by Jack Yeovil
Stack touched the car with his gunbarrel. It didn't move.
"Careful, Trooper," Behr said. "That there thing is mucho dangeroso."
He tried to feel any vibes that might be coming off it. He remembered how it had seemed back at Slim's. It had been animated, exuding evil and viciousness, spitting venom from the exhaust pipe. Now it was just another beat-up wreck.
"I think it's dead," he said.
"I don't care what frequency your brainwaves is on," spluttered Behr. "I saw Carl Cass spread over a wall this afternoon. And I'm seeing poor ole Padre Burracho pinned to his altar like a butterfly in a case."
He exposed the doorlock, and tapped in his personal entry code. Nothing. The electronics were down. The plastic keys were blackened and cracked.
"Give me a hand," he said.
"I ain't messin' with that bring-down city jazz, Trooper."
Stack levelled a grouchy stare at the half-machine old-timer. "Then shut up and stand back."
Stack kicked the lock with a steel-capped heel. It caved in. The door swung open with a horror movie sound effect.
The cruiser was empty. The dashboard lights were dead. Stack clambered over the rubble, getting too close for comfort to the stiffening priest, and slipped into the driver's seat.
Leona's keys still dangled from the ignition. There was an Aztec figurine on the ring. Stack had given it to her in Managua. He reached across to take the gift back. Maybe he would need a keepsake, to remind him who Leona Tyree was…
The steering column thrust forwards, pinning him to the seat. The synthesised voice crackled to life.
"Hi there, Trooper, here's a present."
An electrical discharge came up through the steering wheel and hit him in the sternum.
"Did that shock you? Here's another."
Stack twisted, and the seat broke. He slithered backwards. The shock hit him in the legs, and he had to pull himself free by his hands and arms.
Everybody else had got out of the church in treble time.
The remaining hood lase was up and swivelling. Scrambling away, Stack found he had plunged his arm into a bucket of water. Without thinking, he picked it up and hurled it, bucket and all, at the lase.
The effects were surprising, to say the least.
The cruiser screeched like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, and the lase exploded. That shouldn't have happened. Stack knew the system was fully insulated. The car was supposed to be completely submersible. It said so in the owner's manual.
The show was over. The audience came back.
Behr crossed himself, and said "Freakin' A!"
Someone else prayed in a loud mumble; The dead priest's hair stood up like the Bride of Frankenstein's, and Stack's nostrils caught a strong tang of electrical discharge. Stack got the impression there was a point being made and that he was sorely missing it.
"It's dead now," the old man said. "Deader'n John Brown, Buddy Holly and my marriage prospects."
Stack shook his head. "But…"
"Holy water, you see. The Devil cain't take no shower in holy water."
II
The Drying-Up of America in the Great Droughts of the Mid-70's left Salt Lake City adjacent to a literal lake of salt. Witer was being pumped in from the North, through a pipeline guarded by good Josephites. The old superstitions were wrong, Duroc knew now. Salt had no power against the Devil and all His works. Nor against Angra Mainyu, Loki, Pluto, Nyarlathotep, Ba'alberith, the Great God Boga-Tem, Pan, Damballah, the King in Yellow, Susanoo, the Deathbird, Aipalookvik, Baron Samedi, Nurgle, Pazuzu, Zalmoxis, Huitzilopochtli, Mosura, Anubis, Set, Quetzalcoatl, Vbdyanoi, Rawhead, Hiranyakasipu, Lukundoo, Yog-Somoth, the Yama Kings of the Chinese Hell, Ramboona, Klesh, Damballah, Khorne or the others. All the demons, all the Gods of Death and Evil, all the cast-out angels. All would walk soon upon this white expanse, trampling the old saws, the old religions, the pale and sickly Gods of milky feebleness, under their clawed, leathery, horned, scaly, slimy and hairy feet.
Roger Duroc stood now on the lakebed, mingling anonymously with the crowds. There was white salt under his boots, and he drank occasionally from a hipflask of water. He was shaded from the cruel sun by a wide-brimmed black hat identical to those worn by almost every other man in the congregation. There must be close to a million standing together here. They had all turned out to hear Nguyen Seth preach, and stood quietly, calmly, waiting for the Elder to appear on the huge stage that had been constructed in the vast natural arena where the lake had been.
