Costume Not Included

by Matthew Hughes

  Denby caught the man's eye. "What is it?" he said.

  The eyes that met his were frightened. "The Dow just fell through five thousand." The ashen face twitched. "It's all over."

  A sound went through the crowd, like the growling sigh of a wounded bear. The singing trailed off as the members of the big choir turned to look at the huge screen. Denby followed their gaze and saw the image of a swarthy, bearded man touching the hand of an overfed man whose face he recognized without knowing the name. Then the porker began to run in place, his head bent impossibly backwards.

  When the first thing climbed out of the man's grossly distorted mouth, the crowd made the wounded-bear noise again. When the second monster emerged, the policeman heard shouts and whimpers. From somewhere behind him came high-pitched, hysterical laughter, abruptly choked off.

  But now a hush fell over the thousands of people. The screen showed a closed door. Denby recognized it. And he recognized the man who came out into a strobing, flickering glare of lights. He watched Billy Lee Hardacre hold up a laptop and say something about a prophet posting a message on the internet.

  Then the image changed. The bearded man, relaxed in a chair, was saying, "These are the end times. The kingdom is at hand. Make yourselves ready. Turn away from the world. Turn to the Lord and to each other. And do not be afraid. All shall be made new."

  Then it was back to Hardacre, who said, "It couldn't be more simple. These are the end times."

  "The end of the world?" said someone off screen. Then the image cut to a studio somewhere, with anxious men and women grouped around a table, monitors in the background, laptops in front of them. A hard-faced woman looked up into the camera and said, "The Pope has scheduled a statement for" – she looked at her watch – "about an hour from now. We're told the President will address the nation from the Rose Garden in a few minutes."

  She rubbed her forehead. "Meanwhile, the man who calls himself Jesus of Nazareth has dropped out of sight, apparently leaving it to television preacher Billy Lee Hardacre to be his spokesperson. But the Reverend Hardacre has had precious little to say."

  She looked to the man on her right. "Roy, what's happening elsewhere?"

  The newsman's face, normally full of wry humor, was stark. "The Pentagon has put all branches of the military on full war alert," he said. "The Director of Homeland Security is reported to have told the President that he should invoke his emergency powers and place the country under martial law."

  The man ran a hand over his face. "Meanwhile, there are reports of rioting and looting in several cities. A gunman is reported to have opened fire at a shopping center in Kansas City. In Tucson, several men in Kevlar helmets and body armor have sealed off a block in the downtown business district. They have commandeered a truck and are apparently emptying the vaults of a large bank."

  He looked at the woman and said, "Back to you, Jane."

  She was staring at something on her laptop. Now she looked up, as if seeing her surroundings for the first time. She unclipped a lapel mike from the front of her blouse, ripped away a flat black box that had been taped to the back of her skirt and dropped it on the table. "The hell with this," she said, getting up. "I've got kids."

  At the top of the Justice Center's steps a balding, stocky man with a bullhorn pushed his way through the rearmost members of the choirs. "Repent!" he cried, his amplified voice echoing off the glass walls of the City Hall. "Repent or burn forever in–"

  Somebody knocked the bullhorn away from his lips. The man struck back and the one who had silenced him grabbed him by the front of his suit jacket. They wrestled and fell, rolling down the steps, knocking over choristers who weren't able to get out of the way.

  "Jesus," said Denby. He tried to push his way toward the fight, but someone tripped him and he half-fell against a woman in a flowered dress. She screamed as he clutched at her to keep himself upright.

  "Get off her!" said a man who could have been her husband; the ages matched. He seized Denby's collar and tried to drag him away. The captain reached for his badge, but somebody's elbow knocked it to the ground.

  "I'm a cop!" he told the man who had hold of his jacket.

  "Who gives a shit!" said the man, delivering a glancing punch that made Denby's ear feel like it had been partly torn off. "It's all over now!"

  Denby had a 9mm pistol under his arm and a canister of pepper spray in his jacket pocket. He went for the latter and in a moment his attacker was reeling back, hands to his tear-stained face.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," said an amplified voice, "the President of the United States."

  The crowd made its wounded sound again. Even the sobbing man was trying to see the big screen. The President looked grim. "My fellow Americans," he said, "the thing I most want to say to you today is what another president once said to the American people in another time of trouble: we have nothing to fear but fear itself."

  He paused for a moment, turning to each of the cameras aimed at him. "There is no cause for alarm. America is not under attack. No natural disaster has struck. There has apparently been another computer malfunction in the stock market, but the economy remains sound.

  "I am asking you, as your President, to remain calm. Do your jobs, or go to your homes. Stay off the streets and allow the authorities to maintain control.

  "We will get through this. It is not, I repeat, not the end of the world."

  "Oh, yes it is," said a fervent voice nearby. "Mine eyes have seen the glory!"

  "Shut up!" said another voice and Denby heard sounds of a scuffle, a little knot of violence pulsing through the crowd. But it was moving away from him.

