by R S Penney
“Why are you telling me this?” Christopher wondered aloud.
“Because we would have you join us.”
“Join you?”
Taking a position in the middle of the room, Slade spread his arms wide and bowed his head. “Your commitment to the Divine is commendable,” he said. “Now join with me, and I will show you the face of God.”
Christopher shut his eyes, tilting his head back until he felt warm sunlight on his skin. He took a deep breath and then let it out. “I know the face of God already. He who died for our sins.”
“Yes, that is one of his faces.” The other man flowed across the room, caressing a strange circular device that he wore on his belt. “Consider this a baptism into a new life, my son. You oppose sin. Your purity will be rewarded.”
“You can't be serious.”
The small smile on Slade's face could have frozen the most violent volcano. “You have prayed to the Lord for a sign,” he said. “And the Lord has provided. Will you now reject the honour that has been given to you?”
Christopher swallowed, then glanced about from side to side. “What do I have to do?” he asked, his brow furrowing. “How do I…How do I accept the place the Lord has set aside for me?”
“Kneel before me, my son.”
Christopher did as he was ordered, dropping to his knees and letting his head hang. A shiver ran down his spine, and he had to resist the urge to tremble. He would meet his Lord with the dignity expected of a man.
Slade held the circular device before him, and he saw that it was some strange kind of container with a blinking green LED. What could possibly be in there? “Accept this,” Slade intoned. “Be one with the Lord, and you shall be transformed into a new and better incarnation. Place your hand on the device.”
Christopher did so.
Slade pressed two buttons with his thumbs, and then Christopher felt something warm and moist against his palm. There was a brief tingling sensation, but it lasted only seconds before raw energy coursed through every cell in his body. Pure, undiluted power. The essence of God himself.
His skin was glowing with brilliant white light, his hand luminous as he flexed his fingers. The ecstasy! The sweet, glorious fury of it. He felt…something. Some other force that was blending with him. And it was enraged. He could feel it in his mind, in his very soul; this was God's divine wrath, and it had been given to him to wield. Sinners would pay for their crimes in droves. He would break them all with his bare hands.
Christopher toppled over, catching himself by slamming hands down on the carpet. His head was spinning. “What was that?” he asked in a rasping voice. “What, what did you do to me?”
When he looked up, Slade was smiling down at him, chuckling softly to himself. “I made you one with the Divine,” he said. “Your old life is forgotten. The man you were is no more. You must choose a new name.”
“A new name?”
One of the hostages stirred, hoping to use this distraction to her advantage, but Isara kicked the woman hard across the chin, breaking her jaw on contact. “Stay down! All of you!” she ordered, gesturing with the pistols in her hand.
The men and women who cowered under their seats began to whimper, a sound that filled Christopher with delicious glee. He relished their suffering. It was as if his desire to inflict pain on these miserable excuses for human garbage had been amplified. “When we join with the Divine,” Slade began. “We each take a new name. You must now do so. Let go of your old life, and commit to a greater purpose.”
What name should he choose? One of the apostles perhaps? Or a great figure from American history? A real man who stood for righteousness? No, none of that would do. He needed something simple, something that suited him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the tattoo on his arm, and the answer came in a blinding flash of inspiration. “Flagg,” he said. “My name is Flagg.”
The woman called Valeth turned her head, frowning at Slade with her brows drawn together. “We can't stay here forever,” she hissed. “Sooner or later, those officers outside will try to reestablish control of the situation.”
“Then perhaps we should send them a message.”
“What kind of message?” Flagg asked.
Slade dropped to one knee before him, picking up the pistol that he had discarded. The man wore a bright smile, his eyes sparkling with delight. “It's fairly simple,” he said, pressing the weapon into Flagg's outstretched hand.
Slade rose in one fluid motion, then ran his gaze over the pitiful excuses for human beings who took refuge beneath chairs. “A man has gun,” he said, eyebrows rising. “Hey, man…Have fun.”
Flagg understood.
He killed the receptionist first.
Jena emptied her stomach onto the sidewalk, bile splashing against the concrete with a horrible stench. Companion have mercy! In all her years as a Justice Keeper, she had never seen anything like that. The horror of it was going to be glued to the insides of her eyelids until her dying day. Focus, she told herself. You have a job to do.
This street outside a fertility clinic in downtown Cleveland had been cordoned off to prevent civilian traffic, and she could see police officers in blue uniforms manning orange barricades half a block away. They scurried about like ants, but none were willing to venture a glance in her direction. They didn't want to be reminded of what had happened to their colleagues.
Tears blurred her vision for a moment, and she could feel her Nassai recoiling in horror. That was a sign in and of itself. After over twenty years together, the symbiont had developed a kind of emotional toughness. Jena had honestly believed that, at this point in her career, nothing could shake her.
She had been wrong.
“Such carnage.”
She turned.
