The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  He broke into a rap song. Strutting around, arms going punchy-punch-punch, rhinestones flashing. I gave him points for rhyming “frankincense” with “abstinence.” When he ceded the stage, I stepped behind the dais and cleared my throat.

  “Prophet’s blessings, everyone.”

  Five hundred well-trained mouths replied, “From the Lord’s lips to his.”

  I was here as part of a Republic-sponsored community outreach initiative whose aim was to warn children about potential Faith Code infractions happening in their own households. The program worked in partnership with the Ministry of Eugenics and Social Stratification, a two-pronged attack to weed out seditious traitors and preach the dangers of cross-pollination with mongrel races.

  On a folding table sat an array of banned artifacts. The teachers and children oohed and aahed as I’d produced them.

  I picked up a yarmulke and asked, “Does anyone know what this is called?”

  Scanning the assembly, I saw coffee-skinned kids, twenty or so Asians, even a few red Indians. Ghetto children were permitted to attend Republic schools—education being the first step to eradicating bastard faiths.

  I spotted a girl in the front whose nametag read Alona Cohen.

  “Alona, have your parents or grandparents ever worn the yarmulke?”

  “My grandparents are dead,” she squeaked.

  I picked up a menorah. “How about lighting candles in this?”

  Alona tucked her chin to her chest and shook her head vigorously. “We don’t have those in our house. They’re bad things.”

  “Look at me when I’m speaking, please.”

  She lifted her head obediently.

  “Now, Alona dear,” I said, “you would tell me if you’d seen these items before, wouldn’t you?”

  She sniffed. “Uh-huh.”

  “You do understand your duty to the Republic, don’t you? What is it, Alona?”

  “Te . . . te . . . te . . .” Alona blubbered before choking up.

  “It’s okay, Alona,” I said, softening, unwilling to reduce her to tears.

  The principal rallied the assembly with, “Come on, guys, what do we do when we see a faith crime being committed?”

  “TELL!” the assembly chorused.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Tell a fellow Follower. Call the anonymous heathen tip line. Or you’re welcome to come down to my office and tell me, okay?”

  The kids were elated at this personal invite. Imagine walking into Acolyte headquarters with a hot tip! Most of these boys probably daydreamed about becoming Acolytes.

  “Remember, the people committing these crimes are sick. They may not seem sick, but they’re very sick up here.” I tapped my skull. “If someone was sick and could be cured, you’d want to help them, wouldn’t you? That’s all we do: take them away and fix them. Once they’re fixed, they come home. Good as new.” A confiding wink. “Better.”

  The presentation continued. I showed off a Scientologist’s E-meter. I produced copies of the Koran, the Gita, and the Torah, all of which I set fire to in a trash can. I torched a copy of Darwin’s evolutionary chart, which had been soaked in creosote to help it burn more cinematically.

  “Any questions?”

  Only one hand went up.

  “Yes, you. Speak.”

  The boy didn’t look particularly well. His skin was the colour of pot roast forgotten in the back of a fridge; balls of sweat ran down his neck, soaking into his parochial vest.

  “You were here last year,” he said. “A few weeks after, I found one of the books you talked about in my Dad’s closet. You said people could be sick and not show it and my Dad sure seemed that way—he wasn’t talking to me or Mom much. He was calling in sick to work a lot.”

  The boy tapped his forehead, just as I’d done.

  “But maybe he was sick up here. So I phoned the tip line. They came and took Dad away.”

  “That was the right thing to do,” I said.

  “You said he’d be cured,” he said. “But they brought him home in a wheelchair and his hair had gone all white and he couldn’t speak anymore. He just sat by the window and watched the snow. One night Mom shook him and shook him and she was screaming so loud that our neighbour made a call and they took Dad and Mom away.”

  Had we been in private, just the boy and I, perhaps I’d’ve spoken about my own mother: not to allay his guilt at an act he could’ve felt tricked into doing—tricked into by me—but only so he’d know he was not alone. But to say so here and now, publicly, in my role as an ambassador of the Republic?—I couldn’t.