Duroc had been in crowds before. In Paris, he had been part of the riots that followed President LePen's decision to send the troops in to put down the provisional government that had sprung up on the Left Bank. "We may have lost Algeria," he had said, "but, by God, we're not going to lose Montmartre." Duroc had thrown the first molotov cocktail when the CRS marched down the Champs Elysees. He had attended with pleasure the mass sterlings of Teheran, when the faithful ritually turn on their outcasts. And he had been at Ken Dodd's thrd farewell concert at Castle Donnington—he was there to assassinate a member of the audience, not to listen to the music—and been swept up in the surge that followed his climactic rendition of the song that inaugurated the "Mersey Beat," "Tears for Souvenirs." Duroc had left the dead diplomat standing up, kept on his feet by the press of the fans. Nobody had noticed the slaying for hours.
But this gathering made all the others seem like meetings of the Richard M. Nixon Appreciation Society. It was different. The silence of the multitude was eerie. The Jospehites had turned out in full. There were perfect couples, with matched toothy smiles and corn-blonde hair. Perfect families with two children and an unnaturally quiet dog. Chipper and upright old folks in black, with their spade beards and bonnets. Everyone was dressed alike. Most people looked alike. Their eyes were dead.
The Path of Joseph was thorny, Duroc knew. He was the only gentile for miles. He was not a Josephite himself, could never adjust to the discipline, but he must follow the path. There were many parallels along it. The Josephite Church was merely one of the routes, his own family was another. Since childhood, it was all he had been trained for. Like his uncle before him, he was bred to do the bidding of Nguyen Seth.
The Elder came upon the stage. Duroc expected cheering, but there was none, just a giant gasp, a massed intake of breath, enough to suck all the oxygen out of all the air in Deseret. Seth extended his arms, and the Josephite Tabernacle Choir began to sing.
"Tis the gift to be simple…"
According to Duroc's uncle, Seth never changed. The contract had been made between Seth and the family during the 16th Century—this wasn't possible, but Duroc believed it now— and Marc-Ange Duroc, an ordinary footsoldier, was elevated to a position of power in the Inquisition during the suppression of the Knights Templar and the Albigensian Crusade. Later, in the aftermath of the French Revolution another Duroc served on Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety. Jean-Louis Duroc had lived through the Terror, would live through Napoleon, and his grandson would survive the Paris Commune and the Great War. Duroc's uncle's father was a high-ranking Gestapo officer during the occupation, and a similarly well-placed civil servant after the Second War. Wars, revolutions, bloodbaths and atrocities would come and go. There would always be a Duroc among the victors, among the spillers of blood, and there would rarely be a Duroc among the fallen. Duroc's uncle liaised with Seth in Indochina in the '50s, walking away from Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to join the Viet Minh, and Duroc himself had been with the Elder when he chose to play Warlord of the Khmer Rouge in the '70s. Duroc's uncle was dead now—Duroc had seen to that himself—and he was the sole disciple of the creature who wore the face of a man but had lived down the centuries unchanged, working towards his peculiar ends.
Sometimes, blasphemously, Duroc wondered what it would be like to be Nguyen Seth. Seth the Eternal, Seth the Unchanged, Seth the Summoner.
The song ended, and Nguyen Seth spoke to his followers. His words didn't matter. Few could ever re
member anything specific he might say in his sermons, but the tone of voice, the gestures, the expressions—congregationists standing up to three miles away swore they could make out precise expressions in his eyes—were spellbinding.
Duroc was luckier than his forebears. He knew he was destined to be in at the end of it.
The Josephite Church was founded in 1843 by Joseph Shatner, a drink-sotted pimp and occasional beer buddy of Edgar Allan Poe's. An angel made itself manifest in the backroom of a Boston bar and handed Joseph a testament written in letters of fire, along with a pair of mirror-faced glasses that enabled him to interpret the otherwise impenetrable writings. The testament and the shades remained to this day prize possessions of the church, locked up in a safe in Seth's stronghold. The 1840s were great days for protestant sects in the United States. The Mormons—who had their own angel and their own glasses—the Mennonites, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Danites, the Agapemonists, the Adventists, the Dancing Fools, the Sons of Baphomet, thirty-five breeds of Baptist and numberless Hellfire and Damnation merchants were thriving. The Mormons got to Salt Lake City first, while Joseph Shatner was dodging fraud charges in Massachusetts and building up his first following.
