And then there was the song; the song that the boy sang and prowled about to on the stage—yes, the General thought, the Prince was speaking to him as in the old days!
“How could you think, I ’d let you get away?
When I came out of the darkness, and told you who you are.”
But still the General needed to be sure. And so he consulted the Prince in the Throne Room and was pleased to learn that he had read the messages correctly. And once he began stalking the boy, once he discovered that all the drag queens used the back entrance, he knew what needed to be done.
The end of the month drew closer, and on the night before the drag show, the General pulled up his van to the old plank-board fence that separated the nightclub’s alleyway from the parking lot of an empty warehouse. He loosened one of the fence boards, slipped through the opening, and decided the space behind the Dumpster would be the best place from which to strike.
The following night, everything seemed at first to go according to plan. The General tailed the drag queen’s bus as he had done many times and waited in the parking lot behind the club; stood listening on the opposite side of the fence and got into place behind the Dumpster when he heard the applause inside. It started to rain, but the General only smiled. Divine providence, he thought, for the rain would keep any potential witnesses inside.
However, about twenty minutes later, when the General saw the young sodomite come out of the club with a stranger, all at once he began to panic. The men were arguing in Spanish. The General couldn’t understand everything they were saying, but heard the word dinero thrown back and forth a few times. He’d picked up enough Spanish in the Army to know that dinero meant money—but the men kept getting louder, until finally the stranger forced the drag queen to his knees and unzipped his fly.
The General watched and listened as the drag queen took the stranger in his mouth, and in a rush of adrenaline he suddenly felt his plan slipping away. He’d have to kill them both if he was to take the drag queen tonight—he might not get another chance before it was too late—but the stranger was not part of the equation! Taking him also might throw off the 9:3 and ruin everything!
Then, without thinking, the General felt himself being propelled out from behind the Dumpster. He fired in quick succession—Thhhwhip! Thhhwhip!—dropping the two men with a silenced bullet to each of their heads before they even saw him.
The rain was coming down hard now, and the General quickly dragged the bodies through the hole in the fence and loaded them onto the plastic tarp in the back of his van. The chloroform he had made from a recipe on the Internet, the rope and the pipe he had stolen from Harriot—all of it was useless to him now! And once he was safely out of the city, he became fearful that he screwed up the Prince’s plan beyond repair, for even though the Prince loved his second in command above all others, he did not tolerate failure from anyone.
He shouldn’t have brought the gun. That had been his mistake.
The General was almost in tears by the time he got back to the farmhouse. He pulled the van around back, unlocked the bulkhead to the cellar, and dragged the tarp containing the bodies down the stairs and into the reeducation chamber.
The General then rushed into the Throne Room—threw himself on the floor and punched himself again and again in the face until his eyes watered and the blood began to trickle from his nose. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” he cried.
But the first drifter had only been on the throne for a week—had hardly begun to smell at all—and the Prince’s voice came through the doorway loud and clear.
The General listened carefully for a long time—closed his eyes and allowed the Prince’s voice to penetrate his entire body. That was how the General had to listen: with his entire body. For the Prince’s voice was not a voice at all; instead, he spoke to the General in flashes of pictures and sounds that scrolled through the General’s mind like TV channels being changed with a remote control. The General assumed it had been that way for all the warrior-priests—those chosen few who had been allowed access through the doorway. And not only did the General understand the pictures and sounds, when the doorway was fresh, the Prince’s “voice” blocked out all other thoughts from his mind.
Back in the present, sitting there in his truck, Edmund Lambert recalled what the Prince had told the General on that night. And even now he felt silly for having worried so. He should’ve known right away that Leona Bonita and the other sodomite were part of the message itself. They already understood the 9:3, the 3:1. Yes, they would be waiting at the doorway when the Prince called them into service; they would recognize him at once and embrace their destiny.
Edmund Lambert exited his pickup and headed for the rear of the building, cut through the small breezeway that connected the theater to the academic buildings, and hurried down the steps that brought him past the large bulkhead for the props cellar. He smiled. It was there that he’d found the dentist’s chair last semester—from an old production of Little Shop of Horrors, someone had told him. Jennings still hadn’t missed it, and the General had since modified the lever mechanism and outfitted the lower half with leg brackets constructed from scrap metal he’d stolen from the scene shop.
Edmund continued on to the electrics shop door, slipped his key into the lock, and paused briefly as he remembered what the General did to Rodriguez and Guerrera. True, their sacrifice lacked the ceremony befitting his role as a warrior-priest—no need for his robes or the strobe light; no need for the songs like with the corrupt attorney and the adulterous, body-profaning sodomite—but still, the General enjoyed his time with them.
His only regret was that they never got to meet the Prince.
But they would meet him soon enough, Edmund said to himself as he entered the electrics shop. The others, too. And all of them would be waiting for him by the doorway when he called them to service.
However, Edmund knew the Prince’s enemies would be waiting for him, too. They would see him coming from the sky and try to thwart his return. But the General and the Prince weren’t too worried about them. No, the Prince wanted his enemies to see him coming; for the Prince was worshipped, and worship gave him strength. And that was something his enemies did not have.
The cemetery.
It began there. His enemies understood the sacrifice as part of the 9, but the cemetery was important to the General, too—part of the 1 or the 3, depending on how you looked at it.
Yes, Edmund thought as he sat down in front of the electrics shop computer. The cemetery proved to all of them that the Prince had an ally to be feared.
One who had given up everything.
One who was worthy of a second in command.
But most importantly, one who would be rewarded for all his hard work.
Chapter 27
Willow Brook Cemetery was large for Johnston County. It sat on roughly six acres surrounded by lush farmland, and contained family plots dating back to the late 1800s. Markham knew the cemetery’s namesake brook lay somewhere behind the copse of willow trees to the south, but he could never hear it babbling during his nighttime visits. He’d also read somewhere that the adjoining field had been purchased by the county, which planned on expanding the cemetery along its eastern border.