  “Do you believe The Prophet would let that happen unless your parents deserved it?”

  The boy shifted on his rump and winced. “It was just a book.”

  A shocked gasp rippled through the assembly. I raised my hand for silence.

  “Just a book? By that argument, son, the serpent in the Garden was only a serpent. A book is never just a book. Do you think we can simply allow people to go around reading whatever they choose? There is no God but God, and The Prophet is his mouthpiece.”

  The bell rang. Assembly dismissed.

  Ten minutes later I stood in the school’s quadrangle doling out cheap plastic badges: shiny silver, APPRENTICE ACOLYTE stamped on the foil plating. After receiving their badges the children shouldered their book bags and made for the yellow busses in the parking lot. The grey-faced boy had left the gym as soon as the bell rang. I kept an eye out for him, thinking perhaps we could talk.

  The principal approached across grass gone brown from lack of watering. She wore the same grey her students did—heavy steel-grey dress and cable-knit sweater, a pewter cross pinned over her heart.

  “Tough crowd, huh?”

  “I was looking for the boy with the missing parents,” I told her.

  “Jeremiah. He rides a bus, but I couldn’t tell you which one. Shall I check?”

  “That’s fine,” I said, unsure of what I might say should Jeremiah be summoned.

  A storm was homing in from the east. The sky darkened in stages, waves of blackness rolling over it like a filthy shade drawn over the day.

  “He’s in a home,” the principal told me. “After his parents were taken. A charity home, but a respectable one. Children are so very resilient.”

  “You should go inside,” I told her. “Catch your death out here in the rain.”

  My eyes rose over her shoulder to watch the busses filing out of the school lot. Their windows were open and the sound of laughter and shrill catcalls drifted across the quadrangle.

  In the final bus I spotted Jeremiah. He was kneeling on his seat, staring out the window at me.

  “If you’d like,” the principal said, “I could find the address of Jeremiah’s home. . . .”

  The boy knelt on the bus seat, face set in an expression far too resolute for his age. He wasn’t wearing a plastic badge. He waved to me. The bus was pulling away, picking up speed. Jeremiah clutched something in his free hand; I squinted, trying to make it out.

  Jesus Christ.

  I sprinted toward the departing busses. Jeremiah now stood at the back of the bus, one hand balanced on the emergency door catch. Still waving.

  The bus swayed as it picked up speed. My feet flashed over the sidewalk as I waved back to Jeremiah: It’s okay, son, whatever you’re going through, whatever hardships you’re experiencing, God is always with you. You know that, don’t you?

  He raised his other hand. A twist of DET cord snaked from his pallid grey sleeve. That tiny red button. His belly was swollen from swallowing ball bearings. His face ashen from all the poisonous C4 stuffed inside him.

  The bus gained ground. The children laughed and hollered. The explosion tore the air apart. A ball of polar whiteness expanded from the boy’s chest and the crumpling blast was so loud, hitting sonic registers b
eyond my capacity to bear, that I heard nothing at all: blank ongoing silence punctuated by the throb of my heart in my eardrums.

  The windows blew outwards, glass fused into molten blobs as the roof curled back in a rip curl like the lid pried off a sardine tin. A superheated fist knocked me off my feet. A pocket Bible pelted through the air and glanced off my forehead.

  I dragged myself up and staggered after the bus, by now nothing more than a fire-scored shell on flaming wheels wobbling out onto the road past the other busses who’d bumped over the curb to avoid it and on through an intersection where students waited—older ones wearing reflective orange sashes in their role as crossing guards—the blackened carapace rolling past their shock-filled faces, flames spitting from its empty window sockets, shedding crisped seats and flame-shrivelled shapes.

  Traffic stood at a standstill, drivers riveted behind their wheels while this horror show lurched past their windshields and into a manicured garden beyond the intersection, crashing through a waist-high wrought iron fence to strike a statue of the Immaculate Mother.

