Xeno Sapiens (33 page)

Then join the millions who
follow Reverend Hall. Renounce the pagan practices of false healing
and place your faith completely in the Lord God Jehovah. You will
be blessed with health, happiness, and prosperity. All goodness
springs from The Lord and only through Him can you receive true
healing and salvation. Place your faith no longer in the sacred
cows of earthly magic; the institutions that have brought us the
threat of nuclear and biological holocaust, the ravaging of God’s
earth, and the deforming of His children. The institutions of false
healing will begin their crumble tonight, and you will be witness
to it.

Clifton crumpled up the page. “Holy
shit,” he said quietly, dropping the balled up paper on the
floor.

He looked over the rapturous faces of
the people in the auditorium. Some read the flier, some sat with
stern, set looks on their faces. Still others spoke animatedly to
one another, nodding their heads like birds at a drinking
pool.

Clifton threaded his lurching way down
a narrow aisle after seeing a seat magically open up. He stepped in
sticky spots of spilled sodas and nudged his cramped way past knees
protruding into the passageway.

On stage, Hall’s choir tuned up for the festivities. It was
a coed choir and the singers were draped in voluminous gray
cassocks with white dickeys on the breasts. Even the girls wore the
absurd dickeys. Probably corseted on, Alex thought. Hall was
apparently hellbent that none of
his
girls’ tits jiggled on a high note.

A clear, beautiful soprano soared out.
The note was a shining crystal in the muggy atmosphere. An ordered
tremor swelled beneath the tone until it harmonized perfectly with
the first note.

The stage was lit only by candles. They
were placed in ornate candelabras scattered along the stage boards
like robot conductors. The voices of the choir swept over the
assembly, pealing like the bells of liberty at war’s end. The crowd
murmured restlessly, stirred, ostensibly, by the spirit of The
Lord. Some had taken up the hymn, giving back the words to ‘Onward
Christian Soldiers’.

Alex blinked at the irony. He was sure
that most of the audience, which was wiping tears from its eyes or
swallowing large lumps in their throats, had no idea of Hall’s
previous line of work.

On and on the singers spilled their
passion to The Lord, growing louder as more voices lifted in
chorus. Clifton was unable to credit the spellbound state to which
the audience had fallen prey. It became like something alive; a
gestalt entity with a singular consciousness, like the survival
force that surrounded the Alamo. They had lost their will, their
ability to think for themselves. All eyes stared mindlessly
forward. Their lips moved. Some sang, some simply made the motions
of words given them. A swaying, rhythmic motion that Clifton
likened to the shuffling of an army of apes began. Except for the
candles, only the exit lights remained, glowing with a dimly
pulsating, red hue.

The audience gave voice to its fervor
as the hymn reached a crescendo. It seemed the roof might come off
the building. From somewhere far distant, Clifton heard the sound
of a window rattling angrily beneath the flood of
voices.

Clifton saw TV cameras from the local
affiliate, ready to train their lenses on the great man. An
intense-looking young man scribbled notes frantically, using a
small pen-light to see. The bulge of a miniature tape recorder was
visible in his jacket pocket. Clifton knew it was Ron Walton,
though he had never met him.

The choir sang ever louder in its quest to finish the hymn.
It began to sound like the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s
‘Messiah’
before the lights
suddenly flashed up and the choir ceased as one. The final voices
rushed like water from a cave of echoes.

Alex blinked rapidly in the sudden
light and squinted to see the stage. Emerging from the wings, Josh
Hall was resplendent, the very image of a fire-breathing, pure
pious minister out to save the masses.

He strode calmly to center stage like a
giant, possessing that elusive quality known as presence, moving
with the purposeful, steely grace of a jungle cat, a skill learned
in the backwoods of Arkansas and perfected in the jungles of
Nicaragua. He had never lost it.

He slammed his bible down on the podium
and clutched the edges of the rostrum as if he meant to rip it from
the stage. He glared silently around the mesmerized audience like a
rabid Solomon. Clifton was surprised at the silliness of it all.
Surely they could see what a perfect ass Hall was making of
himself.

Nobody was laughing. Hall surveyed his audience, locking
eyes with the few stern enough to meet his gaze. His sweeping scan
rested on Clifton. For a second, their eyes locked. Hall’s gaze did
not falter, nor even remain still, but flickered for a split
second, as if to confirm ‘
I know to watch you’
. Clifton felt no fear at his stare, only
an irrepressible uneasiness. He had seen through the sham. Hall
might have millions around the nation fooled, but Clifton saw the
true man.

Hall had the eyes of the man who had
tried to kill Jon Merrifield.

Hall settled into the role of guiding sheep. His voice
poured over the heads of the anointed who had gathered to hear his
words.

“
Let us pray,” he said.

Placed in the role of supplicant, Seth
struggled closer to the lights on the hill. The loss of zinc
electrolytes in his brain had taken their disastrous toll and he
found himself more and more susceptible to the crazing voices that
thumped inside his skull like a jackhammer.

His desperate eyes roamed between the
lamps of the Alamo and the moving chain of dazzling headlights
winding their way down the mountain. The night was an awful black
curtain behind which men could be lurking, ready to spring at any
moment, and wield their terrible weapons against him.

He looked cautiously into the void,
allowing his hyperdeveloped senses to lapse into a semblance of
normal acuity. He felt a strangely draining, restful sensation when
his information gathering apparatus wound down to a lower
power.

