Night Prayers (3 page)

Leaning back against the warm bricks of the Hollywood landmark, Mica smiled down at a homeless woman wearing too many clothes for so hot an evening. She smiled back, then flipped him off and wandered away, mumbling to herself.

Forgive her, Lord.

Rolling the fatigue out of his shoulders, Mica stood up and began again… keeping his voice soft and easy. For a while, at least. He knew he wouldn't be able to hold back the Power for long, but since the cops had already warned him once that night about disturbing the peace, he wanted to give it his best shot.

"Now, when I say Mica, brothers and sisters, I'm not putting myself up there with the Old Testament Prophet
Micah
." He emphasized the name, hoping they'd hear the difference. "No sir, I would never place myself so high as that! I am Mica
— the rock… hard as flint. The Lord made me hard not because this is a hard world, but because we all have to be hard to fight the temptations of this world."

He was shouting again.
Oh well, Lord, You know best
.

"It's too easy to just lay down and let the world screw you whenever it wants. We have to be hard… hard as rock… hard as MICA to know that the Lord loves you. And I'll help, because that's my job. I've been tempered by the Lord and I'm hard enough to kick all of your asses through the Pearly Gates if I have to. Because the Lord loves every last one of you. AMEN!"

Collapsing against the building, Mica pushed the sweat-damp hair out of his eyes and nodded. His throat was raw and throbbing, and the pocket Bible felt like a Guttenberg in his hand, but that was all right. And if the cops came back and hauled him away that was all right, too. Because he'd done his nightly duty. He'd spread the Word.

Even if no one listened.

But tonight someone; actually clapped. And whistled. And pounded the sidewalk with heavy heels. Mica lifted the Bible to his chest and smiled weakly.

"Thank you, but it's not me you should be praising — it's the Lord you should be…
shit
!"

The two skin-heads who were leaning against the busted out newspaper stand weren't clapping and whistling for him
or
the Lord. All their adoration was directed at the teenaged street whore swishing her ass across Highland.

"Hey!" Mica yelled at them. "Don't you brain dead fucks know you're Loved?"

Only one of the skin-heads turned, the other was darting through the cruising low-riders after the whore.

"Sure we do, man," the skin-head smiled. "My friend's trying to negotiate a deal right now. You want in?"

These you don't have to Forgive, Lord.

Before he climbed down from his portable pulpit, Mica looked across the bumper-to-bumper traffic to the robed Satanist.
He
didn't seem to be doing any better. Tourists, as a general rule, were hard to convert to
anything
.

Tucking the K-Mart step stool under one arm, Mica shoved his way through the meandering crowd like a running back trying to find a hole.

"I am as mica," he reminded himself, ignoring the looks he might be getting. "Hard and layered against the temptations of self-will. I am blessed."

The crowds thinned by the time he crossed Hawthorn. The action was on Hollywood Blvd… no one walked down Highland unless they were heading for
more
action on Sunset.

Mica realized he was still mumbling when he kicked an empty beer can half-way up the steps of Hollywood High's auditorium. He imagined going to school there would be like trying to learn in a cesspool.

"I'm Mica," he told the silent building.

Actually, his parents had named him Milo — after a distant cousin who made a fortune in the sausage industry
— some thirty-two years earlier, but the name just didn't have the same impact as
Mica
.

That — and the fact that his first time preaching as Brother Milo had cost him three fractured ribs and a dislocated jaw. When he woke up, still in a codeine haze, an Angel had appeared and touched his aching head softly with her cool hand.

"Your name's really Milo?" she asked. "Damn… it's lucky those punks let you
live
!"

It was one of the
clearer
signs he'd ever received and the next day Milo became Mica.

Forever.

Amen.

Not that
all
the signs were that easy to understand. One of the troubles with doing the Lord's work solo was that there was no training manual.

"Except
this
!" Mica said, tightening his grip on the small Bible. He smiled and felt the scar on his forehead twitch.

But, of course,
some
signs were more obvious than others.

His daddy — a devote Fundamentalist — had presented him the scar on his thirteenth birthday when he asked, innocently, if Jesus really had fucked Mary Magdalene.

Mica, then Milo, had seen pictures of men and women fucking (he'd learned the correct term from his best friend Horace Bonner) in magazines his daddy kept hidden behind the paint cans in the garage, and thought it was cool that Jesus could fuck (he liked the word the moment he'd heard it) and still find time to preach.

Mica spent the rest of the week in his room.

Healing.

That
had been the first sign.

The second came that night when, groaning and drifting in and out of consciousness, he woke up to find Jesus sitting in his bean bag chair reading one of his MAD magazines.

They had a nice talk (every time he woke up) and Jesus explained that, although He Loved Mary Magdalene the same way He Loved Mica and the rest of the Apostles, He never fucked her. She was a whore, He reminded Mica, and being God, He knew the kinds of diseases He could catch off her.

