by Jon Land
“Don’t be a fool.”
“Trust me. We’ll turn and start walking together toward the car. When I tug your arm, we make a dash for the woods over there on the right.”
“You’re mad!”
“We’ll be safe. We’ll find someone in power who’ll listen to what you’ve got to say. Van Dyne has got to be stopped, Alex. You wouldn’t have admitted all this if you didn’t believe that yourself. I’m the one who can save you.”
“You’re not alone,” he realized.
“Neither are you.”
Just for an instant MacFarlane wavered, seemed ready to join her before his expression solidified once more, his eyes like the granite spheres of a park statue’s.
“Last chance, Karen. Last—”
MacFarlane’s words were interrupted when gunshots erupted their way from inside the limousine. Karen caught the brief flares of orange muzzle blasts as she dove to the ground under the spray.
“What?” MacFarlane blared. “No! No!”
He turned back toward the car and began waving his arms. A pair of bullets thumped into his chest and blew him backward. He staggered briefly, puzzled eyes finding Karen’s, and then crumpled near her.
The doors to the limousine opened, allowing four figures to emerge. Rifles leveled, they began a slow trot across the park toward her, taking their time. No reason to rush.
Where were the Skulls? Why weren’t they firing back?
Fear poured through Karen as she lunged to her feet and started to scamper away.
A pair of the gunmen were bringing their rifles upward.
God …
Karen stumbled and lost her footing. All the gunmen had stopped now, the weapons of the two in the front trained upon her.
And then a pair of pounding roars split the stillness of the night. The two gunmen with rifles ready were blown forward, blood exploding from the chasms ripped straight through their chests by what could only be the Skulls’ shotguns. Another series of roars sounded where the remaining pair tried to swing. These two were blasted from all directions, it seemed, not even managing to get a shot off before hitting the ground.
Stuttering automatic fire from the limo raked the Skulls who had moved in the open. One of the bikers fell, whether from a hit or from evasive action, Karen couldn’t tell as she continued to hug the ground. The remaining members charged out of the woods and closed on the big car from both front and rear. Their fire peppered the limo in a nonstop barrage that had Karen covering her ears tightly to drown out the sound. Window glass exploded and sprayed the ground nearby. The tires blew out. Stray shotgun pellets punctured the car’s white body, leaving black holes from front to back. The firing from within the cab had stopped early into the barrage, but the Skulls were not taking any chances. Finally a half dozen of the gang members converged on the doors, while the remaining pair rushed toward Karen.
“You all right, ma’am?”
“You hurt?”
She shook her head as one of them helped her to her feet. The second Skull grasped her on the other side, and then they were running, her body shielded between theirs. Karen wanted to tell them to slow down, let her catch her breath. But there were no words.
There was only the night and the wooded park that enveloped them as they fled.
CHAPTER 17
Harlan Frye had first realized his destiny the day his stepfather kicked his dog to death. A week past young Harlan’s eighth birthday, the mutt had shit in the house. His stepfather’s response was to chain the dog in the backyard and begin kicking. He made Harlan watch the whole thing until the animal lay there bloody and quivering. A lesson in responsibility, he called it.
Harlan Frye stayed up all night praying for his stepfather to die. No matter how stiff he became, no matter how bad the pain got in his knees, he stayed on them, leaning over his bed with hands pressed tight together and eyes squeezed closed. He nodded off a few times, but the knee pain brought him back and he was glad for it.
Please make him die … . Please make him die … .
Over and over again.
By morning the flesh covering his knees had become so raw, it was sticking to the fabric of his pajamas. Harlan pulled the fabric away, visualizing his stepfather as the pain jumped through him. His back and legs were all cramped up, and his shoulders throbbed terribly from the strain of digging his dog’s grave the day before.
Please make him die, God … . I’ll do anything if you make him die … . I’m yours if you make him die, God.
It was a childhood fantasy of the most self-serving, lurid kind, but in this case it was a fantasy that came true.
