"That fella opened it up fer ya pretty good. Hit ya with a foundation brake spanner. I cleaned the wound off, taped it up, but you oughta get stitches."
Lucky was trying to sit up, but he felt dizzy, so he slumped back again.
"Tell me what happened to yer friend. How'd a kid like him die like that?"
Lucky wasn't about to share the details of what happened, no matter how bad he felt about it. If he told the yard bull about Mike's attack and the fight on the back ledge of the grainer, they would probably arrest him for murder. So he gave an abridged, reconstructed version of the story: "We jumped on the freight up by Vanishing Lake. I think he banged his throat real bad getting on. I got worried, so I cut the air and we jumped off the freight down here."
"Vanishing Lake," Roscoe said, alarmed. "They say some kinda killer bug is loose up there, people goin' nuts, attackin' each other. Somebody started a big ol' forest fire. It was on the radio."
Lucky was still trying to get a grip on his wavering consciousness. He sat up straighten "Whatta you mean?" he said. "What killer bug?"
"Don't ask me. They got the whole place quarantined. Maybe your friend got the bug!" Roscoe said, alarmed.
"Don't think so. Like I said, I think he crushed his larynx when we were getting aboard. The door handle whacked him in the throat," Lucky lied.
His mind was spinning with what the yard bull had just said. He started to replay the strange events he had witnessed at Vanishing Lake, ending with Mike, for no reason, clawing at his throat in the darkness of the tunnel, screaming obscenities while they fought desperately on the narrow ledge of the grainer.
Lucky looked down at the handcuffs holding his wrists to the wood arm of the sofa.
"Yer under arrest," Roscoe explained. "I'm holdin' ya here for the Sheriff. He ain't gonna make it for a bit, on accounta the substation at Government Camp is workin' with the military right now, lookin' for some scientist that started the fire. They got roadblocks up for two hundred miles."
"Where'd you put Mike's body?"
"Got him in the other room. My brother's gonna shit."
"Whatta you gonna do with him?"
"I ain't gonna do shit with him. I just watch parked freight cars for the SP," Roscoe said. "I ain't got nothin' t'do with this. Once the Sheriff gits here, he'll figger somethin', probably pack him off to the Medical Examiner in Government Camp, then they'll probably do him like all the other 'no names' we find dead 'round here .. . Just drop him in a potter's grave with a sack a' lye."
"You don't wanna do that."
"Yeah? Why's that?"
"You just don't wanna," Lucky repeated.
"Yeah? Well, it ain't gonna be none a' my doin'."
Lucky didn't want to wait around for the Sheriff. He knew he couldn't dry out cold in some cell, covered with bugs. He cleared his throat and leaned forward.
"He hoboed under the name 'Hollywood Mike,' but his real name was Michael Brazil."
"Yeah?" Roscoe said, not really caring.
"His father's a big-time movie producer."
Roscoe Moss now started to smile and shake his head in bewildered amusement. "Sure," he said. "Sure."
"Go look in his mouth."
"What's that gonna tell me?" Roscoe smiled. "He got his daddy's name engraved there?"
"Just go look in his mouth, you'll see." Lucky could still feel the Scotch, warm inside him. It had settled him, given him new courage. "Go on, take a look," he prodded.
After a long moment Roscoe got up and moved out of the back room of the store, muttering to himself. He had laid Hollywood Mike on the floor behind the counter, out of sight. He peeled back the tarp he had covered the body with, then took a pair of pliers and a screwdriver off the shelf and carefully pried Mike's mouth open. It was harder than he expected. The joints were already beginning to lock from rigor mortis, a condition that Roscoe knew from his ambulance-driving days would have the body board-stiff in an hour. After he got Mike's mouth open, he looked in. He couldn't see much in the dim light behind the counter, so he got a flashlight down off the shelf and shined it into Mike's mouth. "What'm I supposed t'be lookin' for?" he called to Lucky.
"His bridgework," Lucky called back.
Sure enough, Roscoe could now see a complicated dental repair job, complete with gold fillings. "That sure musta cost a few bucks," he shouted. Then he snapped off the light and moved back into the room where Lucky was seated. "So?"
