Jake's Wake (2 page)

“And HERE’S THE MIR ACLE, brothers and sisters! The thing I’m here to tell you, one and all, today!”

And Frankie was crying, oh yes he was, one wracking sob for every moan and thrust of the rutting couple before him. Not a speck of hesitation as he brought the blade up.

“THERE IS NO DEATH!”
roared the voice on the screen.
“Do you hear what I’m sayin’? THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DEATH!”

Then the blade came down.

And changed everything, forever.

A split second before the knife went in, Jake was shouting along with his TV self while the jism pressure mounted. He could feel it swimming up from the soles of his feet as he looked from his face to her ass and back again.

“‘It’s a lie that Satan taught you!’”
he howled.
“‘It’s a joke that isn’t all that funny!’
AHH, FUCK…!” Almost getting off more on himself than this sweet, twisted little girl before him…

…and that was when his own penetration began, right between the shoulder blades, cold steel sliding in so fast that he didn’t even feel it happen, the blade was
just suddenly
there
, inside him, all the way in and almost through his chest, point grinding against the back of his breastbone.

Jake howled, his cock forgotten as his ruptured heart-meat started squirting instead. He started to spin, and the knife pulled out, blood gutters letting the steel slide smoothly back into the open air, glittering black in the blue TV light.

“And right behind it is the SECRET TRUTH that Jesus has been tryin’ to tell you the whole time!”

Then the knife came back, gutting him this time, carving his insides and spilling them out in the open. He bent over as if to catch them, dimly aware of the woman who scrambled away from him, hysterically screaming.

And over it all, the sound of his own voice.

“Christ has promised us life everlasting. It’s in the Book. In black-and-white.”

The knife pulled out, went in again.

“NO!” Sugar screamed, was not the only one screaming.

Jake felt blood squirt out of his mouth and staggered back, then collapsed to the floor, hitting it hard and yet barely aware of it. His perception was a crumbling mosaic, life dissembling into death one broken shard at a time.

“Omigod, Frankie, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…!”

From his perspective on the floor, he could see Sugar wrap herself around Frankie, sobbing and clutching him tight. The killer just stood there, swaying, unsteady, then dropped the knife, sobbing, letting her kiss the tears from his face.

“All we have to do is pledge our souls to him…”

Jake hissed out another thick mouthful of blood. It was the only thing that didn’t feel cold. He could feel the warmth drain from his face, his shivering limbs and ruptured torso.

“Pledge our souls…”

“I love you,” Sugar said, but not to him. “Look at me. I love you so much. Look at me, baby. I’m so sorry…”

Look at me
, Jake tried to say, but he couldn’t do it, and they didn’t care. He faintly heard Frankie slap her, heard her sudden yelp of pain, but found himself staring straight up at the crappy stucco on the ceiling.

“…all our hearts, and all our souls…”

He had always expected a motion picture at the end.
Jake’s Greatest Hits
: a biblical travelogue, in Cinema scope and Technicolor.

But there was no vision, no thought, no revelation. Just the numb wash of shock, like an icy gray tide, slowly drowning out his pain.

“…to that DIVINE RESURRECTION!”

And that was when Jake’s demons appeared.

It began as a flicker at the far end of the room, like a strobe light from another, even uglier dimension. A crackling in the air that made his short hairs stand on end.

Something was taking shape there, with the body

(jake)

of a woman, flicker-flashing

(jake)

in and out of the darkness.

(jaaaake)

It whispered to him as it writhed upright, like some malformed exotic dancer, hips undulating obscenely, arms snaking through the air. Too many arms. Two, four, six

(look at you)

and then they were laughing, the three-demons-in-one: almost solid now as its spectral body crouched, nearly squatting, as if to shit or give him birth…

…and Jake couldn’t feel his fingers or toes, but he could feel his balls contract in terror. It was the only emotion he had left, and it screamed through every still-working nerve in his body.

Worse yet, it screamed through his soul

(and your life everlasting)

with horrible recognition

(everlasting jaaaake)

and before he could blink, the three-faced demon was upon him. Leaning over him. Leaning down close

(in everlasting judgment)

with all of its six flickering eyes so knowing

(death everlasting)

knowing him, as he knew them.

(but only for the blind, jake, does death never end)

Jake’s own eyes were glazing over, smoke-clotted windows between this world and the next. But he could see the demon smiling now, and knew that it hadn’t just come to claim him.

His great work was only beginning.

The miracle had finally come.

Three nights later, and the chill autumn wind prowled over a desert painted silver by a brooding half-moon. It simmered like a window fan set angrily on low, fretting at chimes and whirligigs on porches, then gusted up hard enough to rattle windows in their frames and bow the jagged crowns of Joshua trees and yucca plants, roaring in across the empty California desert as if looking for a place to hide from what ever chased it.

A storm was coming, but nobody had the slightest clue how bad it was going to get.

The news of the day was focused elsewhere, loaded with the same domestic absurdity and foreign atrocity as ever, fodder aplenty for arguments that the world continued to chase its own tail, or charge straight off a cliff.

For those looking for signs of the end times—aside from the wars, floods, famines, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, conspiracies, scandals, UFO sightings, soaring oil prices, homosexual agendas, and polar ice caps melting—there were more than a few bits of good news.

A “rather popular” Shiite cleric—whose name reporters dutifully mangled with every repetition—was killed by a suicide bomber in Basra, along with two
dozen of his followers. After loudly denouncing the sectarian violence and American occupation of Iraq, he foretold his own death, but proclaimed that “I will be the last to die.”

The assassin who made the cleric a martyr was disguised as an Iraqi policeman. His prophecy held true for three eerily quiet days, until this morning, when an IED outside Kirkuk flipped a Humvee filled with marines.

