Ghost Dance

by Rebecca Levene

  The Israeli had procured them fake passports from somewhere. No one except the flight attendants spared them a second glance on the plane and when they landed the journey through security was slow but problem-free.

  Morgan relaxed a little as they passed through customs and into the sterile cleanliness of the arrivals lounge. He turned to Lahav. "You going to tell me why I'm in Las Vegas now?"

  "No," Lahav said. "I will tell you when we've hired a car. When we're alone."

  Half an hour later, he gestured Morgan outside, where a big black Jeep flashed its lights at them as they approached.

  "Aren't those supposed to be bad for the environment?" Morgan said.

  Lahav snorted as he climbed in, the most human reaction Morgan had yet seen from him. The city outside the tinted windows was featureless but definitely foreign. The houses were too regular, too new, too widely spaced. "I've never been to America before," Morgan told Lahav.

  The Israeli shrugged.

  "Why am I in America now?" he asked. "What makes you think Coby would come back here?"

  Lahav kept his eyes on the road as nondescript suburbs gave way to scrubby desert around them. The interior of the car was air-conditioned and chilly. It made the view outside seem almost like a mirage. Morgan found it hard to believe he'd come so far so quickly.

  "You don't know what Croatoan is, do you?" Lahav asked.

  Morgan scowled, sensitive to the suggestion that a better-educated man would. "No. I don't know."

  Lahav nodded. "If you were American, perhaps you would. It's an American legend - the lost colony of Roanoke, England's first settlement in the New World. Roanoke is an island off the coast of North Carolina, but your country called it Virginia then, after its virgin Queen. There were several attempts to found a colony, all failing - the last in 1587."

  "Hang on," Morgan said, feeling the first stirrings of excitement. "That's the same time John Dee was alive, isn't it?"

  "Yes. And very shortly after his house was burgled, many of his most precious possessions stolen."

  "You think the colonists took some of his stuff with them when they went."

  "I think that now, yes."

  Morgan shifted so that his shoulder was leaning against the car door and he could study the other man. There was something in his expression he couldn't read, a tightness to his jaw that suggested frustration. He seemed angry, but maybe with himself. "So where did the colonists take the shofar?" he asked.

  Lahav grimaced. "Croatoan."

  "It's a place?"

  "It was a message. The colony disappeared, you understand. When a ship returned for them in 1590, not a single person was left - only the word 'Croatoan' carved into the trunk of a tree. They call it a great mystery."

  "Yeah," Morgan said, "but I'm guessing you know the solution."

  "Everyone who thinks for two seconds knows the solution. There was a native tribe on an island close by, the Croatoans. They'd been friendly to the English colonists when others had not. And many years later, when the Croatoans were contacted again, some were found to be blue-eyed or fair-haired."

  Morgan smiled. "So the colonists just moved in with the local tribe and married them, and they took the shofar with them. But where are they now?"

  "Gone. Lost to history."

  Morgan slumped back against his seat, watching the road unroll ahead of them, heat haze shimmering and blurring its margins. "Bullshit. As soon as you heard that word, you knew. You brought us here, didn't you?"

  "Yes. The Croatoans did disappear from history, but recently a new group appeared using their name. A cult for the young and foolish."

  They were in full desert now, the sky above washed out by the heat so that it was almost the same colour as the sand below. The only features were the cacti, squat and bulbous against the horizon. Morgan watched a small bird land on one and wondered how its feet bore the sharp spines.

  "It's a pretty big leap," he said, twisting his head to watch the bird until it was out of view. "I mean, if it's like you say, and everyone's heard the story about the lost colony, couldn't they just have picked the name because it sounded cool?"

  "It's more than that. We have already been investigating the Croatoans. There are claims about them, and they've grown in power far too quickly. They have it. They must."

  "So that's where we're going now - to find these Croatoans?"

  Lahav nodded. "But first, we'll meet some friends of mine."

  "What sort of friends?"

  "Friends with guns. If the shofar is here, we'll need them."

  Morgan jolted out of a light sleep, hand reaching for a shapeless something he'd been pursuing in his dreams. He clenched it into a fist instead and looked across at the man driving, but Lahav had his eyes on the road and didn't seem to be paying him any attention.

