CHAPTER SEVEN

THE PASTOR

 

 

“THIS-A-WAY, MY SON. This-a-way, to walk in the very footsteps of the Lord...” And a chuckle like animal bones cracking underfoot. Then the Pastor turned back to his shuffling walk, one foot dragging after the other, the shoulders jerking back and forth in time with the steps. It was eerie, like watching a cobra trying to walk on its tail like a man.

The more Cade saw of the Pastor, the less he liked it. Those damn neck hairs were standing up to be counted.

The streets were still clean, and apart from the Pastor and his guards, there still wasn’t a soul to be seen in them. Cade followed along - the way he saw it, if he wanted answers, he could either walk in the very footsteps of the Pastor’s God or just kill the guards and beat the answers out of the Pastor.

There were a couple of problems with that second option, attractive as it was. For one, Cade had done things to people occasionally that folk would call torture, and there wasn’t anything about it that was reliable for getting information out of anybody. The only thing torture was good for was torture, and unless you were ready to own the fact that there wasn’t any kind of purpose or reason to it besides that, you were fooling yourself. So Cade had to shake his head a little when he heard some damn fool talk about using it for an interrogation on the Iraqis or whoever the hell it was this week. That was just fool’s talk from a bunch of clowns who figured the only way they could get another bunch of clowns to vote for them was by showing how very badass they thought they were. ’Course all it did was show they were clowns, but a clown’s gonna vote for a clown anyhow.

Cade was a mite cynical when it came to politics.

Anyhow, aside from the practicality of beating a confession out of the Pastor, it was pretty obvious the man was crazy as a broke-backed snake and he was likely to say any damn thing that came into his head. Best Cade could do was follow along as the man’s guest and hope he picked something up.

Hell, if Cade acted godly enough, maybe the Pastor’d help him out with his insulin problem, or at least tell him what happened to Sausalito. Acting godly wasn’t something Cade had much practice in, but he figured if he kept his mouth shut, that’d about do it.

Keeping his mouth shut was something Cade specialised in, after all.

The Pastor smiled, bobbing his head and moving with that gentle, sinister, shuffling gait as he led them down Cervantes Boulevard to where it intersected Fillmore Street. Ahead of them was the Moscone Recreation Centre – a big grey and white building. Cade shot the Pastor a look. It wasn’t exactly a threat, but there was a hint in his eyes that he could just as soon go straight to the killing if he was forced to, and he’d take a certain amount of pleasure in doing just that.

The Pastor smiled his cracked-face smile, his eyes as cold as January morning. “They had basketball here once. Did you know that? One of the best places in the city, I was told.” He chuckled softly, like a glass file rubbing against a shard of bone. “We have other entertainments here now. Oh, yes, we do...”

Cade was starting to wonder if beating the Pastor’s head against the concrete until it cracked open wasn’t the best plan after all. Cade wasn’t a man to be unsettled easy, but there was something in the Pastor that just didn’t strike him as right. Part of him was already clocking the positions of the guards with their baseball bats, working out who to kill first, who’d make a good shield, who he should take his blade to and who he could just disarm and put down with a simple neck-breaker or a dislocated leg. Cade had a pretty good strategy worked out by the time they’d pushed the doors open and walked down to the basketball court. That was when the smell hit him.

He’d spent a day at the San Diego Zoo, once upon a time. Hell of a place to spend time, and even a man like Cade could find a point of interest in it. He’d spent a while in the monkey house, on account of he liked watching them – Cade was of the opinion that monkeys were people with most of the bull taken out of them.

Now, the smell of shit there was overpowering, but you got used to it quick. Cade had spent a good couple hours there, watching the monkeys do what the monkeys did. After a while the smell stopped bothering him, and he didn’t even notice it. And when he’d gone to get himself a Coke from a vending machine, the fresh air had smelled sweet as rosewater. A few minutes later, he went back to the monkey house and there it was again, strong as ever. Monkey shit. Didn’t matter if you’d gotten used to it – one breath of fresh air and you were primed for it all over again.

The nature of shit was to stink. There was a lesson in there somewhere.

This was a similar situation. Cade had lived around Muir Beach, with its corpses and old bones, for a good couple of years. He’d smelt some sweet air in the Pastor’s territory, but now it was like heading back into that damn monkey house. Only this time the smell that was hitting him wasn’t monkey shit.

It was dead folks.

