“Like what?” Zoe asked.
“Like why my mother — and all the women who married into the family, for that matter — ended up crazy, or dead, or both,” he replied. “And why the house was sanitized and turned into a historical site.”
“Why is that?” Seth asked.
It was then that Joya Hayes stepped in. “To protect it,” she said. The look on her face was deadly calm and all the more frightening for it. “You may not want to believe any of this. But deep down, you all know it’s true.”
Neither Caroline nor Amy nor Seth could argue the point. Josh stepped in, immediately trying to solidify their fragile resolve.
“When I first told Justin, he didn't believe me either,” he said. “Until I introduced him to Joya and Henri, and they showed him how to work the magick. Then he understood. And he knew what he had to do. Justin went back to let them know that we were coming. Unfortunately, he got intercepted. But he's over there, and he's still alive. They're waiting for us."
“To do what?” Zoe asked.
“End it,” he said, “Once and for all.”
His friends looked around at the men guarding the windows, at Josh and Joya, at Henri and Louis. They all nodded.
“What do you mean?” Seth asked incredulously. The others echoed the sentiment to varying degrees. Josh smiled, an odd light sparkling in his eyes.
“Tonight we're going back to Custis Manor,” he told his old friends, “and we're burning the fucker to the ground from the inside out. And because it's quite possible that we won’t see each other again, I needed to explain to you what was happening. I feel like you all deserved to know. I’m sorry for misleading you. I hope you can forgive me.”
He paused. And for the first time, the others noticed his hands were shaking.
“So you brought us all here just to tell us this,” Seth said, as though sensing that somewhere another shoe was waiting to drop.
“Yes,” Josh replied. “And to invite you to help.”
Amy blanched; Caroline looked like she might just faint. Seth just rolled his eyes.
“I knew it,” he said bitterly. “You’re playing us.”
At that point Louis looked at Seth. “You of all people should understand, brother.”
“Understand what?” Seth replied. “That you lunatics want to get us all killed? I’m sorry for what happened there. Not a day of my life goes by when I don’t try very hard to deal with that. But what can we possibly do about it?”
“More than you know,” Josh replied. Joya backed him up.
“What happened there has been going on for generations,” she said. “Others have tried and failed. But you,” and with that she indicated the members of the erstwhile Underground, “you experienced the wrath of the Great Night and survived. That’s never happened before. We don’t know what it means. But it’s a chance, one we’ve never had before. And the more of you that are there, the better.”
“Maybe the drugs pried open some chemical door that somehow allowed us to survive,” Josh added. “Maybe it was something else about us. I don’t know. I just know this: if we try to stop it we might lose, but if we don’t it will win. And then God help us all.”
And there it was — a chance, however slim, to actually do something about human suffering, to help rectify a centuries-old injustice. And to repay an old debt to a friend who needed them, now more than ever.
At this point, Kevin was way more than ready to gather up his family and beat it back to Baltimore. As far as he was concerned, every weird thing he ever heard about Josh Custis had proven true: the man was a certifiable lunatic. Unfortunately, Kevin’s family did not share this view. Caroline was not only stunned but seemed suddenly hooked by the notion that Mia and Justin could still be alive. What's worse, Zoe was totally caught up in Josh: his story, his persona, everything about him. She was not about to miss out on it.
There was a similar conflict between Amy — who came knowingly into danger, though she didn't know its form — and Seth, who had no intention of leaving behind a widow at this stage in his life. Fascinated though he was, he was all for leaving now. Before it was too late.
Unfortunately for them, it already was.
25
It was about this time that Louis Hillyard decided he had just about had it with whiny white people.
Bad enough that they had relied upon a burnout like Justin Van Slyke to be point man on their operation; worse still that both Joya and Henri seemed hell-bent on trusting Josh Custis to not only fund their efforts but to get them into the manor. As far as Louis was concerned, Josh’s name alone not only disqualified him from any position of trust but rendered him a figure of instant suspicion, to be summarily dealt with at the first sign of betrayal. But then to further stake the outcome of their efforts on the willing participation of a yuppie, a junkie, and a goddamned Oreo…
It was beyond stupid. It was a recipe for disaster.
