Any Minute Now (42 page)

“Hello, my friend. My name is Preach. What's yours?”

“Billy.”

Preach smiled somewhat sadly. “What did this sorry excuse for a human being do to you, Billy?”

“Some of them,” White said, “have tried to claw their faces off.”

“I told you not to worry,” Preach said. “Now keep still, I'm talking to Billy.” His smile widened. “Now, Billy, tell me what's happened to you.”

“I…” Billy glanced fearfully at White. His tongue ran around his dry and peeling lips. “I was taken off the streets. Things were done to me, but I don't … I don't remember. I don't know.”

“Well, we'll soon fix that.” Preach put one hand on the back of Billy's head, the other at the small of his back. “Just relax,” he said in a soothing singsong. “Nothing bad will happen to you now. My promise to you.”

As Whitman had done with Flix, he felt for the trigeminal beneath his fingertips. He sensed the blockages the alkaloid had caused, scrambling the nerve messages between this man's brain and his body. He sensed what the alkaloid was meant to do, and how it had partially failed. What science didn't know contaminated the universe with its distortions, delusions, and outright ignorance, he thought with bitter contempt as he ran his delicate fingertips up the man's spinal cord to the nape of his neck. In that sense it was no better than religion. There, he thought. There!

Billy gave a galvanic start beneath his hands. His eyes cleared and his breathing became deep and even, as if in a resting state or deep in a kind of powerful meditation.

Preach turned to White. “You have what you wished for.” No, it was what he wished for. “Now I need another stiff drink.”

*   *   *

“My journey,” Preach said, as if nothing had occurred between the time White had asked the question and his answer, “was like all journeys. Though, as in all physical matters, it depends on your point of view.”

They were sitting on the porch of the old hunting lodge in the same rocking chairs that White and Hartwell had occupied an hour before.

“Never two the same.” White nodded, pouring them a second helping of the moonshine. “I understand.”

Preach sucked down his drink, smacked his lips as he thought, You don't understand a damn thing, as many years as you know me. We met when you were, what?, a teenager full of rage. Only your rage never abated. I could feel that and I fanned it every time it threatened to subside. You had a role to play, but you were just a man—ordinary, but fated to accomplish extraordinary things—with my help, always with my help. Not that you ever knew or even suspected. No, you'll die an ignorant man, and I won't be sorry. The Alchemists have outlived their usefulness.

Too much bickering and internecine warfare had eroded his confidence in the solidarity, the oneness, of the group. He had the electronic keys to their accounts. Those and the alkaloid serum were all he required of them now. Time to move on to another set of people whose cruelty and greed could be used against them. Not that he was going to destroy the Alchemists himself. There was no need.

At that moment, Lucy emerged from the entrance to the Well, crossed to the building housing the kitchens. Preach put his shot glass on the wooden railing, stood up, hands jammed into the back pockets of his dusty jeans.

“Huh,” he said.

White rose to stand beside him. “Something troubling you?”

Preach smiled. “Just admiring Lucy Orteño.”

“You know her? Luther recruited her.”

“Well, whataya know.” Preach gave a hoot so close to that of a screech owl it was startling. “Life is just chock-full of ironies.”

White leaned closer. “Come again?”

Preach watched Lucy enter the building across the sloping expanse of lawn. “St. Vincent's dead.”

“What?”

Preach turned to White. “You haven't heard? Well, that's unsurprising, I suppose. Hemingway was involved.”

“What happened?”

“Shot to death. That's all Crow showed me. That's all I needed to know. You, too, I imagine.”

“Unless Hemingway is coming after us.”

“Hemingway knows nothing about either the Alchemists or the Well. Rest easy on that score.”

“Well, that's reassuring,” White said. “Now tell me how you know Lucy Orteño.”

“She was a guest of mine some time ago.”

White knew all about Preach's “guests.” He said, “How was it that you let her leave?”

“An oversight,” Preach said with his eyes half-closed, “that can now be rectified.”

