Cold Fire (9 page)

Half a mile from the town, he rode the Harley into an arroyo and left it there on its side. The soft sand walls of the channel gave way easily under his hands, and he quickly covered the bike.

He had assumed he could walk the last half mile with relative ease. But he was worse off than he had realized. His vision swam in and out of focus. His lips burned, his tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth, and his throat was sore—as if he were in the grip of a virulent fever. The muscles in his legs began to cramp and throb, and each foot seemed to be encased in a concrete boot.

He must have blacked out on his feet, because the next thing he knew, he was on the brick steps of the white clapboard church, with no recollection of the last few hundred yards of his journey. The words OUR LADY OF THE DESERT were on a brass plaque beside the double doors.

He had been a Catholic once. In a part of his heart, he still was a Catholic. He had been many things—Methodist, Jew, Buddhist, Baptist, Moslem, Hindu, Taoist, more—and although he was no longer any of them in practice, he was still all of them in experience.

Though the door seemed to weigh more than the boulder that had covered the mouth of Christ’s tomb, he managed to pull it open. He went inside.

The church was much cooler than the twilit Mojave, but not really cool. It smelled of myrrh and spikenard and the slightly sweetish odor of burning votive candles, causing memories of his Catholic days to flood back to him, making him feel at home.

At the doorway between narthex and nave, he dipped two fingers in the holy-water font and crossed himself. He cupped his hands in the cool liquid, brought them to his mouth, and drank. The water tasted like blood. He looked into the white marble basin in horror, certain that it was brimming with gore, but he saw only water and the dim, shimmering reflection of his own face.

He realized that his parched and stinging lips were split. He licked them. The blood was his own.

Then he found himself on his knees at the front of the nave, leaning against the sanctuary railing, praying, and he did not know how he had gotten there. Must have blacked out again.

The last of the day had blown away as if it were a pale skin of dust, and a hot night wind pressed at the church windows. The only illumination was from a bulb in the narthex, the flickering flames of half a dozen votive candles in red-glass containers, and a small spotlight shining down on the crucifix.

Jim saw that his own face was painted on the figure of Christ. He blinked his burning eyes and looked again. This time he saw the face of the dead man in the station wagon. The sacred countenance metamorphosed into the face of Jim’s mother, his father, the child named Susie, Lisa—and then it was no face at all, just a black oval, as the killer’s face had been a black oval when he had turned to shoot at Jim inside the shadow-filled Roadking.

Indeed, it wasn’t Christ on the cross now, it
was
the killer. He opened his eyes, looked at Jim, and smiled. He jerked his feet free of the vertical support, a nail still bristling from one of them, a black nail hole in the other. He wrenched his hands free, too, a spike still piercing each palm, and he just
drifted
down to the floor, as if gravity had no claim on him except what he chose to allow it. He started across the altar platform toward the railing, toward Jim.

Jim’s heart was racing, but he told himself that what he saw was only a delusion. The product of a fevered mind. Nothing more.

The killer reached him. Touched his face. The hand was as soft as rotting meat and as cold as a liquid gas.

Like a true believer in a tent revival, collapsing under the empowered hand of a faith healer, Jim shivered and fell away into darkness.

A white-walled room.

A narrow bed.

Spare and humble furnishings.

Night at the windows.

He drifted in and out of bad dreams. Each time that he regained consciousness, which was never for longer than a minute or two, he saw the same man hovering over him: about fifty, balding, slightly plump, with thick eyebrows and a squashed nose.

Sometimes the stranger gently worked an ointment into Jim’s face, and sometimes he applied compresses soaked in ice water. He lifted Jim’s head off the pillows and encouraged him to drink cool water through a straw. Because the man’s eyes were marked by concern and kindness, Jim did not protest.

Besides, he had neither the voice nor the energy to protest. His throat felt as if he had swallowed kerosene and then a match. He did not have the strength even to lift a hand an inch off the sheets.

