The nun held out her arms. “And in this rubble, he saw a new beginning.”
“Cool off, baby,” Calhoun said, “before you have a stroke.”
“He gathered to him men and women of a like mind and taught the gospel to them. The Old Testament. The New Testament. The Lost Books. And his own Book of Lazarus, for he had begun to call himself Lazarus. A symbolic name signifying a new beginning, a rising from the dead and coming to life and seeing things as they really are.”
The nun moved her hands rapidly, expressively as she talked. Sweat beaded on her forehead and upper lip.
“So he returned to his skills as a scientist, but applied them to a higher purpose—God’s purpose. And as Brother Lazarus, he realized the use of the dead. They could be taught to work and build a great monument to the glory of God. And this monument, this coed institution of monks and nuns would be called Jesus Land.”
At the word “Jesus,” the nun gave her voice an extra trill, and the dead folks, cued, said together, “Eees num be prased.”
“How the hell did you train them dead folks?” Calhoun said. “Dog treats?”
“Science put to the use of our lord Jesus Christ, that’s how. Brother Lazarus made a special device he could insert directly into the brains of dead folks, through the tops of their heads, and the device controls certain cravings. Makes them passive and responsive—at least to simple commands. With the regulator, as Brother Lazarus calls the device, we have been able to do much positive work with the dead.”
“Where do you find these dead folks?” Wayne asked.
“We buy them from the Meat Boys. We save them from amoral purposes.”
“They ought to be shot through the head and put in the goddamn ground,” Wayne said.
“If our use of the regulator and the dead folks was merely to better ourselves, I would agree. But it is not. We do the Lord’s work.”
“Do the monks fuck the sisters?” Calhoun asked.
“When possessed by the Spirit of Christ. Yes.”
“And I bet they get possessed a lot. Not a bad setup. Dead folks to do the work on the amusement park—”
“It isn’t an amusement park now.”
“—and plenty of free pussy. Sounds cozy. I like it. Old shithead up there’s smarter than he looks.”
“There is nothing selfish about our motives or those of Brother Lazarus. In fact, as penance for loosing the germ on the world in the first place, Brother Lazarus injected a virus into his nose. It is rotting slowly.”
“Thought that was quite a snorkel he had on him,” Wayne said.
“I take it back,” Calhoun said. “He is as dumb as he looks.”
“Why do the dead folks wear those silly hats?” Wayne asked.
“Brother Lazarus found a storeroom of them at the site of the old amusement park. They are mouse ears. They represent some cartoon animal that was popular once and part of Disneyland. Mickey Mouse, he was called. This way we know which dead folks are ours, and which ones are not controlled by our regulators. From time to time, stray dead folks wander into our area. Murder victims. Children abandoned in the desert. People crossing the desert who died of heat or illness. We’ve had some of the sisters and brothers attacked. The hats are a precaution.”
“And what’s the deal with us?” Wayne asked.
The nun smiled sweetly. “You, my children, are to add to the glory of God.” “Children?” Calhoun said. “You call an alligator a lizard, bitch?”
The nun slid back in the seat and rested the derringer in her lap. She pulled her legs into a cocked position, causing her panties to crease in the valley of her vagina; it looked like a nice place to visit, that valley.
Wayne turned from the beauty of it and put his head back and closed his eyes, pulled his hat down over them. There was nothing he could do at the moment, and since the nun was watching Calhoun for him, he’d sleep, store up and figure what to do next. If anything.
He drifted off to sleep wondering what the nun meant by, “You, my children, are to add to the glory of God.”
He had a feeling that when he found out, he wasn’t going to like it.
5
He awoke off and on and saw that the sunlight filtering through the storm had given everything a greenish color. Calhoun, seeing he was awake, said, “Ain’t that a pretty color? I had a shirt that color once and liked it lots, but I got in a fight with this Mexican whore with a wooden leg over some money and she tore it. I punched that little bean bandit good.”
“Thanks for sharing that,” Wayne said, and went back to sleep.
