by Brian Hodge
He was alone on a ship of fools.
Reaching the backstage doors of the chapel felt like an accomplishment of epic proportions. Mike’s leg a victim of exertion and bone stress, marrow deep. Amanda badly winded, leaning heavily on her cane. They paused on the back walkway for a moment’s rest in the vast shadow of the satellite dish.
“Hanging in there okay?”
Amanda nodded, gulping air. The gentlemanly thing to do, Mike reached to open the door, one of two with glass set in the top halves. View looking in on a wide hallway, deserted and ending in a T-intersection. Neither door would budge.
“They’re never locked during a service,” she said. “Never.”
Precautions upon secrets, and if they had one thing on their side, that would be ignorance. Mike frowned, inspecting one door’s outer lock, circular keyport a foot above the handle. Then he felt the material of the rawhide jacket he wore. Thick enough.
“No problem,” he said, turning around and jabbing back with his elbow. Once, again, harder, punching out a corner of the window; glass tinkled inside. He slipped his arm through the hole, groping for the large wingnut-like bolt release. A moment later, they were in.
Mike unclipped the walkie-talkie from his belt, switched it on. Thumbed the code key twice for Ramon’s benefit.
“The quickest way to the stage is left,” Amanda said. “But there’s still a lot of hallways to cover between here and there.”
Mike nodded, said fine, watching her out of the corner of his eye as she began to take the lead. Reducing her world to legs and cane, with some distant goal at the end of her tenacious vision.
“Can I tell you something personal?” he said.
“Sure.”
“I’m admiring the hell out of you right about now.”
He thought it odd: There was nobody back home that he’d ever been able to say that to. The only two had been residents of Oklahoma City, knotted up by the delusions of a self-ordained demigod, trying to free themselves after it was too late. He had already let one pay with her life.
Amanda smiled hesitantly, though obviously pleased, clearly something she needed more of these days, and Mike found himself wanting, in some capacity, to provide it. Weren’t they more alike than he would have thought before meeting her? Both sad visionaries, well-intentioned whores who had hoped to accomplish good through the most sullied avenues.
She might have been about to say something. Train of thought derailed, however, as they neared the intersecting hallway. If the uniformed man stepping out in front of them had his way, they would get no farther.
Eyes going from Mike and Amanda to the broken glass, back and forth, he was the picture of authority Mike hated most. The kind with a job to do, and no amount of reason would penetrate his head.
“Where in hell do you think you’re going?” he said, hand dropping to a nightstick, and Mike felt grateful this rented dupe’s belt didn’t have a holster.
“I don’t know you,” Amanda said firmly, and you had to love her, she was holding her ground. “I’m Mrs. Dawson.”
“Uh huh,” he said, too flat to tell whether he was convinced or not. “Even if you were on my list, I still wouldn’t like that busted window.”
He reached out like a traffic cop to shove a halting hand against her chest. Mike didn’t like the move at all, put his hand without thinking on the guard’s wrist, wrong move, because next he was taking a step back to draw the baton while Amanda fell.
Mike had to let her, knew he would be the first target, and tried to beat him to the draw, smashing the walkie-talkie against the guard’s ear, taking a numbing whack in the shoulder while plastic cracked. Mike swung again, and now the plastic fragmented, and the guard staggered and Mike knocked his hand and sent the club flying.
Mike charged like a linebacker, driving the guard against the corridor wall, and how frightfully quick had been this degeneration from talk to brutality. A desperate realization: This guy was just doing his job as he saw it. The gun in Mike’s waistband was a reminder that he would have to force the issue.
The guard went groping in his own pocket, then his hand came out and Mike heard the click of a switchblade. Quick glance downward, six-inch stiletto jutting from handle, locked into killing mode, and surely this wasn’t regulation equipment. The guard floundered his arm around and Mike cried out more in surprise than pain when the blade jabbed deeply into the back of his left upper thigh. He felt a warm, wet flow, and the son of a bitch could carve on him all day in this position.
