Wish You Were Here (17 page)

Wesley gave the bison a long, hard look but didn't say anything. What he was thinking ran too deep for words, except for a few short, vulgar ones mostly beginning with B.

The bison shook itself and became the lovely girl again. ‘Come on,' she said. ‘I'd pencilled in this time for a coffee break, but we're running a bit behind schedule. This way.'

 

Janice swore.

Around here somewhere, there must be a telephone. You'd have thought that, wouldn't you? A civilised country like America. In your dreams.

Not, she told herself as she sat down and fished a small boulder out of her boot heel, that there was any great rush, being realistic about it. If the people from the ship had all drowned (as she feared was the case) then they'd still be just as drowned even if she didn't make it to a phone booth before nightfall. More drowned, even. So why should she break her neck scrambling down semi-vertical deer trails and break her back scrambling up the other side? Pointless . . .

Hang on, she muttered to herself as she struggled with a recalcitrant bootlace, just a cotton-picking minute. For a girl who's just witnessed a major tragedy - Ship Sinks In Lake, Fifty Feared Drowned - she ought to be going through all kinds of ghastly mental trauma, with a side order of guilt and choice of emotional damage from the trolley. And here she was, sitting grumpily on a rock cussing out a bootlace.

Delayed shock? The anaesthetic effect? Probably. Truth was, however, that all she really felt was rather silly. Did those strange men really steer their ship onto a rock because they were too busy gawping at
her
to mind where they were going?

Is this the face that sank a thousand ships? Under normal circumstances she could believe it; also the face that smashed a thousand mirrors, cracked a thousand lenses, soured a thousand gallons of milk - she'd heard 'em all, over the years. But beguiling sailors into running their ships aground; not me, pal, you're thinking of someone else. Surely.

Maybe I'm imagining it. Probably. After all, picture the scene, where she's telling it how it was to the police. Well, officer, they were all standing on deck whistling at me and saying nice things, and then they hit this rock. Yes, at me. Yes, I was wearing clothes at the time. No, I don't think they were all stoned out of their brains . . .

The sun, she muttered to herself, must be hotter than I thought. It's curdling my brains. Me? Nah.

She stood up and tramped painfully over a low rise, from the top of which she could see a pleasant sight: a road of sorts, more of a dirt track really but flat, regular and, best of all, human-made. The logic being; people don't make roads that lead nowhere. Follow this track and you'll end up someplace people are. Goody.

She walked down to the track and was following it in what she hoped was an easterly direction when she heard an even more hopeful sound: the rumble of an engine. Better still; because right then she'd had enough of walking to last her a very long time. The noise was coming from in front of her, where the track disappeared into the trees.

Not one engine. Lots of engines. One hell of a lot of engines.

And then they appeared; twenty or so big, garish black-and-silver motorcycles, all daddy-long-legs forks and spider-bodies a few inches above the ground, straight out of
Easy Rider
genre ripoffs but without the class. On the motorcycles rode vaguely humanoid shapes - huge, burly, hairy men with enormous black beards and arms as thick as legs. She stopped where she could, trying to still the instinctive panic as the bikes surged forward and seemed to flow all round her, their engines deep and growling as the voices of great bears.

Oh
cringe
, she thought.

The ursine nature of their appearance was probably intentional, for they were all wearing black leather cutoffs, on the backs of which were embroidered fancy stitching; somebody's girlfriend? Somebody's mother? Or did they sit round in the evenings beside the campfire threading needles and borrowing each others' silks?

- and a stylised picture of a bear's head, open-mouthed and roaring. One of them even had an
actual
bear's head, and the rest of its skin, wrapped round him like a towelling-robe, or Hercules as depicted in antiquity. Actually, it looked decidedly seedy and moulted, and Janice felt it had probably come from the back room of a pawn-shop, a long time ago.

The bikes stopped, corralling her in. The bikers cut their engines simultaneously, like a platoon of marines coming to attention. That alone was more unnerving than anything else about them.

‘Hey, miss. 'Scuse me.'