Cold rain pelted him and his head ached
with the onset of some disease. The throbbing and burning of his
many wounds and abrasions sapped his strength. The lights on the
hill were too far to reach. His salvation could never be obtained.
It would be easier to give in and die. The grim, whining voices in
his head were to much to bear.

He had been conscious for just under
twenty-four hours and in that time he had killed four men and
injured one, been shot at, chased, hunted, horribly maimed, and
endured the tortures of the damned, all because he was different.
He was special above all other creatures, but did he have a soul?
Could such an abstract concept be constructed from bits and pieces
of elemental energy like atoms?

His senses flared involuntarily as the voices began again.
The inky night tinged with red as he saw the telltale, infrared
shapes of small animals scurrying through the tree branches and
shuffling across the compost-covered floor of the forest, seeking
shelter from the storm. The beating of an owl’s wing from seven
miles away came to his ears. Closer by, in the river, he heard the
sudden, savage
glup
of an underwater predator breaking the surface and
devouring some unfortunate top dwelling creature.

The sounds lowered and merged, becoming
part of a primordial, low frequency hum. By fractional increments
the humming increased in pitch like a struggling radio
transmission. The whining broke up and became words, fading in and
out, but becoming clearer.

“
...don’t know what it’s
going...”

“
...to be about. I heard it’s
something...”

“
...special. Something very
special...”

“
...he won’t, give ’em an
inch...”

“
..he’ll take them right down to
hell...”

“
...where they belong.”

Seth tried to force the voices out with
a vicious shake of his head. Electric bolts of agony rattled his
teeth as pockets of pus burst from the swollen skin stretched too
tightly. The voices spit and snapped in his head like shorted
electrical wires.

From the valley below, a terrible man,
a thousandfold worse than any of the others, fomented an awful,
single-minded insistence on his destruction. The man was like the
wild flowers with the thick smell that had torn Seth’s hands. They
were beautiful to see and touch, but had sharp teeth that pierced
his skin and spilled his blood. This man would do the
same.

Seth had no words and not even pictures
in his mind’s eye would come. Just the knowledge.

Just the man hating him for what he
was, marshaling his forces against him. Not out of fear like other
men, but out of simple hatred. The fear Seth should have felt was
only a tiny whisper, like the yowl of the catamount shut away
outside of locked doors.

The fire in his jaw screamed at him to
find Ingrid; to be healed. But a newly formed part of his humanity
shouldered his physical traumas aside.

Seth needed to know his enemy. The way
he moved; the way he thought. The man knew Seth was injured. He
sensed it just as Seth sensed that the man would attack him
indirectly, but wouldn’t shirk a direct challenge if push came to
shove. His healing would have to wait until his study was
completed. No detail could be deemed too small or
insignificant.

Seth began his descent into the valley.
A minister might have called it the valley of the shadow, but Seth
thought of it as the valley of his being. Of seven billion human
souls on the planet who had asked themselves the meaning of life,
Seth knew his purpose. He was no less human for the
knowledge.

His function was to neutralize those
like Josh Hall.

Alex shifted his crowded position and
tried to settle more comfortably into a difficult situation. Hall
had taken the bit between his teeth a half hour before and every
passing minute saw the death knell knocking louder at the door of
the Alamo.

The congregation had at first listened
in stunned silence as Hall poured out the story of the science
mongers in their midst. Those operating against the very principles
of the Lord.

Alex watched disbelief slowly change to
anger in the sparsely lit auditorium. Hall had not come to deliver
his message with mealy-mouthed polemics. His intention was to stuff
a large chunk of Godly wrath directly down the throats of the
parishioners.

The men had clamped their jaws shut and
tight sinews stood out like white ribs against the red flush of
their necks. The women sat in silent, dignified sobriety, some of
them working handkerchiefs or lace doilies through their spidery
fingers. Their eyes glowed with a strange, judgmental
light.

The ushers had moved up to the rear of
the auditorium, leaving the lobby empty. Their faces were rapt.
Obviously, this was the first they had heard of Hall’s message.
Clifton expected a noose to materialize at any moment.

They’re ready to lynch Seth
from the nearest tree. In fact, I think they would rather shoot him
down because he’s different. Shoot him down, as Merrifield would
say, like a dirty dog.

Hall’s sermon came from the text of
second Peter, chapters one and two. Clifton foggily recollected it
was mostly about false prophets. Given that Hall’s beliefs about
genetics were roughly analogous to Arthur Dimmesdale’s views on
adultery, it wasn’t a stretch to figure what form his false prophet
would take.

He had started off quietly enough, no
inkling of a great unburdening to come. It had only gotten worse
after the first minute and a half of prayer.

Within two minutes his calm voice had
begun to boom. The years had etched his features only slightly and
he still presented a ferocious, overbearing vitality as his ocean
of words rolled onto listening shore of ears.

“
Does it not say in the second verse
of the second chapter that false prophets will come among us,” Hall
questioned.

There was an approving murmur from the
audience.

“
Simon Peter has told us they will
bring us false doctrines and false teachings. Destructive ways that
are not God’s Will. They will abet in their own destruction by
denying the very God Who has saved them.”

Hall let his righteous gaze rest on all
the faithful. He held his bible over his head, almost like a waiter
carrying a tray.

“
Brethren, I am not talking about he
bestial, panting lust that one man feels for another’s wife. I
speak of the new lust that is so evil, so heathenish it makes
heresy seem like a woman lying about her age.”

There was a small, rebellious titter
from some of the women in the audience.

Clifton was surprised anyone had
laughed, considering the slobbering, obsequious way most of them
hung on his every word.