“We Could be closed down!”
“That’s why we’ve got to take action.”
“Quick action.”
“In everyone’s best interests.”
“Including yours, Marty.”
“You’ll agree with us.”
“In time.”
“In time.”
“And for God sakes, Marty, please get some help.”
It was a mighty fine ice-cream sundae of a dismissal, with all the fixings. Then someone—Martin couldn’t even remember who—came up with the cherry to top it off.
“We want you to know that we’re all here for you, if you need us.”
The building’s seventy-year-old security guard supervised the cleaning out of his desk, and his departure from the building five minutes later.
* * * Martin didn’t drive straight home. Eureka was a small town and nothing was more than fifteen minutes away from anything else, so finding a slow, meandering route was difficult. He took in a matinee, then stopped at Chick’s Sporting Goods, picking out some baseball items his son would have liked, had he and his mother not drowned in four hundred million cubic yards of water. At the funeral, his pastor had lauded the mysterious ways of God. His golf buddies had shaken their heads, mumbling about life’s curveballs, before returning to their families and rejoicing in their own domestic torpor. Well, there were curve balls, and there were wild, skull-crushing pitches. This particular pitch had been thrown by a redheaded teenager, who Martin had once believed was God himself.
Coast highway, more than a year ago now. It was a road trip to Disneyland, just the three of them. Eddie was in the back seat of their Taurus, complaining about how boring the radio stations were in central California. It was ten at night when they were driven off the road just north of San Simeon. Three men came out of the other car, and from the very first, Martin knew this would only get worse, because all three of them carried baseball bats. They smashed the windows and dragged the Briscoes out kicking and screaming. The men didn’t take anything—they didn’t want anything. They just swung their bats, and shattered his son’s skull, and smashed his wife’s spine. Then they pinned Martin down, as a fourth man approached. This one had a chainsaw.
After leaving Chick’s Sporting Goods, Martin drove each street in his neighborhood, passing his house several times, then sat at the bar in T.G.I. Friday’s, drinking tequila shooters, and stuffing his gut with tacos al carbon. It was eleven o’clock at night when the place closed, and he left, heading back to his former place of business.
Martin remembered very little once the chainsaw began to roar. He mercifully fell unconscious. When he awoke, he was in some sort of library . . . and he had no legs. There were just two stumps above where his knees would have been, crudely tied off with his own jumper cables. Around him were at least a dozen others in no better condition. His son lay sprawled, rasping an unconscious moan, his head a briused, swollen mass of flesh the color of eggplant. His wife was there, too, slumped in a corner, most definitely dead. He wanted to panic—but there was something gripping his spirit, containing his emotions. At first he thought it was shock, but he quickly discovered it was something entirely different.
Eureka Dental’s building only had one night guard, whose narcolepsy was well known. Still, Martin wasn’t taking any chances. He came from behind and struck him with the Louisville Slugger he had gotten from Chick’s— the same brand of bat that had shattered his wife’s spine, and son’s skull on the last day that the world made sense. Only the night light was on in Eureka Dental’s waiting room, the sign in sheet waiting for the morning patients. On the wall was a framed poster of a popular comedian touting the merits of flossing. The glass shattered as the poster became the next casualty of the slugger.
The Library was filled with people clinging onto life, and there were only four standing. Teenagers. A bizarre triage Mod Squad. One boy was listening to a walkman in the corner, dancing to the beat, ignoring the pain around him. Then there was the blonde girl who pressed her hands on people’s sores. Another girl moved around the room wearing a beatific grin that Martin could swear was numbing his pain. Then the redheaded kid went to his dying son. “Don’t you touch him,” Martin screamed, but the kid ignored him. Just then the black teen named Winston came up to Martin, looking over his oozing stumps as if they were nothing out of the ordinary. “Welcome to Hearst Castle,” he said, then removed the jumper cables. Blood gushed instantly, and as weak as Martin felt, he became weaker, darkness closing in his peripheral vision . . . but the moment Winston touched his hands to Martin’s thighs, the blood stopped flowing. When he looked down, Martin saw flesh—his own flesh—folding out of the wound like the fabric of an inflating raft. He could feel the tingle of growing bone—actually felt his knee joint, then shin and ankle regenerate themselves. In less than five minutes toes sprouted from the end of his feet, and by the time Winston moved on to the next patient, Martin’s toenails needed a trim. Then he turned to see his resurrected wife and healed son standing beside him, just as awed and bewildered as he. After that, the men with the bats and chainsaws didn’t seem to matter.
Eureka Dental had fifteen dental stations, each room equipped with cutting-edge equipment. Indeed, they did not skimp when it came to technology. All that money gleaned from rich patients and fat insurance companies went right back into their facility. He was amazed at how quickly the overhead lights and chairs broke beneath the swing of his bat.
They called themselves Shards, great spirits whose souls were born of a shattered star.
He had never been a religious man, but in the face of what he saw over those next few weeks, it was no longer a matter of faith but one of certainty. There was a divine power greater than himself. There was a greater purpose, and it had revealed itself through these youths. He would have followed Dillon, and Winston, and the others to the end of the world. And that’s exactly what he did.
The porcelain rinse sinks were harder to break than he expected. So were the X-ray machines, their mantis- heads predatory in the way they parried and pivoted, their long-jointed necks taking the impact and bouncing back for more. It took him four or five machines until he discovered the proper trajectory to decapitate them with a single blow. He kept waiting for the scream of sirens, anticipating being caught in the act. That would make him news! The Associates would then have cameras and microphones crammed down their throats, forced to explain all this in the midst of the wreckage. It would be worth it. But when no sirens came, he only became angrier.
A few weeks after his legs were shorn and regrown, Martin stood on the rim of Black Canyon with a thousand others. He watched as Dillon hand-picked four hundred followers to descend into the canyon with him—the four hundred to stand with him as he would rupture Hoover Dam, then hold back the water with the force of his mind. His wife and son were among them, but Martin was not selected. Instead, Martin had stood there at the rim among the unchosen, saw the dam fall, and watched Dillon’s betrayal . . . for when the dam fell, he did not hold the waters back as he had promised. Instead Lake Mead spilled free, killing his wife and his son, and the rest of the four hundred. By the time the water reversed direction, and the undeniable miracle of the Backwash began, Martin was numb to it, wandering the desert until the police picked him up that night. His wife and son’s bodies were recovered days later, washed all the way back through the lake, and halfway through the Grand Canyon.
It took four swings to break the tempered glass window of the climate-controlled building, and that finally set off the pathetic alarm system. He hauled out the file drawers, dumping dental records out of the window until the parking lot below was yellow with manila folders. Then he went into the conference room, smashing his bat against the marble table over and over again until the table won, and the bat splintered in half.
No matter how powerful Dillon’s miracle was, he knew it could never offset the loss he had suffered. How did he think he could return home to Eureka and take up his old life? How could his associates ever expect him to devote his days to dentistry? Hell, in Dillon’s order there had been no cavities—no crooked teeth. So what was the point of his own pitiful attempt to correct flaws when he had already seen flawlessness in the shadow of Dillon Cole? And how could Martin feel anything but virulent contempt for the families who came to him? There were times he wished his drill could reach straight through to their hearts, leaving his happy patients as lifeless as his wife and son.
Exhausted he threw the broken bat handle down, and found a room where the dental chair was still intact—a room decorated for their younger patients, cartoons painted on the wall and a dental chair done in plush lavender
