Disconnection (30 page)

From her underground room, Sela let out a horrific scream.

This time, the congregation heard her. All the members turned and faced one another, wondering what else Reverend Applegate had in store for them.

Harold cleared his throat. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Knights of Galilee, I have a special surprise for you. Tonight, two sinners will be cleansed of their sins and sent to the Heavenly Father.”

The two robed men moved toward Sela’s cellar door.

Sela’s eagle-eye view disappeared, and she was once again staring through the cracks.

The door to her tomb opened and the two red-robed men appeared before her.

Sela screamed when the men roughly grabbed her by her wrists and yanked her to the top floor. “Leave me alone! Murderers! Murderers!”

She saw Harold Applegate from the corner of her eye. The round sweetness of his face reminded her of the first day she had met him. He had seemed so sympathetic then, so incredibly likeable, reminiscent of all the kindly preachers who had inhabited her grandmother’s world.

The Devil came in many disguises.

D
ean lay in an unknown place, in a condition just a shade more coherent than sleep, his body temperature slowly declining, his heart beating only twenty-five times a minute, blood barely circulating. He drew every breath shallowly and with a great deal of difficulty. A female medic stood over him with a concerned look on her attractive face. She turned her head every now and then to alert the other medics to his condition. She did not look Dean in the eye and tell him that he would be okay or that he would make it, and this made him believe that he wouldn’t.

Lord, oh Lord, please listen to my prayer; I do not want to die today
.

He thought of his parents in New York.

He thought of his classes at Tulane: Neurobiology of Disease, Genomics, Embryology, Cells and Tissues, and how hard he had worked after his miserable effort at Brown.

He thought of Sela in the bayou that afternoon, before she had accused him of being a serial killer, when they were making love in the pirogue under a dense blue sky.

He thought of his temple and his bar mitzvah. He thought of the cinnamon buns across the street from his old high school and how good they tasted on cold days.

He thought of the entirety of his life and how everything would be wasted if he were to die in this ambulance.

Dean’s breathing was running ragged and he could feel the last spasm of brain waves burn and fizzle inside his head. From the waist down, he could feel nothing. Deeper and deeper he went, into his isolated dark cloud, a state of consciousness between life and death.

He began to see people he had not seen in years hovering around his cloud. He saw his grandfather David, who died of leukemia when Dean was just a baby, and his grandmother and great aunt, both casualties of heart attacks. He saw his aunt May, who used to bring him chocolate éclairs from the Swiss bakery every afternoon, until one day she never showed up, and years later Dean would learn she had died of toxic shock syndrome. Dean saw a kid he knew named Bobby, who shot himself in the head their senior year in high school.

His cloud began to solidify and Dean saw strange kids he had never seen before, and people sitting on couches in a room shinier than the sun, and tunnels of light pouring in from above. Music played, first softly, and then louder, and the room seemed to dance in front of him, until it was no longer just a room, but the entire universe in a compact case, swirling and twirling in crayon box colors.

Then, everything stopped.

Dean no longer felt that he was in motion. A quick jolt had suspended movement of the ambulance, as if the driver had braked suddenly. The swift change in momentum created havoc in Dean’s dying world, and consciousness began to rise in him like a red flag.

He was suddenly
aware
.

“What is it?” the female medic cried from beside Dean. She leaned over and knocked on the window connecting the back of the ambulance with the front seats. The window opened and the girl asked, “Why did you stop?”

“There’s a man in the road!” the driver yelled.

“What is he doing there?”

“He’s waving a gun at us!”

“Start the ambulance! Get out of here!”

“I can’t, I’ll run him over.”

“Christ, Danny, this guy,” she pointed at Dean, “is gonna die if we don’t get him to the hospital.”

“We’ll kill this man if we run over him,” the driver argued.

“So be it! If the asshole is stupid enough to stand in front of a moving vehicle, then he deserves to die!”

