Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  Patrick’s hand slipped into the pocket containing the wooden disc with the spiraling design etched onto its surface. He had carved those loops and whorls himself, and then carefully filled the cuts with paint mixed with sea salt, just as he’d watched his great-uncle do when he was a child. And even though he couldn’t know for certain that it would protect him if the need arose, he felt comforted knowing that he had it with him. Was that really all that different from his aunts clutching their crucifixes or saints’ medallions in times of crisis?

  Patrick realized that, in a way, what he and the others were doing at the moment could be seen as reinventing a very personal kind of faith from the ground up. A faith based on their experiences and how they believed the world to work, perhaps, but that drew from multiple traditions and schools of belief. A faith that they were working out experimentally, through trial and error.

  It was sobering to realize that the same could easily have been said about Nicholas Fuller five years before. And even the most respectable of faiths had a history of leading people to make less-than-ideal choices.

  He thought about what Joyce had said to him on their walk back to her car the day before, and her worries that the path they were on might lead to him choosing to act outside the law. But less than twelve hours later Joyce had been seemingly unfazed when Izzie had stabbed someone in the neck with her own scalpel and then left them in the road to die. Sure, there was the complicating factor that the person in question had likely been dead already, but the fact remained that Joyce seemed to have gotten increasingly comfortable with the idea of taking matters into their own hands. As had Izzie’s friend Daphne, for that matter.

  Where would all of this end? And even assuming that they survived, what kind of people would Patrick and the others be when they got there?

  Patrick stepped out of the bakery on Mission with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and, in the other, a paper bag filled with island-style donuts, each of them flaky, sweet, and roughly the size of a dinner plate. He headed down the sidewalk in the direction of his house, but had only taken a few steps when he heard a voice calling out from behind him.

  “Hey, sir, you get enough to share?”

  Patrick couldn’t help grinning slightly as he turned around. It was far from the first time that he’d heard the request.

  “Morning, guys,” he said with a nod to the three kids who were sauntering up the sidewalk toward him.

  “We’re pretty hungry, sir,” Tommy Hulana said as he leaned heavily on the handlebars of the bicycle he was pushing along beside him. He didn’t look like he’d missed a meal a day in his life.

  “Yeah,” added Ricky Kienga, “I didn’t even have breakfast this morning.”

  “Liar.” Joseph Kienga jabbed an elbow into his brother’s side. “You ate all the biscuits before I even got downstairs.”

  The Kienga twins and their constant companion Tommy were eighth graders at Powell Middle School, and all took part in the Te’Maroan Cultural Enrichment program that Patrick sponsored at the school. He was well accustomed to them trying to cadge sweets or treats out of him at any given opportunity; it was pretty much their standard modus operandi.

  “Well, let me see . . .” Patrick set the Styrofoam coffee cup down on top of a metal newspaper box, and made a show of unrolling the top of the paper bag to peer inside. This was not his first rodeo, and he always made it a point to buy far more donuts that he thought he needed, just in case. “I suppose I could spare a couple,” he said, feigning deep concentration, “but I need you guys to do a favor for me in return, okay?”

  The three kids didn’t bother to consult with one another, not even so far as to exchange a glance, but all three nodded immediately with enthusiasm.

  “Here’s the deal.” Patrick reached into the bag and made a show of pulling out one donut. “I’m putting together a community project this afternoon, and I need you guys to round up as many kids as you can to meet me at the blacktop behind the school. Say around four o’clock? Can you spread the word for me?”

  He held the donut out in front of the boys, waggling it slightly from side to side.

  “Sure thing,” Tommy said, reaching for it.

  Patrick pulled the donut back out of reach. “Promise?”

  Nodding as one, the three boys’ expressions were as solemn as police recruits swearing in their oath of office.

  “Okay, then.”

