Firechild (30 page)

“Thanks!” he whispered. “Not that I know where she went or anything about her. Nor even expect to. That jet would have been too hot to come down safe in some pasture. If it crashed, she could be dead.”

“So she could be.” She was nodding slowly as she spoke, green eyes growing remote and cold, as if the notion somehow pleased her. “We may never know.”

He drew his hand away, that moment of closeness broken.

35

“The Whore

of Babylon”

N
ext morning Belfast was sitting in his office, staring at another angry letter, this one from a farmer threatening to sue because the claims office had refused to pay him even half the value of his seven prize-winning Holstein dairy cows, dead in the dust of Enfield. Instead of punching up a form-letter reply, he was wondering hopefully if Keri would be coming in. He smiled to greet her, when he heard a rap on the door, and started a little guiltily when he saw Captain Holliday.

“Come along, Doctor. The general wants to see you.”

Holliday failed to say why, but the waiting guard escorted him across the quad to the old administration building, almost as if he were under arrest. A black sergeant frisked him for hidden weapons and led him down a corridor walled with glass-cased trophies the college teams had won, at last into a big corner room where Clegg sat at the departed president’s glass-topped desk.

In full uniform, medals on his chest and silver star shining, Clegg sat ramrod straight. His rawboned face seemed older, Belcraft thought, bitten deep with new trouble-creases. The guards had left him at the door.

Clegg ignored him for half a minute, then looked up at him and paused as if expecting a salute.

“Good morning,” Belcraft said.

“Come in.” A commanding hand beckoned him closer, with no invitation to sit. There were, in fact, no chairs in front of the desk. “Major Kalenka informs me that you are now cooperating with us.” His voice was loud and flat. “Is that true?”

“I am doing office work.”

“I expect something better.” Clegg scowled, the dark, deep-sunk eyes narrowed as if to probe for his soul. “Perhaps you know your brother’s demon is now at large?”

“Alphamega? Kalenka tells me she has been rescued.”

“Rescued?” The cragged head jutted at him. “By whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“I understand that in the past she has sent you revealing visions?”

“I have dreamed about her, yes.”

“Call them dreams!” Abrupt impatience. “Do they come since the rescue?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Unless she is dead?”

“She’s alive!” Clegg rapped the words. “I saw her last night. In a vision of my own. The whore of Babylon! I heard the voice of St. John like thunder in the dark sky behind her. He was denouncing her monstrous fornications as he denounced them in his own apocalypse two thousand years ago.

“He warned me that she must die again.” The general’s somber eyes lifted toward the ceiling, and his voice began to ring. “And yet again, as she has died so many times since he first warned the world against her. She has been burned at the stake. Hanged from the scaffold. Racked and drawn and quartered. Forever in vain.”

Listening, Belcraft shifted uncomfortably on his feet, uncertain what to make of such an outburst.

“Her evil is eternal,” the solemn tones rolled on. “She has been banished to hell and returned again to every whore-hungry nation, to tempt the innocent and corrupt the righteous and lure every soul she can into Satan’s blazing maw. Alive again, reborn through your brother’s hell-taught arts, she must die again and yet again, until almighty God decrees her death forever.”

Half erect, he leaned across the desk, rawboned hands supporting him.

“Hear them now if you never heard before.” His eyes fell to blaze at Belcraft, cold with accusation. “Hear and heed the words of St. John, as they are written in the Scripture and he spoke them to me last night in my vision.”

Intoning them, his voice rang with a ritual power.

” ‘I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written.
MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs—’ “

He broke off the chant, glaring at Belcraft.

“Sir, do you challenge the truth of my vision?”

“Your quotation is probably accurate.”

“Dr. Belcraft, you hear this!” High on his forehead, his birthmark burned redly through its makeup. “That witch is sent upon us as a curse from Satan, bearing the sword of Armageddon. God has allowed her fearful weapon to destroy one city, to let us see how it can destroy the world. She has taken now it with her, wherever her demoniac minions have hidden her.

“If we suffer her to live, she will wield that sword again, smiting every nation. Therefore she and all her monstrous iniquities must be banished again from the planet. Look now into the depths of your quivering soul. Don’t you see that her reign of sin must be cut short?”

“No—no sir.” He had to catch his breath. “If I could see Alphamega as anything supernatural, it would be as an angel of mercy, sent to bring us life and hope and peace—”

“Infidel!” Clegg’s hoarse boom cut him off. “Hear the judgment of the Lord, in the words of Saint John: ‘The ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.’”

He scowled across the desk.

“Sir, if you remain too stubborn to perceive the truth, let me explicate. Those ten horns are the company of the holy, that blessed group which I am chosen to command. I implore you to grasp the need of our God-appointed mission, which is to recover that mighty sword for the defense of our own sacred destiny, and to kill the witch before she can deliver it to the hosts of evil that teem all across our idolatrous planet. Understand?”

“No, sir.” Belcraft straightened. “That’s nothing I can understand.”

Clegg came to his feet, the handprint flaming brighter.

“Then, sir, let me try to make it clear.” Fury trembled in his voice, and he paused as if to smooth it. “With the same hell-given craft that enabled her escape, that whore of Satan has evaded the CIA and the KGB and the police of all our international friends.

“Others are after her, as desperate as we are. The hellhounds of the KGB have been hunting her with all their own Satanic zeal, hoping to seize her weapon for the evil schemers in the Kremlin, but we know that they also have failed.

“Sir, the simple fact is this: To save the world for God, we must find her before they do. Since other means have failed, we must turn to you. Your own past visions have told you where she had hidden herself. When you dream again—”

“I see.” Wryly, Belcraft smiled. “Now I understand.”

