The Methuselah Gene (33 page)

What's happening to us? she'd asked.
 
I didn't know, but I didn't like it, whatever it was.

After swabbing our wounds with peroxide, we used cotton and medical tape to bandage my hand.
 
I downed half a dozen acetaminophen tabs with a Miller
Lite
, and then, warily, we stepped through the broken glass back outside.

Zion's main street was now a junkyard—a graveyard in the dim silver light.
 
Nothing moved.
 
I gazed past the hulks of cars with their burst tires toward the Cadillac, which was mostly hidden in the alley.
 
As I squinted toward the car's license plate, Julie noticed where I was looking.
 
She was still trembling from her encounter with Earl, but she pulled free of my arm to walk several steps out into the road in the car's direction, nonetheless.

“No,” I warned, stopping her.
 
“It's dangerous.”

“Whose is it?” she asked, coming back to me.

“I've got my suspicions, but I've been wrong before.
 
I tried the door when I was next to it, but it was locked.
 
Probably has a car alarm activated too.”

“So we can't use it to . . . to get out of here?”

“Not unless you know how to bypass an alarm and hot-wire an engine.”

Julie shook her head slowly, in disappointment.
 
I thought about blowing out the Caddy's tires, but I turned toward the church instead, where another faint hymn could now be heard.
 
This new one sent a chill across my otherwise fevered skin.
 
It was the same song I remembered hearing with my mother in the First Baptist Church at age ten:

We're Marching to Zion.

“Why?” Julie asked in perplexed astonishment, hearing the song too.
 
“Who?”
 
Then: “How . . . can it be?”

“I don't know.
 
But I think this is where I face the music.
 
Meet the devil himself, and offer to send him back to hell, if I can.”

Julie's eyes widened.
 
“And what about me?”

“You've been through enough hell because of me.”

“So you want me to wait for Earl in the Slow Poke?
 
Or in the street?
 
Or maybe in that Cadillac, with the radio playing Love Me Tender?”

I saw her point, but considered whether it might be better than facing whatever insanity was happening in the church.
 
“Are you saying he raped you?”

“Tried to.
 
But he . . . couldn't.
 
Maybe it's another side effect of your virus.
 
Opposite of Viagra.”
 
She paused, turning away as her eyes welled at another memory.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It's the other two.
 
The ones dispatched to the ranch house.”

“Did they rape you?”

“They started to, until I encouraged it, saying to go ahead.”

“Then they stopped?”

“Suspected I had HIV.
 
They didn't have condoms, so they raped the mother, instead.
 
Karen.
 
Her name was Karen.
 
They took turns, made us all watch.
 
When one of the sons tried to stop it, he got shot in the head.
 
He was the first one killed.
 
His name was Mike.
 
Mike Briscoe.”

“Were they the same men who entered your house this morning?”

“I don't know.
 
I don't think so.
 
They weren't wearing suits, and one had blond hair.
 
Wanted me to watch as they executed the family, but when I became hysterical, they hit me here.”
 
She touched the bruise on her forehead.

I leaned into her, and kissed her hair.
 
“I'm sorry.
 
So they believed you when you said I left you?”

She nodded.
 
“After a quick search, yeah.
 
Maybe because of the HIV thing, I don't know.
 
And by the way, I don't have it.
 
HIV.”

“I know,” I said.
 
“Not even mine.”

“What?”
 
She seemed confused.
 
“What did . . . how did you know that I—”

“Because you would have told me.”

“No,” she said, “I mean how did you know that I'd told them you left me?”

“Because Walter told me, just before I killed him.”
 
She looked into my eyes in disbelief, saying nothing.
 
“Because Walter had just killed Darryl.”

“Darryl,” Julie repeated, resurrecting the name.
 
Then she took my arm.
 
“Your friend, how is he involved?”

“He's not.
 
He came here to help me, and it cost him his life.
 
Now whoever's responsible for all this is in that church.”
 
I nodded toward the closed front door scarcely fifty feet ahead of us, from behind which we could hear voices chanting another hymn.
 
Or blabbing it.
 
We hesitated in front of the shattered windows of the barber shop, but then, when Julie saw me move forward again, she gripped my arm tighter.
 
But still she didn't try to stop me.

“We should get out of here,” she whispered, as though the observation needed to be voiced, for the record.
 
“There must be a way.”

“This is the way,” I insisted, “if I want it to end here.
 
If I want the man who set me up to pay.”

I was surprised at my own determination, although I still expected Julie to offer another reason that might prevent me from making possibly my biggest mistake yet.
 
I could tick off a dozen such reasons myself, knowing that curiosity killed not just cats.
 
But she did not persist.
 
Instead, her hand dropped altogether from my arm as she peered toward the door that hid our fate.
 
The lady or the tiger?
 
Maybe the lady had become a tiger.

“Are you sure you want to face this?” I asked her.
 
But I already knew the answer, because her eyes held the memory that had become her own motivation, and which now mirrored mine.
 
This was why she wasn't killed by whoever took her.
 
Maybe her death was to be filmed, and Earl figured into that after he had his fun.
 