"He told me he was in a car accident up on Mulholland Drive last summer. He trashed his dad's Porsche and broke out a buncha teeth. How many twenty-two-year-old hobos you know got ten grand in dental reconstruction?" Then Lucky stretched open his own mouth, showing his own broken tooth for emphasis. "You don't wanna be the guy who dumped Buddy Brazil's kid in a hole with a bag a' lye."
"Whatta you think I should do?"
"Take a Polaroid of him and send the picture to his father in Hollywood. He's gotta be at one of the movie studios." Lucky paused. "Who knows... maybe he gives you some kinda reward."
Roscoe Moss finally nodded. "And what's in all this fer you?"
"He was my friend. I want him to get a proper funeral." Lucky hesitated, then added, "I can't go to jail, man. I can't go through that. I helped you, you gotta help me, one Marine to another. Semper Fi, brother."
Roscoe looked troubled. He moved over and sat down next to Lucky. "I let you go, there's gonna be hell t'pay. Not that I wanna give you no grief, but that Trainmaster is gonna drive up here from Sierra Blanca. I know him. He's a tough old buzzard, an' them two brakemen gonna be yellin' 'bout how you 'bos're all the time cuttin' the air t'slow trains. He'll go on 'bout how them products on that train is worth money--The interest on that trainload a' stuff would pay my salary fer ten years!' I'm gonna have t'listen t'that shit fer hours."
The two of them held each other's gaze.
"So, y'learned that trick a' yers fightin' in the Marines?"
Lucky decided to humor him, and smiled warmly. "It's called ground fighting. The idea is that all fights end up on the ground anyway, so you take it there first. Use the other guy's force against him. There's half a dozen choke points. You should be able to kill an opponent silently in seconds."
"You was a Ranger?"
Lucky nodded. Roscoe looked at him hard and said, "See, thing is I don't really like bustin' people. It sorta ain't in me."
Finally, Roscoe Moss, Jr., got up and left the room.
Lucky looked down in wonder at his bloody wrists cuffed around the arm of the sofa. Then he looked out the back window of the Feed and Grain. The dusty Texas-Oklahoma landscape was barren and bleak, like the last four years of his life. He wondered what had happened to Hollywood Mike. He remembered the horrible way Mike had choked on his own spit. His friend's eyes had burned with insanity, then had been empty and expressionless, devoid of soul. Suddenly Lucky wanted to run, wanted to get the hell out of there. He had never felt such a compelling desire to be someplace else. He wanted a new life... a life without alcohol, without dementia tremens, and the poverty of hopelessness and homelessness.
For three and a half years he had been riding the high iron, living in main stems or hobo jungles. He would catch out on the SP rails and head west to the Burlington tracks, then north to Oregon. Once there, he would have no reason to be there, no reason to stay, and would catch out again on the UP, heading east until he got to New York. Then it was the main central line to Fort Kent and back west again on the CN, fueled by restlessness and cheap wine. Around and around he went, human lint on a big useless spin cycle, sleeping under cardboard with the Sunday paper for a mattress. Then up again, with no reason or direction, wandering aimlessly to nowhere important, from nowhere special.
Suddenly, he wanted to sleep someplace warm, where he wouldn't wake up being hammered into oblivion for his shoes.
Then all at once, with Mike's death weighing on his mind, Lucky knew the journey was over. He was through with the liquor, through being a drunk. He would go home. He would talk
to his old friend Clancy Black ... Clancy would help him find a way to beat it.
Ten minutes later, Roscoe returned. He unlocked Lucky's handcuffs and opened the back door.
"Git on outta here. I'll figure somethin' t'tell the Trainmaster when he gets here."
Lucky moved to the door, past the half-empty bottle of Scotch.
"What's yer name?" Roscoe asked.
"Lucky," he replied.
Roscoe thought the greasy hobo was about as lucky as road kill. "Where you gonna go?" the yard bull asked.
"Pasadena, California."
"Why there?"
"It's home."
"Good luck, Marine," Roscoe said. They shook hands, and then Roscoe turned and went to the front of the store. As Lucky walked out the back door, he slipped the half-empty bottle of whiskey under his coat. He was through drinking, he told himself. That was settled. That was a done deal.
