The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  I returned to the front room and sat on the sofa. Walls bare: no portrait of Christ or The Prophet. Not even a cross hung above the door. Doe was still in the bathroom. I leafed through the mail on the coffee table, a snoopy force of habit.

  A white manila envelope, no return address. Inside was a check; on the memo line was written: Love you always. Doe had been getting this same check, the same amount, for years. She guessed it was her birth parents, some too-late act of atonement. She’d tried to have them traced through the mail system, but never with any success. She never cashed them but they arrived steady as clockwork.

  Love you always.

  Doe stepped into the room. Face clean, hair wet, terrycloth bathrobe on. I stared: the drugs made me brazen. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes the colour of antifreeze. She was barefoot. Her second toes were slightly longer than the big ones.

  She padded over to the CD player. The song was familiar—not from constant radio play, but because it was on the banned list. “American Pie,” by Don McLean. The lines about the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost catching the last train for the coast suggested that the Lord might travel on such shoddy earthbound conveyance as a train.

  “Evidence lockup again?”

  Doe nodded. Song notes drifted out into the night. Someone might hear them and ring the Heretic Tipster line.

  Both Doe and I were orphans of a sort. She’d never known her parents—quite stereotypically, she’d been left on the front steps of the Republican orphanage in a raft made of reeds. My own mother had been taken away for heresy, an effective abandonment. Angela’s last name, Doe, was the one given to every orphan.

  We had kicked around different child-care systems and first met as teenagers at Kids on Fire, a charismatic Christian summer camp and by that time a Republic-mandated summer rite. I remember her face lit by burning effigies labelled “Homosexual” and “Abortionist” and “Darwinist” at our nightly bonfires. I remember how she’d fall to the floor during prayer meetings, quaking and kicking and jabbering in tongues, possessed by the power of the One True Faith.

  My first impure thought had been of her. I’d glimpsed her stepping from Atonement Lake one June morning, the water’s chill hardening her nipples under the standard black bathing suit before she covered herself, mortified.

  That night I’d lain in the darkness of my own cabin, hands clutched between my legs, whispering to myself: Think no vice. Think no vice. Think no vice.

  We met years later at the training academy. We were posted to the New Bethlehem force and later became Acolytes—Doe was the first woman ever so ordained. How, I often wondered, had a parentless orphan secured such a gift?

  I lead a charmed life, Doe herself often said. We were partnered together. Our paths seemed oddly bound.

  Could I be blamed for feeling it was all somehow part of God’s plan?

  She said: “Could we run? Somewhere they won’t find us?”

  “Anywhere we go, they’ll follow,” I said. “If we stay on the lam for a few months, they’ll dispatch Trackers. Maybe even the Quints.”

  “Think they’ll be lenient?” she wondered. “Amputations?”

  “I doubt leaving the scene helped.”

  Don McLean sang about good ole boys drinking whiskey and rye. Wind whistled through the room bearing the scent of autumn.

  “How long?” I asked. “How long since you stopped believing?”

  She met my eye, unembarrassed. “It’s not like asking someone when they lost their car keys, Jonah.”

  Following a span of silence between us, she said: “When you’re a kid it’s simple. God is good. Followers do good work. When you’re older you learn about The Prophet and The Prophet is good. You go to SuperChurch, watch the fireworks, they trot out The One Child and you feel all that energy and think, I’m blessed to be a part of this. But that’s just the stage dressing. And when you find yourself behind the stage backdrop with the rusted pulleys and frayed ropes—when it’s your job to pull the strings and rig the guy wires . . . you realize how fake it is. You know what we do, Jonah. The games we play and why we play them.”

  “To keep the citizenry sedate. Maintain equilibrium and social harmony—”

  “Don’t quote The Charter at me.”

  I said, “You can’t mean this, Angela. We’re . . . we’re the Chosen People.”

  “Everyone thinks they’re the chosen people.”

  “But,” I told her, confused, “we really are.”

