“Hello.”
“Your wife has already agreed to come with us, Warden Reed. She claims that you’ve been keeping her and the children against their will up here. The Sandlers contacted us for her.”
“I’m under arrest?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For what? I haven’t done anything.”
“That’s not what your wife says.”
“She could have left. I didn’t stop her from going down to Jason and Bridgette’s. She could have just kept on going.”
Lonnie Briggs shrugged his big shoulders even though the plea had been addressed to his superior.
“She says that you used psychological cruelty to keep her and the kids up here,” Bonhomme said. “She said that she was afraid of you coming after her and killing the whole family.”
Gerin Reed looked at the bluish smoke issuing from the agent’s lips. He wondered whether it was true. Was he crazy? Was he ready to kill Karen and little Jason and Anne-Marie? Was he insane?
He remembered Karen complaining that the money was running out. She’d asked him how they would survive if there was no money.
Was that crazy?
Gerry had thought that he could ask Jason about a job in the logging camp down in the valley. He’d been a cook in the Pacific Theater. He’d killed men in the war. He’d killed children too. But all that was before he’d been wounded and been made a cook.
At that moment Gerin saw Miles Barber assessing him. There was neither sympathy nor accusation in that one hard eye, simply the desire to know.
“Warden Reed?” Christian Bonhomme asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.”
“Are you taking me to prison?”
“No, sir, I’m not. But we need to have some questions answered and you’re a hard man to find.”
From all accounts Claudia prepared the sweet oils herself. She used store-bought extracts of cinnamon, almonds, rose petals, and vanilla to scent them. The oils, which came from cottonseed mainly, were heated to body temperature and placed around the room in wooden bowls. The walls and ceiling were draped with deep red cloths. Every corner housed a cluster of a hundred or more lit candles. In the center of the room was a pile of mattresses decorated with silken blankets, sheets, and pillows. Naked, Claudia Heart reclined in the middle of the mattresses and silk. Max the dog stalked the perimeter while her Special Chosen surrounded her. They were also naked and, to a man, erect. Each one had greased himself with the warm oils and now waited, listening to a song that had no words or sound. The music emanating from deep within their love goddess.
She leered with anticipation at their lust.
“Sing to me,” she said loudly. “Sing to me.”
Lonnie Briggs got that on his tape recorder. He and Miles Barber, backed up by eighteen state troopers, watched through an obscure window.
“We gotta wait until they do somethin’ illegal,” Briggs whispered to Barber. “Otherwise, the goddamned lawyers’ll get the arrest and everything we seize thrown outta court.”
But Barber thought that it was the spectacle of all that sexuality that had arrested the SIB sergeant’s attention. After all, the SIB usually went after less flamboyant suspects. The rare case of police corruption, construction scams against the state of California, or some bureaucrat using state resources illegally — these were Briggs and Bonhomme’s staples.
Barber also felt something from the naked woman. Whatever it was felt raspy and unpleasant on his sinuses and eye.
It was Barber who brought them to this abandoned mine. He used her husband’s name to do a tide search on desert properties. William Zimmerman had put a down payment of $175,000 on the played-out Jacobi mine in the eastern Mojave Desert.
Claudia Heart’s Special Chosen let out groans and guttural pleas. They begged and demanded. They stroked themselves and posed.
At first she called forth a small Asian man who sported an exceptionally wide erection. She made him lie beneath her and rode him while Max bit hard into the flesh of his thighs and arms.
The next lover was a tall and virile Mexican man. She was happy simply to swallow his sperm.
The next three men approached at the same time.
Max’s eyes flashed as he moved among the Chosen and howled. Claudia wailed with him.
Lonnie Briggs was breathing heavily. The uniformed state troopers, who couldn’t see what was happening in the room, were beginning to get restless. Miles Barber was wondering why he didn’t seem to care about sex or even if there was a crime being committed.
