Scarecrow Gods (15 page)

Ortega concentrated on the curve as he passed Hereford, heading through Paradise Valley. On his right, lit up like a shopping mall, was the church. That bastard, John the New Baptist, had so far refused all of Ortega’s attempts to solicit a bribe. It wasn’t that the fake Jesus didn’t understand.

Which was another reason Ortega had been drinking tonight. If he had any chance of getting out of this at all, it would be through the skills of a high paid Phoenix lawyer. He had the name of a man who was the scourge of the state attorney general’s office, but needed ten grand for a retainer.

As Ortega drove past the lighted entrance to the compound, he noticed a coyote sitting by the side of the road. The lights of his pick-up truck reflected yellow from the animal’s eyes.

Pasquali had screamed louder than the two girls put together. In mid-stroke, the woman had bit down. It took precious seconds for Ortega to react—seconds where, beneath the peaks and valleys of his friend’s pain, he’d heard the sound of teeth grinding. Whipping the heavy barrel of the shotgun across the back of the old woman’s head, she fell, pulling Pasquali with her.

Another coyote appeared, this time on the other side of the road. As the truck approached, the animal dodged in front of it. Ortega swerved, his actions magnified by the alcohol. The pick-up breached sideways, first left, then right. He barely manage to straighten it as the tires ate dirt and scrub from the right hand ditch.

Damn, that had been too close.
It was almost like the damned animal had waited for the truck before making its mad dash across the road, but then that was impossible. Coyotes were smart, but not that smart.

It had been several long moments before Pasquali had recovered enough to stand. He kicked the old woman twice in the face, each wet smack of his boot followed by his own yips as the effort caused his pants to chafe his bloody penis. Finally, jerking the single-barreled shotgun from Ortega’s grasp, he descended upon the woman.

This time a coyote stood in the middle of the road. Ortega wasn’t about to swerve this time. He was almost upon the animal when it began trotting towards him. A small bump, then empty highway once again.

Too fucking weird.
Ortega shook his head trying to clear away some of the alcohol-etched cobwebs. He knew he hadn’t seen what he’d just seen. Next, he’d be playing chicken with a pink elephant.

Pasquali had used the shotgun in a way it had never meant to be used.

A ball of fur launched itself into the air and struck the windshield with enough force to crack the glass, leaving a streak of blood and brown fur. Ortega fumbled for the knob to activate the windshield wipers.

Naw. It couldn’t be.

But apparently it was, because within moments it was a weird tempest of kamikaze coyotes launching themselves at his vehicle like the Detroit-made machine was a free steak dinner. Over a dozen of the animals struck his window, so far, even more had missed as he’d swerved, pulling the truck out of their ballistic paths. The glass was a maze of cracks. He jerked the wheel as another coyote leapt towards is face.

Even though the woman had been almost dead, it did nothing to quench Pasquali’s thirst for revenge. When he finally fired, the barrel was buried deep inside her—so deep, the muffled sound was followed by a small puff of smoke and blood from her open mouth.

Ortega accelerated, the needle tipping past one hundred. He was almost to the San Pedro River Bridge and felt certain that if he could just cross it, he’d be home free. The window was gone. His left hand gripped the steering wheel. His right was wrapped around the neck of a dead coyote.

The bridge came into view just as another coyote entered the window, striking him in the face with the force of a heat-seeking missile. Blood sprayed the ceiling of the cab as Ortega’s nose turned to mush and his eyes ran to fluid. The pick-up struck the side of the bridge, flipped and spun through the air.

Agent Ortega was dead before he hit the ground.

CHAPTER 5

Tuesday—June 12th

The Alexian Brother’s Retreat House

Simon poured himself a second glass of wine from the retreat’s store. He usually stopped at one, but what had happened yesterday with Billy still bothered him. Not only were the Scarecrow Gods weighing heavily on his mind, but so were the things Billy had said.

Evil’s agent. Evil’s agent in dirty room. Is no amity, Simple Simon. Is no amity. Billy Bones. A rope ends it.

He wrote the words one by one in a column along the left-hand side of a pad of paper. On the right-hand side be began to scribble out word combinations. If they were simple anagrams, then it was only a matter of time before he figured them out.

He tried
Evil’s Agent
first. Working the letter combinations he couldn’t help but think of all the possible agents of evil. The Devil with a capital
D
. Demons with a small d. More mythical creatures like vampires and ghouls. Possession, like the cases in Nuevo Laredo. There were a host of things that were agents of evil.

There were even some similarities between Billy Bones and the others he’d run across. For not the first time, Simon wondered if the possessions he’d witnessed were some form of insanity such as schizophrenia or perhaps Tourette’s syndrome. Couldn’t the opposite also be true? What if insane people were really possessed?

Simon stared at the paper. Like an ouija, his hands had spelled out the answer almost of his own accord.
Evil’s Agent
equated to
Evangelist
. Not a demon or the Devil, but a man of God. The dichotomy would have been funny had Billy Bones not been so serious in his fear.

Simon took a long slow drink.

In dirty room
was his next word combination. Five minutes later, Simon had figured it out.
Dormitory.
Evangelist Dormitory. Evangelist in the dormitory? The evangelist’s dormitory? What was it? This was going to be a long night.

Simon went to the sideboard and grabbed the bottle he’d opened earlier. His glass was empty and he wasn’t leaving until he’d finished his decoding. The only evangelist he knew was the man known as John the New Baptist over at the old bible college. There were dormitories over there as well, but that was probably just coincidence.

