Thirteen

  His head ached.

  Had been aching, on and off, since he’d woken in the back of the swaying truck and touched the field dressing wrapped just above his eyes. The doctor Ren took him to that night outside Fresno told him it was a normal symptom for the head injuries he’d sustained; with luck it should fade in a few days.

  Head injuries the stranger had given Scott. And how could that be right? At first, he couldn’t make sense of it.

  He will return—Pastor William’s soft tones rolling out over the pulpit like thunder a long way off, thunder you knew was riding in on the wings of a storm coming right your way. They said he’d trained at one of the South Carolina megachurches before he got his ministry, and in the teeth of the gale he blew you could well believe it. He will return, and how’s that going be, you ask yourselves. Well, I’ll tell you, friends, I’ll tell you, building now to a roar, it ain’t going be no cluster-hugging happy clapping day like them niggers always singing on about. No, sir, the day of His return ain’t gonna be no party, ain’t gonna be no picnic and skipping road right up to paradise for you all. When Jesus comes again, He will come in judgment, and that judgment going to be hard, hard on man and woman and child, hard on us all, because we are all sinners and that sin, that dreadful black sin gotta be paid out once and for all. Look in your hearts, my friends, look in your hearts and find that black sin there and pray you can cut it out of you before judgment because if you don’t then the Lord will, and the Lord don’t use no anesthetic when He operates on your soul.

  There was a story Scott remembered from the End Times comics, Volume III Issue 137, The Triumph in Babylon. Coat wrapped, the Savior stalks the mirror-glass canyons of New York with a long navy Colt on one hip and a billy club in his hand fashioned from the sweat and bloodstained wood of the cross he died on. He kicks in the frosted-glass door of a coffee franchise off Wall Street and beats seven shades of damnation out of the money changers gathered there. Painted, black-stockinged lady brokers twisting prostrate at his feet, red licked lips parted in horror and abandonment, thighs exposed under short, whorish skirts. Fat, big-nosed men in suits braying and panicking, trying to get away from the scything club. Blood and waxed coffee cups flying, screams. The capitalized crunch of broken bones.

  Judgment!

  Scott touched the bandage around his head again, figured maybe he’d gotten off lightly after all.

  In the truck, staring at the gaunt, sleeping face, he’d leaned across and whispered to Ren, “Is it really Him?”

  She’d given him a strange look. “Who’d you think it is?”

  “Him, Jesus. The Lord, come again.” He swallowed, wet his lips. “Is this, are we living in the, you know, the End Times?”

  No response. She’d just looked at him curiously and told him to rest, he was going to need his strength. Thinking back, he guessed he must probably have sounded delirious with the concussion.

  And then the doctor, and other helpers along the way. People Ren seemed to know well. A change of trucks, a house and a soft bed on the outskirts of a town whose name he never saw. Another long, bone-jarring night in an all-terrain vehicle and tipping out at dawn on the airfield’s deserted expanse.

  And then the waiting.

  He tried to make himself useful. He tidied up after Ren and the stranger, put their bags and bedrolls straight every morning—and, oddly, glimpsed in among Ren’s gear a Bible and a sheaf of curling hardcopy from Republican ministry download sites, some of which he knew well himself; he closed the bag gently and didn’t look again, he wasn’t nosy by nature, but it made him frown all the same. He put it out of his mind as much as he could. Instead he put together a table and three dining places out of pieces of junk he found lying around in the control tower block and the hangars. He discovered a wrecked and wingless Cessna in one hangar corner, halfheartedly draped in thick plastic sheeting that he cut up and made into hanging curtains for a couple of the toilet cubicles and the showers. He took care of the food. The supplies the all-terrain driver had left them were mostly pull-tab autoheating, but he did his best to make meals out of what there was, carried them up to the other two in the tower when they showed no sign of coming down to eat. Tried not to stare at the stranger. He took the painkillers the doctor had given him sparingly and he prayed, diligently, every time he ate or slept. In an odd way, he felt better about life than he had in months.

  “Won’t be much longer now.”

  He started. When night fell, the quiet in the derelict building seemed to deepen somehow, and Ren’s voice jumped him like a gunshot. He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway that led through to the tower stairs. Light from the last red-gold leavings of the sunset outside meshed with the bluish glow of the camping lamps he’d lit, picked up a gleam in her eyes and along the teeth of the zip fastener on the ancient leather jacket she wore.

  “What you doing?”

  “Praying.” Half defiant, because he certainly hadn’t noticed her doing it in the last few days.

  She nodded. Moved into the room and folded herself down onto her sleeping bag with unconscious grace.

  “We need to talk,” she said, and he thought she sounded weary. “Why don’t you come over here.”

  He nearly jumped again. “What for?”

  “I won’t bite you, Scott.”

  “I, uh, I know that. I can hear you from here, though.”

  “Maybe you can. But I’d rather we didn’t have to shout. Now, come over here.”

  Tight-lipped, he got up from his own bedroll and walked over to hers. She nodded to her left and he squatted awkwardly beside her, not quite sitting down. Her scent washed over him, faintly unclean with desert sweat—he thought she hadn’t showered since early the day before. She looked into his face, and he felt the same old flip in his chest. She nodded upward, toward the ceiling and the tower above.

