Afterparty

by Daryl Gregory

  I doubted that. “So how far away is this church, Luke?”

  “It’s close,” he said. “And you’re going to love Pastor Rudy.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The call came for the Vincent while Vinnie was branding the spring calves. He was halfway through the shipment of freshly weaned three-month-olds—five bison cows and a bull from the Rakunas, Inc., facility in Santa Monica, California. The cow in his hands bucked and kicked, a real lively one. He ran a thumb along its side to soothe it, took a breath to soothe himself, then pressed the red-hot iron into the animal’s fuzzy brown flank. The calf squealed. A thin coil of acrid smoke rose up to the ceiling.

  “Sorry, little girl,” Vinnie said. Ranching was no business for the sentimental, but the cries of the young ones really got to him. He flipped down the magnifying glass and inspected his mark, a Flying V about two millimeters long. The lines were crisp, and he was satisfied.

  He set the cow down on the other side of the foot-high fence that separated the kitchen from the wide-open range of the living room. The calf scampered across the carpet of #10 Giro Home Prairie. The herd (thirty-eight head, counting the six he’d just purchased) had congregated in the shadow of the coffee table. It was midday, and the ceiling’s grow lights were turned up strong.

  The pen pinged a second time: another message. He would have ignored the device, but this was the Vincent’s pen, the one that hardly ever beeped. Vinnie removed the magnifying specs and put the branding iron into its tiny holder. He picked up the pen. The messages were the same, sent only thirty seconds apart: “Please call.”

  Vinnie would have preferred to do all their business through text, but the employer was an old-fashioned man who wanted to hear a voice. Vinnie thumbed the connection. After a moment, the call went through, and the employer picked up.

  “Is the Vincent available?” the employer said. He knew that the Vincent did not like to be ordered around. He liked to be asked.

  Vinnie looked down at the crate of calves. He’d planned on finishing the branding. Then he was going to move the herd to the back bedroom where the carpet was high, so he could use the living room to set up a new breeding area for the two-year-olds. He’d never gotten his herd to breed, despite spending thousands on the highest-rated bulls. It frustrated him to be dependent on lab-grown stock, and upon the money that the Vincent’s jobs provided. Someday he’d live off his herd, like a true rancher.

  “How long is the engagement?” Vinnie asked.

  His employer said, “A few days at most. I want him to talk to someone in Toronto.” Talk. One of those kinds of jobs, then. Most of the time the Vincent met people. Sometimes he saw them. Talking was a rarity, but it paid the best.

  “Okay,” Vinnie said. “Send the details. The Vincent can leave tomorrow.”

  The employer said nothing for an uncomfortable moment. Then he said, “If it’s at all possible, I’d like him to be on the ground tonight.”

  Now it was Vinnie’s turn to insert an uncomfortable pause. Buying an international plane ticket at the last minute would raise the Vincent’s air travel threat score. Also, would there be enough time for the Vincent’s pills to kick in? And what about the calves?

  The employer said, “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t of the utmost importance. I’ll of course include a bonus for express service.”

  Vinnie breathed out. “Okay. I’ll tell him.” By tradition, Vinnie pretended to be the secretary for the Vincent. The name Vinnie was never mentioned by either of them. The conceit was that the Vincent was too badass to ever talk on the phone.

  The employer hung up, and Vinnie rested his forehead on the edge of the table and stared at the floor.

  One of the miniature calves in the crate bleated. Vinnie wouldn’t have time to brand them now, and he wouldn’t be around to watch over their integration with the herd. He’d have to release them to the prairie and hope for the best. In a few hours he wouldn’t care about such things, but he did now, and he would again when he returned.

  He told his pen to search for available flights, then sent an email to his neighbor down the hall. He made sure that the branding iron was turned off and unplugged. What next? The Poomba. He detached the robot from its charger and set it down in the high grass. The little flying-saucer-shaped device did nothing for a moment, but then its sensors caught a whiff of methane, and it swiveled left and rolled slowly forward, the grasses bending before its rubber bumpers. The herd sometimes got spooked by the machine, but what could he do? Without it the whole apartment would fill up with tiny buffalo chips.

