Not germ-sick, like the flu, but somehow worse. He felt heavy in the wrong places, his center of mass so badly thrown off that even when he gave walking his full attention, he still couldn't keep going in a straight line for more than a few steps at a time. His head felt like it was going to split open and cabbages sprout up through the burst sutures of his skull. He needed help, or he was going to die. If God had meant for him to die, he'd have left him up on the mountain, but he'd given him enough of a lift to make it within staggering distance of the town. It would be a mortal sin, he decided, not to carry out God's will and get help.
He fixed his gaze on the Dairy Queen marquee for the last mile, the tiny red dot swelling with agonizing slowness as he shambled along the shoulder of State Road 117, across the two-lane bridge over the Salmon River, and into White Bird. A few trucks passed by, but none stopped. He noticed one slowing down to watch him, saw eyes big and blank as marbles taking in his obvious plight, then passing on. He shuddered with more than cold. Maybe Grossvater Egil was right about the world. Maybe things were different in the new millennium, and the world truly was Satan's pitiless slaughterhouse.
In the Dairy Queen, they pretty much convinced him. The girl at the counter backed away from him and got the manager. In the pre-lunch lull, there was no one in the dining room but two gangly high school dropouts in DQ uniforms. His luck running true to form, the manager was a fat, middle-aged beaner, who came out and told him to beat it—we don't serve choo people. He didn't have the strength to argue, let alone leave. He pushed his change at them and asked for french fries one last time, then slumped across the counter.
The two boys dragged him out to the dumpster corral behind the Dairy Queen and kicked the shit out of him for about ten minutes. They came back after their shift was over an hour later and beat him up some more before they went home. When the sun began to set, Karl lay in a dumpster on a bed of wilted salad greens and rancid deep-fryer grease, too weak to blink away the snow settling on his eyes.
"Heute abend," he whimpered, "heute abend, gibst nur Jesus Christ…"
Someone stood over him. An angel of the Lord come to collect him, he hoped, but it was probably just the DQ jerks with a bunch of their friends.
"Der Meisterrasse, nicht wahr? Was machst du denn, in diese Mulltonne, Karl?"
"I'm sorry, Grossvater Egil," he managed, though the pain of moving his mouth brought fresh blood, and he swallowed one of his molars. "I thought it was God's will…that I go to get help. But—"
"All is God's will, Karl. Come home, boy. Your family misses you."
"What?"
"The rapture we have prayed for has come, Karl. Even for you, it will come." He did not remember being brought back to Heilige Berg, but he remembered the eyes, like the heads of steel nails in the dark, and the hands lifting him up, carrying him back, once again, to be purified.
And here he sat, waiting for Grossvater Egil and his surprise. It had been a day for surprises. When he'd awakened in his own bunk this morning, warm and dry, but still sick and sore, his mother and Heidi stood over him. Heidi held a baby. She was nicer to him than she'd ever been before, but she didn't try to tell him the baby was his, anymore. It was about three months premature, he figured; he'd never seen anything that tiny and unfinished alive outside of an incubator. It studied him with its lidless gray eyes, never making a sound, except once, it tugged Heidi's shirt and she leaned down to listen to it whisper in her ear, and then carried it out of the room. His parents were nice to him, too, so cloyingly sweet he had to get away.
The Jägers greeted him by his proper name, not even little Werther called him Swinefucker. All around the compound, people worked at their respective tasks. The children all shoveled snow, singing a merry work song. It was like the pastoral pictures in the dining hall. It was the realization of what Karl had fuzzily expected to find when he first came to Heilige Berg, but never saw. It was like the bad things that happened before were all a dream, like maybe everything that happened since he stepped off the bus in this place was just a nightmare. But he still felt sick, like his head was going to burst open and a demented clown marching band was going to goose-step out of it.
The Jägers escorted him up to Grossvater Egil's lodge and opened the door for him, but Grossvater Egil was not there, and he'd been waiting here ever since.
As his relief turned to confusion, then a swelling, choking dread, he found a very peculiar notion growing increasingly predominant in his flitting, half-formed thoughts.
