The Acolyte (8 page)

I shook my head no.

Hollis said, “If I’m going to be stabbed, I’d prefer it in the chest, not my back.”

I willed my face into a mask. “No grudges.”

He stared at me for a long time. “We have been put on this earth to spread the One True Faith. We are on the same side, are we not? Those things I said while you were in the Confessional . . .”

“Duty.”

“You and Doe have been reprimanded and thus expiated. You may still need to mend fences with your fellow Acolytes, but I’ll do my best to help. We need to maintain a unified front in light of recent events.”

A horrible sense of loneliness enveloped me, spurred by the understanding that the monster at the foot of the bed might be as close to an ally as I had left.

“I only cut off the tip of Doe’s finger.” He held this fact out, an olive branch. “Could’ve taken it all. It was mine by right.”

I fluttered my eyes, feigning exhaustion. Hollis opened the privacy curtain. The moon hung low in the black sky. Eerie orange-tinted light bathed the rooftops and cathedral spires of New Bethlehem. I shut my eyes.

Morning came. Sunspots sparkled off dangling IV bottles. The sunlight felt wonderful where it touched me. I needed to relieve myself. Fiercely.

The duty nurse was in conversation with Chief Exeter, who saw I’d awoken.

“Acolyte Murtag.” Exeter eased himself into the bedside chair.

“If it isn’t the ghost of Christmas future.”

He smiled obsequiously. “How are you feeling?”

Better, but I wasn’t going to say so. “Got to piss like a racehorse.”

Exeter’s throat flushed above his collar. The man’s prudishness was legendary. The nurse came over with a bedpan.

“Would you like me to . . . ?” Exeter said. “Shall I turn away?”

“Don’t bother.” I knew it would embarrass him more than it would me, and it’d be wise to put him on the defensive. “It’s the standard plumbing.”

I swung my legs off the mattress and fished myself from the slit of my hospital gown. Exeter sat with eyes averted, legs crossed, clasped hands resting on one knee.

The book on Exeter: overeducated—Master’s in Civic Faith Services from Oral Roberts, matching doctorate from Pat Robertson University—but under-experienced. Naturally, I loathed him—despite the fact that, so far as I knew, he was the one who’d saved my skin. But I doubted very much it had been out of the goodness of his heart.

I said: “To what do I owe this honour?”

Exeter sighed. “Can’t say as I was expecting graciousness, but I could do without the outright hostility.”

“Recent events have temporarily put me in an un-Christian spirit.”

He polished his specs with the hem of his vest. “Are you speaking of your failure to protect The Prophet’s daughter?”

I took a shaving mirror off the bedside table and consulted my reflection. The sight did nothing to improve my mood: hairless, skin pale as candle wax, eyes surrounded by black rings like washers. My front tooth had broken off during Hollis’s interrogation session. I probed the empty space with my tongue and marvelled at just how witless I looked.

“You’re alive,” said Exeter. “No broken bones, no internal bleeding. Besides, your duties do not require you to look good.” He aimed for a levity that didn’t suit him. “A scar or two, roughened features—who says those aren’t a plus?”

“And I take it you’re the reason why I’m not six feet under.”

To his credit, Exeter’s expression revealed nothing; he finished polishing his specs and slid them onto his test-pattern face.

“I overheard Hollis on the phone in the interrogation room,” I went on, “in between jolts from his cattle prod. Figure I should be thankful.”

“I don’t figure as you should be anything at all,” Exeter said after an introspective pause wherein I sensed he weighed the benefits and drawbacks of telling the truth. “I wasn’t aware what was happening to you. As you well know, your unit operates behind a veil of autonomous secrecy.”

“So, who?”

He waved my question off. “Does not factor. Suffice it to say, I found out and put an end to it. There was never any intention to have you or Acolyte Doe executed. And that”—he indicated the stump of my finger—“is regrettable, but Deacon Hollis took it as his right. The investigation into the bombing is ongoing. You and Doe are witnesses, which makes Hollis’s actions not only hotheaded but borderline treasonous. What if one of you had been killed? What were you doing in the Confessional in the first place—an oaf with a blowtorch can get whatever admission he wants.”

The nurse retrieved the bedpan. It was filled with red broth: as much blood as piss.

“The trend continues,” Exeter said. “Another bombing last night.”

“Two nights in a row?”

He shook his head. “You’ve been here three days. They’ve had you medicated on ether and that”—a nod to the bottle of fortified wine and mandrake root—“so I’m not surprised you’re foggy. Nevertheless, two bombings in four nights is an alarming trend.”

“Where?”

