Blasphemy

by Douglas Preston

  “What the hell’s going on over there?”

  Begay rode up beside him and raised his binoculars. A few hundred yards away, in a sandy area, a group of men had collected. They were filthy, like they had recently emerged from a caved-in area of ground, surrounding a group of what appeared to be ragged, dirty prisoners. Begay could hear jeering.

  “Looks like a lynching,” said Becenti.

  Begay examined the prisoners more closely with the field glasses. With a shock, he recognized the scientist who had visited him, Kate Mercer. And some distance from her was Wyman Ford, holding up what looked like an injured man.

  “I don’t like it,” said Begay. He started to get off his horse.

  “What are you doing? We got to get out of here.”

  Begay tied the horse to a tree. “They might need our help, Willy.”

  With a grin, Willy Becenti swung off his horse. “This is more like it.”

  They crept up to the group, finding cover behind a screen of boulders. They were less than a hundred feet from the assembly and concealed by the darkness. Begay counted twenty-four men, with guns. Everyone was blackened with coal dust. Faces from hell.

  Ford’s face was bloody and it looked like he’d been beaten up. The other prisoners he didn’t know, but he guessed they must also be scientists from the Isabella project, given the lab coats they wore. Ford held one of them up, the man’s arm slung over his shoulder. The man had a badly broken leg. The crowd was spitting at them, jeering and cursing. Finally, a man stepped forward and raised his hands, quieting the mob.

  Begay could hardly believe his eyes: it was Pastor Eddy, from the mission down in Blue Gap—except the man was transformed. The Pastor Eddy he knew had been a confused, half-crazy loser who gave away old clothes and owed him sixty bucks. This Eddy had an air of cold command, and the crowd was responding to it.

  Begay hunkered down and watched, Becenti next to him.

  EDDY RAISED HIS HANDS. “ ‘AND THERE was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies!’ My Christian friends, the Antichrist will speak. Witness with me his blasphemy.”

  Hazelius tried to speak. The burning of Isabella flickered in the background, the sheets and pillars of flame leaping up and spreading, and he was drowned out by a series of sharp explosions. He began again, his voice stronger.

  “Pastor Eddy, I have only one comment to make. These people are not my disciples. Do what you want with me, but let them go.”

  “Liar!” someone shouted from the crowd.

  “Blasphemer!”

  Eddy raised a forebearing hand and the crowd fell back into silence. “No one is innocent,” he shouted. “We’re all sinners in the hands of an angry God. Only by God’s grace are we saved.”

  “Leave them alone, you demented bastard.”

  Not much chance of that, thought Ford, looking around at Eddy’s flock, howling for Hazelius’s hide.

  Hazelius weakened, his good leg buckling.

  “Hold him up!” Eddy roared.

  Kate came to Ford’s side and helped hold the scientist up.

  Eddy turned. “The day of God’s wrath has arrived,” he thundered. “Take him!”

  The crowd lunged at Hazelius, crowding around him, pushing him this way and that as if fighting over a rag doll. They struck him, shoved him, spat on him, beat him with sticks. One man slashed him with a piece of cholla cactus.

  “Tie him to that tree.”

  They dragged him toward a massive, gaunt, dead piñon, the crowd struggling with him like a clumsy, hundred-footed beast. They lashed one wrist, threw the rope end over a stout branch and pulled tight, did the same with the other wrist, and tied them off, so that Hazelius was half-hanging, half-standing upright, arms apart. His clothes hung in tatters from his filthy body.

  Suddenly, Kate wrenched free, leapt forward, and embraced Hazelius.

  The crowd burst into angry shouts, and several men grabbed Kate and yanked her back, throwing her to the ground. A scarecrow of a man with a squared-off beard scooted out of the crowd and kicked her while she was down.

  “Bastard!” Ford shouted. He slammed the man in the jaw, knocked another aside and fought his way toward Kate, but the mob swarmed him and he was driven to the ground with fists and clubs. Half-conscious, he was barely aware of what happened next.

