Any Minute Now (38 page)

“Leave him,” Whitman said, frightened and disgusted in equal measure.

The blown-out tire was changed for the spare, and then it was time to go. Almost. Charlie, standing beside the truck, took out her shoulder launcher, loaded it up.

“No!” el-Habib screamed. “That's my home!”

“I hate this fucking place!” She pulled the trigger and, with an ear-splitting noise, the villa exploded into an immense fireball. El-Habib broke away from Flix, ran with a staggered gait toward the conflagration. None of them stopped him. No one watched as he vanished into the flames.

 

PART FOUR

THE SUMMONING

You see, a secret is not something untold. It's something which can't be told.

–Terence McKenna

 

42

Lindstrom was dead. Another pathway cut off, and that was as it should be, Preach thought as he barreled up the interstate in the dead of night. The Alchemists had had no choice but to summon him. Lindstrom had served his purpose. He had created the serum that would speed up the zombification process. Crow had informed him of the serum's deleterious side effects. No use creating soldiers who ripped their face off. But Preach was altogether certain that using the serum in conjunction with his own process would eliminate the problem while accelerating the creation of the soldiers.

Preach hummed to himself a creaky old Creole tune as the miles flew by, beating time on the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. The warm wind whistled and gnats slammed into his windshield as he cut through the night. Life—even one as long as his—was often a bowl of fucking cherries.

At two-thirty in the morning, he pulled off the interstate into the deserted blacktop parking lot of an all-night diner. It was clad in formed aluminum and looked like an Airstream recreational vehicle. Five flagstone steps led up to the front door. Preach parked and got out.

Inside, the place was as devoid of life as the parking lot. To his right and left, along the windows, was a series of booths. In front of him was the counter, fronted by a line of chromium and vinyl stools that swiveled back and forth. A blowsy blonde stood behind the counter placing pies in a glass carousel. No one was at the register. A shadowy figure inhabited the booth at the far end of the diner, where the lights had gone dark. The figure, hooded and difficult to make out clearly, was hunched over a cup of coffee that looked as if it hadn't been touched, although it might have already gone cold.

Preach bellied up to the counter and sat. The blonde turned from her pie placement and gave him a weary smile.

“What'll it be?”

“Eggs up; bacon, crisp; grits with extra cheese; coffee, black, no sugar.”

“We got cornbread,” she said hopefully, “fresh-baked.”

“Sounds too good to pass up,” Preach said.

She nodded, appearing happy as a child at Disneyland, gave his order to the kitchen, then turned back to him, poured his coffee.

“Come far?” she said.

“Going far.”

“I hear ya.” She nodded. “You're from the bayous, yeah?”

He heard a vehicle turn into the parking lot. It was big, probably one of those new-style SUVs. “Yes, ma'am, that I am.”

“I knew it. My grandpappy was from down yonder.”

He sipped his coffee, which tasted of eggshells and bitter grounds. “Ain't we all related there.”

The two of them shared a laugh at that one.

The front door opened behind him, someone strode in, sat on a stool nearby: a man with a weathered face, leathery skin, big as a bear and, from the look of him, just as mean. In the corner, the shadowy figure seemed to ripple, as if with a tremor of foreboding. Preach felt it like a hand on the nape of his neck, a gentle dispatch from the other side.

“Eggs, plenty of 'em, bacon and sausage, plenty of it. And make it snappy.”

“Would you like coffee, sir?”

“Did I order coffee? And why are you standing around gawping. I said make it snappy. Are you deaf as well as stupid?”

The blonde recoiled, turned, and gave in his order. She stayed that way, her back to the newcomer, until Preach's food was delivered via the high pass-through. She set the plates in front of Preach and, smiling, said, “Can I get you anything else?”

Before he had a chance to answer, the bear-man said, “Hey, what the hell're you doing. That's my food.”

“No, sir, it isn't,” the blonde said with a quaver of fear in her voice. “I just gave in your order.”

“Are you fucking telling me that's not my breakfast right there?”

