As the flames rose over the roof and the gray and black smoke became a pillar visible for miles around, Cundieffe stowed the Thermos in the briefcase and shrank into a ball against the leeward wall of the shed.
It's dead,
he told himself,
it's dead, it's got to be dead—
~22~
When Karl Schweinfurter woke up on a cold hard cot under harsh fluorescent light, his first thought was that it had all been a dream, and he was home. But there was no cot next to his, empty or otherwise, and no singing of hymns, no shouts of drilling Jägers outside.
He wiped the gummy mucous crust from his eyes and found that he could see little better with his eyes open. He saw enough, though, to remember. He was still in jail, still sick. They still didn't believe him.
He tried to convince them when they pulled him out of the wreck, but they wouldn't listen. They nagged the shit out of him some more, refused him medical treatment, and shut him up in the cell.
He tried to tell them again, when the Sheriff came in with a doctor, but they still wouldn't listen. They said he was nuts and injected him with something that made him sleep, and when he woke up, he was still in jail, and now, they wanted answers. He told them to eat shit and die.
They hadn't come back after that, not that he remembered. He didn't want to talk to anyone, now, could barely think straight or remember what it was that had been so important, anyway. Last he saw them, everyone at the compound was happier and healthier than ever before, and even Grossvater Egil had only seemed to want what was best for him. He sensed that he was very sick indeed, dying, even, and that it was he who needed help, and only Grossvater Egil could fix what was wrong with him. Only Grossvater Egil had been willing to listen. Maybe he should go back.
He pulled himself up, leaned against the wall and tried to see straight. The jail cell was empty, as were all the others. The only thing to look at was the steel sink-and-shitter combo fixture at his feet, and the Dairy Queen bag on the floor in the center of the cell. He hadn't looked inside it, but he doubted it contained food. Whatever it was, he'd be hard pressed to get up and walk that far, though he was hungry enough to eat a rat. The bag floated on the poured concrete horizon, a twinkling, unreachable star.
He rubbed his face and neck, vaguely alarmed to find strange bumps and spongy masses under his skin where there shouldn't be any. Dragging himself up to the sink, he tried to check himself in the metal mirror set into the wall, but either the steel or his eyes were too bleary to see more than a pale greenish ghost. His head started to swim and his stomach revolted at standing for too long, so he swooned on the cot and tried to close his eyes.
He wondered what his parents were doing right now. He wondered about Heidi, and her new baby, her new, smart, whispering baby. What was he trying to save them from? What was it, that seemed so important at the time, that he'd fled?
When he stole the car (
pimpmobile?
), he'd been driven by a fear greater than his terror of Grossvater Egil and the harsh life of the compound. Something had come from outside, and gotten in, and now—
You were stupid to run away, but yet you may be saved.
Maybe it was just a movie he saw. He'd do that, when he was really stoned or drunk or sick, see something on TV and confuse himself that it happened to him. Or he'd get so worked up about a song on the radio that he'd break something before he even knew what he was doing. But nothing like this. Those Dairy Queen assholes, they beat him up—and Grossvater Egil came—sick—scared—Grossvater Egil was so kind, now, so different from the stern patriarch that had stripped him naked in the snow, and Karl—he—stabbed him…
Come, boy. The rapture comes again.
Remembering only made him hurt worse, so he resolved to stop.
He woke up with his mouth brimming with bile. He heaved it out for a long, long time, then he was seized by hunger cramps so severe he balled up and screamed into his knees. He wouldn't let them hear him suffer. He wouldn't tell them anything. He wouldn't tell them what he knew, which was less than nothing, anyway.
In his half-dreams, his hands and head swelled up until they filled the room, pressed against the bars and through them. He engulfed the deputies and the Sheriff and burst the walls of the station and ate up the town, the state, the nation, threw out pseudopods into the sea, and ate the world. When all the world was Him, nobody would ever pick on him ever again, nobody would ever hit or kick him or call him Swinefucker, because there would be only Him.