Downswing number two sliced near the same place when Mike backed off just enough to worm his hand between their bodies. Fingers closing on the grip of the Smith and Wesson, flipping his wrist to reverse the barrel’s direction before he even knew what he was doing, arms race escalation to the point of no return, not believing his thumb was flicking off the safety or that he was leaning in hard again so their bodies would act as a silencer, jamming the muzzle into the man’s soft gut just below his breastbone, finger twitching once, twice, God forgive me I killed him and I don’t even know why, the recoil of the pistol’s slide like taking a ball bat in the ribs as the slugs tore the guard’s heart from its moorings and exited from his upper back to spray a dripping red fan onto the wall.
Across the corridor, Amanda choked and turned her head away, and a moment later, all three of them were on the floor.
What had this taken, four seconds, five? Watching his moral life change in the twitch of a finger, watching another life extinguish, those dead eyes still staring with surprise. He disentangled himself from the guard, crawling back to Amanda and leaving smears on the tiles. Remembering a time of a mere broken leg; in comparison, its pain seemed nostalgically minor.
“Oh, look at you, look at you,” Amanda said. By the tone of her voice it was the last command he wanted to obey. She had him roll onto his stomach so she could get a better look at the pair of backdoor stab wounds. His pantleg was soaked down to the knee.
She used her cane to hook the fallen knife, dragged it back within reach. Used it to clumsily slice into her sweatshirt at the shoulder, then ripping away the entire sleeve. She looped it around and over his wounds, and he felt pain as a result of her diminished dexterity.
“Damn it! I can’t even tie a knot!”
“I’ll do it.” Mike rolled onto his back, reaching toward the sodden mess. She’d at least done the hard part; he finished the job.
Once it was tied off, they could only look at each other in silent bewilderment. They scarcely knew whom to trust under this roof. Knowing that someone considered them hindrances, to be dealt with as expendable. That they shared in the death of a security guard, like accomplices. Second-guessing already — what if they’d given talk ten more seconds to work? What if…?
It was a worst-case scenario. Now they were bad guys too.
“Can you walk?” Amanda asked.
“I think.” He began to wrestle himself up, getting his legs beneath him, and the going was easier when Amanda gave him her cane. Satisfied he wouldn’t take the gravity express back to the floor, he tucked the warm pistol into his waist again.
Her arm went around his waist and his around her shoulders, leaning together to steady each other, and the first step was a clumsy excuse for anguish. The next few little better. The few after that became tolerable.
Close enough.
Paul found he could coast through the services by rote now, sitting with his mind a world of hurt away. Tuning Donny out, the man’s words heard too many times already, most consigned to audio trash, a few cues filed away for snapping back to the here and now.
Paul Handler, welcome to the machine.
Hollow as it happened around him, automatically bowing his head for Donny’s prayer, neither hearing nor feeling it. Sitting at stage left from the pulpit, with fellow ushers Ricky and Robby, and a handful of other ministry dignitaries. Suited and pious and so respectable in their tiny little pews before the masses.
If he made himself sick, c
ould he cure it? Or hadn’t he tried that route before, somewhere, some day long past — and failed?
Paul shut his eyes beneath his cap of sprayed hair and thin wires, trying not to listen as Donny introduced Laurel Pryce, solo vocalist. She came forward and the music began while Donny took his seat mere feet away, and Paul could smell his acrid sweat as a dog smells fear. Donny’s one leg jittering three, maybe four times quicker than the music’s tempo.
Her voice captivated everyone present, thousands of them, perhaps millions more at home, and helpless, Paul raised his head to watch her across at stage right. Blue robe and blond hair and microphone, surely the cameras loved her too. Her song of hope, where there was no greater love, there could be no greater gift.
How could she do it? He remembered that last look in her eyes backstage, like he was ripping her heart out and holding it up before her dimming eyes, daring her to lash back in morbid futility. Not a sign of it now, though, the consummate schizoid, burying the pain out of sight to show another face entirely.
