Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (23 page)

The upper echelons of Gideon Falls lived in individual housing units. These were obviously modeled after suburban housing. The crudely constructed houses used substandard materials and were arranged around dirt cul-de-sacs in a parody of suburbia. It was almost amusing to see asphalt driveways and green grassy lawns facing dusty roads of hardened dirt.

I could only imagine the sort of muddy hell the roads became in the rainy season. Of course, that was pretty much fine, since everyone drove the same blue jeeps.

As we passed by the houses I noticed a gathering of people. About a dozen men and women, standing in a circle, heads low and arms interlaced. It was almost like a football huddle, except every thirty seconds or so the whole group would leap in unison.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

Travis slowed the jeep so we could watch.

“Leaps of faith,” Travis beamed. “Every day we all take leaps of faith to try to get us closer to the Lord. Some day when they do that they won’t come back down to the ground, they’ll just keep going up and up and up.”

“Into space?” I asked.

Travis laughed and drove on.

We ended the tour at the rectory, a palatial structure that was obviously meant to resemble, if not outright copy, the White House. The White House if most of the windows had not been installed yet and there was a 20-foot crucifix on the front lawn. Several jeeps were parked outside in the circular drive. Travis bypassed this and parked next to a side entrance that required a magnetic key card.

“Here’s where the real work happens,” he said. “Downstairs in the basement. That is where we crack the code.”

“Oh, is this the part where you hand me a check for the price of my car that you burned?” I asked, but he did not answer.

Decoding the Word

We descended into the cool depths beneath Travis’s White House. This was a world of clicking PC towers and the steady hum of cooling fans. The construction work was done by professionals, not eager amateurs.

Old CRT monitors served the network of computers.

“I wrote all of the software myself,” Travis noted.

We passed a row of monitors, each covered with rapidly scrolling text.

“Every word and phrase in the Bible has a numeric value and these computers are calculating every possible equation and result of every scrap of code contained in the Bible.”

“Where do you get the results?” I asked.

“I don’t,” Travis said. “I am the revelator. I reveal the Lord’s Plan. These machines just dump all of their data into a huge printout. The Lord guides me to find the proper information.”

We approached a silent bank of printers and Travis picked up a thick stack of paper. He waved it at me as if to prove his point.

“Wait a second,” I said. “You just randomly pick stuff out of a big stack.”

“Not random,” Travis objected. “It is the Lord at work. He guides my selection.”

“Why is it always about the end of the world then? All of your sermons in the church and on your website, all of your podcasts and videos, they’re all about the End Times.”

“Two reasons,” Travis said. “One, it’s the Lord at work. He wants me to read about the End of Days. Reason number two is that we’re in the End of Days. The signs are all around us.”

“When did you pull out the prophecy about you guys lighting my fucking car on fire, man?”

His expression darkened and the pits of his eyes fell into shadow as he tilted his head forward.

“Now listen here.” He pointed a finger in my face. “The signs are real. Do you think I made up the wars in the Middle East? That’s where the Antichrist will arise. Just some coincidence? Did I make up 9–11 or the Mayan calendar? It’s all interconnected and it’s all leadin’ to one thing. It’s leadin’ to the End of Days.”

“So when is it?” I asked. “When is it coming?”

“There will be signs,” Travis replied, affecting a theatrical manner of speaking in the process. “Each day it will become worse and the signs will grow more obvious. Great conflagrations will swallow up entire nations. Meteors will fall from the sky and crash into the earth. Terrible plagues will afflict mankind.”

“That sounds like Super Bible,” I observed.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I waved my hand, “Just something else in my notes that you torched.”

He scowled at my impudence, but could not resist continuing.

“Airplanes will crash from the sky, ships will be dashed upon the rocks. Cars will stop working—”

“Oh, they just stop working? Is that how it is? The cars don’t, I don’t know, driiive out to the desert and get doused with gasoline?”

He stared at me silently for a few seconds and then continued, “Computers will go silent. The great armies of the world will be swallowed up by the earth.”

“What about trains and buses?”

“What do you mean?” Travis asked.

“You said airplanes will crash and cars will ‘stop working,’ but will we still have trains and buses available?”

“No,” Travis replied. “Don’t be contrary. They’ll stop working, too.”

“So you are going to take them out to the desert and set them on fire? That seems like it might be doable for buses, but trains? Good luck.”

“At that moment, when we are isolated from one another and terrified, our greatest fears will be realized and the monsters and demons of hell will be unleashed upon the face of the earth.”

“Whoa,” I said. “What sorts of monsters and demons?”

“Horrible, bloodthirsty ones,” Travis assured me.

“Not sex demons? The big titty demons? Or the Monsters of the Midway?”

“Absolutely not,” Travis snapped. “These will not be fun demons. They will be horrible locusts with the faces of men and recurved talons that—”

“Recurved?”

“Yes, they will curve back, like this.” Travis bent his fingers back toward his wrist to demonstrate.

“Those seem like some shitty talons,” I noted. “Wouldn’t it be better to have, say, knife hands or one of those spiked balls on a chain instead of a hand?”

“That’s beside the point.” Travis sighed. “They’re going to rip off your flesh. And if you’re a sinner they will carry your soul back to hell for eternal punishment. This isn’t one of your jokes. It’s not some game. This is the end of everything.”

“Do the demons have any weaknesses?” I asked. “Like silver or something you could research in advance?”

Travis shook his head, obviously irritated by my attitude.