Maybe that was something he saw on TV, too.
"Somebody to see you, prisoner," someone shouted. The bars clanged and grated and a short black shadow stepped into his cell.
Karl tried to open his eyes wider, tried to focus. His arms and legs clenched against another beating. The shadow grew larger, saying something, but not loud enough to penetrate the buzzing in his head. Then he smelled something, a wholesome, meaty aroma that cut right through the numbing miasma of industrial cleaning solutions and sour sweat and his own blend of filth. The shadow's hands laid something out before him on the cot, then retreated into the mint-green fog of the walls. He strained, and made it come into focus, and his mouth, so dry and dirty from vomiting and starvation, overflowed.
It was the most glorious sandwich ever rendered by human hands. Layer upon layer of marbled roast beef and luxuriant Swiss cheese drooped from between the toasted decks of a Kaiser bun, and scales of melting ice dripped from a tall plastic, foil-topped cup of orange juice.
The sandwich eclipsed the shadow, the cells, the world. He reached for the juice warily, hand shaking so bad he knocked it over. When no trap sprang, he snatched it and punched one grubby thumb through the foil, slurped it down.
In an unsettling flood, color came back into the world. The buzzing receded into a backwater territory of his brain, and his convulsing guts settled down. When he could lift his head, he tore into the sandwich. Only when it was finished and he felt that he might be able to hold onto it for a while did he look around for the shadow. Instead, he saw a short, slim, balding, bespectacled man in a heavy black topcoat standing over him with one hand in his pocket and the other holding out a shiny gold shield in a billfold. He didn't look like a cop, unless libraries had cops. He looked like the kind of bookworm even Karl used to pick on in school, and he looked more than a little scared at the sight of Karl, although Karl didn't feel particularly badass.
"I see you enjoyed the sandwich," the bookworm said.
"Buh," Karl managed. His mouth was still thick and swollen from the sudden onslaught of food and drink, and his brain had apparently shut down to pitch in with digestion. "Guh," he tried again.
"I'm Special Agent Martin Cundieffe, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." The bookworm pocketed the shield, knelt down beside Karl. "I'm here to protect you."
"Puh—protect—muh—m—me?" Getting better…
"I believe you were already interrogated by two agents who claimed to be from the FBI."
Karl couldn't remember. He'd spoken to someone, but he'd thought it was Grossvater Egil. Soon, they'd all be Grossvater Egil, and it wouldn't matter…
"Now, I understand your group recently became suddenly ill, from unknown causes. You look pretty ill, yourself. Have you received any medical attention?"
Karl shook his head.
"You don't trust me. I understand completely. I know all about Heilige Berg, Karl. I've studied your church, and its teachings about the world. You believe that the federal government is controlled by a shadowy enclave of internationalists who are waging a covert war on pure-blooded Aryan patriots."
That sounded like something Grossvater Egil used to say. He nodded again and tried to speak. "The Jews—"
"You're right, Karl, but it's not the Jews. They're far stranger than you can imagine, and far more powerful. Those agents you spoke to—or didn't, as the case may be—are part of it. They're part of something that is going to happen here that involves your people, something big. But they're going to keep it a secret—if you let them."
Karl nodded again. He was pretty sure he knew what the bookworm was talking about, but he couldn't remember what it was. Something important… He wanted to remember now with dog-like earnestness, if only to get more orange juice.
"You may not believe me, but I am here to protect you, though I can't speak for anyone else. As an American citizen, you are entitled to due process and humane treatment, and I apologize on behalf of the federal government for the deplorable conditions here. But I must reiterate. If I'm to get to the bottom of this, you are the only material witness to what's happening up there. I want to protect your people, for, though their politics be odious, they are American citizens—"
He went on like that forever, until Karl got hungry again and started to remember just to shut him up. "They just popped up right on New Year's Eve. Said they were our new neighbors—"
"Who did?"
"The tree—"
In fits and starts, he told the bookworm about the first encounter with the place; about the buses, the big building where no building should have been, and the sickly light that came down from the sky, and about the monsters in the woods.
