The Tenth Circle (27 page)

Blountstown, Florida

Women!
McCracken realized, as he fought them off. Not creatures or monsters at all. Desperate, pleading for help in barely audible rasps and cries, hands outstretched to latch onto him so he might carry them from their prison.

Half naked, reeking of their own waste, their eyes wild and terrified. He pushed them aside, realizing even in that terrible moment they must be Rule’s prisoners, held down here as further testament to his madness.

Six of them, Blaine counted, six …

The light from the flashlight alone forced one off him with filthy hands raised to shield her eyes. Blaine twisted it from her to the others, using its spill to hold the women back.

“Please,” he said, trying to sound calm. “Let me help you. I’m here to help you.”

McCracken couldn’t imagine how long they’d been down here shrouded in darkness; varying durations almost surely, all of them long enough to turn the sudden wash of illumination into a weapon for the women’s light-deprived eyes. And he caught splotchy still images in the flashlight’s reach, so horrifying that he wondered if they were tricks or illusions of his own mind.

One woman was missing a hand.

The empty eye socket of another was crusted over.

A third had dark blood oozing from her mouth. She opened it to scream and McCracken saw her tongue was gone.

He backed up toward the ladder, making sure he’d missed none in his count. An anonymous call would alert the proper authorities to the Reverend Jeremiah Rule’s personal chamber of horrors, Blaine thought as his flashlight froze on one last sight that stole a heartbeat and froze his breath.

He climbed faster than he’d ever climbed before, Wareagle helping to pull him up through the hatch and then sealing it quick.

“How bad, Blainey?”

“Worse, Indian,” McCracken said, struggling to steady his breathing, “worse than we ever imagined.”

THE TENTH CIRCLE

CHAPTER 85

Washington, DC

“I’m in the air now,” Zarrin told McCracken, speaking almost too softly to hear. “Talking to you from the lavatory.”

McCracken and Wareagle had administered basic first aid to Rule’s female prisoners prior to leaving his property. They’d suffered horribly at his hand, their wounds just one indication of his sadistic madness. Blaine and Johnny had no choice but to leave the women in the basement after bringing down water and placing the flashlights at strategic points to keep the darkness from consuming them again. They departed only after placing an anonymous call to 9-1-1 to get rescue personnel to the house.

“The Indian and I are walking across the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement place to meet up with my old friend H. J. Belgrade again,” McCracken told Zarrin.

“Another old friend of yours.”

“Only kind I’ve got. Should be able to report this whole thing is buttoned up, after we’ve spoken to him.”

“Are they going to cancel the speech?”

“That’s the hope, but short of that a full-scale roundup of the Rock Machine motorcycle gang should do the trick. Them and the Reverend Jeremiah Rule.”

“Be careful, McCracken. The man’s insane, and he’s got the White Death now.”

“Belgrade’s also arranging for a dragnet for the whole region in search of the barrels.”

“All this from a retirement home?”

“Nobody ever retires in this business. You know that.”

They approached the figure of H. J. Belgrade feeding invisible pigeons again from his bag of bread crumbs, his eyes aimed downward, focused intently with a smile on the birds that weren’t there.

“Very convincing, H. J.,” McCracken greeted. “Almost had me fooled.”

Belgrade didn’t look up.

“It’s us,” McCracken continued.

Belgrade finally regarded them, breaking out into a wider grin. “You come to sing with me?”

“No need, Hank. There’s no one else watching.”

“It gets lonely here sometimes. No one to sing with. But now you’re here, two friends to sing with me.” His eyes met McCracken’s, nothing in them but emptiness. “Come on, let’s start.” Then, tossing more bread crumbs in rhythm with the tune, he started.
“The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town
.
”

“Hank?”

Belgrade’s gaze stayed downward, seeming to forget Blaine and Johnny were even there.
“The wipers on the bus go
Swish, swish, swish. Swish, swish, swish. Swish, swish, swish
. The wipers on the bus go
Swish, swish, swish
all through the town
.
”

“Oh shit,” said McCracken, texting Zarrin.

She called him back from the airplane lavatory again.

“I won’t ask.”

“Don’t bother. We’re on our own.”

“How many in the opposition?”