  Patrick grinned as he tossed Tommy the donut, and then fished two more out for Ricky and Joseph. He knew that it probably wasn’t necessary to bribe them with donuts, and that they would likely have helped out for free. They were three of the most eager participants in the Te’Maroan Cultural Enrichment program, though he got the impression that they were eager to be done playing konare on battered old checker boards and to move on to something a little more active. Whenever one of them started a sentence that began “Sir, when are we going to . . .” Patrick knew that the words “learn stick fighting” were going to follow in pretty close order.

  The three boys were already working their way through the plate-sized donuts as Patrick rolled the top of the bag shut and picked up his coffee cup. “Don’t forget, four o’clock.”

  Tommy tried to reply around a mouthful of donut, but the twins just nodded again, eagerly. Then they hurried away down the sidewalk, as if worried that Patrick might have second thoughts and take their treats back from them.

  As he turned to continue heading home, he paused, shrugged, and then opened the bag back up to pull a donut out for himself. This was not his first rodeo, after all, and he’d bought more than he thought he’d need. . . .

  By the time Patrick walked back into the house, the bag of donuts was already half empty, but he told himself that was still more than enough for Joyce and the others. The two that he’d eaten on the way home had been filling enough that he would probably only want one more, himself.

  The house was filled with the smell of coffee brewing, and voices coming from the doorway to the kitchen. Hanging his jacket on its hook by the door and putting his pistol on a side table, Patrick walked into the kitchen to find that Izzie had taken over one end of the dinner table as her workstation, and was sitting in front of her laptop deep in concentration, with a legal pad at one elbow and a stack of papers and hardcover journals at the other. Daphne and Joyce were sitting across from one another at the other end of the table, each with a steaming cup of coffee, and were currently engaged in what seemed to be a fairly spirited discussion.

  “Um, hey guys,” Patrick said. And then, when all three women turned to him with annoyed expressions on their faces, he held up the paper bag and added, “Anybody want a donut?”

  Joyce sat back with her arms folded over her chest, fuming silently, while Daphne scowled as she took a sip of her coffee.

  “What’d I miss?” Patrick sat the bag of donuts on the table and went to fetch some plates and napkins.

  “Not enough.” Izzie straightened up and pushed her laptop away from her, a look of annoyance on her face. “For one thing, your wifi’s bandwidth is for crap.”

  “Yeah, I always . . .” Patrick put the plates on the table, then turned to look at Izzie, raising an eyebrow. “Hey, how were you able to log in? I didn’t give you the password.”

  Izzie sat back, rolling her eyes.

  “For a cop, you’ve got a pretty lousy sense of security.” Izzie nodded in the direction of the wireless router in the corner of the room, sitting atop a rat’s nest of cords and cables. “I needed to do some research online and didn’t want to have to wait until you got back, so I tried the default password that the manufacturer printed on the back of the router, and was able to log in no problem.”

  Patrick glanced over at the router and then back to Izzie, a blank expression on his face.

  “You can reconfigure the router and choose your own password when you set them up,” she said. “You do know that, right?”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, dismissing the criticism with a
wave as he went to grab a cup of coffee for himself. “But I’m guessing that’s not why things seem so tense in here, right? Or did you all get in a disagreement about my substandard cyber security?”

  “Look, if I seem tense,” Izzie shot back, “it’s only because these two won’t knock it off and let me concentrate on what I’m reading.”

  She waved her arm at the far end of the table, indicating Joyce and Daphne, who were still staring daggers at one another.

  Patrick finished pouring coffee from the pot into his cup—he was stuck with So Many Men, So Few Can Afford Me—and came back to the table, taking a seat between Joyce and Izzie.

  “Well?” he said, looking over the rim of the cup while he took his first sip. “What’s the problem on this end of the table?”

  “The only problem,” Joyce said, arms still crossed, “is that Little Miss FBI here can’t accept that some people have principles, is all.”

  “Look,” Daphne snapped, leaning forward and slapping the table with the palm of her hand, “I wasn’t suggesting that you lie, okay?”

  “No?” Joyce gave her an icy glare. “And what would you call falsifying official medical records then, hmm?”

  “They wouldn’t be medical records . . .” Daphne began.