  By the time I arrived, a few motorists stood, shell-shocked, around the flaming wreck. A man made a useless attempt to douse the flames with a water bottle, droplets spitting off the bus’s white-hot flanks. Another woman had a blanket, as if she hoped to wrap a shivering survivor in it. The scorched skeletons of the children not vapourized outright sat heat-fused to their seats in positions they’d held when the bomb burst: some sitting straight, others blackly frozen in the midst of horseplay. Flames licked from the domes of their charred skulls and I thought, awfully, of Vespers candles.

  The witnesses looked at me, the agent of civic peace, as though I might be able to fix things. What could I possibly do? I had no magic to bring these children back. What could I say—Disperse, people, nothing to see here? There was everything to see here.

  So we stood there, us good Followers of New Bethlehem, round the flaming hulk of a school bus in the driving rain. The Immaculate Mother’s arm outstretched, an oxidized copper dove cradled in her palm—and hooked over the statue’s arm was another: a severed child’s arm that hung like a shrivelled black boomerang.

  Another explosion ripped the air, the sound of roof beams snapped between giant hands. Shielding my eyes from the rain, I saw a building tumble through the sky less than a block east. Dust clouds puffed, forming a gauzy cocoon that the building collapsed into, straight down, as if a gallows trapdoor had sprung beneath it.

  Blasts rocked other city sectors like distant artillery fire. Everything was falling down; everything was breaking apart.

  Chaos Theory

  Eleven explosions would rock the city that afternoon.

  The targets shared no obvious commonalities. The school bus and the building nearby—which had been a condemned fireworks factory, of all things. The midtown Ecclesiastical Library. A municipal bus. A downtown fitness club. A raw sewage treatment plant in Little Baghdad. The technical wing of Trinity Divinity College.

  Eleven explosions. No trace of connectivity. Some explosions took not a single soul; others took dozens. Final death toll stood at 179 Followers. Nobody saw or claimed to remember anything—faces, voices, names. Eleven roads leading nowhere.

  The Immaculate Mother was kidnapped that same afternoon.

  Every week she had her nails done at Zoila’s Salon in Jewtown. She was driven to the salon in a bulletproof town car accompanied by a pair of armed guards.

  The guards’ distress signal came at 3:13 p.m. When the officers arrived in the alleyway behind Zoila’s Salon they found the chauffeur and guards dead, shot in the face. The guards’ gun-arms had been broken, bones punched through the skin; they looked to have been manhandled by an incensed gorilla.

  The Immaculate Mother had managed to trigger the car’s automatic locks but her kidnappers cut through the door with a plasma torch. Officers found the empty car with the motor running, seat still warm where the Immaculate Mother had sat. Her abductors had not made contact. No ransom note. No concrete proof she was even alive. The Prophet released a tersely worded statement exhorting the kidnappers to seek the Lord and return their captive unmolested.

  New Bethlehem had become a killing jar. Not a single hole was punched in its lid.

  The day following the explosions saw me bedridden.

  My decision to chase after the bus earned a heap of injuries. Shoulder dislocated by the blowback and resultant fall. A deep purple bruise radiated halfway down my arm and across my chest. Also, I must’ve been weeping when the boy detonated: the tears boiled away in the blast and left me with thin inch-long scars under each eye. I looked a little like a sad clown.

  Hollis called that afternoon.

  “Holding the fort alright, lad? Heard you were scraped up.”

  “I’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “Don’t bother. Until further notice, all Acolytes are on their own reconnaissance. Us all gathered under one roof is an invitation to the loons,” he said. “If you’ve any leads, follow them on your own. At such time that one of them blossoms into a traceable thread, we’ll reconvene the unit. Contact the others privately if you wish.”

  I hung up and lay on the sofa dabbing aloe vera lotion on my blisters. The bird twittered in its cage. The frog hung upside-down from the aquarium screen. I closed my eyes but all I saw was that white ball expanding from Jeremiah’s chest. Someone had convinced the boy to press the button. Someone had orchestrated it. That same someone was surely behind the Immaculate Mother’s abduction, which had likely been the end goal all along. The explosions were only a distraction.

