Empire of Dust (41 page)

"Father," Laika said when they were finished, "is there any way out of this cellar? Any . . . secret passage to escape Indians, or anything?"

Father Alexander smiled sadly and shook his head. "When this mission was built, there was no longer any danger from the natives. No, the only way out is through that guarded doorway. Or breaking through the three-footthick adobe walls, or digging through solid earth."

It seemed fairly hopeless, but Laika drew Joseph and Tony to the far end of the cellar where neither Father Alexander nor Swain could hear them. "Our only chance for escape will be tomorrow," she said. "We're stuck here tonight."

"Don't know if tomorrow looks much better," Tony said. "This bunch doesn't look like the type to let down their guard."

"We'll just have to stay alert for an opportunity," said Laika. "But the most important thing now is getting through the night alive."

"You're talking about Fat Boy," Joseph said, glancing at Ezekiel Swain.

"Yes. He's a monster, a murderer. I'd have no compunction about killing him. If we could."

"Iffy," said Joseph. "He's already dead. Maybe LaPierre can torch him tomorrow, along with his
Antichrist
." He said the last word with contempt.

"You don't believe the story?" Tony asked.

"No. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that there isn't anything religious or supernatural about this at all."

"How can you say that?" Tony asked. "After everything you've seen."

"Just because we don't understand things doesn't mean we have to ascribe a supernatural origin to them. For example, there has to be an explanation as to how Swain has managed to stay alive and feed off the living. It's not like he just sucks in their 'life energy,' to use a New Age term. He requires physical contact. There's some organic process at work."

"When he was on me," Laika said, "it felt like burning needles."

"Exactly. We could theorize that his individual cells merge somehow with his host's."

"But he was
dead
," Tony said. "What brought him back to life in the first place?"

"Some force that we don't understand. Maybe some force derived from this being who everybody's calling the Antichrist. But I'd bet my life that it's got to be explainable by natural laws. It's just that those laws aren't in our lawbook yet. I don't know, maybe Stephen Jay Gould or Edward Wilson could explain it. I can't. I'm not smart enough."

"Well, whatever makes him tick," Laika said, "Swain is dangerous to us."

"Those ropes are tight again," said Tony. "And strong. He's probably tried to get out of them already, and he hasn't succeeded. But we can keep a watch on him in shifts."

"I'd rather kill him." Laika glanced at Swain, then at the priest sitting across the room from him. "But even if I knew how, it's not something I'd want to try in front of a priest. Let's just keep watch."

Laika took the first watch while the others lay on the burlap mattresses, trying to get comfortable enough to catch some much needed sleep. Ezekiel Swain closed his eyes, too, and several hours passed uneventfully.

At eleven, Laika woke up Joseph. She drifted into sleep eagerly, surprised at how easily it came.

H
ours later, she awoke to the sound of a long, drawn out, "Ahhhhhh. . . ."

When she looked up, she saw Ezekiel Swain on his hands and knees. He was as bloated and corpulent as ever, and beneath him was a brown-skinned mummy smothered in a greasy, gleaming black robe.

Tony rose from his sitting position, and as he ran to Swain, Laika figured out what had happened. Tony had fallen asleep just before Swain had lost enough mass to slip out of his bonds. Hungered, he had attacked the priest, and now Tony, enraged at his own failure as well as at Swain, was going after the monster.

"You
sonofabitch
!" Tony yelled as he tackled Swain. He landed on top of the man, and went sliding across the floor on the slick surfboard of Swain's moist and slimy body until they hit the wall. Tony struck at him, but his fists sounded as though they were pounding into plastic garbage bags filled with brie, a thick, pulpy sound. The only sound Swain made was a wet
whoosh
every time Tony hit him, as though the air was sputtering out of him.

Finally Tony grasped Swain's thick neck, trying to strangle him. But he could not encircle it with his fingers, and the glutinous flesh seemed to slide right off it. It looked, Laika thought, as though he were trying to throttle a lump of bread dough.

Together, she and Joseph were able to pull Tony off the man just as the door opened above. "What's going on down there?" a voice said, and then several men came down the stairs, their weapons in front of them. They stopped when they saw the bizarre tableau. "What's happened here?" one of the men said, trying to make sense of a scene from hell.

"Got. Hungry," said Ezekiel Swain, and the stench that the words rode as they came through his lips was abominable. They all winced, but the young man with the gun retched, and fragments of his morning's breakfast dribbled from between his lips and onto the floor.

"Mmm," said Swain, eyeing the puddle. "Dessert."

"We'll get Mr. LaPierre," said the man behind the one who'd been sick. Then all of them went up the stairs again, leaving the ops, Swain, and the mummified priest locked in the cellar again.

"You bastard," Laika said to Swain, who was still lying on his back like a tremendous roly-poly toy, chuckling and snuffling. He spread his sausage-fingered hands in a gesture of submission and smiled. The usual exudations appeared.

"You, criticize me, for my,
nature
."

"Your nature," Joseph said, "is killing people for their bodily fluids. You can see how one might be critical of that."

"Cheer up. Could have, been you."

The three agents sat together at the opposite end of the cellar from Swain, who now rolled himself up to a sitting position. "Damn it," Tony was saying to himself. "God damn it. He hadn't moved for hours, not for
hours
, and I was just too tired. I fell asleep, and because of it the priest died."