The compound had been delivered, alright, but not by God. If Grossvater Egil had taught him one thing, it was that God didn't work like this. And he thought he had a pretty good idea who was behind it.
A pounding knock at the door. The hall shook with it, sheets of snow sliding off the slanted roof.
"Karl! Make yourself ready!"
Limping, trying to hold his head stiff, he hauled himself to his feet and went to the door, wondering why Grossvater Egil knocked on his own door, and what he would do when he opened it. He passed the hulking Stormtrooper, seeing now a figure of hope, instead of fear. The barrel of the carbine was plugged with lead, the bayonet soldered in place. He reached out—
The door swung open so fast it bashed his right kneecap. He drew himself up into a ball, yelping and tucking his hands behind the injured limb.
Grossvater Egil stood over him, his parka draped in frost, his great silver beard dripping icy water as he shook his head. "You must not keep them waiting," Grossvater Egil touched his shoulder. "You were stupid to run away, but yet you may be saved. Come, boy. The rapture comes again."
Karl looked up into Grossvater Egil's eyes, saw how the bloodshot yellow of his pupils was now flinty gray, the same hue as Heidi's baby's eyes. In that moment, he really did want to believe Grossvater Egil, really needed to believe that God's Healing Word had saved them all from illness and the Tribulations, saved them because they were God's chosen people, and He loved them. When he looked up into the old cleric's eyes, he could believe it, like never before. There was something in them he never saw before, though it was a sin to say so. Grossvater Egil loved him, cared for him, where before there was only righteous disgust.
"We were wrong all along, Karl," Grossvater Egil said, "to think our blood alone was sacred. All the races will be saved. He loves us all, even the Juden. All will be called into the holy light and made whole, made One, with Him."
Karl looked outside. Down the narrow trench dug from the lodge to the open compound courtyard, he saw no Jägers waiting with guns, no sign that this was some sort of trap. In the compound, a big silver bus grumbled as it idled, sick, sunken faces pressed against the windows.
"There are some even sicker than you, Karl. They cannot wait." He knelt beside Karl and his beard, wiry and stiff as chainmail, scraped his ear. "Hab keine Angst, Junge. Heilige Licht is waiting to come into you, and make you whole."
Karl decided. He stood so fast he set his own head spinning, but he lunged at Grossvater Egil as he rose, his right hand driving the SS dagger behind his beard and up through his throat, until it must be dimpling the backside of his eye.
Karl backed away from Grossvater Egil, away from the door. The cleric filled the doorway, a confused, vaguely disappointed cloud passing over his features. His mouth tried to open, but the knife nailed his jaws shut, only a great gush of blood escaped his lips. His hands came up, palms out, as if to ask why he would do such a thing. And Karl felt that he'd made a terrible mistake, and that was thinking that Grossvater Egil could be killed.
He just stood there, meditating on the dagger in his throat. Karl charged him, then, roaring, "Get the fuck away from me, devil!" His hands hit the cleric's chest dead center and drove him back over the threshold. Grossvater Egil offered no resistance, his massive weight tipped over like a cigar store Indian's and he fell on his back on the slippery path outside and was sliding down the trenched walkway like a bobsled when Karl slammed the door and threw one bolt after another and dropped the heav
y pine plank into the bracers on either side of the frame.
You've done it now, Swinefucker.
Frantic, he ransacked the lodge. The main hall was Spartan in its plainness, and offered no weapons or telephones, but he found a door where he'd never noticed one before, behind a curtain that screened the bed. A big padlock hung open on the frame, and the door glided open when he touched it.
He crept into an adjoining, windowless room that must be dug out of the mountainside. He pushed the door shut behind him, shot the bolts on this side, thanking God that Grossvater Egil was paranoid enough to put locks on both sides of all his doors.
Inside, he found computers. Stacks of them on pine utility shelves with fans blowing on them, and a row of monitors, all showing the Heilige Berg logo. When he touched a mouse or a keyboard, a window popped up demanding his User ID and password. He backed away from these, biting his lip. He could use a computer to call for help, he knew, but he didn't have the faintest idea how. Computers had seemed like a geek's plaything in school, and he hadn't even heard the word computer in all his time at Heilige Berg, except when Grossvater Egil railed against them as tools of ZOG in his sermons. He typed 911 into one, then Operator, then help, then hilfe, but the password window wouldn't go away.