All for good. For there could be no deceit in music when it came from the heart. He had spent a career listening to the proof.
How could she do that, and make it look so effortless?
Maybe, soon, she could teach him.
If only first she would forgive him.
In the control room, Gabe watched the console and licked his lips. Laurel filling the screens of the master monitor and those of cameras two and three. Yes, there was some sort of purity there, it was obvious if you had but eyes to see, and in another life, he might have wanted to better understand it. Stand beside it, let it save him from himself.
No wonder Paul had been drawn. Silently, Gabe thanked her, damned her, for giving him that final yoke of control. She had done this to them all. Quite the unholy ménage à trois they had made.
Gabe checked an oscilloscope above the audio console, sole link to the labyrinths of a Scapegoat’s mind. The wonders of a god broken down into a monitor readout, coming through clear as a church bell on a country winter day, how soulless — yet wasn’t technology the magic of the twentieth century?
Brain waves. Twelve cycles per second, what he liked to think of as the omega wave.
Another regret: He would have liked a chance to tell Laurel how truly sorry he was. Even her. His hand went for the vox switch at his belt as he rose and steadied himself for the final genesis of judgment and deliverance—
And then the script began to deviate in all the wrong ways.
The commotion was first born in the choir loft, for they were the closest to recognize who had just entered. Heads turning, voices buzzing. Amanda’s presence alone was enough of a surprise. That one arm was bare and blood-smeared and that she was with a limping man in even worse condition was positively damning, and tongues did wag. The audience lost no time getting in on the act.
“Oh no, oh no,” Gabe whispered, wide-eyed, at Mike’s monitor image, “not this guy again,” and he wasn’t even aware of the violent trembling in his left hand.
Going out live as it happened, Donny deflated in his chair, turning a white the hue of spoiled milk as his wife walked past him toward the pulpit. The music sputtered to a halt of lurching chords and clunking notes, and Laurel turned at the waist, lowering the microphone from her mouth in deference to its rightful heir. Eight thousand eyes on Amanda and her escort, and even the babble of surprise dried to a hush of nervous expectation as she took the pulpit.
“This is what happens,” she said, “when people start believing their own lies,” and her voice rang as loud as the peal of doom.
“KILL THE PULPIT MIKE!” Gabe screamed, lunging for the console, no time for the cleansing focus of pain. “KILL THAT PULPIT MIKE!”
The audio man was in a red-faced fluster, hands wavering over microphone sliders while craning his fat neck to see what had happened on the monitors. “Mr. Matthews, I — that’s Mrs. Dawson!”
Gabe’s hand plunged into his nylon bag of wonders, came out full, and he blew a chunk out of the audio man’s throat. Terry Durbin gave a whoop of excitement — he’d almost forgotten that imbecile — and Gabe took over the mixing board as the tech keeled out of his seat. If you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself. He knocked the mike out of commission, but by then, the rest of the staff appeared to have grave doubts about the workplace. Gabe waved his gun, dug out the TEC-9, and tossed it to Terry Durbin in his corner. No mutiny on this ship.
“DON’T YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT MOVING!” he cried to the rest, and Terry nodded, that’s right. “YOU DO YOUR JOBS OR YOU DIE RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!”
Omega wave, twenty-six cycles per second, and Gabe whirled for another glance at the monitor, Amanda in the middle of silent confusion over her loss of voice, and this could still be salvaged after all, Gabe ordering at gunpoint a master image from camera one, medium shot on Laurel, and then he cued his vox switch, a message intended solely for one very special ear down below:
“Make us all proud of you, Dougie, your brother and I are watching, now DO IT, and while you’re at it, kill Mrs. Dawson and that demon she’s with.”
Maybe thirty-five feet from one of the cameras, Mike saw it coming. This morning was one surprise after another, overzealous guards and immediate sound loss and now this, some blond gargantuan brute emerging from behind a camera operator after clubbing him unconscious with a gun, his face bright with mad righteous zeal.
