The Acolyte (10 page)

We stepped over snapped fence posts and snarls of barbed wire. Garvey had a shotgun; Newbarr and I carried flashlights.

The trailer rested on its side; one of its cargo doors lay open like a drawbridge. Sunlight slanted through low-lying clouds to highlight the patina of blood on the door, the weeds and grass, still soaking into the dirt. Feathers—white, brown, yellow, most bloody—dotted the scene.

The head of some animal, a goat or sika deer, lay where it had been hurled in a thatch of cockleburs. The ragged neck wound indicated its head had not been cleanly sliced but rather wrenched and partly torn off. Its hide was stuck with burrs and its eyes gone filmy: they looked like marbles rubbed with sandpaper.

Coming from inside, their origin obscured by darkness: rustling sounds, scrabbling sounds, the odd peep. I pulled my revolver from its shoulder rig. It felt ungainly in my pinkie-less hand.

The second cargo door hung down like a flap of skin. I bent underneath it, easing myself into the trailer. The stink hit me like a closed fist: not decay, as not enough time had passed—just the high, giddy smell of death.

My flashlight beam was joined by Newbarr’s. They illuminated wholesale slaughter.

It looked as though a wind of razor blades had blown through the trailer. The compartment was crammed full of animals. Goats, deer, rabbits, guinea pigs, birds of many species. Most had been caged but some had obviously been roped to the walls; when the trailer flipped on its side these ones—goats, a few llamas—were strangled on their leads: they hung in the muggy darkness like heavy bags for boxing.

The cages had been forced open, steel rods bent and mangled, the animals plucked out and subjected to far worse than the goats got.

Someone had fed rabbits into the trailer’s cooling fan—it had remained operational even after the crash, judging by the red spray on the walls. The whicker birdcages had been stomped to splinters, birds and all. The hanging deer had been gutted and their chest cavities stuffed with dead guinea pigs.

A bluebottle bounced against my head, rendered sluggish by this bounty. Thousands of them created a maddening buzz. Below the buzzing, other noises: confused and pitiful.

“Who?” Garvey was seething. “Who would commit such sacrilege?”

He snatched Newbarr’s flashlight and stalked deeper into the trailer. I staggered back and heard a brittle, jaw-clenching crack. Training my flashlight down, I saw I’d stepped on the skull of a pale blue budgie. I blessed myself and inspected the ground for footprints, finding not a single one—how was that possible?

A fresh realization stung me. These animals hadn’t been killed outright: most had only been mutilated. Birds with wings torn off, rabbits with their feet snipped off, all left to bleed out and die. The mutilations were careful, meticulous; it must have taken hours. A wingless dove lay in a pile with several others, still horribly alive. Biting back a sob, I stepped on its head, too.

“How much more do you need to see?” Newbarr said softly. “This all seems nothing so much as . . .”

“Some sort of a message,” I finished for him.

Garvey let loose a scream. His shotgun blew a ragged hole into the death-box, and another, and another. He stormed the length of the trailer and shouldered past Newbarr out into the field.

When I took a hesitant step forward, the old coroner gripped my elbow. My ears were ringing from the shotgun volleys but I could read his lips well enough:

“You don’t want to see it.”

And he was right: I didn’t want to. But I needed to.

The flashlight reflected tiny glassy eyes, piles of wings and paws and hooves, lit up a decapitated llama head with its mouth stuffed full of bullfinches. The air was so thick with blood the feeling was narcotic; I swanned into a suspended carcass and gaped in horror as severed rabbit heads tumbled from its stomach to patter at my feet. I swung around, revolted, heartsick, and saw what had set Garvey off.

Two deer sat in a shaft of sunlight coming in through the holes Garvey’s shotgun had punched in the trailer. One young, the other older: a mother and fawn. The young one was dead: someone had almost but not quite sawn its head off. The older one was licking its neck as if this might somehow resurrect it. Licking tenderly but obsessively: the hair on the little deer’s throat had been licked clean off.

I chewed the air to stave off the deep rootless panic rising in my chest. The deer stared around aimlessly. Did it see me? Could it see anything? Sunlight streamed through the holes and touched its soft brown coat. It was then I noted, with the kind of sick attention to detail peculiar to only the most profound nightmares, that all four of its legs had been broken. Bones shorn through flesh as if someone had snapped each one over a knee like kindling. It scrabbled on those useless legs, inched itself forward, shielding the little dead deer from me. It licked and licked and licked and it licked.

I cocked the revolver’s hammer. I didn’t know that my bad hand would be strong enough to handle the kickback. It had better be.

Afterwards
I heard a frantic chirping outside the trailer.

Off to my left in the long grass and dandelions: a fitful flash of blue. I knelt and saw what it was: another blood-spattered budgie. It didn’t look hurt; the weight of blood on its feathers merely prevented it from flying.

I covered it with my hands. Its wings beat against my fingers. I picked it up, let its head poke through the circle made by my thumb and pointer finger. Eyes bright and alert. Twittering away. I laid it into my wide duster pocket.

Garvey knelt in the field, head bowed, gripping his skull with both hands. Newbarr stood nearby trying to light a cigarette but his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t touch flame to the tip.

I touched the back of Garvey’s neck. “Garvey, it’s okay. I . . . I took care of it.”

Newbarr joined us. He’d managed to get his cigarette lit, but it jittered between his lips. “Those animals will go to Heaven,” he assured Garvey. “They deserve that.”

Garvey braced his hands on his knees and straightened his spine. The skin ringing his eyes was puffy and red.

“Hell’s not good enough for the men who did this. Some of those animals are still alive. We got to
do
something.”

