Xeno Sapiens (27 page)

“
But as the years passed and it didn’t
happen, I saw the truth.
Men
were afraid of me. A formidable obstacle, but you’ve
finally found a way to get over that. You don’t need
men
anymore, do
you?”

Merrifield grew cold inside. Hall knew
for certain.

“
You’re a sick puppy, Josh,” he
said.

Hall ignored him. “The time to slay the
dragon has come. I am God’s instrument.”

“
How can you pawn yourself off as an
evangelist,” Merrifield said in disgust. “You would be more at home
in a bag of mixed nuts.”

“
How can you call yourself human,”
Hall countered with equal contempt. “Your only purpose is to
manipulate God’s work; to bend it to your own heathenish
intentions. Man was meant to suffer. Nothing you do will change
that. God
wants
us to suffer. Would you undo His work?” Hall smiled
craftily. “Or would you take it over?”

“
Get out of here, you sick excuse for
a human being,” Merrifield said in a nauseated whisper. “You turn
my stomach.”

“
Indeed?” Hall raised his
eyebrows.

“
You’re a filthy, walking ghoul,”
Merrifield rasped. “You’re no better than a maggot or a...a slug.
You’re beneath contempt.”

“
Insult me all you want,” Hall said,
pleasant as ever. “For many years I believed it was a twisted
blessing you didn’t die in Atlanta. No, God intended me for a
larger effort. He allowed the small fish to live and thrive, only
to give birth to a bigger fish for me to fry. Can’t you see it’s
God’s will? If he places obstacles in my path, I will strike them
down. You can’t save the world, Jon. God doesn’t want it
saved.”

This was more than Merrifield had
expected. Hall was certainly nuts, but he was also a man with
tremendous influence, now. He was a robot bent on destruction, even
if it meant his own destruction.

“
You’re worse than a ghoul,”
Merrifield said with breathless comprehension.

Hall smiled beatifically. “Who’s to say? I think the ghoul
is here. A monster, a dragon, an experiment. Call it what you
will.” His smile was no longer gentle, but intimidating. “There may
be one in this very room, I’ll get what I want in the end. Maybe
not all of it, but I will get
you
. You are not safe. No way, no how. Don’t underestimate,
Jon. I’m still around.”

Hall stood up.

“
Don’t bother showing me out, I know
the way. The chief was kind enough to lead me right to you.” He
turned around before opening the door.

“
I’ll be seeing you, Jon.
Soon.”

As the old song went, Josh Hall knew it
down in his heart. He had been witness to the corruption and
wickedness of humanity; had built up such a reservoir of hate that
he would not shirk, would in fact enjoy the responsibility for
destroying humanity, if he could.

He was, in a way, a foundling. His
father, the never seen John Hall, had disappeared in the Dominican
Republic in 1965 during the fighting there. His mother, Lucy, had
worked as a seamstress and a washer woman until the time Joshua was
four years old. Though it was only a fleeting instant in a life
filled with discontent, he sometimes could almost recall sitting on
the braided rug of the small apartment his mother kept, dressed in
his striped rugby shirt, and playing with his wooden train
locomotive with the blue smoke stack and yellow wheels.

The wolf was almost always camped by
the door of the Hall household, but his mother would take time from
her washing and folding- a fog of smoke from her constant Lucky
Strike circling them with a blue haze- to crawl around on the floor
with him and pretend to be a horse, much to the squealing delight
of young Joshua.

He had been a good little
boy.

When he turned five years old his
mother was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, a virtual death
warrant back in the days of the late sixties, though Joshua had no
way of understanding this.

A few weeks after the diagnosis, a
gentleman caller stopped by the apartment. Josh remembered the man
as being tall and thin, nearly gaunt, with the dark, sad eyes of a
mortician. He wore a somber, black suit, and he reminded the little
boy of the pictures of the Carriage Men he had seen in his picture
books. The Carriage Men carried whips and wore hats with feathers
in them. They took laughing couples on hansom rides in the parks.
But Joshua had never seen any children with the smiling couples in
the picture books and he was afraid that the Carriage Man had come
to take his mother.

Lucy had sent young Joshua to bed early
that night, but he had lain awake, listening to his mother and the
Carriage Man chant, and weep, and moan, sometimes crying out. He
had slipped from his bed and peered into the living room only to
see his mother and the Carriage Man on their knees in the tiny
living room. The lights had been off and burning candles had given
the small room a hellish glow.

His mother had been crying, almost
wailing in some sort of rapture while the Carriage Man held his
clasped hands up toward the ceiling, shaking them as if in anger.
Joshua had fled back to his bed, his pajama footies slipping on the
polished wood of the hallway.

A week later, Lucy had dragged Joshua
with her down to the hospital. The Carriage Man had been to the
apartment every night since then and Joshua had listened to the
nightly ritual with his hands clutching his blanket below his nose,
his eyes wide and frightened.

In that week, he had seen the desolate
light in his mother’s eyes change from a dim, dying glow to a
burning fire that was demented. She left Josh in the waiting room
while she went in to see the doctors. Two hours later she was back,
the doctors tagging along behind her. She had been very pretty in a
flowered, print dress and her high heels, but also intimidating and
indignant.

A miracle,
the doctors were saying.
No other explanation. The cancer is
completely gone.

From that time on, Josh had been
carried from revival tent to revival tent, the three of them
trundling around the country like a trio of gypsies. The Carriage
Man was always with them now, and he exercised a scary hold over
his mother. He would get up at night in front of a crowd of a
thousand people and shout and exhort his listeners about the
greatness of Jehovah. Before the night was over, he would parade
Lucy on stage as if she were some freak at a carnival
show.