"You woke up fast," Joseph said.

"Go to hell."

"Maybe, before the day is out."

They heard the door above open again, and now Michael LaPierre came down the steps, bodyguards before and after him. He looked at the priest's corpse, then at Swain's corrupted and reeking flesh. "A demon," he said. "This man is a demon of Satan, feeding on his own kind."

"How do?" said Swain, waving a hand in a manner meant to be jaunty.

The gesture did not amuse LaPierre, who wrinkled his nose. "You'll die today, demon. Right after you witness the destruction of your master."

"Ooo.
Scared
."

If LaPierre's eyes could have shot flames, Ezekiel Swain would have been a pile of bubbling ashes, Laika thought. "Bring them up," LaPierre ordered his guards. "It's nearly dawn."

M
artin Reigle drove his car across the dam crest as he did every morning. But this morning he didn't look out across the reservoir, as he always did, to see the first rays of the rising sun over the water. No, this morning Martin's attention was on what he had to do, and how to do it. He was thinking about what was wrapped in the thick wax paper in the cardboard box in the backseat.

At the end of the roadway he turned left and drove down to the parking lot near the powerhouse where he worked. He parked his car in his usual space and walked to the powerhouse, carrying the cardboard box with the wrapped cylinders.

"Heya, Marty," said Joe, the guard, as he waved him in. "Subs? Shame on you—you didn't tell it was sub sale time again."

Martin smiled sheepishly. Once a month his two kids in junior high school sold subs for their church's bell choir, and Martin hit up everybody he knew at the dam. "Sorry, Joe," he said. "Forgot to get you this time. You want one if somebody's out sick today?"

"Yeah, sure." Joe sniffed the air. "Don't smell any onions."

"Nobody ordered any. Sorry." He walked past Joe and into the building. He went to his locker right away and put the wrapped cylinders inside, then threw away the box.

Then he sat down on the wooden bench in front of his locker and thought about just what the hell he was going to do. He knew he was going to die today, and when he thought about that, he didn't want to do it. He knew how badly Susan and the kids would miss him, and they wouldn't understand at all why he had done it. But he didn't really have a choice. Once the voice had spoken to him, he knew that he would do whatever it told him.

He thought that it was God. Anyway, he hoped so. Because if it was God, then He would take Martin to be with Him when Martin died doing what God wanted done. He couldn't conceive of it being anyone
but
God. Who else could speak to you in your head and tell you to do something that you never would have dreamed of doing yourself in a million years—and then you went out and did it?

He didn't understand why God wanted this particular thing done, but it wasn't his to question, it was his to obey. That was the weird thing. He couldn't consider, even for a minute, not obeying. There seemed to be no option. If God wanted the Dead Horse Reservoir dam blown up, then Martin Reigle would do it.

O
utside the Mission of San Pedro, the guards tied Laika's, Tony's, and Joseph's hands behind their backs. Laika glanced at the others to see if they were considering making a break, but it would have been suicide. Two of LaPierre's soldiers held the muzzles of their guns to the operatives' heads while a third did the tying.

The soldiers did an even better job with Ezekiel Swain, winding heavy nylon cord several times around his stinking body, between his legs, and around his wrists, so that he had to hobble out to the military truck into which the guards directed their four captives.

LaPierre reappeared and climbed into a Humvee loaded with his troops. Three trucks besides the one the ops were in followed the Humvee as it headed toward the narrow canyon Laika had noticed when they'd come in. She estimated that LaPierre might have five or six dozen men with him, not counting the few who remained to guard the mission and the helicopters.

"Not flying to our destination?" Laika asked a guard.

"Couldn't land a chopper in the terrain," the man said.

Laika tried to follow the maze of canyons they drove through, in case they had to find their way out again. She prayed to God they would, but was afraid the truck was taking them to their deaths.

At last the truck slowed and the procession came to a halt. Laika could see that they were in a round canyon larger than most of those they had come through. She guessed the area was thirty to forty yards across, small enough that only the Humvee and the truck they were in parked within it, along with a Jeep that was already parked against the curved wall. The men sitting in it had probably been there all night, guarding the place. The other trucks simply stopped in the narrow canyon that provided access to this one. When Laika looked up, she noted with unease that the upper walls of the canyon were actually curving in on them, as though they sat at the bottom of a round vase.

The unseen sun was far to the east and just above the horizon, so the deep canyon was still in heavy shadow. Yet as soon as they had climbed from the truck, there was enough light for Laika to see the circle of ancient stones. They were in the center of the canyon, thirty feet across, fitted together, a foot wide and perhaps nine inches high. At one side of the circle was a squared-off area that extended a few feet outward from the circle.

"My God. . . ." she heard Joseph whisper.

"It's your keyhole, isn't it?" she asked him. "The giant keyhole you saw in your dream."

"Yes," he said, nodding. "What is it?"

"It's a kiva," said Laika. "An underground ceremonial room. It must be where they have the . . . the prisoner."

Michael LaPierre, along with four cameramen, came strutting up to them. "Tie them to that," he said to the guards, gesturing to a large cross constructed out of thick wooden beams. It was planted in the sandy soil just outside the stone circle. "I want you all to have an excellent view," he told Laika. "And it may as well be from the symbol that you have spurned."

"Quite the Kodak moment," Joseph said, gesturing to the cameramen. Two held video cameras, and the others were still photographers.