on high.
“God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”
It echoed over and over again from four different throats as the last ray of sun disappeared under a velvet purple bank of clouds.
“God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”
“God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”
The echo of four became one wailed litany. “God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”
God hadn’t planned on returning those souls to anyone, but it was a little late for that warning.
I spit water and said hoarsely, “Charlie.” I’d dropped his keys in the water, but I didn’t need a reading from them to know what the hell was happening. No one did. We had ten men: Hector, me, Thackery, Fuji, and six soldiers. Brother Job had his disciples to help him conduct the baptisms. Three soldiers were doing their best to drown the other three, and Fujiwara was up to his chest in the water, both arms beneath the surface to his shoulders, and Thackery was nowhere in sight.
And right then, I began to wonder why only those who committed violence and not the victims had their personalities imprinted to be replayed when triggered by Charlie’s attempts to return. Thackery had said that violence frayed the ether. Why that and not fear and terror? Thanks to Boyd, I’d experienced all three, and fear and terror felt just as powerful as dealing out aggression. But I wasn’t an asshole with a giant brain and a degree in physics like Thackery, so I guessed I’d never know.
“Jackson…”
And maybe I should stop wondering and help save some people from following the fate of the cult of Job. I couldn’t save Tess. Tess wasn’t there. She was long gone, but I could save someone else.
We were in the shallows of the water, and I shook Hector off. “I’m okay. I just… I’m okay now, all right?” I didn’t wait to see if he believed me or not. I went back into the water, heading for the nearest soldier holding his thrashing comrade under for the glory of God. Hector hadn’t come across with a Taser yet, but he had slipped me a nicely illegal pair of gloves before we’d left that morning. These did more than protect me from psychic images. They had lead weights sewn into the knuckles, and they gave a punch an extra snap-which I delivered to the back of the soldier’s neck.
He went limp. I caught his shirt with my other bare hand-reading nothing of consequence-and kept him from sinking while his unwilling come-to-Jesus participant erupted out of the water, coughing and wheezing. He was still expelling quarry water, and his eyes suddenly took on a fanatical glow as he tackled me and the unconscious soldier. “God… accepts-” was all he managed to choke out before the three of us ended up buried in what could have been our unpleasantly wet grave.
I fought my way back up into the air, dragging the guy with me with one hand and swinging the other in a fist. The blow took the other soldier directly under the chin as he surfaced. He promptly toppled back under the water again, and soon I was pulling two dead-weight, but alive, goons out of the water to dump them on the shore.
Hector was taking out the soldier who’d dived off the rock wall to play disciple. He choked him out the same as he had the man at the mill. “You have a hell of a punch,” he told me as he took his opponent out. “Why didn’t you try it on me?”
“Because you were behind me, and you pour your breakfast milk over steroids instead of Cheerios.” And because I’d realized in time that he’d been pulling me away from an illusion in the water that wasn’t my sister and wasn’t my past. I moved to the next zealously chanting soldier surrounded by roiling water. Fuji was closer, but if he succeeded in drowning Thackery, I wasn’t going to be crying any tears. Thackery was most likely a murderer, and if he died at the hands of the echo of another murderer, that was poetic justice at its best.
“I lift weights. I don’t take steroids.” He threw the soldier he had knocked out into the arms of the half- drowned one. “You have two couches. One for you and one for your dog. That doesn’t shout ‘exercise fiend.’ Hell, if you walked that dog a block, you’d both be winded.”
It was strange to be snarking with someone while trying to keep a long-past massacre from taking lives in the here and now. Although not as strange as you’d think. It was a tough thing to do, face someone who’s screaming about God, temporarily insane, and trying to drown whoever he can get his hands on. I lived every day in other people’s pasts and secrets, and even I found this pretty damn creepy. A little sarcasm was a welcome distraction from the weirdness factor.
As I handled the last soldier with another punch, putting my new glove through its paces, I retorted, “I run ten miles every day!” When it wasn’t too hot, and it was always too hot. “I’m a natural athlete!” Close enough. I did run and swim, but at the Y, where they had air-conditioning. I was built lean, and I was in shape enough to take care of myself. I hadn’t forgotten my teenage years and that someday I might need that skill again.