The Sheriff brought the news to the Frye doorstep two nights later. Grim and solemn, he held his hat in his hand while he delivered it. Harlan’s stepfather, a truck driver, had apparently nodded off behind the wheel and crossed the center line. He plowed into the oncoming traffic, ultimately jackknifing and spilling over, causing a massive pileup in all directions.
An investigation later showed that Harlan’s stepfather had polished off one bottle of Jack Daniel’s and was halfway through another when he lost control. While his mother wept and cried, Harlan sauntered back upstairs to resume his position of prayer.
Thank you, God … I’m all yours.
He meant it, too. God had done him a favor, the biggest favor anyone had ever done him, and he wasn’t about to forget it.
There was plenty he would have liked to forget about those years of his youth spent in Haleyville, Alabama. Friendless and painfully shy, Harlan went through childhood alone. But from that day forward he didn’t much care because he had God. He wasn’t keen on regular church, but he was a regular at the services held by traveling preachers who set up shop in ramshackle tents and ranted about sin, while their assistants passed wicker baskets through the crowd. These men knew the real God, knew how to talk to Him and how to listen back.
Harlan Frye had just turned twelve when he stowed away in the back of a truck belonging to Preacher John Reed. Reed’s roadies didn’t find him until the next morning when they hit Mississippi to set up shop anew. Harlan had polished off his candy bars in the first few hours of the journey, and that had been it. He emerged pale, sickly thin, and certain Preacher John Reed was going to send him straight on home. So he prayed silently to God to let him stay. Don’t make him go back to Haleyville; anything was better than Haleyville.
And, once again, God heard him.
Only it wasn’t long before Harlan learned there were plenty of things worse than Haleyville, after all.
Harlan Frye began to believe that God would do things for him if he asked right. But he never wasted the privilege, never asked for anything unless it was something on which his whole young life seemed to hinge at the time. Sometimes God taught him a lesson by giving him just what he asked for. He couldn’t have been happier traveling with Preacher John Reed at first, for example. Reed called him his adopted son, let Harlan sleep in a small cot in Reed’s own trailer.
Then one night Preacher John climbed into the cot with him.
“It’s God’s will, child.”
Harlan Frye felt John Reed’s arms wrap around him and shivered.
“Please …”
Reed’s arms began to stroke and pet him. “Let it be, child.”
Harlan pulled away and stiffened Those hands locked like simmering ice cubes on his shoulders.
“Refuse the Lord’s will and I must turn you out, boy. Back to the world you came from. Turn away from me and you turn away from Him.”
Preacher John Reed pressed his crotch against him. Harlan shrank up against the wall the cot was perched next to.
“That’s better, boy. That’s better … .”
The experience became almost a nightly one. Sometimes Preacher John Reed smelled of liquor. Sometimes he just stank of the day’s sweat. For Harlan each night became like watching his stepfather kick his dog to death over and over again. He thought about asking God to help him, but never did. After all, this was happening beca
use God had already granted the request of an earlier prayer. Harlan had nowhere to run and was desperately afraid if he stopped obliging him, Reed at the very least would turn him out, and at the very worst might do far more than that.
He’d have to settle this one for himself.
So one night, lying in the cot all sweaty and rank after Preacher John had finished with him, Harlan slipped out of bed and eased a can of extra gasoline from the trailer’s rear storage hold. He sprayed it around the cot’s perimeter and the sheets, then sprinkled it atop Reed’s frame, careful not to rouse him. Harlan Frye lit a match and waited until the flame had singed his thumb before tossing it.
Preacher John awoke on fire, trapped within a circle of flames. His eyes bulged with terror and rage as he spotted Harlan calmly gazing at the scene in the last instant before the flames swallowed him. Harlan heard his awful high-pitched screaming and loved it.
They were the screams of his stepfather, the screams of Haleyville.
Harlan Frye watched him burn for as long as he could take the heat, then escaped through a window while the roadies worked desperately to douse the flames. He was long gone by the time the trailer had been reduced to ash.
