Carvers, Nevada
As Jake and Mary approached Carvers, about a third of the way through the Big Smokey Valley and roughly two hours past Gold Strike, like clockwork, Mary had to pee. The gas station (pretty much the only reason for the town’s existence) seemed about as unremarkable as it got, with a single three-pump island in the middle of a dusty parking lot, alongside which Jake ground to a halt.
Two cars sat in front of the faded red adobe building: one, a newer model blue sedan, the other, a rusted beater SUV from back when Clinton sat in the Oral Office, doing strange things with Cuban cigars. Both were covered in a patina of dust.
Mary rushed into the station through the flimsy screen door, once again “asking” Jake to walk The Noodle. Molly seemed indifferent about the need, but delighted to get out and move around, so they trotted to wherever her nose led, as Mary did whatever she was going to do.
The golden fur ball tired of it after a few minutes, apparently not finding enough interesting smells in that middle of nowhere, except for the dust, which was making her sneeze. He escorted her back to the truck and filled her bowl, setting it onto the ground beside her, then leaned against the cool steel of the SUV’s roof.
The dry air felt cold, the kind of chill that cuts through to the bone if you’re out in it long enough. Dust swirled. Off to the right, in an empty lot next to the gas station, a mini tornado spun, grew, then twisted apart. He watched it in the silence.
Until he noticed the motor home.
Eleven
"But what was this world created for?" said Candide.
"To drive us mad," replied Martin.
Voltaire
Candide
1
Crew Quarters
Yellowstone National Park
The scream ripped from Maggie’s lips as Rick Golatta yanked her shoulder back into its socket. The pain was huge - a black and slobbering beast, sinking its teeth into her flesh and shaking her like a rag doll. She passed out.
When she awoke, she found herself lying on her bed, back at the main compound. A dream, she thought. It had only been a dream. But then she tried to move.
Not a dream. Oh, God, it hadn’t been a dream.
Of the forty-one people who had been on the bus, thirty-six were dead. Doctor Shintake: dead. Doctor Higgenblat; dead. Suzie Babbett: dead. And Maggie Jones?
Maggie Jones lay on her bed with her left arm taped to her chest. Her head hurt. Her ribs hurt. And her heart? Shattered into a million pieces.
A soft knock sounded at her door, and Rick Golatta entered. “Still with us, I see,” he said.
She said nothing.
After a moment, he said: “You are still with us? Still gracing us with your presence?”
He was trying to be charming, trying to make light of the darkest moment in her entire life. This man with his octopus hands, this man who had scarred his nephew for life with his tales of the Monster Under the Ground, was trying to be charming.
Then again, he could just be a smart ass. That would be more in keeping with his character.
“Can I get you anything?”
“Water,” she croaked. Her throat felt like sandpaper.
He pointed with his chin. “There’s a bottle on the table next to you.”
She looked to her right, saw the bottle and reached for it. The cap was still in place. She only had one good arm. She looked at it with an expression of mixed horror and embarrassment.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Rick swore, strode to her bedside, grabbed the bottle from her right hand and slapped it into her left. “You can manage. Just takes a bit of ingenuity.”
Smart ass it is. She unscrewed the cap, transferred the bottle from left to right, and sipped. The water was tepid, but wet, and it slid down her parched throat. She guzzled.
“And now, if you’re done being pampered,” he began, “why don’t you see if you can get out of that bed. Don’t want to miss the show.”
“The show?” she asked.
“The Monster is waking up.”
2
Inside the Motor Home
Carvers, Nevada
The Animal had left fifteen minutes ago. Dani put the time to good use. Two of the Mickey Mouse ear butterfly nuts lay on the ground beneath her elbow. They’d been impossibly tight, and her fingers were raw, but the nuts were now gone and she as that much closer to...what, exactly? To being free. And then?
Her ribs hurt from both the beating and from the awkward position under the table. She rested, just for a moment. She knew she didn’t have much time, but oh, it hurt so much!
She’d heard what sounded like three firecrackers about five minutes ago – pop, pop, pop – but kept right on working. Dani knew, or thought she did, what those pops must have been: gunfire. And she knew what it meant: somebody was dead. But she wasn’t. She was still alive.
And then she heard another car pull into the lot. Keep working . . .
3
Carvers, Nevada
The motor home sat parked along the right side of the gas station, almost out of sight, but Jake could still see the back bumper, and the sticker that lay upon it: Palin for President. The cop in Tonopah had said the motor home they were looking for - the one into which Dani had been abducted - had that bumper sticker. What were the odds this wasn’t the one? Nonexistent.
He put Molly and her bowl back into the truck and was about to reach for the gun beneath the driver’s seat, when the screen door burst open, falling to the ground, as the hinges ripped from the dry-rotted door frame. Out came his mother. She was not alone.
Freddy Perdue, all five-foot-nine of him, older, thin to the point of being emaciated, with close-cropped dirty hair and a face that hadn’t seen a razor in at least a week, shoved her out ahead of him, his left hand obscenely squeezing her breast as his arm locked her tight to his torso. He held his right hand behind him.
“Hiya Kiddo!” he exclaimed. “Surprised to see me?”