Then a man skulked into the room. He was different from the rest, inasmuch as he was fully dressed. But Barber could see that he too was greatly aroused by the woman. He avoided Claudia’s line of vision. Barber knew somehow that he was breaking Heart’s command, that he just needed to see her.
“Hey, Briggs,” Barber said.
“What?” the state agent answered in a husky voice.
“Ain’t that one in the pants Halston?”
Lonnie Briggs broke into the room with his uniformed state police force. The prone woman, barely larger than a girl, looked up and shouted, “Stop them!”
Briggs and his men found themselves set upon by twelve naked men.
“I was talking to the police, Inspector,” Claudia Heart-Zimmerman said to Christian Bonhomme.
He had been feeling a little light-headed ever since he’d entered the interrogation room with the suspect.
“You ordered your followers to attack Sergeant Briggs and his men, Mrs. Zimmerman,” the inspector replied.
“No. No, not at all.” The love goddess smiled. “I was yelling for your sergeant to stop them from raping me. They’d been raping me for weeks, you know.”
Claudia peered intently at Bonhomme, and he felt a vague pang of fear.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what you say. But Mr. Briggs calls it murder. He says that you ordered your men to fight to the death. The police officers were forced to respond with deadly force. …”
It had been in papers all around the country, STATE POLICE FORCE ASSAILED BY NAKED ZOMBIES OF LOVE. Four of Claudia’s acolytes had been shot to death. Five others fought so hard against arrest that they were killed, or died later, from wounds they received while being subdued. The survivors were now locked up in a medical facility in San Francisco, suffering from some disease or withdrawal and committed to their escape and reunion with their queen. Claudia Heart and Robert Halston were arraigned in absentia because of the wounds they sustained.
Halston was subdued in the cafeteria. Claudia had run out into the desert with a dog. When the police approached her she fell, hitting her head on a stone.
She was captured, but the dog, after biting three policemen — who now were hospitalized with undiagnosed ailments — had been too fast for the law.
“I am innocent, Inspector,” Claudia said with a shrug, staring intently at the wavering Bonhomme. He noticed the sweat on her forehead.
“You are not, Mrs. Zimmerman.”
“Call me Claudia Heart,” she commanded.
“I don’t know what power it is that you think you have over men, Mrs. Zimmerman. But I am going to have you up on charges of assault and murder.” Inspector Bonhomme turned quickly and went through the interrogation-room door. He knew that if the woman had stood up and approached him, he would have gladly let her go.
“Should I have her transferred to a holding cell, Christian?” Lonnie Briggs asked.
“No. No. Leave her right where she is. Open that door only to bring her meals. Don’t talk to her. You hear me, Briggs? Don’t say a word to her.”
“Yes, sir.”
After snapping his ankle chain, Winch Fargo slammed his hard and skinny body against the ironbound door in the darkness. No one heard the dull thudding deep under the desert floor.
Sixteen
GRAY MAN WALKED THROUGH the towering forest, unconcerned with the beauty of the redwoods, unconvinced by
their grandeur. His leather dress shoes were broken, his black jacket torn. Gray Man’s clothes were spattered with mud, but he didn’t care. He was waging a war in his mind with Horace LaFontaine, the first soul he’d ever met that he could not easily destroy.
He’d built Horace out of leftover memories, scraps of a wasted life in the shell of a body that had died. The persona, a loose association of thoughts, had been useful when Gray Man wanted to understand what humanity demanded of its citizens. Humanity — like rutting shrimp in a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. Humanity — globs of self-referential fats and amino acids that couldn’t know the source of existence even if they were spoon-fed that knowledge in the lap of their own pitiful God.
Horace was a perfect example of this primitive life-form. He’d absorbed the inaccurate language, shared the mindless lusts. He was seen as nothing even among the useless, and still his will had stymied the great Gray Man.
Grey Redstar, the Gray Man, the reaper of lost light. The one creature destined to cleanse the soul of its body. The harbinger of a newer and higher form of being.