In other news—and a stunning reversal of centuries-old doctrine—the Catholic Church issued a digital papal bull closing the limbo loophole, retroactively consigning untold millions of pagan babies to the fires of hell.

This, combined with their admission that life on other planets did not contradict biblical infallibility—since extraterrestrials would be “God’s children, too”—begged the question: what
else
did the pope suddenly know that he wasn’t letting the rest of the world in on?

And in New Zealand, global warming had finally given comfort to bereaved humanity, or at least some closure, as a melting glacier off Baffin Island disgorged the frigid remains of a Kiwi survey plane and its crew, given up for lost in 1964. Loved ones and descendents gathered on a chartered ship to watch as the wreckage thawed in the summer sun, then tumbled into the sea.

Signs and portents. But mostly smoke and mirrors. For gloomy true believers and faithless curmudgeons alike, the real indicators never appeared as mainstream news. They were tiny details, stuck between the cracks of consensus reality: hidden in sacred texts and environmental reports, research dug from the
Fortean Times
, or the rantings of little-known small-town cable access prophets.

For most people, the only news that mattered was the substance of life that impacted them directly: money, jobs, friends, and loved ones. The world was too big, too unwieldy to fathom. The question was, “How are
you
today?”

On a desert road in the Southern California night, a white sedan passed a billboard asking
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO
?

The frightened people inside asked themselves the same question. It was a personal question, which they kept to themselves.

The desert, as always, was full of secrets.

But the storm was blowing in.

Esther’s house—formerly the Weston-Partridge Free School and Homestead—sat alone on ten acres surrounded by no one. It looked like a single-level ranch-style house that had been blowtorched by hippie witchcraft until it was pliable, then awkwardly stretched to twice its normal length.

Esther’s parents had built it in 1971, shortly after their groundbreaking scholastic treatise,
Know Your Self, Grow Your Self
, hit the best-seller charts. This had allowed them the luxury of giving up on fighting the system from within, pioneering radical alternatives instead.

Clearly, the architect they conspired with had some radical alternative theories on quality, as well, because the place not only looked wrong, it was wired wrong. It was plumbed wrong. They had endless fucking problems all the time, only some of which were ever truly fixed.

The result was, the house had patches on its patches, one quick save after another, like a perpetually leaky vessel that somehow managed to stay afloat.

But they were cheerful people, her parents. Eternally
optimistic, even when they were fighting: with the house, with disease, with her, with each other, with the county or the culture at large. They were mellow, stoned, passionate, rigorously well-meaning take-it-as-it-comes sort of people.

And they had always made her crazy.

In their heyday—which neatly paralleled her developmental years—the Weston-Partridge Free School and Homestead had been vibrant with the songs and laughter of children, the exchange of information, the cultivation of exciting young lives. Rarely more than two dozen kids at a time, and once as few as six, all given the kind of attention that rich parents paid thousands for, at private academies.

And it was all very sweet, but of course it died, as the eighties brought an end to hippie homeschooling, and the Reagan years brought corporate bottom-line hardball back into vogue. The kids stopped coming, the books went out of print, her father passed away. And then her mom, not far behind.

But the land and the house were paid for. And they’d left a generous trust. At least their lawyer wasn’t stoned.

Relics of those days still remained in the yard—a derelict wooden carousel, a rusted-out slide, some monkey bars—a playground ghost town where she once played, then dreamed of bringing back to life with her own children—

The paint had faded and begun to peel. The grass had gone brown. The old oak tree that everyone used to climb on had been struck by lightning and driven insane, its longest half-severed limb still stretched out twenty feet alongside the stone fence that bordered the property.

The rambling front of the house was entirely dark, but halfway down, the fitfully flickering light from the
hallway glimmered through narrow ceiling-level windows. And around at the back, there was the shy, yellow glow of a porch light. A beautiful stained glass window set into the front door.

And dark curtains, concealing the picture-window walls of the living room.

Behind them, a fire was burning too hot.

While secrets and worse fluttered between the shadows and the flame.

Eddie Echevarria knelt before the roaring fireplace, wiping the sweat and dark bangs from his forehead, warming himself from the chill outside and watching the raw primal power of dancing energy in its purest state.

Eddie was in awe of flame. Not in some twisted, pyro way, but with the kind of love and fascination that the cavemen must have felt when they learned that they could make that sort of magic with their own two hands.

Fire
was
magic, and the fireplace was an altar, where a handful of properly stacked chunks of dead wood, some good kindling, and a couple balls of newspaper could transmute single-handedly into proof of a living God.

To watch shapes transform in that red-yellow dance, sheering away into sharp charcoal outlines of themselves that radiated both heat and light—disintegrating into something both hotter and higher than themselves—was more than
un pocito
like watching human beings rise above themselves under stressful situations.

And dear God, they were under some stress tonight.

Eddie was thirty-six, just slightly younger than Esther. He had devotedly cared for the family, and for Esther, for nearly eighteen years—five times longer than
her marriage—and he had no intention of quitting. Especially now.

He turned to look at her pinned in the stark kitchen light, leaning over the counter that linked it with the living room where he knelt, thinking thoughts high above his station and half expecting to wake up to something worse.

She was chopping something—cheese, from the sound of the knife on the wooded cutting board—with metronomic precision.

She looked, as always, beautiful and frail: too skinny for her own good, if the truth be told. She had pale, regal features and fine ash-blonde hair that cascaded in lush ringlets when set free; but tied back now in elegant fashion, it lent her an air of poise she could almost hide behind.

Her black dress was designed for mourning, with spaghetti straps slung just low enough to set off her slender neck and accentuate her modest cleavage. Needing to feel both beautiful and powerful to night, she had asked him to help pick out the dress.