Chapter Twelve

Erica

It wasn’t like the movies where everyone turned and gawked at the hero when he walked inside. In a way, that would have been better. Rather than having every gaze swoop toward him and stare him down until he spoke, not one thing in the room changed when he entered.

But room wasn’t the right word. This was obviously the place where the parishioners of the First Baptist Church had congregated to worship, an A-framed sanctuary capacious enough to seat perhaps five hundred people. Not a gigantic church like some of the ones he’d seen in big cities, but not a quaint country church either. Before the bombs flew, the First Baptist Church might have been thriving.

There was nothing holy about the place anymore. There were a few pews scattered here and there in the far reaches of the space, but most of them, he suspected, had been chopped up for firewood. In their stead had been arranged an assortment of wooden tables and chairs, so that the church now resembled an Old West saloon. Most of the tables were round, but a few were square, and though there were empty seats here and there, the majority of them were occupied.

It was the largest gathering Dez had beheld in years.

The stench was revolting. Unaired flatulence and unwashed bodies, spiced with a whiff of putrefying corpses.

Dez breathed through his mouth.

Opposite him, forty yards ahead, lay what had been the primary worship area of the Baptist church. He half-expected the enormous wooden cross on the wall to be desecrated in some way – perhaps festooned with one of Bill Keaton’s crucified enemies – but curiously, the cross appeared unscathed by human hands.

Rather than housing an altar, the head of the church was now a lengthy bar, and not of the makeshift variety. Dez supposed it wasn’t all that difficult to fathom. After all, now that society was destroyed, it would be relatively simple to find an abandoned bar and, if one possessed the manpower, have it transported here in sections. Nevertheless, seeing the length of polished wood and the patrons ranged on stools was a shock. Above the shoulders and heads of the figures seated at the bar, Dez made out an assortment of bottles, a swath of mirrors about four feet high spanning the length of the bar.

Evidently, Keaton was a fan of cowboy movies. Though he was loath to admit it, this meant that Dez and the ruthless son of a bitch who owned this house of horrors had something in common.

Furthering the impression of a Western barroom were the long balconies enshadowing the flanks of the main sanctuary. From where he stood he couldn’t see much of these balconies, but there were quite a few figures up there, just elbows resting on handrails or faces limned by wall sconces.

He’d been right about the generator. The light in here wasn’t dazzling – some of it was provided by old-fashioned kerosene lamps or squat candles within ruby-glassed globes – but the illumination spilling out of the overhead lights and wall sconces was enough that he could make out the architecture and the patrons.

He could also, he realized now, discern some of the Four Winds Bar’s décor.

Dez’s guts gave a sideways lurch. And he’d thought the penises on the sign outside had been bad.

Before the world ended, the word terrorist meant one thing: enemies of peace, foreign or domestic, who blew up buildings or hijacked airplanes or fired automatic weapons at defenseless people. Since the bombs flew, however, terrorism had come to mean something very different, at least in Dez’s mind. The invocation of terror was now as common as a word of greeting. What remained of the human race had adopted the belief that frightening fellow survivors was preferable to befriending them.

Bill Keaton clearly understood the benefits of terrorism. Keaton could now count Dez among the individuals who’d been suitably terrified by his handiwork.

The strips of wood running beneath the balconies on both sides of the sanctuary were adorned with human heads. Their eyes had been opened, their mouths arranged in permanent screams.

Dez knew it would mark him as weak-stomached, but he couldn’t help it. He closed his eyes and braced himself on the back of an empty chair, yet the afterimages still pursued him.

Fuck me, he thought.

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. It was useless to pretend the severed heads weren’t there, so he allowed his gaze to rove over them, thinking vaguely that meeting the horror head-on – Christ – might, like some macabre species of immersion therapy, inure him to its effects.

Nope, he thought after a few moments. It’s not working at all.

The gory flaps of throat were horrid enough. Worse still were the words carved into the foreheads of the deceased. MUTINEER, read the head immediately over Dez’s left shoulder. The face beneath the mauve inscription was shriveled and dark, like a prune into which some amateur sculptor had etched human features. Next to that was a female face, not as decayed, with the word SLUT sliced raggedly across her brow. LIAR, COWARD, and SODOMITE came next, and though these were ghastly, the inscription that stopped him was the sixth.

WEREWOLF, the forehead said.

The face was half-human, half-beast, the werewolf apparently having been beheaded mid-transformation. Dez was reminded forcibly of Jim, who’d murdered his wife against his will, who was forced to live out the rest of his days in a purgatory of guilt and excruciating metamorphoses. Pity wasn’t the right word for what he felt for Jim, but it came close. Dez gazed upon the face of the werewolf and wondered if the man had been similarly tormented by what he’d become.

“Like them, do you?” a voice asked.

Dez glanced at the speaker and saw a bald man with a tangled growth of beard and sunken eyes watching him from a table full of patrons. The man looked familiar. Dez stared at him until he realized who the guy reminded him of. Evan Gattis, a former Houston Astros slugger.

