony. It could have been the common room in a college dorm, right down to the scattered books and magazines and a video game console hooked up to a big-screen television. Most colleges, though, didn’t have assault-rifle cleaning manuals or guides to the proper care of plastic explosives on the syllabus.

  Sullivan had a hell of a racket going on here. Find vulnerable cambion who didn’t have families to turn to, teach them to hate themselves down to the very core, and then put guns in their hands. They’d do anything he told them to, as long as he kept dangling the promise of salvation over their heads. I’d seen this song and dance before.

  Now I had two good reasons to keep this escape from turning into a gunfight. I couldn’t take Sullivan down by myself, and I wasn’t looking for a fight with his followers. They’d sure as hell kill me, though. I found a back door adjacent to a parking lot, just a cluster of cars in ragged rows near the edge of the mission’s outer wall. I kept my head down and ran for it. One of the locals drove a pickup truck, an old F-350 with some muscle under the hood. I broke out the driver’s-side window with the butt of the pistol, let myself in, and popped the plastic panel under the steering wheel. About three minutes later, after a few false starts as I struggled to remember how to hot-wire one of these models, the ignition throbbed and the radio turned on.

  I sat up and looked at the dashboard. Half a tank of gas. That should get me back to Vegas.

  I pulled out of the lot nice and slow, not wanting to attract attention from the villa. I thought I was free and clear until the tower bell rang out, a shrill and endless peal that set my teeth on edge. They must have found Tyler’s body. I cursed under my breath and stomped on the gas, gunning it up the dirt road toward the iron gate.

  One of the cambion ran out of the guardhouse next to the gate. He clutched a hunting rifle like he’d just picked it up for the first time in his lif
e. I hit the brakes and leaned out the window, dropping a bead on him with my stolen pistol before he could line up a shot.

  “Drop it!” I barked. The rifle fell to the dust.

  I nodded to the heavy latch on the gate. “Open it.”

  “I—I can’t let you go,” he stammered. “I’ve got orders—”

  I shot a round into the dirt at his feet. He jumped back.

  “Now!”

  He unlatched the gate. I gave him just enough time to jump clear before I launched the pickup truck into full gear, crashing through with a screech of twisted metal and flying sparks. Hitting the highway with the speedometer kissing eighty and the engine dancing on the redline, I left the mission in the dust.

  I aimed the pickup southbound, flying past a sign that read “Las Vegas–80 Miles.” Once I’d gone a good distance and figured nobody was following me, I eased off the gas. Getting pulled over for speeding in a stolen car, with a recently fired pistol on the passenger seat, was the last thing I needed.

  I reached for my phone, then remembered I didn’t have it anymore. They’d taken it from me at the mission along with everything else in my pockets. I’d have to track down Caitlin and Emma the hard way. As for Nicky, I wouldn’t call him if I could. By now he’d know that Father Alvarez and I had never showed up at the safe house last night. I hoped he could put two and two together and realize he had a snitch inside his gang. In any case, next time I talked to him, it’d be face-to-face in a room swept for bugs.

  My next stop was Our Lady of Consolation. If my hunch was right, Sullivan needed two things: the “road map to hell” and Father Alvarez to finish translating it. Alvarez was optional, but people who can read ancient Coptic weren’t exactly a dime a dozen. I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t hurt the priest, at least until his usefulness was at an end. Keeping the manuscript out of Sullivan’s hands would pile a lot of sand into that particular hourglass.

  Dusk clung to the city like a wool blanket by the time I got there. The desert night would come soon, bringing some respite from the heat, but for now the streets were a tangle of sweltering shadows. I rolled toward the edge of the church’s lot and backed into a parking spot behind a line of overgrown bushes, keeping the stolen truck as far out of sight as I could. Then I slipped my gun under my shirt and went inside.

  The front doors still hung open from yesterday’s invasion, the lock broken under a cambion boot. All the lights in the chapel were dead, though. Fingers of dying light pushed through the tall stained-glass windows, painting the church in shades of ochre and swamp green.

  Something rattled in the back office. I pulled my gun.

  I inched my way closer, moving between the pews as fast as I dared. My ears perked at the sounds of rustling paper and books thumping to the carpeted floor in Alvarez’s office. I hadn’t gotten here first after all.

  A shadow loomed in the office doorway. I ducked behind a pew and took aim, balancing my forearms against the rough wooden seat back.

  “Drop the book,” I called out, “and you can walk away.”

  The shadow spun, dropped to one knee, and opened fire. I hit the floor as two bullets chewed into the pew to my left, sending splinters flying. I took a deep breath, held it, and jumped up. I ran to my right, squeezing off one, two, three shots that boomed like cannon fire, trying to pin the thief down. He answered with a fusillade of bullets, forcing me to dive for cover. When I dared to poke my head up again, he was long gone, and the back door of the church slowly swung shut in his wake.

  Following was suicide. If he was out there, watching the door, he could gun me down in a heartbeat. Instead I ran out the way I’d come in, shoving through the church’s front doors just in time to see a lime-colored Mustang launch down the street with its tires screaming.

  I slammed my fist against the door. I’d lost the priest, and now I’d lost the manuscript too. Game, set, and match.

  Seventeen

  I dumped the pickup and the gun a few blocks away after wiping them both for prints. The pickup I left parked on a side street, where it would be towed by morning. The pistol I stripped to pieces and tossed the bits into three separate Dumpsters. I liked the idea of having a gun, under the circumstances, but I had no idea where that piece had been or what kinds of evil business a forensics expert could tie it to.

