Armageddon Crazy

Now he watched TV and waited for the phone to ring. He could get beer, booze, and pizza delivered, so he had no reason to leave his room. From all he had seen, he wanted as little as possible to do with the citizens of Buffalo. Apart from anything else, they might decide that he would be a fit subject for a Saturday night barbecue. He certainly did not see himself asking around if anyone knew somebody who would get him into Canada. If smuggling people across the border was an industry in the city, there were no signs of it. From a couple of conversations with the manager and the boy who brought his beer, he started to form the impression that the real underground industry was ripping off fugitives who were waiting in vain. The woman from the hundred-dollar bill had called after six days. The message had not been encouraging.

"The canuks seem to be ru

"So I wait?"

"These things don't happen overnight."

Speedboat's concern over what was going on in New York was not a matter of either boredom or nostalgia. He was going to run out of money in approximately two weeks, and getting back to the city was his only failsafe option. If he could not get out of the country, Manhattan was about the only place he could survive.

The TV was hardly informative, but, reading between the lines, it was pretty obvious that some strange shit was going down. First there had been the freakout and hoopla over the attempt on Aden Proverb's life. Speedboat was amazed that it got on TV at all. They had blanked out the entire riot outside the Garden as if it had never happened. After the Proverb incident, the wall went up again with a vengeance. The networks were smothered in a barrage of happyvision, puppies, kittens, old folks, miracle cures, and just plain miracles. Jesus was everywhere. He even smote the enemy. There was footage of a large squad of Mexican and Cuban prisoners who had surrendered after a fierce firefight forty miles south of Austin. Speedboat was certain that he had seen that footage before.

The big news was the latest Faithful propaganda fest. The president going to take over Liberty Island for something that was being trumpeted as a Day of National Reconciliation. It was being pitched as a very big deal. There was an item about it, or at least a reference to it, on practically every show. That, in itself, was a definite indication that something was slipping out of sync in the world of the true believers. National reconciliation was quite a mouthful for a regime that never admitted there was the slightest dissent in the ranks. They would not be pissing away some millions on a TV special from right in the heart of New York, a town never loved by Fundamentalist Christians, unless there was a potential major problem and it was centered right there. A thought struck him. Maybe that was why the Canadians were massing troops on the other side of the border. It was not uncommon for the Canadians to know more about what was going on inside the United States than the country's own population knew. Indeed, there were times when it was hard to know less.

Speedboat's beer was all gone. He had a sudden urge to hurl the bottle through the TV screen. He was bored with all the madness. He restrained himself with difficulty. He told himself firmly that it was no time to get stir crazy. Time might move slowly holed up in this cruddy motel, but it did not move half as slowly as time moved in Joshua.

Winters

Winters woke to a deacon's worst nightmare. Dreisler and what looked like half of Internal Affairs was at the foot of his bed. Short of Satan on the bedpost, that was as bad as it got. He had a blinding headache, and his mind was still fuzzy from whatever they had used to sedate him. He struggled to sit up in bed.

Dreisler seemed amused. "Good afternoon, Deacon Winters."

"Good afternoon, sir."

Winters did not know whether it was day or night. The hospital room he was in – if, in fact, it was a hospital – was a windowless white cubical. A neodevotional print of Lazarus being raised from the dead hung in a cheap plastic frame on the wall beside him.

"Where am I?"

Dreisler ignored him. "You've been very careless, Winters."

Physical pain aside, Winters was very frightened. He had heard all the horror stories of what happened to erring deacons who fell into the hands of Dreisler's IA headhunters.

"Careless?" he asked.

"It's one thing to go out and engage in illegal torture and executions. In some parts of the service, they look on that kind of behavior as the mark of a healthy enthusiasm on the part of an up-and-coming deacon. To lose your whole team, however, on your very first mission is just plain careless."

"I…"

Dreisler sat down on the bed, fastidiously adjusting the knife-edge creases in his pants. There was something almost friendly in the move, a vague suggestion of the desire to confide. " You'd probably like to talk to me."

"I don't know. I 'm confused."

"Of course you're confused. You're also in a bit of a double bind. You'd like to tell me all about what happened, but you're well aware that that would violate your mortal oath to the Secret Order of Holy Magicians. I have this problem, Winters. My reputation tends to precede me, and people seem to be very anxious, as a rule, to tell me things. In your case, though, you also have to consider the reputation of the Magicians. They can get very creative with oath-breakers."

"I wasn't – "

"No, I know you weren't. It was Spencer who was in charge. He should have made sure that the building was secure. Unfortunately, Spencer's dead, as are all the others."

Winters knew that he would blurt out everything in the end. What would happen to him then?

"It was the Lefthand Path," he said.

"How do you know that?"

"The one who hit me with the gun butt," he yelled it out. "Lefthand Path, mother – " He could not say it in front of Dreisler.

Dreisler laughed. "You only have his word for it."

"What are you going to do with me?"

Dreisler stood up. "Normally there would be disciplinary action in a case like this. Fortunately these are troubled times, and I need all the men I can trust. I can't spare you."

Winters was surprised. "You trust me?"

"Yes, Winters, I trust you."

Winters could not read his expression.

"In fact, I trust you so much that I need you to be in a key position on the Day of National Reconciliation. It's possible that the heretics will use the occasion to cause trouble."

"What position will that be?"

Dreisler shook his head. "Get your head fixed first. You have a skull fracture. You'll get your orders when you're up on your feet again."

"Thank you, sir."

Dreisler threw his coat over his shoulders. "Don't thank me yet, boy. You may not like these orders."

He walked around the bed, then hesitated as if he had just remembered something.

"By the way, do you have any idea what happened to Carlisle?"

Winters shook his head. The motion hurt. "I didn't see him after the attack started, and then I was out cold."

Dreisler nodded. "It doesn't matter."

Carlisle

The black lake was gone. There was spring sunlight streaming in through a window that was secured by three serviceable steel bars. The drugs had worn off, leaving Harry Carlisle with a queasy hunger in his stomach and a gritty feeling under his eyelids. The old-fashioned sash window was open about five inches at the bottom, and a breeze was blowing in. That felt good. Each deep breath helped clear the narcotic residue from his brain. Goddamn, but if mere was ever a time that he needed his brain functioning to the max, it was right then. Where the hell was he? And, even more important, what was his status? The last time he had looked, he had been dead meat. Then, in what had seemed to be the nick of time, a bunch of guys, shooting off guns and yelling that they were the Lefthand Path, had rushed in and rescued him. Why they had rescued him was another matter. In the best of all possible worlds, they would have saved him simply because he was an unfortunate victim of deacon oppression. Unfortunately, it was not the best of all possible worlds, and he feared that his saviors, whoever they were, also had a use for him. He could only pray that it would not be as a mutilated corpse.