Virtual Light

32. Fallonville

Must be getting closer” Rydell said.

Chevette Washington sort of grunted. Then she drank some of the water they’d gotten at the Shell station, and offered the bottle to him.

When he’d crashed out of that mall, he’d felt like they were sure to be right by a major highway. From the outside, the mall was just this low tumble of tan brick, windows boarded up with sheets of that really ugly hot-pressed recyc they ran off from chopped scrap, the color of day-old vomit. He’d gone screeching around this big empty parking lot, just a few dead clunkers and old mattresses to get in the way, until he’d found a way out through the chain link.

But there wasn’t any highway there, just some deserted four-lane feeder, and it looked like Loveless had put a bullet into the navigation hardware, because the map was locked on downtown Santa Ana and just sat there, sort of flickering. Where he was had the feel of one of those fallen-in edge-cities, the kind of place that went down when the Euro-money imploded.

Chevette Washington was curled up by the fridge with her eyes closed, and she wouldn’t answer him. He was scared Loveless had put one through her, too, but he knew he couldn’t afford to stop until he’d put at least a little distance between them and the mall. And he couldn’t see any blood on her or anything.

Finally he’d come to this Shell station. You could tell it had been Shell because of the shape of the metal things up on the poles that had supported the signs. The men’s room door was ripped off the hinges; the women’s chained and padlocked. Somehody had taken an automatic weapon to the pop machine, it looked like. He swung the RV around to the back and saw this real old Airstream trailer there, the same kind a neighbor of his father’s had lived in down in Tampa. There was a man there kneeling beside a hibachi, doing something with a pot, and these two black Labradors watching him.

Rydell parked, checked to see Chevette Washington was breathing, and got down out of the cab. He walked over to the man beside the hibachi, who’d gotten up now and was wiping the palms of his hands on the thighs of his red coveralls. He had on an old khaki fishing cap with about a nine-inch bill sticking straight out. The threads on the embroidered Shell patch on his coveralls had sort of frayed and fuzzed-out.

“You just lost” the man said, “or is there some kind of problem?” Rydell figured him to be at least seventy.

“No sir, no problem, but I’m definitely lost.” Rydell looked at the black Labs. They looked right back. “Those dogs of yours there, they don’t look too happy to see me.”

“Don’t see a lot of strangers” the man said.

“No sir” Rydell said, “I don’t imagine they do.”

“Got a couple of cats, too. Right now I’m feeding ’em all on dry kibble. The cats get a bird sometimes, maybe mice. Say you’re lost?”

“Yes sir, I am. I couldn’t even tell you what state we’re in, right now.”

The man spat on the ground. “Welcome to the goddamn club, son. I was your age, it was all of this California, just like God meant it to be. Now it’s Southern, so they tell me, but you know what it really is?”

“No sir. What?”

“A lot of that same happy horseshit. Like that woman camping in the goddamn White House.” He took the fishing cap off, exposing a couple of silver-white cancer-scars, wiped his brow with a grease-stained handkerchief, then pulled the cap hack on. “Say you’re lost, are you?”

“Yes sir. My map’s broken.”

“Know how to read a paper one?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

“What the hell’d she do to her head?” Looking past Rydell.

Rydell turned and saw Chevette Washington leaning over the driver’s bucket, looking out at them.

“How she cuts her hair” Rydell said.

“I’ll be damned” the man said. “Might be sort of good-looking, otherwise.”

“Yes sir” Rydell said.

“See that box of Cream o’ Wheat there? Think you can stir me up a cup of that into this water when it boils?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, I’ll go find you a map to look at. Skeeter and Whitey here, they’ll just keep you company.”

“Yes sir…”

PARADISE, so. CALIFORNIA

A CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

THREE MILES

NO CAMPING

CONCRETE PADS

FULL HOOKUPS

ELECTRIFIED SECURITY PERIMETER

FREE SWIMMING

LICENSED CHRISTIAN DAYCARE (STATE OF so. CAL.)

327 CHANNELS ON DOWNLINK

And a taller cross rising beyond that, this one welded from rusty railroad track, a sort of framework stuck full of old televisions, their dead screens all looking out toward the road there.

Chevette Washington was asleep now, so she missed that.

Rydell thought about how he’d used Codes’s phone to get through to Sublett’s number in L.A., and gotten this fu

“You mean you’re in Texas?”

“Paradise, Berry. Mom’s sick ’cause she ’n’ a bunch of others got moved up here to SoCal.”

“Paradise?”

Sublett had explained where it was while Rydell looked at the Shell man’s map.

“Hey” Rydell had said, when he had a general idea where it was, “how about I drive over and see you?”

“Thought you had you a job up in San Francisco.”

“Well, I’ll tell you about that when I get there.”

“You know they’re saying I’m an apostate here?” Sublett hadn’t sounded happy about that.

“A what?”

“An apostate. ’Cause I showed my mom this Cronenberg film, Berry? This Videodrome? And they said it was from the Devil.”

“I thought all those movies were supposed to have God in ’em.”

“There’s movies that are clearly of the Devil, Berry. Or anyway that’s what Reverend Fallon says. Says all of Cronenberg’s are.”

“He in Paradise, too?”

“Lord no” Sublett had said, “he’s in these tu

“From what?”

“Taxes. You know who dug those same tu

“Who?”

“Hitler did, with slave labor.”

“I didn’t know that” Rydell had said, imagining this scary little guy with a black mustache, standing up on a rock and cracking a big whip.

Now here came another sign, this one not nearly as professional as the first one, just black spraypaint letters on a couple of boards.

R.U. READY FOR ETERNITY?

HE LIVES! WILL YOU?

WATCH TELEVISION

“Watch television?” She was awake now.

“Well” Rydell said, “Fallonites believe God’s sort of just there. On television, I mean.”

“God’s on television?”

“Yeah. Kind of like in the background or something. Sublett’s mother, she’s in the church herself, but Sublett’s kind of lapsed.”

“So they watch tv and pray, or what?”

“Well, I think it’s more like kind of a meditation, you know? What they mostly watch is all these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter into them.”

“We had Revealed Aryan Nazarenes, up in Oregon” she said. “First Church of Jesus, Survivalist. As soon shoot you as look at you.”

“Bad news” Rydell agreed, the RV cresting a little ridge there, “those kind of Christians…” Then he saw Paradise, down there, all lit up with these lights on poles.

The security perimeter they advertised was just coils of razor-wire circling maybe an acre and a half. Rydell doubted if it actually was electrified, but he could see screamers hanging on it, every ten feet or so, so it would be pretty effective anyway. There was a sort of blockhouse-and-gate set-up where the road ran in, but all it seemed to be protecting were about a dozen campers, trailers, and semi-rigs, parked on cement beds around what looked like an old-fashioned radio tower they’d topped with a whole cluster of satellite dishes, those little expensive ones that looked sort of like giant gray plastic marshmallows. Somebody had dammed a creek, to make a sort of pond for swimming, but the creek itself looked like the kind of industrial runoff you wouldn’t even find bugs around, let alone birds.