The Acolyte (29 page)

She said: “Wait for me in the yard.”

Outside I heard the shots. Two, with a short lag between.

Doe met me in the yard. Dry-eyed, blood speckled on her cheeks. She gave the gun back to me.

She said: “I don’t want this happening to us.”

“To us?”

“New Bethlehem. Our city.”

My eyes snagged on movement over her shoulder, down the end of the street. My jaw fell open in shock.

It
couldn’t
be. This city was too vast, the chances next to nil. I squinted down the dew-wetted tarmac into the clearness of the floodplains beyond. I whispered, “Shhhhh.”

She turned, looked. We waited.

There
. A glint of white. An albino-white duster—but torn now, grimed with blood.

If there’s only one shark in the whole sea . . . well, there’s still that one.

It was the Quint. Number Three. The lost one.

She grabbed my arm. “
Run
.”

We dashed through Hogan’s backyard at a dead sprint, Doe matching me stride for stride. I cut through Hogan’s gazebo, crashed awkwardly through the warped wooden latticework, sprinting a few steps to vault the chain link fence into Hogan’s neighbours’ backyard. We pelted across the lawn, blood hammering in my eardrums, so wired I swore I saw fine blue electricity snapping off the tips of my fingers. I trailed Doe across the lawn over the fence into the next yard, bear-walking behind a hedgerow, wondering why, the Quint was blind according to the lookout—but it wasn’t a matter of being seen but rather sensed,
smelled
. As if we were being hunted by a giant mole rat or an albino earthworm.

We broke past the hedgerow into the yard, running through a child’s sandbox with high-kneed, churning steps; I trod on a rusted Tonka truck half-buried in sand, twisted my ankle and hissed in pain. I limped past a dog run housing a canine skeleton with its teeth clamped to the chain link and its sleek skull shining with dew. Doe cut sharply through a darkened breech between houses and we were on another street running in what I felt to be the right direction but not entirely sure.

Mailboxes in the shape of cathedrals. Burnt houses leaned predatorily, hungrily over the road. I hazarded a glance over my shoulder and caught the knife-flash no more than a block off, skirting the flank of a fire-gutted garden shed. How many shots were left in my revolver? Four, Doe having used two; I spun awkwardly, pistol out, trying to draw a bead but there was nothing to orient on—only block upon block of nerve-chafing dark. We followed the blind curve of the road into the barrens, fleeing across sand overlaid with a layer of fog so thick we couldn’t see our feet.

I barely heard the shot; the only way I knew we’d been fired at was the puff that bloomed in the fog two feet ahead to our left. I grabbed Doe’s shoulder, cutting hard right and in doing so nearly ran into the watchtower we’d have otherwise fled right past.

The car was just where we’d left it—for a panicky instant it looked to have sunk into the earth but this was only the effect created by sand drifting round the tires. I moved toward the driver’s side but Doe darted in front and I was forced to do an end-around, flanking the trunk and sliding into the passenger’s seat. Doe keyed the ignition, set the tranny in reverse and goosed the gas; the tires spun, yowled, spat sand.

I said: “Ease it, ease up; you’re gonna mire us!”

“I got it, shut up I got it.”

She dropped into drive and gave it gas. The chassis groaned, rocking forward. The hood squatted so low I feared the crankcase would eat sand. She flicked the headlamps, flooding the barrens and the ice-cold sky beyond . . .

. . . and there he stood, no more than fifty paces away. Colourless duster flapping in a desert wind to make his body look huger, more menacing. The number ‘3’ tattooed on his neck and his cheeks cratered with acidic scars, eyes blazing red in the glow of the headlights.

The Quint’s pistol-arm went up. The sideview mirror exploded in a spray of plastic and glass, remnants hanging off the doorframe by coloured wires; Doe wrenched the wheel full left, tires gritting in their sandy grooves; the windshield spidered as a hole punched through six inches wide of her skull to burrow into the backseat upholstery; she stood on the gas as if weighing herself, tires spinning, smoking; I scrabbled for my revolver as another slug whanged off the moulding somewhere above my head.

Doe hauled the wheel right, slammed the gearshift into reverse and stamped the gas; my gun was ready when the car caught traction, sluing assways in a drunken arc, wind lashing through the shattered windshield as the undercarriage scraped a half-buried rock to send blue sparks fanning up before the grille. My finger jarred the trigger and a bullet punched into the roof. The interior reeked of cordite as Doe reversed in a long sweeping bend then dropped the transmission without taking her foot off the gas; the engine screamed like a scalded cat and before the gearbox bit, she cut side-to-side and sent up a rooster tail made red by the brake lights.

I got a leg up and kicked the busted windshield, popping it from the frame and watching it crumple onto the hood. I thumbed the dome light and found three fresh cartridges in the grooves of the rubberized floor mat, snapped the revolver chamber, teased out the spent shells, filled the empty cylinders and calmly said, “Turn back around.”

“What?”

“Turn around. I am going to kill that thing.”

Doe actually smiled. “I like a man with a death wish.”

We charged across the flatlands in a shaky little car, creosote bushes and salt-plants crushed under the piebald tires as the night pushed in at us, wind rippling the skin of our faces like boat sails. The car took a bad hop off a hillock, wheels accelerating as the hood reared up and nosed down into the sand to send what seemed a dune’s worth up over the hood, blanking out the high beams. Sand blew clear of the lights and there, pinned in the glare like a moth to a velvet sheet, was the Quint.

