839 AST #2
She thought about Ella Gresch, who had roasted to death screaming for water, screaming for help, and thought Horation Matthews
would need a hell of a soak to wash that off him.
“And how does your pastor know about it?”
“He has made a study of miracles.”
“But you’ll never get there. To this well. In five hours it’ll be Easter Sunday, and the King will blow this plane out of
the air.”
“Four hours,” he said. “Possibly only three. I imagine we crossed into UTC-4—that’s the Atlantic Time Zone—some while ago.
We’re rushing toward the hour of midnight as fast as it’s rushing toward us.” He didn’t sound worried.
“We’ll die. We’ll all die.”
“You must think not,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be on this plane with me. He said you might find safety with me . . . and
you have. I am protected, for now. And so are you, as long as you’re by my side.”
“How are you protected?” she asked. He seemed so sure of himself.
“How much do you know about me?” he asked.
“I looked you up in the library—and on Yahoo. I know you’re in a pretty intense church. I know the federal government doesn’t like the things your pastor says on the radio. Jacob Weyland, is it?”
“They don’t like that he goes on the radio and says there is a power higher than the US government. That there is a law higher
than their law.”
“Well, or that he says nurses and doctors who perform abortions ought to be beheaded.”
“Do you spend a lot of time worrying about the rights of medical butchers who ram vacuums into women and suck babies out in
pieces?” His tone never changed in pitch, never expressed anything in the way of feeling.
She ignored that and said, “And there was also a kerfuffle about plastic explosives? You were making your own and distributing
the packages to militia groups?”
“Chemistry doesn’t belong to the government, Miss . . . ?”
She hesitated, then said, “Alice Toklas,” not sure why that name came to her. She had read it somewhere once, maybe in college.
She said, “That’s all I know.”
“Not all. You also know about the dragon.” He laced his fingers together. “If there was ever any doubt in my mind about the
things I’ve had to do—about the life I’ve chosen to live—then it’s behind me now. I knew there were bad people out there,
people behind the whole rigged system, the banks and the courts, the abortion clinics and TV. People who want to keep us numb
and passive while they spread sickness. People who . . .”
But she didn’t care and found it hard to stay focused on what he was saying.
He lectured her like someone reading from an old text, a religious tract from an earlier century.
With his pale-eyed calm, and habit of speaking in the rhythms of one delivering a sermon, he was an impressive figure.
But almost everything in his head was a cliché.
Allie had been at the get-even game long enough to know that most really bad men thought entirely in clichés.
You would expect a paranoid to have a rich fantasy life, but in fact, most of them brimmed with the stalest sort of rubbish, and in the next 120 seconds or so, he managed to touch on all of it, working through the whole trite checklist:
√ global banking conspiracies operated by the new world order
√ the coming race war
√ the secret agenda behind rap music, namely, encouraging America’s daughters to engage in miscegenation
√ the secret agenda behind Madonna’s music, namely, encouraging America’s sons to try sucking the occasional dick
√ Vince Foster
√ Janet Reno
√ Hillary Clinton
√ Jews, Jews, and more Jews
He was like the flat-earther who believed the world was a vast game board resting on the top of a tower of turtles. To Horation
Matthews, the entirety of American life was a morally bankrupt world, held up by a cabal of Jews. It was Jews all the way
down. She didn’t know how you could fix a person like that. She didn’t know how one shook their maddening, serene certainty.
“. . . again and again they have tried to turn their worldly forces against me: their courts, their tax collectors, their
corrupt lawmen.” He put a hand on her wrist, and she stirred herself to look at him with rapt admiration. “Every time, I made
fools of them. There was nothing left but for our enemies to call upon powers unnatural. But if they believed their King of
Sorrows would shatter my nerve or my belief in God’s power, they misread me entirely. My faith has never been more certain
than it is now. The devil has moved one of his pieces against me, which proves there is a game in play. And you can’t play
chess with just the black pieces. A white army must surely stand opposed. I have countered his move with a play of my own.
My confederates are moving even now. Parker and Bridges. My own dragons.”
She frowned at that, wondering who they were, then let it go. It was a problem for another night, if there ever was another
night.
“None of this tells me why you think you’re safe on this plane,” she said.
He lifted a finger to signal for patience. “But you needed to understand why they hate me: it’s the power of my beliefs, the
power of my religion, which has held them at bay a thousand times already and will hold them at bay again tonight. Before
I broke camp, I prayed with our pastor, Father Weyland. And then my brothers and I helped him onto a cross. He remains there
even now, praying for my safety.”
“Tied to a cross?”
He stared at her blandly. It took her a moment to understand, and when she did, she felt a throb of horror in the pit of her
stomach.
“Nailed? You and your brothers nailed him to a cross?”
“Suffering is a crucible in which the raw ore of prayer is turned into an iron blade. Father Weyland’s spirit holds the dragon
at bay even now.”
She laughed incredulously. “How old is he?”
“I don’t know. Eighties.”
“You left an eighty-year-old nailed to a cross? Are you sure he’s still praying to save you? If I was in his holy loincloth, I’d be praying to die. He probably is dead by now!”
“I doubt it. He is strong in faith and body. My brothers will bring him water. My wives will wipe the blood from his wrists
and the sweat from his brow.”
Allie supposed it wasn’t worth raising an eyebrow over wives, plural. When you were talking to a man who had nailed his religious guide to a cross, it seemed a bit trivial to argue the
ethics of polygamy.
“We need to get off this plane. If King Sorrow is really out there—if he’s really coming for us tonight—we need to make them
land.”
“How would we do that?”
“I could tell them I’m having a heart attack.”
He placed two fingers on her wrist. “I don’t think they’d believe you. Your pulse isn’t even very fast.”
“They wouldn’t want to risk someone dying on the flight.”
“People die on planes, same as anywhere else. They cover them with a blanket and pretend they’re sleeping so as not to frighten the other passengers. Didn’t you know that?”
She shivered.
“You could—I don’t know—scream at me. Throw a punch. If we had a fight, a physical altercation—”
“—then we would be subdued and arrested when we land in London. And that won’t do. I need to get to St. Helen’s Well, and
so do you. Therein lies our chance of salvation.” He sat back in his seat and stared straight ahead. “We will be washed clean
and then find the serpent in his lair and have off his head. In truth, King Sorrow is more afraid of us than we are of him.”
“Wow,” Allie said. “Speak for yourself, bro.”