Rotting dead folks.

Cade had a feeling he should start the killing there and then. But when the doors swung open and he saw what the Pastor kept on those courts, he figured he’d hang on a little longer. He figured anything that fucked up had a story in it.

The Pastor smiled, breathing out his words in a soft hiss, like air escaping from a balloon. This time the smile touched his eyes, and they shone.

“Oh hear, sinner man, oh hear... oh hear the word of the Lord! Oh, behold, sinner; let thine eyes feast on His word and His work! Sinner man, can you not see it? Can you not see the glory of the Lord your God?” He laughed, and the laugh was a rustle of pages in an undertaker’s book.

Cade could see a hell of a lot. He could smell a lot, too.

He maybe wouldn’t call it glory, mind.

Set up in the basketball court were about a hundred wooden crosses, and nailed to each cross was a rotting skeleton. Once, there’d been people on those crosses – living people – with nails pounded through their wrists and ankles for who the hell knew what. And they’d been left there until they’d died, one by one. After that, the putrefaction had set in – the writhing maggots that still coiled and squirmed over the last scraps of a long-vanished face, the seeping, blackened mire that clung to thighbones and scraps of mouldering cloth. A couple of the ribcages were homes to rats, that skittered and gnawed on the bones, giving the cadavers a kind of twitching motion, a parody of life that stilled the heart and sickened the gut.

Cade knew for a certainty that the Pastor came in here every chance he could, to watch it happen, day by slow day. And he knew for a certainty that – while his men might have helped hold them still and keep them in place – it was the Pastor his own self who’d nailed every one of those souls up onto their crosses with his own withered hands.

He heard the sound of a breeze rushing through a graveyard. The Pastor was breathing it in. Savouring it. His brittle body shook like a leaf in a storm. Cade had seen folks taking their first hit from a needle who didn’t look half so transported as the Pastor did in the presence of his works.

Cade wasn’t a blushing virgin in the ways of death, and he figured he knew a thing or two about horror. He’d seen a hell of a lot and done a hell of a lot too. He’d figured he had a pretty good idea of how bad the world could be when it had a mind to be.

Now he knew he’d been a damn fool all the while.

He turned to the Pastor and nodded, once.

“It’s something at that.” His voice was steady, and level, and his eyes were boulders. Cade wasn’t a man who got mad, exactly, but those few who knew him as well as anyone could would have said he was as close as he could get to it.

An eyebrow twitched. Questioning. The voice dropped, just a shade quieter than before and cold as stone. The question was almost under Cade’s breath, but there wasn’t a body in that room who didn’t hear it.

“How come?”

The Pastor was still smiling that weird cracked-skin smile of his, eyes still sparking for joy. When it came, his voice was just as quiet and just as focussed. “Perversion. Men laying with men and women with women. Godlessness and atheism. The worship of drugs that steal the soul from the body, a terrible affront to the Lord... but that wasn’t the question, was it? No, no, it wasn’t the question at all...” Another chuckle, like a trickle of cut glass along a knife blade. “You’re not concerned about their crimes. You want to know why I chose this path. Why the Lord chose it... well, sinner man, you will hear it. Hear now the word of the Lord...” He closed his eyes, reverentially.

Cade marked the positions of the Pastor’s men again. Then he listened. He figured he’d more than bought his ticket. He ought to get the whole show.

The Pastor walked between the crosses, occasionally putting his hand on the bones, breathing in deep. “When I was a young man, I decided to serve as a chaplain in Vietnam, to bring the word of the good Lord to the men fighting there for freedom from the seeping coils of communism...” He turned, and gave Cade another of those cracked-face smiles. “I was young, you understand. Naïve. I did not heed the Lord, nor did I understand His word, nor His glory. I knew very little.”

His smile was wide as a cat’s. His eyes were like two rivets nailed in his face.

Cade had a feeling he knew where this was going.

“The firebase I was stationed at had been long abandoned by command, and the men there were now fully under the power of demons, oh yes... I saw it with my own eyes, O Lord, the debasement of the spirit in that dank and lonely place! You say Hell is not real, sinner? I saw it! The degradation, the fall” – his voice rose, calling out like he was giving a firebrand sermon from a pulpit – “I say to you, the very fall of Man! And there were times, oh yes, sinner, there were times when I could no longer feel the hand of the Lord upon me! When I could not hear His foot treading in the shadow of my own, when instead – instead I heard a hoof! A cloven hoof!”