He found it was easier to tell if he just closed his eyes and let it happen to him again. The words came fast and furious, sentences tailgating and fender-bending as he relived it in high-definition Technicolor. The running, the sickness, the beatings, the cold; Grossvater Egil, not angry; his parents, not dead. About how the Rapture came, and he missed it. He told about running away again, about his triumphant return to Dairy Queen. Now, waiting to die—
"Rapture came, and I missed it," he said again.
"How were they different after you came back?" the bookworm asked.
"Not different," Karl growled, brain buzzing as he tried to access parts of it that had gone to static. "They
were
all different, but they were all the same—as each other. I still knew them, and they knew me, but they all fit together like…they all talked the same, and they had the same eyes. Like they all had the same soul. I was scared, but—like—it was what we were waiting for, you know? The Rapture, the Ragnarok of the races. It was like they were all pure, and full of God's grace, and I was—I was— shit…"
The bookworm leaned in closer, his shiny bald head and glasses reflecting the fluorescents hurtfully into his eyes. "And after this— change—what activities did you observe?"
"I was only there for a while, after Grossvater Egil brought me back from the DQ. The trucks—they usually keep them all down at the slaughterhouse on the state road, but they was all up at the compound, going up and down the mountain. They might've been killing the whole herd, but they store the meat down there."
"The Sheriff says your people have cleared out of the compound, Karl. What do you make of that? Where would they go?"
"Nowhere! That's a damned lie! We're supposed to stay up there 'til—until the Rapture, I guess."
"And if that event came to pass…or if they believed it did?"
"Then they're supposed to go forth to spread the Word."
"Spread the Word?"
"Shit, you don't know us at all. Spread the Word. Duh! Christ's return, bearing a flaming sword? Ain't you a Christian?"
"What do you believe, Karl? Do you believe it was the Rapture?"
Karl looked at the DQ bag on the floor.
"Have you ever heard the name Radiant Dawn?"
He said nothing.
Heilige Licht is waiting to come into you…
"The place you described sounds just like an operation in California. They cured people of cancer, but they changed them. I believe you and your people were infected with some malignant agent, so that you could be 'cured', as well."
The bag fluttered in his foggy vision like a funeral bonfire on a gray tundra. He wished himself into the bag.
"Karl, this is only the beginning of the bad things that are going to happen to your people if I can't bring in federal forces to stop it, but you've got to tell me what I can expect to find when I go up there."
Karl could only look at him and drool. When the pained silence made it clear no more juice or sandwiches were forthcoming, Karl mumbled, "I can't remember anything else."
The bookworm rose up, became a black shadow again in the mint green mist. "Then that'll have to do, I suppose."
"You—" Karl tried very hard to look into the shadow's eyes. "You believe me?"
"I don't have much choice, I'm afraid. But your troubles are at an end, young man. I'll see to it that you're rushed to the nearest hospital, and placed in the very best of care. I'll contact you as soon as possible, when I know more. If your people have left the mountain, then the FBI will find them, before anyone else can get hurt."
Even though his face was a blurry wisp of pale smoke above the black shadow, Karl felt his muscles go slack at last as he felt the positive honesty in the FBI bookworm washing over him. All this time, maybe he had been taught wrong, after all. "You—you're not a Jew, are you?" Karl asked.
"I'm an American, young man. My religion is orderly democracy. My Bible is the Constitution of the United States. And I'm not ashamed to say, I hope I can make a convert out of you."
His hand swam up, big and bony and strong enough to squash Karl's trembly, clammy sticks to mush. The hand took his and pumped it heartily, almost pulling Karl off his cot. "We're going to put this right, Karl. You'll see."
Whatever the bookworm did in the front office worked, and things started to move fast after he left. Paramedics came in and gingerly transferred him to a stretcher, plugged a glucose IV and some more sedatives into him and strapped him down. He felt too weak to resist, but he didn't want to.