“We’ve got to figure this motorcycle gang numbers at least a couple dozen. I’ve got Captain Seven checking their backgrounds, but I’m guessing plenty will have military experience, demolitions and explosives included. They already tried this once, Zarrin, so motivation won’t be an issue. And Rule knows everything he needs to know about the White Death.”

“Not good.”

“That was my first thought too.”

“What was your second?”

“We could use some more guns.”

“What about all those old friends of yours?”

“I could use some new ones, Zarrin.”

“Tall order right now.”

“Maybe not. Call our mutual friend Colonel al-Asi,” McCracken told her. “Remind him that he owes me a favor.”

Washington, DC

“You call this a motorcycle gang?” Captain Seven said, speaking into his computer through which he’d answered McCracken’s call. “More like Anarchists Anonymous. Man, this bunch could use the calming influence of some medical weed in one big way.”

“How bad, Captain?”

“Well, sixteen of the original twenty-eight went to federal prison on domestic terrorism and treason charges. Ended up getting released because the Feds messed up the test that connected them to the explosives. Your tax dollars at work, MacNuts.”

“Did you say
twenty-eight
?”

“More than five times that number are active in their drug enterprises on the East Coast so you can throw them into the mix too. But it’s the composition of the original twenty-eight that’ll really make your day. Six marines, five light infantry, seven special ops, and five former army reservists. All with active service and almost all well known among militia, separatist, or insurrection-based movements. Oh, and throw in some white supremacists just for good measure.”

“The crazies have been recruiting heavily from ex-military for years now.”

“By all accounts, nobody needed to recruit these guys. They
are
the crazies, MacNuts.”

“Comforting thought. Where can we find them?”

“With a psychic or maybe a Ouija board. As of maybe twenty-four hours ago, all of them dropped off the grid. I’m checking into the additional members in their ranks now, but you can look forward to having these two dozen or so to deal with for starters.”

“Thanks, Captain,” McCracken told him, “you made my day.”

“I haven’t even finished my first bowl yet you’ve kept me so busy. I’m gonna take a bud break and get back at it.”

“I want to hear as soon as you find anything else that may help the cause.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“These guys have the means to drive a wrecking ball through the heart of this country, and there’s not a damn person left in Washington we can call for help. Find me something actionable, Captain, something I can use to stop them before the president steps up to the podium to give his State of the Union speech tonight.”

“Anything else, MacNuts?”

“Yeah. Jeremiah Rule’s phone number.”

Washington, DC

Jeremiah Rule stood on the shore of the McMillan Reservoir, smelling the air and enjoying the quiet. He kept to the shadows cast by the nearby trees just a block away from the Bryant Street Pumping Station that was responsible for feeding Washington with a vast portion of its water supply. The reservoir bordered the campus of Howard University to the west and the rolling fields adjacent to McMillan Drive to the east, casting it as a pseudo-oasis amid the more cluttered swatch of government buildings a mere mile or so away.

A great calm had fallen over him since he’d arrived in Washington less than an hour before, growing greater with each passing moment as time ticked down to the remaking of a nation that needed to learn from death and hopelessness as he had learned. It was a blessed mission for which he’d been chosen, Rule realizing with vast satisfaction his entire life, the good and the bad, had been leading up to this moment.

I have never lost faith in you
, Rule said in his head.
Through all the trials and tribulations, I have persevered waiting for my true purpose to be revealed. I thank you, oh Lord, for casting those who served that purpose before me. I see your hand in that message, oh Lord, and know now that I take your word as my own and will strive to see the mission you have bequeathed to me succeed. It’s all so clear at last, all the signs you have sent me, and I look forward to your next message with all my heart and soul.

Rule’s phone rang, startling him.

Washington, DC

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Blaine McCracken greeted. “It’s been a really long time, really long, since my last confession.”

“How’d you get this number, friend?”

“Don’t you want to hear my confession, Father?”

“It’s
Reverend
and you still haven’t answered my question.”

“I’ve killed a lot of men in my time, but I have nothing to confess in that regard because they were all bad men and many of them were trying to do likewise to me. But I’d like to confess I’m about to kill again.”

“Who is the unfortunate victim?”

“You, Reverend. Unless you come clean and do some confessing to me.”

Rule wanted to end the call but something stopped him. The voice wasn’t familiar at all, yet he felt he knew this man, that they were somehow acquainted.

“Do I know you, friend?”