I said: “It’s still technically a crime scene.”

“You won’t see me back in there,” Newbarr said.

“Okay,” I said.

I headed to the truck. Stepped over Irvine B. Coughlin’s white-sheeted corpse to retrieve the grenade from the cup holder. Garvey taped it to the prowl car’s emergency jerry can with white medical tape from Newbarr’s kit.

Newbarr said, “You boys better take a look here.”

He directed us around back of the trailer. Written on the overturned roof in six-foot high letters spelled out in dried blood:

LET YOUR SINS GO UNPUNISHED.

Newbarr flicked his cigarette into the weeds. “What do you figure it means?”

“It’s a threat.” Garvey slammed the trailer with his fist. “Can’t you see? Some sick twists killed these animals so they couldn’t be used to wipe out our sins.”

Newbarr and I crouched by the semi as Garvey pulled the pin and heaved the jerry can through the trailer door. He’d hotfooted it fifty yards before an explosion bulged the trailer’s hull and threw him to the ground.

Newbarr came over and set a shaky hand on Garvey’s shoulder.

“It is my seasoned medical opinion that nothing could have survived that blast. Dangerous, foolish, but effective.”

Before making our separate ways back to the city, Newbarr drew me aside. “I’ll need you to drop by the pathology lab. I’ve been putting off Eve’s coronary report—figure you’ll be able to fill in some blanks.”

I assured him I’d stop by in the afternoon. Garvey set the car in gear and pulled out of the breakdown lane. Those five words kept turning over in my mind.

Let your sins go unpunished.

I couldn’t quite draw a bead on it.

Was it a threat . . .

. . . or an entreaty?

Seditious Materials

Garvey stopped at a Puritan’s Pantry on the way back. I went to a roadside callbox and fished in my pocket for a two-gerah coin. Eve’s nickel-plated profile glared up at me from its face. I fed it into the payphone.

I rang dispatch and was patched through to the DMV. An office drone took Irvine B. Coughlin’s name and licence number and spat info back: no pink slips, no priors, an overdue parking ticket charged to his family minivan. A dead end. I rang dispatch again and got patched through to the New Nazareth Hall of Public Records.

A clerk said, “Who’s requesting?”

“Acolyte Murtag, NBPD badge number 1099. Criminal background check, one Irvine B. Coughlin, 28 East Ark Avenue, New Nazareth.”

“One minute.”

The clerk put me on hold. I listened to a recorded sermon on abstinence delivered by The Prophet of New Nazareth: each major metropolis had its own Prophet, instated by the Divine Council.

The clerk clicked on. “Not much to relay. He fell behind on civic tithing seven years ago but has been prompt since his warning. No Reconditioning jolts. A good Follower.”

So the killing had been random. After briefly summarizing the crime, I said, “You’ll have to send someone round to deliver the news to his next of kin.”

“Will do.” The clerk’s voice maintained its chipper tone. “Give all glory to God.”

I rang dispatch and ran a check on the location of the accident report call. The operator scrolled through the daily log and told me it had been placed from a payphone on Pilate Street.

“Kiketown?”

Dispatch affirmed. “Just inside ghetto limits.”

When I relayed this to Garvey, he stiffened. “The heebs had something to do with it?” Fat beads of sweat dotted his upper lip. “Isn’t Goldberg’s shop on Pilate?”

Tibor Goldberg was a snitch who ran a vintage record store in Kiketown.

We motored down the Bakker expressway. The budgie chirped in the backseat; I’d put it in a shoebox with holes punched in the lid.

Garvey mashed the gas and juked in and out of traffic. He thumbed the cap off another bottle of Hallelujah Energy Boost, chugged the yellow goo and hucked the bottle out the window.

“We are gonna lean hard on that filthy snipcock,” he said, speaking of Goldberg. “Lean until his ankles snap.”

I tried to ease him down. “The call came from Kiketown, but that doesn’t mean anyone there had anything to do with it. Could be the perpetrators knew it was going to be logged, and dialled from the ghetto purposefully to throw the dogs off their heels.”

“Could be,” he said. “Could be the sun god Ra descended in his golden chariot and dialled the number with one flaming finger. Could be any wacko supposition. That’s why we lean on Goldberg and get some answers.”

Garvey was only the palest shade shy of totally unhinged—in his current state, he’d peel Goldberg like a banana.

He tuned the radio to RBJC and cranked it. The song was “Less Than Nothing” by Jimmy Saint Kincaid; the station was airing a memorial marathon. He took the first Kiketown exit and badged his way through a ghetto checkpoint.

In the early days of the Republic it was concluded that to eliminate all heathens would be imprudent. It would wipe out a city’s workforce. Instead they were to be segregated—
quarantined
was the official nomenclature. Heathen families were allotted a single child and all children were to be indoctrinated into the State Religion. These policies ensured that over a span of generations all impure faiths would cease to exist.
Be eradicated
was the official nomenclature.

The car bounced down a cobbled road, through potholes filled with oily water. The buildings were squat and trollish, clad in a layer of soot that pumped ceaselessly from a solid waste incineration plant nearby.

We pulled up across from Divine Discs. Pilate Street’s lone payphone stood directly in front of the store.

Garvey said, “Where’s the golden calf?”

I hunted it out of the glove box; Garvey slipped it into his pocket. We headed across the street.

Divine Discs was long and narrow with a high popcorn ceiling. Racks of vintage LPs, carefully organized and labelled, ran down both sides. It was dimly lit with forty-watt bulbs on account of Kiketown’s energy restrictions.