The Otherworld

by Mercedes Lackey

  Frank let him take his time. It was obvious that this wasn't comfortable for him.

  Joe took up the thread again, in a softer voice now. "Funny. From the time I was thirteen I dreamed of being Rambo. I only saw First Blood one time, but I remember every line in the movie. I worshipped Rambo, I guess. I kind of felt like I knew where he was at, because I was an outcast, too. But I never told Father that, since I was only allowed to worship two people, him and his Jesus. So when he sent me to a military academy, I was happy. The other kids, they saw the academy as some kind of punishment. Not me. I thought it was great. Like summer camp, training for the Olympics and getting to join the army all in one. I did pretty good, too, until one day they just pulled me out of class and sent me home. Father had a disagreement with the dean over the religious part of our training, wasn't to his liking or something, so I went back to Atlanta."

  That much could be checked. Frank nodded, and Joe took that as encouragement to continue.

  "I got a big surprise, though. After only six months, the Chosen Ones had grown. There were ten congregations in the south and east, instead of just the one I remembered. And everybody had started wearing guns everywhere." He grinned, disarmingly. "I started thinking that coming back to Atlanta wasn't that bad a deal after all."

  "So you could play Rambo?" Frank said cynically. Joe flushed, but nodded.

  "Father changed some time while I was gone. He was always crazy and weird anyway, but now it looked like something else was pulling his strings." The kid leaned forward, earnestly. "He would talk to himself when he didn't think anyone could hear him, and he would have these conversations with something, only it was like overhearing someone on the phone. You only heard one side of the conversation. He started calling this other thing the `Holy Fire,' and he said it was telling him the direction the church would go. Like, it told him to begin all the other congregations. It told him to begin the Guard, and then it told him to start training for the war of all wars. Armageddon, with the forces of God toting assault rifles, you know?"

  "Excuse me," Frank interrupted. "The Guard? Is that what you call your army?"

  "The Guard of the Sacred Heart," Joe supplemented. "Then there's the Junior Guard, which I used to be in charge of."

  "Tell me a little more about that," Frank said. "The Guard, the Junior Guard. I'm curious. How many are there? What kind of weapons do you have back there?"

  For a moment Frank was afraid pushing for that kind of information might have been premature, but apparently Joe had warmed up enough to be willing to talk. Poor kid, Frank found himself thinking. All these years, and he never really had someone to talk to. Already he feels comfortable enough around me to unload.

  It surprised him to feel pity for the boy. It surprised him more that he wanted to.

  Joe frowned, absently, his lips moving a little as if he was adding up numbers in his head. "There's around two hundred fifty foot soldiers. Everyone has an AK-47; Father and General Plunket like them a lot. We have stockpiles of ammo, fourteen thousand rounds per rifle last I counted. Grenades, launchers, AR-15s, M2A2s, six .50-cals."

  Frank couldn't help but utter a low whistle. "You're not pulling my leg, are you? That's an army down there."

  "You bet it is," Joe replied brightly, but the sudden pride in the Guard seemed to embarrass him. "But—it's bad. I know that now. I don't hold with any of it anymore. Ever since . . ."

  The boy looked away, evidently struggling with what he had to say. "Ever since my father killed Sarah. She was just a little girl."

  Killed a little girl? Jesus—Frank waited in stunned silence for him to continue. When Joe didn't, he prompted, "What little girl?" Let him be wrong. Let this be hearsay, God, please. . . .

  Joe swallowed and turned pale. "I—I saw him do it. I helped bury her."

  Well, so much for it being hearsay.

  "It had to do with that Holy Fire thing. It told him to do it, I think. Her parents were part of the church. They disappeared, and I don't know what ever happened to them."

  They're probably dead, too, Frank thought, still in shock, but he didn't say anything. Likely the boy knew it, but was just hoping it wasn't true. Look, you've dealt with murders before. People die. People kill. It happens. The important thing now is to get the damn evidence that'll put this bastard away.

