Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (10 page)

The ixiptla laughed, sly eyes ensnaring Ahuac’s as he gagged on black foam. “I have not starved, all these months, my priest. I feasted on snakes and scorpions and poisonous frogs, which the poor gave to me in return for your fine food, and tonight, I have eaten enough to kill even your god. You Mexica are so chained to your rituals; you are more a slave than I. If you do not eat this flesh, your terrible lord will hurl earthquakes and plagues on the city… but this meat is death.”

The ixiptla shuddered, and bile leaked from his slack mouth, his muscles going to water beneath his painted skin. “Will you taste my name, priest? Will you savor my courage? My heart is a codex of venom. It holds all the future you need to see.”

“At last,” Ahuac hissed, “you reveal yourself.” The priest removed his mask and showed his face to the sacrifice. He raised the obsidian knife over the ixiptla and cracked his chest wide, as he had done it hundreds of times here and thousands in his dreams, ripped out his heart and held it up for the ixiptla to see.

Close before his clouding eyes, Ahuac bit into the beating heart and gorged himself on the envenomed blood. Choking now as it mingled with his own, Ahuac said, “Your name is Tezcatlipoca.”

Even as his own strength began to fail, Ahuac ordered the body of the ixiptla to be prepared for the feast.

He pulled up to the crosswalk at Hinterland and Blossom, in a big goddamned rush, but not too much rush to stop for a pedestrian. When citizens shirk their duties to their fellow man, he reminded himself to soothe the nervous twitch in his leg muscles as he braked, then everything goes to hell.

But the human toadstool just stayed planted on the curb, digging at a ragweed sprouting from a crack with one shiftless toe. Maybe lost, maybe just visiting this planet, but he was wasting the driver’s time. The selfishness of the patient black smear made him see red. “Enough’s enough, ped; move ‘em or lose ‘em.”

He kneaded the wheel, gunned his engine to urge him along, but no dice. Hours passed behind the driver’s sweat-streaked brow, an unforgivable sentence, until finally, the slacker feebly waved him on, evidently satisfied he’d stolen a sufficient chunk of the driver’s life. Standing still as a portrait on the corner, hooded from the rapacious blade of his stare. He peeled out to regain the lost time, but mostly to blow off steam, shouting out his window, “What makes you think you’re worth running over?”

The next day, in an unusually big goddamned rush, due to the sheets of black sleet holding traffic down to a blind baby’s crawl, he burned down Hinterland through the red light at Blossom with his gas foot crushed to the floor.

Shimmying across smoky black glass like a needle on a grooveless record, bathed in the dim red stoplight bloodglow, as the walker on the curb went all eyes to take him in. Sucker’s eyes. Twice shy and no time to spare playing the clown for another stinking ped. Off the curb at the light’s indifferent command to WALK, spasming like an epileptic bullfighter in an involuntary veronica, his foot snatched back from the scissorblade tire and scarred gunmetal tarmac, suddenly as precious as found money.

In any orderly society
, thinks the driver, easing down on the accelerator to turn onto Victory Circle,
in any one that really works, there’s got to be give and take, or everything just goes to hell
.

“God-dog-damned if I’m gonna let some hot-rodder holier-than-y’all motherfucker run me down,” swore the pedestrian, breathless, at the tiny, faraway car. Shook his red windbreaker over his head. He wandered away from Hinterland, down Warren, where the dark burns brighter than any light. Kicking a trail through scattered trash, fists balled in pockets. Into a hole in the wall to recover, regroup, and strategize.

He felt his reflexive anger taking root in reason and unfurling to entangle his mind in red shoots of hate. He was alive, wasn’t he? A faceless stranger had tried to take that life, for no other reason than that he could, because he had a car. Sick mothers, every one of them foaming at the mouth, looking to get put down. He watched Hinterland out his barred window.

He felt it swell into a tower inside him that night on Hinterland and Luddite, only to fall when he threw a brick at the next speeder was too important to let him stop at the crosswalk. He went home to get a beer, at peace with the world.

His fiberglass bodywork was smashed to hell, remolded and repainted at stellar cost—the computerized custom paint-matching alone ate up a paycheck—that his insurance company deftly squirmed out of paying. The assaulted driver now saw the street’s camouflaged threats with new eyes. The meaningless blurs resolved when he slowed to pace them into sinister shapes brandishing weapons under coats and behind packages, pretending to buy drugs or forage for change in payphones, huddling, plotting to take their frustrations out on their betters. He cruised late into the nights down alleys and avenues in questionable areas to show he was not afraid.

His new vision bore fruit during a night patrol on Hinterland and Conquistador, when the ped sent by his nemesis charged out in front of his car from behind a burning pay latrine, one arm cocked to seal his fate. His independent suspension bore out the impact without spilling his coffee. When they stopped him at Hinterland and Cassandra, it was all he could do not to bust out laughing.

The injury to his grillwork and rightside turn signal would cost much less than the damage caused by the brick. He realized how much smoother it would go to play dumb and keep his motive to himself. They knew the score, and would only have to look him in the eye to know the truth, but no one did. An accomplice had removed the pedestrian attacker’s weapon from the scene before anyone had seen it, complicating any self-defense case he might try to make. He would ride out his probation and suspended license with a clean conscience and, most importantly, no fear.