Not that Louis trusted the rest of the team all that much more, and his misgivings were more than skin deep. Louis had a vast and bitter skepticism to go with his innate solidarity for his kind. Born to the bad avenues of Oakland, CA, on February 21st, 1965, Louis grew up in a time when giants walked the earth, as the clarion calls of Malcolm and Martin stirred the passions of a people long denied and for a fleeting moment it seemed that revolution and deliverance were not only possible but inevitable. From earliest memory his mother reminded him that his first proud cry of life came at 3:10 p.m., the exact minute that Malcolm fell at the Audubon Ballroom stage in Harlem. To her this was a sign of near-cosmic significance; to Louis, it was a ten-ton weight levied upon his young soul.
He grew up fed by Black Panther free breakfasts and had learned their Ten-Point Program practically before his ABC’s, as Huey and Bobby duked it out with everyone from the local cops to Governor Reagan to Hoover’s COINTELPRO thugs. But by the time he reached manhood, the movement had withered, eroded from within by infighting, stress, and conflict, and from without by indifference and the simple attrition of life. Revolution, it seemed, made for great theory but poor practice: it took too long and cost too hard, and even the most glorious of goals — full employment and guaranteed income, an end to oppression and all wars of capitalist aggression, demands for land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace — seemed more like a wish list of crypto-Marxist fantasy than any kind of workable plan; nice gig if you could get it, but don’t hold your breath waiting. And as long as the ‘or else’ part of the bargain was measured in white men’s guns and money, the dream seemed destined for failure.
One day he realized that even Momma’s prophesies of his own importance had failed to account for the simple difference between East Coast and West Coast time. But Louis never had the heart to point that out.
After Momma died, Louis drifted away, his anger burrowing ever deeper. He hated the white culture he grew up under the yoke of, but had come to loathe his own culture as well, replete as it was with con men, charlatans, gangsters, and fools. Even his admiration for the Panthers withered in the face of the split into warring camps, with Cleaver’s hard-edged black nationalism on the one side and Newton’s social-reformist idealism on the other, coupled with rumors of an opportunistic and increasing reign of terror inflicted on even the lowliest rank-and-file believers: turning girls out to do tricks for the most meager of “infractions” against the revolutionary order, running extortion rackets against Oakland’s pimps, dealers, clubs and bars, and even flat-out murders — a troublesome Berkeley nightclub owner found dead in his car at the San Francisco airport, straying members shot, stabbed, or OD’d into oblivion, or Betty Van Patter, the Panther’s white bookkeeper, turning up dead after being summoned to a meeting at the Lamp Post bar, where Huey used to like to hang.
Little was proven; no one seemed to care about the sundry extinguishments of lesser lights. But Louis found himself put off by it all, increasingly alone and at odds with the world, making his way through the belly of the great wh
ite beast, assiduously avoiding anything that could result in arrest and imprisonment, even joining the army in a perverse bout of personal, youthful rebellion. He learned weapons. He learned discipline in the face of an omnipresent enemy. But above all, he learned to trust no one.
And then he met Joya and Henri. And they explained to him the secret of Custis Manor, and the magick.
The very notion of it stirred a profound sense of calling in Louis’s soul. Most of the problems that plagued his people he could do little to nothing about, short of sacrificing himself to some unforeseen and bitter end. But this… impossible as it seemed, he had resolved to do something about it. Or die trying.
As for the others — Louis knew Henri was a brother to be trusted; Henri’s two young homes, Khalil and Russell, rode in on Henri’s say-so, and had performed admirably both in their first foray to the manor and in their subsequent arrest and interrogation at the police station. That was comforting, but he still wondered how they would fare when the spraying they were called upon to do turned from acrylic to lead.
