Disconnection (31 page)

The robed men lifted Sela and carried her to the glass compartment.

Fire, and now water. God’s deadliest inventions
.

(with the exception of men)

“Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power,” Harold called out through the church.

The glass was cool against her burning skin. Sela was almost relieved that the moment of her drowning death had arrived. Anything was better than fire. She would not think about her favorite things anymore. She would not welcome consolation. The time had come for her to die. She was ready. Finally, she would meet her end.

The robed men closed the glass lid, and already Sela found it hard to breathe. She could see through the glass that one of the men was turning the knob that released the water into the coffin.

Sela closed her eyes and waited for the water to consume her. Only a second passed by before the water began flowing into her tomb, entering at her feet, rising to her ankles, sliding up her calves and to her knees.

Sela could vaguely hear Harold’s voice when he said, “And with all the deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they may be saved.”

The water was caressing her thighs, moving toward her belly, slipping, slipping, slipping to her breasts, and finding its way to her neck.

Outside the coffin, Harold’s sermon continued. “But we are bound to give thanks always to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you for salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth …”

Sela heard Harold stop short. And she heard something else. What was it? She could not tell. Water was filling her ears, and, oh God, her nose.

No no no please no I take back what I thought I take it all back I do not want to die please please

Her thoughts faded as a bright surge of light came for her, encircling the remainder of her consciousness, lifting her to a place beyond substance and time.

S
tuart opened the doors of the church and stood looking in long enough for the congregation to turn and look at him as if he were a wolf coming to invade their last supper.

Stuart grinned. He loved being dramatic. He had always been a showman at heart, God bless him. Maybe when all this was over, he would take acting classes. Break way from BankPartners. Fuck them anyway. What had they done for him lately? Okay, so maybe they had gotten him out of debt. But if it wasn’t for their damn convention, none of this would be happening now.

Stuart inhaled a large breath and said, “Party’s over,” firing his pistol in the air.

Chaos immediately erupted. Girls, boys, grown men and women scattered from every corner of the church, moving through the aisles, knocking out windows to escape the armed madman.

Stuart fired three rounds into the crowd, shooting down an old lady dressed in hideous pink ruffles and a woman he recognized as a TV reporter. More screams exploded from the crowd as they pushed their way to window exits, falling, crawling, walking on one another on their way to life.

“Murderers!” Stuart screamed. “Christ’s corrupt children! I’ve come for you! God has sent me!”

A scruffily-dressed derelict came toward Stuart. He was filthy, unshaven, with teeth as black as coal. His face was gnarled and repugnant, half eaten away by bugs and spiders crawling out of his nostrils and mouth. In his left hand he held the head of a long haired cat. In his grimy right paw he gripped a broken crucifix—only half a Jesus hung in its center, the bottom part was torn off—and held it up to Stuart. His eyes were fevered, horrible. He whispered,
“Lmishema` ’aden shema`thak wak`an `ayni hazthak!”
as he raised the crucifix high over Stuart’s head.

Just before the crucifix came crushing down, Stuart fired a shot into the man’s temple. “Die!” he screamed as the shaggy-bearded man crumbled to the ground.

And then Stuart saw it. In the front of the church, he saw a girl he recognized from Sela’s apartment—a girl he had thought was cute at the time and would have asked her out had the circumstances under which they had met not been so damned unusual. She was nailed on a cross in a sick, perverted imitation of the crucifixion of Christ. Stuart narrowed his eyes to have a better look. He stared hard into her face, waiting for her to move, if only just a little. But she didn’t.

She was dead.

Just in front of the cross laid a contraption resembling a glass coffin. Stuart shivered.

What in the name of all that’s holy
…?

He walked closer to the altar and was met with a brutally hard punch to his face. He turned and saw a middle-aged man dressed in a red velvet robe coming forward with fist pointed out. Stuart dodged the man’s awkward punch and released one of his own, knocking the man into the gut. The man
(Hell’s bells, what kind of fag wore a red robe anyway?)
crunched over while Stuart hurled another punch his way, connecting his fist with the top of the man’s head. The man collapsed on the floor.

