The very next day, Tara leapt into his car willingly as he pulled to a stop at a street corner crowded with prostitutes and drug dealers.
“Hey, daddy! Want some pussy?”
There were shadows all around her crying out for her blood. She didn’t seem to notice or care. Jamie heard a horrifying voice boom in the cramped confines of the car.
“Kill this whore! Sacrifice her!”
He wasn’t sure which God had said it, but he knew he had to obey. He gave her a snort of heroin and a whack on the head with a tire iron then drove straight to his apartment where he chained her up in the room with Naomi. He’d kidnapped little Bill while he was leaving the hospital after his last check-up, the one when they told him he only had a few more months to live. He’d scooped the boy up out of his wheelchair and walked right out of the building with him. So far he hadn’t hurt any of them. So far he hadn’t found the nerve.
The Aztecs sacrificed twenty thousand people a year to their gods to keep the earth in motion, Jamie thought. All I need is one to make my contribution. Why is it so hard?
He thought about Kitten, about Bill, and Naomi, and Tara, all chained up in his apartment waiting for him to make up his mind. But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The question kept nagging at him.
What if I am wrong? What if this isn’t the true religion? What if by killing someone I am committing a sin and damning my soul to hell?
But then the opposite thought would immediately rise up to complicate things and send him spiraling into a near panic.
What if the Aztecs, the Druids, the Africans, the Greeks, the Polynesians, the Egyptians, and three quarters of the ancient world were right? What if by not killing I am damning myself?
Since he’d first been diagnosed HIV positive and then with full-blown AIDS Jamie had been struggling with this same dilemma. Ever since his death sentence, he’d decided that in order to ensure his soul would not perish or suffer eternal damnation he’d had better play it safe and worship every god known to man just in case one of them was the TRUE god. Better safe than sorry. The problem was that so many of the religions conflicted. What was canonized by one was condemned by another. Sinner and saint were one and the same depending on the religion or the times. In order to cover his ass, he’d have to worship every religion, but by worshipping them all he was sinning against many and condemning his soul anyway. And then there were the jealous Gods, the monotheistic religions that made it a sin to worship any other. They pissed Jamie off the most.
There has to be a solution, Jamie thought. There has to be a way to make it work.
Jamie unlocked his car and collapsed behind the wheel. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lower lip trying to control his frustration.
What do I do? What if they are all wrong?
Jamie sighed in exasperation and looked at his face in the mirror. He looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past. He knew he’d be dead soon. If he couldn’t save his body then he had to at least save his soul. He drove to the hospital and followed the familiar path to the terminal ward. No one thought to question his presence there. With his emaciated body shivering from fever, the various rashes and tumors on his face and hands, Jamie looked like death. AIDS was kicking his ass. But he wasn’t technically terminal yet. The people housed here had only days or weeks to live. Jamie had another reason for visiting the terminal ward. Jamie was after virgins.
Finding virgins of any age was difficult. Even nuns were getting laid these days. Priests and altar-boys were having more sex than rock-stars if the rumors were true. The only place he could be relatively sure to find a pure unsullied virgin was among the diseased and dying. He considered it a safe assumption that the young adults, twenty-one and under, who’d spent much of their lives in and out of the hospital, probably hadn’t gotten laid much.
Jamie smiled at the night nurses as he passed their station. They smiled back with expressions of pity, disgust, or apathy. None of them questioned him. They had little doubt that he belonged. Jamie shuffled his way down to the farthest room and grabbed a wheelchair that sat unattended in the hallway. There was a boy inside the room exuding the all-too familiar smell of cancer. The smell was so overpowering that even without reading his chart Jamie knew the kid was terminal. No one survived with that much cancer.
The kid was tiny, his appetite long destroyed by chemotherapy along with his hair. Jamie looked down into the boy’s eyes as they fluttered open, his brilliant blue irises now wan and rheumy.
“Hi, kid. How was your Thanksgiving? Did they serve you turkey?”
The boy scowled and turned up his nose.
“Yeah, I don’t suppose turkey and gravy from the hospital cafeteria is much of a treat. Your parents sent me to get you out of here. Nobody should have to die in a place like this. We’re going outside beneath the stars. Would you like that?”
The boy nodded, too weak to speak. Jamie took a quick look at his medical chart to get his name and the name of his doctor should he need it. Then he slid the IV from the boy’s arm, disconnected his morphine drip, and removed his oxygen mask.
“You okay breathing without this thing?”
Again, the boy nodded.
Jamie threw back the kid’s covers and slid one arm under his legs and the other under his shoulder and lifted him from the bed. The boy’s head flopped backwards as if he had no spine and his head weighed a ton. Jamie eased him gently into the wheelchair.
“Do you have regular clothes?”
The kid nodded towards the closet across the room and Jamie walked over and withdrew a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. The kid must have been in the hospital since the summer. Jamie removed the boy’s hospital gown and slipped his t-shirt on over his head. Then he slid his shorts on.
“It’s kind of chilly out now. We’ll take this blanket with us to keep you warm.”
Jamie whipped the thin hospital blanket from the bed and wrapped it around the boy’s bare legs.
“There. That’s better. You ready to go?”
The boy smiled and Jamie wheeled him out of the room.
He wheeled the kid down the opposite hall, away from the nurse’s station, and into an elevator. Minutes later, Jamie strolled leisurely through the main lobby and out the front door without anyone once stopping to question why such a sick boy was being taken out into the cold.
Jamie wheeled the boy out to the parking lot and right up to his car. He slid the passenger seat back as far as it would go and lifted the boy into it. Then he hopped in on the opposite side and sped out of the parking lot leaving the wheelchair abandoned.
The boy was smiling as he looked out the window at all the passing cars. Jamie wondered how long it had been since he’d been outside. He decided to drive him around a little for one last tour of the city before taking him to the park and butchering him.
They cruised around Central Park, past Trump Tower and Rockefeller Center. Jamie watched as the boy craned his neck to see the top of the skyscrapers. He turned at Broadway and they cruised all the way down to Times Square. The boy smiled at the lights, and Jamie checked his watch. It would be dark soon.
Jamie turned the VW around and headed back toward the park. It was already emptying out. He decided to wait until the darkness was absolute. There were very few people willing to brave the park after dark even with all the progress Mayor Giuliani had made in the war on crime. They’d be alone soon.
They sat outside Tavern On The Green watching the carriage drivers change shifts as the sky grew darker. The park was alive with movement. Very little of it was human. Bizarre shapes gyrated and convulsed, thrashing about in the darkness. Here and there Jamie caught a hint of fangs or claws or flaming red eyes. He tried his best to hide his fear from the boy.