Exeter’s brow wrinkled. “It happened in Kiketown. An eight-storey storage facility.” In the ghettos, there was no differentiation between warehouses and apartment complexes: all were zoned as storage facilities. “An explosion on the third floor. Seventeen tenants burned to death, another dozen dead of smoke inhalation.”

Had the explosion taken place in the city proper, the damage would not have been so extensive. But the fire department did not respond to storage facility fires.

“So . . . it was random?”

Exeter nodded. “And it’s looking more like The Manger was random. That The Prophet’s daughter was killed can be construed as an unexpected tragedy or bonus, depending on which side you’re on.”

Random. The most terrifying word in a lawman’s dictionary. If heathens had a
modus operandi
you could stake out potential targets and zero in. But if they had no specific enemy—if they were aligned against humanity in general—all bets were off.

Exeter said: “The Prophet will be addressing the death of his daughter during his weekly sermon two days from now. It’s in your best interests you be up and on duty before then.”

“I’ll be back by tomorrow.”

“I imagine it may be difficult easing back into things. You Acolytes are an insular crew, and some may harbour a grudge. So if there’s anything I can do in futu—”

A shockwave trembled through the hospital. Beds jounced, ceiling tiles cracked, IV bottles shattered. Exeter rushed to the nearest window.

Off to the east, smoke was already rising into the cloudless morning blue. Greasy black streaks were joined by grey funnels spiralling from wreckage too far away to glimpse, yet which I could still picture in my mind’s eye: heat-warped girders blown apart and laying at jigsaw angles, flames shooting from shattered windows, disconnected arms and legs roasting on the blackened brickwork. And screaming. Lots and lots of screaming.

Exeter said: “That’s in Little Baghdad. My God, even the bombers are being bombed.”

The lack of civic response told me he was correct. I heard no sirens because no emergency vehicles would be dispatched.

My blood was buzzing. “This makes no earthly sense.”

Exeter’s pager went off. He glanced at the number and shut his eyes.

He would keep his eyes shut for quite some time.

Article II:
He Falls the First Time

Mom

I checked myself out of the hospital sometime during the witching hour. A trio of charge nurses knelt round me reciting the standard fare-thee-well prayer. One of them gave me a lump of cornbread covered in blue-green mold.

“Eat it all,” she said. “Helps with your infection.”

I flagged down a cab. The cabbie dropped me at my apartment building. No key so I hauled myself up the fire escape, cracked my window and clambered awkwardly through. Stink of cordite smoke. Black ash climbing the walls.

I found the wrapped box in the closet. Mom’s present.

Raphael’s Roost was a rest home for Cure cases. A squat tri-levelled building in the shape of a U, flaking paint the hue of a diseased liver. Lawn burned so badly all that remained was a fuzz like that covering a tennis ball.

Inside the Roost, wall sconces burned feebly. The hallways smelled somehow forlorn, as if the emotional states of its inhabitants had impregnated themselves upon the physical bearing of the Roost itself, layer upon crazed layer.

The overnight orderly was a bovine-looking character. His nametag read: R
EMO PALLADINI, TRAINEE
.

I set the wrapped box on the inspection table. “My mother’s here. This is for her. Her birthday.”

Palladini said, “It’s well past visiting hours, Mr. Murtag.”

“Officer.” I flashed my badge. “Officer Murtag.”

“Right. Officer. Past visiting hours.”

“I won’t wake her. I just want to leave the present so she wakes up to it.”

“You can leave it at the desk.” His lips skinned back from his teeth as if to suggest even this would be putting him in a tight spot. “Maybe the dayshift orderly can get it to her.”

I asked if he had pen and paper, and when he gave them to me I looked at his nametag before carefully copying his name down.

“What’s that for?” he said.

I slipped the paper into my pocket. “Oh, this? It’s nothing. Every so often I get someone’s name and run a background check. The department encourages it.”

Palladini’s face blanched. His nostrils dilated.

“Why would you do that? What for?”

“That’s the whole point. It’s random, totally random. The same way policemen in cruisers run the licence plate of the car ahead of them at a traffic light. Ninety-nine percent of the time they’re clean. I’m sure you’re clean—right?”

Palladini’s jaw tightened.

“Five minutes, Officer Murtag.”

My mother
was asleep, her white hair fanned over the pillow.

Honeycombed shadows from the security window sectioned her face, which was pinched with tension. While awake, her face was as placid as a pool of water. That placidity had been carved with the blade of a scalpel.

I set the box on her dresser. She stirred in agitation, and the smell of the room—sick, same as the hallways—rushed at me, and in the darkness I swore I saw the layers of sickened psyche peeling right off her, thin as onionskin paper.

Wholesale Slaughter