Duroc knew that the shadowy figure referred to in Joseph's memoirs, whom he names "The Ute" (never having been West of New England, he had no idea what a Plains Indian looked like) and who had bankrolled the early days of his sect was none other man Nguyen Seth, who was today taken by most people for either an Egyptian or a Vietnamese. Joseph had attracted followers by allowing all manner of liberties and excesses barred by other denominations, and then withdrew all allowances for everybody except himself. He died a martyr, hanged by the Massachusetts authorities under anti-sorcery laws that had lain unused on the statutes since the Salem witch trials. Led by "The Ute," his followers had made their way West to settle the wilderness. Joseph's brother Hendrik Shatner—rumoured to be the only man of the American garrison to step out of the line drawn by Davy Crockett at the Alamo in 1836 and decorated by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna for services to Mexico during the siege—took command, and his colourful career later included leading the Josephite forces during a brief war with federal troops in the 1850s.
Like the Mormons, the Josephites out West allied with the Indians when it came to resisting the encroachments of other settlers and Hendrik had personally led a joint Josephite-Chiricahua raid against a gentile community called New Canaan in Southern Utah. That had been one of the bloodiest days of the Old West, and Hendrik, war-painted and wearing the black hat that had him named Bonnet-of-Death by his allies, was supposed to have personally lifted thirty scalps. Now, Duroc could appreciate the history better. Now he knew of the need to spill blood constantly, in defiance of the Biblical word, and as a seal on the charms of Invocation. Hendrik Shatner had lived to be 97, and died amid great wealth attended by the several mistresses he maintained until the last. Duroc planned to do better for himself.
Seth finished his speech, and the choir began again. This time, they joined voices in the Josephite anthem, "The Path of Joseph." As a single throat, the multitude joined in.
It was quite possibly the. loudest human sound ever heard in history.
Roger Duroc clamped his hands over his ears, looked down at the salt, and relished the prospect of the End of the World.
When it was all over, there would be few winners and many losers. He would be in the former category. Indeed, after Nguyen Seth, he would be the big winner. All the suckers in the world, all the suckers in the crowd, were placing their bets on the wrong side, the losing side. To only a few had the correct result of the last battle been revealed.
He knew who would inherit the Earth, and it wasn't the meek.
He knew who would ascend to the throne of Heaven, and it wasn't the pure in heart. The seven-thousand-year snowjob was about to be blown out of the water.
The hymn rose up to the Heavens, but Duroc's thoughts stayed below. The news from Welcome was good. He felt an almost sexual excitement, the thrill of being part of somethng vast that would affect the entire human race and of being one of the few people—perhaps the only person—with the knowledge to appreciate just what was, in the vernacular of the Americas, going down.
Things were coming to a head.
"The Path of Joseph" was nearly over.
"In the Name of Joseph," the multitude sang,
"In the Name of the Lord," Duroc joined in…
"…HALLELUJAH!"
III
Federico the Ferrari took care of most of the driving, but Chantal liked to keep the manual override. She had no ambition to become a cyborg, but she loved the feeling of communion with the machine. She had no bio-implants, had always found the idea somewhat distasteful, but there was an undeniable attraction in this temporary fusion. With her helmet on, she was in harmony with the car's system. It was a cyberfeed, but the terminal rested against her shaven hackles rawer than jacking into a skull-socket. Sometimes, she could feel the road under the wheels. She and Federico took turns to select musics from the Ferrari library of non-Russian pop. It answered her choice of Jim Morrison's "I'm a Believer" with Don Gibson's "Sea of Heartbreak."
The country was unfamiliar, but the Cavalry's maps were detailed, and there had been no problems. She had never been to this part of the US before. However, she thought she recognized some of the table mountains and cracked mesas from Western films. This was John Wayne country. The cactus were gone, and the Indians absorbed, but the US Cavalry still rode, and there were still outlaws, varmints, gunslingers and border raiders. More than one Trooper back at Fort Apache, including a Navajo scout, referred to rogue gangcultists as "injuns." Federico pulled out Roy Rogers' "A Cowboy Needs a Horse," and she snapped back with Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Three Wheels on My Wagon."