4
Medford, Oregon
Bobby Drummond woke from what could barely be classified as a nap with the sound of a blaring radio alarm that sounded as if it had been attached directly to his ear. In reality, it sat about two feet away, on the night stand of his hotel room. It did not come with music to gently lull him awake. It did not come with an annoying buzz to yank him out of a restful slumber. It came, instead, as the harbinger of more bad news.
“...and the death toll in Juneau, and Vancouver, and Seattle, and Portland, and San Francisco continues to rise. The Associated Press reports that FEMA has declared this to be the greatest disaster in human history. The staggering numbers of dead and injured have reached well over the half-million mark. Damage to property and infrastructure has reached into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of people, left homeless by the massive earthquakes, have taken to the road. These are added to the estimated one-point-two million refugees from the states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, fleeing the possibility of an eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. The President has declared the entire Western United States to be a Federal Disaster Area. Canada, the United Kingdom, China, and even Russia have pledged to help in this time of National crisis. In what has been called the largest relief effort ever mounted, the Department of Defense has mobilized Reserve forces from East of the Mississippi River to bring aid to the stricken region, and the Governors of eighteen states have thus far called up the National Guard to assist. In a related story, the President has asked for a National Day of Prayer for–”
Bobby slapped the snooze button and silenced the radio. A National Day of prayer? He thought, groaning his way stiffly out of bed. Fat lot of good that’ll do.
He had finally been relieved of his job as Professional Babysitter for the Reverend Fucking Jericho sometime around noon, and had been told to report back on duty at six p.m.. It was now, according to the clock radio he’d just slapped into silence, four-fifty-three.
The coffee he’d used to sustain him through th
e previous night and half of the day, had kept his nerve-endings buzzing with caffeine, and his sleep hovering just below a light doze. His eyes felt puffy, and his head felt as if someone had stuffed one of the hotel pillows into it. His body ached. He had to piss.
He took care of the last of these, then choked down five ibuprofen tabs to deal with the second-to-last. He started the pathetically small pot of Free In-Room Coffee to address the pillow in his head, and turned on the shower. This was going to be one long fucking night.
5
Carvers, Nevada
Without taking his eyes off them, Jake reached into the truck and pulled out Mary’s gun. Molly growled deep and low and he shut the truck door just in case she got any wild ideas.
“Let her go, asshole,” he said, easing toward the nose of his truck and cocking the pistol, keeping it out of sight.
“Now, is that any way to greet your Daddy?” He pulled his right hand out from behind his back. It held an automatic, probably a nine-millimeter, but Jake couldn’t be sure, and it wouldn’t have mattered in any case. The asshole held the barrel against Mary’s temple.
Jake answered by pointing the .357 at his head. Mary’s eyes grew to the size of Frisbees, but he couldn’t pay any attention. “Let her go, asshole,” he repeated through clenched teeth.
An odd thought floated through his head: I sound like some B-Movie tough guy. As if to give lie to the observation, his testicles felt like they were somewhere up around his aorta. His mouth felt like part of the desert landscape. At the same time, however, that black kernel of inhumanity inside of him, that place where his blood lust lay sleeping, except in his nightmares, that inner-demon that had enabled him to kill eighteen men in the desert, woke up, looked around, and began to grin.
Kill this motherfucker. Kill this motherfucker.
“Such foul language,” Perdue replied, moving so that Mary’s head stood between himself and the bead Jake had on his eyeball. The top of the asshole’s skull peeked over the top of hers, but nowhere near enough for Jake to risk a shot - not toward his own mother. “Didn’t you teach him any manners?” Perdue said into Mary’s ear.
She squirmed against his grip. “You are such a shithead!”
6
Print Shop
Medford, Oregon
Richard Crenshaw - publicist extraordinaire for the New and Improved Jericho Ministries - suffered a small pang of conscience, but shook it off and carried on with his assigned task. He stood in the back of Barnstable Printers, supervising the creation of hundreds of signs and placards.
Some bore the obligatory Repent Now or John 3:16 slogans that had always been great moneymakers. He’d even added one of his own creation: Give unto God and He shall Give unto You. An oldie, but a goodie that always opened the wallets, as were the others. Some of the new ones, though, had him worried.
Be the Sword of God, read one of them. Be the Iron Fist of God read another. Smite God’s Enemies read a third. These were not new ideas, at least not new to Christianity. He knew from his own upbringing as an Episcopalian, and from his association with a few Southern Baptists during his first year at NYU, that the God of the Christian Bible was one violent son of a bitch. But such violent rhetoric created nut-jobs who blew up abortion clinics, not wealthy parishoners who gave them shitloads of money, and money had always been what this whole charade was about.
Until now.
Where did the violent streak come from? He wondered, but came up with no answer. He knew Bourassa had a well of violence a mile deep inside of him, but the exercise of it had always been practical in nature. Jericho and the Security Chief didn’t think he knew about it, but he did. Keeping his mouth shut had seemed to be the best response to it, but now...?
To tell the truth, Bourassa scared the crap out of him, and he supposed the man knew it. Never a good idea to poke at a snake. Jericho, on the other hand, had fulfilled every one of the promises he’d made when the man recruited him - what was it, five years ago? Very lucrative years, as his account in the Caymans could attest. Best not to rock the boat.