“Not personally. But I know you well enough to know you intend to carry out the rest of Colonel Turwell’s plan. You’ve got the barrels and your own private army now in the form of that motorcycle gang.”

“
Who
are you?”

“The man who took Turwell and Robert Carroll off the map. And now I’m coming for you, unless you have a change of heart.”

“I am doing the work of the Lord, friend. Only He can stop me.”

“That what you call trying to destroy a country, getting millions and millions of innocent Muslims killed in the retaliatory strike that’ll undoubtedly follow? But I’m guessing it wouldn’t bother you one bit if the whole Muslim world got nuked.”

“My entire purpose.”

“Yours now instead of God’s?”

“I do this to serve Him and His word. We are one in the same, a unified voice against sin.”

“A true pillar of faith, aren’t you?”

“I try, friend.”

“Then what about the bones of those two boys you’ve got displayed in your basement, Reverend, not to mention the six women? You made them mutilate themselves, didn’t you? The one who was missing a hand, what’d she do exactly to deserve that? Or the one who sliced off her own nipple? My guess is they’d done nothing to merit what you did to them, but it allowed you to keep them prisoners, didn’t it? Made them too terrified and dependent to even think of escaping. That’s why you didn’t need to chain them. You chose victims who had nowhere else to go, who were desperate to belong to
anything
. Then you beat and raped them into submission.”

“That is between me and God, friend,” Rule said stiffly. “And you will be punished for your transgressions by powers far higher than me.”

“One of the women’s starting to show, Reverend,” Blaine told him, revealing the last sight he’d glimpsed in Rule’s basement. “Did you impregnate all of them, or just rape the others for fun?”

“Your words hold no meaning to me.”

“But what do you think all your faithful, your flock, would think of you being a child murderer and a rapist?”

“We all have our choices. The women made theirs and I made mine.”

“Now it’s my turn and I choose to stop you in your tracks. Treat you with the same compassion you treated those women. So tell me, Reverend, was fathering their children your way of bringing children into the world to replace those boys you murdered?”

“Those deaths were part of His plan,” Rule stammered, suddenly defensive.

“And was molesting them part of that plan too? Did you have divine permission to partake in that particular practice?”

“I did nothing of the kind,” Rule said, without raising his voice.

“So no matter how all this turns out, you won’t care if I let the world in on your little secret. Let them judge the obvious for themselves. That this tenth circle of hell you’re opening is for rapists and child molesters. How’s that for an epitaph?”

“Except there’s no grave to put it on, is there?”

“Not yet, anyway.”

And McCracken heard a click as Jeremiah Rule terminated the call.

Washington, DC

McCracken pocketed the phone and looked toward Wareagle. “My powers of persuasion must be lacking.”

“Do you recall the legend of the renegade Sioux warrior undone by his blind ambition and delusion?”

“Not off the top of my head, Indian.”

“He ravaged the countryside, killing as many from neighboring tribesmen as he could because he believed he was absorbing the soul of each victim, growing that much stronger with every kill. He believed this would eventually render him invincible and immortal. Until one day, he caught his own reflection in a pool of still water. Unable to accept the fact the earth had birthed another as powerful as he was, the warrior attacked his own reflection and ended up killing himself. Reverend Rule is no different.”

“But unlikely to kill himself before the president’s speech tonight, leaving the heavy lifting to us.”

“You’re surprised?”

“Not for one second.”

“You knew it would end that way, just as I did.”

“Because it always does, Indian. Doesn’t mean I welcome it, though.”

Wareagle stood straighter, seeming to rise even taller than normal. “Go back to the day you came to get me in South Dakota so we could return to the Hellfire.”

“Okay.”

“I was working on a statue I knew I’d never see finished, Blainey. Pounding away one day, only to return to the next with nothing looking any different. The progress was there, but I couldn’t see it and so it wasn’t.”

McCracken shook his head and sighed. “I really wish the spirits could learn to speak simple English. Just once.”

“It’s why we welcome these opportunities,” Wareagle told him, “long for them even. Because we’re able to see the result, and don’t have to see what would’ve happened without our intervention. We don’t just do it because we’re the only ones who care; we do it because we’re the only ones who can.”

“Can we this time?” McCracken posed tentatively.

“Even the spirits don’t have that answer, Blainey.”

“Then we better hope we find it somewhere else before the State of the Union goes to hell, Indian.”