The slain pedestrian’s widower found himself aimlessly wandering the streets in the freezing rain coming back from the hospital. He studied the slick gray asphalt scrolling beneath him alongside the black tarmac, separate and supremely unequal, looking for chalk outlines. Upon reaching the northbound Conquistador crosswalk, he stopped cold and began to cry.

This was where it happened. This was the scene. His grief eroded into panic as the gauntlet of idling automobiles, held back only by the blind blinking lights, honked their horns, daring him to step into the no man’s land of the intersection.

“Got stage fright, asshole?” someone behind the headlights shouted and gunned his engine. After what seemed like days of chewing his lip the pedestrian waved them sheepishly on from the curb…

Saturday mornings, rain or shine, Jubal Gibbons and his son, Caleb, walked neighborhood rounds, spreading the Word.

By age seven, Caleb had already deduced that very few of their neighbors had any real interest in God’s message, and nobody seemed to want to hear it from Father. At thirteen, he sleepwalked through the agonizing ordeal with the weary aplomb of late middle age. He knew which houses had kids from school, and hid until the door slammed in Father’s face. He knew which houses had lonely weirdoes who would suffer an afternoon of Father’s sermons just for the company, but never convert. He knew when he could catch a decent nap just out of earshot, until the loud call to prayer jolted him out of dreams of watching TV and talking to girls.

Father did this not because the church expected it of him, but as penance. He knew his naked faith scared or offended most decent suburban folk, and banged his head against their repulsion as a way of demonstrating his total commitment to his God. Sometimes he volunteered to help with yardwork or chores in return for a shared prayer vigil. They drank beer and laughed at him as he raked their lawns, and never warmed to his faith. Jubal didn’t seem to care, or else he buried it so deep that it only came out as a more intense, angry silence.

Why he brought Caleb, when it was clear his son had other things on his mind, had taken longer to unravel, but with nothing but church pamphlets and his pocket Bible to read, he’d had a lifetime of Saturdays to mull it over. God did not speak to Caleb as He had to Jubal, who heard the Lord with such stunning intensity that he’d been committed twice. Surely Caleb, with his mumbled, cracking prayers and sweaty, fidgeting hands, could only spook the heathens and queer the pitch.

Father had no hope of kindling a torch of faith in his son, who’d been ruined by public school, but dragged him through the godforsaken backwaters of their neighborhood to peek into the homes of strangers and show him how they lived without God in their lives—the hangovers, the neglected children, the smut coming out of the TV. Never did the endless, episodic lecture turn to why the godless houses were larger and nicer than theirs, or why the sinners who lived in them had better jobs and were still married, and home on Saturday with squeaky-clean consciences.

On rainy days, they rode in the old Pacer with the leaky moon roof, but on sunny summer days like this, Father brought an extra sheaf of pamphlets. They started in their own neighborhood, and walked until every pamphlet had been delivered.

As he limped the last mile of their route on this blistering late August day, with his feet swollen halfway out of his cheap brown shoes and the grubby canvas pamphlet bag chafing the calluses around his wrist, Caleb daydreamed about the Pacer with its AC that blew only smoky engine heat, windows that only rolled halfway down, broken bumper festooned with embarrassing bumper stickers—MY GOD IS AN AWESOME GOD; FOLLOW ME TO SALVATION; HAVE YOU HEARD THE WORD MADE FLESH?

He dreamed of Father actually making just one sincere convert, and ascending bodily up to Heaven like the Prophets of old, or maybe just chucking the pamphlets in the gutter and leaving Caleb in front of a bar. Either would be fine.

Caleb despised the Mormons who breezed past them on their ten-speeds, wind ballooning their short-sleeve white shirts out behind them.

Father came to the door of a house they had visited every month for the last eight years, though the man who lived there never answered. The door opened as Father raised his fist to knock. A magazine girl staggered out, her laminated conversation card in hand and her shirt half-unbuttoned. Her face was flushed, and the man inside the door wore a bathrobe and a bestial grin.

Jubal railed at the house until the sinner threatened to call the police. Caleb had to drag his father away. He was disgusted with his own excitement over the episode, but couldn’t condemn her. At least she got inside. At least she was selling something somebody wanted.

If Caleb hoped Father would be moved to give up for the day, he should have known better. As they split their dry tuna sandwich and a mushy Bartlett pear on the concrete bench in a neighborhood park, Jubal studied the street map on his clipboard and slashed at it with a felt tip marker. “We’ve tried and tried with this area, and none will hear us. They are dead to the word.”

Caleb nodded mutely at the solemn verdict. More of the world was dead to them every year, with this simple marking out. Television, Catholics, Jews, Islamists, evolutionists, fornicators, his teachers, his fellow students, Caleb’s mother—all dead.

“We’ll go spread the word down here, today,” he announced, tracing an arrow across the map, like the scythe of a conquering army, into the Hollows.

A maze of steep hills, canyons and cul-de-sacs that seemed to twist on forever, the Hollows was mercifully out of their territory. Caleb truly pitied whoever had to walk it every Saturday. “Isn’t that someone else’s route, Father?”

“No, son,” Jubal answered, “not for a long time. The church gave up on it years ago. I’ve heard…” he clammed up, then leaked a little smile, as he knowingly sinned. He wanted so badly to excite his son that he gossiped. “I heard once that a couple of missionaries even quit the church after walking the Hollows. Nobody ever knew why—”

“What happened to them, Father?”

“They left the church, Caleb. Their faith was broken. We never saw them again—”