  Joe shook his head and traced patterns on the formica with the water that had run down the side of his glass. "The church began to center around that Holy Fire thing more and more. It began calling the shots. First we'd train ten men to use a gun, then it would tell us to train fifty. And when that was done we'd get the orders to train a hundred."

  Frank didn't like any of this. It sounded like some kind of carnival sideshow—except that people with high-powered firearms were taking it seriously. "And you never actually saw this `thing,' did you?"

  Joe shook his head again, emphatically. "It all came through Father. But then the thing wanted to talk to us directly. The little girl, Sarah. She was used to talk to it at first, and what came out of her would scare anyone. Ugly sounds. Grunts. Then it would talk. Like something out of a movie."

  Frank nodded, wondering where reality ended and fantasy began. He had to act as if he was taking it seriously, or he'd lose the boy. He sure thought it was real. We should be getting this on tape, he thought. There's time for depositions later, but I wish I had a recorder going now. This Brother Joseph guy must be one hell of a con artist to convince a little girl to play along with this little parlor show, not to mention the rest of this group. There must be hundreds more down there. And they're all under his thumb.

  Correction. All except his son, now. I've never seen anyone spill their guts like this. He sings like a cage full of canaries. Or like someone with a guilty conscious.

  Joe raised his eyes to Frank's again, and the earnestness on his face could not be mistaken. "This wasn't just my father playing like a ventriloquist or something, you've gotta believe me. This thing, this Holy Fire, it's the real thing! It ain't—isn't—anything I've ever seen before. But it's real, real as you or me. . . ."

  Frank nodded, but his skepticism must have shown a little. The boy frowned.

  "I bet you'd like to know where we get our money, right? The Holy Fire, it would give us information on the horse races and the bingo games in Tulsa. And the information would always be right. But we couldn't attract attention by scoring big every time we went out there, so the `luck' was sort of spread around." He swallowed, hard. Frank tensed. Something big was coming. "That wasn't where the real money came from. That was just seed money."

  Here we go. Time for the nitty-gritty.

  "Drugs. That's where the real money comes from. I never got involved in the sales, but I knew what they were doing. They used the money from the horse races and stuff to buy coke from the big guys in South America. It got delivered at night about three times a week. Then they would have to move it the next day, out into the street."

  Frank cleared his throat. "What kind of large quantities? How much are we talking about here?"

  "Oh, three, four hundred kilos a shot," Joe said casually. "Comes in by private plane, mostly. There's a landing strip and camo-nets out on the land. Or when the plane can't make it, they bring it in by truck."

  Christ almighty, Frank thought. All that coke, right under our noses. If what he's saying is true, it's hard to believe that we didn't get a line on any of this. He might be exaggerating the amount. But even if it's one ounce, we can bust them but good.

  Joe caught his attention again. "Now listen for a minute. They never got busted, not even once, because of what the Holy Fire would say right before we went out. Like the other night, it told us about the Oaktree Apartments. That there was going to be a bust, and when. Exactly."

  Frank squirmed. Which, for a man of his size, was not an action easily concealed. "Oaktree Apartments. In Cleveland?" He had been involved in that stakeout. And the resulting raid had produced zilch.

  Every residence on their warra
nts had been sanitized. Not a shred of evidence, not a dust speck of coke. Nothing. And no explanation. One day before the bust, the place was red-hot. Day of the bust, nothing but empty rooms.

  "Cleveland? I guess. But there's more, the reason why nobody ever gets busted. The Holy Fire warned us about the police. There was something about a blue Mustang."

  Frank knew about the Mustang; he'd driven it once. The Tulsa County sheriff's office had loaned it to Pawnee last winter for a drug bust related to one on their turf. But how in the world did that quack know about it?

  The first thought was that there had to be an informant working from within the department or even the state's attorney's office—

  But how could someone cover county cops and Tulsa City stuff? And state busts?

  Someone who had access to warrant information right across the state? But that was coming out of a dozen different offices—oh, it could be done, but only after the busts were over and the warrants filed—

  More than one informant. It was the only explanation.

  And it was the least believable. When a cop goes bad, it's generally an isolated event. A statewide coordinated effort of counter-informers—run from the sticks?—that was too much to believe.

