Cruel World (21 page)

The day grew around him as he traveled. The Earth seemed to be coming alive with each passing hour. More green buds appeared at the ends of branches, a V of geese cruised over the highway heading north, and the temperature warmed enough for him to lower the windows and let the breeze flow across his skin.

Quinn ate as he drove, chewing every so often on a chunk of jerky and sipping on bottled water. There was no sign of life along the road other than animals, their habits uninterrupted by the catastrophe befallen to the dominant species. He tried the radio every ten miles, spinning the dial through the hissing channels. Only one station still broadcast any music, and after an hour of listening to it, it was clear that the last action the DJ had taken was to loop the same seven songs endlessly. He was about to try the AM band when the road dropped into a hollow and curved, opening to a huge expanse beyond.

A massive concrete bridge sat before him, spanning a wide river fifty feet below. The water was a murky brown, flowing fast with the winter’s meltings.

Quinn brought the Raptor to a halt at its edge, gazing across the breadth of the river. The bridge itself was littered with several piles of debris. It looked as if a car crash had been cleaned up at some point. Dark stains covered the first fifty feet of the structure, and a narrow cable snaked from one side to the other at its midpoint, its ends disappearing from view over the railings. A red and brown heap lay at the far side of the bridge. When he brought up his pair of binoculars, he saw it was a deer’s carcass torn asunder, its intestines draped around it in an expanded pool of dried blood.

He set the binoculars down, glancing once in the rearview mirror. The back roads had been mercifully clear, and he hadn’t seen a stilt all morning.

But this bridge…

He rolled down his window and listened. Water chuckled and the wind spoke in the reaching branches of trees beside the road. Quinn swallowed, drawing out the XDM and laying it on the passenger seat before accelerating. His tires began to hum on the concrete, the sun glinting off the river below in a blazing ball of orange. As he neared the center of the bridge, he thought he heard something, a yell or a horn of some kind, and drew his foot off the gas, eyes flying to the mirrors and ahead once more.

Something was wrong with the cable lying in the middle of the bridge.

It was moving, uncoiling, straightening as he approached it. For a moment he thought it was his point of view and the movement of the vehicle playing tricks on his eyes. As he realized what was happening, he jammed on the brakes, but it was too late.

The cable snapped tight across his path, flying up and toward the truck with liquid speed.

It sunk into and through the grille, slamming him to a stop. The Raptor’s tires screeched as boiling anti-freeze geysered skyward. The airbag deployed, sending a chemical dust into his eyes and mouth, choking him even as he crashed into it. He rebounded, bashing the back of his skull off the headrest.

The world fluttered, and the engine died.

He tasted blood.

His vision spun, and his ears hummed with the impact.

Quinn fumbled for the pistol even as the sounds of a motor reached him, but the gun was gone, lost somewhere in the crash. He tried to sit up, but the air bag pressed against his chest. It was full of air and his lungs had none. His leg hurt where the stitches were, the ones Alice had put in so carefully, twice. She’d be angry with him if he’d tore them again. He nearly laughed. The buzzing in his ears faded, but with it came a new sound.

Footsteps.

There was someone on the bridge. Someone outside the door, looking in through the window at him, but their features were indistinct, like the figures in his dream two nights before. The door opened.

“What in God’s name are you?” a gravelly voice said.

“Please,” Quinn said, trying to focus. And as his vision straightened, all he could see was the butt of a rifle. Then darkness.

Chapter 19

Sacrifice

Quinn came awake to blinding pain in his face and the douse of ice water cascading over his head and shoulders.

Reality blazed into existence as he rose from unconsciousness. His hands were bound together behind a wooden chair he sat upon. He was in a room made of cinderblocks stacked together, their borders gapped, daylight pouring between them. Crude crosses were drawn on several of the blocks in what looked like charcoal. The roof was a single chunk of ribbed steel, and there were two people standing before him. One was a middle-aged man with a gray goatee and cold eyes holding an empty ice cream pail. And the other was a woman with long, straggly, blond hair, her age somewhere near the man’s but harder to determine because of the taut skin covering her face, stretched tight by high cheekbones and a broad smile.

“Can you hear me?” the man asked, and Quinn remembered his voice as the last thing he’d heard before being knocked unconscious.

“Yes.”

“And it can speak, too,” the blond woman said. Her voice was velvety soft, a frigid purr that sent a splinter of ice down his spine.

“You can have my supplies,” Quinn said.

“Thank you, we’ve taken them already,” the woman said.

He waited a beat, shifting his eyes between the two of them.

“Then what do you want?”

“We want our world back, demon.”

“What?”

“Oh come now. We were doing so well. I’ll ask the questions and you answer them. Okay?” the woman said tilting her head to one side. She came closer and Quinn could smell her, a molding flowery scent competing with rancid body odor. He looked at the man who merely glared back at him, freezing stare, eyes half-lidded.

“I was just trying to cross the bridge.”