  The roar of a dirt bike sounded at the edge of the crowd, the engine sputtering to a stop. A deep, authoritative voice sounded out: “Greetings, Christians!”

  “Doke!” cried the crowd. “Doke is here!”

  “Doke! Doke!”

  The crowd parted and a mountain of a man strode into the ring, dressed in a denim jacket with the sleeves ripped off, brawny arms tattooed, big iron cross dangling from a silver chain around his neck, assault rifle slung across his back. His long blond hair whipped in the winds generated by the fires.

  He turned, embraced Eddy. “Christ be with you!” He released Eddy from his embrace and pivoted to the crowd. Doke radiated easy charm, a complement to Eddy’s ascetic severity. With a mysterious grin, he reached into a bag and removed a glass bottle filled with a clear liquid, unscrewed the cap, flicked it away, and stuffed a rag into the hole, leaving the end dangling. Then, holding the rag in place with two fingers, he shook the bottle and held it up. The crowd roared. Ford smelled gasoline. With his other arm he raised a Bic lighter until both arms were over his head. He waved them back and forth and did a full turn around, like a rock star onstage. “Wood!” he cried, his voice hoarse. “Bring us wood!”

  Eddy said, “ ‘And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire!’ The Bible is clear on this point. Those who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior are cast into everlasting fire. This, my fellow Christians, is what God wants.”

  “Burn him! Burn the Antichrist!” responded the crowd.

  “‘And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire,’ ” Eddy continued, “‘ cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are.’ ”

  “Stop it! In the name of God, don’t do this!” Kate shouted.

  Heaps of dead piñon branches, cactus husks, and sagebrush bushes were passed over the heads of the crowd and tossed at the foot of the tree. A brush-pile began to grow.

  “This is God’s promise to the unbelievers,” said Eddy, striding back and forth in front of the growing pile. “‘And they shall be tormented day and night, for ever and ever.’ What we do here is sanctioned by God and confirmed repeatedly in the Bible. I give you Revelation 14:11: ‘And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night.’ ”

  The brushpile grew helter-skelter. Several men began kicking it up around Hazelius.

  “Don’t do this!” Kate screamed again.

  The pile reached Hazelius’s upper thighs.

  “ ‘And fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them,’ ” quoted Eddy.

  Cactus husks, sagebrush, and rabbitbrush, explosively dry, continued to pile up, burying Hazelius to his waist.

  “We’re ready to do God’s will,” Eddy said quietly.

  Doke stepped forward, raised his arms again, Bic in one hand, Molotov cocktail in the other. The crowd fell back and a silence followed. The man did another half turn, hands raised. The crowd shuffled farther back, awed.

  Doke flicked on the lighter and lit the Molotov cocktail. The dangling rag flowered into flame. Turning, he pitched he lighted bottle into the pile. There was a whump! and fire blossomed inside the brush, erupting upward with a loud crackling.

  A great “Ohhhh!” went up from the crowd.

  Ford braced himself, his arm around Kate, supporting her as she swayed, nearly fainting. They all watched in silence. Nobody turned away.

  As the flames mounted, Hazelius spoke, his voice steady and clear: “The universe never forgets.”

  75

  NELSON BEGAY WATCHED THE HUMAN PYRE with mounting fury. Burning
a man alive. This is what the Spanish had done to his ancestors if they didn’t convert. And here it was happening all over again.

  But he could think of no way to stop it.

  The flames leapt up, catching the man’s tattered lab coat. They obscured his face and scorched off his hair with a sizzling flash.

  Still the man stood.

  The flames mounted up with a roar, his clothes blackening and burning off in strips, like fiery confetti.

  The man didn’t flinch.