“
See with your own eyes,”
he would shout,
“this beautiful woman healed by the power of God! This woman, who
was but a poor washer woman, a helpless widow woman, who the
doctors told could not be healed, put her faith in the Lord and was
given a new hold on life. See for yourself what God has
done!”

His mother hung on the Carriage Man’s every word, falling
on her knees in front of the wailing congregation and crying tears
of joy and madness. The crowd would then rush on stage, wanting to
touch Lucy, thrusting wrinkled and soiled dollar bills at the
Carriage Man and tossing coins into dishes with pleasing,
metallic
clink-clinks!

Time passed in a blur of one horse
towns and revival meetings conducted on deserted fairgrounds and
riversides. Lucy and the Carriage Man had set up house together and
Josh was left to mostly fend for himself. No more did his mother
put down her laundry or her sewing to play horsie with the little
boy, or tuck him in at night. There was only the lunatic light of
rapture in her eyes anymore, and her need to serve the Carriage
Man.

One night in 1969, when Joshua was five
years old, the Carriage man had folded up his tent and took it and
his mother away, leaving him sleeping outside on a cot in
Clarkston, Indiana.

He had been found by a local family
and, in the days before computers and pictures on milk cartons, all
attempts to find his mother and the Carriage Man drew blanks. They
had vanished as easily and quickly as the Carriage Man had
come.

Joshua at least knew he had been born
in Arkansas and he had been shipped back there to live at the
Perkins State Orphanage in Bell, Arkansas while the authorities
searched for any living relatives. They never found any.

He grew up there, unhappy and
disillusioned. He never knew the Carriage Man’s name, but he hated
the Carriage Man and the Carriage Man’s God who had taken his
mother from him. He made a habit of running away from the orphanage
and it was on the last of these forays that he had killed his first
man at the age of eleven.

Poking around in the alleys of the tiny
business district of Bell in 1975, looking for something to eat
outside of the back doors of the two greasy spoons that served the
town, a man had come up behind him. Even to this day he remembered
the way the beard stubble on the man’s face had appalled him; how
his breath was like clouds of poison in his face. And the man was
tall and thin, like the Carriage Man.

He remembered the man coming toward
him, unzipping his pants, reaching inside his fly while the young
Joshua cringed against the stinking barrels of trash. As if in a
dream, he remembered the sharpness of the man’s beard against his
smooth, hairless cheek; the way his searching hand had found, as if
it had been placed there by some Divine Providence, the discarded
butcher knife in the heaped piles of garbage. Its handle was broken
and the blade was dark brown and dull, but the point had been sharp
enough to drive through the back of the man’s neck. The man’s
surprised, bug-eyed expression and the gurgling sounds that bubbled
from his throat had given the young Joshua a grim
satisfaction.

The man had fallen forward in the trash
and thrashed weakly for a few moments before dying. The young
Joshua had felt nothing, but he had seen his chance. The quick
thinking on his feet that would serve him in later years took hold
of him and he reached into the man’s back pocket. He pulled out a
battered wallet and was surprised to find two twenty dollar bills
in there, a handsome sum of money for 1975, especially to a
penniless orphan who had never had more than fifty cents at any one
time. With this King’s Ransom, Hall left Bell, Arkansas, and never
looked back.

He roamed the streets of Little Rock
for a couple of years, learning the lessons that would allow him to
survive the rigors of war. Far from being the skinny, starving
street urchin, Hall had thrived, blossoming and blooming into a
formidable young man by the time he was fifteen.

He simply walked into the offices of
SecureCom that year, using a phony birth certificate, and presented
himself for training to the shadowy, illicit men who worked there.
He had killed before, and it paid well. The ability to acquire
phony documentation was one of the first, and most useful lessons
he had learned as a street kid. As far as he knew, he was born in
1964, but with no firm birth date and his own fakery of ID, the
best estimates of his age put him between 40 and 45. Hall wasn’t
sure, himself.

Hall was trained in firearms and hand
to hand combat in 1980. From there he moved on to sniper school. In
the beginning, he wished to become proficient at killing simply
because it was a skill few men possessed. And even when those men
learned to kill, it was still the rare man who could put the
crosshairs on an enemy’s face and pull the trigger while seeing
them as close as if they were beneath a magnifying glass. But he
had killed a man up close; had seen the light of life fade from his
eyes. As he progressed, his qualifications with the M-14, M-16, and
Remington 700 bolt action became second to none.

Numerous global engagements called for
his very special talents. Snipers were in high demand and short
supply when he arrived in Beirut in 1980, during some of the
heaviest fighting of the war. The war between Iran and Iraq was
heating up and the United States was hedging its bets and
positioning units in strategic areas of central command. The
abortive attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages was heavy on the
mind of the new administration and they were looking to head off
possible pitfalls opening up all over the world.

In 1985, Hall was shipped to Nicaragua
to assist the Contras in dealing with the troublesome Omar
Torrejos. SecureCom operatives did the nasty, illegal work which
the regular army had to avoid. Hall’s bolt action rifle was like a
magic talisman, allowing him free fire without authorization within
defense perimeters, special bennies, and almost unlimited
mobility.

With inborn patience and cunning, never
falling for the booby traps that killed many guerrillas, Hall had
sniffed out the enemy on his first hunter kill operation. On his
order to fire, the Contras had fled, coming together well out of
the line of fire.

They grinned sheepishly and
apologetically at Hall.

“
Day too nice for bullets,” they had
said in their bumbling English. “We fight tomorrow.”

It happened only once. Word soon spread
through the ranks that the kill sheets Hall piled up were often
padded with Contras who refused to fight. It was only a very short
time before they were more afraid of Hall than the Sandinistas and
the Cubans.