Each time he awoke it was brighter, and finally he awoke to the sun going down and the storm having died out. But he didn’t stay awake. He forced himself to close his eyes and store up more energy. To help him nod off he listened to the hum of the motor and thought about the wrecking yard and Pop and all the fun they could have, just drinking beer and playing cards and fucking the border women, and maybe some of those mutated cows they had over there for sale.
Nah. Nix the cows, or any of those genetically altered critters. A man had to draw the line somewhere, and he drew it at fucking critters, even if they had been bred so that they had human traits. You had to have some standards.
’Course, those standards had a way of eroding. He remembered when he said he’d only fuck the pretty ones. His last whore had been downright scary looking. If he didn’t watch himself he’d be as bad as Calhoun, trying to find the hole in the parakeet.
He awoke to Calhoun’s elbow in his ribs and the nun was standing beside their seat with the derringer. Wayne knew she hadn’t slept, but she looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She nodded toward their window, said, “Jesus Land.”
She had put that special touch in her voice again, and the dead folks responded with, “Eees num be prased.”
It was good and dark now, a crisp night with a big moon the color of hammered brass. The bus sailed across the white sand like a mystical schooner with a full wind in its sails. It went up an impossible hill toward what looked like an aurora borealis, then dove into an atomic rainbow of colors that filled the bus with fairy lights.
When Wayne’s eyes became accustomed to the lights, and the bus took a right turn along a precarious curve, he glanced down into the valley. An aerial view couldn’t have been any better than the view from his window.
Down there was a universe of polished metal and twisted neon. In the center of the valley was a great statue of Jesus crucified that must have been twenty-five stories high. Most of the body was made of bright metals and multicolored neon; and much of the light was coming from that. There was a crown of barbed wire wound several times around a chromium plate of a forehead and some rust-colored strands of neon hair. The savior’s eyes were huge, green strobes that swung left and right with the precision of an oscillating fan. There was an ear-to-ear smile on the savior’s face and the teeth were slats of sparkling metal with wide cavity-black gaps between them. The statue was equipped with a massive dick of polished, interwoven cables and coils of neon, the dick was thicker and more solid looking than the arthritic steel-tube legs on either side of it; the head of it was made of an enormous spotlight that pulsed the color of irritation.
The bus went around and around the valley, descending like a dead roach going down a slow drain, and finally the road rolled out straight and took them into Jesus Land.
They passed through the legs of Jesus, under the throbbing head of his cock, toward what looked like a small castle of polished gold bricks with an upright drawbridge inlayed with jewels.
The castle was only one of several tall structures that appeared to be made of rare metals and precious stones: gold, silver, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. But the closer they got to the buildings, the less fine they looked and the more they looked like what they were: stucco, cardboard, phosphorescent paint, colored spotlights, and bands of neon.
Off to the left Wayne could see a long, open shed full of vehicles, most of them old school buses. And ther
e were unlighted hovels made of tin and tar paper; homes for the dead, perhaps. Behind the shacks and the bus barn rose skeletal shapes that stretched tall and bleak against the sky and the candy-gem lights; shapes that looked like the bony remains of beached whales.
On the right, Wayne glimpsed a building with an open front that served as a stage. In front of the stage were chairs filled with monks and nuns. On the stage, six monks—one behind a drum set, one with a saxophone, the others with guitars—were blasting out a loud, rocking rhythm that made the bus shake. A nun with the front of her habit thrown open, her headpiece discarded, sang into a microphone with a voice like a suffering angel. The voice screeched out of the amplifiers and came in through the windows of the bus, crushing the sound of the engine. The nun crowed “Jesus” so long and hard it sounded like a plea from hell. Then she leapt up and came down doing the splits, the impact driving her back to her feet as if her ass had been loaded with springs.
“Bet that bitch can pick up a quarter with that thing,” Calhoun said.
Brother Lazarus touched a button, the pseudo-jeweled drawbridge lowered over a narrow moat, and he drove them inside.
