“I swear…!”
“I can fix the door,” interrupted a voice.
Emmy turned—everyone turned—to look at Eddie.
Esther’s handyman, or what ever he was, stood straight and stared Jake in the eye. He was trembling, yes, but there was something solid underneath the terror that kept his voice astoundingly steady.
“When we put in the stained glass, I took the old one out back. It’s still good. The hinges fit.”
“I bet they do,” Jake fired back. “And I like how you fucking change the subject. You been back in the deep end, where you don’t belong?”
“Just leave her alone, and I’ll take care of it.”
Jake laughed. “‘Just leave her alone.’ You all know that he’s bangin’ her, right? Just so nobody thinks they’ve got the moral high ground, here…”
“Jake, please!” Esther moaned.
“Shut up. God, you stink.” Jake sneered at Esther, poked a thumb toward Evangeline. “You’re as much of a whore as she is. At least she gets paid. You have to pay me to fuck you anymore.”
Then he turned at last to Emmy, and she felt herself not just shrink, but diminish beneath his nightmare gaze.
“As for you…” he said, “well, you’re gettin’ there. I like that you come when you’re called. But you’ve still got a lot to learn. You’ve all got a lot to learn to night.”
When the thunder boomed outside, it was as if God agreed entirely. Jake noted it, too, and it made him smile.
The world as they knew it was over and done.
And final Judgment was at hand.
Part IV
Gospel Of The Resurrection, From The Book Of Gray (45 Minutes Ago)
Chapter Sixteen
If he lived to be a hundred, Gray would never forget a moment of it. He’d been hit with a Bible more times than he’d opened and read one; but he knew the story of Saul, who was struck from his horse by a vision that transformed him into the apostle Paul, on the road to Damascus.
Gray had seen the same thing happen to epileptic feebs and schizophrenics. And he wasn’t a born-again Jesus freak. In fact, he wasn’t transformed at all, so much as he was confirmed.
What happened at the chapel did not reassure Gray that there was a God. Such a revelation would have truly fucked up his day. After today, he knew that whatever absolute power looked down from heaven was not down with the hypocrite Bible-thumpers or the kiddie-rapers or the ragheads, but on their side…
Gray was free to be the same as he ever was.
But the world, itself, was brand-new.
A miracle, but how different it all looked, only a few hours ago.
He’d gone back home after burying Frankie in Death Valley, and drank Everclear until he tried to stab some bitch on his TV. Even so, he could not sleep until he’d paid his final respects.
Sitting in a pew in the back of the chapel throughout that murderous service—while the mealymouthed Unitarian minister babbled at the lectern—Gray had put aside his plans for the future and his regrets for the past, and just let himself simmer. If he was any less strung out and hungover, he might have broken down and cried.
He moved only to duck outside for a smoke, and to discreetly heave bile into the hymnal holder in the back of the pew before him. Gratified to discover he was not the first.
The rage oozed out of him like toxic waste, without depleting the bottomless reserves of it stored up in his soul. The hardwood pew should blacken and smolder under him. The spent human trash in the rows before him should clutch at their throats and choke to death on the fumes coming off him.
But Jake’s wasted TV flock just kept sobbing and nipping from their flasks, wallowing in their shallow, secondhand sadness like junkies drowning in two inches of bathwater.
How he longed to teach them what real grief felt like. He was not about to debase himself by wishing or praying for anything, but he would gladly stuff the world into that fucking box, to have his friend out of it.
He had met Jake Connaway ten years ago in L.A., right before they both got kicked out. Gray was delivering coke for some people who were probably still looking for him, and Jake was fronting a shitty metal band and living in some has-been soap opera star’s guest house, until she caught on he was fucking her daughter on the side, not to mention half the sluts on the Strip.
Gray had reached the end of his rope, and was danger-close to exploding. L.A. was a sea of people; somebody witnessed every goddamned move you made. Drugs and alcohol never quite did for him what ever they did for other people, and sex was just how nature tricked idiots into making more idiots.