Gattis was grinning. So were the others. All but one, Dez realized. Of the six ranged around the circular table, one man kept his back to Dez, the figure small, a bit hunched.

“He asked you if you liked the heads,” another voice said. This speaker was a younger man, full of piercings, his dun-colored hair messily cut, like he’d done the job while inebriated. All the men gripped heavy pewter steins. Not the sort of receptacles Dez would have expected.

Of course, he wouldn’t have expected a Baptist church to be decorated in severed heads either. He supposed it could be an allusion to the fate of John the Baptist, but that would be giving Keaton too much credit.

“You a mute?” a third member of the table asked. This one had shoulder-length red hair, pale blue eyes, and a nose so pockmarked it appeared he’d been mauled by wild dogs.

At least the men’s hostility took Dez’s mind off the heads. He didn’t feel good – he figured he’d be queasy for several more minutes – but he no longer worried he’d faint.

Ignoring the jeering patrons, he navigated his way between a pair of tables. He drew even with them as the ginger man with the dog-chewed nose pushed up from his chair and barred his way.

Okay, Dez thought. You knew you’d have to prove yourself one way or the other. It might as well be with this asshole.

But only if you have to, a voice cautioned. At the sound of the voice, Dez suppressed a smile. His dad. A smartass, but a smartass with a heart. Man, Dez missed him.

“Something funny?” Gattis snapped.

“Just thinking of someone,” Dez answered without heat.

“Is that right?” the red-haired man asked, his breath puffing over Dez’s face. It smelled of bourbon and death. The man apparently didn’t spend much time on dental hygiene. “Well, we always enjoy a good story.”

“It passes the time,” Gattis explained.

“Pull up a chair,” the one with the piercings said and stifled a burp.

Dez inspected their faces. The problem was you never knew. The red-haired man could be a werewolf. Gattis could be a cannibal. He certainly appeared burly enough to be a flesh-eater. Even the young man with the piercings and the butchered hair might be a monster.

You could never be sure. Not until it was too late.

“Thanks for the offer,” Dez said, “but I’m heading to the bar.”

Gattis shrugged, leaned back on two chair legs. “No need for that. Iris’s servers will be by any minute. They know I like my beer full.”

Dez tried not to show his surprise. He hadn’t tasted beer in two years, had assumed it was as extinct as Major League Baseball and the Internet.

Gattis seemed to catch his train of thought. “Keaton brews his own. Or rather Hernandez does.”

“Hernandez?”

“One of Keaton’s guys,” the red-haired man said. “Hernandez grows his own hops. Was a real aficionado before the Shift.”

Dez grunted. It was the first time he’d heard the extinction of mankind referred to as the Shift. He supposed it was as apt a description as any. If, that was, you considered the deaths of nearly seven billion people a shift.

“Sit,” the red-haired man said, gesturing toward an open chair. It wasn’t a request.

Dez made to sidestep the man, but he stepped along with Dez, his pale blue eyes widening. “Hey now, we’ve been nice. No reason to make enemies when we can be friends.”

A corner of Dez’s mouth rose. “You want to be my friend?”

The man’s face split in an icy grin. “Why else would we invite you into our crew?”

“Simple camaraderie,” Gattis said.

The red-haired man spread his arms. “See?”

“I get the crossbow,” the one with the piercings said.

The red-haired man grinned and Gattis chuckled softly.

“Let him pass,” a voice said.

Dez looked askance at the speaker. It was the man with his back to Dez, the hunched, scrawny figure seated opposite Gattis. This man’s hair was trimmed in a style Dez associated with medieval monks, minus the bald tonsure. Furthering the monastic appearance was the black cloak draped over the man’s shoulders.

Gattis frowned at the man in the cloak. The red-haired man did too, something uncertain, even fearful creeping into his pockmarked face.

When no one spoke, the figure in the cloak half-turned in his chair, looked up at the red-haired man, and said, “Let him pass.”

It was a woman, Dez realized. His first reaction was surprise. You didn’t encounter nearly the same ratio of women now as you did before. The Bastards from Baltimore had seen to that. Just one of many flaws in their hideous plan. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that men had been at the root of most of humankind’s problems before the Four Winds. Now men had even more power, and look at how fucked up the world was.

However, Dez mused as he studied the woman now, there were still women, but if they were free and respected, it meant they possessed some special power. The majority of vampires were women. Some of the most ferocious cannibals Dez had encountered had been women.

So what could this woman do? Plenty, Dez guessed, judging from the aura of solemnity the men around her exuded.

Dez studied her upturned face, was surprised by the unblemished youthfulness there. The woman was likely thirty, but she looked like she’d never suffered hardship of any kind, had spent the past two years of hell cloistered away in study and prayer. The woman’s eyes were intelligent, a coffee-hued brown. There was a vitality there that Dez found unsettling.

Evidently, the red-haired man found staring at the cloaked woman difficult too. The red-haired man smiled in the way of all lackeys. “Come on, Erica. This fella’s armed to the gills. You think Keaton’s gonna like him strutting around here like some prince?”

“Lefebvre let him through,” Erica answered.