Harlan figured God had granted his prayer to stay with Preacher John Reed for a reason. There was a lesson to take from everything, and especially from this: the world was an evil, wanton place in desperate need of being saved. Maybe God Himself had given up on the process. Or it could be that He dispensed salvation now through a few chosen others. In time Harlan came to believe he had been doing the Lord’s bidding the night he had burned Preacher John Reed.
And he could continue to do the Lord’s bidding, because the world needed saving.
He apprenticed with a number of men who, like John Reed, traveled the South in big trucks and trailers. He learned the tales of the hopeless lot that filled the tent shows hoping to be saved. He came to know that they were a microcosm of the downtrodden and needy throughout the country. Yet all these people could be saved. But he couldn’t reach them from atop a rickety makeshift stage when the ones most in need of saving would never even consider passing into the tent.
So Harlan Frye decided to go to them.
He broke off from a long succession of traveling preachers at the age of twenty. His first real ministry began in the South and trekked cross-country, picking up the down-on-their-luck on the way west. Ex-convicts and criminals, men and women in need of a second chance, in need of a man with the key to unlock the door to a better life. In the north woods of California, others who had heard of his work came in dribs and drabs. His success proved he was worthy of more, of moving on to another, higher phase. It was time to branch out, to spread the word God had given him to more of those in need of it. The first years had been good. The next ones would be even better.
But another test, another lesson, awaited him. Not all of his legion agreed to follow. The Reverend Harlan Frye knew what would become of them without him, knew they would lapse back into their old lives without his guidance. He gave them every chance, every opportunity, yet they continued to balk. If they were not with him, they were not worthy. It was as simple as that.
Once again Harlan Frye called upon fire to vanquish those who had disowned him. If hope was to survive, all those who resisted it had to be destroyed. Harlan Frye was true to his own word and teachings. Punishment dispensed justly serves the world well, and he returned to that world from the woods determined to save every soul he could toward its remaking.
Magazines began to take notice of his work. Radio talk shows wanted him to do call-in programs. Men from television began calling regularly.
Television …
The progression was as natural as every other step in his life had been. With television he could reach millions and millions more with his word, could save anyone from afar who could flip a switch. Harlan Frye felt certain this revelation had been shown to him because now he was ready to use it. He started with a Sunday show on a southern religious cable channel. His successful ratings led to a breakthrough in northern markets as well, making him the rival of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Unlike these contemporaries, the Reverend Harlan Frye was hardly satisfied. If a program could do this well for him, imagine what an entire network might yield! Investors were easy to come by, and the Future Faith network was born. Only five cable systems picked the station up initially, but Harlan Frye was patient. Within seven years that number had grown into the low hundreds. And “Sunday Morning Service” was now one of the top ten programs in all of cable. Since the occasion when the true purpose of his ministry had been revealed to him, Frye had been broadcasting the service live from a different location every Sunday; not just ordinary locations, but from an inner-city back alley, a welfare hotel, a porno theater. The theme, after all, was rebirth—hope from nothing. Live audiences drawn from locals had become staples as well. The demand for seats grew so frantic that Frye had stopped announcing Sunday’s site until the Saturday night before. Word traveled fast. Boy, did it ever … .
The Future Faith network was available in all fifty states and reached an estimated hundred million people. International negotiations were under way with a number of countries who wanted to carry it too, the biggest stumbling block being the Reverend Frye’s resistance to letting his words be translated by a stranger. A compromise was reached whereby the foreign representatives agreed to let him choose the translators for them from a list provided. Harlan Frye paid the candidates’ way to the United States so he could interview each and every one of them personally. He was that serious.
The money in terms of donations and advertising revenues began pouring in beyond Frye’s ability to keep track of it. And yet still he wasn’t satisfied. Still he didn’t feel he was reaching enough of those who needed help. Then, as always, when he needed a revelation, it came to him.
