False Gods

by W. Glenn Duncan Jr.

  I told myself to calm down, we were safe.

  So it was a hell of a surprise when I stepped over a fallen tree, looked up and saw the compound bathed in light spread out before me.

  I stopped. Did a double take.

  Realized how bright everything was and how exposed that made me. I turned back for the tree, slipped on the wet ground and half fell in the process.

  I reached out to grab the rough bark of the downed trunk and tried to keep a low profile as I slithered over it. I shlooped to the ground, landing in a puddle.

  “Smooth,” Cowboy whispered from his crouched position.

  “Shut up.”

  I gave him the finger. He didn’t care.

  “I was gonna call out but you was already over the log. No harm done, anyways.”

  I squiggled around to peer over the tree and get a better look at what I’d nearly walked into.

  Twenty feet beyond our tree, the land pitched downward. Not a cliff, but steep enough that a nine-year old would’ve had great fun hurtling the seventy, seventy-five feet to the bottom on a bike. Or a sled.

  The ridge slope curved away from us in both directions, the perimeter of a circular depression a football field and a half across, broken only by a landslide on the opposite side.

  If you’ve seen pictures of the meteor crater outside Winslow AZ, you’ll have an idea of what we were looking at.

  Except for a couple of minor differences.

  The Arizona crater was much larger.

  And although I hadn’t been there, I was confident it didn’t have an assortment of dirty-white buildings at its base. Nor the animal pens on the far side, peeking out from behind a building with a steeply-pitched roof that had to be a church. And I don’t think the Arizona version was cabled for the power needed for the scattered light poles to bleed their yellowish light through the rain.

  Gravel walkways wandered between the various buildings. No landscaping to speak of, but almost a quarter of the depression was spotted with rows of bedraggled crops struggling to find purchase. A shallow depression in the ground traced the lower edge of the slope, collecting the water that ran down the bank and funneling it away somewhere.

  It could have been a cute little township.

  If it hadn’t been at the bottom of a big hole, in the middle of nowhere.

  Couldn’t tell if the crater was man-made. It didn’t matter, it was a perfect protection for the township below. As I’d found out, you’d have to be right on top of the damn thing before you had a clue anything was there. In fact, we’d got lucky; without the storm’s low cloud cover, and the resultant light reflection, we’d have never found it.

  Cowboy nudged me. “Check the motor pool.”

  At the south-eastern side of the whole shebang the black mouth of a tunnel beckoned from the side of the crater. Water-filled tire tracks exited the tunnel and traced curved lines ending at the side of a long gray-green metal building. The sliding industrial doors would roll back to provide access inside.

  I wondered if there were two pickups that I would recognize inside that shed.

  “Any activity?” I asked.

  “Naw. Not even our friends from the front gate. Who’d be out on a night like this, less’n they had to be.” If I came up with any theories on that, he’d be the first to know.

  I turned around and sat down with my back to the log. I was confident we’d found the Texas spread of The People’s Church of the Reformed Temple, but I felt a bit like the dog chasing the car, once the car stops.

  Okay, I’ve caught it. What do I do with it now?

  We had no idea whether Kimberly was down there. For that matter, we had no idea who was down there. Or how many of them. Or what weapons they might have.

  “Boss-man,” Cowboy said through the hiss of the rain. “We got motion.”

  I turned and eased my head up over the top of the log. A door had opened from a building on the far side of the village, throwing a muddy yellow rectangle of light on the ground. Seven, no eight, men stepped out and the door swung closed. They walked with shoulders hunched and heads bent against the rain to the gray-green shed. The first one there grabbed the handle of the nearest sliding door.

  “Cowboy,” I hissed.

  “Got it.”

  I felt him shift the gun and sight it as the door rolled back with a metallic scrape. The inside of the shed glowed bright, stacked high with olive-green boxes. I cursed myself for not bringing a camera and hoped that Cowboy was as quick as he said. The men filed into the shed and the door slid closed with another scrape and a boom which rolled to us through the night.

  We both turned and leaned back against the log this time.

  “What have you gone and got yourself into this time, boss-man?”

  I pulled my cap off and ran my wet hands through my soaked hair. Ached for a pipe. Asked myself the same question.

  “Are they …” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yep,” Cowboy said again. “Now why would a nice ol’ god-botherer have a garage full of weapons crates?”

  I didn’t have a chance to answer before a tinny voice crackled through the rain.

  “Attention.”

  I felt Cowboy slump further to the ground and I scrabbled for the Colt.

  “Attention. O Holy Night. Father will speak. O Holy Night.”

  “What the fuck?” I whispered, looking left and right for the imminent threat. Cowboy worked the action on the Winchester.

  When I figured that an incoming assault force was unlikely to announce themselves, I turned and peered over the log. For the first time, I noticed the PA speakers mounted on the light poles. The voice continued.

  “Attention. O Holy Night. Father will speak. O Holy Night.”

  Like an ant colony being poked with a stick, the township below came alive. Figures trudged through the rain towards the church.

  “Attention. O Holy Night. Father will speak. O Holy Night.”

