by Al Ewing
He couldn't think of a damned thing.
He should have figured he was in trouble when he'd seen Fuel-Air, that stupid, doomed little bastard, always talking even though he was dead. Goddamn Fuel-Air...
Cade narrowed his eyes, then he turned his head and asked the question.
"Why not Duke?"
What the fuck you on about now, dog?
Fuel-Air was standing in his utility dress, the rain dripping off his helmet. He still had that goddamn grin on his face, like a damned skeleton. Cade shook his head, trying to get the rainwater out of his eyes.
"Duke's dead. Why you?"
Fuckin' Duke? What the fuck is this, election day? You wanna pick the guy who you like having a fuckin' beer with or the guy who gets you out of the fuckin' shit when it hits? Duke was fuckin' army, dog, what the hell do those fuckers know when the shit goes down? I'm the dude who drives the fuckin' humvee and gets you through the shitstorm. You know how many times I saved your ass, bitch?
Cade frowned. If he was going to go crazy, he figured he had a right to pick. He wasn't going to start arguing with a dead man, though. Wasn't any profit in it. His head sank back on the tarmac and he relaxed.
Shit, dog, what the fuck do you want? Some fuckin' Patrick Swayze Ghost I-ain't-gonna-quit-you best buddy motherfucker treatin' you to a fuckin' beer and a game of cards while you rot your ass off in the fuckin' street? Fuck, I kept your ass alive in the fuckin' desert, bitch, I'm keeping it alive here... you got tough when you needed to get tough, and now you're nice and fuckin' flexible and Semper Gumby and shit, letting all this bullshit slide off your ass while you wait it out. You been doing everything fuckin' right in this fuckin' ass-ugly situation you made for yourself. You know why, dog? You want to take a guess?
Cade didn't speak.
'Cause you hate me. He laughed. Shit, dog, ain't you worked that out yet?
Cade nodded. The little prick had a point. Maybe he'd have given up in front of Duke. But damn if he was going to screw up in front of goddamn Fuel-Air.
Cade spat, and Fuel-Air's ghost grin widened a notch or two.
Attaboy. Figure you last the night, we're almost done. Just stay cool like Ferris Bueller and shit, don't let it get to you. Almost done, dog. I guaren-fuckin'-tee it. Just stay loose.
"Semper Gumby." Cade muttered the words, and closed his eyes, letting the torrents of water trickle off him and onto the road. Things could be a hell of a lot worse. There could be a dip in the tarmac right about where he was nailed to the road - that'd drown him. Hell, they could've cut his balls off. A man could still be a good killer without any balls. They could've stuck his dick in his mouth like they did with the fat guy on the road in.
If that was them. And not some other bunch of crazy bastards Cade hadn't met yet.
Things could always get a hell of a lot worse, Cade figured.
The rain kept on lashing him, pooling in the wounds in his palms, washing the dried blood off his hands and chest and off the road and carrying it into the gutters. Cade turned his face to the side, so it wouldn't drown him.
Then, finally, he slept.
In his dream, the Duchess was sitting in front of him, naked as the day she was born, her breasts falling their full distance without the support of her bra, the blue veins on her thighs visible as her legs spread. She grinned, in that way she had, laying down cards on an old card-table - tarot cards, and every one was Death.
"You got to be ready, Cade. Things are going to get worse and you're going to feel them getting worse right in your soul, but you can't go making mistakes. You just bought something, and you'd better use it, that's all. And watch out for Fuel-Air."
She held up five Death cards, and smiled, starting to sing softly, the way she did sometimes in the mornings.
"Gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em..."
"You should've showed up earlier." Cade said. He was wearing his uniform, behind the wheel of a humvee he didn't know how to drive. He needed some coffee. Maybe the Duchess had some of those instant granules - he could eat those raw. "You got coffee?"
The Captain barked back at him, face red as a damn beetroot. "Wake the hell up! Danger close is coward talk! Wake the fuck up, pissant! Just wake the fuck up!"
Cade woke up.
