Patience, My Dear

by Bower Lewis

  Her pocket chimed and Zane grabbed the phone. He tossed it to her and picked up a three-legged plaster of Paris badger from a shelf in the corner. Then he dove at John and smashed it over the soldier’s head.

  “I guess I might have thought of that myself,” he said to the window as the giant toppled to their feet. “Thank You.”

  Patience just glared down at the screen. “Where the hell have You been?”

  WE WILL TALK LATR

  THER IS WRK 2 DO NOW

  “Do You have any idea what’s been going on around here? Christ, Biz! We’re making this up as we go along, and You’re the one who started it. How could You just disappear on us like that?”

  I SED LATR!

  She held the phone up to show Zane, but he just shook his head and knelt down to check her uncle’s pulse. He slid a couple of painter’s smocks beneath John’s head and retrieved their guns from his coat pocket.

  “You and The Biz are going to have to sort this out yourselves, Patience. Argue about it on the road.”

  “You’re flaking out on me now too?”

  “No, but I’m finally learning not to engage.” He pointed down at John. “Any thoughts on what we should do about this situation?”

  She shook her head at her beloved uncle, the Lord’s assassin. “There’s no room to bring him with us, obviously, but we can’t just leave him here, where some unarmed person could stumble upon him. I guess we’ll need to find a better place to hide him.”

  Zane scratched his head and the phone chimed in her hand.

  SHPPNG/RECVNG LOOKD PRTTY CLUTTRD

  Patience turned her face from the message. “So, You’re speaking to me now?”

  NO IM JST SAYNG

  • • •

  Forsyth’s bus was still idling exhaust beside Rockwell’s Porsche as they stepped back into the crisp fall air. Zane pulled the receiver from his track pants and switched it on.

  “Let’s hope Joey’s still got his necklace nearby.”

  Forsyth did, in fact, still have his necklace nearby. From the sound of it, it seemed he might actually still be wearing it, so they had no trouble hearing Rockwell berate him for what he’d considered a less than inspired performance of Boi II Boi’s highest charting single. They also had no trouble hearing Forsyth complain about his stomach or Rockwell’s wave of curtly dismissive vitriol, followed by his instruction to the senator that he get himself together by the time they reached Milton. Then the bus door opened with a bang and Rockwell stormed off to pick up some Maalox for his bellyaching candidate.

  The doors snapped shut and Forsyth told the driver to take off. The brakes squealed and the sound became distorted as they pulled toward the playground exit. Forsyth turned his attention to one of his aides as his voice started breaking up.

  “Go get me those pancakes off the bar,” was the last thing they heard him say. “And don’t be stingy with the syrup.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Zane was trying his damnedest not to engage in the argument beside him. Patience had the phone close to her face, glaring as though she could set it afire by heat of her eyes alone. He glanced over once and returned his attention immediately to the road. He didn’t look entirely convinced that she couldn’t.

  “It was bad enough having Forsyth and Rockwell and those two SolarTech freaks all together in that gym with those kids. The whole building could have exploded from the sheer malevolence in the air. We’ve been killing ourselves, trying to accomplish what You’ve asked us to do, and You just bailed on us with my crazy uncle on the scene, setting up target practice! What the hell was that?”

  I GAVE U A TIME-OUT

  Her jaw dropped and she looked up at Zane. He shook his head and kept his attention forward. “I told you, Patience, I won’t be involved. I’ve been zapped once already, thanks.”

  “My point exactly!”

  “No.”

  She tossed the phone onto the dash and glowered out the window. “He’s got all the time in the world for emoticons and ridiculous jokes, so long as everything’s under control. But, the second things start to get a little hectic, we’re on our own. The Big Guy is out of here.”

  SIGH

  “He just texted me a sigh!”

  Zane sighed himself and the phone chimed again.

  WEN U SEE 2 SETS OF FOOTPRNTS IN THE SAND U NO I WALK B-SIDE U

  WEN U SEE 1 SET OF FOOTPRNTS IN THE SAND THT IS WEN I CARRY U!

