I don’t have to do much to him really. He’s drunk, his cock is out, and there’s piss everywhere—plus I already gave him a concussion—so everyone will think he stumbled and cracked his head on the flatbed. Okay. Just wipe out, say, the last hour or so of his memory.
This will be interesting. I’ve never tried it before. Still, I’m good at improvising hoodoo. I bark a few Hellion words at him.
The first thing I note is that my hex doesn’t make him explode. So far, so good. I grab the booze bottle he set on the ground and pour some over him so that he really reeks of the stuff. There’s nothing else I can do if I’m not going to kill him. I need to get moving or risk more guards coming back.
I make a wide circle from the flatbed to the trucks and construction equipment, staying in the shadows as much as possible. Eventually, I come out at the earthmover and slip back into the bucket from the far side, hoping that no one came by to check on me and found me gone. At this point, though, there’s nothing to do about it but curl up with the empty whiskey bottle and pretend to sleep it off while worrying about the fifty things I probably forgot while trying to cover my tracks.
The sounds of the camp have settled down again. Either they put the Lamborghini out or they’re using it to roast marshmallows. Now that I think about it, I probably should have killed that guy. But ever since I got Doll Man hanged, I feel like I want to ease back on the homicide for a little while. Just a little.
That said, I probably should have picked up a bottle with a little whiskey left in it. Or gone looking for the greatest Hellion libation of all—Aqua Regia. But what are the chances of finding that out here in the boonies?
I lie in the earthmover’s bucket, staring up at the bruised eternally twilight sky wishing I hadn’t thought about Aqua Regia. My big decision now is whether I lie here until we break camp or give in to one of my mother’s favorite expressions: beggars can’t be choosers.
In the end, I decide to go and beg for a drink. Anything is better than lying here hoping I got the hex on the guard right. If I fucked up and gave that idiot superpowers, I’m going to be really pissed.
The ground at center camp is littered with empties. I walk around like a true wino, checking each one to see if there’s enough to get one good belt. After striking out a good dozen times, I drop-kick a couple of empties into the bonfire in frustration.
“Here,” someone says. “Before you hurt yourself.”
When I turn around, Daja is there holding out a mostly full bottle of . . . hell, I couldn’t care less. It’s liquor. I accept the bottle and take a couple of long pulls. When I hand it back, it’s considerably emptier than it was a minute ago.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’ve been looking for a while.”
“No problem. We got every bottle in town. We’re set for a month.”
“A month? How do you tell time out here? I don’t even know how long we’ve been in this town.”
She upends the bottle, drinking a good potion of what’s left.
“It’s just an expression. I count the days by when we reach a new town or the Magistrate says to camp.”
“He’s Father Time, too? The guy knows a lot of tricks.”
“That he does.”
She hands me back the bottle. The stuff we’re drinking is vile. Greasy and fishy, but even flounder-flavored turpentine will taste good when it’s the only drink in town.
I say, “How long have you been with him?”
Daja shakes her head. “I don’t know. There weren’t a lot of us back then. Hardly any vehicles.” She holds out her arms and turns in a half circle. “But now look at us.”
I hand her back the bottle.
“You’re a whole army.”
“Damn right,” she says.
“Onward Christian soldiers.”
Her eyes narrow.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s an old hymn back where I grew up . . . not that I actually spent a lot of time in church.”
“Must be a Protestant thing. What were you? Methodist? Baptist?”
“I have no idea.”
“I figured. My family practically worshiped the pope. It felt like I was in church all the time,” she says. “Four times a week at least. Not that I minded. Except I couldn’t be an altar boy, but I’d sneak in after services and put on their gear anyway.”
“You ever get caught?”
“Never. But it was still a sin, so here I am.”
I hand her back the bottle.
“You think you were damned because you played dress-up?”
“Why else?”
“You never killed anybody or robbed a bank or short-sheeted the pope?”
Daja smiles.
“Nope. I was a very good girl.”
“And here I was thinking you were Ma Barker back upstairs.”
“Nah. I didn’t learn to ride till I got here. I never even threw a punch back home.”
She looks me over.
“I bet you were exactly the way you are now.”
“Only prettier.”
She drinks most of what’s left, but offers me the last swig. I shake my head so she finishes the bottle and tosses it into the fire.
“What happened to your face?” she says. She pulls down my shirt a few inches. Spots more scars. “And the rest of you.”
“Never follow a foul ball into a wood chipper,” I say. “We didn’t even win the game.”
She ignores my stupid joke and says, “Were you a soldier? A boxer?”
“You got me. I fought a bit,” I say, wondering if she ever saw the gladiator pit in Pandemonium.
“You must not have been very good at it.”
“On the contrary. I beat pretty much everyone. Just some were harder to knock down than others.”
I flash on Hellbeasts, the ones that spit fire, the ones with pincers as big as a man, the ones with teeth like buzz saws.
Daja says, “I didn’t have my first fight until after I was damned. Isn’t that funny? I was scared as hell.”