That’s right, mother-fucker. Die, mother-fucker! I’m doin’ God’s will now
.

Stuart ignored the renewed blood pouring from his leg as he half limped, half ran to the altar. Another man in a red robe
(How many faggots are there in this place, anyway? Shee-at)
waited for him by a large purple candle tipped in melted gold. “Not one step closer,” the man whispered menacingly, drool bellowing from his trembling lips.

Stuart held his gun up. “Try and stop me,” he urged.

The man lifted the candle in the air just as Stuart pressed the trigger. The bullet ripped a hole through the candle, knocking over its fiery tip, and the fire scattered along the floor.

Ignoring the growing inferno, Stuart shot again and this time he did not miss. The bullet sliced a hole in the man’s neck, and he tumbled into the altar with a loud crash.

Stuart took only a moment to admire his carnage
(sure beats the hell out of deer huntin’)
before leaning over the watery coffin. His eyes widened when he saw the body lying inside. He looked for a way to open the contraption. “Sela,” he said to the drowning girl inside, “just you wait a minute, hon. I’m gonna get you out of this in no time.”

When he thought he had found the latch that would bring Sela Warren’s body to air, a blow from behind knocked Stuart to the ground, rendering him unconscious.

Dean rose from his medical bed and began ripping out the tubes that imprisoned parts of his body.

“Don’t,” Cynthia cried, moving beside him in the ambulance. “You’ll die.”

“I think you and I know perfectly well that I’m fine,” Dean said groggily, staring down the medic with two weary eyes.

“I don’t understand your recovery,” she mumbled, her eyes searching his face for an answer.

“Me either. Just call it luck.”
And a hell of a lot of praying
. “Will you help me with this?” he asked, nodding toward his IV.

Cynthia shook her head. “I shouldn’t.”

“Please.”

Cynthia gave him one last look of dissatisfaction and finally, but hesitantly, began to remove his IV.

“What are we going to do?” Clark asked from outside the van. “Just wait for that crazy lunatic to get back? Look, do you see that place?” He pointed at the chapel.

“He has the keys,” Danny acknowledged just as shots were heard from the church.

“Holy shit!” the front medic hollered. “He’s killing people in there! We have to do something other than just sit on our asses …”

“And wait for him to kill us, too,” Danny completed the thought.

Crowds of people began to rush out of the church. “What do we do?” Cynthia asked. “We’re fucking
medics
. What if someone gets hurt?”

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” the front medic said hastily as he leaped out of the car and ran toward the crowd.

No longer imprisoned by hospital equipment, Dean jumped off the bed and made his way to the double doors. “Hey!” Cynthia screamed. “Where are you going?”

Dean paused for one moment before leaving the ambulance, and said, “I’m going to save my girlfriend.”

L
ew, you wanna tell me what the ambulance is doing here?”

Lewis looked up from the map stretched over his steering wheel. His eyes narrowed when he saw the ambulance that had earlier been at Gunter Davis’s house. It was now parked in front of a church that, according to Harold Applegate’s tax returns, belonged to the reverend.

“I have no clue what it’s doing here,” Lewis admitted as the Tahoe rolled into the parking lot.

The ambulance wasn’t the only vehicle, Lewis noticed. From side to side, in the back and front, were cars of all shapes and sizes, parked under trees and thick brush, as if wanting to keep their presence secret.

Lewis pulled his keys out of the ignition just when the sound of gunshots thundered through the bayou. He drew his gun out of its holster. “Hell!” Lewis shouted as he jumped out of the Tahoe and sprinted to the chapel.

Sawicki stumbled out of the car. “Wait, Lewis!” he screamed. “We need to call for backup…”

“You call for backup. I’m going in!” Lewis yelled back, feet running like mad beneath him.

Just as Lewis was sure that the people in the church were either hostages or gunmen, clusters of men, women, and children began running out of the chapel’s solid oak doors.