  He left the apartment, always a nerve-racking experience, and walked two doors down. Al answered wearing only a pair of UNLV basketball shorts, his hairless rounded gut like the dome of a mosque. He was a Hispanic man a foot taller than Vinnie and a hundred pounds heavier, even with the lightweight titanium leg. Like so many men of his age and income bracket, Al had participated in Operation Enduring Freedom, which he’d described as an international limb-exchange program sponsored by the American government.

  “I’m going to be gone for a few days,” Vinnie said. “I was wondering if … well…”

  “You want me to watch the critters?” Al had served as emergency ranch hand on two occasions. He wasn’t Vinnie’s first choice for the position, but he had two important qualifications: He was always home, and he always needed money.

  “I’d really appreciate it,” Vinnie said. “I just emailed you updated instructions. Did you get it?”

  “Sure,” Al said. “Just came in.”

  “Great. You can delete the earlier one.” It had been several months since Al had watched the herd, so Vinnie unfurled his own pen to go over the major sections of the document: “Water and Lights”; “Veterinarian”; “Pasture Schedule”; “Food Supplements.” He apologized for not having time to write up notes on the new stock. “Sometimes the herd rejects the new calves,” Vinnie said. “If you see some of them wandering off by themselves, put them in the back forty.”

  “That’s…”

  “The bedroom with no furniture,” Vinnie said.

  “Got it,” Al said. He shifted his weight to his biological leg. Raised his eyebrows significantly.

  “Oh!” Vinnie said. He handed over the envelope that contained the cash. “I wrote the apartment guest code on the envelope. It’s a new number. Also, I won’t be reachable while I’m traveling, but if you call my home number and leave a message, I should be able to check voicemail at some point.”

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” Al said.

  Vinnie went back to his apartment. He didn’t feel great about leaving Al in charge, but he did know a cure for that feeling. He opened the freezer, pulled out the box of Commander Calhoun Fishstix, and retrieved the bottle of Evanimex that was hidden inside. The pills were provided by the employer as part of his compensation, and arrived at regular intervals by FedEx.

  Vinnie preferred to ramp up slowly, taking one pill every two hours, but time was short. He swallowed four. They slid down his throat like lumps of ice, each one (he imagined) ushering his tender heart one step closer into cryogenic storage. For safekeeping.

  He stepped over the kitchen fence and walked back to his bedroom via the narrow boardwalk. The wooden structure stood a foot off the ground, and its struts were spaced far enough apart that the bison could migrate without impediment. It also allowed Vinnie to cross the rooms without trampling grass, squashing livestock, or smearing cow patties on his flip-flops.

  There was a trick to becoming the Vincent that went beyond chemicals, a ritual that helped realign his headspace. He stripped off his clothes and turned the shower to hot. Afterward he shaved, even though he had shaved just that morning. He unwrapped one of the charcoal suits, as well as a blue shirt and matching tie, and dressed. Then he took down the black Caran d’Ache briefcase and placed in it a second blue shirt, a pair of underwear, and a pair of socks.

  Last, as always, the hat. He opened the box and lifted it out, a black 800x Ser
atelli with a Vaquero brim, one of the finest Western hats ever made. He lightly gripped the crown in three fingers and set it on his head.

  That’s the ticket. He could feel the Vincent coming on now. Not a different identity, exactly, but a different way of thinking of himself. An alternate approach to the world. The knot of tension he carried in his chest—his worries for the herd, his agoraphobia, his certainty that he was an evil person—began to unwind and fall away.

  His plane departed in ninety minutes. By the time it landed in Toronto, he would be at Full Vincent, ready and able to stalk and torture a Canadian.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hootan’s car was a tiny biodiesel Honda tricked out with fins and whitewall tires. The kid pressed the remote, and the engine roared like a fighter jet. “Real Engine Sound,” he shouted proudly. The recording was ridiculously mismatched for the car. “I can also do Mustang GT and a Ford 150!”