Riding the crest of the wave of 900 numbers, the Reverend Harlan Frye opened 1-900-237-2833, or 1-900 BE SAVED. By paying two dollars for the first minute and one dollar for every minute thereafter, the troubled and downtrodden could speak to a representative one on one for consolation and counsel. The average call ran twenty-six minutes, and hundreds of representatives were on duty to take them around the clock. It was the crowning achievement of his ministry and the most successful marketing tool in the history of religious evangelism.
The Reverend Harlan Frye became one of the ten most recognizable men in the country. The incredible power he wielded was as terrifying to some as it was mystifying to others and wondrous to still more, though least of all to himself. He felt he had merely scratched the surface of the world’s need. The core continued to elude him.
The Reverend Harlan Frye prayed to God for guidance. Just as he had done that first night so many years ago in Haleyville, Alabama, he knelt by his bed and cupped his hands atop the sheets. He prayed for guidance, for a sign of what he should do. Come dawn, when nothing had come, Harlan Frye dared to consider that the Lord might have abandoned him. His faith wavered, and the ensuing days brought no means to avoid its continued diminishing.
Until Dixonville, a small town in Virginia. Frye was drawn there when a school collapsed, killing over fifty children. He stood atop the rubble, even as rescue crews continued to sift through the last of it, and conducted a service. The minutes that followed revealed the true basis and inspiration for his being and his ministry. The thoughts rushed into his mind, the words barely trailing them. And as they came, he saw, he knew:
This was the sign he had been waiting for! If these children were not worthy to be saved, then who was? The world as a whole had fallen from any trace of grace. It needed to be rebuilt from scratch, to rise out of a rubble only figuratively different from the remnants of the school upon which the revelation had been delivered onto him. Those worthy of being saved had to be found, singled out, before the rubble consumed them as it had these children.
After that, for a day and a night unbroken Harlan Frye read the Book of
Revelation and came away knowing what he was to be the instrument of.
Judgment Day, as had been foretold.
But he couldn’t do it alone. The Book of Revelation had told of seven great woes, an angel signaling the coming of each. So it would be for him, the task to find six others who spoke the Lord’s word and possessed the resources, frustrations, and power that mirrored his own. In Judgment Day’s wake, they and their chosen alone would be left. Toward that end, Harlan Frye would construct a kingdom for them where they would be able to thrive unencumbered.
The Kingdom of the Seven.
It had taken four additional years to find a site that met all the specifications. Frye fondly recalled the day when he had been summoned by one of the teams he had sent off in that quest to a massive, abandoned salt mine near Palo Duro Canyon in the heart of the Texas panhandle. The mine’s interior was formed of a labyrinth of various-sized chambers surrounding one central one that was nearly two square miles in area, easily large enough to contain the equivalent in construction of several city blocks. Only a few of those structures had actually been completed today, and of these, only the main building was fully functional. Several additional shells had been finished, and construction crews were hard at work on their insides, even as more foundations were poured. Other crews had begun work in the connecting chambers, which were perfect locations for living quarters of various designs. It was like a beehive, Frye supposed, taking solace in his kingdom’s kinship to nature.
Among the factors that raised it above other potential sites, the salt mine offered solidity and stability. There was plenty of air, and the risk of accidental combustion was significantly less than it would have been in, say, either a sandstone or limestone cavern. Several government agencies, in fact, had taken to storing hard copies of their records in similar salt mines, the expert theory being that their integrity could withstand even a nuclear blast.
Of course, problems of light, heat, and safety were inevitable. First the chambers had to be shored up with huge support beams which were designed to eventually become unobtrusive parts of the finished buildings. Because of the risk of fire posed within any confined space, all construction equipment had to be powered by propane, which was simply not as efficient as oil or gas. And, of course, the work crews’ need for light necessitated the installation of massive gaseous lamp rows all across the ceiling. The effect created was comparable to that of an indoor sports arena. It was so bright that Frye could walk about the mine and, if not for its musty, baked air, could have easily convinced himself he was above the surface instead of below it.