  They knew somehow, he thought in shock. There's no denying that. For one moment, he wondered if it was possible this Holy Fire thing was real—

  No. It couldn't be. There was some other explanation. Meanwhile, he had to play along, because the kid believed, even if he didn't. . . . "It sounds like this thing needs a medium to talk through," Frank said, thinking quickly. He'd heard of the psychic medium scam, some with a kid hypnotized for good measure.

  "A child," Joe corrected. "At least, that's according to my father. That was why Sarah. But Sarah began to resist this medium thing too much, and—"

  Frank waited. And waited. "And what?"

  "He got angry," Joe said in a soft voice. "He—strangled her. Six months ago or so."

  A thin line of ice traveled down Frank's spine. "You did see this?"

  Joe nodded, and his haunted eyes begged Frank for forgiveness. "I can show you the grave."

  Evidence. "That will help. Is it on Chosen Ones' property?"

  "It's hidden, but yeah, it's on our land. Their land." He shook his head. "I'm glad to be out of there, but at the same time I feel sorta lost. Like I don't know where I'm going now."

  "Don't worry," Frank assured him. "You're doing the right thing." Damn bet you are, kid. "But if the girl was murdered six months ago, then who's he been using for the go-between since?"

  Joe stared at the back of his hand. "That's what I'm getting at. This family started showing up at Praise Meetings in Atlanta, before we moved everything out here. There was this little kid—he was kinda like the way I was when I was that age. I think one of the reasons I liked him from the start, now that I look back, is 'cause he wasn't caught up in all that crazy Sacred Heart stuff like everyone else was. And he liked me, I think he kind of thought I was like a big brother. The kid needed someone to look up to, and I just sort of fell into the role, I guess."

  Frank was getting an eerie feeling about this, a sense of déjà vu that he couldn't quite shake. Why does this sound familiar? he wondered, but saved his questions for later.

  The back of his hand seemed to fascinate the boy. "The father, this drunk named Jim, got roped into the Sacred Heart real good. My father convinced him to bring his son to the Praise Meeting. The kid turned out to be better than Sarah."

  "The man's name was Jim?" Frank asked, knowing now why this all seemed familiar. And he didn't want it to. "Was his last name Chase?"

  Joe frowned. "Might have been. Everyone there is on a first-name basis, but it'd be on record somewhere."

  Frank knew he had to ask. "What about the boy? What's he called?"

  "Jamie," Joe said. "The boy's name is Jamie."

  Oh Lord, Frank thought, keeping his face as bland as possible. How do I tell Cindy Chase this? The answer came to him quickly: You don't. At least, not yet.

  "He grabbed the kid—actually, he got Jim to grab him and bring him here. He had Jim kidnap the kid out of school, and lie to him, told him that the compound was a summer camp or something. Then they started using Jamie all the time as the medium thing, and they started starving him to keep him quiet, make it easier for the Holy Fire to talk through him. All he gets is juice—" Joe faltered, then picked up the narrative again. "That was when I started to feel bad about my position in the Guard, the whole Sacred Heart thing. Last night—Father made me a lieutenant with a new promotion, head of Internal Security. He must have figured something was wrong, 'cause all of a sudden he started dangling all this stuff in front of me. New apartment, new rank. But—I just can't take it anymore."

  "You couldn't take what happened with the little girl?" Frank asked.

  Joe shook his head, guiltily. "No, I mean, I know that sounds bad, but I didn't know her. She was kind of a puppet for Father, and it was like what was happening wasn't real. No, it's what he's doing to the kid. For weeks they've been starving him, to be a better channel for this Holy Fire, and he keeps getting weaker and thinner—he can't hardly stand anymore. It's torture. I got some food through to him, but it's not enough to save him. I was up against too much in that place. I had to go get help."

  Joe shuddered. "Sir, you've got to go in there before it's too late. Father's been putting him in a sensory deprivation tank for some godawful reason, which is just hurting him more. It's something I don't understand at all, it's like he does it just 'cause he can. And whatever else happens, Jamie can't go on much longer!"