Aamani Patel stood before her in a black pants' suit, her arms folded as she directed a scowl toward the pile of corpses. Jena had to give the woman credit. Somehow, she was able to maintain her composure. “Twenty officers,” she murmured. “All dead. Every last one of them. Not to mention the civilians.”
Doubled over with hands on her knees, Jena looked up to blink at the other woman. “Come to tell me that I'm not doing my job?” she asked in a rasping voice. “That this is yet another example of Leyrian incompetence?”
Aamani closed her eyes, shaking her head in dismay. “Not at all,” she answered, striding forward and offering one hand to Jena. “I've come to realize that there is nothing to be gained from such antagonism.”
Jena took the woman's hand.
A moment later, she was standing up straight and struggling to ignore the churning in her belly. Oh, Companion have mercy! If she let herself think too deeply on it, she would be throwing up again.
Wiping her mouth with the back of one hand, Jena winced. “I wish I could tell you it's good to see you,” she said, shaking her head. “But our interactions haven't been what I'd call pleasant. Why are you here anyway?”
Aamani lifted her chin, snorting with such force her nostrils flared. “I have some contacts in the CIA,” she explained. “A few friends who were more than willing to let me get a first-hand look.”
The woman spun around, turning her back on Jena and standing on the curb with her fists on her hips. “Rogue Keepers affect all of us,” she went on. “Not just the United States. You can understand their desire to cooperate.”
Jena crossed her arms, hanging her head as a shiver went through her. “Is that why you're talking to me now?” she asked, stepping forward to stand beside the other woman. “You want to cooperate?”
Aamani cast a glance over her shoulder, her mouth a thin line, her brow lined with wrinkles. “I've had occasion to reevaluate my choices,” she said. “I spoke to your young telepath, the boy named Raynar.”
Jena closed her eyes, breathing deeply through her nose. “He's becoming a valued member of my team,” she said with a curt nod. “Let me guess: you want access to him. There are some terrorists you need him to interrogate
.”
“You really don't trust me.”
“Should I?”
A heavy sigh exploded from Aamani's mouth, and she hunched up her shoulders as if caught in a sudden chilly wind. “I suppose that's only fair,” she hissed. “Your telepath informed me that someone has been influencing my thoughts.”
“Come again?”
The other woman spun to face her with fists balled at her sides, her eyes downcast as if she were too ashamed to meet Jena's gaze. “You heard me,” she said. “Someone has been influencing my thoughts, tweaking my emotions; there are telepaths on this planet, pulling the strings of who knows how many VIPs in who knows how many countries.”
Covering her mouth with two fingers, Jena squinted at the other woman. “It's not possible,” she said, backing away. “We thoroughly monitor all incoming traffic. Any ship that goes near the Antauran Sector is turned away.”
“Then perhaps the telepaths were here before you arrived,” Aamani said, voicing another possibility that Jena would have preferred not to think about. “Another layer to Slade's conspiracy. It doesn't matter. The point is we both need allies.”
Jena opened her mouth to reply with another biting comment, but clamped it shut again before her tongue betrayed her. If what Aamani said was true, then she really did need all the help she could get. “What did you have in mind?”
“I tell you everything I know,” Aamani began. “You tell me everything you know. We pool our resources, and maybe we can prevent…this…from happening again.” A scowl twisted the other woman's features. “Think long and hard on that, Director Morane. For the first time in four years, I get the feeling that you're just as out of your depth as we are. Allies are not easily discarded in times of trouble.”
Jena couldn't argue with that.
She let herself look at the crime scene one more time, really look at it and take in every last detail. The urge to vomit tried to overpower her, but she kept control of herself, and her Nassai offered comforting emotions.
Two police cruisers were parked in front of the clinic, both with flashing light-bars. On the far side of the road, three officers in full tactical gear were piled one atop the other with a stop sign driven through their chests, the metal post holding them together the way a skewer holds a shish-kebab.
A severed head was sitting on the roof of one cruiser, leaking blood onto its pristine white paint job. And there were corpses strewn about the road.
One of the officers had been thrown through the windshield of his car, and now his feet protruded through the shattered glass. Still as stone. Jena wasn't sure if the impact had killed him or if he had been dead already. But that was not the worst part.
No, not the worst part by far.
The worst part was the hologram that floated on the rooftop across the street: a tall man in black pants and a red coat with long dark hair that floated in the wind. The image of Grecken Slade stared down at her, speaking the same message that had played on a loop since she had arrived. For the last five minutes, she had been tuning it out.
“This is just a taste,” Slade promised. “The devastation I can unleash will be much, much worse. My demands are simple. Is Jena Morane listening? Good. You're going to stay out of my way, Jena. Your little trained minions are going to stay out of my way. From this point onward, any action that you take against me will be met with the same carnage that you see here. Think I'm bluffing? Try me. My people are everywhere, Jena. You will never be safe again.”
The End of the Fourth Book of the Justice Keepers Saga.
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