Control sneers. “I don’t think so!” Then he pushes down on the trigger, and the top of Patrick’s skull disappears in a mist of fatty tissue and bone splinters.
IT IS A SMALL MERCY, IN CONTROL’S OPINION: A REWARD FOR all Patrick has done for the Agency, and a final discharge that painlessly clears all debts. (Which are not inconsiderable, counting the group health insurance.) The situation was already non-survivable by the time Patrick became aware of it. He should have grasped this as soon as he realized the CCTV was being spoofed. Or in any event once the banishment rounds misfired when he engaged the enemy.
But Control is now aware of the true identity of the adversary. And that means there’s still some hope of saving Denver.
THE TROUBLE WITH GODHEADS, IN JOHNNY’S EXPERIENCE, IS that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. It seems as obvious as gravity to them, as normal as water flowing downhill and rain following sunshine; everything works the way it says in the book because the book is the inerrant word of God.
Leaving aside the idolatry implicit in taking a mere book as a more authoritative source of truth than divine revelation, there are damaging consequences when such a belief system collides with reality. If the world was created in six days six-thousand-odd years ago, then a whole bunch of evidence relating to geology, biology, paleontology, genetics, and evolution has to be ignored—or, much harder, refuted. Which is easy enough if you don’t hold with school-book larnin’, but it’s difficult to practice general medicine if your religion says bacteria can’t evolve antibiotic resistance, and hard to be a geologist if your cosmology is incompatible with continental drift.
And then there’s the picking and choosing. Men who lie with men are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But then, so is the eating of shellfish, if you go back to the original text. And the wearing of garments made from different types of fiber. And tattooing. And witchcraft—or is it poisoning? Different translations disagree. (And what on earth does the bit about what to do if your house contracts leprosy mean?) The early Church fathers cut through the Gordian knot by declaring the Old Testament obsolete: version 1.0, superseded by the new, improved version 2.0. But they couldn’t make it stick, hence the thousand-page prologue you have to wade through before you get to read the Gospel of Matthew. And even there, even in the prologue, even after weeding out the obvious Bible fanfic, there’s no rhyme nor reason: some churches can’t be arsed with the Book of Judith, while some of them cancelled the Maccabees after season two because of dwindling Nielsen ratings.
So you end up with divergent sects reading from subtly different versions of the same book—which in turn is a third-generation translation of something which might have been the original codification of an oral tradition—and all convinced that their interpretation overrides such minor obstacles as observable reality.
Which still wouldn’t be a problem except that some of the readers think the books are an instruction manual rather than a set of educational parables, a blueprint instead of a metaphor.
Johnny whistles tunelessly between his teeth as he drives.
He’s fed up to his back teeth with Godheads. Godheads in the person of his father and uncles and mother and aunts were why he joined up with the British Army when he was sixteen. Godheads following the blueprint for salvation got him into trouble a couple of years later—and then there was the Légion étrangère. Because when you’re born eldest son to the moderator of a remarkably exclusive brethren in an exceptionally free kirk where they don’t believe in sex because it might lead to dancing (which in turn would imply the existence of music), the tendency to see demons everywhere never really leaves you.
It took meeting Persephone all those years ago to show Johnny that he was not, in fact, insane: the visions and nightmares in the corners of his vision were, in fact, really there, and that his ranting elders with their taste for spiritual warfare and their ancestral skeletons in a very watery closet were barking up the wrong tree.
Johnny drives.
There is a pricking in his fingertips and an itching in his left buttock that tells him where to point the pickup. Patrick didn’t exactly hand him a business card, but they’ve broken bread and shared a meaclass="underline" the symbolism is not wasted. Johnny doesn’t have much in the way of natural magical aptitude, though like Persephone he has vastly more than most of the arid theory-driven paper-pushers of the Laundry. What he does have is a knack for seeing and sensing the unseen and unfelt. Centuries earlier he’d have been doomed to the madness of the witch-finder, but in these enlightened years he’s just a regular guy with a talent for spotting trouble before it spots him. And a couple of psychotic blades.
But he has a bad feeling about Patrick.
His itches and hunches take him off the freeway and onto a leisurely cruise around the back streets of Denver. They’re drawing him north, into a subdivision dominated by low houses behind rusting chain-link fences, untidy yards showing the detritus of suburbia—dirty plastic slides and paddling pools, aging cars. Patrick and (What was her name? Morag? Moira?) live cheaply and frugally, in one of these houses. Yes, this street, that house—with the black Suburban with blacked-out windows parked casually asprawl the sidewalk fronting it.
Oh. Too late.
Johnny pulls over and backs up until his tailgate is up against the radiator of the big SUV. Then he climbs out and walks up the garden path to the front porch and the door, drawing the pair of knives as he goes and holding them point-down. The door is ajar and there is an itching in his nose, and the skin on the nape of his neck wants to stand on end. A powerful geas surrounds the house, making eyes drift by and ears misinterpret noises. Johnny, however, is immune to such distractions. He kicks the door open and breathes in the stink of death.
He counts two corpses and two bodies that still breathe. Heads turn to look at him, eyes glowing the green of luminous watch dials in the shadows. He raises his knives and they shrink backwards. Two bodies: one male, pretty much headless, a sawn-off shotgun lying to one side. Another…too late.
“Awright,” he snarls, “so whose smart idea was this?”
One of the breathing bodies—clad in a dark suit, with a spreading stain of sticky blood drenching the front of its white shirt around the handle of a carving knife—slobbers incoherently at him. The other is less far gone. In fact, by born-again zombie standards he’s positively eloquent: “The sinner summoned up a demon from hell, which shot his wife before turning his weapon on himself. You are Johnny McTavish. We have a message for you.”
“You do, do you?” Johnny stares at the speaker. He looks human—as human as a missionary in his Sunday best—but his voice sounds sluggish and thick. “Stick yer tongue out, mate.”
The missionary stares at him. Writhing shadows in the shape of worms twirl endlessly in the depths of the missionary’s eyes. Then it slowly opens its mouth, revealing a laminated silver carapace. Johnny stares at it. After a moment, it extends eye stalks and stares right back.
“I should kill you right now. Like the others.”
The missionary retracts what passes for its tongue. “Then you would not find it so easy to reach your destination.”
The other missionary’s slobbering quiets. It’s nearly out of blood; even a cymothoan mind parasite can’t get much mileage out of a body that’s no longer capable of supporting aerobic respiration.