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Jeff gave him a searching look.
“You’re missing a pretty major point here, Tom.” He raised his hands, palms open. There was something almost pleading in his face. “I don’t regret Nuying. Or the others, because God knows Nu hasn’t been the only one. I just never told you about the others after the way you reacted. Yeah, each time it’s emotional complication, Tom, stress I could do without. But I can’t make myself feel bad about it, and I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened. Can you understand that? Can you stand knowing that about your brother?”
I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened.
Norton put himself carefully back in the other armchair, gingerly, on the edge of the seat. Jeff’s words were like staples taken out of his heart, a sudden easing of a pain he hadn’t fully known he was carrying. The bright truth about his feelings for Megan welled up in the new spaces. He sat there trying to balance it all out for a moment, then nodded.
“Sure,” he said. “I guess I can stand it. I guess I’ve got to.” He shrugged, smiled faintly. “Brothers, right?”
Jeff matched the nod, vigorously. “Right.”
“So pour me another drink, big brother. Make up the spare room. What time’s Megan getting back?”
CHAPTER 9
They slept in well-worn nanoweave survival bags—as used by real Mars settlers!, the fraying label on Scott’s insisted—but always inside. Too many eyes up there, Ren said somberly as they stood at the hangar door on the evening of the second day and watched the stars begin to glimmer through in the east. It’s better if we don’t give them anything unusual to notice. The abandoned airfield buildings offered shelter from both satellite scan and desert sun; the heat built up inside during the day but long-ago-shattered windows and doorways mostly without doors ensured a cooling through-flow of air. The walls in the rooms they used were peeled of all but fragmentary patches of paint, stripped back to a pale beige plaster beneath, and none of the lights worked. The toilet facilities and showers, oddly enough, did seem to work, though again without the privacy of doors and only cold water. There was no power for the elevator up to the control tower, but the stairs seemed safe enough, and once up there you had long views over the surrounding tangle of ancient concrete runways and the flat open spaces beyond.
Ren spent a lot of her time up there in the tower, watching, he supposed, for signs of unwelcome visitors, and talking in low tones with the stranger, with Him. And that last part worried Scott, for reasons he could not entirely pin down.
He supposed, finally, it was lack of faith. Pastor William had always said it attacked the so-called freethinkers first and worst, and God knew Scott had been away long enough to get contaminated, rubbing up against all the smut and doubt of West Coast life. He felt a vague, uncontrolled spurt of anger at the thought of it, the bright LCLS nights, the nonstop corrosive stimulus-ridden whirl of so-called modern living and no escape anywhere, not even in church, because God knew he’d gone there and tried. All that lukewarm, anything-cuddly-goes sermonizing, all the meetinghouse handholding circles and the flaky moist-eyed psychobabble that never went anywhere except to justify whatever weakling failures of moral vision the speakers had allowed themselves to fall into, three fucking years and more of it, clogging the certainty of his own vision, confusing the simple algebra of good and evil he damn fucking well knew was right, because that was the way it damn fucking well felt.
His head ached.
Had been aching, on and off, since he’d woken in the back of the swaying truck and touched the field dressing wrapped just above his eyes. The doctor Ren took him to that night outside Fresno told him it was a normal symptom for the head injuries he’d sustained; with luck it should fade in a few days.
Head injuries the stranger had given Scott. And how could that be right? At first, he couldn’t make sense of it.
He will return—Pastor William’s soft tones rolling out over the pulpit like thunder a long way off, thunder you knew was riding in on the wings of a storm coming right your way. They said he’d trained at one of the South Carolina megachurches before he got his ministry, and in the teeth of the gale he blew you could well believe it. He will return, and how’s that going be, you ask yourselves. Well, I’ll tell you, friends, I’ll tell you, building now to a roar, it ain’t going be no cluster-hugging happy clapping day like them niggers always singing on about. No, sir, the day of His return ain’t go
There was a story Scott remembered from the End Times comics, Volume III Issue 137, The Triumph in Babylon. Coat wrapped, the Savior stalks the mirror-glass canyons of New York with a long navy Colt on one hip and a billy club in his hand fashioned from the sweat and bloodstained wood of the cross he died on. He kicks in the frosted-glass door of a coffee franchise off Wall Street and beats seven shades of damnation out of the money changers gathered there. Painted, black-stockinged lady brokers twisting prostrate at his feet, red licked lips parted in horror and abandonment, thighs exposed under short, whorish skirts. Fat, big-nosed men in suits braying and panicking, trying to get away from the scything club. Blood and waxed coffee cups flying, screams. The capitalized crunch of broken bones.
Judgment!
Scott touched the bandage around his head again, figured maybe he’d gotten off lightly after all.
In the truck, staring at the gaunt, sleeping face, he’d leaned across and whispered to Ren, “Is it really Him?”
She’d given him a strange look. “Who’d you think it is?”
“Him, Jesus. The Lord, come again.” He swallowed, wet his lips. “Is this, are we living in the, you know, the End Times?”
No response. She’d just looked at him curiously and told him to rest, he was going to need his strength. Thinking back, he guessed he must probably have sounded delirious with the concussion.
And then the doctor, and other helpers along the way. People Ren seemed to know well. A change of trucks, a house and a soft bed on the outskirts of a town whose name he never saw. Another long, bone-jarring night in an all-terrain vehicle and tipping out at dawn on the airfield’s deserted expanse.
And then the waiting.
He tried to make himself useful. He tidied up after Ren and the stranger, put their bags and bedrolls straight every morning—and, oddly, glimpsed in among Ren’s gear a Bible and a sheaf of curling hardcopy from Republican ministry download sites, some of which he knew well himself; he closed the bag gently and didn’t look again, he wasn’t nosy by nature, but it made him frown all the same. He put it out of his mind as much as he could. Instead he put together a table and three dining places out of pieces of junk he found lying around in the control tower block and the hangars. He discovered a wrecked and wingless Cessna in one hangar corner, halfheartedly draped in thick plastic sheeting that he cut up and made into hanging curtains for a couple of the toilet cubicles and the showers. He took care of the food. The supplies the all-terrain driver had left them were mostly pull-tab autoheating, but he did his best to make meals out of what there was, carried them up to the other two in the tower when they showed no sign of coming down to eat. Tried not to stare at the stranger. He took the painkillers the doctor had given him sparingly and he prayed, diligently, every time he ate or slept. In an odd way, he felt better about life than he had in months.