Deeper in the bunker room, he found a row of lockers, but no weapons. Just a bunch of trophies, he couldn't figure what else they were good for. A shoebox filled with cash. Nigger clothes. Nigger shoes. Big nigger Afro wigs. Dark brown shoe polish. Dimly, he remembered that when his Mama was attacked, the niggers had smeared shoe polish on her clothes, there were big subhuman pawprints all over her body. The children had been told that the Mud People spread their black contagion on whatever they touched. Karl had just taken it on faith that the niggers had smeared shoe polish on her to scare her. Who knew what niggers were capable of?
Think, Karl. Think!
"This is foolishness, Karl. Komm auf!"
He froze. Grossvater Egil was outside the cabin door, shouting loud enough to be heard even here, even with his throat punctured. He could hear sloshing, spilling blood in the voice.
His brain had never been good at putting shit together, but now, he knew there was something else, maybe someone else, growing inside him and fixing to take over, the way everyone else had been taken over, but they had to take him up to the mountaintop, into that awful light, to make it work. He had to be smarter than he'd ever been before, with what little gray matter he still had left.
"You can still be saved, boy."
Think, Swinefucker, think!
Not niggers…Jägers.
There was a race war in the offing, but Heilige Berg fought both sides of it.
Karl had broken curfew enough times, just sitting at the window and watching the moon pass over, to say for sure that blackfaced Jägers didn't strut out of Grossvater Egil's lodge in the dead of night. There was another way out of here.
He stuffed his pockets with cash from the shoebox, then went around the log walls of the bunker, pounding and kicking on them and pressing his ear against them. Heart racing, muscles trembling, he felt the awful weakness creeping over him again. He was going to faint, and they would be on him, and when he awoke next morning, he'd be somebody else…
He grabbed one of the utility shelves and heaved it over. The computers tumbled to the floor with a scattershot chain of explosions and sprays of sparks. The wall here was as solid as the others. He grabbed the next rack and yanked on it, but instead of tipping over, the shelf swung smoothly out into the room. Behind it, there was a narrow door set into the logs.
He threw himself against it, plunged through into an icy dark that had no floor.
His fingers scratched cold rock on either side of him as he fell. His feet flailed and almost caught on the slick, steeply sloped floor. He brought his arms up in front of his face just in time to catch an oncoming bend in the tunnel, his elbow hit the wall hard enough to strike sparks off it. He fell backwards, now, down the second, even steeper, leg of the tunnel. He sat down to try to brake himself, but now he was rolling ass-over-teakettle down and down, the rock banging his head into itself over and over again, and when he crashed to a stop, he was entangled in bushes and snow. A chilly breeze kissed his cheek. He was outside, on the backside of the knoll on which Grossvater Egil's lodge sat. This area was off-limits to all but the Jägers. It was where they played their wargames. He crawled out of the bush and lay on his back on the frozen ground for a long time. He couldn't hear anyone coming after him, didn't really know if he could hear anything, anymore, didn't much care if he could.
The stars danced and threw out scintillating arms to each other, their eons' old light fragmenting into overlapping prismatic showers coming down through the clouds and the trees, it was raining blinding light. He rolled over and tried to see the earth. A garage-sized shed lay before him. He crawled to the doorway and in through it, thinking only of finding a place to hide until he could see and think straight, until everything made sense. And he crawled headfirst into the passenger-side door panel of a monstrously large powder-flake violet Lincoln Continental. He lay across the hood for a minute, letting the chill steel suck the heat and fear from his head. God, his head hurt so much, his heart felt like it had holes in it, his lungs felt like they were full of wet sand.
He was laying on the hood of a car.
See straight, Swinefucker. Think!