  The change in speed was probably what had woken him. They were slowing down, though they didn't seem to have arrived anywhere. There was desert all around, closer now they'd moved to a more minor route, then more minor still as Lahav yanked the steering round to pull them onto a dirt track. The Jeep rattled as the view disappeared behind a cloud of dust churned up by its wheels.

  "We're here?" Morgan asked then, after Lahav nodded curtly, "Which is where, exactly?"

  "The northern edge of the Mojave Desert. A small town called Cima."

  The Jeep slid to a halt on the rough ground. The dust cloud grew then settled, and Morgan saw that they were somewhere, though it wasn't much different from nowhere. A few buildings dotted the bleak landscape around them, the same colour as the sand and many looking as if they'd been half worn away by it. He noticed a straight black line bisecting the landscape halfway to the horizon and guessed it might be a railway line. It was hard to imagine why a train would ever visit a place like this.

  "This is a ghost town," Lahav said. "Built for the railway, abandoned when the trains were."

  Morgan grunted as he swung open the car door. "Welcome to Cima, population nil."

  He stepped out and stopped, feet grating against stone, as he saw the five SIG Sauer semi-automatics trained on him. The men holding them were big, heavily tattooed and massively muscled. They held the guns as though they knew how to use them and were eager to start.

  "Not nil," Lahav said from the other side of the car. "Leave him, Jimmy, he's with me."

  "Him?" said one of the men, scrawnier and angrier looking then the rest. But the blond giant in the centre of the group lowered his SIG Sauer and after a moment all the others did the same.

  They crowded round to embrace Lahav, slapping him so roughly on the back even the Israeli was rocked on his feet. Morgan saw that their eyes were still on him, though, and he felt others unseen in the abandoned buildings all around.

  One of the men handed a semi-automatic to Lahav along with the holster to hold it. Morgan raised an eyebrow when the Israeli caught his eye and Lahav nodded. "Give him a weapon too," he said to the one he'd called Jimmy.

  Jimmy shot Morgan an unloving look. "You sure about that?"

  "He knows how to use it," Lahav said.

  Jimmy nodded curtly and pressed the handgrip into Morgan's palm. He was surprised at how alien it felt to him. The years he'd spent as a soldier seemed like a long time ago.

  The building they led him to was little more than a shell, the roof decayed and sagging and the walls stripped bare by winds and time. It was hard to tell what the place had originally been - a shop maybe, or a meeting hall. On the far wall, two planks of wood had been nailed to form a crude cross and someone with more enthusiasm than talent had painted a picture of Mary holding the baby Jesus below it.

  A man with a straggly beard and tattoos of swastikas on his muscled forearms was kneeling in front of the makeshift altar. His shoulders were shaking and Morgan thought at first that he was laughing. But when he lifted his face to the broken ceiling, tear tracks glittered in the harsh midday sun.

  Jimmy scowled when he read Morgan's expression. His own face was seamed with scars
, one cheek lumpier than the other as if the bone beneath had once been broken and never properly set. "What are you staring at, boy?" he said.

  Morgan was very aware of the men around him, the weapons in holsters at their sides and over their backs. His own semi-automatic wouldn't do him much good against so much concentrated firepower. "Nothing," he said. He looked at Lahav. "I suppose I'm just wondering what we're doing here."

  "Oh, you suppose," the man beside Jimmy said in a nasal accent that Morgan guessed was meant to be British. "What in hell is he doing here, Jimmy? We need real men to fight the good fight, not this foreign faggot."

  Jimmy grabbed the man before Morgan could, backhanding him across the face and knocking him to his knees. "Watch your mouth, Ben! We're all God's children here."

  "Not all of us," Lahav said, his eyes cold on Morgan. "But we need him."

  "For what?" Ben glowered at Morgan as he wiped blood from his mouth and climbed back to his feet. "Them Croatoans ain't no threat to no one. Jimmy's been keeping track of 'em for months, checking they ain't up to no ungodly business. They're nothing but rich assholes dressing up like Sitting Bull. That's a joke, not a mission." He shrugged off Jimmy's hand and pushed past Morgan to exit the derelict church.