  She took it back from the dash and stared down a moment, her eyes filling with tears born of indescribable emotion. Then she blinked them away and glared up at the sky. “That isn’t even Yours! That poem was on the walls of half the houses I babysat for as a kid. Jesus, Biz, if You’re going to steal Your material, why can’t You at least steal it from the Bible like everybody else? You’re not even trying!”

  ITS A NICE POEM

  “I can pick it up at the car wash, stamped on an air freshener!”

  GOLDN RULES NOT MINE EITHR BUT I LIKE THT ONE 2

  SUE ME

  “Do You think I can’t find a lawyer arrogant enough to try?”

  R U DONE???

  Zane took the phone from her hand and tossed it back into the console. “I’m about to give you both a time-out. My basic theology’s been through enough for one day, thank you. Patience, what are you doing? All you ever do is bicker with Him, and He just bickers back. The two of you are seriously starting to screw with my head.”

  “Well, your head should be safe from now on, Zane, because I’m done. As far as I’m concerned, I have no need to speak to Him at all.”

  “You’ve said so about a thousand times, but when I ask you why, I get twenty minutes on the atrocities of text speak or railing about His invasion into your personal space. I’m going to ask you a serious question now, and I’d appreciate an honest and thoughtful answer for once. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  She stared down at the orange paint trapped in the corners of her fingernails. Then she answered him before she’d even decided what she’d say. “I just feel more comfortable fighting with Him than I do talking to Him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t understand Him. I don’t understood who He is, or if He’s real, or what role He’s supposed to play in my life. Those things have never been clear to me the way they seem to be for some people. His presence here confuses me, and things that confuse me make me angry. When something makes me angry, I fight it until I win, and then I feel better.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “You know something? I think I can actually sort of understand that.”

  “Well, that makes one of us.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It was not for the faint of heart. They hid in the shadows behind a display case at the back of the town hall and watched through their hands as the good people of Milton, Massachusetts jumped back in dismay and the good members of the local press rushed forward. Forsyth was doubled over at the front of the hall, white-faced and quaking, as he vomited his breakfast onto the floor with astonishing velocity. The expulsion was so violent, and so protracted, it was nearly two full minutes before Rockwell could get anywhere near him, during which time he’d been caught by the cameras crying that he didn’t want to kill the world, and then he soiled himself.

  “Wow.”

  Patience studied Rockwell’s face, transfixed by the daggers of disgust in his eyes as he stared down at his ailing candidate. He looked up again to the SolarTech executives across the room, and then he turned to two of Forsyth’s aides and directed them to lift the sobbing, heaving senator from the floor and carry him back to the bus.

  “That was effective.”

  Zane nodded back.

  “More so than I’d predicted.”

  The cameras kept filming the mess around the podium and the people fleeing the hall, some of whom had been sitting quite close to the senator and bore the stains of their misfortune on their clothing and stricken faces. Zane appeared just a little bit stricken himself, because
he was nice that way, but his unease lessened after a minute or so and then he smiled.

  “The senator is a man of his word, if nothing else. Joey sure did do it, and he did it again and again for us.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Patience opened her apartment door, and then she turned back to warn Zane that they were still out of luck in regard to his morning coffee. He just took her face in his hands and kissed her before any such nonlife-threatening concerns could be addressed. The phone slipped from her fingers and he caught it in mid-air, then kicked the still broken door shut behind them.

  “Wait.”

  He pulled back with a trace of concern in his eyes. It disappeared as she grabbed the edges of his sweatshirt and stripped him of it, then wrapped the phone up inside. She led him to the bedroom and buried the bundle in the darkest recesses of her closet. He shook his head as she turned back.

  “Seriously, Patience, you must understand by now that it’s never been the phone that’s communicating with you.”