The other medic in the back of the car, a young black man who had been quiet until now, said, “Danny’s right. We can’t run over the guy. That would sort of defeat the purpose of an ambulance, wouldn’t it?” His voice seemed calm in light of everything.

The girl medic screwed up her face. “Fine, have it your way!” she exclaimed, reaching over to the latch of the back door and opening it. Dean watched the girl through vague eyes as she held her head outside. “What do you want?” she screamed into the darkness.

Dean’s ears rang with her voice.

The wild man in question rounded the corner and opened the driver’s door. “Go on and scurry to the back,” he said to the medic named Danny.

Danny held his hands in the air. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Boy, there ain’t gonna be any trouble if you go on and move your ass to the back of this here ambulance
right now.”

Danny shuffled out of the seat and into the night. He appeared a moment later in the back of the ambulance. He and the other male medic shut the door. “Cowardly shitheads,” the girl whispered between clenched teeth, her stare burning a hole into their chests.

“I don’t want to die today,” the former driver said.

Yeah, I feel you there buddy
, Dean thought.

“Sorry ‘bout this, but I’m gonna have to use this here vehicle,” the trespasser said as he pressed his gun to the ceiling, allowing everyone a good look at the metal he carried. Dean heard him work with the radio, cutting off buttons and pulling out wires until the static disappeared into silence.

I must be dreaming
, Dean thought. Or he was already dead? He thought back to the last moment that he could actually pinpoint reality, back at the pig farmer’s house, dying on the ground next to a boy he had thought was his friend. Everything had seemed so real then, and now, it was if his world had collapsed into nothingness.

HaShem, our God, King of the Universe, please turn me into something. Take back this nothing. Strengthen me, return me
.

The female medic interrupted Dean’s prayer with a loud scream. She stood at the driver’s seat, yelling, “Sir, we have a sick person that has to arrive at the hospital in the next few minutes or he is going to
die
, do you understand? You are committing a
crime!”
Her face grew bright red with anger. Dean thought her eyeballs might pop out of her head.

The man shook his head and put the ambulance in gear. “Listen here, missy,” he began, “if I don’t borrow your vehicle, there’s gonna be another Fishhook murder tonight, you can guaranfuckingtee it. And the good Lord called on me to stop it.”

The woman fell backwards into Dean’s bed as the ambulance lurched back onto the road. “What do you mean, Fishhook murder?” she asked, recovering her balance.

“Stop askin’ so many fuckin’ questions.”

“Your leg is bleeding,” Dean heard the medic in the front seat say.

“It ain’t nothin’ I ain’t had before,” the intruder answered back.

The black medic reached his hand over the woman’s shoulder. “Cynthia,” he began, “you are not helping the situation by being disagreeable. If we play along, he might let us live.”

She shot him a go-to-hell look. “Clark, he’s
bleeding,”
she answered, nodding to the front seat where the strange man was pushing the speedometer up to eighty miles per hour. Cynthia said, in a louder voice, “Whatever this man’s been up to, it hasn’t had good consequences.” For the first time, the scared light in Cynthia’s eye made her look vulnerable.

“I can hear ya’,” the man said from his driver’s seat. “Girl, you don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about. If you did, I would have the right mind to hear you, ’cause you ain’t all that bad lookin’. But right now, I got’s to redeem myself in front of the Lord—who I just realized is the real deal and trust me that means somethin’ cause’ I ain’t never been to church a day in my life.”

Cynthia seemed sustained by his words. Dean watched as she returned her attention to his limp body, hovering over him once more, checking his vitals. For a moment their eyes met and Dean could tell that Cynthia knew that he was no longer in danger of dying. The miracle of his recovery grew like an exploding sun in her eyes. She stepped back and held one unbelieving hand to her mouth.

She wouldn’t tell the others of his recovery, Dean realized. As long as he was close to death, she still had an inch of persuasion with which to convince everyone else to rally against the insane lunatic at the wheel of the ambulance.

“How do you expect to redeem yourself by stealing an ambulance?” asked the medic called Clark.

