“You say that now—but there may come a time when the picture you see and the orders you are given contradict one another. I wonder what you’ll do then.”
“Orders are orders.”
The path was coming toward the end of the wood, and the bare gray walls of the plant loomed between the thinning pines. Tessic stopped, and turned to her.
“Do you believe in God, Lieutenant Haas?”
She hadn’t expected the question. “I can’t see how my beliefs are your business.”
“The way I see it, there are only two possibilities,” Tessic said. “Either there is purpose and meaning to our lives, or there is not, and everything is random and meaningless.”
“I’m not surprised you see everything in binary.”
Again he laughed. “That’s all everything comes down to, isn’t it? Zeros and ones? The separation of light from dark on the first day of creation.”
“And which do you believe in Mr. Tessic? The zero, or the one?” Oddly, she found herself actually caring about his response.
“I’m a practical man. The way I see it nothing can be gained by believing in a meaningless world. No accomplishments would be worth celebrating, no comfort in success. When you see life as meaningless, no amount of money in the world can buy the joy you desire. I’ve always found it practical to hold to the other alternative: that there is meaning and greater purpose to life.” He casually brushed some pine needles from his vicuna overcoat. “And so my trappings of success do not trap me. For that same reason, I believe there must be a purpose for the existence of Dillon Cole—and I can assure you it is not to rejuvenate livestock and despots.”
“I wouldn’t have pegged you as a spiritual man.”
He nodded. “9906753,” he said, and at first offered no explanation. A phone number, she thought. Was this all just an elaborate come-on? His offhand demeanor darkened then, became a shade more solemn. “My mother was a survivor of the death camps. Did you know? The rest of her family died in the gas chambers.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Years ago, I arranged for her to undergo laser surgery to remove the number on her arm, but she refused. For her it was a battle scar. 9906753. A badge of courage and a reminder of those lost.”
Another officer jogged past them, this one a bit more interested in their presence than the first. He caught their gazes, but offered nothing more than a quick “g’morning” as he passed. It got them both moving again toward the plant.
“You see, Lieutenant, I must have faith that there is justice,” Tessic said before he left her. “Punishment for the wicked, and liberation for the innocent.”
And as Maddy went to prepare for her new assignment, she couldn’t help but wonder what Tessic was planning, the punishment or the liberation.
7. SLUGGER
* * *
TRANSCRIPTION EXCERPT, DAY 201. 13:29 HOURS
“Do you think I’m evil, Maddy?”
“That depends—are you going to share that sundae?”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Why should you care what I think?”
“People out there think I’m God or the devil, and they don’t leave room for anything in between. I want to know there’s someone who can see me as human.”
“I wouldn’t be here feeding you if I thought you weren’t human.”
“If the shards are agents of evil, here to end the world, I wouldn’t be too pleased about that, but I’d understand it. If we were spat out here to be gods, I could understand that, too.”
“From what I hear, you’ve been to both those places.”
“And so I know it’s wrong. There’s some other purpose, I just can’t figure it out.”
“You’ve been in lockdown for six months, and you still haven’t gotten over yourself?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just because you are what you are, it doesn’t ordain some grand purpose. Maybe it’s your purpose to sit here, and be fed by me. Have you ever thought of that?”
“You don’t believe that, Maddy. Any more than you believe it’s your purpose to feed me.”
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, a dentist with no future was called to service in a war against Dillon, and the shards. Martin Briscoe was, in fact, the perfect candidate, as his mind had been sharpened and focused into a weapon by a single image that plagued him. It was the image of his dead wife and son that obliterated most everything else in Martin Briscoe’s mind. He was particularly focused on the day he was fired, and then saw the angels.
“How are things, Marty? Getting better?” His afternoon began in a conference. Banning, who sat at the head of the marble conference table, took the lead. He was a blowfish of a man with such bad breath that his patients preferred to be knocked out rather than endure his halitosis. They all must have heaved a collective sigh of relief when he gave up the drill for dental administration. He was the type of officious asshole who would add an “a” in front of a patient’s name, as if their little dental factory wasn’t impersonal enough.
“Fine, fine. Couldn’t be better.” It was a rote response, geared at curtailing any further interrogation. It wasn’t anyone’s goddammed business how he was. Martin sat down, grinning at the half-dozen faces seated around the table. None of the associates of Eureka Dental had much of a poker face; they telegraphed their intentions long before saying them aloud. “Actually,” Martin added, “I’m having a marvelous day.”
The clutch of dentists looked to one another with that troubled, self-important gaze, like members of a secret society. Yes, Martin knew why they were gathered, and he was going to force them to go through the exercise in slow, tortured strokes. Let them be the ones to suffer the pain of this particular extraction.
Judith the Compassionate was the next to speak. “We’ve had even more complaints, Marty—from quite a variety of your patients.” She glanced down at a folder in front of her. “I have them right here—would you care to look them over?”
Martin grinned, imagining that they were all bobbing heads in a shooting gallery, and he was firing away with the disgruntled joy of a postal worker. “No thanks.”
Banning the Halitoxic snatched the folder away from Judith and flipped through the pages.