“Sir, there's no call to use that kind of language.”

“I'll use whatever fucking language I fucking want.” He climbed off the stool. “I want to know why you're giving my breakfast to this piece of trash here.” He glanced at Preach. “I know low-country shit when I see it. Old people don't have need of food, am I right?”

“Sir, please sit back down and be patient,” the blonde said. Preach could feel her terror coming off her in waves. “Otherwise, I'll have to call the police.”

“Okay, okay. Relax, Blondie.” Smiling, the bear-man reached into his pocket, shook out a cigarette.

The blonde's eyes grew big around and she pointed to a sign taped over the pass-through to the kitchen. “I'm sorry, sir, but there's no smoking on the premises.”

“That right?” The bear-man shrugged. “Well, we don't want to break any of this shithole's rules, do we?” Holding the cigarette like a pointing finger, he jammed it down into one of Preach's egg yolks, then swirled it around until it broke open, the bits of tobacco flecked through the running yellow streams.

“Now I
will
call the police,” Blondie said.

The bear-man's hand snaked out, pinned her wrist to the counter. “You ain't going nowhere, Blondie.”

“Please! You're hurting me.”

He grinned at her, baring his nicotine-stained teeth.

In the far corner, the shadow stirred at precisely the same instant Preach's lips moved as if in prayer. Preach's eyes slid shut, and a shimmery dimness overtook the interior, though the blonde was dead certain the lights were burning as bright as ever.

“Oh, Lordy,” she breathed.

A moment later, the bear-man's SUV burst into flame.

“What the fuck?” he said, as he whirled around. Then he let go of the blonde's wrist and, striding to the front door, hauled it open. “What the fucking
fuck!”

He raced down the steps, but somehow his feet got tangled up, his ankles turned to Jell-O, and he fell hard face-first against the bare concrete. There was a crack like lightning. He lay where he fell, unmoving. A dark stain spread out from his head, dripping from the concrete to the blacktop, where it glimmered in the diner's fluorescent lights.

The blonde blinked as the shimmery dimness lifted. “He dead, d'you think?”

“Any minute now,” Preach said.

The blonde clucked her tongue. “That's a shame.” She reached for his plate of ruined eggs. “I'll have Hector quick-fry you up a fresh breakfast.”

“Don't bother.”

“On the house.”

“The eggs served their purpose.”

She regarded him with curiosity, shrugged, “Just as well, I suppose. I'm gonna have to call the cops.”

Preach rose, digging out his wallet, but the blonde shook her head. “Like I said, your money's no good here. I never charge family.”

Preach nodded. “Much obliged.”

“Careful on your way out,” she called. “Bound to be slippery out there.”

“Always am, ma'am.”

When he was gone, the blonde gathered her courage to peer into the far corner. The shadowy figure had vanished. As she sighed her relief, the light above the booth snapped on. She turned away and, shuddering, picked up the phone to call the police.

 

43

The casualties from the Mobius Project arrived at the Well around noon. Albin White supervised their entry and subsequent incarceration. It was as well that he was busy; it kept his mind from dwelling on the imminent arrival of Preach.

Summoning Preach was a calculated risk; he knew that from the get-go, but he also knew that Preach's involvement was a necessary evil—just as the Well was a necessary evil—for Mobius to be successful. Lindstrom had been a brilliant researcher—they never could have gotten anywhere without his breakthrough with
Papaver laciniatum
. For that alone White would be forever grateful to the scientist, but now that he was dead, only Preach would be able break down the complex alkaloid to rid it of its pernicious side effects.

Down the darkly gleaming corridors he went, emerging into one of the vertiginous chambers. Three of the casualties were on their knees, wrists tied behind their backs, gas masks with the eyeholes blacked out over their faces. They were all bleeding from beneath the ears and the chin, depending on how badly they had clawed at their faces before they were sedated. All had bloody crescents beneath their fingernails, some of which were ragged and torn. Their chests beat in the threadbare pulse of the panicked and the despairing.