  A metallic squawk and feedback cut through the night, and then there was only the sound of the rain.

  “You ever see anythin’ like this?” Cowboy asked. I shook my head.

  I couldn’t see where they were all coming from. The stream of humanity; men, women, and children flowed to the front of the church, onto the porch and through the front doors.

  Cowboy nudged me. “Boss-man.”

  From a collection of huts near the soggy crops a line of figures filed, heads bowed, towards a square building behind the church. About fifteen in number, dressed in similar robes and all walking with the same, resigned motion.

  “Cowboy?” I said.

  He squinted through the rifle scope.

  “Yeah. Yore not imaginin’ it. Looks like anyone of them could be your girl.”

  They continued their chain-gang shuffle, bent around the corner of another building and one by one stepped onto the porch and disappeared inside. The few small windows flickered with candlelight.

  The flow of people to the church slowed until the last person, an old man with a walking stick, levered himself onto the porch and then the door swung closed behind him.

  Before I got into motion over the log and headed down the hill and toward where the girls were sheltering from the rain, a square of light broke through the darkness again, and a group of men stepped back into the night from the gray-green shed. They spread out and took up defensive positions around the church and the square building behind. They cradled their weapons, like the two guys we’d seen earlier at the driveway.

  I started to wonder if I should have been able to hear any undertones of speech coming from the church, but something else scratched at my brain.

  Like the drawing which shows both a young woman and an old woman, depending on how you perceive it, I couldn’t work out what was wrong with the picture in front of me. Okay, Dariell’s got a security force protecting the compound. They might be amateurs, but they were mobile, well-armed, and ringing the locations of his floc
k.

  Then the picture flipped, and I heaved a breath out.

  If they were protection from an unknown threat, why were they all facing inwards—towards the congregation?

  The rain pissed down.

  Chapter 23

  Cowboy sped down the interstate.

  We’d made fast work back to the truck, once we’d left Dariell’s retreat behind. Angling left as we stepped into the darkness soon put us back on the dirt road. I figured we’d be out of sight of the compound driveway, though with the rain it was hard to be certain.

  No-one came out of the dark to ambush us as we squelched through the mud and tried to avoid the potholes, so maybe we were okay.

  Two trucks still flanked the driveway as we cruised past an hour later. It was too dark to see if they were the same pickups as earlier, or to tell if there was anyone inside; I didn’t see anyone moving in the brief flash of our headlights.

  “You got any paper and a pen?” I said.

  “Glove compartment, mebbe.”

  I rummaged around and found an old envelope and a battered pencil. That’ll do. I flattened the envelope down on my leg and started drawing.

  “Whatcha doin?”

  “Drawing what I remember about the compound, before it gets foggy.” I drew a rough circle and marked our viewing position with a crude X. “I figure we’ll be coming back and it’ll be handy to put together a plan next time.”

  “You didn’t have one this time?” Cowboy chuckled.

  I ignored him.

  I plotted positions as best as I could remember for the buildings, starting with the church in the centre. Two lines (one with a hiccup from a sudden swerve of Cowboy’s to miss another pothole) showed the tunnel entrance. I drew locations for the motor pool-cum-arsenal and three long low sheds, one from where the eight men stepped into the night. I guessed that to be a sort of barracks.

  If this was a religious retreat, why was I thinking in military terms?

  At the nearest side of the crater, backed in against the dismal agriculture project, I pencilled in the series of smaller buildings, where the girls had emerged.

  “How many small huts?” I asked.

  “Eight. Two rows of four.”

  I looked up and closed my eyes, swaying with the movement of the truck. Counted the huts I could see in the darkness. Two. Four. Eight. Yep. There were two other larger buildings, behind the church and between the huts and the barracks.

  I opened my eyes and sketched these on the envelope. Also put down the square building further behind. This was more or less aligned with the church, seemed to be centered on an invisible axis running through the centre of the town.

  Cowboy leaned over and glanced at the paper, lit by the reflection of the headlights in the sheeting rain.

  “Looks ’bout right to me,” he said. “There was sumpin here, too. Beside the church.” He stubbed a thick finger at the paper.

  “Any ideas?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Smaller structures. Stores, tanks. I didn’t see no windows.”

  I looked down again, tried to locate some of the light and speaker towers. I was sure there were more than I could remember. Drew a couple of big squiggles in the southwest corner. Can you have a corner in a circular space? There was something down there where all the people came from, but I didn’t get a clear view past the log. I waggled the pencil and brought it down onto the paper again.

  Nothing else. Had as much as I was gonna get.

  I popped open the glove box and threw the pencil back in. Tossed the envelope onto the dash. Put my head back and closed my eyes.

  As Cowboy drove through the darkness, I found myself returning to his question.

  I knew it was rhetorical, but that didn’t stop my brain running around to find an answer. Without success.

  Why did Dariell have firepower?

  I had thought this case was screwy enough when it was only about religion. To find out that this whack job had transcended from zealot to god-incarnate—in his own mind, at any rate—was one more step into the abyss. And those crates stacked in the shed took all of us passengers on this tour off the exit from the True Path Highway and straight into Crazyville.

