In the middle of Act Two of Twilight of the Gods, just as the world was gearing up for the Last Days and all the sins of the past were about to come home and kick ass, Stack thought he had found it. There was a cruiser overturned and burned out in the middle of the hardtop, tyres melted off the durium spokes, Cav colours burned out of the paintwork. Perhaps the mean machine had met its match?
Then he saw the corpses. A horned, doglike thing with a swollen, dragging belly was chewing at a blackened manshape sprawled in the ruin of the ve-hickle. Stack took a shot at it, and it sped up towards the Mogollon Mesa. He sighted properly, and brought it down. He remembered Slim Pickens' complaints about "mew-taters."
He got off the cyke and walked over to the wreck. There were two dead people, one dripping out of the shattered window, pink flesh showing through the baked-black skin where the coyote creature had been worrying, the other hanging by his seatbelt from the driver's position.
Chalk up another couple of casualties for the runaway.
He'd buried Leona. He had to bury these unidentifiable Troopers.
By mid-day, he was back on the trail.
III
St Wsrburgh's didn't have much of a roof, but since the Lord hadn't made it rain in fifteen or twenty years that didn't really matter. The lack of doors was a bigger problem. O'Pray was always having to pay one of Armindariz' brood of children to sweep out the sand that drifted in. And when there was a sandstorm, the whole community had to turn out to shovel the church empty.
And yet St Wsrburgh's was still standing. Its windows might be burned out, Christ on the cross might be less three out of four limbs and no two pews were alike, but it was still a church, still a centre for the town.
It was the well, O'Pray knew. The church had originally been erected in the 1860s by settlers astonished to find a deep, clearwater well this high in the mesas, and they had built it to last. Most Western towns made do with wooden churches, but the hardy stock who made Welcome built with stone.
Miguel O'Pray, although New York City-born, epitomised the original fathers of Welcome. Half-Hispanic, half-Irish, bedrock stubborn, and with no place else to go.
He took a swig from his bottle and looked up at the sky through the remains of the church roof. There was still a bell in the tower. It had sounded during the long-ago Apache attacks. It had rallied the people of Welcome that night the Bible Belt had come into town looking to smite the papist infidels. O'Pray still tolled it every Sunday morning before mass. His hands, once city-soft, were red and ridged with the friction of the old hemp rope.
The Shochaiku burned his throat; and warmed his insides. Behind his back, Armindariz called him Padre Burracho. Father Drunk.
"Father forgive me," he said aloud, "for living up to the stereotypes of the drunken Irishman and the lazy Mexican…"
He couldn't remember much about last night. He had been at the Silver Byte, and in the back room at Tiger Behr's. He had woken up in the yard of his shack, under a canvas sheet, his body bent into an unusual position.
He set his bottle down next to the altar, careful not to let the liquor come into contact with the holy object, and ran his hands through his grimy hair. He wished now he hadn't given away yesterday's leftover water. He could have done with a wash.
Once, The Gaschuggers—the gangcult who hung out over at Tiger Behr's—decided it would be a good idea if they took the town's central resource into their own hands. That was back in the days of Exxon the Elder. They had come out behind Exxon the Elder and demanded O'Pray turn over the well to them.
Behr had given Exxon the Elder the elder both barrels of his favourite shotgun in the back. The blast had pushed the panzerboy the full length of the aisle and dropped him a yard from the altar.
"You gotta have respect for somethin', or else you're just a breadhead pig," Behr had said, and The Gaschuggers had elected a new Exxon and gone back to the Silver Byte.
"Radical," Behr had said at the funeral, "radical in a tubular sort of way."
The church was something. Maybe it was all that Welcome had left to distinguish it from the other sandratholes. There was no school, no police station, no library, no real estate brokerage, no Studebaker dealership, no movie-house, no gas station, no post office, no proper brothel. Just the motel, the saloon, and the church. It was the church that made the difference.
O'Pray folded the altar cloth and put it away. The altar came to life.
"Good morning, Father," it said in the computer-generated voice he found so strangely reassuring. This was how angels, unused to the flesh, talked when they were upon the Earth.
"Good afternoon."
"I am sorry. You have not adjusted my internal timepiece since the last temporal displacement."
The altar was right. O'Pray made the necessary alteration.
"Thank you, Father."
"My pleasure."
O'Pray ran a check. The altar was linked to a net of other altars, in churches throughout the Western United States. This was the true Church Invisible.
"There has been further clarification of Vatican LXXXV."
O'Pray snorted. The new church was increasingly difficult to get used to.
"Aren't you interested?"
O'Pray wondered if the altar would notice if he took a drink.
"According to the Pope, you can now get married."
It was hard not to laugh. "And will Pope Georgi provide a nice little nun for me to get married to?"
"That has not been clarified."
"Fifteen years ago, I might have cared."
O'Pray had seen the church change a lot in thirty years as a priest. He had been in Rome when Pope Mandela I gave his St Peter's Square address. "Information is power," he had said, "power to work unspeakable evil, power to do great good." So many of the old church's prohibitions had been thrown away. In the light of the Third World's population problem, contraception had been first tolerated, now endorsed. Monogamous homosexual relationships could now be confirmed in church weddings. And Mandela had pioneered the Vatican's involvement in any political conflicts where a simple distinction could be made between Good and Evil. O'Pray had been with the socialist rebels when El Salvador fell in 1974, and had been one of the go-betweens in them negotiations between Mandela and President Goldwater that staved off a full-scale US intervention in Central America and led the way to the formation of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala into a Central American Confederation. O'Pray, finally winning his Irish Republican father's approval, had taken up arms when the CAC threw the British garrison out of Belize and helped supervise the referendum that brought the former colony into the Confederation. He had been a good soldier for his pontiff.
The altar hummed, waiting for his daily input.
But, in the early '80s, he had begun to have doubts. He had never held any official position with the CAC, and found himself spending more and more time on missions to Mexico. Here, even the formidably confident Mandela couldn't find a clear distinction between Good and Evil, and he had found himself shuttled between faction and faction as Rome tried to pick a side in the permanent civil war. He had seen men who called themselves Good Catholics loot, rape and murder while trying to solicit the aid and succour of the church, and his indignant reports to Rome and Managua had been spiked. Priests couldn't marry back then, but the restrictions on clerical chastity had been relaxed. And with his roman collar, black suit and bandoliers of ScumStopper rounds, he had undeniably cut a glamorous figure. After Belize, he had made the cover of Guns and Killing magazine, and the story had inaccurately tagged him as "the Pope's top gun." He had been with Sister Maria Concepcion all through the jungle fighting. And in that stone-age Indian village up in the Sierra Tarahumare as the drunken doctor tried to deliver their child, he had been there at the end.