“A Mrs. Susan Bernstein claims that you injected her daughter’s anesthetic right through her tongue.”
What’s the problem? The little bitch is pierced just about everywhere else. Martin only grinned. Banning continued.
“And a Tommy Watkins claims that you carved your initials in his molar.”
Just like he’s been tagging his initials all over town. The spray paint was still on his fingertips. Martin only grinned. Banning angrily flipped a page.
“And now, a Mr. Fisher claims that this very morning, you urinated into his rinse sink during your examination! I couldn’t believe it!”
“I could,” mumbled one of Banning’s minions.
Banning slapped the grievance folder on the table for emphasis. “Good God, what were you thinking?!”
That Fisher was a prick in a power tie who deserved a little piss on his life. “Listen, I’ve got a pulpotomy in ten, are we almost through here?”
The tribunal of dental pharisees gave each other hot-potato glances, wondering who would deliver the bad tidings. Banning, of course, took the initiative. “We know you’ve suffered great loss, Marty. No one should have to bear the death of a wife and child—God knows we all feel for you . . . but behavior like this . . . Well, whatever the reason, we just can’t tolerate it any longer.”
And then the potato went round.
“You’ve left us vulnerable to a dozen lawsuits.”
“We could be closed down!”
“That’s why we’ve got to take action.”
“Quick action.”
“In everyone’s best interests.”
“Including yours, Marty.”
“You’ll agree with us.”
“In time.”
“In
time.”
“And for God sakes, Marty, please get some help.”
It was a mighty fine ice-cream sundae of a dismissal, with all the fixings. Then someone—Martin couldn’t even remember who—came up with the cherry to top it off.
“We want you to know that we’re all here for you, if you need us.”
The building’s seventy-year-old security guard supervised the cleaning out of his desk, and his departure from the building five minutes later.
MARTIN DIDN’T DRIVE STRAIGHT home. Eureka was a small town and nothing was more than fifteen minutes away from anything else, so finding a slow, meandering route was difficult. He took in a matinee, then stopped at Chick’s Sporting Goods, picking out some baseball items his son would have liked, had he and his mother not drowned in four hundred million cubic yards of water. At the funeral, his pastor had lauded the mysterious ways of God. His golf buddies had shaken their heads, mumbling about life’s curveballs, before returning to their families and rejoicing in their own domestic torpor. Well, there were curveballs, and there were wild, skull-crushing pitches. This particular pitch had been thrown by a redheaded teenager, who Martin had once believed was God himself.
Coast highway, more than a year ago now. It was a road trip to Disneyland, just the three of them. Eddie was in the back seat of their Taurus, complaining about how boring the radio stations were in central California. It was ten at night when they were driven off the road just north of San Simeon. Three men came out of the other car, and from the very first, Martin knew this would only get worse, because all three of them carried baseball bats. They smashed the windows and dragged the Briscoes out kicking and screaming. The men didn’t take anything—they didn’t want anything. They just swung their bats, and shattered his son’s skull, and smashed his wife’s spine. Then they pinned Martin down, as a fourth man approached. This one had a chainsaw.
After leaving Chick’s Sporting Goods, Martin drove each street in his neighborhood, passing his house several times, then sat at the bar in T.G.I. Friday’s, drinking tequila shooters, and stuffing his gut with tacos al carbon. It was eleven o’clock at night when the place closed, and he left, heading back to his former place of business.
Martin remembered very little once the chainsaw began to roar. He mercifully fell unconscious. When he awoke, he was in some sort of library . . . and he had no legs. There were just two stumps above where his knees would have been, crudely tied off with his own jumper cables. Around him were at least a dozen others in no better condition. His son lay sprawled, rasping an unconscious moan, his head a bruised, swollen mass of flesh the color of eggplant. His wife was there, too, slumped in a corner, most definitely dead. He wanted to panic—but there was something gripping his spirit, containing his emotions. At first he thought it was shock, but he quickly discovered it was something entirely different.
Eureka Dental’s building only had one night guard, whose narcolepsy was well known. Still, Martin wasn’t taking any chances. He came from behind and struck him with the Louisville Slugger he had gotten from Chick’s—the same brand of bat that had shattered his wife’s spine, and son’s skull on the last day that the world made sense. Only the night light was on in Eureka Dental’s waiting room, the sign-in sheet waiting for the morning patients. On the wall was a framed poster of a popular comedian touting the merits of flossing. The glass shattered as the poster became the next casualty of the Slugger.
The Library was filled with people clinging onto life, and there were only four standing. Teenagers. One boy was listening to an iPod in the corner, dancing to the beat, ignoring the pain around him. Then there was the blonde girl who pressed her hands on people’s sores. Another girl moved around the room wearing a beatific grin that Martin could swear was numbing his pain. Then the red-headed kid went to his dying son. “Don’t you touch him!” Martin screamed, but the kid ignored him. Just then the black teen named Winston came up to Martin, looking over his oozing stumps as if they were nothing out of the ordinary. “Welcome to Hearst Castle,” he said, then removed the jumper cables. Blood gushed instantly, and as weak as Martin felt, he became weaker, darkness closing in his peripheral vision . . . but the moment Winston touched his hands to Martin’s thighs, the blood stopped flowing. When he looked down, Martin saw flesh—his own flesh—folding out of the wound like the fabric of an inflating raft. He could feel the tingle of growing bone—actually felt his knee joint, then shin and ankle regenerate themselves. In less than five minutes toes sprouted from the end of his feet, and by the time Winston moved on to the next patient, Martin’s toenails needed a trim. Then he turned to see his resurrected wife and healed son standing beside him, just as awed and bewildered as he. After that, the men with the bats and chainsaws didn’t seem to matter.