His only real pleasure was in observing the pleasures of others, and the depths of degradation he could lead them to in pursuit of said pleasures.
But if Gray was an explorer of shame, Jake was an artist.
As hopeless as Jake’s band was—and they made David Koresh’s band look like Van Halen—it was a license to hunt poon, and Jake seemed to be the happiest man in Hollywood. They paid for his coke. They went down on his friends and “business associates” for the price of a smile. They ripped each other’s hair out in hilarious catfights, but never came after Jake.
Gray could make a dumb slut suck him off for a gram of blow, then watch the fun as she snorted pure scouring powder; but Jake could make them believe in him so strongly that they’d tell him it was the best blow they’d ever had, and keep coming back for more.
With Jake around, the fun never stopped.
Jake and Gray burned through their L.A. connections about the same time that Jake realized his supernatural charisma could serve a higher calling. The church was a perfect front for all kinds of fun and games, but it never grew into the massive sucker-fleecing operation it could have been. As always, Jake rarely saw past his own dick, but he almost seemed to be buying his own line of bullshit lately. He talked a lot about death and resurrection in the small hours, when there were no suckers around. He asked questions nobody could answer.
Gray guessed he had all his answers now.
Eventually, the po-faced cow who ran Jake’s church took up the mic and bleated for the congregation to cough up some coin to keep the church alive.
Check, please, Gray thought, biting back acid. Amen to all this horse shit.
The faithful stirred and meekly cleared the chapel, cried-out and eager for the next spiritual fix, or at least happy hour at the nearest honky-tonk. The church-chick had a good bodice-ripping cry on the coffin before some sunken-chested waif in a cheap suit led her away.
When the minister and a pair of deacons hovered in the wings to take the coffin away, Gray pulled himself out of the pew and shuffled up the aisle, feeling like he was about to stop a wedding. His empty stomach convulsed.
Someone laughed in the back of the chapel. An old man in grass-stained overalls swept the bottles and cans out of the pews.
It didn’t hit home, of course, until he looked inside the box. Gray had seen plenty of dead people, and felt the whole range of emotions such sights could inspire. But Jake in the box looked like he’d never been alive at all. This was a puppet, with a face as cold and shiny as Lincoln’s face on a penny, and just as likely to breathe or blink.
It looked like they stuffed cotton under his skin; the angles were all subtly wrong, teasing Gray with the possibility that this wasn’t Jake Connaway at all, but a bad imposter.
But there was no refuge in lies. He’d known it was Jake, and how he’d met his end, as soon as he heard the news. It was as traditional a fate for small-time ministers as rock stars choking on puke: to be found with their pants around their knees, and a cuckold’s knife in their back. How many times did I tell him not to go out alone? Gray needled himself. How many fucking times did I warn him?
An arrangement of roses festooned the top of the coffin, and wreaths and bouquets crowded close around the coffin. Someone must’ve thought it looked pretty, but it was only further testimony to Jake’s passage. He had nasty pollen allergies, and hated flowers a
lmost as much as Gray did. The flowers were like a mirror held to his unbreathing lips, to prove that he was never getting up.
Gray looked down at Jake’s hands folded neatly across his chest, noting with grim amusement how many pairs of panties were stuffed into them, like a rank bouquet of wilted lilies.
The three men milling around at the edge of the dais inched closer with the trolley on which they planned to carry Jake to the fire. Gray lit a cigarette and blew a fuck-off cloud of smoke in their direction. They didn’t take the hint and leave, but got deeply involved in studying each other’s cheap patent-leather wingtips.
Gray took out a pair of Polaroids and slid them into Jake’s breast pocket. His mouth was sour and dry, his voice a croak, when he leaned over and whispered, “They paid all they had…but it wasn’t enough, was it?”
The coffin lining was quilted, silky mother-of-pearl, like the plush lining of a fruity Europe an pistol case. They would probably dump him into a cheap plywood box before they slid him into the crematorium.