Lucy was already in the chamber, which was adjacent to the waterfall with its ages-old
cenote
.

“Well,” White said, regarding her with both care and precision, “will you have difficulty killing them?”

Lucy pointed. “Look at them. Would you want to live like they're living?”

“Not a second more.”

He handed her a Heckler & Koch P30L handgun, saw with interest that she checked the magazine. She recalled with perfect clarity how Preach had taught her how to handle an old Mauser, how to load it, fire it, clean it, take it apart and put it back together in pitch darkness. How he had kissed her in the moonless night as a reward. Before tying her back up and laying her down with a tenderness she had heretofore never experienced, before he had taken her from behind, grunting and rutting like a sweat-slicked animal. Afterward, as he pressed down on her in the heat of a night with not even a whisper of a breeze to cool her off, she had burned with the humiliation his repeated violation of her body caused her. And still the violation of her body was the least of it. Each time he took her she could feel him inside her mind, worming his way through her thoughts, emotions, and memories. This was the thing that terrified her down to the marrow of her bones, the thing that caused her to steal the Mauser while on a nighttime bathroom run, shoot the man who was guarding her, and tear off through the bayous surrounding the church like a series of circular picket fences.

She ran and ran, fully expecting Preach—or a posse of his acolytes—to come after her, but either that didn't happen or she managed to elude them. Near dawn, she jump-started a jeep outside someone's house, and drove all day, until the tank ran dry. Then she hitched rides on semis, sometimes giving her body as payment, sometimes just talking with the lonely drivers. Heading north, always north, snorting lines of coke in an increasingly desperate attempt to forget what had happened to her in the Louisiana bayous, until somewhere in North Carolina the state police and the FBI had caught up with her in the forecourt of a sad motel.

Now, without hesitation, she stepped behind the first casualty, placed the H&K at the base of his skull and pulled the trigger. In a burst of blood and bone, he lurched away from her, sprawled over on his side. She held the second one down as she shot him. The third one gave no resistance at all—he was too far gone to know whether he was dead or alive, or to care.

As she handed the H&K back to White, two men wearing plastic overcoats entered the chamber and began to carry the dead men out.

Lucy looked at White. “You have the stones?”

“As you asked,” he said. “But I'm still unclear as to why you need them.”

Instead of answering him, she followed the two men with the last of the corpses. As soon as they had cleared the chamber, high-powered jets of water sluiced the blood and bits of bone down a large central drain.

The bodies were waiting for her at the waterfall. They had been stripped of their gas masks. The two men in slickers waited, patient as Roman sentinels. On the lip of the
cenote
was a small pyramid of stones about the size of her fist.

“Bring the first one,” Lucy said.

The two men lifted the first corpse, laid him on his back against the lip. Lucy opened his jaws and one by one stuffed the stones into his mouth until it was filled. Then she closed the jaws and nodded to the men, who lifted the weighted corpse over the side of the
cenote
and dropped the body headfirst. It plunged into the dark turbulent water, vanishing within moments.

When the same procedure had been performed on all three, she turned to White and said, “Is that all for today?”

When he told her it was, she discovered that she was disappointed. She had to content herself with the knowledge that Preach had been summoned, that very soon he and she would be reunited, just not in the way he had foreseen.

*   *   *

“Someone's gunning for you,” Jonah Dickerson said into his mobile.

St. Vincent, sitting in Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street, NW, had just taken a painkiller for his shoulder so he could enjoy the pair of chili dogs, fried onion rings, and jumbo Coke he'd ordered, and was in no mood for bad news. “What the fuck d'you mean?”

“Our contact in the AG's office tells me an investigation jacket has been opened on you.”

St. Vincent sat up straight, the deep throbbing in his shoulder all but forgotten. “That's impossible. I'm invulnerable. He must be mistaken.”

“It's an unofficial investigation,” Dickerson said, “and he's not mistaken. I'm looking at an electronic copy of the information they've pulled on you. I have to say it's pretty damn impressive.”