  “Those file requests go into the official records.” Joyce shook her head, exasperated. “I keep telling you but you don’t want to . . .”

  “Enough!” Izzie shouted from the other end of the table, slamming the lid of her laptop shut by way of punctuation. “I’m sorry I asked.”

  Patrick looked from her to the bickering pair at the other end of the table and back again.

  “I thought this didn’t have anything to do with you,” he said. He pulled a donut out of the bag, put it on a plate, and slid it across the table to Izzie.

  She took a bite of the donut, sulking while she chewed, a frown lining her face.

  “All Izzie is asking for is a little—” Daphne began, but Izzie interrupted her before she could continue.

  “No,” she said evenly, remaining calm. “Joyce is technically correct. And I shouldn’t have even asked before exhausting all other alternatives. But who knows, maybe Patrick could help out, instead.”

  Patrick was confused, and he knew it showed on his face. Izzie could clearly see it, too, and sighed before she tried to explain.

  “This morning I got to thinking about what we’re going to do the next time we run up against the Ridden,” she said. “We survived last night by a combination of quick thinking and dumb luck, and we can’t expect our luck to always hold out. But it occurred to me that we’re not the first people to go up against these things, and maybe we can learn from their example. Or, worst case scenario, from their mistakes.”

  “Like old man Aguilar, you mean?” Patrick gestured to Roberto Aguilar’s personal journals on the stack at Izzie’s elbow.

  “In part, but the old guy doesn’t really go into much detail in these,” Izzie answered. “These were for his own benefit, after all, and he didn’t need to explain things to himself that he already knew. But he wasn’t the only person we know of in Recondito who survived an encounter with the Ridden or the loa.”

  Patrick arched an eyebrow, and Izzie held up a finger, begging a moment’s patience. Then she opened the lid of her laptop, waited while it woke back up, and turned it around so that Patrick could see the screen. The banner at the top of the browser window indicated that Izzie had loaded the website of the Recondito Clarion, and the headline of the article on the screen read KILLER CULT HIDES DEEP SECRET.

  “That’s the article you sent me the other day.” Patrick looked up from the screen to meet Izzie’s gaze. That had been the source of Izzie’s discovery that the subterranean levels of the Eschaton Center had been connected to the disused mine that was connected to the Undersight project and so many other elements of their investigation.

  “Right.” Izzie nodded as she turned the laptop back around to face her. “And whatever it was that went down the night of the Eschaton Center mass suicide, it involved the loa somehow. Maybe Jeremiah Standfast Parrish was one of the Ridden himself, like Zotovic. Maybe not. But either way, it would be useful to talk with someone who was there, right?”

  After a moment it occurred to Patrick that the question wasn’t rhetorical and that she was waiting for an answer. He glanced over at Daphne and Joyce and saw that they were still glaring at one another, and so he turned back to Izzie and quickly bobbed his head in agreement

  “According to the news reports at the time,” she went on, “there were three people who were at the Eschaton Center that last night who lived long enough to see the next day. Two young people who had been indoctrinated into the cult—a young man and a young woman—and the man who rescued them.”

  “What was his name . . . ?” Patrick snapped his fingers, trying to find the memory in his cluttered recollections of the past week. “Jet something?”

  “George Washington Jett,” Izzie read aloud from the screen. “Though most of the news reports at the time referred to him as ‘G.W.’ Jett, and a couple of times as ‘Harrier’ Jett.”

  “Harrier?” Patrick raised an eyebrow.

  “Nickname, I guess,” Izzie answered with a shrug. “Anyway, the young woman, Muriel Tomlinson, and the young man, Eric Fulton, had both been living at the Eschaton Center for about a year when their families hired Jett to pull them out. At the time he was a Recondito-based private investigator who specialized in ‘deprogramming’ young people who had been indoctrinated into cults. Several other families had approached him about getting their loved ones out of Eschaton, too, but unfortunately Tomlinson and Fulton were the only ones who made it out alive.”