  The roaring fire consumed his clothes and began charring and peeling off his very skin; his eyes melted and ran out of their sockets. And still the man never moved, never flinched—and the sad half smile never left his face even as his face was scorched. The fire caught the ropes holding him to the tree and burned them off—and yet he still stood, solid as a rock. How could it be? Why didn’t he fall? Even as the dead piñon he was tied to went up in a writhing column of fire, the flames leaping twenty, thirty feet into the air, he remained standing, until he had completely disappeared into the pillar of fire. From a hundred feet away Begay could feel the heat of the fire on his face, heard it roaring like a beast, the outermost branches of the tree like so many burning claws; and then the flaming tree collapsed in a great shower of sparks that swirled into the heavens, so high they seemed to join the stars themselves.

  There was nothing left of Hazelius. The man had completely vanished.

  The other prisoners, held in a group at gunpoint nearby, looked on in absolute horror. Some were weeping, holding hands, arms around each other.

  They’re next, thought Begay. The thought was intolerable.

  Doke was already reaching into his bag, pulling out another bottle.

  “Screw this,” said Becenti under his breath. “Are we just gonna let this happen?”

  Begay turned to look at him. “No, Willy. No, by God, we’re not.”

  FORD STARED AT THE DYING FIRE dumbstruck with disbelief and horror. Where Hazelius had just stood there was a great crumbling heap of coals, nothing more. Ford held Kate tightly, supporting her. She stared into the coals, her smudged face streaked with tears, her body still. Nobody moved or spoke.

  They would be next.

  The crowd was suddenly quiet. The preacher, Eddy, stood to one side, Bible clutched to his chest in two bony hands. His eyes looked hollow and haggard.

  Doke, the tattooed man, also stared into the fire, his face radiant.

  Eddy raised his head and looked at the crowd. He pointed a shaking hand at the heap of coals. “ ‘You shall trample the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet.’ ”

  His harangue woke the crowd up. They shifted uneasily. “Amen,” said a voice, echoed feebly by others.

  “ ‘Ashes under the soles of your feet,’ ” Eddy repeated.

  A few more ragged amens broke out.

  “And now,” he said. “My friends, the time has now come for the disciples of the Antichrist. We are Christians. We are forgiving. They must be given a chance to accept Jesus. Even the greatest sinner must be given one last, final chance. On your knees! ”

  A follower hit Ford across the back of his head and he involuntarily dropped to his knees. Kate joined him, pulling him close.

  “Pray to Our Lord Christ Jesus for the salvation of their souls!”

  Doke knelt on one knee, Eddy following, and soon the entire crowd was kneeling on the desert sand in the ruddy glow of the dying fire, amid a rising murmur of prayer.

  Another explosion rumbled across the mesa and the ground shook.

  “Do you,” said Eddy, “the disciples of the Antichrist, confess your apostasy and accept Jesus as your personal savior? Do you accept Jesus wholeheartedly, without reservation? Will you join us and become part of God’s great army?”

  Absolute silence. Ford squeezed Kate’s hand. He wished she’d speak, wished she’d agree. But if he couldn’t do it himself, how could he expect her to?

  “Will not one of you repudiate your heresy and accept Jesus? Not one wants to be saved from the fire of this world and the everlasting fires of the next?”

  Ford felt a rush of boiling anger. He raised his head. “I’m a Christian, a Catholic. I have no heresy to repudiate.”

  Eddy took a deep breath and spoke in a quavering voice, his hand raised dramatically to the listening crowd. “Catholics are not Christians. Catholicism’s spirit is one of idolatrous adoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

  An uncertain murmur of agreement.

  “It’s the spirit of demonism, as is evident by the vain repetition of Hail Marys in the Rosary Prayer. It’s the idolatrous worship of graven images, in violation of God’s commandments.”

  A rage took hold of Ford, which he tried to master. He rose up. “How dare you,” he said in a low voice. “How dare you.”

  Eddy raised the gun and pointed it at him. “Priests have brainwashed you Catholics for fifteen hundred years. You don’t read the Bible. You do what the priests tell you. Your pope prays to graven images and kisses the feet of statues. The word of God is clear that we’re to bow to Jesus and none other, not Mary or the so-called saints. Give up your blasphemous religion—or suffer the wrath of the Lord God.”

  “You’re the real blasphemers,” said Ford, staring at the crowd.