The rain had stopped, and the sun had come out and dried him off while he slept. It was high noon. His palms throbbed, a regular, hot drumbeat of pain. It didn't feel so bad, Cade reckoned.
In fact, Cade felt pretty good.
He turned his head, and saw someone standing next to him, wearing black.
"Fuel-Air?"
It wasn't Fuel-Air.
It was the Pastor.
Chapter Ten
The General
"Easy now, children... easy now. The Lord's touch is gentle, yes it is..."
The Pastor crooned softly, keeping his eyes on the spike as it slowly worked free. The man holding the long-handled pliers gave careful little tugs, trying to do as little damage as possible, but the blood had started flowing again despite that. Cade's right hand was already free, and he held it up in front of his face, slowly opening and closing the fist. Every time he did it, his hand seemed to catch fire and burn, the pain igniting his nerves like electricity. He was a little amazed he could move his fingers at all, after what the Pastor had done. The man must have the mind of a surgeon.
Or maybe he'd practiced a hell of a lot.
Anyway, Cade figured he'd feel pain any time he held anything for a long time. Maybe for good.
Cade would probably come to resent that later. Right now, he didn't mind it so much. Not now the spikes were coming out.
The spike in his left hand pulled free with a little rush of blood, and Cade raised that one too, the blood trickling down his forearm as he tested it. This one was a little harder to close - he was going to have to watch himself if he used that hand to work with, and hitting with it was going to be murder. He was going to have to test that out soon.
No time like the present.
Cade stood, his feet unsteady for a second from the long hours on his back. The Pastor watched him, careful as a hawk. Then Cade wheeled and punched the man with the pliers in the forehead, hard enough to send him crashing onto the tarmac, out cold.
The Pastor didn't blink, but Cade did. His mouth twitched. His hand was in agony, glowing like a hot coal. He growled slightly when he spoke. "Wanted to check."
"Oh, I understand, my brother. A soldier in the service of the Lord must test himself." He chuckled, and it still made Cade uneasy, even after all that he'd done already. Shattered glass tumbling from a polished skull. "We should get your wounds seen to, lest the Devil enter and infect the flesh. The sin is driven from your heart, but your body may still succumb to the evils of Satan..." He smiled, and turned, shuffling up Fillmore Street towards North Point. Cade followed, leaving the man with the pliers where he lay.
Cade didn't bother asking the Pastor why he'd had the sudden change of heart. He figured a man who liked the sound of his own voice that much would let him know the reasons soon enough, and in the meantime he'd stick with Fuel-Air's theory - that the Pastor was testing him to see if he'd break, either nailed to the road or after. Testing him to see if he was going to try and kill the Pastor right now. Cade could tell when a gun was on him, and he figured there was a fella at a window somewhere who had orders to make damn sure that if Cade raised a hand to the Pastor it'd be the last thing he ever did.
Cade wasn't in the mood to raise a hand to anything except maybe a sandwich and fries. After close on three days laying on tarmac with just rainwater for drinking, he'd noticed how hungry he was. Unless he got some food in him pretty soon, he wasn't going to be much use to anybody, never mind the Pastor.
The Pastor turned his head and smiled that weird smile of his. He seemed to know what Cade was thinking.
"We have food and drink, and a place to rest in my sanctuary. My place of peace in the midst of war, where my flock gather to come together
in the glory of the Lord. You have seen my purgatory, my brother, now shalt thou know my paradise, oh yes you will. Now shall you understand the joy of service to the Lord..." He chuckled his bone-rattle laugh as they turned to move west up North Point Street, heading towards some kind of big supermarket. Cade figured that was where they were headed. It made sense. Lots of room, lots of food - hell, if they'd rigged up a generator to the PA system he could even give sermons. Seemed like a pretty sweet setup.
He flexed his fingers a little, frowning slightly at the firestorm of agony that ricocheted up his arms. There was still a steady throb of pain in both hands and Cade knew it wasn't going away. Maybe not ever. It wasn't going to stop him doing anything he needed to do, but it was an additional distraction he didn't need.