 

48

Lucy was eating a hot fudge sundae with peanut brittle crumbled on top, which the chef had whipped up especially for her, when Preach entered the commissary. He slid into the chair next to her, folded his arms on the table perilously close to her.

“How you doing, Lucy?”

“How d'you think I'm doing?” She took a spoonful of the sundae, savoring the melding of sweet flavors.

“Looks to me like you're doing all right for yourself, but I gotta tell you your patron, Luther St. Vincent, is dead.”

“Fuck him.” Lucy continued eating, never missing a beat. “You want to talk, Preach?”

“I do. You know I do.”

“Then put Crow away.”

He paused. “Okay, he's gone.”

“Bullshit. I can still feel the shadow he casts.” Her eyes met his. “How d'you think I got away from you?”

He nodded. “Fair enough.”

His eyes rolled up for a moment, and Lucy felt the shadow lift off her. She breathed deeply. “Chef makes great sundaes here. Want one?”

“I don't eat sugar.”

“You don't eat anything, so far as I remember.”

He smiled faintly. “That isn't quite correct.”

“Close enough.” She attacked the hot fudge as if it were Crow. “Mmm. You don't know what you're missing.”

“You surprise me, Lucy.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

“You're curiously unmoved by your mentor's death.”

That was just like him, Lucy thought. Anyone else would say, You
seem
curiously unmoved, for how could they really know? Preach did know.

“He's wasn't my mentor—jailor, more like it.”

“Tell me.”

“He put me in his debt; he used me to get to my uncle Felix.”

“Why would he do that?” Preach seemed genuinely interested.

“He wanted to use Felix—for something, I don't know what. I saw him inject something into Felix's neck, then bundle him into an ambulance.”

Preach considered a moment. “He was using your uncle as a guinea pig in the wild.”

“I don't understand.”

“The test subjects that have come here—that you've been … processing.”

“What about them?” Lucy didn't bother to ask how he knew these things because she knew: Crow.

“They were in the same program your uncle is in.”

Lucy's heart thumped painfully in her chest. “You mean he's dead?”

Preach shook his head. “He's not dead. In fact, he's close by.”

“Why did St. Vincent—”

“Luther was running ahead of everyone else,” Preach said. “As usual.”

“Is Felix safe?”

“As safe as anyone can be in this life.”

She nodded, seeming to liquefy with relief. She could tell he wasn't lying.

He studied her for a moment, leaned in. “Tell me something. Why did you run?”

Lucy just managed to stop a spit-take. “Make a guess.”

“Didn't I treat you well?”

“Is that a joke?” She put her spoon down, her hands balled into fists. “In what universe does raping me repeatedly fall into the category of treating me well?”

“I never raped you, Lucy.”

“What was it then—” she snorted, “consensual sex?”

“I believe it was, yes.”

“Wow, I can't believe what I'm hearing. Go peddle that shit to your zonked-out followers, not here. I know what you did to me. It was my body you violated, over and over.”

“But you liked it.”

She reared back. “What the fuck?”

“I know you liked it, Lucy. Your body told me. I'm attuned to such things.”

“You're attuned to getting what you want.” She did not bother to keep the disgust out of her voice.

“That's neither here nor there,” he said. “You wanted what I gave you.”

“Now I know for sure you're nuts.”

“You wanted power where you had none. You could feel it flowing into you with every thrust. You could feel the power over life and death spurt into you.”

“Completely bat-shit crazy.”

“You love the power I gave you—a power you never could have had, the power you longed for. It was why you ran away from home.”

“I ran away because I was abused.”

“It's why you sought me out.”

She laughed. “I didn't seek you out. Our meeting was pure happenstance.”

“I wonder.” He cocked his head. “How long will you need to feed yourself these falsehoods before you recognize the truth that's right in front of you?”

Her expression turned incredulous, her tone mocking. “What? You're telling me you set it all in motion—the abuse I suffered, the group of kids I met heading south, the days and nights of drugs, everything?”