A look of disdain rippled through the red-haired man’s features. “Lefebvre is just the doorman. He’s—”

Unaccountably, the red-haired man stopped speaking and took a backward step, his pale eyes flitting downward. Dez followed his wide-eyed gaze but saw only the chair he’d been occupying before confronting Dez. Now, however, the red-haired man was gaping at it like it was a viper poised to strike.

What’s this? Dez wondered.

“Hey,” Gattis said, his tone conciliatory. “Let’s just drink, all right?”

The red-haired man looked like he might bolt in the other direction. But his shoulders twitched in what might have been a shrug. “Sure. Hell, I was only being helpful.”

With that, he moved out of Dez’s way. He retreated a couple paces from the table rather than returning to his chair, a decision Dez judged strange. Whoever or whatever the woman in the cloak was, the others at the table were scared silly by her.

As were, he now realized, the rest of the patrons in the vicinity of the table. A score of men had taken notice of the scene, and their expressions ranged from sleepy curiosity to a rabid, glitter-eyed hunger.

Dez passed the red-haired man. He sensed the eyes of the patrons marking his passage. Dez kept his gaze fixed on the bar at the far end of the room as he moved.

Something hard thumped him painfully on the back. Cold liquid splashed his neck and soaked his collar.

Dez kept the pain out of his face by gritting his teeth. Someone had nailed him with a beer stein.

He spun around and scanned the faces for the perpetrator, but the dozens of eyes only watched him sleepily. For a wild moment, Dez found himself on the verge of shouting, Who did it? I want the culprit to reveal himself now!

But that would be worse than foolish. It would be suicide. If he showed how rattled he was, they’d rend him to pieces. Who knew what manner of creatures lurked behind those impassive faces?

Dez was turning back toward the bar when a voice called, “Did you enjoy your drink?”

Dez paused. The voice had been bland, uninflected.

Don’t show anything, he reminded himself. You show your anger, whoever pelted you with that stein wins.

At the thought of the object that had knocked him in the ribs, Dez looked down and discovered it lying on its side. There was a moose featured in bas relief, its antlers raised to a full moon, as if it had turned feral like so many of its human counterparts. Dez’s eyes crawled up to the nearest table, where he discovered a man with a thick, brushy mustache staring at him. The guy’s features were arranged in gloating defiance.

Dez was sure the man was the guilty party, but how could he prove it? Ask him, he supposed, but then what? If the man said yes, he’d done it, Dez would be cornered. Either fight the man or turn the other cheek and be branded a coward.

Fleetingly, Dez was reminded of what he’d heard about prisons: You either proved your toughness by killing another man, or you became a victim. Several times, Dez had found this stark axiom to be true in the new world.

But what if the mustachioed man had hidden powers? Would a Latent frequent a place like this? Dez doubted it. If there still existed Latents like himself, they were almost certainly in hiding the way he and Susan had been before Keaton had shown up.

Dez’s lips thinned.

Keaton. The memory of the man’s soulless face reminded him why he was here. He needed to locate Keaton; he was the key to finding Susan. If Dez were killed now, he’d never learn what happened to her. He couldn’t save her. If she were still alive.

She is, he thought. She is alive.

He forced himself to move toward the bar.

“I did it,” someone called, and this time Dez knew who was speaking.

Knew it even before he turned and saw the woman in the cloak rising from her chair and facing him across an expanse of thirty feet.

Erica folded her hands before her, smiled charmingly. “It’s a pleasure to know there are still Latents in the world.”

Now everyone in the bar was watching.

There was no use protesting. Nor of speaking at all. If Dez claimed to have powers, Erica would demand he display them. If he confessed to having none, the others would slaughter him for sport. He could see the violence in their eyes, sensed it baking out of their stinking clothes.

Erica lowered her head and pressed the tip of a forefinger to her bottom lip. “You’re probably wondering how my aim is so accurate. After all, you were a good distance from me.” She looked up at Dez with mock inquisitiveness.

“I know how you did it,” Dez said.

Good, he thought. His voice had been tight, low, but it had been steady. Not a scared voice. Not a plea.

“Care to educate the denizens of the Four Winds?” Erica said, smile broadening. She flourished a hand to encompass the vast room. “Perhaps you, like Lefebvre, are gifted with the ability to penetrate the psyche?”

“It’s nice of you to take an interest in my gifts,” Dez said.

Erica’s smile wavered a little. Rustles of movement stirred here and there, all eyes shifting to Erica.

Erica’s eyes narrowed, then her self-possession returned. “Perhaps you’d like to see the trick repeated.” The finger touched her lips again as she observed her surroundings. She tapped her lips. “Ah, yes. That will do.”

A heavy square table halfway between Erica and Dez began to vibrate, then to rattle. The men seated there shoved away, their faces blank with surprise. Several snatched up their drinks, but a couple opted to forsake them.

The table came to rest. A febrile energy charged the air.

Then, as Dez watched in horrorstruck silence, the large wooden table, which must have weighed two hundred pounds, began to rise from the floor.