“We can fight these guys,” I said. “Come on, Deacon. We can fight back. Mankind will unite against these invaders and the world can celebrate a new Independence—”

Deacon Fish held up a hand to silence me. His glare would have been enough.

A Singular Ending

We retired to Travis’s game room on the rectory’s ground floor. A few of the guys in sunglasses were playing pool. Canyon and an elderly fat woman with a beehive hairdo were playing Connect Four. I was expecting someone to sing Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a light fixture.

“Sit down.” Travis gestured to a leather couch and I obeyed.

He was drawn and serious, exasperated by my fixation on his cult’s automotive arson. In hindsight, I think that he wanted me to be afraid, but nothing was getting in the way of my outrage about the car. I’m still mad about that.

Travis took a moment to prepare us drinks before handing me a glass of Scotch on the rocks. I reached out for the tumbler with my gloved artificial hand. My fingers clicked slightly as I took hold of the glass. Travis cocked his head and gave me an odd look, like a chicken studying a piece of birdseed that just pecked back. Whatever he was thinking, he shook it off.

The Scotch was the good stuff, or at least that’s what he said. All Scotch tastes like weather sealer for a deck to me.

“We try to find people without friends or family,” Travis said. “People who don’t belong in society. The outcasts. People nobody wants.”

“You know that’s the same profile most serial killers follow, right?” I asked.

Travis didn’t seem to notice the jab.

“Last year we recruited almost thirty people from the Internet. That was more than half the number of our community outreach work at a tenth of the cost. This year we’re hoping to double that number. We might even triple it.”

It was impressive, I guess. I didn’t tell him that a couple weeks earlier, ninety people showed up in San Francisco wearing Guy Fawkes masks and protesting Scientology for no reason other than it was fun.

“The more tools for recruitment there are, the more successful we become. The more successful we become the more people we can have working on outreach. On and off the Internet.”

I leaned in conspiratorially and asked, “Do you really believe all this shit?”

“Absolutely,” Travis answered. “I speak the Word of God and to believe that word flawed is to not believe that God is infallible.”

“Come on, you’ve got to doubt some of it a little,” I said. “Like the bugs with the human faces. When have you ever seen shit like that outside a science fiction movie or a bad dream?”

Travis glanced at the others and then leaned in close. “I think some of it is metaphor, naturally. You ever heard of a singularity event?”

“Rise of the robots? Man versus machines?” I asked.

“Yes, exactly. Sometimes when I watch the news I think maybe it’ll be like that instead of all this other stuff. I mean, I believe it’s all true, I just think the Bible maybe can’t describe it right.”

I knew what he meant.

“Like if we went back in time and ran over some dude with a truck his family would think it was a great iron beast or a dragon or something.”

“Exactly,” Travis agreed. “I think the angels with their burning swords might just look a little more like a droid with a burning laser saber.”

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“That definitely sounds like you’re getting it from Super Bible.”

“What’s that?” Travis asked. “I heard you mention it earlier. Some kind of joke?”

“It’s serious to me,” I said. “We all worship our own way.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“There are wrong ways to worship,” Travis said, and sat next to me on the couch.

I thought he was about to lecture me and probe my religious beliefs. Instead, he seemed almost eager to stay away from the topic of religion. He directed the conversation toward a discussion of Texas college football. I’m better versed in weird religious sects.

Travis was intent on talking up the “Aggies” from Texas A&M. The name suggested medieval illness and I was only familiar with the school because several students managed to get themselves killed at a school bonfire and made national news. I just nodded along to whatever Travis was saying about a quarterback and imagined my car burning in the Aggie bonfire. At least there it might stand some small chance of exacting its revenge.

For all I knew, the football talk was Travis’s version of the villain revealing the master plan right before attempting to kill the hero. The hero always escaped, deflecting a laser with a belt buckle or disarming the villain with kung fu. My plan wasn’t nearly as fleshed out. At that point I had worked out that I could punch Travis in the chest and then bite Canyon on the hand if he tried to crush my head. After that, all I had was my instincts and an SAS field manual PDF I think I read once when I was drunk.

“Would you like a refill?” Travis asked, rising from the couch.

I must have given him a dumbfounded expression in reply, because he shook his empty glass of Scotch in my direction. I cast my gaze to the empty glass in my own hand and nodded. The last thing I needed was more Scotch, but I supposed if they were going to kill me I might as well be drunk.

He took my glass and turned to the small selection of booze to make a fresh pair of drinks.

“Science is more likely than anything to bring about the end,” he said, returning to his original topic.

Travis twisted the top off the bottle of Scotch and the tea-colored liquid spilled out into my glass. He looked over his shoulder at me.

“Might not even be a battle, you know? Look how much computers run our lives now. Even we use them. It’s not like one day we are all just robots, but it could happen gradually. Then after years and years we’re just metal servants of Satan.”

“How do you fight that?” I wondered.

“Faith,” Travis answered, and turned back, “and maybe a little bit of napalm.”

He held out the glass for me and I took it without thinking. There was a whir and a click as the fingers of my right hand closed around the tumbler. We froze like that, my hand clasping the glass, Travis refusing to let it go. His gaze narrowed; his brow furrowed.

Suddenly, his eyes went wide, and he snapped his hand out and yanked the edge of my leather glove up my hand almost an inch.

It exposed the workings of the hand Doctor Lian gave me all those months earlier. The red ring of my wrist stump was welded with surgical staples to the metal stump-clasp of the hand. My arm muscles controlled the grasping and neural impulses operated the individual fingers.