“Jimmy, can you refresh its memory on how this works?” the woman said, stepping to the side, her smile unwavering. The man lunged forward, and Quinn didn’t have time to flinch.

Jimmy’s fist drove into his solar plexus, and his lungs caught fire. He gasped then gagged, stomach acid racing into his mouth. He coughed and spit, the cramped muscles in his midsection slowly loosening.

“There. That’s better. Now, where did you come from?” the woman asked.

“Maine,” Quinn managed, though the word was more of a moan.

“Hmm, you’re not fooling us, harbinger. You crawled from the cracks of the earth, divulged from the stinking bowels of the underworld.”

“What?”

“Jimmy?”

Jimmy’s fist connected with his shoulder this time, knuckles smacking the tender flesh where the nitrogen had scalded him. Quinn cried out as tears flooded his eyes. The pain was something alive, writhing in time with his accelerated heartbeat.

“Listen to me, beast, you have no power here in the sovereign nation of God Almighty. You will answer my questions or suffer his wrath.” Spittle flew from her mouth as she spoke, some of it landing on his face as she neared him. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Quinn breathed. Behind his back he began to feel how he was bound to the chair. The rope around his wrists wound through one wooden support. He touched the wood with his fingers. It was decoratively carved, and thin.

“Good. Again, admit that you are the cause of this plague of the body and mind that has killed so many of the unfaithful and changed the rest into creatures designed by the fallen one.”

Quinn glanced past Jimmy and saw a rickety wooden door set into the building behind him. There was no handle on it. He nodded.

“I am.”

Jimmy inhaled and tipped his head back, closing his eyes. He began to mumble a prayer under his breath. The woman traced the sign of the cross on her forehead, the manic smile still pulling at her mouth.

“I knew it. The moment I saw your cursed face, I knew we’d found the cause of the downfall. Jimmy, go get him. Tell him the news; tell him he was right.”

Jimmy turned away and pushed at the wooden door, which swung open. No lock.

“Before you go,” Quinn said, stopping the man in his tracks. “You should know you’re all doomed. By bringing me here, you’ve killed yourselves.”

The woman’s smile finally faded as she looked at Jimmy. The man pulled the door shut and flexed his fingers before balling them both into fists. He stepped forward, winding back his right arm, knuckles raw and red from their prior use.

Quinn snapped both his feet up and kicked Jimmy in the chest.

The other man’s eyes widened, and he made a squawking sound in his throat. Quinn felt his chair tip backward and tucked his hands beneath the seat as far as they could go as he fell. The chair hit the concrete floor, the impact jarring him. Wood cracked and he pulled hard against the ropes binding him. There was another loud snap and the bindings at his wrists loosened.

Quinn rolled to the side and felt the back of the chair come with him. Then Jimmy was above him, a short steel tube shining in one hand. Quinn drove a heel out and caught him in the crotch. Jimmy blanched, his knees unhinging. As he fell, Quinn whipped his foot around and connected with the other man’s chin.

Jimmy’s head rocked to the side and his eyes rolled to the whites. He crumpled backward, his skull cracking like the chair against the floor.

“Help! Demon!” the woman shrieked, and started to run across the small room toward the door. Quinn bucked his hips up and slipped his wrists past his ass, then brought his knees to his chest, threading the rope over his feet. By the time he was able to stand, the woman had escaped the room, her shrill cries like that of a wounded bird. Quinn ran to the door, banged it open and paused.

A huge, open yard spread out around him, the new grass of spring growing everywhere. Dozens of cabins lined the edges of the clearing in a circle and several massive oaks grew at its center. A long, low building to his right had a large steeple growing from its roof, a steel sculpture of Jesus hanging from its wide cross. The woman was running toward the church, glancing back every few steps, her dirty hair floating behind her. She yelped seeing him outside the structure and poured on more speed. The door of the church opened and two men stepped outside, their eyes squinting in the bright sunlight.

Quinn ran.

He pelted away, head throbbing, stomach sick with adrenaline, skin slick with sweat. A woman holding a small child opened the door to a cabin ahead of him. Her eyes bulged and she retreated, slamming the door shut. Yells grew behind him, more and more voices joining in until it sounded as if a mob were pursuing him.

He flew past the first row of cabins.

Beyond a second row was a wooden fence at least ten feet high. He would have one chance to run up it and grasp the top. He leaned forward, a high-pitched scream carrying to him from the way he’d come.

As he passed the second row of cabins and readied himself to jump, a rope snapped up from the ground, pulling tight near his ankles.

His feet hooked it and he was falling, the ground rushing up to meet him much too fast. He slammed into it, skidding forward, rocks and dirt taking bites of his skin. All the oxygen was gone from the world; there was none in his lungs. He rolled over to his side, attempting to get up.

Twin boys, no more than ten years old, watched him from a dozen yards away, their hands still gripping either end of the rope. One of them smiled at him.