“Just rest,” the stranger said. “You’re suffering heat-stroke and a bad sunburn.”

Windburn. That’s the worst of it, Jim thought, remembering the Harley SP, which had not been equipped with a Plexiglas fairing for weather protection.

Light at the windows. A new day.

His eyes were sore.

His face felt worse than ever. Swollen.

The stranger was wearing a clerical collar.

“Priest,” Jim said in a coarse and whispery voice that didn’t sound like his own.

“I found you in the church, unconscious.”

“Our Lady of the Desert.”

Lifting Jim off the pillows again, he said, “That’s right. I’m Father Geary. Leo Geary.”

Jim was able to help himself a little this time. The water tasted sweet.

Father Geary said, “What were you doing in the desert?”

“Wandering.”

“Why?”

Jim didn’t answer.

“Where did you come from?”

Jim said nothing.

“What is your name?”

“Jim.”

“You’re not carrying any ID.”

“Not this time, no.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Jim was silent.

The priest said, “There was three thousand dollars in cash in your pockets.”

“Take what you need.”

The priest stared at him, then smiled. “Better be careful what you offer, son. This is a poor church. We need all we can get.”

 
Later still, Jim woke again. The priest was not there. The house was silent. Once in a while a rafter creaked and a window rattled softly as desert wind stirred fitfully outside.

When the priest returned, Jim said, “A question, Father.”

“What’s that?”

His voice was still raspy, but he sounded a bit more like himself. “If there’s a God, why does He allow suffering?”

Alarmed, Father Geary said, “Are you feeling worse?”

“No, no. Better. I don’t mean my suffering. Just ... why does He allow suffering in general?” “To test us,” the priest said.

“Why do we have to be tested?”

“To determine if we’re worthy.”

“Worthy of what?”

“Worthy of heaven, of course. Salvation. Eternal life.”

“Why didn’t God
make
us worthy?”

“Yes, he made us perfect, without sin. But then we sinned, and fell from grace.”

“How could we sin if we were perfect?”

“Because we have free will.”

“I don’t understand.”

Father Geary frowned. “I’m not a nimble theologian. Just an ordinary priest. All I can tell you is that it’s part of the divine mystery. We fell from grace, and now heaven must be earned.”

“I need to pee,” Jim said.

“All right.”

“Not the bedpan this time. I think I can make it to the bathroom with your help.”

“I think maybe you can, too. You’re really coming around nicely, thank God.”

“Free will,” Jim said.

The priest frowned.

 
By late afternoon, nearly twenty-four hours after Jim stumbled into the church, his fever registered only three-tenths of a degree on the thermometer. His muscles were no longer spasming, his joints did not hurt any more, he was not dizzy, and his chest did not ache when he drew a deep breath. Pain still flared across his face periodically. When he spoke he did so without moving his facial muscles more than absolutely necessary, because the cracks in his lips and in the corners of his mouth reopened easily in spite of the prescription cortisone cream that Father Geary applied every few hours.

He could sit u
^p
in bed of his own volition and move about the room with only minimal help. When his appetite returned, as well, Father Geary gave him chicken soup, then vanilla ice cream. He ate carefully, mindful of his split lips, trying to avoid tainting the food with the taste of his own blood.

“I’m still hungry,” Jim said when he finished.

“Let’s see if you can keep that down first.”

“I’m fine. It was only sunstroke, dehydration.”

“Sunstroke can kill, son. You need more rest.”

When the priest relented a while later and brought him more ice cream, Jim spoke through half-clenched teeth and frozen lips: “Why are some people killers? Not cops, I mean. Not soldiers. Not those who kill in self-defense. The other kind, the murderers. Why do they kill?”

Settling into a straight-backed rocker near the bed, the priest regarded him with one raised eyebrow. “That’s a peculiar question.”

“Is it? Maybe. Do you have an answer?”

“The simple one is—because there’s evil in them.”