  “You know who that is up there,” she murmured. “Don’t you.”

  Exhilaration sloshed in his guts, chased up and met the feeling she’d made under his ribs. He managed a jerky nod of his own. “It is, isn’t it.”

  “Yeah, it is.” She sighed. “This is difficult for me, Scott. I grew up in a big family that had some Christians in it, but I wasn’t one of them. My religious experience is…very different from yours. Where I’m from, we accepted that other beliefs were possible, but we always thought they were just other ways of looking at the same truths we believed in. Less accurate, less enlightened paths. I never thought that maybe our truth would be the less enlightened one, that the Christians would be the ones who got it right. That—” She shook her head. “I never considered that.”

  He felt a warm, protective affection for her surge up inside, like flames. He reached out and took her hand where it lay in her lap, squeezed gently.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You were true in your beliefs. That’s what counts.”

  “I mean, you have to believe what you see with your own eyes, Scott. Right?” Her eyes held his. “You have to believe what you’re told when nothing else makes any sense, right?”

  He drew a deep breath. “This makes perfect sense to me, Carmen.”

  “Yeah, well here’s the thing, and I don’t know if there’s anything in your Bible that covers this, because it certainly isn’t what I was taught about the final cycle. He says”—another upward tilt of her eyes—“that he’s come early, that it’s not time yet and he has to gather his strength. He has work to do here, but his enemies are out there and they’re still strong. And that means we have to protect him until it is time. He’s chosen us, Scott. Sorted us from the, uh, the—”

  “The chaff?”

  “Yeah, the chaff. You saw what he did with Nocera and Ward? They were servants of the darkness, Scott. I see that now. I mean, I never liked Nocera, and Ward, well, I thought he was okay but—”

  “Satan has a thousand snares,” Scott told her. “A thousand masks to wear.”

  “Right.”

  He hesitated, looking at her. “Are y
ou His—” He tasted the word, awkward on his tongue. “His handmaiden?”

  “Yes. That’s what he’s told me. Until one of the, uh, the angels can come to take on the task. Until then, he says he’ll speak through me.”

  He was still holding her hand. He let go, pulled his own hands back as if she were hot to the touch. He tried not to stare at how beautiful she was.

  “You are. So worthy of it,” he said hoarsely. “You’ll be filled with light.”

  Then her hand was on him, on the buckle of his belt, pulling him to her. She leaned in and brushed her parted lips across his mouth. Pulled back again.

  He gaped. Blood hammered in his head. Below the belt buckle, he felt suddenly trapped and swollen.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed.

  She gestured at the ceiling. “He’s up there, Scott. Staying up there, keeping watch for us. It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s—” Shaking his head numbly. Trying to explain. “—it’s a, a sin, Carmen.”

  He wanted to move away from her, but in moving he only tipped back over in his awkward crouch and wound up sitting slumped against the wall behind him, still on the bedroll. He hadn’t succeeded in opening the distance between them at all. Or maybe—he’d wonder about it afterward—maybe he just hadn’t wanted to move away from her after all.

  “Carmen,” he pleaded. “We can’t be sinners. Not now. Not here. It’s wrong.”

  But Carmen Ren only hooked a thumb inside the neckline of her shirt, looked down at her own hand, and tugged. The static seam split with a tiny crackle and she ran her thumb downward, opening the shirt on the molded lift of her breasts in their profiler cups. He could see through the clear plastic sheen to where her nipples were pressed flat against the inner surface of each cup. She looked up again and smiled at him.

  “How can it be?” she asked simply. “Scott, don’t you see? Don’t you feel it? This is meant to be. This is a sacrament, a purification for both of us. A gift of his love. Reach inside yourself. Don’t you feel it?”

  And he did.

  It had been a very long time.

  He was not a virgin, not since the eleventh grade and Janey Wilkins, and Janey hadn’t exactly been the only one before he left for the Rim, either, though he tried not to take pride in that because he knew pride in it was wrong. But the girls had always come to him, no way to deny it. Scott took after his mother, was tall and long-legged, and he’d hardened his upper body in his early teens, putting in all the part-time hours he could get stringing fences and doing river security for the big Bitterroot land parcels so later he’d be able to pay his own way through tenth to twelfth grade and not be a burden or have to sign up for a youth stint with the marines if he wanted to finish out his education. And then, for all his muscle and length of limb, he was still soft-spoken and kind, and it seemed from what Janey told him that that didn’t hurt too much, either, when a girl was looking.

  But in the Rim, something happened to him.

  Maybe it was the fact that sex was suddenly everywhere—perfectly toned and tampered-with bodies, impossible to know if they were real flesh or generated v-format interfaces, but there they were, twining around each other on the big LCLS billboards, on storefront display screens, on those high-end pixelated shopping bags the women carried in fistfuls like a harvest of some big, brightly colored oblong fruit held up by the stalks and vines. There was flesh and liquid moaning on every nonfaith channel he had viewing access to, in every ad-tagged piece of mail he opened, on the trash cans, for God’s sake, and even, once, when he was down in the Freeport, sketched holographically across the sky and booming out of massive speakers along Venice Beach. Maybe it was that, the unending barrage, the overload of it all, or maybe it was just that he was heartsick for what he’d left behind. Whatever it was, by the end of the first year, the gentle confidence he’d enjoyed back home had gone wisping off him like steam off a morning coffee left out on the porch. Had left him lonely and cold.