“Ask your guys when they wake up if they don’t feel like they got a natural ass kicking. Cane Lake lessons stick with you. Even Charlie swung one helluva mean book bag,” I added, giving over the unconscious man to the one who came up out of the water. He coughed up water, caught his baptizer, and didn’t take over the role as the other soldier I saved had done. Hector’s hadn’t, either. That meant something.
I looked up at the sky, twilight now, as if I could see Charlie and his book bag, but of course, I couldn’t. And without the lost keys, I couldn’t feel him, either. But there wouldn’t have been anything to feel, anyway. As the soldiers and Hector started to pry Fuji off a submerged Thackery, the small scientist’s eyes cleared from fanatical to frantic. Along with stuttered fervent apologies, that told me what I needed to know. Charlie was gone, as was the repeating, gibbering chorus that had been the mirror’s reflection of Job and his disciples.
Thackery, unfortunately, was still here and alive-vomiting water and glaring at Fujiwara as if he’d throw him onto the nearest French Revolution cart headed to the guillotine. Fuji’s stuttered apologies went straight to plain incoherent stuttering. I couldn’t make out a single word. The other men, the baptizers and the baptized, recovered and slowly dried in a Georgia heat that the coming night wouldn’t begin to tame. Most of them sat with their heads in their hands. I didn’t know if it was from the sensation of a rerun of dead killers in their heads, almost being drowned by their brother soldiers, or the sight of Job’s victims back for a reunion tour.
I should’ve been at least somewhat happy. I mean, welcome, guys, to just a small part of my world. Feel what I feel every damn day.
I wasn’t happy, though. Six formerly tough-looking guys now seemed to want nothing more than to be anywhere but here. As far as I knew, they’d been in battle, seen friends die, but that living hell was something they were prepared for. What the sun had set on today had shown them a layer to this life that they knew nothing about and didn’t want to know anything about. And this had been a recording. If ghosts really had existed, who knew what knots would’ve been tied in their brains? Then again, the scientists had told them what to expect, I was guessing. Or at least, Hector would have-the possibility of the visual recording.
Seeing that, knowing that it wasn’t ghosts, it wasn’t life after death, it was only a fluke of physics, it could be that some of them were less upset by what they’d seen and more shaken by a loss of some religious faith.
One person, not surprisingly, wasn’t shaken at all. He was adjusting perfectly fine to visions of dead bodies and almost being drowned by his employee. Not only was he fine, but he had a theory. That gleam I’d noticed in his eye earlier was now the brilliant glint of a cold operating light bouncing from a surgeon’s scalpel. “It’s you, Eye. You and Hector combined, perhaps.” Thackery became caught up in coughing, but lungs sloshing with water couldn’t stop the bastard for long. It seemed nothing could. “You’re providing a focus for Charles. Considering our location”- he gestured at the water-“you could say you’re the next best thing to a scientific fishing lure.” He said it so smugly that I wished Fujiwara had more upper-body strength or Hector had been slower in pulling him off his boss.
Hector studied Thackery with interest, not much hope, but he was listening. “How did you come to that conclusion?” His dark hair blended into the night, but his pale eyes were visible and challenging.
“First, he’s your brother. That is one tie to this plane, blood or genetics. It doesn’t matter. Second, there’s Eye.” He addressed me without even waiting for me to bow and kiss his ring. He had to be in the midst of a scientific orgasm.
He ran a hand over his light hair and shook the water from his fingers. “You say your psychic ability only lets you feel people when you touch an object that belonged to them. You touch Charles’s keys, and you can sense him trying to get through. I think Charles, changed as he is now-the fragment that is left of him-is feeling you as well. This is the second time Charles has shown up at your and Hector’s location, a location of lesser violence in comparison with the others available. A less likely location. Less ether-fraying. This could mean no more random guessing. No more aiming for what we think is the highest violence quotient. With the two of you and the machine
