"He's mocking us! He's trying to confuse us, trying to make a joke out of this!"
"A joke? Just look back on the last twelve months, Hatchet Face." Jim was surprised how clearly his mind was working despite the drinks he'd had earlier. "We've had a six-day war in the Middle East that upset the whole balance of power there, a military junta in Greece, martial law in Thailand, more fighting in Cyprus, Palestine, and especially Vietnam, thousands upon thousands of homeless, hungry refugees in Somalia and Jordan and good ol' Vietnam. And over in the Soviet Union they're celebrating fifty years of their revolution which has so far cost the Russian and East European populace something in excess of thirty million lives. Here at home we've got race riots in East Harlem, Roxbury, Newark, Detroit, and lots of other places. The blacks hate the whites, the whites hate the blacks, the shorthairs hate the longhairs, the longhairs hate anybody with a steady job, the Arabs hate the Jews, and the Klan hates everybody. Ever-growing numbers of people are spending their lives stoned on grass or else they're nuking their psyches with LSD. And on top of all that they kicked my dear friend, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell out of Congress! Sheesh! What's left for me to do?"
Spano's mouth worked spasmodically. "I… I…"
"Devil of a predicament, isn't it?" Jim said.
"Do not let yourselves be swayed by the Father of Lies!" Spano cried.
"Right on," Jim said.
He wondered if Hanley had envisioned this sort of scene. Maybe that was why he had kept the whole experiment under wraps. Apparently the scientist's instincts had been on target. Jim had spent days hating Roderick Hanley, but now he was having a slow change of heart.
Besides, I wouldn't be alive without him.
Maybe he hadn't been such a bad guy, after all.
"The Antichrist tries to tell us that the evil in the world is not the devil's work!"
Antichrist! There it was again, and Jim was suddenly angry. As his anger grew, the fears and self-doubt of the past week began to melt away. Who was this pasty-faced twerp to tell him who he was? He would decide who he was! And he was Jim Stevens. So what if he was genetically the same as Roderick Hanley, Ph.D., Nobel laureate? It didn't matter. He wasn't Roderick Hanley—he was someone else. He was his own man and no one—not these religious nut cases or anyone else—was going to hang a sign on him.
He smiled. Carol had been right all along: Being a clone really didn't matter. As long as Carol stuck by him, he could handle anything. So easy! Why hadn't he seen it himself?
"Pray!" Spano was saying to his followers. "Close your ears to his lies!"
Jim was suddenly tired of the game.
"Get lost," he said. "You're all pretty pathetic. Take off before the cops get here."
"No!" Spano cried. "We want the police! We want the world to know your name so that Christians everywhere can be warned of who you really are!"
"Scram!" Jim shouted.
He was really angry now. He pulled on the gate but it was locked. With a sudden burst of energy, he climbed up the iron pickets to the top of the brick gatepost.
14
"Oh, God! What's he doing!" Carol cried at Bill's shoulder as they watched Jim reach the top of the gatepost column.
Bill had been watching the scene from the front door with Carol and Jim's mother. His palms had grown slick with sweat.
"He's going to get killed!" Emma said.
"Bill!" Carol said, her grip tightening on his arm. "Get him down from there! Please!"
"I'll try."
He hurried down the driveway. This whole affair was getting out of hand. The best thing was to get Jim back inside and let the police handle it. But he sensed that getting Jim to change course once he was on a roll like this was not going to be easy. A nameless fear quickened his pace, but he sensed that he was already too late.
15
Jim sat on the concrete ball atop the column and looked down on the small, uneasy crowd.
"Come on, folks!" he said, making a shooing motion with his hands. "Get packing! This isn't funny anymore!"
They recoiled at the sight of his hands.
"Look!" someone cried. "His palms! The Mark of the Beast!"
"It's proof!" Spano shouted. "Proof that Satan dwells within!"
They oohed and aahed and muttered together as they clustered below him. Jim looked at his fuzzy palms.
The Mark of the Beast? What the hell did that mean?
Whatever it was, it seemed to frighten them, and maybe that would scare them off.
"Yes!" he said, rising up, straddling the concrete ball with his ankles and spreading his hands out in front of him. "The Mark of the Beast! And if you don't leave now, all your future children and grandchildren will be born as frogs and crawly things!"
And then his right foot slipped.
For an awful, gut-wrenching moment he thought he was going to fall, then his foot found the edge of the capstone again. He thought he was okay, then realized he'd lost his balance.
He was falling.
He saw the iron spikes atop the gate rising toward him and thought as clearly as he had ever thought—
I'm going to die!
He tried to twist to the side, but it was too late. He managed to swing his head off to the right, but the spikes caught him in the groin, stomach, and chest. There was an instant of blinding agony as the points speared his heart with a tearing, thudding impact, ripping through to his spine and beyond.
Not yet! Oh, please, not yet! I'm not ready to go!
He opened his mouth to scream, but he had no air left in his lungs.
Abruptly the pain was gone as his ruptured spinal cord stopped sending impulses to his brain. A strange, ethereal peace enveloped him. He felt strangely detached from the cries of horror rising all around him.
Suddenly Carol's face swam into view, looking up at him with wide, horror-filled eyes. She seemed to be saying his name, but he couldn't hear her. Sound had slipped away. He wanted to tell her he loved her and ask her to forgive him for being such a jerk, but then vision slipped away as well, with thought racing close behind.
16
Carol had seen Jim begin to lose balance and was already running for the gate when he tilted forward and fell onto the spikes. A voice she barely recognized as her own was screaming.
"No—no—NOOOO!"
Time seemed to slow as she saw the black iron spikes drive into his chest and burst from his back in a spray of red, saw him writhe and twitch, then go limp as bright scarlet blood gushed from his mouth.
Her legs wanted to collapse under her and her heart wanted her to follow them to the ground and curl her body up into a ball and hide from what she saw. But she had to reach him, had to get him off there.
Bill was running ahead of her but she passed him and slammed into the gate below Jim, looking up at him, screaming his name over and over in a vain attempt to awaken a spark of life in those glazed, staring blue eyes. She thought she saw his mouth work, trying to say something, then his lips went slack and there was nothing there, nothing at all, and then something warm and wet was on her fingers and she looked and saw his blood running down the fence rail she was gripping and spreading over her hand just like in one of her dreams and her screams became formless wails of horror and loss as Bill dragged her away.
17
Grace stared in mute shock at Jim's body impaled on the gate above the scattering forms of the Chosen. This couldn't be happening! She felt her gorge rise at the sight of the blood. He was dead! Dead in an instant! Poor Jim—no one deserved a death like that!