I squeezed off a shot, two, three as we pounded in on him like the hammers of Hell but they missed and the Quint squared to the onrushing car, leering as he returned fire. A headlight deadheaded in a shower of electric sparks; a crisp metallic
ka-ting!
as another slug drilled the radiator.

The Quint juked deftly and we might have only clipped him with the fender had Doe not calmly juked the same way, centring him back on the hood to slam into him broadside.

The Quint broke over the grille, engine squeal and buckled metal as the airbag deployed, a ghostly bubble pinning Doe back in her seat but she kept the pedal floored with the Quint’s body now lodged in the windshield gap, his rancid duster flapping inside the car and a maddening cockroach hiss coming from—from where, his body?

The flappings and hissings and mere proximity revolted me so much I reared back and kicked, my ankle howling, but I ignored the pain as I hoofed at the Quint’s spine until the body tumbled free of the windshield, bumping over the hood down off the trunk.

Doe finally slammed the brakes, bringing the car to a lurching halt.

When we got out, the Quint lay face down in the glow of the brake lights. Saf-T-Glas winked in the sand. The duster torn up the centre, wadded round the shoulders and spread out on either side like a pair of diseased angel’s wings. He wasn’t moving and was in all likelihood dead, though with a thing such as that you had to wonder.

The watchtower spotlight shaped a bright halo round the Quint’s body. We took a step back, shielding our eyes.

“That’s it,” Jeremy’s bullhorn-amplified voice advised. “Stand back.”

His first shot missed its mark, catching the Quint’s shoulder. The hydrostatic pressure was still enough to send blood jetting out his ears. The second tore off the crown of his skull.

The spotlight snapped off. Jeremy said: “God watch over you both.”

Confessions

I awoke in the car. We were parked somewhere in the Badlands.

Doe was awake, sitting next to me. She said, “There’s something you should know.”

She sat up in the driver’s seat. I was reclined in the passenger’s seat. I lifted my eyebrows, waiting for it.

“I’m pregnant.”

I almost laughed. “No, you’re not.”

She said, “I know my own body.”

“Pregnant?” My head was swimming. “Me? I mean,
us
?”

“You think I get around that much?”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay. That’s . . . so great. You’re pregnant. We’re sinners, but that’s okay, too. I mean, it is, right? Isn’t it fine?”

She drew away. “I can’t, Jonah . . . I won’t be keeping it.”

“Please don’t say that. You haven’t—”

“Thought it through? Don’t insult me, Jonah.”

I said, “You didn’t even give me a chance to say whether I wanted it.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, of course, for God’s sake,
yes,
I want our child.”

Months ago I could’ve placed a call to the Parenthood Ministry and they would have dispatched agents to enforce the pregnancy. Not to say I would have done so, but the option existed. Now what the hell could I do?

“You have to look at it rationally,” she said. “It’s so small right now—not even a person. A bundle of cells. It won’t know it ever existed.”

“We’ll know, won’t we?”

“Just some cells,” she said. “Grey cells. No face, no hands, nothing human about it.”

“We could get out,” I said. “Of the city. Calvin Newbarr, he’s got a cottage someplace. He’d know a thing or two about delivering a baby—”

She cut me off. “Listen to me, Jonah: the decision has been made.”

“So why tell me?” I said angrily. “Seeing as every conclusion was foregone.”

“Because it seemed fair that you know. And because I could use your help. I need . . . what’s his name? Jewish, runs a record shop? We busted him a few years back for—”

“Goldberg.”

“Tibor Goldberg, right. He knew a guy, didn’t he?”

I hung my head. “That’s supposing either Tibor or the guy he used to know are still in the city.”

Doe said: “Can you help set it up?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “You’re asking me to seek out a hit man and make arrangements for a murder.”

“You do understand I’ll find a way regardless.”

“You’d make a good mother, Angela.”

“Please. Just stop it.”

She keyed the engine. The car rumbled to life. She set it in gear and we drove back to the city in silence.

Arrangements

We ran out of gas two blocks from Doe’s place. I left her without saying goodbye.

The prowl car was where I’d left it. When I got back to the apartment there was a note in the mailbox from Doc Newbarr. A pencil-drawn map to his cabin. There were a pair of messages on the answering machine. One from Hollis, saying to visit him at home. Another from Swift, saying simply:
Whenever you’re ready.

My mother and Amira were sleeping in the same bed. I left them and went to find Tibor.

The checkpoint shack leading into Kiketown was destroyed. A strange calm overhung the ghetto. Street signs had all been repainted: Pilate Court read as Yahweh Court; Iscariot Gardens was now Abraham Gardens. Divine Discs was closed. Goldberg’s apartment was above the shop. I laid on the horn.

“Goldberg! Tibor Goldberg!”

The upper-storey window rattled up. Goldberg leaned out.

“The fuck you want?”

“Just a question.”

“I don’t converse with heathens.” Tibor was wearing a yarmulke.
Proudly
.

“What’s written back on the checkpoint? My Yiddish is rusty.”

“
Kristlekh Sotn Avekgeyn
,” he said, spitting the words at me. “Christian Devils Go Home.”

“One question,” I said. “I come in peace.”

“Try anything and you’ll be leaving in pieces,” Tibor warned.

I waited patiently as he snapped the lights on and unlocked the shop doors.

“Thanks,” I said.

Tibor said: “
Geh cocken offen yom
.”

“Translation?”

“Go shit in the ocean.”

I followed him in. He took a seat, heels kicked up on the counter.

“Of course you realize you’ve run a good chance of getting shot coming here, you dumb schlemiel.”