  I caught looks from the twentysomething hipsters lined up outside Winter, snug behind ropes of black velvet. I wasn’t sure why until I took a good look at myself in the tinted window of a parked car. My hair was a mess, my pants were caked with dirt, my shirt had rips from Sullivan’s cane, and I looked like I hadn’t slept in a week. Not my best moment.

  The bouncer gave me the stink eye. I fished Caitlin’s business card out of my wallet and flashed it. He nodded like he’d just met the president and pulled the ropes aside for me. It helped to know people in this town. Inside the door, a vortex of strobing blue neon and eardrum-blasting dubstep swallowed me whole. The icy bar looked inviting. I needed alcohol right now like a man in the Sahara needs water, but my business was down below.

  The locked door to the club’s underbelly was right where I remembered it, as was the man in the gas mask and the black leather overalls. I wondered if it was a uniform the guards wore in shifts, or if just this one guy stood here, ominous and ready, night after night. He remembered me, like Caitlin had told him to, and he let out a rattling wheeze as he punched in the door’s combination.

  I wasn’t alone down in the catacombs, surrounded by black leather and gold. Candles burned along the corridor, casting flickering shadows into rooms where revelers laughed, whispered, and cried out. I passed a nook where a naked man dangled from a harness of leather straps and buckles. His lover took him from behind, biting his neck as they coupled with quiet, primal urgency. A small semicircle of observers stood around them, cradling wine glasses and commenting in low whispers like patrons at an art gallery.

  Deeper into the maze, I found Emma. She was dressed for business, not play, sitting on a bench with her cell phone out and a portfolio on her lap. I guessed she’d come here to escape the musical onslaught in the club upstairs.

  “No,” she said, irritated. “If he wants a salary increase, I get to extend his contract. If he gets something, I get something. That’s how this works. You know better—”

  She looked up, saw me, and hung up the phone.

  “Daniel,” she said, standing. “What happened? You look like a truck hit you.”

  “Yeah, and the truck’s got a name. Where’s Caitlin? I need to talk to both—”

  Emma got in my way and pressed her hand over my heart.

  “No. You don’t. Caitlin is…indisposed.”

  “This is important.”

  “Daniel,” she said, trying to be delicate, “Caitlin is in a very, very foul mood tonight. I gave her one of my toys to play with. She’s busy, at the moment, breaking him. Please trust that you do not want to walk in on her right now. Come here. Sit down and tell me what’s going on. If it’s that bad, we’ll go interrupt her together.”

  I let her sit me down. I wasn’t sure where to begin, so I started with a name.

  “Sullivan.”

  Emma’s eyes narrowed to slits. Black pupils sank under swirling splotches of dark copper.

  “Suulivarishisian? What do you know about him?”

  I lifted my shirt and showed off his handiwork, the angry welts that crisscrossed my chest and back.

  “He said something about Caitlin I didn’t like,” I said with a shrug, dropping the shirt. “So I felt obliged to defend her honor. Didn’t work out too good.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you. No, you absolutely cannot see Caitlin tonight. She can’t see those marks. That’s a calculated insult on his part, telling her she’s not strong enough to defend her own property. She’d go into a rage.”

  I held up a finger. “Pretty sure I’m not anybody’s property.”

  Emma shook her head, near frantic, looking like she was trying to follow
three trains of thought at the same time. “I forget you’re not one of us. Too ignorant to know when you’re being honored. Not the point. Where did you see him? Where is he right now?”

  “This ‘Redemption Choir’ outfit you guys are so worried about? He’s their leader. And I saw him in a fortified compound about a hundred miles north, but I’d bet they’ve long scattered by now.”

  I gave her a rundown of the fun and games, from meeting up with Alvarez to my little shootout at Our Lady of Consolation.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, frowning. “A route allowing someone to bodily travel from Earth to hell and back? That’s like you, physically, stepping into an electrical outlet and riding a power line until you feel like hopping out again. One realm is solid matter, one’s spirit. They don’t interact that way.”

  I shrugged. “Well, Sullivan believes it, or at least his followers do. Maybe it’s just a new angle on his scam?”

  “It’s not a scam. Well, not like you’re thinking. Sullivan believes every word he says, Daniel. He’s mad as a hatter. He was exiled from our court for being an insufferable rabble-rouser. The Court of Night-Blooming Flowers gave him sanctuary, and eventually they kicked him to the curb too. That must have been when he started the cult. Operating without sanction here on Earth, building a following of cambion right under everyone’s noses.”

  “Wait. So he actually thinks he’s helping these people? He’s fucking with their heads, Emma. He’s teaching them to hate themselves just because they were born different from everybody else.”

  “And he hates himself even more deeply,” she said. “He’s merely sharing his disease. I’m embarrassed to say he’s a member of my choir, though a degenerate one. When I want something that someone else has, I take it. If I cannot take it, I strive for it. Work toward it. My envy makes me strong. Understand?”

  I nodded, looking more certain than I felt.

  “Sullivan envies things that cannot be taken. He covets the colors in flowers, the notes in songs. Other people’s experiences, their lives, not anything tangible. He developed this fixation on humanity about a century ago. It’s only gotten worse with time. A single, driving, all-consuming obsession. And of course, since humanity is the pinnacle of perfection in his eyes, this absolute ideal he’s built it up to be in his fevered mind—”