  The next morning I headed to the Municipal Hall of Records.

  The sky was purpled like the bruises ringing a hanged man’s throat. The streets were deserted. Closed signs hung in store windows.

  I’d never set foot in the Hall of Records. That such a small building could house the archived historical records of New Bethlehem and select sources from other Republican cities seemed absurd until you considered how much had been censured, doctored, or burned over the years.

  The matronly clerk’s hair was arranged into a bun that pulled each follicle tight as a guitar string. She had the emasculating glare specific to librarians and museum curators and those whose orderly systems were continually under assault from a slovenly public.

  “May I help you?”

  She was not much impressed when I showed my badge.

  I said: “I need to look over any records you have coming out of New Beersheba.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Official investigation, ma’am.”

  I was led to a staircase that spiralled down two stories before exiting into a catacomb-like hallway. The air was bone dry. We arrived at a steel door, which the clerk unlocked with one of two dozen keys on a ring hitched to her waist. Beyond the door was a cramped room housing a microfiche reader and a single unpadded chair.

  “Sit,” she ordered.

  She set a slim padded sleeve in front of me. “We haven’t received anything else from New Beersheba in over a year.”

  Once I’d managed to manoeuvre the slides onto the reader, it became apparent there was little to be gleaned. The New Beersheba newspaper had been subjected to the customary censures: the local censor blacked out anything deemed inappropriate for out-of-city viewers, the New Bethlehem censor blacked out anything deemed inappropriate for local residents, and an official Republican censor waved his pen over whatever else might cause strife. Entire lines had been erased. I riffled through a months’ worth of papers and found nothing. They stopped on July 24th of last year; the final weeks were so heavily blacked out I couldn’t help but wonder, What the hell had happened in New Beersheba?

  The record keeper returned. Her eyes fell to my notebook, lying open next to the microfiche reader. Different spellings of the same name were written in block letters:

  TOM SWIFT, THOM SWIFT
, TOM SWYFT.

  “That’s who you’re searching for?”

  “You know him?” I said, surprised.

  “He’s not anyone you can really know. I can find him for you, though.”

  My hand shot out, fingers tightening on her wrist. “You know where he is?”

  “You’re . . . you’re hurting me.”

  I eased off. Massaging her wrist, she said, “Follow me.”

  She led me to a set of stairs that terminated at yet another corridor. The room I found myself in next was larger. I followed her down rows she navigated seemingly without need of sight. Her fingers roamed over book spines, alighting softly before moving on.

  “Here,” she said. “I knew we had one.”

  The book she handed me was titled Tom Swift and His Motorcycle, by Victor Appleton. The cover was badly faded but I could make out an illustration of a boy puttering down a country lane on an old-fashioned motorbike. He was wearing jackboots and a crested leather hat; from what little I could remember of their uniforms, he appeared to be a . . .

  “He wasn’t a Nazi.” Unnervingly, the clerk had read my mind. “He was a boy adventurer, an inventor, a genius based on . . .” She searched her memory banks for a name. “. . . Thomas Edison. My older brother read all his books. I was too young and a girl—girls read Nancy Drew—and besides, Tom Swift always relied on a Jewish boy to help him out of scrapes. I didn’t like that.”

  “Thank you,” I said to her, and left.

  The Damascus Towers

  Stakeout.

  I’d met Tom Swift only once, in the company of Angela Doe. If the thread wasn’t particularly long at least there was an end to grab hold of.

  Doe had returned to her fourth-floor apartment near Nazareth Park. I took a room at the motel across the way with clean sightlines into her place. For three days I drank rotgut joe and spied on the woman I loved. I could not deny that my snooping was based at least partially on jealousy. But it wasn’t my sole motivation. People were dead and it was still my responsibility to discover who’d killed them. Tom Swift was as likely a candidate as any.