  The restless mob seemed to be pulsing, the people moving in on each other, then edging away. Space opened around Denby and he saw a glint of gold out of the corner of his eye: his badge. He stooped and recovered it.

  The once-wry reporter was back on the screen, his face haggard. "Have we got it?" he was saying to someone off camera. "No, not that one, the other one."

  A man standing near Denby, looking up at the screen, said, "This can't be happening."

  A woman on the man's other side said, "It is happening. It's on TV!"

  The captain realized there was nothing he could do here. His instinct, his impulse to get to where the trouble was, had let him down. He turned and pushed his way toward the rear of the mob, holding up his badge as if it might make a difference. And maybe it did. In a couple of minutes he found the going easier, the people not so closely packed, until all at once he was out of the crowd. He was on the west side of the plaza, near a fountain that spurted water in several streams out of a complicated structure of bronze struts and plates. It supposedly represented the city's pioneers.

  He sat on the fountain's edge and scooped water to wash the sweat from his face. Across the plaza, over the heads of the throng, he could see images flashing in rapid succession across the big screen: police behind riot shields beating back a stone-throwing mob; cars overturned and on fire: someone smashing a newspaper sales box through a plate glass window, then jumping through the jagged gap; a helicopter's view of city streets packed with people, flowing like ants.

  All at once, Denby knew. This was what the time traveler had come back to prevent: the collapse of civilization, the end of order. And he knew that Hardacre was central to it. That's why the preacher had been slipped the unreadable book and sold the line that his weird son-in-law was a prophet – as some kind of distraction that would prevent him from doing whatever he'd done to bring this about. But it hadn't worked – at least not yet.

  Chaos was breaking out. The authorities were urging calm – nothing to fear but fear itself – but if that didn't work, Denby knew what would come next. Homeland Security had been briefing senior police officers for years. Next would come men in black uniforms with automatic weapons, backed up by special forces troops in armored personnel carriers and helicopter gunships. If necessary, behind them would come tanks.

  Denby sat beside the fountain and saw i
t all in his mind's eye. The way the world ends, he remembered from somewhere, not with a bang but a whimper. From anarchy in the streets the road led to the future wasteland he had been shown. He knew what he had to do: find the time traveler and help him make this stop.

  The kid, he thought. He was the only lead. He took out his phone, dialed Chesney's work number. He got a computer telling him no one was available to speak to him, though his call was very important to Paxton Life and Casualty. Then Denby tried the kid's home number and got a live person. It took a few moments for him to figure out that he was talking to a reporter who'd staked out the apartment.

  But that's the only place he's likely to show up, the captain thought. He doesn't like the world outside. Not enough pools of light.

  Uniformed police were arriving now, having come on foot through the car-choked streets. A uniformed inspector approached Denby and said, "It's a goober, Denby. Go get into your bag and get back here. You're not on detached duty anymore."

  The captain saw no point arguing. "On my way," he said, getting up from the fountain. But when the senior officer turned his back Denby went, not toward Police Central but toward the riverside apartment house where Chesney Arnstruther and his time-traveling descendant might be found. He would throw out the gate-crashing media and wait.

  Half a block later, the captain changed his mind. He retraced his steps to Civic Plaza, turned and headed for Police Central.

  "You come to the Garden of Eden," Chesney's mother said to him, "and… that's the first thing you think of doing?"

  Chesney was pretty sure that it was probably the first thing the original pair of inhabitants had thought of, too. But he had long ago learned not to voice all of his thoughts to his mother – especially any that concerned sex. He well remembered the time, at the age of ten, when he had asked her if she had had sexual intercourse with his father. He had only been trying to establish that it was a universal rule in procreation, as a kid at school had maintained – Mary and the visitant angel notwithstanding – but his mother had not taken his question in a spirit of scientific inquiry. He could still taste the soap, way deep in the back of his throat.

  "It's the Tree of Life, Mother," he said. "It has a… an effect on you."

  "Put some clothes on," Letitia said. "Both of you."

  Chesney did as she said, hunting around for his underpants while Melda gathered up her clothes and went behind a bush. But as he pulled up his briefs, the young man watched his mother, and saw her expression change as she looked up at the great tree, and at the strange, banana-like fruit that hung from its branches. Her hand went halfway toward the lowest-hanging specimen; then it was as if she had just noticed what her hand was doing and pulled it back, clasping it with the other one then putting them both behind her.

  Chesney pulled his trousers on and closed them up. As he fastened his belt, he said, "What do you want, Mother?"

  If he'd been struck by the wistful look with which she'd regarded the fruit, he was outright surprised to hear her say, in a small voice, "I think I need your help."

  "With what?"

  He could see that she was reluctant to say it. He put on his shirt and began to button it methodically, as always starting at the top and working his way down. Finally, as he fastened the last one, she said, "With Billy Lee." It was not until Chesney had his shirttail tucked in that she finished with, "I think he's maybe doing some harm."