His nostrils were flaring, and his shock of white hair was plastered up on his head. The eyes were bloodshot, where before they’d been clear. Cade wondered if the man was working himself up to a stroke.

Might save him the trouble.

“I felt the most alone I’ve ever felt in that place, with those men who were destroying themselves faster than the Viet Cong could do it, those men who had been abandoned and who had abandoned themselves and their souls in turn. Oh Lord! Didn’t I tell them, Lord? Didn’t I warn them what was coming? But I could not teach them! For I could not teach what I did not know, and sinner, I did not truly know my God! I did not hear his word! Not then!”

The Pastor hissed the words, eyes narrowing.

“Not until those devils came for me!”

He whirled, stabbing his fingers at the guards, who dropped to their knees, faces transported in joy.

“Charlie rose against us, rose up, I say, and murdered every man in that camp, whether he fought against them or lay in stupor! The ground ran red with blood, I tell you, red with the blood of sinners! And in that fire and fury I felt You rise, O Lord! I felt Your hand upon me! I felt you working in the fire and in the blood! In the screaming and in the dying! I felt you, Lord, and your name was death! And Hell came with you to that place! And I prayed, Lord, oh I prayed! I prayed for you to enlighten me! To show me the way! To bestow upon me the reason! I prayed for a sign, O Lord, and a sign came, oh yes, oh, my Lord, my God... a sign did come!”

Cade blinked. He got the impression the Pastor had kind of forgotten he was there, and to tell the truth he could see how that might be. Cade had lost himself for a second in the fire and fury of the man. He could figure how other folk might end up losing themselves for good.

“I was the only one to survive. They saw me praying, saw me kneeling, and the spirit of the Lord moved in them. And they took me, O Lord! They dragged me under the earth! To their tunnels! They beat me with sticks and with stones! They cut me with knives! They broke my legs again and again until I begged to be killed! I spent three years in a bamboo cage, three feet by three, O Lord! I faced torments! Torments of Hell itself!”

The Pastor gulped air, steadying himself on one of the crosses. Cade wondered how a man could breathe in gulps of that rotting air without passing out – the stench of the corpses was still in his nostrils with every breath he took, and his stomach did a slow, lazy roll every couple of minutes. The smell of a body that’s been dead a long time was a hell of a thing to put up with, even for Cade.

Eventually, the thin man spoke again. He seemed to acknowledge that he was speaking to Cade now – the fever in him had passed. “The good Lord spoke to me. For three years... the Lord, the good Lord, was my helper through those terrible days and nights. He spoke of His plan for the world to me, you see. That one day, one day, there would come a terrible scourge upon the Earth... and those of purest heart would be saved for the final task, O Lord, the most sacred task... the culling of the last sinners from the Earth.” He chuckled, sweat beading on his brow. “You’ve a great power in you, boy, a great power. The Lord hath placed a terrible judgement in your hands...”

Cade narrowed his eyes. This was starting to get a mite personal. He turned towards the door. “Got things need doing.” Cade never had believed in wasting words.

The Pastor smiled.

“You’ve a great power in you, and I have great power in me, son. I have scores of pure souls in my flock, all waiting to do the word of the Lord and work for His glory, Now correct me if I’m wrong, but the kind of things a man like you might want to get done... well, they could need that great abundance. Many hands make light work, they say. And you have set yourself a great task...”

Cade stopped, and turned his head.

“Oh, I can tell just by looking. You have the look of a man on whom the Lord has placed his hand. A man with a mission.” He chuckled. This time is was like the shattering of a test tube containing some deadly bacillus. “I will help you, if you will help me, my brother. Place your hand in mine and I will place the hand of the Lord in yours, and He will guide you in your works and bring you aid from every corner of this great city. Only aid me when the time comes. Help me in my time of need, my brother.” The Pastor smiled his crack-faced smile, and ran a hand over a thighbone, caressing it. His eyes glittered. “Help the Lord in his righteous work.”

Cade took a look around the room – at the skeletons hanging from the crosses. There were men there, and women too. A couple of kids. He could see one skeleton at the back, rotted down to bones, and it was no bigger than a chicken’s might be, held to the cross with a single nail.

A baby.

Cade took a deep breath of the air in that room. The heavy, sick-sweet, rotted air.

Then he gave his answer.

“Deal.”