  “Of course I do, Zane.” They fell together onto the tangle of sheets as their fingers got to work ridding each other of unwanted clothing. “But nothing in the world would kill this mood like an emoticon-riddled message from The Biz, and I really don’t want this mood to be killed.”

  There was no arguing the validity of her point, and Zane seemed in no mood to argue, anyway. Patience had already forgotten what she was saying by the time his lips touched hers. Zane Grey Ellison made love to her that night with all the drive and heroism of a man who’d just saved the world from destruction, and Patience Abigail Kelleher responded to him in kind.

  • • •

  It wasn’t until the next morning that Patience realized she was in trouble. It had taken most of the night to satisfy the thing that had grown up between them, feeding on their angst and adrenaline until it had swelled into a state of epic overload during their fight against God and the Apocalypse, their futility and fear, and too many goddamn guns all around for either of their tastes. The time finally came, however, when Zane could focus his attention where he wanted it most, and that was on Patience. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry as he whispered the sorts of things a girl charged with saving the world would probably consider to be dangerous distractions, but to a girl just released from duty, they were pretty nice things to hear.

  She pushed the hair back from his eyes and he looked down at her, and that was that. Patience was done for. She didn’t try to pretend that things were any less complicated between them; she simply acknowledged that there was nothing left to be done about it. Zane had uncovered all her secrets in a single night, and curiously, she felt better now that they were known.

  There was a strange lack of heaviness in her chest as the sunlight warmed her skin through the window. A surge of relief rose up so suddenly inside her that it might actually have felt good to burst into tears. The thing she’d dreaded for so long had come and gone, and the world hadn’t come to an end. Neither, for that matter, had she. Patience Kelleher was just beginning.

  Zane smiled back at her and then he slipped from the bed. She watched in self-conscious silence as he crossed over to her paint-chipped bookcase and poked through her books and keepsakes. He grinned down at a photo of her at age eight, sticking her tongue out at a birthday party clown, and then he plucked her fuchsia-furred teddy bear from atop a stack of paperbacks and came back to lay beside her. The bear had retained a remarkable degree of vibrancy for a dye-job achieved via felt-tip marker, and its right leg was attached by a large bolt and nut encased in a swath of pink felt designed to protect the delicate skin of its ardent and obstinate young companion. Zane shook his head and held it up to her.

  “I can’t conceive of a person going to such pains to fix a toy that could simply have been replaced.”

  Patience clutched her heart in horror and took the bear from his hand. “Frank promised me that hip-replacement patients always returned from surgery stronger than they’d been before. I think he may have taken some liberties with my six-year-old gullibility there, but Kool-Aid did seem to be a more resilient bear when all was said and done.”

  Zane raised an eyebrow at her. “Frank did this?”

  She smiled back. “My screams must have been heard for a mile. You’d have thought it was me who’d lost the leg.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Tragic miscalculation with a parachute I’d invented from plastic bags and a bungee cord. I was so sure it would work, because I’d seen it on TV. I was such a mess when poor Kool-Aid went splat. Mom could barely get me into the car. She drove straight to the pub with me screaming the whole way and Frank took it from there. That was a pretty hard day for my mother.”

  “I’d say it was a hard day for Kool-Aid as well.” Zane paused. “This seems an unexpected side of Frank.”

  She laughed. “I think he was mostly just relieved that I’d let Kool-Aid take the first jump. I was a pretty exuberant kid.”

  Zane took the bear back and twirled a bit of pink thread around the bolt. “I’ve never had a man threaten to toss me from his establishment for talking too much,” he said. “Actually, I’ve never had anyone threaten to toss me out of anywhere. That was sort of nice, if you want to know the truth. It meant a lot to me.”

  Patience grinned and settled back. “Frank once bounced the governor and his staff during a campaign meet-and-greet because they were getting on his nerves. As long as you’re respectful and you don’t cause any trouble, he really doesn’t care what your name is, if he even knows it at all.”

  “Not even if your name is The Biz?”