  "Maybe?" Chesney said. "I don't believe I've ever heard you use that word before." He'd always assumed that his mother saw nothing but pools of clear light, all around her – although she often didn't care for what might be so clearly illuminated.

  "All right," she said. "He is doing harm, real harm." She looked in every direction but at her son.

  Another son might have been deeply moved to see a woman of Letitia Arnstruther's firmness of mind and spirit reduced to such an abject state. Reconciliation, even hugging, might have ensued. But Chesney was not another son; all his mother's distress did for him was to make him deeply uncomfortable. Much as he disliked his parent's unending campaign to direct his life, the prospect of having to deal with an insecure, uncertain Letitia was moving him toward an unaccustomed sense of panic.

  "What do you want me to do?" he said.

  At Police Central, off-duty officers were pouring in and uniformed personnel were pouring out, many of the latter bearing transparent plastic shields and dressed in riot gear. Denby took the elevator but rode it past the twentieth floor where his office and uniform were and straight up to the roof. As he expected, he found the department's helicopter on its pad, its pilot in his seat and its rotors slowly turning.

  He went straight to the passenger-side door, climbed in and fastened the seat belt. The pilot, a sergeant named Borisovich, looked at him curiously. "Nobody told me you'd be coming on this one, captain," the man said. "Thought it was just the chief and the deputy watch commander."

  Denby saw no point in prolonging the confusion. He drew his pistol, racked the slide, and pointed it at the pilot. "Get us up," he said.

  The man registered shock but recovered as quickly as a good pilot should. "Not gonna," he said. "And I don't reckon you can fly this thing if I'm sitting here dead."

  The captain said, "Did you know Gabe Martinez?"

  "Sure. He helped train me."

  "He ever tell you how he flew Hueys in Vietnam?"

  Borisovich's face turned cagey. "Yeah."

  "He ever tell you about the time a RPG exploded right next to him in mid-air, and he had to fly back to base with shrapnel wounds all down his left side?"

  The pilot looked straight ahead. "Maybe," he said.

  "So you could probably do it with just one bullet wound," Denby said. He poked the muzzle of the pistol into the fleshy part of the man's thigh. "Say, right here?"

  "This is seriously fucked up, captain," said Borisovich, but he upped the revs on the engine. Moments later, they were off the roof and, at Denby's direction, heading south at the machine's top speed.

  The detective had put it together. The time traveler had come back from his future wasteland to stop Billy Lee Hardacre from precipitating a mass panic that would somehow lead to the end of the world – or at least the end of civilization. He couldn't quite see how the crimefighting fitted in, but that was because history was lived forward and understood backward, and he was living this moment instead of studying it in retrospect. One thing he was sure of, though: the strange book that the preacher had been working on with the supposed angel had been part of the plan to derail Armageddon, and Denby had impulsively stolen that book; an act of theft that had led to its destruction.

  So there was a very good chance, Denby thought, that he, himself, was responsible for the Hell on Earth that was about to descend on the world. And thus it was up to him to stop it. He told the pilot to follow the highway south; he would tell him when to turn toward Hardacre's estate.

  He wouldn't be surprised to find the time traveler there. If not, Denby would take care of things himself.

  "How can you help us?" Chesney asked the demon. "I dunno," said Xaphan. "Question is, do I gotta hurt him?"

  "No," said Chesney and his mother together.

  But Melda had a different take on what the demon had said. "Why is that the question?"

  The weasel face took on an even shiftier than usual cast. "The basic rule," the fiend said.

  Chesney remembered. "Can't interfere with another contract?" he said. "But Billy Lee doesn't have a contract with Hell."

  Letitia drew herself up to her full height from which she glared down at the demon with sufficient force to have shattered it into smoking fragments. "Of course he does not!"

  Incredibly, Xaphan managed to look even more shifty. "Not as such, no."

  "What aren't you telling us?" the young man said.

  "We've been through this," the demon said, preparing to count on its fingers. "The temperature in downtown Kabul, Madonna's shoe size, the odds against tossing a coin and coming up h
eads six million times in a row, the–"

  Chesney interrupted. "For the rum and cigars," he said, "last chance: does Hardacre have a deal of any kind with Hell?"

  The fiend drained its ever-present tumbler and said, "Of a kind."

  Letitia squawked, but her son bored in on his assistant. "Specify."

  "He thought our guy was an angel, the same one he dealt with when we had the strike."

  Chesney's mother gasped. "That's cheating!"

  "No kiddin'?" said the fiend. "Imagine that."

  "You're saying the preacher took help from a demon he thought was an angel," Melda said, "and that's the same as signing a contract?"

  Xaphan shrugged. "That's the way we're seein' it. Constructive culpability, that's the term."

  "But he thought he was doing the work of the Lord!" Letitia said.