Only Earl couldn't get it up.

No matter.
 
Now it was time for a reckoning, a final judgment.
 
And the guilty would pay, I would see to it.

I put one arm around Julie's shoulder again, and then we walked together toward the door of the church as though we were going to Sunday services.
 
Just another married couple, on the way to hear a sermon.
 
Only it wasn't Sunday.
 
It wasn't even day.
 
And there was one other difference between us and the other couples who may have entered earlier.

We had a gun.

Ominously, the door was not locked.
 
It did not even creak.
 
As I opened it, slowly, I tried to imagine Pastor
Felsen
performing the special prayer service Walter had mentioned . . .
Felsen
ignoring the gunshots outside, not knowing who was being shot.
 
Perhaps not even caring.
 
Felsen
, like the preacher I remembered listening to with my mother while we sat in the pew on endless Lord's Day mornings, while the ceiling fans cut the high hot air above me like the propeller blades of P51 Mustang or
Messerschmidt
.
 
But what Baptist preacher in my or anyone else's memory would really have such a service on such a night?

None would,
I realized.

None who were sane, that was.

The heavy wooden door swung wide.
 
We stepped quietly into the vestibule.
 
The voice I now heard was unfamiliar to me.
 
I couldn't place it.
 
Was it him?

“
Felsen
,” Julie confirmed at a whisper, and I nodded.

Indeed.
 
From where we stood I could see part of the way into a mostly empty auditorium, where a woman stood in the aisle clasping her young son's shoulders.
 
They might have been me and my mother, thirty years ago.
 
Only something was wrong here.
 
Both were weeping, heads bowed.
 
And they were at the back of what appeared to be . . .

A line.

Gripping my revolver tightly, I lifted it and moved toward the entrance.
 
As I did, other memories flashed back to me.
 
I had not been inside any church in years, but I remembered how it had been in another Baptist church we'd attended.
 
A Reverend Billy Bob Williams had preached that damnation awaited those who did not accept the gift of eternal life, then.
 
Hell was a place of darkness and gnashing of teeth, where the cries of the damned ascended forever, unheard.
 
Amid dark sulfur flames that burned without end, your flesh would never be consumed there, no matter how hard you prayed it would . . . no matter how long you shrieked your prayers into the oily black sky.
 
Yet heaven was a place where time did not exist, and you never got old, and the streets were paved in gold like transparent glass, and all you had to do to get there was make the right decision here, just like the nut case Jasper--who I'd met in a coffee shop back in Virginia--had said.
 
Will you praise God, or trust Botox?
 
Will you eat the good apple or the evil one with the worm inside?
 
Will you be saved, or lost?

When the remaining residents of Zion came into view, and I saw where they were looking, I lowered my gun and stared.
 
But not because they begged forgiveness for their sins, which they appeared to do.
 
It was more because of the line they were in, and due to the reason they waited . . . as every new Christian in every Baptist church is duly instructed to do.

I tried to tell myself that this could not be happening, but it was.
 
It was a special service, yes.
 
Just as Walter had said.
 
But the people—twenty or more women and children—were not here just to pray and sing.

They were here to be
baptized.

Many wept as they waited their turn, under the watchful gaze of a man, a stranger who sat on the front row in a dark gray suit.
 
I moved slowly along the aisle nearest the wall in order to see the man's face.

“Oh Lord,” bellowed
Felsen
from the baptismal tank, his eyes closed, his big hand resting behind an elderly woman's back, “we ask You to cleanse our dear sister Lilly from the sins befallen us.
 
May she not partake of Thy judgment come to Zion . . . amen!”

Felsen
dipped the old woman into the green baptismal water, which closed around her face.
 
Then he opened his eyes to look down at her, and I saw something reflected there that hinted at terror and madness.

“Buried in the likeness of Thy death . . .” he intoned solemnly while he held the woman under.
 
Yet his own face contorted in hallucinatory revulsion, as though he was fighting something evil.
 
Bubbles rose from the woman, who struggled, her feeble legs then kicking beneath
Felsen's
strong arm.
 
“. . . and raised from Thy holy water in the likeness of Thy resurrection,” the pastor concluded at last, and then lifted her out as she gasped on swallowed water.
 
Felsen
smiled as the old woman began to cough.
 
Then the man on the front row lifted a camera, and snapped a photo.
 
The Polaroid's flash sliced into my dormant brain, bringing me out of my daze with an involuntary spasm, like what an epileptic felt.

“What's going on here?” Julie asked, from behind me.
 
“What, in the name of all that's . . .”

I lifted my gun higher, clicking the hammer back.
 
The man on the front row heard the audible gasp of those nearest me, and turned to see the commotion for himself.
 
I saw his face too.

It was Kevin Connolly.
 
Accountant, numbers man, and company attorney.
 
His face was shiny with sweat, as though he'd just concluded a sermon on the nature of God's wrath, judgment, and mercy.
 
But I knew it had been a long day of the Devil's work for him, and this was his final detail.
 
It would all be over soon, he'd reckoned.
 
Although he hadn't counted on me showing up.