  Dr. G and I crawled into the back, with Luke all knees and elbows in the passenger seat. Luke told Hootan the address, and the Afghan kid slipped on a pair of sunglasses and swung into traffic. The speakers under the floor settled into a highway thrum.

  “Tell me about this holo church,” I said. “Pastor Whatsisface, everything.”

  Luke twisted to face me, tilting his head to fit under the roof. “Is she really dead?” he asked.

  “Francine?” I flashed on her body laid out sideways on the white tile, her arm and belly a coastline for a lake of blood. “I’m sorry. Yeah.”

  Luke tried to take this in. “It doesn’t make sense. She was so much better.”

  “She was despondent,” I said. “She said she had to pay for her sins.”

  “But she told me she felt forgiven! God had forgiven her.”

  “Well, evidently he changed his mind. She was calling for him to come back.” I leaned forward. “What did she feel so guilty about?”

  “It’s private,” Luke said. “She confided in me.”

  “But she was a teenager. It couldn’t have been that terrible.”

  “You’re provoking him,” Dr. G said. “Why don’t you just double-dog dare him to tell you?”

  I ignored her. “How bad could it be?” I asked.

  “Pretty bad,” Luke said. “Not the worst thing I’ve ever heard. But … yeah.”

  “You won’t shock me,” I said.

  He said nothing for a few moments, then said, “It happened a couple years ago. She was shacking up with this guy, a real asshole. He just wanted someone to live with him and take care of his grandmother. She had some kind of disease where she was getting more and more paralyzed every month, from like the feet up?”

  “ALS,” I said.

  “No, that wasn’t it.”

  “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”

  “That one,” Luke said. Dr. G rolled her eyes. The boy said, “The old woman couldn’t walk anymore, and she could barely move her arms, and she had trouble swallowing? Frannie said that it was like feeding a baby—spitting up, choking, a real mess. And then the bathroom stuff! Frannie did all of it, wiped her ass, changed her diapers. She really took care of her.”

  “What did she get out of it?”

  “She got to sleep in a bed. And the old woman’s money paid for the drugs. The boyfriend, can’t remember his name, was a meth head. And Frannie liked to smoke, too, so it worked out.” He took a breath. “So one day the boyfriend has to go out to buy, says his friend has some new stuff, something from the States, and he’ll be right back. I’ll only be gone for an hour, he says.”

  “Uh-oh,” Dr. Gloria said.

  “So she’s there for an hour, two hours with the granny. Then it’s all afternoon. That night the boyfriend doesn’t come back. And by this time Frannie is pissed, because she knows what he’s doing; he’s getting high without her.”

  A car horn blared, and Hootan jerked the car to the right. The side of a bus like a silver wall appeared six inches from my face, then swept past.

  “Jesus Christ!” I yelled. “Are you blinking while driving? Take off those damn specs!”

  Hootan said something in an unknown language that I translated as “Fuck you.” The sunglasses stayed on.

  Luke said, “So now it’s morning, and the old woman is making noises like she has to go to the bathroom. Francine’s stuck in the house, and the asshole grandson is out there smoking. She thinks, this isn’t even my relative. I am not responsible for this person. So she leaves another message on the boyfriend’s phone and says, ‘Fuck you, I’m out of here.’ And she leaves.”

  Hootan said, “She did what?”

  “She grabbed her stuff and went back to her friends on the street,” Luke said. “And a couple days later she hears that the boyfriend got admitted to the hospital. He’d been there for days, an overdose maybe or some bad reaction.”

  Hootan said, “What happened to the grandmother?”

  Luke didn’t answer.

  “She just left her here?” Hootan said. “She left an old woman to choke and die?”

  “That’s what she told me,” Luke said.

  “Well, your friend deserved to die.”

  “What?” Luke said. “Fuck you!”

  Hootan slammed on the brakes. Behind us tires squealed, horns blared. He yanked off his glasses. “Say that to me again! Say ‘fuck you’ to me!”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Hootan lurched sideways, trying to get his arm behind him.

  “Gun!” Dr. Gloria said.

  Hootan’s arm came up with a fat black pistol. He pointed it at Luke’s head.

  “Whoa whoa whoa!” I yelled. Not very helpfully.