Preach smiled at her benignly, as a grandfather smiles at his beloved granddaughter. “I want you back, Lucy.”

“Well, gee, that's just too fucking bad for you.”

“You have the gift.”

She shook her head. “What gift?”

“You're a death-dealer.”

She shook her head. “Stone-cold insane.”

“Don't look so alarmed. I won't force you; I won't have to. You'll come back of your own accord.”

“When the temperature rises in heaven.”

“We'll see.” He grinned as he stood up. “Enjoy your sundae while you can. No sugar allowed at home.”

Lucy stared down at her half-eaten dessert. The ice cream she had consumed seemed to have congealed in her stomach. She had thought about this reunion for a long time; the conversation hadn't gone anything like what she had imagined. That fucker had something nasty up his sleeve, she could feel it in her bones. Before he unleashed it she would have to find a way to protect herself. Then she'd destroy him.

Deliberately, she took up her spoon and resumed digging in. Even though her stomach was clenched tight, she was determined to finish the sundae, even if in the next minute she might vomit it all up.

*   *   *

Preach stood just inside the door to the kitchens building, his eyes closed to slits, in intimate communion with Crow. Trey emerged from the house onto the porch, settled into the rocker next to Albin. As Preach had expected, Trey had with him the
Peranomicon
, which he foolishly believed would protect him from what was to come.

The future was like an ancient tree: it had many branches, most alive, but some dead, awaiting the bite of the lumberjack's axe. The branches were a maze, so thickly tangled not even Crow, whose perspective was more far-reaching than his, could see them all. Preach liked things to be as neat, clean, geometric as a chessboard, and while the tree was no chessboard, he had done his level best to fashion it into his playing field. Moves had been planned out, not over days or weeks, but years. Salvation was coming in the form of the son he had never had, the son he had trained, guided, manipulated all toward the tip of this particular branch, which Crow had seen in his aerie of no-time. He had spent more than a decade climbing this tree with great care and deliberation so that he would arrive here, now, with all the required elements in play.

The future had arrived at last. It would be a surprise to everyone but him.

 

49

“You're prepared,” Whitman said, as they drove away from the landing strip for the short, jouncing ride to the Well.

Charlie fingered the backpack, feeling the familiar contours of its contents through the leather and canvas as if she were sight-impaired. “I am.”

“I'm counting on you.”

“And I'm counting on you.”

They glanced at each other, then away: Whitman at the road ahead, Charlie at the blurred greenery passing by.

“The Elf Lord warned me against consorting with you again,” she said at length.

“Huh! Consorting. That's a word the Elf Lord would use,” he retorted.

“She didn't,” Charlie said, “but I did.”

Whitman gave her another sideways look. “Is that what we're doing? Consorting?”

“Would you prefer ‘pal around with'?”

He laughed. “Yeah, that's just what we've been doing.”

There was silence between them for a beat or two.

“Whit,” she said, “what are we in for?”

He considered for a moment. “You recall ‘mind-no mind.'”

She nodded. “From my martial arts training, sure.”

“What did you learn?”

“Come on, Whit. What does this—”

“Indulge me.”

“In mind-no mind you let go of all thought, all anticipation, all expectation.”

“This is the place where we're headed.”

“React in the moment,
at
the point of attack and nowhere else.”

“And?”

“Attack with absolute commitment.”

The double meaning of the word
commitment
hung in the air between them, a bridge of sorts, visible only to the two of them.

Whitman made a sharp turn to the left, and structures appeared piecemeal beyond the dense web of tree branches, as if seen through a kaleidoscope.

“This is what is required of us now.”

*   *   *

Lucy sat over the remains of her sundae, the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach pinwheeling as if she were on a roller coaster. Preach had crawled right into her mind. As always. But, she thought, what if Preach was telling the truth? What if he had arranged everything so that she would be taken to his church of fire and sex? Was it even possible? And even if it were, why would he do such a thing? Who was she that he wanted her so badly?