  The man kneeling before the cross looked over his shoulder at them. The tear tracks had dried on his cheeks, leaving a smear like the trail of a slug.

  Jimmy shook his head. "Don't mind Ben. He's new here, hasn't learnt our ways."

  Lahav smiled and suddenly Morgan was sick of it all. He'd betrayed his own people - betrayed Kate and Tomas's memory - and for what? An agent of another power who'd never claimed to be doing anything other than using him.

  "You know what," he said, "I do mind him. I'm not here to help you and-" he looked at Lahav "-I'm not just a weapon you can holster and forget about when you don't need it."

  Jimmy smiled. "That's exactly what you are to him, boy. And you're less than that to us."

  Something in Morgan snapped. Jimmy was too big and heavy to topple head on. Morgan got behind him instead, one hand under his chin and another pressing back against his nose so that the pressure and the pain flipped the bigger man onto his back. The breath burst out of Jimmy in a rank cloud, stinking of cigarettes.

  Morgan barely registered the shouts around him or the cocking of guns. He pressed his arm across Jimmy's throat, hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to kill. Not yet. "You've got no idea what I am, you ignorant fuck. You think you're dangerous? I'm a fucking nuclear bomb. You think you're better than me? You are. I'm the worst person in the whole fucking world!"

  He felt Lahav's hand on his shoulder and froze. The other man's flesh felt too hot against him but he wondered if it wasn't him who was too cold. He was shivering, even the arm pressed against Jimmy's throat, and after a minute he lifted it up, rocking back on his heels and running a hand over his face. Sweat slicked off him and other moisture which might have been tears. He didn't know what he was doing any more.

  He expected Jimmy to push him away, maybe to punch him. He half expected a bullet in the back of his head. But the other man just nodded at him and for the first time his eyes looked something other than contemptuous. "Don't give up hope, brother," he said. "No one is beyond redemption. Not even us. And not even you."

  Jimmy showed him the town, his tread heavy beside Morgan's, combat boots crunching the skeletal plants. The men in the church had remained behind, their eyes sliding over Morgan as if they'd suddenly ceased to notice him.

  There were more men scattered throughout the ghost town. Some were shooting at targets using anything from old-fashioned revolvers to machine pistols. Others were wrestling or boxing, faces streaked with blood and dust. A group of ten jogged in from the desert with heavy packs on their backs and dry tongues licking cracked lips.

  Morgan felt wrung-out after his outburst and strangely weightless. "This is a training camp," he said.

  Jimmy nodded. "You got that right. Bad times are coming, brother."

  Morgan had been with the Hermetic Division long enough to guess what the other man meant. "You're talking about the apocalypse."

  "The end of days. The signs are there for those that know how to read 'em. Satan's forces are growing strong and we intend to oppose them." Jimmy's hand clenched around his brass belt buckle and Morgan saw that he had HATE tattooed on his knuckles. Beneath the collar of his loose khaki T-shirt, another tattoo poked out. It looked like the tip of a bat wing.

  "Mate," Morgan said, "don't take this the wrong way, but you look like you ought to be fighting on the other side."

  Jimmy laughed, a hacking sound not much different from a cough. It left flecks of saliva in his wild blond beard. "Was a time I woulda been - we all would. Lahav tell you anything about us?"

  Morgan shrugged. "He told me you had guns and that you could help us with the Croatoans. I don't know how you know him or why you're working with him. You do know who he is, right?"

  "An Israeli agent," Jimmy said, pronouncing 'Israeli' as if it had about seven syllables. "You reckon it's unpatriotic, but there's a higher loyalty than love of country, even this one."

  "You mean in the other conflict. The one between heaven and hell."

  "The only war that counts, and I was on the wrong side of it for a helluva long time. I got in my first fight when I was 13, beating on some kid just 'cause I didn't like the colour of his skin. By the time I was eighteen I was cooking meth, and when I knifed a man so bad he nearly bled out, I finally got where I belonged - behind bars."

