Kay Non .. .'
'And you were there, weren't you? All the way back then?'
Brother Elias only smiled.
Jim looked at the business-suited preacher and shivered. How had he appeared to his great-grandfather? he wondered. As one of those frontier ministers with the dusty black suit and stovepipe hat?
And how before that? As a wandering Indian? How about originally? A caveman? He wondered how his very first ancestor, way back when, had gotten involved in all this. Someone, sometime, had to have made a conscious decision to go along with all this.
But he was making a conscious decision, wasn't he? This was his own choice.
Not really. It had already been decided for him.
'Why was I chosen?' Gordon asked.
Brother Elias shook his head. 'That I cannot yet tell you,' he said.
'You are not ready for it. I will tell you when the time comes.'
'Tell me now,' Gordon said.
'I will tell you when the time comes,' Brother Elias repeated. His black eyes bored into Gordon's, and Gordon felt his will crumble beneath the gaze. The preacher moved over to the sheriff's desk and picked up a pencil and pad of paper. 'We have little time,' he said.
'The hour of action is drawing nigh. We must prepare if we are to be successful.'
'And what if we are successful?' Jim asked. 'Will that be it? Will that be the end of it?'
Brother Elias shook his head. 'We were successful in the past,' he said. 'If we had not been, the four of us would not be here today.
Satan has been beaten and humiliated by Almighty God, and he will never give up in his attempt to usurp the power of the Lord. He is immortal.
And though we may beat him in these small battles, he can afford to wait. He will try again and again, gathering to him new armies, until he is successful.'
'What if we lose?' Gordon asked.
'Satan will walk the earth. The earth will be his, and all in it his subjects. He will twist lives to his own purposes and mock the creations of God. He will laugh in the face of the Lord.'
'Why doesn't God do something about it himself?' Father Andrews asked quietly. 'Why must he work through our imperfect vessels?'
'Do not dare to question the decisions of the Lord,' Brother Elias said angrily. 'Do not presume to know the mind of God.'
Jim stepped between the two. 'How much time do you think we have?' he asked Brother Elias.
'I do not know,' the preacher admitted. 'The evil has already started, and it will intensify as more are converted. I would estimate that it will be twenty-four hours before Satan and his minions have the strength to take what they are after. We must strike before then. If we don't, we are lost.'
They were silent, looking at each other, each of them feeling numb.
Brother Elias began writing on the pad of paper. He tore off the top sheet and handed it to the sheriff. Jim looked over the penciled list.
He handed it to Father Andrews, who read it and handed it to Gordon.
Gordon glanced at the paper. 'Items we need,' it said in a thick bold hand. He scanned the list. Thick rope, an unspecified amount. Pickup trucks. Four copies of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
Plastic tarp. Four crucifixes. Four pitchforks.
Pitchforks?
Four high-powered rifles. Four hand-held axes. Matches. A gallon of human blood.
Gordon looked up from the paper at Brother Elias. 'What are we going to be doing?' he whispered.
Brother Elias ignored him. Jim took the paper back from Gordon, looking it over. 'Most of this should be fairly easy to get,' he said.
'The blood might be a little difficult, but I think I can requisition it from the hospital.'
'I want you to get your families out of town,' Brother Elias said.
'Take them to a safe place, away from here.' He looked at the sheriff.
'Have your wife and children stay with relatives for a few days, until this is over.'
Jim nodded.
The preacher looked at Gordon. 'Make sure your wife is far away from this area,' he said. 'This is very important. She must not be here come tomorrow.'
'Why?' Gordon asked.
'I cannot yet tell you. The time is not right. But you must get her away from here.'
Gordon felt his mouth go dry. He imagined Marina killed, torn apart like the Selways , likeVlad . He licked his lips, looking up at the preacher. 'I don't know if she'll go. I don't know if she'll even believe all this when I tell her.'
'It does not matter what you tell her as long as you get her away from here.'
'It's her decision,' Gordon said firmly. 'I can't force her to do something she doesn't want to do.'
'Take her from this town,' Brother Elias said. 'for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.. . As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.' Ephesians The preacher pulled out the Bible he had been clasping unobtrusively beneath his arm and began nipping through pages. He pulled a recently taken photograph from between two pages of the Bible, handing it to Gordon.
Gordon stared at the color photo. It had been taken near a beach somewhere. In the background, he could see the ocean. In the foreground were several dead and bloody bodies.
A tiny infant, with grinning bloody teeth, was pushing its way out of a pregnant woman's abdomen.
The implication was obvious.
Gordon handed the photo back, sickened. His rational mind wanted to protest, to label the photograph a fake, to attribute the horrible scene to darkroom trickery, but he knew the picture was genuine.
The preacher turned to Jim. 'We need a camera as well,' he said.
Jim reached over and grabbed a pencil. 'Camera,' he wrote at the end of the list. 'Film.'
'What exactly are we going to be doing?' Gordon asked.
But Brother Elias had moved back in front of the window and was staring out, unmoving, at the black shape of the Rim far above the town.
Ted McFarland pulled his white government-issue Pontiac into the closed and abandoned Texaco gas station next to the Colt Saloon.
Shutting off the engine and the headlights, he sat in the darkness for a few moments, staring out the windshield, thinking. He felt lonely, depressed. He knew he wasn't doing a damn bit of good on this investigation, and he could feel the resentment of the local authorities every time he tried to make a conjecture or offer an opinion. He sighed. He didn't know why Wilson had assigned anyone to this case at all. State police shouldn't have the responsibility of bailing out locals when they screwed up.
A pickup truck pulled in behind him, the bright headlights reflecting back off the rear view mirror and almost blinding him. He tilted the mirror up to keep the light out of his eyes. A minute or so later he heard the sound of the truck's doors being slammed and the sound of boots on gravel as its occupants made their way toward the bar.
He knew he should call Denise. She was probably waiting by the phone for him to call. But listening to her talk, hearing her voice, would probably only accentuate his loneliness and make him more depressed. He stared out the windshield of the car at the lighted doorway of the saloon. He could hear, from inside the building, the raucous sounds of people having a good time, the music of Charlie Daniels. He knew that, in the state he was in, if he didn't call Denise he would be likely to do something stupid, something he would later regret.
A young buxom woman wearing tight jeans and a skimpy halter top came stumbling out of the bar, her arms around a tough-looking man in a cowboy hat.
McFarland looked at her, thought for a second of Denise, then rolled up the window of the car door and got out, locking it. He walked over cracked slabs of asphalt and hopped the low, crumbling brick wall that separated the