Which left him with Mohammed and Rajim: a pair of wannabe badass knuckleheads if ever there were. Louis had seen more than his fair share in the army, and on the streets: young bloods all pumped up on anger and testosterone, looking for someone or something at which to aim all that displaced rage. He trusted them about as much as he believed in their Muslim trappings, regardless of how many Asalaam Alaikums they mumbled; he bought it about as much as he believed in the militant Stars of David they wore, along with Mohammed’s half-baked rap about how blacks were the true Chosen people and the real tribe of Israel, or Yisrael, or Shabaaz, or some such conveniently righteous crap. He had plumbed the arcane convolutions of the Nation of Islam, which shored up racial pride by invoking tales of how whites were a race of devils genetically engineered some six thousand years ago by a black demigod named Yakub for the express purpose of torturing everyone with their ungodliness; of course, the teachings also prophesied a cosmic mothership manned by African supermen that would lob nukes from outer space in fulfillment of some bastardized prophecy, but that was just a little too L. Ron Hubbard for his tastes. Louis never failed to marvel at the lengths to which people would go to find something worth believing in. Himself included.
For him, the real wild card in all of this was Joya, and her power to work the magick. He had no doubt she had power, but the closer they got to their mission the more he worried how it would weather a stand-up fight. At this point, Louis was half inclined to say fuck the magick and rely upon his own abilities to rectify history. Like say with twenty kilos of C-4.
Louis looked across the room, taking in the small and pitifully inexperienced gathering. As his attention turned to Rajim, his hackles went up. Rajim was supposed to be guarding the rectory door.
But he was not there.
“Motherfucker,” he muttered. Louis crossed from his post by the front door to the entrance to the rectory. He opened the door and gazed down the hallway. To the left was a small, cramped office, to the right the door to the bathroom, which was closed. At the end of the hall a set of stairs turned and led down to the basement. Rajim was nowhere in sight.
Louis reached into his jacket and pulled a fat black Glock, held it down by the side of his leg as he advanced. As he got to the end of the hall, he heard the creak of the stairs …
…and suddenly Rajim appeared. He saw Louis and looked vaguely surprised. “S’up?” he said.
Louis looked at him, both relieved and annoyed. “You a’ight?” he said.
“I’m a’ight,” Rajim replied. “Just checking security.” His eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses; even so, he would not meet Louis’s gaze.
“You’re supposed to be on the door,” Louis told him.
“I’m on the motherfuckin’ door!” Rajim protested. “I went to take a leak, a’ight?”
“I thought you were checking security,” Louis said.
“Yeah, dawg,” said Rajim, “I took a piss, and then I checked the back.”
Louis looked at him skeptically. He noticed Rajim was sweating. He looked high, or ill, or both.
“Lemme see your eyes,” Louis demanded.
“Wanna see my dick too?” Rajim snapped indignantly. He tried to push past; Louis blocked his path.
“Lemme see your motherfucking eyes,” Louis warned.
Rajim hesitated; Louis stood poised, the Glock still in hand, looking altogether not a man to be fucked with. Rajim pulled off the shades and glared defiantly. Louis scowled; Rajim looked wired and pissed, but not under the influence of anything obvious.
“Happy now?” Rajim said.
“Sorry,” Louis said, backing off. “My bad…”
Damn right, yo motherfuckin’ bad,” Rajim grumbled and headed for the door. Louis watched him exit, then lingered at the head of the stairs. Something was wrong. The cellar light was on. Suddenly the bathroom door creaked open; Louis turned, his gun rising.
Amy emerged, her eyes going wide. “Jesus!” she squeaked, hands going up.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Louis snapped, lowering the gun, looking hugely annoyed.
“What?” Amy said defensively. “I was in the can!”
“You were in there by yourself?” he asked.
“Duh, yeah,” Amy said. “Who else would I be in there with?”
Suddenly Louis shushed her. There was a light switch at the top of the steps. Louis clicked it off. Darkness enveloped the basement below. Amy came closer.
“What’s wrong?” she said. He ignored her.
“Louis?”
Suddenly Louis saw it: a thin slice of light bisecting the shadows below. As he watched, it widened, other shadows crossing it. He heard the shuffle of footsteps and hushed voices downstairs. He turned to Amy.