  Eddy raised the shaking gun and pointed it at Ford’s right eye. “Your church is straight out of the mouth of Hell! Give it up!”

  “Never.”

  The gun steadied as Eddy took aim from four inches away, his finger tightening on the trigger.

  76

  THE REVEREND DON T. SPATES SLAMMED down the phone. Still out of order. His Internet connection was also down. He thought of going over to the Silver Cathedral media office and turning on the television to see if there was any news, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was afraid to leave, afraid to get up from his desk—afraid of what he might discover.

  He checked his watch. Four-thirty A.M. Two hours until dawn. When the sun rose, he would go straight to Dobson. He would put himself in his lawyer’s hands. Dobson would handle the whole thing. Sure, it would cost money. But after this, the donations would be like a gusher. He just needed to weather the storm. He’d been through storms before, like when those two whores reported him to the newspapers. He thought then his whole world was over. And yet, a month later he was back in business, preaching in the Cathedral, and now he was the hottest televangelist in the business.

  Pulling out a handkerchief, he mopped his face, wiped around his eyes, forehead, nose, and mouth, leaving a brown stain of old makeup on the white linen. He looked at it in disgust and tossed it in the trash. He poured another cup of coffee, splashed in a shot of vodka, and drank it down with a shaking hand.

  He put the cup down so hard it broke in two. The rare Sèvres cup had split perfectly down the center, as if cleaved. He held the pieces in his hands, staring at them, and then, in a sudden fury, threw them across the room.

  Lurching to his feet, he went to the window, threw it open, and stared. Outside, all was dark and silent. The world slept. But not in Arizona. Terrible things could be happening out there. But it wasn’t his fault. He had devoted his life to doing Christ’s work on earth. I believe in honor, religion, duty, and country.

  If only the sun would rise. He imagined himself cosseted in the hushed, wood-paneled confines of his lawyer’s offices on 13th Street, and he felt comforted. At first light he’d rouse his chauffeur and head to Washington.

  As he looked down the darkened, rain-slick streets, he heard the distant sound of sirens. A moment later he saw something coming down Laskin Road: police cars and a wagon, lights flashing, followed by vans. He ducked back inside and slammed the window, heart pounding. They weren’t coming for him. Of course not. What was wrong with him? He went back to his desk, sat down, reached for more coffee and vodka. Then he remembered the broken cup. To hell with the cup. Sweeping up the bottle in his hand, he tipped it to his lips and sucked down a mouthful.


  He put the bottle down, exhaled. They were probably just chasing niggers out of the yacht club down the way.

  A loud crash in the Silver Cathedral made him jump. Suddenly there were noises, voices, shouts, the blaring of police radios.

  He couldn’t move.

  A moment later his office door boomed open and men in FBI flak jackets came barging in, crouching, guns drawn. They were followed by an enormous black agent with a shaved head.

  Spates remained seated, unable to comprehend.

  “Mr. Don Spates?” asked the agent, unfolding a shield. “Federal Bureau of Investigation. Special Agent in Charge Cooper Johnson.”

  Spates could say nothing. He just stared.

  “Are you Mr. Don Spates?”

  He nodded.

  “Place your hands on the desk, Mr. Spates.”

  He held his fat, liver-spotted hands out and placed them on the desk.

  “Stand up, keeping your hands in sight.”

  He stood up clumsily, the chair falling with a crash to the floor behind him.

  “Cuff him.”

  Another agent came around, took a firm grasp of one forearm, pulled it behind his back, pulled the other one behind—and Spates felt, with stupefaction, the cold steel slip around his wrists.

  Johnson walked up to Spates and parked himself in front, arms folded, legs apart.

  “Mr. Spates?”

  Spates stared back. His mind was completely blank.

  The agent spoke in a low, rapid voice. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense. Do you understand?”

  Spates stared. This couldn’t be happening to him.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Wha—?”

  “He’s drunk, Cooper,” said another man. “Don’t bother, we’ll just have to Mirandize him again.”