Janice tensed. Lacking gun, knife, can of mace, electric cattle prod or any other form of weapon, she was going to have to rely on her wits and her heels to get her out of this one. She tried to take a breath, but her lungs were too stiff—

‘Only,' the biker was saying, ‘we're lost, and we were wondering, is this the right road for Tucseehanna?'

Huh?
Janice felt physically unbalanced, the way you do when you step off the escalator without looking down. She wobbled, and pulled herself up straight again. She didn't know quite what she'd been expecting, but a squeaky little tenor voice—

‘Only,' the biker went on, ‘Maurice reckons we should have taken a left back there on the Fawcett pike, but the map clearly says . . .'

And then Janice noticed the thing that had been staring her in the face, except that she'd been too busy panicking to notice.

They were all wearing dog-collars.

Not leather straps with lots of shiny big studs; clerical collars, as worn by ministers of religion. That, together with the odd tank-sticker that read
Bikin' For Jesus
and
Freeway To Heaven
and
God Rides A Harley
, pointed her in a direction which logic wanted her to follow, although sanity wanted nothing to do with it.

‘Excuse me,' she heard herself whisper, ‘but are you guys
priests
?'

‘Sure are,' replied the biker, beaming. ‘I'm Father Armand, this is Father Patrick, Father Maurice, Father Bernard and Father Duane. Pleased to meet you.'

‘Very pleased,' murmured Father Patrick.

‘You bet,' added Father Duane.

‘Excuse me,' Janice croaked. ‘It's just a bit—'

Father Armand smiled. ‘Yeah, I know,' he said. ‘Priests on bikes. People do tend to have a problem with that, to begin with. But basically, you know, we're just guys who're into bikes and into Jesus, and we like to get out of the city once in a while, you know, build a camp fire someplace, open a bottle of wine, sing a few psalms. You know,' he concluded, blinking, ‘we kinda figure, if Bishop Odo of Bayeux could ride into the battle of Hastings on a big white horse, then it's probably OK if we ride Harleys.'

‘Right on,' agreed Father Bernard. ‘It's very, you know, American.'

‘Um,' Janice replied. ‘Actually, I'm not from these parts myself, so I really don't think I can help . . .'

As she was speaking, she began to feel ever so slightly uncomfortable; not that she'd been wildly comfortable before, when she'd been under the impression that she was about to be raped, murdered and quite probably eaten by a pack of human wolves. But this was a different sort of uncomfortable. The bikers were all
looking
at her.

Looking. More to the point, they were glazing. Yearning, even.

‘Priests,' she said aloud. ‘Catholic priests, right?'

‘You bet,' replied Father Maurice, with a kind of strangled twist in his voice, as if he'd just remembered something he'd forgotten a long time ago. ‘That's us,' he added wistfully. ‘We're priests, all right.'

‘Every one of us,' added a biker behind him. ‘You know, like unmarried . . .'

‘Celibate . . .'

‘Aw gee . . .'

‘Hey!' That was Father Armand, calling his people to order. ‘Guys! Let's all just bear in mind who we are, OK?'

‘Kinda hard to forget sometimes, Armand,' replied Father Patrick, sullenly. If the others were yearning at her, he was double-yearning, in spades. ‘Especially when we happen to meet, like, an exceptionally attractive and charming young lady.'

‘Guys!' Presumably Armand meant it as a mild rebuke. But since he was yearning at her too, with great big round eyes that'd have looked just fine on a Jersey cow but which were entirely inappropriate for a sworn-celibate man of God, it was hard to see what he intended to achieve. ‘OK, so we're only flesh and blood. Still, I feel sure that a couple hours of silent prayer . . .'

‘I only became a priest to please my folks,' Patrick was muttering. ‘Family tradition, they said. Goddamn stupid Irish pride.'

‘Hey!' Father Bernard interrupted him. ‘You think that's bad, you should try being Italian. My momma said . . .'

It was, Janice realised, exactly that same
ohshit
feeling she'd had when the ship hit the rock. Inside her mind, the penny gave in to gravity and began its long descent.

‘Guys,' she said, ‘maybe I should be getting along. Er, go with God.'