  Morgan looked over the dusty desert and the men running and crawling across it under a maze of barbed wire. "And then you what - saw the error of your ways?"

  "Not hardly." Unselfconscious, Jimmy yanked his T-shirt over his head, using it to swab the sweat under his armpits. When he turned his back, Morgan saw that a demon spread its wings across the whole expanse of flesh, tail curling round to point its tip at his belly button. It was a crude prison tattoo, and it must have taken hundreds of hours of pain to complete.

  "Need all the friends you can get in that place," Jimmy said, "even the bad ones. You're white and you want to survive inside, you join a gang that puts swastikas on your body and tells you you're the master race. That's just the way it is. And it wasn't like I objected to sticking a shiv in some black bastard when occasion required. It was only when I got a shard of glass in my own gut things changed. They say I died on the operating table and I... I saw the flames - I saw where I was going. When they brought me back round I got me a Bible and I read it cover to cover. Then I preached it to anyone in there who'd listen."

  Morgan's eyes scanned the private army around him. "These people-"

  "The Tribulation Militia. Used to be what I was, till I showed them how to be something better"

  "You really think this is what God wants? What happened to peace and love and all that shit?"

  Jimmy turned to face him, T-shirt clutched in one meaty fist. "Scripture tells us when the last battle comes, the good will be Raptured right up into heaven to sit at the Lord's right hand. That ain't gonna happen to us. We're so heavy with sin, no way we could lift ourselves into the clouds. But those who remain behind have a task too, to fight the Devil's forces here on earth. That's the battle we're training for, and when we win that war, we'll have earned our places in paradise."

  A fire of absolute conviction burned in his eyes, and Morgan found that he wanted to believe him. "But how can you be sure that Lahav really is on God's side?" he asked. And how, he wondered, can I?

  Jimmy just smiled. "We're having a prayer meeting later. Join us and you'll understand."

  The sun set quickly in the desert, leaving a surprising chill in its wake. Morgan watched it all the way down, standing on the borders of the ghost town and looking out on the nothing beyond.

  He could hear the militiamen moving behind him, gathering in what might once have been the town square. He hadn't seen Lahav since he first arrived and he wondered why he'd been so quick to
follow him. Seeing Jimmy's blind faith in the Israeli and the God he claimed to represent had forced him to face his own. Lahav had some powers beyond human, but what did that mean? So did Morgan.

  When he felt the hand settle on his shoulder, he knew it was Lahav. He turned to face the other man and found his face shadowed, the sliver of new moon not enough to illuminate him. He hadn't realised how dark it had grown, lost in his own thoughts.

  "You want answers," Lahav said.

  Morgan nodded. "I reckon I'm owed some, don't you?"

  "No one is owed anything. But you will get them. Come - it's starting."

  Morgan followed him, trainers catching in the loose rocks that littered the sand. There was light up ahead and as he drew closer he saw they'd lit a bonfire. He wondered if they'd pulled down more of the houses to feed it. The flames flickered a playful yellow and the militiamen sat in a ring around it, bottles of beer in one hand, crosses in the other.

  He expected Lahav to find a seat on the edge of the circle, but the other man kept walking towards the fire. Morgan followed as far as he could, until the heat was too much and he had to stop, hand held in front of his face to shield it. Sparks floated around him and the flames rose high overhead, and Lahav kept on walking.

  Morgan took one step back, then another, as Lahav stepped forward. The flames licked at the Israeli, tongues lapping against his brown cheeks as the fire seemed to seep inside and then blaze out of his eyes. They met Morgan's and Morgan felt the heat of them.

  A hand grasped his elbow and he realised that Jimmy was pulling him back, away from the sparks that threatened to set his clothes alight. He didn't resist as the other man drew him down to his knees.

  From that angle, Lahav looked huge. Or maybe he really had grown as tall as the flames which surrounded him. He drew what must have been his knife, the blade which in his hands could cut through anything. Morgan was numbly unsurprised to see that it too had grown until it was almost as long as Lahav himself. The Israeli held it in two hands, pointed it upwards, and the militiamen roared their approval as their shadows danced in the desert all around.