The Pastor glanced at him. "You have a choice ahead of you, brother. Many are tested, yes, but few are chosen to serve in the glory of the Lord. Now your sins have been wiped from your soul and you are again clean, born anew. Tell me, are you still willing to serve the Lord in all of his splendour?" His voice was soft, but there was a keen edge to the question.
Cade shrugged. "Might as well." He shot a glance at Fuel-Air, who was leaning in a doorway with a jar of Ripped Fuel, grinning that smart-ass son-of-a-bitch grin.
Told you so, dog.
Goddamn Fuel-Air. It was a little unsettling to see him again. He remembered the Duchess telling him to watch out.
Well, he hadn't done any harm so far. Might have kept him alive, in fact.
Fuel-Air grinned.
"Got my knife?" Cade looked over at the Pastor, not blinking. He was pretty fond of that knife, and he'd sharpened it and got the balance the way he liked it, and it'd be a hell of a shame to start from scratch. If he had to start from scratch, he'd have to seriously consider snapping the Pastor's neck and using his body as a shield against sniper fire.
He might need to do that anyhow. He hadn't decided yet.
"We have your knife, and we have your chain - the big one with the weights, I mean. We've got all the tools you'll need to be a warrior in the service of the Lord your God, and that's what you'll be, make no mistake." He smiled, turning his eyes up. "The Lord your God has a mission for you, my brother, a mission of great import, oh yes, a mission vital to the work of God on Earth..." The Pastor was starting to breathe faster, his hands waving and clutching the air as he warmed to his theme, still shuffling with his broken snake-walk. "Will you follow his path, oh my brother? Will you bring your sharp sword to bear on the unbelievers, the tools of Satan, the followers of the Hor-ned Goat?" The words were spat, his eyes rolling in his head in a fever.
Cade shrugged.
"Sure."
The Pastor led Cade up Buchanan Street, around to the front of the place. "There are powers in this city, oh faithful servant, yes there are... powers ranged against the glory of the Lord, powers arrayed to destroy his works, to commit acts of murder, to foment crimes of perverse lust!" He walked faster as his hands shook and danced, weaving between the abandoned cars still sitting in the parking lot.
Cade figured that line about murder and perverse lust sounded a little like the pot calling the kettle black, but there wasn't much mileage in saying so - leastways, not until he'd got his knife back. "The hippies?"
"Lust and murder! Satanism and destruction! You saw their handiwork yourself - do you think your community will be safe if their filth is left unchecked?" He hissed it, looking at Cade with that odd ferocity of his as they passed through the doors. Cade frowned. The man had a point. If the hippies - whoever the hippies were, wherever they'd set up - were the ones doing the burning, Cade needed to deal with them.
If they were. Cade wasn't in the habit of trusting people who nailed him to the middle of the street.
The supermarket had been gutted and rebuilt - most of the shelves had been dismantled and taken out, their place taken by a sea of mattresses, most crusted with piss and filth, and the occasional tent-like structure. Dozens of people - men, women, some of the children Cade had seen earlier - were sitting on the mattresses, some singing softly, some reading from Bibles. A couple were eating from tins, taken from the still-standing shelves on the far side of the supermarket. These shelves were stocked entirely with cans and a small quantity of canned drinks, as well as a vast reserve of bottled water - Cade figured any food with an early sell-by date had been eaten long ago. The shelves were guarded by the big men with the aluminium bats from before.
It was a crude setup. Cade could've put something better together in two days, and working alone at that. Most of the men and all of the women looked thin and pale - the kids looked malnourished, with that greyish skin Cade had seen a lot of. The food was probably rationed, maybe one can per meal if they were lucky. Cade looked around, and saw a set of double doors, locked up tight with strong chain and a padlock. That would be where the supermarket storage area was. Cade figured there'd be more food back there.
Unless they were using it to keep something else.
A picture was starting to develop. The hippies, the Satanists, the defilers - if they had control of the Haight-Ashbury, they'd be near Buena Vista Park, Golden Gate Park, the golf course, Corona Heights - all kinds of decent farming land. Cade had slung the word 'hippies' around pretty casually along with everybody else, before the bad times and after, but he knew it could mean a hell of a lot of things; some teenager with long hair, some fella with liberal views, hell, pretty much anybody in San Francisco as was, if you were standing outside it. But now Cade was thinking about communes, collectives, organised groups of people living off the land, growing crops like the Diggers in the sixties. Hell, if they had a working generator or two, they had hydroponics on their side too. As far as food was concerned, they'd be sitting pretty.
