Infernal Revelation : Collected Episodes 1-4 (9781311980007) (17 page)

Gideon recoiled at the sight of the rage in
the old man's eyes. Sheriff Cermak had been pissed at him before,
but this -- there was a contempt in the sneer on his lips, and an
undeniable hatred on his face that he'd never seen before.

Sheriff Cermak knocked the chair aside and
took two large steps up to Gideon, shotgun held tightly across his
chest. "I didn't want you! I never wanted you! No one fucking
wanted you, you worthless little shit!"

"Easy!" Gideon half-raised his hands, a
chill down his spine, blinking. The old man had lost it. There was
no humanity in those eyes. "I'm just here to get my shit and
go."

"Your shit? What shit? You don't own a damn
thing I didn't give you or that you didn't steal."

"Fine. Fine. I'll just go. I'm getting out
of town." Gideon stepped away, back into the hall. "You won't have
to deal with me ever again, okay?"

"I shouldn't have had to fucking deal with
you to begin with! Baker was the one that volunteered. I said he
was foolish, that you were monsters, that we should have drown
y'all in buckets and been done with it. But no, Baker volunteered
our fucking town to raise you hell-spawn, and it's all come to
fucking this!"

"Wait, you knew?" Gideon stepped towards the
older man. "You fucking knew?"

The sheriff raised his shotgun.

Gideon slapped it out of his hands almost as
a reflex, sending it tumbling to his bed. "You fucking knew what I
was? What we were?"

His foster-father dove towards the dropped
weapon.

Gideon grabbed him by the shoulders, pushing
him back, slamming him against the wall, almost screaming. "You all
knew?"

Bill struggled. "They didn't know shit.
Baker and Ross thought that if they raised you right, within the
Church, you'd grow up righteous. The Kleins thought that the way
you developed would teach them something. But I knew, you're
fucking right I knew."

Gideon slammed him back against the wall
hard enough to make the house shudder. "What did you know, you
miserable old fuck?"

The sheriff's voice dropped to a whisper. "I
knew that the only thing they'd learn was that you were corrupt,
through and through. I knew you'd turn out like this. I knew it was
starting as soon as Bob sent word that the other one was headed our
way, that it was coming to Laton."

"Bob?" Gideon asked. "Bob who?"

He suddenly became aware that his foster
father had worked his revolver free of its holster. Gideon grabbed
his father's hand, squeezing and yanking it upwards. The sheriff
howled and dropped the gun.

Filled with a sudden furious rage, anger at
years of abuse, years of neglect, years of being lied to, Gideon
hurled his step-father across the room. The man smashed through the
doorway and into the hall, where he lay in a crumpled heap, like a
pile of dirty clothes.

Each step Gideon took towards the fallen
sheriff felt thunderous, ponderous, and each step brought memories
to the surface. Memories of the sheriff's harsh words, his disdain,
his emotional neglect. Memories of Gideon's suffering at the hands
of bullies like Barny and his cronies. The world receded into a red
haze as he stepped into the hallway, towering over the groggy
sheriff.

"Do it." Bill tried and failed to get up.
"Show them I was right, you devil."

"Gideon? Dad?"

Gideon spun to see his foster-brother
staring at them from the end of the hall. "Dale?"

"What are you doing?" Dale dropped his
skateboard. "Are you fighting?"

"Wait, no--"

Dale took a few steps into the hall, then
stopped, his face paling. "What did you do? What did you do to
dad?"

Gideon looked down towards the fallen
sheriff, then back up at his foster-brother. "He attacked me!"

He started towards Dale, stopped by his
foster-father's weak hand grasping at his leg.

"You leave him!" The Sheriff dragged himself
onto his elbows. "Run, boy. Run! Save yourself!"

Dale's face set itself grim. "Leave dad
alone!"

"He pointed a gun at me, Dale--"

Dale grabbed a coffee mug from the kitchen
counter, and hurled it down the hall towards his
foster-brother.

The mug shattered against the wall next to
Gideon's head, and he raised an arm instinctively. "Dale,
wait!"

"Get out!" Dale's face was burning red, and
he grabbed a plate. "Get out of here!"

Gideon reached back into his room and
grabbed the blue canvas duffel go-bag, packed with everything he'd
need for the next few days, just as the plate shattered against his
back.

