Making friends wherever we went.
13
Two days, ten misses, and one hit later, I was standing at Job’s Quarry, my hand wrapped around Charlie’s keys.
It was Job as in the biblical Job. The preacher had been Brother Job, and the town was the Trials as in the trials of Job. 1840. It hadn’t been much of a town or much of a cult. Ten gullible families and a scattering of tents that would do them until cabins could be built. But purification came first. You had to prove yourself righteous enough to receive God’s word through Brother Job and to live in the Trials under the same prosperity the original Job had come to know once God and Satan had stopped dicking around with his life, killing his family, and giving him boils and leprosy to see just how far faith would go.
Show me a horror movie that equals that, and I’ll pay you fifty bucks.
Ten families plus Brother Job’s disciples came to about eighty people raising the canvas town of the Trials. At the end, there was only one to abandon it.
Job left the bloated, floating bodies of the faithful-and they were faithful, suicidally faithful-and wandered through the woods, shouting to heaven of his trust in the Almighty. He stayed faithful, too, despite the loss of all of his followers, despite the hunger, the coming winter chill. The walking, raving embodiment of faith… right up to when he ended up as a bear’s last snack before hibernation. When those jaws fastened around his neck, ripping and crushing, that faith vanished like a magician’s rabbit.
The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.
Then again, who’s to say the hungry bear didn’t get its prayer answered?
I stopped staring at the blazing orange water and turned my head to see Fujiwara eating a sausage-and- biscuit sandwich he must’ve brought from the cafeteria. “They put blood in their biscuits.”
He gaped at me. “Ex-excuse me?”
“Job’s followers. As the wine was the blood of Jesus, Job followed in his footsteps and sliced his arm every morning when the women made biscuits. Drip drip.” I smiled cheerfully. “Smart for a psycho. He combined the blood and body, wine and host into one. Thrifty bastard.”
Fuji dropped the sandwich onto the ground and hurried to Thackery’s side thirty feet down the quarry beach. The machine to enhance Charlie’s energy and pull him through the ether to dissipate was still at what they considered the best bet: Cannibal Caverns. But Thackery wanted to see me at work if, by random chance, Charlie tried to come through here. At least, that’s what he said, but I saw something needful behind his blank face. There was something more to wanting to watch me work, not that Thackery was sharing the why of it. I’d find out sooner or later, one way or the other.
“Why did you do that to Fuji? He’s harmless.” The question broke into my thoughts and held exasperation, if not much surprise.
“Because, Hector, he feels sorry for me being dragged into this by blackmail but has his nose up Thackery’s ass anyway. He doesn’t have a brother to free, like you. He does have a shred of conscience but no excuse for ignoring it. Besides, and this goes for all of you, if you’re going to benefit from what I can do, you should get to experience some of the downside. Although, trust me, hearing about it sure as hell isn’t the same as living it.” I gave Hector a sideways glance. “If I could give this gift to you and spend the rest of my life digging ditches, then maybe I would get a little God in my life, because it’d be a damn miracle.”
“You might get part of your wish.” Hector folded his arms as he kept his eyes on the still water. “This is one of the few sites rumored to show a genuine ether recording of the event. People throughout the years claimed to have seen Brother Job at work, always as the sun sets.”
“Yeah?” That had been when the baptisms took place. “Seeing it isn’t the same as feeling it, but I’ll cross my fingers and take what I can get.”
In the very next moment, get it I did.
And a lot more.
I heard one of the soldiers, unarmed as they’d been at the mill, for all the good that had done, yell in shock and fear or a damn good imitation of both. He was standing on the high rock wall on the other side of the quarry, opposite where we stood seventy-five feet down on the narrow strip of gravel and red mud beach. I looked where he was pointing, to see a white blur under the water glowing with the fire of a descending sun. I crouched and put my one ungloved hand fisted around Charlie’s keys against the ground. The blur rose, and the body of a woman surfaced. Her arms were spread, hovering on the top of the water like the wings of a bird. Her hair was black, I knew, although I couldn’t see it. It was covered by a white scarf. A woman’s hair is the jewel of God. Let no man but her husband see it.
“Rachel Adams. She was fifteen.” I knew I said it because I felt my lips move, but I didn’t hear the words. She drowned. Brother Job baptized his followers until their life and their sins fled their bodies. And if God deemed them worthy, he would return that life to them and send the sins to hell. Funny, no one proved quite good enough for God to step in. Job was mighty disappointed. Mighty disappointed, as he and his disciples held the men and women of the Trials under the quarry water. Even more disappointed when he himself held the head of his last disciple under and that man proved too sinful to return as well.
Another body floated up, dark pants, white shirt, open eyes reflecting the bleeding rays of the sun.
“Adam Jacobson. Nineteen years.”
Then another.
“Joseph Bevins. Eight.”
Another.
“Mary Bevins. Five.” She held a doll, a rag doll in a pink dress.
There was more shouting, men who’d seen war horrified by the virtual photo of a long-dead little girl. Only an image out of death’s memory album revealed for a moment, and their brains short-circuited.
Walk a mile in my shoes? They couldn’t walk even a second.
“Mary Bevins. Five,” I repeated, my eyes fixed on the small spot of pink. “Lungs filling with water as she screamed for her mommy.”
Pink doll. Pink shoe. A wide quarry or a narrow well, was there any difference?
Mary Bevins. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, until Brother Job said nursery rhymes were the work of the devil. Mary, Mary, whose mommy was right there, her hand with Brother Job’s, holding her little girl under the water for God.
Mary and Tess. Five years old, screaming to be saved, but no one listened.
The pink patch bobbed in the water. It wasn’t the dress on a doll. It was a shoe, a pink shoe. Tessie’s shoe. The floating form wasn’t a little girl named Mary. It was my sister. It was Tess, and this time I wouldn’t be too late. I lunged into the water after her. I took two long steps and dove into the water. I was with Tess in seconds. I wrapped an arm around her to lift her up, lift her to the air, lift her to life.
My arm passed through her. I tried again with both arms and the same result. I was there, right there, and again I couldn’t save her. Just as I couldn’t all those years ago.
Another set of arms wrapped around me this time, the grip solid and unbreakable.
“It’s not her, Jackson. It’s not Tess.”
I was being yanked back through the water as I fought.
“Shit, I’m a goddamn idiot,” Hector swore savagely at himself. “There was no way I shouldn’t have known this could happen.”
Not Tess.
It couldn’t be Tess.
Tess was gone.
I wasn’t reliving the life of Job. I was reliving my own.
The dying rays of the sun shifted, and I saw my sister change into a girl with soaked brown curls and wide- open gray eyes before she disappeared, leaving only the waves I’d made in her wake. All of the bodies disappeared with her, and that’s when the yelling turned to screaming. And the screaming turned to gurgling and praises to God