But as powerful as he was, he could not stop the disease within him, this vague alliance of memories attached around the name Horace LaFontaine.
He’d crucified Horace, stripped his flesh down to the bone and crushed out the cells that remembered him. But every time, Horace had risen out of the depths of Death’s mind — whole again, though broken and afraid.
“Please let me alone,” Horace cried.
“Then die,” Gray Man answered. “Let your life stop and leave me to accomplish my own ends.”
“I cain’t die,” Horace cried. “I mean, I keep comin’ back. I don’t know why. I’m sorry. But if you leave Joclyn be, I won’t have to fight wit’ you no more.”
“You would threaten me?”
“I cain’t he’p it, man. I cain’t. It didn’t bother me when you kilt all them other ones. But I like Joclyn, and whenever she’s around, I just come up in your mind, like. An’ even if you wanna do sumpin’ bad to ’er, I still like ’er an’ don’t want that.”
Gray Man screamed in his mind, and for a moment Horace faded out of existence. But he was still there, there in the fabric of cells and light. Horace LaFontaine was like a mutating virus that had lodged itself deep in the cells of the god of death. The only cure would be to divest himself of the body and release the beautiful deep blue light into the heavens.
In the yawning space between earth and sky and the bright sun, she had stood for 734,906 mornings. From a sapling bole to branchling finger. From a straining prayer for light to the crashing death of her mother. And then that straight run upward and outward. Not even the black bear’s raking claws could stop her. Not gnawing worms or lightning bolts or shifting soft earth could hinder her stretching, yearning ascent. …
… and then the different light, knifing down on her needles and sinking below the bark. Not for a year did she even feel it. Not for three did she know that she knew anything, and then she knew more than even the longevity of trees can witness. The tickling wings of butterflies and the nuzzling snouts of deer and lion and rat. She felt and knew the scrabbling claws of birds in her branches and among her leaves.
And then there was the sun shining. The pulsing story of creation humming again and again through her inner timber. So beautiful that it called a song from her depths, a song that flowed out through the atmosphere and deep into the soil and stone of the earth. She was calling to awareness the very atoms that composed the world. She purred and rumbled out the song of awakening that only a patient tree could know. She called and counted butterflies; she bathed in morning fogs and knew her sisters even though they were still unconscious as she was on the day before the light.
She reached down farther in the earth and stretched her leaves upward. Her seed fell barren to the ground, and she knew that she was merely a beacon. I say that she knew, but it was not knowledge as we hold it. The green cell is the engine in plants where blue light is purely mind. And blue light is knowledge, the truth before it is warped by perception of eyes and solitary minds. Plants, and some simple animals, are best suited for holding and sharing the light.
The unity of living flesh and divine light is still more a dream than reality. The light strains to reach the flesh that stretches toward it. But they are not yet one, not even for that woody giant. To reproduce herself, then, she could only sing, waiting for a mate to come. Waiting for the moment when she reached maturity.
He approached the ancient tree with no more concern than a woodsman.
“What are you doing here?” Esther the park ranger asked Gray Man. She’d just come from around the tree and was startled by the appearance of the hobo.
Ever since the day she came awake before the great tree, covered in butterflies, with the memory of those bright blue eyes in hers, she came to visit the tree at least once a week. She came to listen to a nearly subliminal thrumming and to watch the wild animals that came in almost religious obeisance. There is magic near that tree, that’s what the ranger thought.
Gray Man ignored her question, craning his neck to see the full height of the towering column.
“Excuse me, sir, but I’m doing research in this area and it’s off-limits to visitors. If you want to see trees, you have to stay on the paths as they are marked.”
Gray Man raised his hands and laughed. Sparks leaped from his fingertips.
“What are you doing?” Esther asked in a trembling voice.
Somewhere inside the tree the trembling was echoed, though not in fear.
Gray Man’s laugh died at the challenge, and suddenly Horace came back to life. He could see what Gray Man was doing, but he had no power to stop him. He had no desire to save a dumb tree.