  “You see writing on those crates?” I asked without opening my eyes.

  “Nope. They had stenciled letterin’ on the sides, but that door slid shut before I could read anythin’. I’d give my left nut if they ain’t weapons crates.”

  “Problem is, they could hold anything from more M16s and ammo to fifty cals and RPGs. It’d be nice to know just how crazy this guy is.”

  Cowboy said nothing. There wasn’t anything to say.

  The night rushed by.

  We made good time retracing our steps to Dallas.

  It was glowing light in the east as Cowboy turned the truck off Mockingbird, made the corner into Palm Lane and pulled into the driveway. We’d been almost twenty four hours on the move and I was looking forward to a shower and a few hours of shut eye.

  I grabbed my crude urban planning diagram from the dash, checked my pockets for pipe and tobacco and said “Fuck it” to the rest of the stuff in the truck. Cowboy grabbed one of the bedrolls from behind his seat, locked the cab and followed me inside.

  By the time I finished a shower and walked out to the living room to tell Cowboy it was his turn, he was flat on his back on his blanket, boots off, and hat over his face, snoring.

  I let him sleep, wandered back to the bedroom and followed his lead.

  The sun was all the way up when I woke. I blinked a few times getting my bearings and smelled coffee perking down the hall. I slipped on a pair of shorts with a hole in one pocket and an old Mavericks t-shirt and followed my rumbling stomach into the kitchen.

  Cowboy sat on one of the bar stools with a mug of coffee in one hand.

  “Mornin, sleepyhead.”

  “Hhmmrgghhh,” I replied.

  Or something like that.

  I poured a cup of coffee, leaned against the counter and slurped. The world started to look better. I packed a pipe, fired it up, poured more coffee and decided I could cope with staying awake a while longer.

  I whipped up eggs while Cowboy worked the toaster. I topped off the cups again for both of us, and we sat on opposite sides of the kitchen bench to eat.

  “What you gonna do ’bout this jumped-up born again?” he asked as he forked another mouthful.

  I spun the envelope sketch under my finger.

  “Don’t need to do anything about him. He can have his visions, deluded followers, and his ultimate reward in paradise. Or wherever. All I want is to get Kimberly out.”

  “Yep.” Cowboy nodded. “Seems to me he can make it a mite difficult for her to leave. If he’s a mind to a’course.”

  “There is that,” I said.

  We finished our food in silence, lost in thought. Cowboy folded his blanket and stuffed it under one arm. He stood in the doorway and looked at me.

  “Now don’t you go wanderin’ in there by yourself, y’hear. ’Specially if this Dariell dude is liable to play rough, okay?”

  I waved him acknowledgement.

  “Cos I would hate to miss out on that kinda fun.”

  I wandered around the house after Cowboy left.

  I started and didn’t finish a few chores. Rinsed the dishes but didn’t wash them, put the wet clothes from the night before into the washing machine but didn’t turn it on, that kind of thing.

  Felt like I had an itch that I couldn’t scratch.

  I called Hilda at home but got her machine.

  “Hi hon. I’m back from communing with the natives of Northwest Texas. Boy howdy, do they know how to show a guy a good time. Talk soon.”

  I considered more coffee, but grabbed a Corona from the fridge instead. Sat at the counter fiddling with the envelope again. I found myself slipping into a strategizing role, mapping approach routes and killing zones in a mythical assault on Camp Thof.

  Assuming, of course, that I knew what we were d
ealing with down there.

  Which, of course, I didn’t.

  Behind the speculative planning I found myself wondering why I kept circling back to the idea that this would only be resolved through force.

  After all, I just wanted to get Kimberly back to her mother. And despite my earliest words to Kathy-Lee, from what I’d seen, I’d be surprised if Kimberly didn’t want that, too.

  Maybe it was my background and experience that kept bringing me back to the warfare analogies. After all, I’m a soldier, of sorts, not a bleeding-heart social worker. So, it made sense that I would gravitate to violent methods of resolution, rather than expecting the combatants to join hands and sing a few choruses of Kum-ba-yah.

  But dammit, it felt like more than that.

  It felt like I wasn’t in control of this, or maybe I never had been. There was an air of … inevitability, that this whole thing was going to end in flames.

  I drained my bottle and told myself to stop being stupid. Nothing had even hinted at a violent end to the search for Kimberly.

  Nothing except the weapons crates, that is.

  I was good at getting things done. I told myself it would all work out in the end.

  Meantime, there was a relaxing nap waiting to be had.

  How wrong I was.

  Kimberly on fire.

  Burning up.

  Smiling.

  Push her to the ground. Roll her over to smother flames.

  Press on her bubbling skin. Burning hands.

  Kimberly still standing. Not yet on fire.

  On the ground. Burning to death.

  Look back. Standing. Bursting into flame.

  To the newly-conflagrated Kimberly. Push her down.

  Another Kimberly behind her.

  I can’t save them all.

  Drop and roll the next Kimberly.

  Smolders under blistered hands.

  Smiles at me.

  Far away a fire alarm.