“Did you win?”
“Nope. But I got better.”
“And now look at you. No one here would lift a finger.”
She looks at me.
“Even you?”
“I’m not looking for trouble.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, not sounding entirely convinced. “Did you hear the explosion before?”
“What explosion?” I say, as innocent as a newborn bunny.
“One of the cars. The gas tank went up. It’s been burning all night.”
She points and I follow her finger.
“Oh, that. Yeah. I saw that.”
“And you weren’t interested enough to crawl out of that bucket?”
I pick up another bottle. It’s empty, so I drop it.
“I’m from California. Pretty much everything is on fire these days.”
She gives me a look.
“There’s a drought.”
“Mmm.”
“And we kind of had an apocalypse thing not that long ago.”
“Mmm.”
We stand there for an awkward minute, staring into the fire.
I say, “Why are you over here talking to me like we’re friends? You wanted me dead a couple of days ago.”
“Who says I wanted you dead?”
“I burned your friend.”
“Megs?” she says, and laughs. “He wasn’t my friend. He was useful, but he wasn’t anyone’s friend.”
“Still, you would have killed me when I first got here.”
“Of course. You came out of nowhere with that story about walking down the mountain.”
“It was all true.”
“The Magistrate believes you, so now so do I.”
“But,” I say.
“But what?”
“No—you were going to say ‘but.’”
A leg collapses on a nearby roulette table and a mob of naked people tumbles onto the ground.
“You have secrets,” she sa
ys. “I watched you in that fight with Asodexus . . .”
“The guy who looked like a horned toad?”
“Yes. That wasn’t an ordinary fight. You did something.”
I wonder for a second if she spotted the hoodoo, but I’d be dead by now if she had.
“And you want to know what I did.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you saw wrong and it was just a fight.”
“I’ve seen fights. I’ve seen souls and Hellions kill plenty. What you did wasn’t like that.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
I give her my best shit-eating smile.
“If I tell you now, what will we talk about on our next date?”
Wanuri and the earless, noseless guy call to Daja from over by the fire.
She looks at me.
“You’re with the havoc now. Don’t forget it.”
“I won’t.”
Daja walks backward away from me, pointing at me with both hands.
“And I know your name isn’t Pitts, no matter what Mimir says.”
I wave to her as she leaves and head back to my bucket, suddenly wanting to be alone.
I take off my coat, roll it up, and put it under my head. Settle down for a nap. The last thing I think before drifting off to a slightly dizzy whiskey sleep is, Daja’s a lot more interesting than I thought. But I really am going to have to kill her.
A few hours later in whatever counts for morning around here, someone knocks on the side of the bucket. I sit up, a little cramped from my steel crib. The Magistrate leans on the edge of the earthmover’s bucket, a bottle of water in his hand. He tosses it to me. I catch it, unscrew the top, and take a drink. It feels good. Whatever was in that flounder whiskey last night left me with a headache, but the water eases it. I finish the whole bottle.
“Good?” says the Magistrate in his clipped diction.
“Very. Thanks.”
“I’m glad. Come. Take a walk with me.”
I crawl out of the bucket and follow him. The camp looks like a tornado passed through during the night. I don’t see a stick of furniture that isn’t broken, cracked, or burned. Gambling tables are overturned or were propped up and used for target practice. The havoc is scattered on the ground, in the backs of vehicles, or on the remnants of the furniture. It’s like a company picnic that turned into Altamont and everybody loved it.
Me and the Magistrate walk out of camp and into the desert. A nice open space to kill someone. But which one of us is it going to be?
We’re about fifty yards out when he stops. He stares out into the distance not looking at me. He seems completely relaxed. But he doesn’t say a word. Finally, I can’t stand the silence anymore.
“Nice magic show yesterday.”
“What?” he says distractedly. “Oh, that. Yes. Another interest of mine. You see those mountains in the distance?”
“There’s nothing else out there.”
“What do you think they are made of?”
I look hard and say, “Rocks?”
He takes out his telescope and scans the horizon. When he finds what he’s looking for, he hands me the glass and points to a spot in the distance. I don’t see anything but more of the monotonous land that we’ve passed through.
“I don’t see a damned thing.”
He points again.
“Your answer was more correct than you think. You said rocks rather than the more logical ‘stone.’ In fact, what surrounds us are not mountains, but rocks. Brilliantly huge rocks that giants might have used to mark the edges of their domain.”
“Are you saying there are giants out there?”
He shakes his head.
“No. Those rocks weren’t thrown by giants, but by angels. During the first war in Heaven, they were hurled at the fallen angels as they plummeted to their new existence below.”
“I thought the angels fell into Hell.”
“Falling bodies tend to drift as they spin through space.”
“Nine days is a long time to drift. I guess they could fall all over.”
“Exactly.”
“I never heard of ecclesiastic geology before. Daja said you knew something about everything.”
“Ecclesiastic geology. I will have to remember that,” he says. “Yes. Daja told me that you two had a talk last night.”