It wasn’t as well lighted in there. The walls were bleak and gray. Brother Lazarus stopped the bus and got off, and another monk came on board. He was tall and thin and had crooked buck teeth that dented his bottom lip. He also had a twelve-gauge pump shotgun.
“This is Brother Fred,” the nun said. “He’ll be your tour guide.”
Brother Fred forced Wayne and Calhoun off the bus, away from the dead folks in their mouse-ear hats and the nun in her tight, black panties, jabbed them along a dark corridor, up a swirl of stairs and down a longer corridor with open doors on either side and rooms filled with dark and light and spoiled meat and guts on hooks and skulls and bones lying about like discarded walnut shells and broken sticks; rooms full of dead folks (truly dead) stacked neat as firewood, and rooms full of stone shelves stuffed with beakers of fiery-red and sewer-green and sky-blue and piss-yellow liquids, as well as glass coils through which other colored fluids fled as if chased, smoked as if nervous, and ran into big flasks as if relieved; rooms with platforms and tables and boxes and stools and chairs covered with instruments or dead folks or dead-folk pieces or the asses of monks and nuns as they sat and held charts or tubes or body parts and frowned at them with concentration, lips pursed as if about to explode with some earth-shattering pronouncement; and finally they came to a little room with a tall, glassless window that looked out upon the bright, shiny mess that was Jesus Land.
The room was simple. Table, two chairs, two beds—one on either side of the room. The walls were stone and unadorned. To the right was a little bathroom without a door.
Wayne walked to the window and looked out at Jesus Land pulsing and thumping like a desperate heart. He listened to the music a moment, leaned over and stuck his head outside.
They were high up and there was nothing but a straight drop. If you jumped, you’d wind up with the heels of your boots under your tonsils.
Wayne let out a whistle in appreciation of the drop. Brother Fred thought it was a compliment for Jesus Land. He said, “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”
“Miracle?” Calhoun said. “This goony light show? This ain’t no miracle. This is for shit. Get that nun on the bus back there to bend over and shit a perfectly round turd through a hoop at twenty paces, and I’ll call that a miracle, Mr. Fucked-up Teeth. But this Jesus Land crap is the dumbest fucking idea since dog sweaters.
“And look at this place. You could use some knickknacks or something in here. A picture of some ole naked gal doing a donkey, couple of pigs fucking. Anything. And a door on the shitter would be nice. I hate to be straining out a big one and know someone can look in on me. It ain’t decent. A man ought to have his fucking grunts in private. This place reminds me of a motel I stayed at in Waco one night, and I made the goddamn manager give me my money back. The roaches in that shit hole were big enough to use the shower.”
Brother Fred listened to all this without blinking an eye, as if seeing Calhoun talk was as amazing as seeing a frog sing. He said. “Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. Tomorrow you start to work.”
“I don’t want no fucking job,” Calhoun said.
“Goodnight, children,” Brother Fred said, and with that he closed the door and they heard it lock, loud and final as the clicking of the drop board on a gallows.
6
At dawn, Wayne got up and took a leak, went to the window to look out. The stage where the monks had played and the nun had jumped was empty. The skeletal shapes he had seen last night were tracks and frames from rides long abandoned. He had a sudden vision of Jesus and his disciples riding a roller coaster, their long hair and robes flapping in the wind.
The large crucified Jesus looked unimpressive without its lights and night’s mystery, like a whore in harsh sunlight with makeup gone and wig askew.
“Got any ideas how we’re gonna get out of here?” Calhoun asked.
Wayne looked at Calhoun. He was sitting on the bed, pulling on his boots.
Wayne shook his head.
“I could use a smoke. You know, I think we ought to work together. Then we can try to kill each other.”
Unconsciously, Calhoun touched his ear where Wayne had bitten off the lobe.
“Wouldn’t trust you as far as I could kick you,” Wayne said.
“I hear that. But I give my word. And my word’s something you can count on. I won’t twist it.”
Wayne studied Calhoun, thought: Well, there wasn’t anything to lose. He’d just watch his ass.