The gun was up and pointed elsewhere, and Mike heard it chatter, saw the flash. Identification was quick, a TEC-9, a drug dealer’s weapon. He’d seen them before — the manufacturer was headquartered in Miami, supply and demand. The things fired as quickly as you could wiggle your finger, and this line of fire was aimed — what the hell…?
The singer. The singer.
She came apart.
His reflexes too slow, or maybe numbed by shock, Mike could do little as the gunner pivoted, spraying wild, now homing in on the pulpit, and Mike felt himself knocked off his feet and going down hard, I don’t believe this, the same fucking leg, oddly calm in that instant, nothing like a dose of reality to bring you back. He grabbed for Amanda’s arm, missed, and they both went to the floor as a sweep of nine-millimeters chewed up the lectern. Splinters raining over them, Mike fumbling for his own pistol. Hearing the groundswell of screaming in the audience, and then it was as if they no longer existed, for the people who now mattered could be counted on one hand.
“Are you okay, are you okay?” he said in Amanda’s ear. She nodded, and he understood none of this, knowing only it should stop, but the situation had snowballed out of all control.
People were diving for cover, people were shrieking, feet had gone to stampede and voices to prayer. This entire chapel stewed into a cauldron of pandemonium and panic. Mike reached out from the protection of the pulpit to fire down at the approaching man with the TEC-9, missed of course, felt his tattered heart further shred when he saw that he’d hit someone in the congregation.
Paralysis by guilt, he had no business here, a hopeless amateur drowning over his head, and they were going to die…
More gunfire joined the fray, sure why not, the more the merrier, and Mike peered down the length of the chapel’s main aisle to see Ramon bulling his way against the current.
“The fuck out of my way!” Ramon yelled, voice high, and he loosed another shot into the ceiling, and no one argued with him. Even in panic, true believers could convert under fire. The sound stopped the blond assassin where he stood. Divided attention was more than he looked capable of handling, and then Mike’s Cuban savior was lost amid a swarming knot of people who had no idea which way to flee.
On elbows and knees, Donny Dawson crawled behind the pulpit, curled himself over Mandy’s prone form, while Mike fought a vertigo plunge of blood loss and swirling consciousness. Donny and Mike looking wordlessly at one another, He doesn’t even know who I am, and if sweat and facial tics and glassy eyes were any indication, the final frayed strands of this guy’s mind we
re about to pop.
Behind his own pulpit — now there was irony.
Even before the shooting began, Gabe had tried to blank every last nonessential from his concentration. Preparation, meditation — distractions could not be allowed to widen the scope of his narrow, one-on-one focus.
He paid the monitors a cursory glance. The events below had gone too far for directorial commands. Camera operators having gone into this thinking it would be just another show — how blissful their uninitiated lives must be, to live in ignorance. Monitor three was blank. Number four showed an unchanging tilted shoelace-level view across the stage. Camera one roved in wild circles, a swirling carousel close-up of ruination.
But camera two? Static, hold on Laurel Pryce, sprawled across the stage. Red, blonde, and blue.
“Go to two and hold,” Gabe said softly, jabbing with the gun for emphasis. “And leave it there.”
He stripped the headset from his bare scalp, tossed it onto the audio console as the shaking engineer locked camera two’s image into the outgoing mix. Rising from his chair, the focus of all eyes, directors and techs over whom he held illimitable dominion, and it meant nothing. They understood nothing.
Terry Durbin stood at open-mouthed, wide-eyed ready, TEC-9 swiveling like a weathervane in high winds. Continually shifting his weight from one foot to the other and back.
“Stay with them,” Gabe told him. “Don’t let them change a single thing.”
“That’s right, that’s right, that’s right—”
Lingering in the doorway then, he would never see this room again. The monitors, camera one finally at rest, abandoned, long side view across from stage right, Laurel in the foreground and Paul treading slowly across the stage for her, gunshots sounding like nothing so much as innocent little pops, omega wave forty-three cycles per second, Gabe stripping away his suit jacket while on the run and unbuttoning his shirt.
The time had come to go downstairs.