“If you really do, I commend you.” An icy smile. “God will bless you for it. When any vision reveals her present hiding place, you will inform us at once. If you do that, we can cut her abominations short, with that holy sword restored to our own righteous hands. If you fail, all mankind may die before the ultimate wrath of God. Understanding God’s commandment and your own sacred duty, you may go.”

“Thank you,” Belcraft told him. “I’m ready to go.”

Glowering like a storm cloud, Clegg waved him toward the door.

In bed that night, Belcraft wondered uneasily if another dream would come. The world’s future might be simpler, he thought, if Alphamega lay dead somewhere in the wreckage of the general’s jet, all her secrets lost. Awake next morning; he felt a gray depression because there had been no dream.

Keri lifted his spirits when she brought in a new set of form letters she and Holliday had devised to answer a fresh flood of apprehensive letters inspired by rumors that governments all over the world were covering up fresh outbreaks of the Enfield plague.

Her sardonic antipathy for Meg still hurt, but he tried to understand. She had never known Meg. All her family dead in Enfield, wiped out by the same biological mischance, she had no reason to think well of Vic or his work. Her smile for him was still alluring, and she cheerfully agreed when he asked her to join him after work for a drink.

The guards let him take her to the new officer’s club, just opened in what had been the faculty lounge. She said she drank no alcohol, but Perrier seemed to give her gaiety enough. Enchanted again with her flattering attention, her shining eyes and her shining hair, her shape and her scent and her voice and the hinted mysteries of her past, he almost forgot his own Scotch and water.

Laughing when he asked about her European years, she recalled a time when she’d thought her talents were for the stage. Hitchhiking across half a dozen countries to catch the Bolshoi Ballet on tour, she had run out of money in Rome and nearly been jailed for begging help from American tourists waiting in line for their mail at American Express. Trying out in London, she had finally been offered Laura’s role in a revival of
The Glass Menagerie,
only to have the director turn her down. He said her accent wasn’t sufficiently American.

“Me! Imagine! Off an Indiana farm!” She giggled. “Not sufficiently American!”

Guards always near, they walked to the mess hall for dinner together. Listening to another story, this time about the Italian banker who hired her to write his life history and wanted to keep her as his mistress when she wouldn’t swallow his tall tales about how he’d bluffed out the Mafia to rake in his millions, he hardly touched his dried beef on toast.

Afterward they strolled around the quad and sat on a bench in front of his residence hall. Listening again, or answering her eager-seeming questions about his boyhood with Vic, he sat longing to be somewhere else with her, and no guards watching. In the darkening dusk, the guard stepped nearer.

“Nearly ten, sir.”

“My curfew.” He kissed her, and her response intoxicated him. “I have to go inside.”

“Shall I come with you?”

He blinked and got his breath. “Would you?”

She kissed him again and called the guard aside. What she said he didn’t hear, but the grinning guard waved them toward the door. With him in the narrow room, she stripped and posed for him silently, smiling with candid pride in a form still firmly perfect, delighted with his breathtaken adoration. Half undressed, he had stopped to admire her. Laughing at him, she came to help him out of his shirt and shorts.

They showered together, soaping each other, and he carried her dripping back to the bed, her pink nipples hardening against him. For one painful moment, her casual expertise reminded him that affairs with other men must have filled her European years. In another moment, as her magical hands guided his first deep thrust into the warm wonder of her, that melancholy pang was gone. Lost in the taste and scent and feel of her, even in the exotic accent of her breathless whispers, he forgot almost everything.

When the air conditioning stopped at midnight, shut down while the damaged power lines were under repair, he found a fan in the closet and set it to blow on their naked bodies. Laughing once at his unceasing eagerness, she murmured that he must have been missing Midge.

“I loved her,” he muttered. “I really did. But she was never—”

Beaching again for Keri, he said no more of Midge. Once when she breathed a half-malicious query about what other women he had loved, he thought of Meg, wondering how she would feel about Keri if she really were alive to reach him again. He thought she wouldn’t care.

He woke at dawn on the narrow dormitory bed, Keri close beside him, breathing gently, splendid even in her sleep, the fan still washing their bodies with humid summer air.

“Meg—”

The whispered name died in his throat. Alphamega had come back in his dream, in Keri’s captivating shape.

36

La Madre

de Oro

The big gringo with Pancho Torres in the cockpit had been a frightened
loco,
never willing to let him land anywhere for
gasolina.
Not even when he begged for
La Maravilla
‘s blessed life. Starving the engines, he kept the
avión
in the air until the first daylight let him find the flatness of a wide
laguna
he remembered from his old days with the
marijuaneros.

It was dry in this dry season, but not flat enough.

The hot
avión
came down too fast, breaking into many pieces, and now he knew he was dying. His broken chest made him want to moan with every breath, but he found no strength even for moaning. Both his legs were numb and dead, the way the one had been when the gringo at Enfield shot his knee. Flies buzzed around his blood when the sun came up, and they crawled in his eyes. Death would be a kindness.

Yet he tried to stay alive because of
La Maravilla.
He couldn’t move to find her, couldn’t even call her name. Listening, he heard
cuervos
cawing—waiting maybe for the death they would find in the wreckage—but no sound from her. Perhaps
los santos
had intervened to shelter her. If they had not, he thought she must be dead.

La santissima!
Perhaps already returned to heaven, where her soul belonged. Praying for her happiness among the saints, he listened to the crows. The flies crawled and stung. His chest grew worse with every breath, but for her sake he kept on breathing. The sun rose higher, blazing into his face until all he saw was purple light. He was glad when the aching deadness began to spread from his dying legs, because he had no strength to help her and sleep would wash away
el dolor.

“Panchito!”