Still . . . Smite God’s Enemies? What the fuck was that all about? Had something changed?
It seemed different, somehow, after Jericho woke from his short coma, following the earthquake and their hasty departure from Boise. That had been a nightmare, all unto itself.
The shaking ground he could have taken. The roof collapse, while frightening, hadn’t been that bad, once it was over. But the aftermath: the screaming people, the pleas for help that were utterly ignored as they rushed Jericho to the hospital, and the look of horror from their staff - people who’d been with them from the beginning - as he, Bourassa, and Jericho headed for the private jet, and left all of them behind to fend for themselves. The evacuation had been in full swing, by that point. The roads in every direction but east were jammed with cars to the point where nothing was moving. The panic was just getting started.
And they left them all behind.
Richard had always viewed the con game as benign; criminal, to be sure - make no mistake about that - but not really all that bad. Not really. Not like murder, or anything. Bourassa was a nasty bugger from the start, and he had no illusions about the level of violence within the man, but Jericho hadn’t been that way. He’d never hurt anyone - not physically, at any rate. But now...?
Jericho seemed different. And his eyes . . . They’d always had a quality about them, as if he could look into people’s souls and tell them what their hearts needed to hear. Not anymore. Now those eyes seemed to look through people instead of into them. Seeing into them had always been Jericho’s strongest selling technique. It enthralled the rubes, and turned on the pious women like nobody’s business.
The man had a gift, to be sure. Charisma, some called it. Animal Magnetism. People said Jim Morrison of The Doors had it in bucket-fulls. So did Thomas Jericho. But, then, so did Charlie Manson, and Jim Jones, and Adolf Hitler.
Now, why would he suddenly jump to Hitler? There was that old canard about he who mentioned the Nazis first lost the argument. Had he just lost the argument? Was there an argument to lose?
Fuck this, he thought, finally. No point in complicating things. Keep doing the job. Keep making money. But keep your eyes open.
And don’t turn your back on Bourassa.
7
Medford, Oregon
Bourassa turned to look at Thomas Jericho, his craggy face wearing a frown. They were in a suite of rooms they’d taken in Medford’s “best hotel.” What a joke. It looked like every mid-grade hotel room everywhere, only bigger.
Jericho sat, lotus-style, in one of the overstuffed chairs, as if he were a meditating, skinny Buddha. An expression of what Bourassa supposed passed for rapture sat on the man’s face. The white square of bandage still covered one side of his head. He looked ridiculous, but that wasn’t what caused the frown.
“We’re on a Mission, David,” Jericho said again. “God has told me to scourge this land, to gather His true believers around me and lay waste to all the sinners, as He is laying waste to the land.”
He’d been going on like this for at least a half-hour. At first, Bourassa thought he’d been rehearsing for his next monkey show of pseudo-religious bullshit, designed - as always - to pry loose the maximum contributions. But this was no rehearsal. The guy actually believed, and that made Bourassa nervous.
The con always worked better if you sounded like you believed, and Jericho had been great at it - a real natural. But if he started to believe his own bullshit, then things could get messy and harder to control. There could be real danger in that.
Jericho had the talent. Bourassa had the brains. That’s how it was supposed to work, how it did work, how it had worked, right up until Jericho got hit in the head. But if he started going off script - if he bought into his fantasy of being on a mission from God and stopped thinking of the bottom line - then this con could be at an end.
But maybe not.
Things were changing. Real things
. Life things. The earthquakes fucked things up, good and proper. The damage to the buildings could very well be nothing, compared with the catastrophic damage to the economy. And if the economy was damaged, then the things people valued would be changing. And if Yellowstone blew, as so many were now thinking it would, then money would be damned-near worthless - just so many pieces of useless paper. So real value would change.
If money became worthless, something else would take its place, something different, with a different form. But what?
Power.
Wealth had always gone hand-in-hand with power. Those who had wealth, had power. And those who controlled the power, controlled the wealth.
He walked to the window and peered outside as Jericho droned on and on about his Mission. It wasn’t much of a view, just the park, where their stage had been set, and the Courthouse. The dog and pony show would resume soon, and the crowd had begun to gather and swell.
He looked at them down there, milling about, clustered in small or large groups, drifting, aimless and leaderless. They were scared. Their world had been knocked on its ass and they were looking for answers. And if the volcano blew, life as they knew it would be over, and the scramble for power would begin. Whoever controlled the crowd would control the power.
He turned and looked at Jericho, still blathering on with his nonsense. He could control the crowd. He could harness the power. And if Bourassa controlled him . . .
A smile began to form on the craggy face.
8
Inside the Motor Home
Carvers, Nevada
The last nut wasn’t moving. All the others had come off, and Dani’s mangled right thumb and forefinger were a bloody testament to the fact. As if to bring her misery home, a drop of blood fell nearly into her eye. She wiped at it with her forearm and kept working - is spite of the twinge of pain caused by the uncoordinated position of her still-zip-tied hands.
Pressure (Book 1): Fall Page 16