Or was it?
Brother Dominic had believed that there was something wrong with John referring to him a cult leader and the bible college a cult compound. The Brother had been very serious in his convictions. Simon remembered the fire he’d seen in the man’s eyes as he spoke of the possibilities of evil. He remembered the tale he’d heard two weeks before at the very same table behind which he now sat—a tale that made Hollywood a reality.

* * *

Brother Dominic’s Tale

“I’ll never forget the eyes. I could tell that the kid wasn’t alone in there. I knew something was staring back at me and the kid had no idea what it was. Father Halloran did, though. He knew it all too well.

“The parents lived in Maryland and were good Catholics. Through their connections with Loyola, we brought the boy into an empty wing of the Alexian Brother’s Hospital in St. Louis. You know the one, Simon. I bet you’ve even been there seeing how you worked at the Salus Place.

“Anyway, I was assisting Father Halloran. I’d been dstudying at the university library so he knew me. On several occasions, I’d been asked to drive him around since he’d never learned how to drive. That’s how he knew me. Wasn’t as if I was special or anything, just convenient.

“Initially the family hired a doctor who said the boy had some sort of personality disorder. The doctor really didn’t know. I mean, how can one explain furniture moving across the room and things levitating? Insane doesn’t equal displacing the laws of physics. I think what confused the poor doctor were the voices. One minute the boy was himself, talking up baseball and television, and the next he was speaking a form of German that died out in the eighth century. One thing was sure true, it was crazy.

“See, when you told me of your experiences in Nuevo Laredo I understood immediately, because there we were in this room in the Alexian Brother’s Hospital and all hell was literally breaking loose. There were times when I thought we were all going to die. The vehemence in the child’s words, the horrible language he used, you knew it was from something else.

“When they made the movie from the notes left behind, they changed a few things. They kept the child near Maryland. They made the boy a girl. They set the events entirely in the house. During the real exorcism, no one died. There was no dramatic ending. We spent days going over the rites and then finally it was as if the evil just couldn’t fight us any longer. For all we know, maybe it just got bored. There was an enormous clap that echoed through the hospital. You can go back and ask and there are probably still people who remember the sound, only they didn’t know what it was. After the sound, the spirit was gone.

“If there’s one thing that the events of those two weeks taught me, Simon, it’s that there is true evil in the universe. It doesn’t matter how good you are or what you’re doing, if it wants you, it’ll get you. That boy had done nothing to anyone, but he was still targeted. That kind of malevolence terrifies me.

“You see, Simon. I know about your search for the truth of things…your quest to discover the cause. What the possession of the boy proved was that there just might not be a causal relationship. What we know is it happened. Like in Nuevo Laredo, it happened. It was through our faith that we triumphed. We believed in ourselves and our cause and by doing so, we were able to banish our opposite. Faith. It was our faith that carried us through, Simon. You need to find that faith.”

Simon never did have a chance to follow it up. He had questions he’d wanted to ask. Questions like what if a person had no faith? What if they were possessed and didn’t believe? Could the Rites work if they didn’t believe? It was the old question he’d seen in a comic book once: if a Jew became a vampire, would he be afraid of a cross? The sensible answer was no, there’d be an entirely different set of rules. If that was the case then did it disprove the existence of God? How could a God have rules that weren’t universal? Could you exorcise a Jew? A Muslim? A Hindu? Or did they just never become possessed? If that was true then who’d ever want to be a Christian?

Simon sighed. During the melancholy hours of too much wine and too much time, he always felt like this. He so desperately wanted to believe. He wanted to belong to something greater than himself. There was just that part of him that needed to know. Sometimes he hated that part.

He stared down at the paper and stopped. Sometime during his deliberations, he’d solved the riddle.

Evangelist.
Evangelist dormitory. Animosity, Simon. Animosity, Billy Bones. Desperation.

* * *

Ooltewah, Tennessee

The old Mung had been such a master of his special brand of magic that he never would’ve had the troubles Maxom continually seemed to have. Maxom strained to move the book across the table. He cleared his mind of everything but the book. Sweat popped along his brow and dripped from the ridges of his eyebrows.

Exhaling in a
shoosh
, he gave up. After five minutes, Maxom had only managed to move it three inches. A raised line of dust on the leading edge and a thin rectangle of clear clean wood stood as evidence of his extreme mental exertions.

In the jungle he’d only been able to move a single grain of rice at a time. It didn’t make him a mental heavyweight. It didn’t even make him a superman. It did, however, make him alive. Sometimes days had gone by without a single meal. Starvation was synonymous with the VC. Many a night had gone by with the communist soldiers squatting around the base of his cross celebrating their increasing victories over his friends.

American ears hung around their necks from thick home-made cords. More than a few wore US boonie caps or green berets as they roasted pig over a fire beneath him. Like any soldier after battle, the fear and tension bled off with each laugh, each smile, each cupful of alcoholic freedom. The glowing tips of cigarettes found their way into his lower legs dotting him like a ten year old chicken pox victim. They peed on him, the challenge to reach his face.

Eventually they’d fall asleep and, one by one, he’d capture a piece of uneaten rice with his mind. Dragging it along the ground, up the base of his crucifix, it would inexorably find its way to his mouth. It took hours to fill him—hours of intense concentration where his entire world was that simple maggot-sized grain of rice. Funny how a millimeter of starch could mean a universe of health.

And still, after more than twenty years, he could barely move a John Irving novel. If Lo Lo had been here, Maxom was sure the man could lift small buildings. He’d seen the small wrinkled man move a boulder in defense of his village. A VC sniper had used a child as target practice—7.62 bullets from a Soviet-made SVD ripping through the knees and elbows of a sleeping girl seconds before a quarter-ton rock intersected his head in a cracking explosion of bone and bloody mist.