They sat in mutual silence for a minute or so. Jim ate ice cream, and the stocky priest rocked in his chair. Another twilight crept across the sky beyond the windows.

Finally Jim said, “Murder, accidents, disease, old age ... Why did God make us mortal in the first place? Why do we have to die?”

“Death’s not the end. Or at least that’s what I believe. Death is only our means of passage, only the train that conveys us to our reward.”

“Heaven, you mean.”

The priest hesitated. “Or the other.”

Jim slept for a couple of hours. When he woke, he saw the priest standing at the foot of the bed, watching him intently.

“You were talking in your sleep.”

Jim sat up in bed. “Was I? What’d I say?”

“There is an enemy.’”

“That’s all I said?”

“Then you said, ‘It’s coming. It’ll kill us all.’”

A shiver of dread passed through Jim, not because the words had any power of themselves, and not because he understood them, but because he sensed that on a subconscious level he knew all too well what he had meant.

He said, “A dream, I guess. A bad dream. That’s all.”

But shortly past three o’clock in the morning, during that second night in the rectory, he thrashed awake, sat straight up in bed, and heard the words escaping him again,
“It’ll kill us all.
”

The room was lightless.

He fumbled for the lamp, switched it on. He was alone.

He looked at the windows. Darkness beyond.

He had the bizarre but unshakable feeling that something hideous and merciless had been hovering near, something infinitely more savage and strange than anyone in recorded history had ever seen, dreamed, or imagined. Trembling, he got out of bed. He was wearing an ill-fitting pair of the priest’s pajamas. For a moment he just stood there, not sure what to do.

Then he switched off the light and, barefoot, went to one window, then the other. He was on the second floor. The night was silent, deep, and peaceful. If something had been out there, it was gone now.

The following morning, he dressed in his own clothes, which Father Geary had laundered for him. He spent most of the day in the living room, in a big easy chair, his feet propped on a hassock, reading magazines and dozing, while the priest tended to parish business.

Jim’s sunburnt and wind-abraded face was stiffening. Like a mask.

That evening, they prepared dinner together. At the kitchen sink, Father Geary cleaned lettuce, celery, and tomatoes for a salad. Jim set the table, opened a bottle of cheap Chianti to let it breathe, then sliced canned mushrooms into a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove.

They worked in a comfortable mutual silence, and Jim wondered about the curious relationship that had evolved between them. There had been a dreamlike quality to the past couple of days, as if he had not merely found refuge in a small desert town but in a place of peace outside the real world, a town in the Twilight Zone. The priest had stopped asking questions. In fact, it now seemed to Jim that Father Geary had never been half as probing or insistent as the circumstances warranted. And he suspected that the priest’s Christian hospitality did not usually extend to the boarding of injured and suspicious strangers. Why he should receive special consideration at Geary’s hands was a mystery to him, but he was grateful for it.

When he had sliced half the mushrooms in the can, he suddenly said, “Life line.”

Father Geary turned from the sink, a stalk of celery in hand. “Pardon me?”

A chill swept through Jim, and he almost dropped the knife into the sauce. He put it on the counter.

“Jim?”

Shivering, he turned to the priest and said, “I’ve got to get to an airport.”

“An airport?”

“Right away, Father.”

The priest’s plump face dimpled with perplexion, wrinkling his tanned forehead far past his long-vanished hairline. “But there’s no airport here.”

“How far to the nearest one?” Jim asked urgently.

“Well... two hours by car. All the way to Las Vegas.”

“You’ve got to drive me there.”

“What? Now?”

“Right now,” Jim said.

“But—”

“I have to get to Boston.”

“But you’ve been ill—”

“I’m better now.”

“Your face—”

“It hurts, and it looks like hell, but it’s not fatal. Father, I
have
to get to Boston.”

“Why?”

He hesitated, then decided on a degree of revelation. “If I don’t get to Boston, someone there is going to be killed. Someone who shouldn’t die.”

“Who? Who’s going to die?”