She had company on the road. Three bikers were trying to impress her with their fancy machines, keeping level and jeering at her. It wasn't so much a sexual display as it was a flirtation with the car. The windows were sunscreened black, so they wouldn't even know she was a woman. She ran their colours through the onboard files and tagged them as strays from the Satan's Stormtroopers, out of Houston, Texas. With their chopped Harleys, banana seats, beerguts, Viking beards, cossack shirts and pickelhaubes, the whole crew were textbook Motorsickle Crazies. They were just joyriding thugs, not real gangcult specimens. They didn't have a Philosophy, like the Daughters of the American Revolution or The Bible Belt. She didn't feel a pressing need to put them off the road.
They bounced a couple of beercans off Federico without even scratching the paintwork, and did wheelies, thumping the Ferrari's bodywork as they came down. It was time to burn them off. She flicked the overdrive, and let the car do the rest. She pushed 200 miles per, and the cykemen were choking on dust, already out of shouting range.
"So long, boys," she said, smiling, selecting Pat Boone's "Speedy Gonzalez" for the in-car sound system.
They were sore losers, evidently. Men usually didn't like to be shown up for half-horse feebs. One of the Stormtroopers must have a little hardware on his motorsickle, because Federico cut into Pat and told her, in Italian, that there was a heat-seeking missile coming after her, personally tailored to the warmth patterns of the car.
She tutted. These Americans displayed an incredible combination of humourlessness, insecurity and lack of imagination.
She took the laptop SDI console from the dashboard, and established provisional contact with the missile's one-track mind. Its directives weren't even encoded. She wiped Federico's smudgy patternprint from its three-minute memory and programmed in a "Return to Sender" package.
"Ciao," said the car. Chantal fed in Dean Martin's "Volare," and sang along. She didn't even hear the explosion.
Otherwise, the roads were clear.
Until the Tonto Basin, when suddenly her music went down, and a voice came at her through all her speakers.
"SISTER," it shouted, "HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED?!!"
IV
When the Reverend Harry Powell, sole owner of the Word of the Lord Broadcasting System, was informed that the aches and pains his faith healing guest stars had been unable to ease were, in fact, inoperable and extensive cancers of the bone marrow, he found himself faced with a choice. As a Good Christian of long-standing who had raised, over his twenty-seven years as a leading televangelist, over three hundred billion dollars for the Lord, he could kill the pain with morph-plus shots and wait his Just Reward in Heaven. On the other hand, as a sin-loving decadent who had used the greater portion of over three hundred billion dollars to indulge himself in luxurious excesses undreamed of by Caligula, he could expend the remainder of his considerable resources staving off the inevitable.
He took some time to assess the health of his business ventures. WLBS was still the top-rated televangelical crusade, beaming the Word of the Lord into perhaps seven hundred million homes worldwide. Royalties were still coming in for his best-selling testaments How to Get Through the Eye of the Needle, Checking Into Motel Heaven, and My Pal, Jesus, not to mention the popular gospel hits he had had ghost-written for him in the '60s by a talented but otherwise unsuccessful young man called Paul Simon, "Little Bitty Orphans in Africa," "Jesus in Blue Jeans" and "I'm Not Ashamed to be a Christian."
He had diversified into the stock market, foods, theme parks, computer software, motion pictures, armaments manufacture, law enforcement, pharmaceuticals, energy resources, marital aids and souvenirs. He was in the Top Forty of the World's Richest Men, and climbing…
Still, there was nothing that could be done for his body. He had been able to pay for a half-hour of Dr Zarathustra's time at GenTech BioDiv, and the Doc had assured him that no amount of bio-implant and replacement doodads would do anything to help. Muscles, nerves, individual organs, limbs, eyes and skin, you could do something about. And you could replace individual bones—even your skull if you so wished—with durium robo-bits. But you couldn't dispense with your whole skeleton and still survive. It had something to do with blood. Powell didn't understand, but Zarathustra had patiently explained it all to him as if guesting on a kid vid teevee show before returning, substantially wealther, to his important research.