‘I mean,' Father Bernard went on, fingering the collar at his throat as if it was made of steel and too tight, ‘don't you ever ask yourself,
Why'm I doing this?What'm I missing out on?
And sometimes . . .'

‘Me too,' whispered Father Armand, nodding. ‘Hey, guys, I think we ought to talk about this. What do you think?'

For a time the hills seemed to shake with cries of ‘Yo!', ‘Right on!' and similar exclamations. One or two of the bikers actually tore off their dog-collars and flung them to the ground. ‘Heck,' one of them was saying, ‘so what if I have devoted my entire life since I was a little kid to becoming a priest? So what? It's never too late to change.'

Do the individuals who act as catalysts to sudden great events occasionally feel just a trifle apprehensive about what they've started? Did Joan of Arc, on seeing the reaction to her petulant complaint about rich English second-home buyers pricing the locals out of the property market, ever wish she'd kept her trap shut? Does the spirit of Columbus, gazing down from the bar of Heaven at modern San Francisco, ever feel he'd have done better to tell the Spanish king that the whole lot was as flat as a pancake, marvellous site for a hydro-electric plant but a complete non-starter as far as colonisation was concerned? Maybe. Certainly, Janice had her doubts about what she'd started. Thirty outlaw bikers she might just have coped with, assuming that death was something she could take in her stride. Thirty love-struck lapsed priests, on the other hand, wasn't something she wanted on her conscience.

‘Excuse me,' she said, and ran.

‘And what in hell is
that
?' Calvin Dieb asked, pointing. ‘Triangulation point? New age TV mast?'

‘It's a sword,' replied the lovely girl. ‘In a stone.'

Calvin shrugged. ‘Ask a dumb question,' he replied. ‘And don't tell me what it's doing there, because I don't want to know.'

The girl stopped, and sat down under the sword. ‘Sorry,' she said. ‘This is what we came here for. If I were you, I'd pay attention.'

‘Sure.' Dieb sighed deeply, and sat down on a rock. ‘So this is Disneyland.'

‘No,' the girl replied. ‘It isn't.'

‘No? All right then. It's Arthurian Park, and any minute now some guy's gonna come running in saying,
Ah shit, the clones've bust loose again
. That's so passé, you know?'

‘Wrong again,' the girl replied, scuffing her toe on the chalky ground. ‘Do you always think in clichés, Mr Dieb?'

Calvin thought for a moment. ‘Not clichés,' he replied. ‘Call it shorthand. Comes of being a lawyer, I guess. We always think in precedents; you know, instinctively try and pigeonhole anything new in with something we've come across before. Saves time and thought, which in our business equals money. At two thousand bucks an hour, you haven't got time to think, you just
do
.'

The girl nodded. ‘Valid enough point, I suppose,' she said. ‘So presumably, if you were to see a guy in a robe with a tea-towel round his head raising the dead to life, you'd say,
huh, a Lazarus job
. Yes?'

‘Yup.' Dieb grinned. ‘Hey, wouldn't that be a great trick if you could do it? The tax-planning applications alone would be stupendous.'

‘Mr Dieb—'

‘Not to mention,' Calvin went on, rubbing his hands together, ‘the use you could make of it in insolvency litigation. Your client dies, you call all the creditors together and say, “Sorry, fellas, the guy just died and the whole estate's gone in legal costs, so forget it,” and then a week later you can fetch him back and slap in an interim bill. Hell, with that I could run the competition clean out of town.'

‘Mr Dieb—'

‘Or divorce. In divorce, it'd be huge. Your ex-wife screwing you for two hundred grand a year alimony? So what? You die, and the settlement dies with you. Then up you get and walk away, a free man.'

‘Mr Dieb,' said the girl. ‘Behind you.'

‘What the—? Oh, fuck!'

‘Quite.' The girl smiled, tight-lipped. ‘A Little Big Horn scenario, don't you think?'

Calvin Dieb started to back away, step for step as the ring of squat, grim bodies advanced towards him. On each leathery, green-tinged face was a look of cold rage. When his back was up against the blade of the sword, Dieb stopped and slotted a feeble grin into the hole in his face.

‘Hiya, guys,' he croaked. ‘It's been a while. How's things with you?'