Meanwhile, the Pastor's people - who'd maybe been used to having things done for them, used to putting their faith in a higher power and slobbing out in front of a TV set or a pulpit while other people got their snack packs ready for 'em - didn't have a clue where to start when it came to farming and weren't in a position to do much about it except pray and keep on praying, because their crazy Pastor had seen to it that they only had one book to read. And now food was running short - what they needed was someone to grow food for them, someone who already had the knowledge. Maybe a slave class, maybe just some warm bodies to turn cold so all their food stocks could be stolen and taken away.
Cade liked this theory. It fit pretty well, and it meant that the fella who'd killed a hundred-odd people for his Old Testament God and then nailed him to a road for three days on top of that was the bad guy in the equation. Cade'd know exactly where he stood, and that'd be pretty damn good to know. Trouble was, there was a big piece missing that Cade couldn't get to fit.
Somebody'd burnt down Sausalito, and Cade was pretty sure it wasn't the Pastor's people. He didn't trust the Pastor, and the Pastor might have been lying - hell, he probably was lying about a hundred things - but these people liked their territory a little too clean and tidy for them to be burning everything outside of it. Still, even that could be worked in. There was just one thing that couldn't be.
Helter Skelter.
That wasn't a Jesus thing. The Pastor hadn't done that.
That was someone else.
Wasn't any way around it, Cade figured. He was going to need to investigate anyhow. Might as well do it for the Pastor as anyone else.
Still, he figured he should set a couple of things straight first of all.
"You run this?" He gestured around him.
The Pastor looked at him, one eye narrowed. He drew himself up to his full height and launched into a speech: "It is my calling to lead the chosen people of the Lord to their salvation, and to bring fire and fury upon the -"
Cade cut him off. "Reckon you need a war chief. Like a General. You need them hippies dealt with - kept an eye on at least. That's my job. You run things here." By Cade's standards, it was a hell of a speech. A regular sermon.
The Pastor scowled,
which seemed to crack his face up as much as smiling did. "I have a mission for you, my friend. A chance, a very special chance, to be a warrior in the glory of the Lord. To do his will upon this earth. To be his sword in the war on the forces of Hell. Now the fool, in his vanity and pride, might want more, but to him I say -"
Cade sighed. "War needs planning. Scouting. Intelligence. Won't get it done otherwise." Cade was getting pretty damn tired of explaining every little thing. He shrugged. "Not like you've anyone else worth a damn."
The Pastor raised one eyebrow, then looked past Cade, over his left shoulder.
Cade turned.
The man standing behind him was blonde, tan and about a head taller than he was - a muscle beach type. The fella's muscles had muscles on them. Cade figured this guy didn't have to worry himself overmuch about food rationing - he was obviously getting a hell of a lot more than his share. There was a smacking noise as the big man slapped a steel knuckleduster into his palm in a slow, golf-clap rhythm. Cade reached into his pockets for his own.
He didn't bother looking at the Pastor. "Another test?"
The Pastor smiled. "Meet Jurgen, brother. You could call him my General."
Jurgen grinned, speaking slowly, in a thick Austrian accent. "Der Leader already hass an advisor to help him with makink decisions. I am in charge of planning der long war against der Godless - he hass no need of a girlie-man like you."
Cade nodded, looking up. The man had to be a good seven feet tall, and he was a walking advertisement for steroid abuse. Great thick veins like cables stood out on the man's biceps. Cade didn't say a word.
Jurgen smirked through gapped teeth. "I am talkink to you, girlie-man. I haff business vith der Pastor. If you want to be useful, you can try cleanink der toilet. There iss a lot of sshit in it." He smirked a little wider, jabbing a finger into Cade's chest. "I think you would be good at pickink up sshit, girlie -"