“What’s happening here?” Lewis half-yelled, half-asked, as he came face to face with the people who were fleeing. No one answered, or acknowledged him. “Police, no one move!” he tried screaming, but the crowd was far from listening to an officer of the law.

More gunfire from the chapel drew Lewis back to his prior mission. He continued moving toward the church, bustling his way through the mass hysteria, a solitary man on a mission unknown.

Strides away from the church, he discovered that he was no longer alone. “What the hell?” Lewis blustered when he recognized the boy limping beside him.

“Hi, Detective Kline,” Dean acknowledged.

“Hi nothing, Yankee. What the hell are you doing moving around? Why is the ambulance here?”

“That’s a long story,” Dean said as the two men arrived at the doors.

“Get back!” Lewis ordered, pushing Dean away.

“Sela’s in there!” Dean yelled.

“I don’t give a shit if Halle Berry is in there. I said get back!”

Another round of gunfire went off, and Lewis forgot about Dean. He found himself running through the door without any of the caution he had learned in the police academy.

The scene inside the chapel caused a bewildered Lewis to pause at the entrance. The church was nearly empty, but fire was now ravishing the altar and everything around it. Even crazier was what Lewis saw next—beside something made of glass (to Lewis, it looked like a coffin) was Stuart Reed, and reaching over him with an iron scepter was the Reverend Harold Applegate, dressed in robes and a turban as white as dove’s wings, and with a metal Fishhook around his neck.

“Look out!” Lewis yelled at Stuart, but he was too late. Stuart Reed was a goner. The Mississippian collapsed beside the glass coffin from the impact to the head just as Reverend Applegate looked up to find the voice of the intruder. When his eyes met Lewis’, he smiled with wicked anticipation.

“Detective Kline!” he sang out menacingly through the inferno of the church. “So glad you could join us.”

Lewis raised his pistol and lunged forward, zigzagging through the remnants of broken pews and wooden floors peeled upward by hurried feet as Dean followed close behind him. “Harold Applegate!” Lewis screamed through hacking coughs caused from the growing smoke. “You’re under arrest for the murder of…”

Half of a wall collapsed in front of him, separating him and the reverend. Another break from the wall sent Lewis flying into the nearest pew. Lewis’s gun was growing hot in his hand, and he dropped it. The revolver fell through a hole in the floor and into dark oblivion. “Fuck!” Lewis yelled, watching it fall. His one piece of protection. Gone.

“He’s taking her!” Dean screamed from behind Lewis, his hand pointing at the sight of Harold opening the casket and lifting a limp, drenched Sela from the glass tomb.

Lewis’ attention was distracted when a tall, erect wooden cross with a young girl nailed to its center tilted over and landed on the ground, becoming one with the flames and smoke. He saw Dean run over to the cross and use a loose bandage from around his leg to pick up what looked like a gun lying nearby.

The detective shut his eyes, the horror of the moment seizing him in waves of revulsion.

When he opened his eyes again, Harold and Sela had disappeared.

F
iddle-faddle

Fiddle-dee-dee

The creature humans called Reverend Harold Applegate laughed with insane glee as it carried Sela through the trees, to the water, beyond the desires of earthly men. Closer and closer to the coast of oblivion it walked, for the night was dark and the landscape grey and this was the way it liked it. Around it, life died. God’s creations. The grass turned to wheat, the stubborn flowers of last summer heeled over, pressing their scented faces to the ground and disintegrating. The animals around it scurried away, making haste through the trees and into the shadows.

Ancient hate fueled the creature’s blood, but the small spark of existing logic told it that the farther it was away from Jew Boy and the nigger cop, the better.

Fiddle-faddle. Fiddle-dee-dee. Christ, come and get me
.

(It was so effortless, you have no idea how far I have stretched.)

The creature had been here before, a hundred years ago. The Knights of Galilee.
Ha!
Small change compared to now. A handful of believers had turned to hundreds. Hundreds! Over a small moment of time.