  Carmen Ren burned through his loneliness like a falling star. Months of half-denied fantasy boiled up inside him. Her flesh where he touched it, where she guided his hands, was warm and smooth, and her tongue in his mouth tasted of some dark, unfamiliar spice. She peeled one of the profiler cups for him, dropped the jellied weight of the breast beneath into his hand. It seemed to fit there as if made for him to hold, as if intended that way. Her hands went back to his belt, loosened it and slipped inside. He went rigid as she slid fingers around the shaft of his erection, squeezed hard at her breast in reflex. She moaned into his mouth.

  They worked each other out of the clothes piecemeal, stopping to kiss and touch until finally she lay back on the bedroll naked, brushed her own hands down her flanks, and opened her thighs for him. He shifted on elbows and hands, a little awkward with lack of custom, and then gasped as he slipped into her. The evening air was cool and breezy against his skin, and Carmen Ren was heated and wet inside. She smiled, shifted sideways lazily, did something with her muscles. He felt himself gripped along the length of his cock, a slippery, tugging intimacy, and then she pulled him down on top of her, lifted her thighs, and clamped them to his sides—they burned like branding in the cool—and he came, sudden and rushing unstoppable, jolting like there was current through him off some badly insulated cable.

  He hung his head, stayed propped on his elbows.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She smiled up at him again, wiggled a little and tensed her muscles around his fading hardness. “Don’t be. You know how it makes me feel, seeing you lose control like that?”

  “It’s just.” He could feel himself flushing. “Been a long time, you know.”

  “Yeah, I guessed that. It doesn’t matter, Scott. We’ve got time. I like you inside me. We’ll go again when you’re ready.” Another twitch of that coiled muscle, and a sudden widening of her eyes. “Oh. In fact.”

  He didn’t know if it was the way she talked, casual as she lay there under him, as if they were sitting in a breakfast diner together, or maybe just the fact that he had her here, the culmination of so many damp, hopeless daydreams when he went home from Ward BioSupply alone. Or maybe it was that word, handmaiden, drumming around in his head, still on his lips like the dark spice taste of her. He didn’t know, truth be told didn’t much care. He knew, because Janey had once told him, that he was uncommonly fast back in the saddle, but even for him this was something else. He felt himself hardening right there inside her, swelling against that thing she did with those muscles, and he knew this time it was going to be all right, was going to be a long, sweet ride.

  Afterward, they lay in a tangle of limbs on the bedroll, backs to the peeling wall, partially draped with the sleeping bag and Ren’s jacket, gazing at the slice of evening sky just visible through the empty doorway that led outside. Scott thought the stars had never looked so bright and kind as they did tonight, not even back home. They seemed like sentinels, vibrating gently in the soft blue-black, wishing well. He told her that, and she chuckled deep in her chest.

  “Postcoital astronomy,” she said.

  “No,” he said, letting her have her joke, but firm despite it. “This is special, Carmen. We’re blessed tonight.”

  She made a small, noncommittal noise and stretched a little.

  “You know,” she told him, a little later. “It could be for a long time, this hiding. It’s going to be tough.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Yeah.” She rubbed a hand on the stubble of his cheek, mock roughly. “I imagine you’re used to tough, aren’t you.”

  “Will RimSec come after us?”

  “I don’t know.” Her tone was thoughtful. “There are people I’ve called to tidy up back at the dock. They’ll cover our traces, that’ll be a start. We have friends, Scott. More friends than you’d imagine.”

  “And enemies,” he said.

  “Yeah. Enemies, too.”

  He twisted his head to look into her face.

  “Tell me the truth, Carm
en. Is this the End Times? When the world goes down in flames, and the beast rises from the ocean with the names of blasphemy written upon him? Is that who we’re up against? The beast?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t think so. He hasn’t talked about that. But I do know this much: somewhere out there, there’s a dark man looking for him, and for us. This man is a servant of the darkness, and that’s who we have to guard against, Scott. Both of us, whatever happens, we’re servants of the light and we have to keep watch. The black man is coming. And when he comes, we have to be ready to fight, if necessary to the death. Are you ready for that?”

  “Of course I am. I’ll do anything. But…”

  She shifted, pushing herself up against the wall so she could look him in the eye. “But what?”

  Scott looked up at the ceiling. “Can’t He do anything about this black man?”

  “Not yet,” she said gently. “At least, that’s what he tells me. It isn’t time. He has other concerns, Scott, other work to do. It’s complicated, I know, I don’t pretend to understand it all myself, but I know what’s been revealed to me, and all I can do is tell you the same. We have to have faith, Scott, that’s what he told me. That’s a Christian strength, isn’t it? Having faith, not questioning what’s revealed?”