I’m dead, Lamenzo thought — the first thought of his new life — tasting the dank breath of the wooden Jesus seeping down his throat, tasting the dry dead strips of varnished wood clamped over his own lips, the rancid tang of the air being forced into his lungs.
No, I’m not…
The wooden mouth went away, then came back, its touch glass. Breathed another rancid lungful of life into him.
Went away again.
He coughed and gagged on a mouthful of clean air. Normal air had never tasted so good.
He was alive again.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back just beyond the sanctuary railing in St. Malachi’s. Faces were looking at him, expressions a mixture of fear and amazement. Eight standing, one kneeling, one sprawled out on the floor much like he was…
Mostly fear.
He looked around, saw the guns levelled at him.
Why? He thought, and remembered…
Rosie Bossman.
He started to rise, drawing his unsteady legs under him.
Seeing him rise, the nine men gathered in the church fired. He heard the bark of bullets coming his way, then they struck him: upper thigh, groin, abdomen, cheek, spleen, lungs, heart and arm. He felt them push him and twist him into a capering fool, but continued to haul himself erect. Someone fired again, bringing a second volley of fire. Two shots took him in the chest, one ploughed through his temple, another into his leg, four went wide.
“Look at me,” he heard the kneeling figure say as it drew itself erect and reached out to take him by the hand. The hand around his felt as cold and heartless as an ocean of glass. “A life for a life… I’ve waited a long time, do you want to live?”
“Do I want to?” he asked, a slight irritation in his throat and temple, from the bullet wounds. “Yes…”
“Good, come then…” His own personal Jesus reached into him, slipped into him, opened him like a book of bones and blood, occupied him, made him live and breathe…
Father Joseph D’Angelo, drawn by the riot of sounds, stood in the open sacristy doorway, clutching his faith in trembling hands. He could not believe, would not believe, the drama laid out before him. Though he saw the corpse reach out, its dirty fingernail smouldering as it bit deeply, burned, into the left cheek of an Amerind officer. Though he saw the stained glass window of Jesus and St. Malachi melt around the thing that had once been a statue of The Son of God just as it had once been the dead body of a child killer lying on the cold stone of the church floor, though he saw the discoloured patch of wall above the altar so recently vacated, though he saw the fallen body of Lieutenant Al Culpepper, and though Seth Lawson babbled in his ear, he could not believe.
In the window only a gaping hole remained, its shape that of Jesus Christ Our Lord in benediction. It was a hole plenty large enough for a body to escape through.
But he was dead…