“Stop it!” cried Esther O’Halloran as she ran at Gray Man with a dead branch for her club.
The electrical shock was enough to shatter the branch and throw the woman down a small incline into a stream. Gray Man gazed upon her with anger that he’d not felt toward a human before. But he was upset, upset by Horace LaFontaine.
Horace looked at the woman and thought, Fool, why you wanna go messin’ ’round and gettin’ yourself kilt like that anyway? I don’t wanna see you die, but I ain’t gettin’ skinned alive again just ’cause you a fool.
The timber of the redwood groaned, and Gray Man knew that this frail being meant something to the tree. He smiled at the possibility of inflicting pain before death and turned toward the park ranger. Her eyes were rolled up into her head, but still she struggled to rise.
Horace watched with fatalistic fascination. He was less than a ghost, no more than a common cold to his demonic host, and he, in his powerlessness, didn’t feel much for the doomed woman. But then the groaning of the tree became louder and more strident. The ground began to tremble. Esther O’Halloran, who had risen upon unsteady feet, danced away while trying to keep upright.
Gray Man and Horace turned to the tree just as it exploded in a shower of splinters and bright blue light.
Horace, fully aware, felt the brunt of the explosion and then ran down a dark asphalt alley under a heavy downpour. Blue streetlights were placed at uneven intervals down the lane. He ran into walls and trash cans and old rotted fences. He fell and stumbled back to his feet, ran and collapsed, all the while followed by the silent specter of pain. It came after him like a flood of thick blood. He ran and fell tumbling right out of Gray Man’s life.
But Gray Man didn’t see Horace go. He was running himself. The splinters and timbers didn’t hurt him, but the light of the life of that tree went down to his marrow. He caught fire from the vitality and sanctity of the tree. And all he could do was run with the curse of the tree etched deeply on his soul.
Beneath the desert, at the same moment of the explosion, Winch Fargo’s door broke open. Wild-eyed and impossibly skinny, the black-toothed felon staggered up the mine shaft into the clear desert twilight. As he climbed to the surface, the sun disappeared and the stars slowly winked
to life. Thousands and thousands of stars. Each one, he knew, like a flower for the honey bee gods who left him here long before there was time or love.
Winch Fargo sought her in the air. There was a trace and a direction — and many fewer steps ahead than there were years behind.
Seventeen
AFTER TWO WEEKS CHRISTIAN Bonhomme decided it was time for him to enter Claudia Zimmerman’s cell again. This was no light decision. He had put it off until the day before the inquest. The only men that had been allowed in to see her were Miles Barber and Felton Meyers, the ex-detective and the court-appointed attorney. And Felton was thoroughly searched before he was allowed into her cell. She fired Felton after their first meeting, however, and spent the next two weeks alone.
Bonhomme was not a religious man, nor did he believe in magic or voodoo or any other such nonsense. But he had seen the depraved survivors of the zombie sex camp. One man, a carpenter named Stanley Brussels, stayed on his knees begging from the time he awoke to the moment he collapsed into sleep. He had to be force-fed through a rubber tube the hospital attendants shoved down his nostril once a day. Others mutilated themselves or became so violent that they were restrained twenty-four hours a day.
Each man wanted only one thing: to see Claudia Zimmerman, to be put in a cell near hers. They begged and cajoled and threatened.
“If that’s what you call love,” he’d said to Briggs and Barber the day he was to go into Claudia’s cell, “then you can have it.”
He wasn’t the same man that Barber remembered. Outside the detention room Bonhomme stalled, clenching his pipe between visible teeth.
“Did you ask the judge for an extension?” Bonhomme asked Lonnie Briggs.
“You know I did, Chris. They said that they have to see her for the indictment as soon as she’s sitting up straight. I don’t know what’ll happen if they find out that she hasn’t seen a doctor.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” Bonhomme said through his pipe. “Is Clemmens out there?”
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