Eureka Dental had fifteen dental stations, each room equipped with cutting-edge equipment. Indeed, they did not skimp when it came to technology. All that money gleaned from rich patients and fat insurance companies went right back into their facility. He was amazed at how quickly the overhead lights and chairs broke beneath the swing of his bat.
They called themselves shards, great spirits whose souls were born of a shattered star.
He had never been a religious man, but in the face of what he saw over those next few weeks, it was no longer a matter of faith but one of certainty. There was a divine power greater than himself. There was a greater purpose, and it had revealed itself through these youths. He would have followed Dillon, and Winston, and the others to the end of the world. And that’s exactly what he did.
The porcelain sinks were harder to break than he expected. So were the X-ray machines, their mantis-heads predatory in the way they parried and pivoted, their long-jointed necks taking the impact and bouncing back for more. It took him four or five machines until he discovered the proper trajectory to decapitate them with a single blow. He kept waiting for the scream of sirens, anticipating being caught in the act. That would make him news! The Associates would then have cameras and microphones crammed down their throats, forced to explain all this in the midst of the wreckage. It would be worth it. But when no sirens came, he only became angrier.
A few weeks after his legs were shorn and regrown, Martin stood on the rim of Black Canyon with a thousand others. He watched as Dillon hand-picked four hundred followers to descend into the canyon with him—the four hundred to stand with him as he would rupture Hoover Dam, then hold back the water with the force of his mind. His wife and son were among them, but Martin was not selected. Instead, Martin had stood there at the rim among the unchosen, saw the dam fall, and watched Dillon’s betrayal . . . for when the dam fell, he did not hold the waters back as he had promised. Instead Lake Mead spilled free, killing his wife and his son, and the rest of the four hundred. By the time the water reversed direction, and the undeniable miracle of the Backwash began, Martin was numb to it, wandering the desert until the police picked him up that night. His wife’s and son’s bodies were recovered days later, washed all the way back through the lake, and halfway through the Grand Canyon.
It took four swings to break the tempered glass window of the climate-controlled building, and that finally set off the pathetic alarm system. He hauled out the file drawers, dumping dental records out the window until the parking lot below was yellow with manila folders. Then he went into the conference room, smashing his bat against the marble table over and over again until the table won, and the bat splintered in half.
No matter how powerful Dillon’s miracle was, he knew it could never offset the loss he had suffered. How did he think he could return home to Eureka and take up his old life? How could his associates ever expect him to devote his days to dentistry? Hell, in Dillon’s order there had been no cavities—no crooked teeth. So what was the point of his own pitiful attempt to correct flaws when he had already seen flawlessness in the shadow of Dillon Cole? And how could Martin feel anything but virulent contempt for the families who came to him? There were times he wished his drill could r
each straight through to their hearts, leaving his happy patients as lifeless as his wife and son.
Exhausted, he threw the broken bat handle down, and found a room where the dental chair was still intact—a room decorated for their younger patients, cartoons painted on the wall and a dental chair done in plush lavender leather. He threw himself on the lavender chair, and reclined in regal repose. This was station number eight. It had been his favorite in the old days. Ocean view and enough room to move around in. The ceiling was plastered with the disembodied smiles of celebrities—a regular grinfest, culled from popular magazines, and he could identify each and every mouth. There was a time that he had thought that was something to be proud of.
It was then, as he rested from his labors, that the reflector lamp above him began to glow. It should not have given off any light at all—the bulb was broken, but still it began to glow, its intensity increasing by the second. In a few moments it had become a spotlight. His eyes hurt from its brightness, but even when he closed his eyes, it didn’t fade—it was as if he had no eyelids to shield himself from this light. He gripped the arms of the chair. If this was a hallucination brought on by cheap tequila, it was a good one.
When he heard a voice resounding within his thoughts, he knew it was a violation from outside himself. “Martin Briscoe,” the voice said, echoing over and over, resonating louder and louder until he had to stop it by screaming aloud.
His mind rang in a sudden silence. And then the voice again, filled with such depth and disharmony, he couldn’t tell if it was one voice or a chorus. The voice, or voices, simply said:
“We require your services.”
This made Martin laugh. To think that anyone who communicated in thought and blinding light could need a dentist was hilarious. But as his dance card was now open, he decided to entertain this delusion a bit longer.
“I’m a professional,” he said. “I don’t come cheap.”
A pause, and the voice spoke again with mind-splitting intensity. “Your task is one of retribution. Your reward will be forgiveness. Forgiveness and salvation.”