  “Ah,” she conceded. “No, that would be altogether different. Irish Catholic and all that. The Biz would never be tossed from the pub, no matter how insufferable He became, and Frank would make my life a living hell if he ever found out what’s been going on.” She paused and glanced toward the closet door. “Do you think He’ll let me live a normal life, now that this is over?”

  “What’s normal?”

  She shrugged. “I’m probably the last person on Earth qualified to answer that question, except perhaps for you. It might be kind of nice to find out, though.”

  He reached across her to set the bear on the nightstand.

  “What I think, Patience, is that there’s a pretty good chance that He’s up there right now, complaining to anyone who’ll listen about the novice waitress SCUD who got Him to promise not to smite her, and then made Him regret that promise almost every hour of every day thereafter.”

  She suppressed a smile and turned her face to the sheets. “I don’t recall anything from my Sunday School lessons about Moses getting hit by an abundance of OMGs and LOLs, Zane. He was goading me.”

  “Moses appears in the writings of several religions, with mountains of text attributed to him.” Zane nodded. “And I’ve yet to come across a single occurrence of Text Speak in any of them. That said, I’m not sure I’d go up against him when it comes to the assignment of unreasonable tasks. There are those who’d argue that Moses’ entire journey with The Biz was one giant WTF.”

  She pressed a finger to his lips. “Fine.” She sighed. “Moses wins.”

  “I do agree that He’s likely been goading you, however. I keep coming back to what you said about fighting the things that confuse you until you feel better. You’re really not His every day, garden variety adherent, and I suspect that He’s on to you there. He’s probably just been doing what He felt was necessary to keep you in the game.”

  She untangled herself from his arms and sat up. “How pissed off do you think He is?”

  Zane just chuckled. “I think He knew what He was getting into. It’s over, though, Patience. What’s the harm in asking Him that now?”

  “I’ve actually been thinking about checking out some new wireless carriers. There’s got to be a phone out there somewhere that can’t receive text messages.”

  He hit her with the pillow and she lay back.

  “While we’re on the subje
ct of supernatural wrath, how do you think it’s going to pan out when your phenobarb-loving uncle finally catches up with me?”

  Patience sighed and shook her head. “I haven’t seen John in a decade, Zane. The man I knew before he signed on to whack people for the Lord couldn’t have hurt a fly, so it’s obvious that he’s changed a bit. You might want to exercise caution whenever faced with the business end of his rifle for a while.”

  “I think that’s probably sound advice.”

  They were jolted from the bed by a room-shuddering thud that sent them scrambling for their clothes and their guns. They dashed to the living room and dove behind the couch as the door flew back on its hinges.

  “Is it Rockwell?”

  Zane peered around the couch at the enormous pair of boots stalking toward them. “Worse,” he whispered back. “I think we’re about to get the answer to my question.”

  “Damn it!”

  Patience jumped up and pointed her gun at her uncle. Zane stood before her and stretched an arm between them, but she stepped around it with her lip quivering angrily.

  “The landlord just had that door fixed a few hours ago, Uncle John, and it was hell trying to explain what happened the first time! Do you even know how to knock?”

  “Hello, Pax. Glad to see you’re still alive.”

  John gave her a kiss on the top of her head and punched Zane in the jaw with the full force of his might. He fell back into the wall as Patience screamed. For a moment, it seemed he might right himself, but then he listed and stumbled to the floor.

  Patience dropped beside him with a glare up at her uncle.

  “That’s done.” John nodded. “And well deserved, as I’m sure you’ll both agree. Look, kid, I just stopped by to check that you were okay before moving on, and to make sure that Rockwell corpse wasn’t pulling any funny business. Everything seems to be sewn up now, but I know how sensitive you are about killing and such. My conscience wouldn’t let me go until I saw you.”

  She turned away from the lump forming on Zane’s jaw and gaped up at her uncle. “What are you talking about? We just made the senator sick and he handled the rest on his own. He’ll be all right in a day or two, as long as he doesn’t show his face at the country club anytime soon.”