A man wearing a gray, button-up shirt approached from the direction of the church followed by the woman who had been in the concrete hut. She blubbered something incoherent and sank to her knees, pulling the two twin boys to her chest as she tilted her head back.

“Praise the Lord. You boys did so good,” she said, her grin stretching across her face again.

Quinn tried to get onto his hands and knees, but the man in the gray shirt kicked him back down. Soon he was surrounded by people, so many people. Men and women and children of all ages, clustering around him in a circle, their eyes flitting to him and then away. Many of their hands were clasped, their fingers intertwined in prayer. All of them were dressed the same, the woman in full-length skirts, the men in the button-up shirts and blue jeans. The circle began to move apart at the far end and a short, stocky man with silver hair strode through the gap. His eyes were shaded behind a pair of dark sunglasses, and he wore a black shirt tucked over his significant belly. He moved without hesitation, his strides purposeful and quick. He paused near Quinn’s feet, the dark lenses reflecting his prone form in the dirt.

“And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth.” The man spoke in a deep baritone that carried well within the circle and bounced off the fence. He squatted beside Quinn, his mouth curling up in a sneer. “Sleep now, demon, and soon we will have the truth.”

Quinn tried again to roll over, but something struck him hard in the back of his head and the sun winked out into darkness.

~

“Wake up.”

The words filtered down to him from a great height. A thudding ache pulsed at the base of his neck. Silence roared in his ears. Quinn blinked, a wood-paneled ceiling coming into focus. He turned his head. He was on a bed. Wide straps ran across his chest, hips, and shins. A fire burned low behind the glass doors of a stove in the corner of the room.

“Over here, handsome.”

Quinn turned his head the opposite way.

The bullish man in the black shirt sat in a chair that looked like a throne beside the bed. His sunglasses were gone, and Quinn saw that his eyes were brown and deep set, piggish and watery. A peppering of whiskers covered his jowly face.

The man smiled.

“Where am I?” Quinn said. The words were too large for his mouth, his tongue thick and dry.

“My home.” He sprung from his chair, moving like a much lighter man, and grasped Quinn’s hand pinned beneath the strap. “Archer Tigmund, at your service. Although I should say you’re at mine at the moment.” He grinned again and released Quinn’s fingers before re-seating himself on the velvet-covered chair. “May I have the pleasure of your name?”

“Quinn.”

“Quinn, you know, I like that. Much better than Ralph. That was my given name. But I changed it. Archer is so much more distinguished and pleasant to say, don’t you think?”

“What do you want with me?”

“Ah, right to the meat of it. I like you, Quinn. You’re a Godsend.” Archer laughed and clapped his hands, lacing his fingers together before bowing his head. “Dear Lord Almighty in the highest, we, your faithful servants of the physical world, come to you this day to offer up a tribute in representation of our loyalty to your grace. This harbinger of the apocalypse, we do now lay waste to in your name just as you cast out the most beautiful of all angels by the name of Lucifer. Lord hear our prayer.”

Archer looked up from his clasped hands and smiled.

“What a load of shit; am I right?”

Quinn gazed at him and then licked his lips. “I don’t understand.”

Archer stood and began to pace around the bed. “Do you know where you are, Quinn?”

“Somewhere in Pennsylvania.”

“Actually it’s Ohio, not that it matters anymore whatsoever. Everything’s gone. The government, the military, the media, everything. But not here. Here we have sanctity and preservation. It’s like a damn game reserve of human beings.” Archer paused and studied him. “But it’s my game reserve. See, I created all this fifteen years ago. The First Church of Eternal Salvation. Has a nice ring to it, right? My father was a Lutheran minister, and he made me learn the bible front to back, cover to cover, when I was only ten. I got picked on a lot growing up, wasn’t easy to be a preacher’s son. That and I was a fat little fucker. But you know what I learned, Quinn?” Archer bent over him, close enough to smell the man’s cologne, something sharp and tangy. “People are always looking for someone stronger than they are.” He straightened and went to the stove, warming his hands above its top.

“What does this have to do with me?” Quinn asked.

“Everything, my friend, everything.” Archer made his way back to the chair and dropped his girth into it. “When I started this church, I had three followers. We’d go into Cleveland, stand on the street corner, and hand out flyers. Our congregation grew over the years, but it wasn’t until my good old daddy died that things really took off. See, he invested enough money to leave me a sizeable chunk with which I bought this land, built these buildings, and began to preach full-time. Now you might be thinking, where’s he going with this. Well, I’ll tell you, Quinn.” He leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. “People are stupid. They’re sheep. They follow anyone with a plan. But if that plan takes even the slightest detour, well, they start to look elsewhere.

“I have a sweet deal here, my friend. I’m looked to as the supreme leader in all respects. I have all the money and food that I want. And the women…” Archer shook his head and whistled between his teeth. “…there’s five that share my bed right now, all of them trying to get a taste of the divine.” He chuckled and his stomach jiggled.