He pushed himself up on his elbows and limped around the pimpmobile. The narrow fire road before him vanished almost instantly into the trees. It probably joined State Road 117 a ways south of where the Heilige Berg drive met it. The road looked treacherous under the best of conditions, and hadn't been plowed in about a week. There were chains on the whitewall tires, but the suspension had been lowered, niggers liked that kind of thing, wrecking perfectly good American cars, but he didn't see any other way off the mountain.
Pull yourself together, Karl Schweinfurter. Drive this fucking car.
He went around to the driver's side door and opened it, climbed into the low, deep bucket seat. The seats were covered in deep, purple shag. The steering wheel was a tiny ring of forged chrome chain. The keys were in the ignition.
Please, God…fuck that, please Karl, please don't fuck up again…
The engine turned over on the first turn, gobbling and growling and purring steadily, glass-pack mufflers hushing the powerful custom V-8 engine so he could still hear his heart hammering in his chest. He grasped the shifter on the steering column and cranked it into Drive, waiting for the car to die, for Grossvater Egil's stony hand to punch through the glass and clasp his shoulder, for Jägers to drop out of the trees in the roadway, for those shadowy giants from the place where all the evil had started to jump out—
We're your new neighbors, little camper.
He stomped on the gas. He fought the ridiculously tiny wheel for control of the car as it bucked and headed down the mountain like a torpedo. When he came to a straight enough stretch of road, he turned on the radio, and found his Christian rock station.
He hoped the Dairy Queen was open.
~11 ~
The moment Martin Cundieffe agreed to meet Brady Hoecker for lunch and hung up the phone, his stomach flooded with acid, and he felt as if he were free-falling into a horrible mistake. His hand shook so badly as he speed-dialed Assistant Director Wyler that he accidentally reached the outside operator the first time. Ms. McNulty told him that AD Wyler was not on the fifth floor, and not accessible via his cellular phone, but she took a message to call him back ASAP.
He studied the Baltimore address Hoecker's secretary had given him. It was nowhere near the CIA or any other seat of government that he knew of, excepting the NSA. He checked an online map service and puzzled over the location it gave him. The Steer Crazy Steakhouse on Southwestern Avenue, off the 95, just outside Baltimore city limits. His stomach relaxed only a little. It appeared that Hoecker actually intended to eat lunch with him.
As he drove off the Capitol Beltwa
y and took the 95 northeast into Maryland, the groomed, gray landscape giving way to only slightly less manicured rural hills, he continued to worry at the subtext of the lunch invitation, and found little to calm his nerves. Hoecker had been coldly neutral to him at the Storch interrogation, and indirectly hostile at the Cave Institute. Wyler had never told him that anyone else in the Mules might try to contact him, but he had been fairly clear on the dietary customs of Mules. They were strict vegetarians, for health reasons that, he was clearly told, went far beyond what the public knew. After a grueling withdrawal phase, Cundieffe had found he needed only a few hours of sleep every night, and had never felt more alert. It crossed his mind that this might be some sort of ruse to draw him out and interrogate him, but that idea was tossed out as patently ridiculous. Anyone who would know enough to arrange such a bogus meeting would know about the diet issue, would indeed know more about the Mules than he did, himself.
When he finally arrived at the Steer Crazy Steakhouse, he was pleasantly surprised to find it a lot less frowsy than its name suggested. A big mock-ranch house of uneven stones and weatherbeaten timbers, with a crumbling replica of a covered wagon parked on the frost-bitten frontage. It was, however, one of those places where they make a big ceremony of shearing off any neckties that come in the door. Cundieffe stopped just short of the revolving doors, staring at the wall behind the hostess's podium, at a barbaric tapestry of severed ties that wrapped around into the restrooms and dining area. Many specimens were displayed in a glass case beside autographs of the celebrities and celebrated politicos who'd sacrificed them. A quick perusal of these through the window proved that the Director was not among their trophies. The burgundy silk necktie he wore was a gift from his mother. Hoping casual dress did not disqualify him for entrance, he ran back to his car and deposited the tie in his glove compartment.
Brady Hoecker was waiting for him at the door when he came back. He had also secreted his tie before entering. Cundieffe checked his pulse as he approached the Mule council-member, even as he tried to puzzle out what to be afraid of next.
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