“She was doing most of the talking.”
“I doubt that. In any case, when she gets an idea in her head, it is hard to dissuade her.”
“What idea does she think about me?”
“That you are an assassin sent by my enemies to kill me.”
I snort back a laugh.
“I don’t know your enemies. Hell, I don’t know you at all.”
“Of course you know my enemies,” he says, and turns to me. “The God of Gods burns in my blood. His enemies will be annihilated.”
I give him a look.
“Right. After all the massacres, I knew you were all about the God of Love.”
“Don’t forget, he is also Lucifer these days. God’s nature has always been multifold, and never more than now. He dances with a dove in one hand and an ax in the other.”
“So, you’re fighting for the nice God and executing helpless slobs for the other. That’s a pretty convenient philosophy.”
“In time, you will see the wisdom.”
“If you say so.”
“Don’t forget. You have the blood of innocents on your hands, too, Mr. Pitts.”
“You sure talk about blood a lot.”
The Magistrate leans back his head and laughs. He looks like a maniac, but I’m sure now that he’s not. He’s something more complicated, but I don’t know what.
I say, “Did we come all the way out here so you could tell me that Daja is gunning for me?”
“Quite the contrary,” says the Magistrate. “She wants you to come deeper into the fold and learn more about our work.”
“Is that what you want?”
“We shall see.”
“What’s under the tarp?”
For the first time, he faces me.
“Do you not know? I thought you got a good look at it last night.”
I shake my head. All innocence.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“An unexplainable explosion. A guard injured, but with no memory of how. And you sleeping in such an uncomfortable, yet highly visible spot. It is all a very good scenario for a lost soul to get up to mischief.”
“I played minigolf once, but the windmill scared me. I try to avoid excitement these days.”
“Naturally,” he says. “Mimir speaks highly of you. She seems to think that you are more than a mere ruffian.”
Dammit, Cherry.
“Mimir might be more than a mere swami,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
I put my hands in my pockets.
“She just seems like an interesting person. Maybe she started the fire.”
“Why would she do that?”
I feel the pistol against my back and wish to hell I had some ammo.
“You know how oracles are. Huffing locoweed all day. Makes them unstable. Maybe she has a kind of vision she hasn’t told you about. Maybe she’s on her own side.”
The Magistrate stops for a minute and seems to consider the idea. Eventually he says, “You haven’t seen Megs around, have you? He seems to have gone missing.”
“He unfriended me when I set him on fire.”
“How sad for us all,” he says, then sighs. “The universe has drifted off its axis. It teeters from side to side. There is a chance it will tumble into oblivion.”
“Like a man once said: ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’”
The Magistrate takes a step closer to me and says, “We live in a time of so much secrecy. Let us play a game. Tell me one of your secrets and I’ll tell you one of mine.”
Daja again. I bet she?
??s been telling him my name isn’t Pitts.
“You first,” I say.
“All right. I know you have a gun. There. Now tell me one of your secrets.”
“It doesn’t have any bullets.”
He laughs another one of those uncomfortable big laughs.
“That’s no secret, my boy,” he says. “Do you think I would have brought you here otherwise?”
“You knew I had a gun but no bullets? How?”
He leans in even closer.
“Souls are so easy to read if you know the trick.”
“That’s a secret I wouldn’t mind knowing.”
“Perhaps I’ll teach you someday.”
We head back to camp.
“When are we pulling out?” I say. “It sounded like the Empress lit a fire under you.”
“We’ll go soon. Perhaps tomorrow.”
“It’ll be quiet tonight. I think everyone is partied out.”
“Still, we must be on our guard.”
“Your enemies. Right.”
“The closer we come to our goal, the more dangerous things will become.”
“I’m sure I’ll be very useful throwing rocks at them.”
“No need for that,” he says.
He takes something from his pocket and presses it into my hand. It’s a box of bullets. They’re even the right caliber. He couldn’t have read that on my face.
Right?
When we reach camp, the Magistrate shakes my hand.
“It was lovely chatting, Mr. Pitts. I hope we can do it again.”
I weigh the bullets in my hand. Someone must have told him about the Colt. That’s the only explanation. Or did I say something that gave me away? Am I that much of a rube?
When he lets go of my hand, I say, “Seeing as how we’re friends now, why don’t you go ahead and call me ZaSu?”
“I think I will stick to Mr. Pitts. It suits you more.”
I take a few bullets and start loading the Colt. The Magistrate heads back to his motor home. When I look up, I swear that every single person awake is looking at me. I guess not everyone gets face time with the messiah. I spin the cylinder on the pistol and snap it closed.
I didn’t want this high a profile, but at least now everyone knows I’m armed.
In the morning, we burn all the furniture and anything in town left standing. Burning ruins seems a little gratuitous even to me, but everyone seems to have a good time and the smoke gives us a good perspective when we hit the road. Unlike those days when it feels like we’re making no progress at all, watching the smoke recede behind us is nice. Proof we’re actually moving.