  She smiled in a way that conveyed sadness, or confusion, or both. “You can take nearly everything away from people—every right and freedom, every want, most every need. But you can’t take their Gods. We’re killing their Gods, Jonah.”

  I recited the departmental boilerplate in my head. Moral Turpitude: a critical loss of faith severely affecting performance of duties, potentially injurious to oneself and one’s unit. Any Acolyte suspecting a fellow officer of Moral Turpitude is beholden to report these suspicions to their Commander.

  Angela came to me. Extended her hand. “Dance with me?”

  To dance alone in the darkness with a woman to whom I was not betrothed was an act of abject sacrilege. . . .

  I gave her my hand.

  Her body still held the latent heat of the explosion. I was clumsy, nervy; she placed my palms round her waist. Her wet hair smelled like a doused campfire. She sang with her chin rested on my shoulder, her breath prickling the hairs there. Don McLean sang about flames climbing high into the night and Satan laughing with delight.

  Doe unfastened the sash of her robe. I glimpsed that smooth cut of skin. She shot a hip to one side, a pantomime of sexuality she must’ve seen someplace. After all, what did she really know? What did either of us know? We were both virgins . . . weren’t we?

  “Are you . . .” I was grinning like a child. “Trying to corrupt me?”

  “Are you willing to be corrupted?”

  Doe slid the robe off her shoulders, old knife wounds criss-crossing them, down the toned ladder of her rib cage. A bullet scar on her left thigh, the deep impression like a core sample. Her body a map of the roads she’d travelled in service of the Republic.

  “Do you love me, Angela?”

  “I don’t love anyone, Jonah,” she said. “But I probably could have, had the world unfolded differently. Is that good enough?”

  “No.”

  “Will it be good enough for tonight?”

  Lips soft, tongue soft, but the body hard. I still didn’t know where to put my hands on her—those scars, the injuries, that hardness. Where do you put your hands on somebody who is broken all over?

  No protection: prophylactics were banned. She hissed in pain but there was no blood: afterwards she told me her hymen had burst during a fistfight with a Sikh who’d been resisting arrest. We rocked together slowly. Angela locked her legs around my back, grasped the bedrails, gyrated against me.

  I closed my eyes and saw Eve’s face turning to ash and watched it blow away in a superheated wind. I wondered who the hunters would be and guessed old mates: Henchel, Applewhite, Garvey. I saw the Star of Gilead twinkling above Hollis’s desk and thought about the face under that hood . . . the wrong colour. The wrong damn colour.

  The Sack

  I sat in a folding metal chair facing my apartment door. I’d left Doe’s apartment hours ago. The hunters usually caught you in bed—figured I’d surprise them. Every light off, eyes closed: I wanted to hear them coming.

  It had been Angela’s decision: Let them come for us separately. They might be more lenient. So I’d left her.

  Steps outside in the hallway now. I felt them out there: the pressure of their bodies, the violence of their intent. A crumpling blast was followed by a superheated wind that raced low across the floor, blistering my ankles. Later on I’d catch my reflection in the interrogation room’s one-way mirror: face and neck acne
d with pinpricks of dried blood, shallow racing grooves on my skull where debris had scored a path.

  Shapes moved in a haze of cordite smoke. One of them said, “Over here—in the chair.” A few mordant chuckles and then a Scots brogue whispered, “Fancied we were coming, did you lad?” and I smiled or at least tried to, couldn’t feel my face, then someone slipped the Sack over my head and I got real scared.

  Every hunter was familiar with the Sack. Black burlap, the word HERETIC printed across the front in yellow block letters. I’d slipped it over a fair share of heads myself.

  The drawstring cinched tight, cutting across my windpipe. A fist drove into my gut and knocked the air out of me. Another punch tipped the chair back and spilled me onto the floor, where I puked a wretched stream of bile into the Sack.

  The blade of a box cutter slid between my collar and the skin of my throat. My shirt was slashed away, belt and trousers, my underwear. Hands gripped my armpits and dragged me into the hallway naked and shivering.