  “One of them wrote a book about it, right?” Patrick recalled.

  Izzie nodded. “Yeah, Fulton was credited as the author of . . .” She broke off, checking her notes to confirm the title. “Escaping Shadows: My Months In The Eschaton Center. But it was probably the work of a ghost writer, because most of the details don’t line up with the statements that either Fulton or Tomlinson gave to authorities at the time. More than likely somebody just paid Fulton for the right to tell his story, and then jazzed it up with details borrowed from stories told by survivors of other cults, or b-movie plots, or whatever.”

  Patrick could remember seeing battered old paperback copies of that book everywhere when he was a kid. The Eschaton Center massacre had left such an indelible mark on the psyche of the city, and even if most people might have preferred to forget all about it, it was impossible to completely erase. It was like being unable to resist probing a sore tooth with your tongue.

  “But Tomlinson gave a few lengthy interviews,” Izzie went on, “including the one I found from the Recondito Clarion, and one of those ended up being the basis of the made-for-TV movie that aired a couple of years later.”

  “I watched that in my ninth-grade history class in school, actually,” Patrick said. “I think the teacher just needed the break, to be honest—we watched a lot of videos that year—but that one really stood out because it took place so close to where we lived.”

  “Well, from what I’ve read it was reasonably faithful to the version of events that Tomlinson gave in her interview, though the people who made it glossed over a lot of details and went to some lengths to keep it family-friendly enough for broadcast standards.” Izzie took a sip of coffee, thoughtfully. “But obviously, there was a lot more to the story than either Tomlinson or Fulton let on.”

  “Maybe they’d be willing to open up a bit more, now that so much time has passed?” Patrick said around a bite of donut.

  “Too late for that, I’m afraid,” Izzie answered. “Fulton died of a drug overdose in ’82, and Tomlinson stepped in front of a bus in ’91. I’ve only been able to search the publicly available information so far, but it seems like neither of them ever totally recovered from whatever they experienced at the Eschaton Center. Both of them had been honor roll students when they walked in the d
oors at Eschaton, Fulton the quarterback for the high school team and Tomlinson her class’s valedictorian, but the months that they spent with Jeremiah Standfast Parrish changed all of that. Fulton was in and out of drug rehab programs pretty much constantly, arrested several times for public intoxication, even served a little jail time for possession, and Tomlinson seems to have spent more time in mental hospitals than out of them.”

  “That’s not too surprising though, is it?” Patrick said. “Look at the people who hung around with Charles Manson, or walked away from Jonestown, or any one of a dozen different cults from the time. Those kinds of experiences can leave some pretty serious mental and emotional scars.”

  “Maybe,” she answered, unconvinced. “Maybe not. But I got to wondering whether they talked any more about what they went through at Eschaton in later years. Tomlinson, in particular. Spending that much time in mental hospitals, there are bound to be patient records about therapy sessions, things that she might have said to the doctors there, I don’t know . . . diaries, even?”

  “Could you request those records?” Patrick asked.

  “Not Tomlinson’s.” Izzie shook her head, frowning. “I checked the hospitals where she was treated, and their policy is to destroy medical records ten years after a patient’s last discharge date.”

  “But Fulton?”

  Izzie glanced at the other end of the table for a brief moment before answering, as if anticipating a fight.

  “After one of his arrests for public intoxication, the Recondito District Attorney’s office wanted to question him in connection with another ongoing investigation—they were trying to connect his dealer to a larger supply ring, and thought he could supply the missing pieces of the puzzle—but they needed to know if his state of mind was solid enough that they could rely on his testimony. And so the D.A. asked the court to order a psychological evaluation.”

  “And?” Patrick asked. “Did he talk about the Eschaton Center?”

  “I’m not sure,” Izzie answered. “But whatever it was Fulton told the psychologist handling his evaluation was enough for them to recommend that any of his previous or future testimony be should be completely disregarded, that he could not be relied upon to act as a material witness in any capacity, and that he should be ordered to seek treatment immediately.”