He had stolen the bottle just in case.
Chapter 15
ZOPHAR
The Aryans conquered the Indus Valley fifteen hundred years before Christ," Fannon Kincaid lectured. "India was a strange exotic place that didn't have enough white women. Eventually primal lust drove the Aryan conquerors to the beds of dark-skinned Indian women."
They were riding on a unit train, heading east. The big, slat-sided boxcars were all filled with cattle. The smell drifted back to the sleeper car they were riding in. A fetid stink of cattle and manure mixed with diesel fumes clogged Dexter's nose; the sermon clogged his ears.
"In time, the pure white Aryans made an ungodly mistake and married the dark-skinned Indian people from Bangalore and, inevitably, their pure white blood mixed with the blood of that lesser race." As he looked at Dexter, his intense gaze burned with this special truth.
The train was moving slowly down the east face of the Black Hills, on a stretch of Northeastern Texas Track that would eventually take them into Louisiana. Dexter was amazed how easily the forty members of the "Christian Choir and the Lord's Desire" had escaped the military roadblocks that had attempted to seal off Vanishing Lake. The rails went completely unguarded, and the forty heavily armed men and women had boarded the eastbound cattle train without trouble. They were gathered in two separate sleeper cars. Fannon and half the men were with Dexter in this boxcar, twenty more armed Crusaders of the Choir were huddled in an open-top gondola a few cars back.
One of the men in Dexter's boxcar was a tall, hardened man named Randall Rader. He was Fannon's second-in-command, and Dexter had been told he was a sub-angel. Randall never took his cruel gaze off of Dexter.
Randall, like many of the others, had the big F. T. R. A. tattooed in block letters on his right biceps. Fannon had explained that it stood for Freight Train Riders of America. F. T. R. A. S, he told the frightened scientist, were a group of outlaw train riders who had originally formed after Vietnam. Eight disillusioned, disenfranchised vets had met in a bar in Dallas after the war and decided to escape a society that had branded them baby killers by riding the rails. Fannon had been one of the founding fathers. They became a rail-riding cult of murdering thieves, and in twenty-five years, their number had swelled to over a thousand. No longer just a collection of disenfranchised vets, they were now train-riding outlaws of all ages. They had no code and no initiation. To be a member you only had to say you were. But any self-proclaimed member of the F. T. R. A. had to be ready to prove his or her tyranny. They usually banded in groups of five or ten. They would derail trains and steal from the wreckage. Sometimes they killed hobos for no apparent reason. They totally escaped prosecution for their crimes, because they lived in the netherworld of the railroad system that was not adequately policed by state, county, or federal law. They all took assumed names and carried no identification, traveling undetected from city to city. Fannon boasted that there were more than thirty of these killers in his Choir.
Scratched on Randall's arm was also the number 88. Dexter had been told that H was the eighth letter in the alphabet, and that 88 stood for "Heil Hitler." The other strange tattoo on Randall's scarred body was an Indian caste mark that he wore between his slanted eyebrows. Now Dexter was enduring that explanation as well.
"So as the White and Indian races mixed," Fannon continued, "it was hard for the true Aryan to tell which blond-haired women or men were his genetic equals. The Aryan gene being as strong as it is, it often did not produce dusky-skinned children when crossbreeding with Indian women occurred. It became necessary for the governing Aryans to devise a way to determine which of the righteous were true and pure-blooded and which had tainted their bloodline by fornicating with the mud races. They devised a system of marking pure children at birth with a caste mark. This custom has been carried down. Today, the Indian caste mark is only a sign of class superiority, but in old times, it depicted racial purity as well."
Dexter nodded his head. He knew this was pure nonsense, but he didn't want to engage Fannon, who, he had witnessed, was capable of killing in an instant without remorse. Dexter shifted his gaze off Randall Rader and his tattoos symbolizing racial hatred and Aryan purity.
"Many in our company have been able to establish their racial integrity, and once I have approved their genealogy, I designate the correct caste mark of purity."
"I see," Dexter said, the chill of this insanity enveloping him.
They rode in merciful silence for several minutes.
"I'm sure you wonder why I went to the trouble of saving you from the godless purveyors of your government's criminal military conspiracy."