  “Heretic!” the hunters called for the benefit of my rubbernecking neighbours. “Traitor to the Republic!”

  They tossed me in the back of a meat wagon. My skull caromed off the floor plates; melting-hot constellations exploded in the stinking blackness.

  Someone was in the meat wagon with me. I heard his ragged breathing.

  “How could you let it happen?” someone said.

  “Garvey?” I croaked.

  “How could you let Eve die?”

  The Sack was wet with blood and puke, glued to my face like cling wrap.

  “I didn’t . . . the guy wore a hood . . . thought he was part of the band . . .”

  “She was The Prophet’s daughter. Did you get a good look at the guy?”

  He was white, Garvey, I thought. He was us.

  “No,” I said. “The hood. Are they going to kill me?”

  “I think so,” Garvey said, rocking with my head in his lap. “I won’t be able to step in, either—you know the rules.”

  “Doe?”

  “We took her in first. Same rules apply.”

  Panic seized me: a thousand fiddleback spiders scurrying the walls of my gut. “Listen: she had nothing to do with it.”

  “Hey.” His voice that of a master shushing a yappy dog. “Hey.”

  Angela mutilated. Exiled. Dead. I pictured her lying face-up in a shallow hole, quicklime eating into the cool green of her eyes. . . .

  The meat wagon wrenched to a stop. Hands grasped my ankles and dragged me out. I was hauled up a staircase—kneecaps bashing each step, pain singing along my spine. The muted chatter of keyboards, telephones ringing. The precinct?

  “Take him to number three and strap him down,” I heard Hollis say.

  Interrogation room number three. They sat me in the Confessional. Same shape as an old-fashioned gynecologist’s exam chair: my legs split, ankles shackled head-high.

  The door eased shut; the soft outrush of air pebbled my skin. A box cutter’s blade slashed through the blackness a quarter-inch from my eyes. Stark light flooded in.

  Hollis’s rosary beads went clikka clikka clikka. . . .

  “We’ll be needing to get to the bottom of things, you and I. Down to brass tacks.”

  My eyes adjusted. Hollis was the only one in the room. A burlap bag, the same dull grey of the walls, lay at his feet. It was Hollis’s infamous tool bag.

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.” My voice was a dead thing. “I don’t know anything.”

  Hollis said, “You know The Prophet’s daughter is dead. You know that what’s left of the poor dear couldn’t fill an ashtray. You know you fled the scene of an investigation—you, an officer, a primary witness and now, it must be said, a suspect. Most of all, you know the procedures of our department so I can’t imagine any of this comes as a shock.”

  He pulled a deck of cigarettes from his vest pocket, shook them at me. I hadn’t smoked in years but it was high time to get reacquainted with bad habits.

  Hollis slashed a new vent in the Sack and poked a cigarette between my lips. I coughed it out on the first inhale: it dropped to my chest, where Hollis let it sizzle through the sheen of sweat before poking it back in my mouth.

  “Go ahead, lad. Tell me what happened. Spare not the slightest detail.”

  “I picked her up after seven,” I said. “It was Eve and two friends. The Manger, she said—some singer she was keen to hear. Jimmy what’s-his-nose.”

  “Saint Kincaid.”

  “It went like any other duty: frisking cocktail waitresses, keeping gawkers at bay. There was no—”

  “The bouncer,” Hollis backtracked. “Involved?”

  “Can’t say. Wouldn’t think so.”

  “He the only one guarding the service entry?”

  “Yes.”

  Hollis cut a look at the one-way glass and nodded. Sometime tonight the bouncer would be roused from his bed, shackled, stripped, and Sacked.

  “When did Acolyte Doe arrive?”

  “Shortly after the girls were seated.”

  “And you were glad she was there,” Hollis said archly.

  “I was glad to have the appropriate backup, if that’s what you mean.”

  I stared at Hollis through the ragged slash of burlap. Hollis pinched the cigarette from between my lips.

  “Filthy things.” He crushed it under his boot. “They’ll kill you, you know.”

  “A lot of filthy things might kill me.”