  “Your friend is evil,” Hootan said. “Say it. She is evil and deserved to die.”

  Luke had pressed himself back against the passenger door, palms raised, but he didn’t seem as scared as I would be with a gun to my face. “Yes, she did evil,” the boy said. “But she isn’t—she’s not Sauron. She just made a bad decision.”

  “Hootan, you can’t shoot him here,” I said. “You’ll get blood all over the car.”

  “Yes, she deserved to die,” Luke said. “We all deserve to die. But God forgives.” He looked at me. “God didn’t abandon her. If she felt like He was gone, it’s because she turned away from Him.”

  “Can we just get to the church?” I asked. “Fayza’s waiting for us to get back.”

  Hootan said something in that unknown language. Then he slipped the gun into the front pouch of his sweatshirt. “God is not as forgiving as you think,” he said.

  * * *

  Pastor Rudy’s church was a former auto parts store, the plastic sign above the entrance long gone but the ghost letters still on duty, false shadows on the faded aluminum, their empty screw mounts bleeding rust. In the parking lot a few old vehicles hunkered before the nail salon, the only store in the strip mall that seemed to be open.

  Luke unfolded from Hootan’s car and loped toward the church, eager as a puppy, which only annoyed Hootan more. The front door chimed as he pushed it open.

  The interior was a wide-open space furnished in early AA Meeting: metal folding chairs, a coffee station, earnestness. Along the walls were long tables that held what looked like elementary school art displays.

  Luke said, “Oh, let me show you mine!”

  He hurried toward one of the tables. “All of us approach God from different angles. We also see a little piece of the whole. But the piece, the shard, is the same as all of God, right?”

  “Hologram,” I said.

  “Right! Pastor Rudy had this idea to get us all to share what we were seeing.” Luke proudly showed me a cardboard box. The side facing us was open. On top was a smaller box wrapped in tin foil. The walls inside were bright red and gold, Bollywood colors. A six-inch action figure lay facedown on the floor of the box beneath a much larger yellow umbrella. The edges of the umbrella were singed black.

  “Wow,” I said. “You made this yourself?”

  The boy was immune to sarcasm. “That’s me,�
�� he said, pointing to the figure. “I can’t see God directly, because I’m facing the wrong way, toward Earth. But He’s there, protecting me. Look.” He reached behind the box, flicked a switch. Inside the tin foil box a light came on, making the umbrella glow.

  Dr. G said, “His God is an umbrella.”

  “Better than a wet blanket,” I said aloud.

  She walked away from me, flexing her wings. “Here’s the guy,” she said.

  A figure had stepped out of the back, where the storeroom used to be. My first impression was of an Olympic mid-weight wrestler: bullet head, powerful arms that wouldn’t hang straight, and a posture that suggested a readiness to shoot the legs. He wore a T-shirt with an unreadable logo, old jeans, brown-and-orange CAT work boots. His skin tone fell in the Mediterranean end of the spectrum.

  “Luke. Good to see you,” he said. His accent was Mexican. “And your friends.” He held out his hand to me, and I noticed a black tattoo lurking under the lip of his sleeve. “I’m Rudy.” I shook hands. Hootan didn’t lift his hand, but conspicuously put it into the front pouch of his sweatshirt.

  Rudy smiled curiously. If he was nervous, I couldn’t see it.

  I said, “Luke’s been telling us about your church, how much it changed his life. We also hunger and thirst after righteousness.” I didn’t bother to sound sincere.

  He looked at Hootan, then back to me. A tilt of the head that said he didn’t know what was going on but was willing to play along. I saw another tattoo on his neck: the number “13” in Gothic script. He said, “You must have a lot of questions.”

  Oh did I. What was going on in the pastor’s head right now? Was he taking his own juice, or only passing it on? It was impossible to tell. He seemed as laid back as a Buddhist monk, but that could have been an act, or his natural chemistry. Behind him, Dr. G drifted along the perimeter of the room, taking in the mini-shrines. I got an impression of Aztec gods, clouds of cotton swabs, black-and-white photo collages. It was an Anti-Science Fair.