It’s what he wanted, true enough. Jake didn’t want to be cut up, and he hated being locked in the dark.
In another minute, Gray was going to start crying like a slit throat. He felt dizzy. He clung to the coffin, willing the grief to go down the memory hole, or to change into something else.
This was all wrong.
This didn’t happen to people like Jake. They didn’t slip in the shower, or choke on fish bones, or get stabbed in the back by strangers. The world was made for men like Jake to fleece, fuck, and forget; and when the end came, it would be something glorious, not a cheap death in a slut’s bed.
Wrong, all of it. Far too much wrong for just Frankie and Sugar to soak up. A world without Jake in it was just wrong, all the way around—
“Pardon us, sir,” the minister mumbled, a sorry smile and runny cunts for eyes, “but we must move on…”
Gray raised his fist and almost knocked the cock-sucker’s teeth out his ass, but he pounded on the coffin instead. The heavy, hollow slave-drum sound reverberated through the chapel.
A burly, booze-breathed deacon reached out to take Gray’s arm. “Hey, buddy, take a couple days off…”
Gray turned to look at them. His jacket sagged open. The mouthy shitbird saw inside it and went white. “Hey, we don’t want any trouble—”
Gray said, “But I do.”
What should have happened next would probably not have amounted to much. Gray was certainly distraught, but never stupid.
What Gray aimed to do was walk away, down the aisle and out to his car—already packed—and get on the blue road to Vegas, where he would go on a bender until he felt ready to face facts and start over.
The deacons would have fed Jake to the flames, blasted the display coffin with Lysol, and gone home to their loved ones and to night’s NFL game. And that would have been that.
Nothing was going to happen…but God, or the Devil or Darwin, or the blind idiot god of chaos at the center of the whole, meaningless mess, looked down on that chapel, and made a miracle.
They all jumped back when the lower panel of the coffin lid flipped wide open, cracking the drunken deacon in the forehead like a fatally good idea. Roses and G-strings flew. Jake’s legs kicked spastically out at the backpedaling deacons.
Gray was just as startled as the other douche bags when Jake’s legs went crazy, but he chalked it up to rigor mortis, gas shifting in the corpse, an electrical short…
Anything but what happened next.
Chapter Seventeen
Jake Connaway wept.
Burning all over, buried in darkness, somehow he still had some vague notion of where he must be when he heard voices over the thudding of his feet. Far off and muffled, but he recognized one of them.
He opened his eyes, but saw nothing. He tried to speak, but his lips were stitched shut. Dry as a spinster’s snatch, his tongue probed the foreign object transfixing his mouth.
Nylon thread lanced his lower lips at either corner, and fastened them to a hook through his upper lip, where the tender flesh met the gums of his teeth.
His eyes burned like onions in his face, like something was in them. He rubbed them with his fists and pried out the tiny studded rubber cups jammed under his eyelids. Watery light flooded in, but he could only make out blurry, shaggy shapes stumbling back from his bed—no, his box.
All at once, it dawned on Jake that this was not a hospital.
Flexing his jaws, he tore stray threads out of his lips, but his first words came out as a muffled growl. His fingers found wads of cotton packed into his mouth. Pulling it out was like unclogging a blocked toilet. It just kept coming and coming, but finally, the tail end of it, stained with yellow and maroon drainage, slithered out of him.
Jake sat up in the coffin and howled a blood-curdling shriek that went on and on like an air raid siren, then broke up into gales of rusty laughter.
He threw his arms up like a champion boxer, or a stage magician bathing in applause for the most amazing motherfucker of a trick ever performed. “TA-DAA!”
“Sweet Jesus on the cross!” cried the minister.
The deacons backed off the dais as if it were electrified. The drunk one tripped and fell into the first row of pews, stunned by the blow from the coffin lid. The minister sank to his knees at the foot of the coffin, overcome by this proof of God’s grace at the worst possible time. The old janitor dropped the broom and turned to run.
“Fuck yeah!” Gray whooped, but buttoned up in a split second, hand on his shoulder rig. “Nobody move!”
