“I don’t work for you anymore, Michael,” Officer Green quavers. “Not this century, you bastard.” He stretches out an arm, lays a hooklike claw on the other side of the illusory shared table; it appears horribly burned. Then he raises his other claw and pulls back his cowl, to reveal a thing of horror.
The Senior Auditor looks at him evenly. “To betray your oath of office was your decision, not mine.” He looks at his colleague, who is shaking her head, appalled: “I don’t think there’s any point continuing with—”
“Please wait.” Officer Black speaks. “This will be investigated.” His tone is much less self-assured. “You are correct in your inferences about the Golden Promise Ministries. More to the point, they have raised a ward against us around a substantial part of central Colorado—from south of Colorado Springs to north of Denver. Your people appear to be able to move freely across it because it was programmed to detect our sigil of office. Which is highly suggestive of an internal rogue element, but that is not your concern; Internal Affairs will investigate in due course. That is not all, however. Yesterday an artificial weather system blanketed the area, and all flights are grounded. They have also suborned the highway patrol, the Denver police department, and the local FBI office.”
“What about the military?” asks the female Auditor. She leans forward intently. “Aren’t there any units within the area that can intervene?”
“No. The only major installation within the zone is the Air Force Academy.”
“Well, can’t you use them? Arm the students and—”
“The Academy is under investigation for discrimination against non-evangelicals,” Black says dismissively. “The faculty and student body must be presumed hostile.”
“So you’re locked out of the area,” Angleton muses. “I take it O’Donnell here was your last remaining asset in Denver?” O’Donnell’s shade nods. Something grayish-pink peeps briefly at the world through the shattered eggshell of his skull. “If our people can deactivate the ward from the inside, how well positioned are you to follow through?”
Officer Green pipes up: “We have assets sleeping in place.” He grins, heat-cracked ivory flashing in a carbonized jaw. “You are not the only soul-eater, Doctor.”
The female Auditor clears her throat. “We want our people back. Preferably alive.”
Officer Black looks at her. “If they survive, we will not prevent them leaving.”
“Forgive me for saying this, but your people have a reputation for not playing well with allied—”
But she is talking to a blank wall, for Officer Black has vanished into the Other Place from which he came, taking his horror show companions with him.
“Well, I think that went reasonably well, all things considered!” The Senior Auditor remarks to the suddenly small and dingy room, as he reaches for the water carafe to fill a tumbler with a hand that is only very slightly shaky.
Angleton shakes his head. “Longer spoon next time,” he murmurs.
The female Auditor is visibly frustrated. “They’re relying on our assets to do their dirty work, and they won’t even guarantee safe passage!”
“Then they’d better be up for the job, hadn’t they?” Lockhart shows his teeth. “Mahogany Row sent them—except for Doctor Angleton’s secretary, of course. Who is not without resources of his own.”
“One may hope so.” Angleton reaches for the table water. “But I admit I wasn’t expecting him to have to deal with a challenge of this magnitude so soon.”
ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH GODHEADS, JOHNNY REFLECTS, IS that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology.
Here he is, sitting snug in the leather-lined baseball catcher’s mitt of a luxury-trimmed Suburban, surrounded by fake walnut veneer and cup holders and power sockets, staring out at a blizzard through tinted windows. Up front a godshattered man in black with a cymothoan parasite in place of his tongue wrestles with the power steering. (At least it isn’t one of the hypercastrating variants, Johnny notes with relief; those things give him the cold shudders.) It is apparent that Schiller’s people have caught up on their research: they’ve worked out who and what Johnny is, which is why they’ve switched from shoot-on-sight to the velvet-glove treatment, like it was all a bad mistake and they want to kiss and make up. It’s that damned summoning recipe from the Book of Apocalypse, of course. If Schiller popped out of nowhere then it follows that he may be short on willing elders to help with the ritual.
But it’s also fairly clear that although Schiller’s people know what he is, they don’t understand where he’s coming from. It’s like something out of quantum mechanics: you can know where something is, or where it’s going, but not both at the same time. Yeah, that’s it, he thinks as he stares out at the swirling blanket of snow: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, as applied to dead gods.
Fuckwits.
“How long have you been Saved?” he asks the missionary.
There is no immediate reply, and he’s about to ask again when the husk speaks: “Three years.”
Johnny is impressed. Either Schiller’s found some way to slow down the parasite’s growth or the man has a very strong mind indeed. (Had a very strong mind.) “How did it happen? If you don’t mind me asking.”
The missionary slowly steers the big SUV around a tight curve, peering out through the windscreen wipers as they batter huge slabs of melting snow away from the glass. It’s mid-morning, but the light is gray, fading towards twilight. “Before I was Saved I was in the FBI. I’m a back-office forensic specialist, not an agent. Jack—he’s our station chief—invited us all to an after-work service one evening, said it’d change our lives. I was…lost…didn’t believe him, kind of resented it. But you don’t piss off your chief over nothing, and I had nothing else on, so I went.” The vehicle rocks slightly as it aquaplanes through slush. “I was scared for a few seconds, at communion, but they had my back. And then everything was all right. Jesus came into my soul and now everything is wonderful.”
Just like a heroin addict describing his first fix, thinks Johnny. “What does Jesus tell you about me?”
“You’re of the prophet’s line,” says the missionary. “You are one of the Elect.” He falls silent for a while. “Jesus says he needs you, for the seed of the elders of the elect is holy.”
Well fuck me, Johnny thinks ironically, with a flashback to his dad’s lessons, punctuated with blows from the tawse: For the priests of the Lord are of the house of Levi, and what are we if not the guardians of the holy seed? That particular beating had been over suspected masturbation, something dad seemed to have a peculiarly superstitious dread of; it had been one beating of many, mostly undeserved. There had been no denying the terror and glory of the Lord in the McTavish household, or the old man’s ability to bring home a trawler with a net full of fish every time he put to sea and prayed, or the fits and the babbling, and—when Johnny was thirteen—the coming of age ceremony, the service of dedication at midnight on a spume-blown rocky beach, attended by representatives of the distant branch of the family who could no longer stray far from the ocean or pass for human.