Brother Elias stared straight ahead, his eyes fastened on the road.
"The Lord's work."
Tim nodded, smiling, and lapsed back into silence. He should've known better than to pick up a hitcher. Any hitcher. Even the ones who looked normal and respectable were weird these days. He snuck a glance out of the corner of his eye at Brother Elias. The preacher was staring straight out the windshield, his hands folded over the Bible in his lap, his face a complete blank. Tim shook his head. It was his own fault; he had picked this clown up. But it was his duty to be friendly. He drove silently for a few miles then turned to the preacher. "So you just travel around? Hitching? Seems like it'd be easier to have your own church and stay in one place to me."
"I go where I am needed," said Brother Elias.
"And where're you headed now? You going to Randall?"
Brother Elias nodded.
"You think Randall needs saving?"
Brother Elias nodded again.
"Seems like there're a lot of worse places than Randall to me. Los Angeles, for one. Damn place is full of hippies, punks, queers, you name it." He cleared his throat, embarrassed. "Sorry again. So how do you pick where you're going? How come you decided Randall was the next place needed to be saved?"
"I have seen the coming evil," said Brother Elias. "I have seen it in a vision. The Lord has shown me the foulness of Satan's corruption and the face of his evil. He has shown me the means by which the adversary will triumph in this new Babylon. "And he called out with a mighty voice, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! It has become a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit."" Revelation 18:2.
"The Lord has sent me to combat this evil with his holy word and the teachings of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior."
Tim did not respond to the preacher. He said nothing. Instead, he looked ahead to where the two-lane road curved through a wooded canyon and inwardly cursed himself for picking up the man. Brother Elias was crazy. Not playing with a full deck, deuce high, as his daddy used to say. This should teach him not to pick up hitchers. No matter how they looked. He hazarded another glance at the preacher and saw that he was again staring straight out the window, his face a blank. Tim shivered and gave the truck more gas, pushing it up to sixty-five.
They passed through the canyon and sped past the small dirt road that led to the ranger station. There was nothing but flat forest the rest of the way into Randall, and Tim turned on the radio to make the drive a little more pleasant and to ease the strain of silence that he felt.
He looked toward the preacher as he tuned in the clearest station, but Brother Elias' face remained impassive.
Since he did not seem to object to the noise, Tim left the radio on.
A few minutes later, the preacher closed his eyes.
They were almost on the outskirts of town when Brother Elias jerked wide awake. He looked at Tim. "You have a son," he said. It was not a question but a statement of fact.
"Yes," Tim admitted.
"Drop me off at the police station," Brother Elias said.
"We don't have a police station. We have a sheriff's office."
"Drop me off at the sheriff's office."
Tim drove through the main part of town and pulled in at the sheriff's office. He watched as the preacher picked up his suitcase and small brown parcel from the seat between them. "Why did you say I had a son?" he asked.
The preacher opened the passenger door and stepped out.
Vivcame running out of the sheriff's office, her face red and wet with tears.
Tim stared at his wife as she dashed across the small parking lot. He jumped out of the truck and hurried toward her, leaving the keys in the ignition. "What is it?" he demanded. "What happened?"
She threw her arms around him and held tight, burying her face in his shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably. Her face was hot and wet against his skin. He hugged her, his hands pressing against the soft flesh of her back. Above her head, he could see Carl Chmura striding slowly but purposefully out of the sheriff's office. The deputy was staring at the ground as he crossed the parking lot, avoiding Tim's eyes. Tim felt a sudden rush of panic--Matt!-and looked quickly from Carl Chmura's averted face to his own white knuckled hands grasping iv's back.
No, he thought, please God don't let it be Matt.
"Tim--" the deputy began.
"Is it Matt? Tell me, Carl."
The deputy nodded. "He never came home this morning. Neither did Jack or Wayne. Your wife reported Matt missing around ten o'clock this morning. I tried to getahold of you, but you'd already left. I called the store up inHargreve , but I guess they didn't find you in time."
"What happened to Matt?" He was starting to feel numb, disconnected, as though his brain was preparing itself for the inevitable shock.
"We don't know," the deputy admitted. "We have a search team out there looking for the boys right now. Your wife said they went camping at Aspen Lake--"
"That's right."
"--so we sent a posse." He looked at Tim. "There was quite a big storm on the Rim last night."
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
The deputy shrugged. "Can't tell. There was a lot of lightning, lot of rain, lot of wind. If we're lucky, they just got lost; they were out hiking when the storm hit and somehow got turned around in their directions. If we're not lucky ..." The deputy left the sentence unfinished.
"Maybe their car just broke down--"
"We found the car. And all their gear. They started to make a camp down by the lake itself."
"We should never have let him go!"Viv screamed, looking up at him. "I
told you he shouldn't have gone!" Her face was contorted with shock and pain and fear.
"Maybe you'd best take her home," the deputy said quietly. "We'll call you if anything turns up."
"I'm going up there," Tim said. "I'm going to look for my son."
"Take me home,"Viv sobbed, looking up at him and clutching the shoulders of his tank top. "Please take me home. I want to go home."
"Take her home,"Chmura said gently.
"I'll be back," Tim said, leading his wife toward the truck. "I'm going up there." He opened the passenger door and helped his wife in.
Closing the door, he ran around to the driver's side and jumped up on the seat, knocking a small illustrated pamphlet onto the floor. He bent down to pick up the pamphlet.
"Do you know where your children are right now?" the headline screamed up at him. "They could be caught in the clutches ofsatan ."
He tore the pamphlet in half and tossed it out the window, and the rear tires of the truck scattered the pieces as he sped out of the parking lot toward home.
Gordon parked the Jeep in front of the closed chain link gate of the dump and got out, leaving the headlights on. The high beams stabbed forcefully into the moonless dark but failed to illuminate more than a straight narrow stretch of the landfill. Around the edges of the light, the blackness closed in thicker, as if gathering for an assault of its own.
Gordon raised his arms and linked his fingers through the square holes in the metal fence, pressing his face against the chain link. He could smell the powerful odors of unburied garbage, rotting food, burning trash. The dump had been here almost as long as Randall, he knew.
There were literally tons of garbage buried beneath this land. A lot of it was natural, organic, but a lot of it wasn't. There were various synthetic products, the used goods of an increasingly disposable society, discarded carburetor cleaner, old oil from oil changes, old transmission fluid. God knew what all was down there.