“Get back!” he growled, pushing her hard. Amy fell ass backward into the bathroom as Louis slammed the door shut.
And the first shots rang out.
Back in the chapel, everyone froze as the volley of gunfire sounded. Seth looked around and saw the brothers springing to action, weapons brandished. In the space of a heartbeat, he did a mental headcount, came up one critical member short.
“Amy!” he cried, turning toward the rectory door. But as the door creaked open it was not Amy but Louis who tumbled out, clutching a spreading red wet stain on his shirt. As he fell, the Glock slipped from his grasp and skidded to Seth’s feet. Just then Seth looked up and saw a thin-lipped, bony-faced white man appear in the doorway holding an AR-15 assault rifle.
“Get down!” Seth cried.
The white man fired a deafening burst, high-velocity lead spraying the room, dinging chunks out of the pews, the coffin, pinging divots out of the walls, as the others scrambled for cover or position.
Seth howled with rage and grabbed the gun, firing wildly into the doorway. The fourth and fifth shots hit with a sound like a hammer smacking a ham, knocking the man back into the hallway until only his shoes protruded, twitching. From behind the door, unseen hands dragged him back.
“Fuck,” Seth gasped. Just then more gunfire emanated from the hallway, the muzzle flashes of a half-dozen weapons violently strobing death.
Seth dove behind one of the pews a microsecond before the slugs chewed it to pieces; acrid smoke filled the air as the brothers fanned out. Mohammed looked up to see
Rajim moving toward the front door, flinging it wide.
What the fuck you doin’, man?!” he called out,
Rajim turned to Mohammed. His eyes were rolled back deep into his skull, showing bloodshot white. He grinned a mad rictus. And shot Mohammed five times in the chest.
Mohammed did a spastic jig and flopped back, dead. The other brothers turned in shock and opened fire on Rajim, killing him instantly as the fire from the rectory entrance redoubled.
Josh and his friends huddled, terrified, caught in the withering crossfire. The door to the rectory hall splintered under the impact; a moment later, a small metallic cylinder clattere
d into the aisle.
Kevin had grabbed Zoe and covered her in the narrow space between the pews: in a dizzying split-second of terror and adrenaline his brain processed what he saw. He barely had time to scream.
“GRENADE!”
Then, boom.
Silence: eerie, deafening. As abruptly as it had started, the assault stopped. The pews were a shambles of torn and ragged kindling. The air was thick with smoke and the scent of fire. Outside they heard gunning engines and screeching tires as the marauders roared away. Kahlil, Russell, and Henri rushed out, cursing and popping futile rounds at the retreating attackers.
Josh scrambled to the dais, found it upended, the casket a pocked and shredded ruin. And Justin’s hand was gone once again.
“Fuck!” he hissed, then looked around frantically. “Is everyone okay?” he called out. The group emerged from the wreckage, dazed and dirty, bleeding and shell-shocked.
Just then they heard a scream coming from the rectory hall. Josh ran back to find Amy standing horror-stricken. At her feet lay one of the wasted assailants. His fingers had been chopped off, his face a shotgunned crater.
“What the fuck,” Josh gasped. Amy trembled as if she might unglue at the seams. Josh hugged her protectively. “Don’t look,” he told her.
“L-Louis…” she murmured. “He s-saved my life…”
Josh helped her back into the chapel, where the others stood in witness to a grim tableau. Louis lay in Joya’s arms, blood soaking his shirt, in a great amount of pain. Amy fell to her knees before him, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I’m s-sorry,” she said.
Louis shook his head. “Not your fault,” he said, adding, “It ain’t that bad.”
Just then Henri came in, winded and wired. Louis looked at him. “Rajim,” he hissed. “He let ’em in…”
Henri nodded frantically. “He capped Mohammed, too,” he said bitterly. “Motherfucker sold us out.”
Louis nodded, wincing. Amy looked around at the panic-stricken group. “Are you guys crazy? He’s hurt. We gotta get him to a hospital!” she insisted.
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