“All right,” Wayne said. “Give me your word you’ll work with me on getting us out of this mess, and when we’re good and free, and you say your word has gone far enough, we can settle up.”
“Deal,” Calhoun said, and offered his hand. Wayne looked at it. “This seals it,” Calhoun said.
Wayne took Calhoun’s hand and they shook.
7
Moments later the door unlocked and a smiling monk with hair the color and texture of mold fuzz came in with Brother Fred, who still had his pump shotgun. There were two dead folks with them. A man and a woman. They wore torn clothes and the mouse-ear hats. Neither looked long dead or smelled particularly bad. Actually, the monks smelled worse.
Using the barrel of the shotgun, Brother Fred poked them down the hall to a room with metal tables and medical instruments.
Brother Lazarus was on the far side of one of the tables. He was smiling. His nose looked especially cancerous this morning. A white pustule the size of a thumb tip had taken up residence on the left side of his snout, and it looked like a pearl onion in a turd.
Nearby stood a nun. She was short with good, if skinny, legs, and she wore the same outfit as the nun on the bus. It looked more girlish on her, perhaps because she was thin and small-breasted. She had a nice face, and eyes that were all pupil. Wisps of blond hair crawled out around the edges of her headgear. She looked pale and weak, as if wearied to the bone. There was a birthmark on her right cheek that looked like a distant view of a small bird in flight.
“Good morning,” Brother Lazarus said. “I hope you gentlemen slept well.”
“What’s this about work?” Wayne said.
“Work?” Brother Lazarus said.
“I described it to them that way,” Brother Fred said. “Perhaps an impulsive description.”
“I’ll say,” Brother Lazarus said. “No work here, gentlemen. You have my word on that. We do all the work. Lie on these tables and we’ll take a sampling of your blood.”
“Why?” Wayne said.
“Science,” Brother Lazarus said. “I intend to find a cure for this germ that makes the dead come back to life, and to do that, I need living human beings to study. Sounds kind of mad scientist, doesn’t it? But I assure you, you’ve nothing to lose but a few drops of blood. Well, maybe more than a few drops, but nothing serious.”
“Use your own goddamn blood
,” Calhoun said.
“We do. But we’re always looking for fresh specimens. Little here, little there. And if you don’t do it, we’ll kill you.”
Calhoun spun and hit Brother Fred on the nose. It was a solid punch and Brother Fred hit the floor on his butt, but he hung onto the shotgun and pointed it up at Calhoun. “Go on,” he said, his nose streaming blood. “Try that again.”
Wayne flexed to help, but hesitated. He could kick Brother Fred in the head from where he was, but that might not keep him from shooting Calhoun, and there would go the extra reward money. And besides, he’d given his word to the bastard that they’d try to help each other survive until they got out of this.
The other monk clasped his hands and swung them into the side of Calhoun’s head, knocking him down. Brother Fred got up, and while Calhoun was trying to rise, he hit him with the stock of the shotgun in the back of the head, hit him so hard it drove Calhoun’s forehead into the floor. Calhoun rolled over on his side and lay there, his eyes fluttering like moth wings.
“Brother Fred, you must learn to turn the other cheek,” Brother Lazarus said. “Now put this sack of shit on the table.”
Brother Fred checked Wayne to see if he looked like trouble. Wayne put his hands in his pockets and smiled.
Brother Fred called the two dead folks over and had them put Calhoun on the table. Brother Lazarus strapped him down.
The nun brought a tray of needles, syringes, cotton and bottles over, put it down on the table next to Calhoun’s head. Brother Lazarus rolled up Calhoun’s sleeve and fixed up a needle and stuck it in Calhoun’s arm, drew it full of blood. He stuck the needle through the rubber top of one of the bottles and shot the blood into that.
He looked at Wayne and said, “I hope you’ll be less trouble.”
“Do I get some orange juice and a little cracker afterwards?” Wayne said.
“You get to walk out without a knot on your head,” Brother Lazarus said.
“Guess that’ll have to do.”