Right before He left, Jesus patted the seeping gash between Mica's eyes and winked.

The next morning the angry red scar was in the shape of a cross.

The
third
sign.

With his free hand, Mica traced the smooth skin with his fingers and smiled. After seeing the wound his daddy had never hit him again.

"Aw, does big boy have a boo-boo?"

She came out of the shadows next to the auditorium so quickly that Mica almost back stepped into a rumbling garbage truck. When his ears adjusted back to the steady hum of the waking city, he heard her giggle… and the sound went directly from his ears to his cock.

"Careful honey," the lilting voice whispered, "I don't want
yon flat
."

Mica nodded and watched her sashay toward him. It was only after the mini-skirted, halter-topped figure stepped out into the piss-yellow light that Mica noticed
she
needed a shave.

"Aw, shit."

"What's the matter?" Although still vaguely feminine, there was a hard edge to the voice. "Disappointed?"

Mica hugged his Bible tighter to his chest and shook his head. Pimps, he could accept, and hookers… and crack heads and bag ladies and gang bangers and even Neo-Nazi-fascist-radical-NRA supporting-assholes like the two he just left.

But not these…
creatures of Perdition
!

Hunching his shoulders, Mica tried to walk past without further comment. He just had enough time to get home and change before —

"I
asked if
you were disappointed."

Mica kept his shoulders hunched, like a cat warning off an interloper, as he turned.
Is this some kind of test, Lord
? "No. Excuse me. I'm late."

"
I'm
never late," the man said as he stepped directly in front of Mica
— the pink lipstick gleaming beneath the bushy mustache. "I can go thirty days out of the month."

When he batted glittered eyelashes, Mica felt something snap deep inside him. Two of his portable stool's legs sank into the fake rubber boobs while the second set trapped the trans-whatever's neck. A gentle, but steady push propelled the man back into the shadows.

Where he belonged.

"Hey…" The giggle had a touch of nervousness to it now. Mica kept pushing until he'd backed the man into a blind corner next to the auditorium's exit door.

"Not so rough, sweet-cakes, I'll have to charge double."

Three quick cranial thumps against the stucco facade was more than enough to convince the man this customer wasn't interested.

Stepping back, Mica pulled the stool away and watched the man crumple, the mini-skirt riding up to reveal heart decorated boxer shorts underneath.

"Shit," the man whimpered, wiping running snot off his lipstick. "I didn't do nuthin' to you!"

"You're an abomination in the eyes of the Lord!" Mica hissed with as much conviction as his overworked throat could produce. "And damned in the sight of men. You mock the body God gave you, you fucking
queer
!"

"I'm not a queer!" the man yelled as Mica cut across Highland behind a bus loaded with upwardly mobile business-types. "I'm a woman trapped in a man's body!"

"You're a fucking pervert!" Mica hollered back, ignoring the raw tickle back by his tonsils. "God made you a
man
!"

"Then God made a mistake!"

The accusation echoed out of the shadows at him.

Mica almost darted back across the street to finish the job, but instead pressed the Bible againsr the scar on his forehead and took a deep breath. "God doesn't
make
mistakes," he whispered.

This was a mistake.

A
bad
mistake.

And her aim had been
way
off.

Allison molded her bare ass into a waffle pattern on the cyclone fence and watched Buck hop around the deserted parking lot
— jeans down around his ankles, his penis flopping out the front of his brief's, his hand pressed tightly against his lacerated left ear.

Oops.

"You God damned bitch! You fucking
bit
me!"

Buck's
Tex-Mex accent had disappeared, along with his passion… and ear-lobe. Allison silently damned Seth's already damned soul to the lowest pit of Hell for sucking her dry and not leaving her so much as a training manual.

Producing fangs was no effort — she managed that while Buck was ripping her skirt off up against the back fender of his station wagon (they couldn't use the back seat because it was filled with kid's toys); and she'd even lulled him into near-orgasmic euphoria by running the tip of her icy tongue up and down the throbbing veins in his neck… just like Seth had done to her.

But
then
she lunged.

What would Christopher Lee do at a time like this?

"You fucking cunt," Buck screamed as he waddled up and shoved his dripping hand into her face. "Look at that!"

Allison did. And her mouth watered.

"You shit-brained whore… how am I going to explain
this
to my wife? I could… kill you!"

"Too late," Allison whispered.

"WHAT?"

"I — I, ah… I guess I just got — um — carried away." She tucked her fangs down under her lip and tried to smile. "You're just so… uh, sexy."

Without warning, Buck grabbed the front of her blouse with his free hand and tore it down the middle. The anger in his face shifted into something else.

Something Allison had seen before.