“Boy, just sit pretty and I’ll show you. Now, any’s of you know the way to a church out here?”

“A church?” the medic in the front echoed.

“A church, buddy, ain’t that what I said?”

This is the Bible Belt
, Dean thought in the midst of his awakening.
There are churches everywhere
.

“This is the Bible Belt. There’s a church on every corner,” Cynthia answered, as if reading Dean’s thoughts.

“I’m lookin’ for something specific. A church with rotten wood and green shit hangin’ out the side of it. You know what I mean?”

Before anyone could answer, the ambulance hit a pothole and went flying off to the side of the road. Dean’s bed roller-coastered backward and locked Danny and Clark against the back door. Cynthia let out one bloodcurdling scream as the vehicle sped through the country, rolling over bush and grass, dodging trees, zigzagging a path until it hit the road again and stabilized.

“Shit,” the man said. “I wasn’t expectin’ that.”

“Let us out of here!” Cynthia screamed.

Please God, King of the Universe, make nothing into something
.

The unseen medic in the front seat coughed and said, “Hey mister, you said something about a chapel?”

“Yeah,” the man answered.

“Well, there’s something wooden and big up there on the left, down by the water. I don’t know if it’s a chapel, but it’s got green shit hanging on the side like it’s really old or something.”

S
ela closed her eyes and prepared to die. Roped, almost naked, to the post in the middle of the church, a white cloth gagging her mouth, she flared her nostrils, drawing in what little breath she could. In her head she heard her mother’s voice:

You have nothing to fear
.

They were lighting the candles. Sela could tell. She could smell their waxy scent, and the smoke. If she opened her eyes, with all those candles around her, she would surely die from a panic attack.

Not that she wouldn’t die anyway.

When they had first pulled Sela out of her underground cell, she had briefly seen Mandy’s body hanging from a wooden cross in the back section of the church. Her friend’s head was rolled forward, as if in prayer. Two nails penetrated her wrists, keeping her in place. Sela had screamed then, and the two robed men had twisted her ninety degrees, so that she was facing the congregation.

Then they hung Sela up to the post where Mandy’s body had been. “Time to join your friend,” one of them had said.

With her eyes closed, Sela tried to imagine good things. She thought of
The Sound of Music
and Maria’s song, “My Favorite Things.” What were Sela’s favorite things? Music, Folgers coffee (the instant kind), pressing her hand against Dean’s back while he was sleeping, little orange kittens, Jude Law. The sun going down over the Mississippi. “Seinfeld” reruns. Christmas parades.

She heard Harold at the podium clearing his throat. “Folks,” he began, “I want you to meet the girl we are going to save. Her name is Sela Warren, and she has been living a path doomed to damnation. It is our duty to God and His son Jesus of Nazareth to save this girl from the fiery pits of hell, where she will rot forever under the judgment of God.” He paused.

Sela could imagine him raising his hands over the altar.

Crazy bastard. Devil.

You are not a man of God
.

Harold continued, “For behold the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble, and the day that cometh shall burn them up, that is shall leave them neither root or branch.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the congregation recited,
“And ye shall tread down the wicked, for thee shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord.”

Sela opened her eyes only when the two robed men began untying her. One of the men held her upright while the other man took the iron Fishhook marker and reached toward her stripped back.

“Please, no,” Sela tried to say, but the cloth in her throat made her words come out like the whimpering sounds of a wounded animal.

You have nothing to fear
.

(I will protect you)

When the iron marker pressed its blazing heat against her back, Sela felt as if every active volcano on earth was being unleashed onto her skin. A choked sob issued from her throat as bewildered tears fell from her eyes. If there was any pain worse than this, she had never felt it.

After the robed men took the iron marker away, Sela could still feel its burning legacy in the sore sizzling on her back.

Harold, his voice filling the church, cried, “In the flaming fire take vengeance on them that know not the Lord, and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ!” The congregation murmured their agreement.