  Joe's eyes were pleading, glistened over with tears not yet ready to fall. "I'm responsible, too. Arrest me if you want to, but go in and save him."

  Suddenly all the barriers broke, and Joe put his head down on his arms and sobbed—tiny, strangled sobs that sounded horrible, as if the boy was choking.

  Frank was amazed. After all that control, he hadn't expected the boy to break down and cry. The other patrons in the restaurant had already left; now it was just them and Peggy, who turned the front door sign to "Closed," then came over with a box of tissue.

  "Sorry," Joe said, after composing himself in the face of a strange female. "I didn't mean to—lose it like that."

  "Its okay," Frank told him, feeling a little better now that he knew the kid still had some real emotions. "Cry as much as you want to. We'll figure this mess out somehow."

  But the control was back, at least for the moment. After a while, Peggy began bringing their food over. Old George was watching, covertly, his face lined with concern.

  "Hope you're still hungry," Frank said. "There's a lot of food here."

  Joe's appetite did not seem to be dampened at all by grief; the boy devoured everything in front of him.

  "Don't worry, son, we're not going to arrest you," Frank assured him, between mouthfuls of his own hamburger. "For one thing, I don't see evidence yet of any wrongdoing on your part. I doubt any judge in the country would hold you responsible for what happened to the little girl or to the boy, either, as long as you're willing to turn state's evidence. Would you be willing to testify against your father?"

  Joe didn't answer right away. He seemed to mull over it, but only briefly. "Yes. I—I know I shouldn't think twice about it, but my father scares me, sir. He has too much power, and what he says goes. If you haven't got a bulletproof jacket lying around, I think maybe you should find one, if you want me alive long enough to testify. Even then it might not make any difference."

  "I'll see what I can come up with," Frank said. Now it seemed like a pretty good idea. Assault weapons. I guess death squads and assassins is a logical next step. After all, this Brother Joseph has killed at least once. . . .

  * * *

  "Surely he left something behind?" Brother Joseph said carefully.

  He had been eating lunch alone in his private dining room, when Luke had interrupted the meal. He didn't like being interrupted at meals. Esp
ecially not with news like this.

  Joe. Gone. No—not possible.

  "No note?" he persisted. "No clues? Nothing at all to tell you about where he went?"

  "Nothing," Luke said simply, his eyes staring at the wall over Brother Joseph's head. "He left nothing behind, sir. Some clothing appears to have been taken, but none of the Chosen Ones' uniforms. He vanished, apparently, as a civilian. No one really knows where he is."

  The preacher's eyes narrowed at the news. I knew the boy was up to something, he thought coldly, a slow rage building. The devil must have had his claws in him for a long time now. Why else would he turn against me? Haven't I shown him the way? Didn't I give him more than any other father would? I gave him one of the most prestigious honors he could ever hope to achieve. And this is how he repays me? How dare he?

  Then the rage—paused for a moment. Or—did he? How could he dare?

  "This is simply not acceptable," he said to Luke. "I think that your conclusion that my son has abandoned us and gone to the authorities is premature. He could be testing us, you know. That would be just about his speed." That made more sense. Surely the boy would never dare run off. He's probably trying to impress me. He smiled as the logical explanation unrolled before him. "I can see it now, flexing his new muscles as the new Internal Security head, hiding in some corner we've forgotten about, waiting to see what precisely our reaction would be to this. If you think about it, our response would be rather revealing. It would emphasize our ability to handle—or not handle—a defection."

  Luke shook his head, stubbornly. "No, Brother Joseph, I just don't think so. Haven't you noticed how peculiar he's been lately? Especially around Jamie. If you ask me, it seems he's had a change of heart about the Cause. The devil's in his heart, and he's not listening to the voice of God anymore."

  "Well," Brother Joseph said, smiling thinly. Luke's statement touched a raw nerve, and he tried to conceal it as much as possible. "I'm not asking you. Use your head, man! This is my flesh and blood you're talking about! I suggest you organize a thorough search of the complex. If he wants to play this little game with us, we'll show him we can play it better."