  Hollis smiled at that.

  “You allowed Eve out into the crowd.”

  I said, “She’s The Prophet’s daughter.”

  “Was The Prophet’s daughter.”

  “What Eve wants—wanted—Eve got.”

  Hollis said, “Yet you realized how badly that would compromise her security.”

  “I made her aware of that. She wanted to dance, and didn’t want me anywhere near while doing so. I refused to leave her side. She slapped me.”

  Hollis sneered. “And that was enough to melt your mettle? A slap from a nineteen-year-old girl?”

  “It wasn’t the power of the slap. It was the power of the slapper.”

  Hollis nodded with a look of patently fake understanding. Friendly Uncle Hollis. I don’t know why he bothered. Did he want to elicit something approximating the truth before beating a false confession out of me? The honest truth before the official lie?

  “Did you want her up on stage, alone, without protection? To save your own skin against the blast you knew was coming?”

  I said, “Is that how we’re playing this?”

  “This isn’t a game, son. Nobody’s playing.”

  “I was nearly killed myself.”

  “But you aren’t dead.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And your accomplice, Doe—she’s not dead, either.”

  I said: “If you want to spin this that I dropped the ball and got Eve killed, okay—could be that’s true. You want to play it like I orchestrated it all and see that I get my head chopped off on National Republic TV, fine, I’ll read whatever script you hand me. But first I want it known and I want it witnessed: Doe is clean. So get Chief Exeter and let’s get on with it.”

  Hollis grinned a death’s head grin.

  “That’s altogether dashing of you—Jonah Murtag, the self-sacrificing hero of any dime store romance.” Then, speaking softly so the interrogation-room mics couldn’t it pick up: “You’ve lusted after Doe for years—I know you’ve always wanted to fuck her.” His voice was pure snake venom. “You craved her sweet cunny, isn’t that right?”

  Before I could protest, he barrelled on.

  “The bomber. The heretic jihadist. Catch a glimpse of his face?”

  “No,” I said after a beat. “It happened too fast.”

  “Too fast?
He was on stage for fifteen minutes.”

  “He wore a hood.”

  “So you couldn’t see, or you purposefully ignored?”

  “I had my attention on Eve. The most credible threats were coming—”

  “From you, isn’t that a fact?”

  “From the crowd. From—”

  “No. No. From you.” Hollis shook a rosary-wrapped fist in my face. “You, Doe, and your accomplice set it up: allowing Eve up on stage, encouraging her even, saving your own hides when any true Follower would’ve sacrificed themselves on her behalf. Isn’t that right?”

  “No!”

  “Shshsh. Shshsh.” Switching gears: placating, honeyed. “Let’s go back to the bomber. When did you recognize the malice of his intent?”

  “Too late.”

  “Don’t get smart. When, precisely, did you appreciate his threat?”

  “He came up behind Eve and Saint Kincaid. He spread his arms, this . . . crucifixion pose. I thought it was part of the act. Everyone did. Then I saw a DET cord sticking out of his sleeve. Half a second later . . .”

  Hollis bent beside his tool bag. He pulled something out.

  “A question for you, lad . . .”—stalking my blind side—“. . . if you acknowledged the threat, why-oh-why weren’t you blown to bits in your attempt, however fruitless, to throw yourself between the bomber and Eve? How come you found yourself in the only place in that club where anyone could have survived the blast?”

  “Get Exeter,” I said. “I’m ready to confess.”

  Hollis’s voice dripped cold rage. “You’re ready when I say so, you filthy bastard.”

  The steel prongs of a cattle prod sent 10,000 volts flooding through my body. Next I was snorting blood and choking against the strap fastened round my throat. I saw an off-white chip stuck to my knee with bloodied saliva and realized, without much shock, it was one of my teeth.

  Hollis was fulminating like an Old Testament Prophet:

  “I am the Divine sword of justice, searching out villainy and excising it!” He broke into the Book of Revelations, spittle shining his lips: “And in those days, evil men shall seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them!”