"You want me to share my research with you," Dexter said bluntly.
"It's not what I want, friend, it's what God wants. You have been delivered into my hands by the Lord God. You are to be His Sword of Vengeance. We have been holding up banks to get money to buy arms, shoulder-mounted Stingers, or perhaps one day a Russian suitcase nuke. But it will be a long, dangerous proposition, and I have been praying to the Savior for a better way. You and your genocidal weapon are God's answer to my prayers."
"The ingredients to produce the Pale Horse Prion are very hard to acquire, and harder still to construct. They require extreme purification and strict bio-containment."
"Nonsense," Fannon said softly, his voice barely audible over the rattling cars and the lowing cattle.
"You can say nonsense, but that doesn't change it. You're not a biologist--you have no idea how sensitive this material is."
Then Fannon took out an automatic that was tucked beneath his shirt. He slowly chambered it.
Dexter's eyes shone with fear. "What're you doing?"
"If you ain't gonna be part of this victory, then you gotta go stand with the heathens, and be part of the defeat. The Lord has christened my journey. The holy water of retribution has been sprinkled on His cause. There is no time to waste on nonbelievers." He aimed the pistol at Dexter DeMille.
"I am not afraid of death," Dexter bluffed, his heart beating wildly in his chest. He could feel his arteries pulsing. "I'm suicidal. Three times this year I've tried to kill myself. You can't scare me with death. I've been courting it."
"Suicide is an acute but temporary form of self-pity," Fannon drawled. "To have meaning, you have to pick the time, place, and method. To have meaning, it has to be your ritual, not mine."
He swung the barrel of the nine-millimeter automatic directly at Dexter.
"Wanna see?" Without warning, he fired two rounds. One blew a chunk of wood out of the slat at the right side of Dexter's face; the other disintegrated the board on his left.
Dexter screamed in terror as splinters of wood flew into his eyes and bloodied his cheeks.
Then Fannon pulled back the hammer and aimed it directly at the bridge of Dexter's nose. "I'm doing the Lord's work here, bub, so don't fuck with me."
"Please ... please, don't shoot. Please. I can do it for you. I can make your weapon," Dexter pleaded.
"How?"
"We need to go back to Vanishing Lake," he murmured.
Fannon turned
back to Randall Rader. "Go back to the others, tell them we're getting off this train."
Randall Rader climbed the ladder at the back of the car. They could hear his footsteps overhead as he surfed the cars to the open grainer that contained the others. Fannon turned back to Dexter.
"Welcome, brother, you are now an Acolyte of the Choir. As an Acolyte, you can have a biblical designation. I name you Zophar," Fannon smiled. "Do you know about Zophar?"
Dexter was still shaking. He had lost control of his bowels and was now sitting in runny shit that filled his underwear and was pushing up against his balls. "No," he finally murmured. "Who's Zophar?"
"Zophar was one of Job's friends. In the Book of Job, he learns a great lesson. God allowed Satan to inflict evil onto Zophar, and he lost everything. The Lord questioned Zophar on this loss of position and wealth, and Zophar finally admitted the limits of human wisdom and bowed before the will of God. This is what you are doing right now. With this new humility, Zophar eventually finds everlasting peace, and so, my friend, shall you."
Chapter 16
SPIN DOCTOR
I can't say exactly how the fire got started," Admiral Zoll said, his rough-hewn voice spilling out over a sea of reporters gathered in his press briefing room at Fort Detrick. "I've explained to you that Dr. DeMille was unstable and that, despite his brilliant work in counter-terrorist biology, he had several bouts with suicide and deep depression. It's hard to understand the choices this kind of psychosis leads to. But let's suppose Dr. DeMille chose to try and destroy a line of research that he had been working on illegally. In so doing, some strain of his experimental virology might have gotten loose. Under this scenario, he could have set the fire to try and contain it. That fire itself became a terrible tragedy causing many deaths, both to people in the town and to many brave soldiers stationed at our research facility there. You all have copies of the suicide note we found in his quarters. Beyond that, I can't comment until more facts are uncovered."
"How much longer will the area be quarantined?" a reporter from AP asked. "Until it's safe."
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