Nobody listens at times like this. For his part, Gray was glad they didn’t. A big, rancid grin split his face.
The gun leapt up level with his eye and barked twice. The janitor jogged up the aisle like his hip joints were full of gravel. The bullets took him in the neck and the base of his curved, question-mark spine. He belly flopped in the aisle like trying to ride a Slip ’N Slide, and lay still.
The drunken deacon seemed unable to figure out how to get up and run, but he slid down the long pew with his arms up to catch any bullets aimed at his face or heart. His grubby palm stopped the first shot, but it punched through and smashed out his teeth.
Gray shot him twice more, in the right eye and the throat, whipping his ruined head back over the splintered pew and slinging gray matter into the cheap seats.
The other deacon flipped the coffin trolley at Gray and ran squealing for the outside aisle, bent low at the waist.
“STOP, MOTHERFUCKER!” Gray didn’t expect the idiot to stop, but he did expect him to panic, and the idiot didn’t disappoint.
The screeching deacon reached the back door, but pushed on it, despite the big brass handle and the sparkly decal above it that said pull. When he did pull the door, he hit his own foot and kicked the door shut, so he was still very much in play when Gray came down the center aisle and put one through the side of his neck from thirty yards. Arterial blood splashed up the chapel wall as the deacon sank to the floor.
A sharp, dry little laugh erupted out of Gray’s pounding chest like driftwood cracking. He slapped himself, but found he couldn’t stop. He had the giggles, and bad.
He turned back to the dais, but found the minister gone. Checking the slide on his automatic, he stalked up the outside aisle, until he stood over the crawling creep.
“You talked a lot of shit about the afterlife, fat boy.”
At his feet, the minister blubbered prayers into the pool of tears and snot on the well-waxed marble floor.
“You don’t really believe all that shit, do you?”
Maybe his head shook like it was going to screw right off. Maybe he was just having a heart attack. God let people off that easy, but not Gray.
“You want to know what I think?” Gray knelt and stroked the minister’s hair with the barrel of his gun. “I think this is hell.”
The minister jumped at the kiss of red-hot metal on his flabby neck, but offered no rebuttal.
“So you
’ve gotta wonder…where are you going now?”
A hand fell on Gray’s shoulder, heavy enough to trap his arm. Gray whirled and threw a wild punch, but Jake stopped it cold.
Smiling down at his friend, his red-rimmed eyes and mouth weeping amber fluid, Jake spat out a wad of cotton and croaked, “Bring him here, would’ja? Alive, if possible.”
Gray took a step back as, once more, reality cock-punched him and stood back to watch the fun. This body, this thing he’d wished to see walk more than anything…it walked, it talked, but was it really…
“Jake…?”
Jake’s huge, slightly greenish hand slapped Gray on the back and gave his arm a playful squeeze that would leave a bruise on the bone. “Good to see you, too, man. Now get that prick for me.”
Grinning, Gray caught the bawling minister by his sweaty collar and dragged him back to curl up on the toes of Jake’s size-thirteen patent-leather wingtips.
Jake hung his head and let the spirit come into him, as he did whenever he was about to launch into a sermon.
“You really did spout off an awful lot about heaven and hell, back there,” Jake husked. Short of breath, as if he’d lost the trick of breathing, and had to remember to draw in air to speak.
Working out a post–rigor mortis kink in his neck, Jake bowed down over the quivering minister. Smiling.
“I forgive you for that, but I’m here to school you. I could tell you what I saw on the other side, but you don’t have to take it on faith anymore.”
Jake lifted the minister up by his lapels until his toes barely scraped the floor.
“I came back to show you.”
He set the minister on his feet and placed both hands on top of his bald head, as if to confer a blessing. The minister seemed to hang from Jake’s hands, animated by them alone as they stroked the slack contours of his face and came to rest at the corners of his half-open mouth.
The minister gave no resistance as Jake slid his thumbs into it, but he tried to pray. “J-J-J-Jesus…”
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