"Dale..." He spared a last desperate glance
back towards his foster-brother, then made a dash out the back
door.

Tears blurred Gideons eyes as he ran around
the side of the house, tearing through Mrs. Foster's fence like it
wasn't even there. Shame burned his face, not for what he'd done to
his father, but for bringing Dale into their conflict. He'd always
tried so hard -- so hard -- to keep his younger brother out of
it.

Towards Bill Cermak he felt nothing but a
sense of betrayal. Not because the man had tried to shoot him, but
because he'd known. All this time, he'd known the truth behind what
Gideon was, what the others were, and had resented him, hated
him.

Sirens in the distance. Gideon ducked
through a few more yards, not sure where to go, where to hide, what
to do.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was easy for
Delilah to get back into the school library after Mr. Gonzales had
locked up. She did have a key, after all. She wasn't supposed to,
but Gideon had acquired it for her during her sophomore year. That
had been the rough one.

Freshman year she was a novelty. The
twelve-year-old prodigy had been too new for Laton's teens to
really know what to think. By Sophomore year, though, they'd
decided that she was a twerp, a freak, a nerd, a subject for mirth
and mockery. Seldom to her face and never in front of the teachers,
but she knew what they were saying. She could figure it out. She
was, after all, a genius.

Delilah began spending more and more time in
the library and on the internet where, the old saying went, nobody
knew you were a dog. Or a twelve year old wunderkind.

The only problem was that the computer lab
was technically only open during study periods, and kept locked at
other times. She'd tried asking Mr. Gonzales if he could let her in
to work after school, but he'd only shrugged and said that rules
were rules. Delilah had come to believe that the school librarian
had a drinking problem, and just wanted to cut out early to hit The
Bum Steer, Laton's only bar.

After much deliberation she'd asked her old
grade-school classmate Dale's older brother Gideon to steal it for
her. He'd always been nice to her, if a bit distant because of the
tremendous age difference between twelve and fifteen. The massive
crush she'd been nursing made making the request one of the most
difficult things she'd had to do in her young life.

He didn't hesitate to agree, seeming to
relish the idea of sticking it to "the man," which at the time she
had taken to mean that he held a grudge against Mr. Gonzales.

The theft been the start of a beautiful
friendship.

She'd taken the key and had a copy made down
at Fred's Hardware, then had had Gideon return it, which was
apparently more difficult than the theft had been. He managed.

From that point on, the library's computer
lab became her refuge. A place of solace, especially after classes,
when everyone went home. Her parents never even mentioned her
coming home late.

Not that she didn't have internet access at
home, but she preferred to stay out as late as possible. Her
parents' indifference was harder to ignore when it was right there,
in her face.

Of more immediate importance, the school was
part of the city's intranet. It was a lot easier to break in here
than it would have been at home, and the connection was faster.

She felt a little bad about cutting out and
leaving all of her half-siblings behind like this, so she'd see
what she could find out from the civic records. She'd look for
information about their adoptions, the agency that had placed them,
about that town Melchezidek was looking for, about anything.

The work would, incidentally, help distract
her from the agony of waiting for Gideon to return.

The security protocols had been changed
since she'd logged in to find Lily and her friends' hospital and
police records, only a week prior. New passwords. A new firewall to
work around. Had they detected her earlier intrusion?

She left the computer lab for Mr. Gonzales's
desk in the main library.

A quick glance told her that he had finally
started taking the memos about not keeping his password on a
post-it fixed to his monitor seriously.

"Feck feck feck."

If he was trying to remember the password,
it'd have to be something simple. She drummed her fingers and took
a look at his desk. Framed photo of his wife, Maria, and their son,
Felipe.

She turned on his computer and tried logging
onto the intranet, using MARIA as the password -- Mr. Gonzales had
a penchant for the Caps Lock key.

Didn't work. She tried FELIPE. Then
MARIAFELIPE and FELIPEMARIA.

"Shiest." Nope.

Hm. Phillipe was what, six? FELIPE2008.

He'd been born in April. The day after
Easter, she recalled. Mr. Gonzales had been out that Monday.

FELIPE041708.

Bingo. Delilah settled into the seat,
fingers flying over the keyboard as she navigated from the school's
main access page to the city hub. Despite his lax security, Mr.
Gonzales moonlighted as the city IT expert, so finding anything
pertinent should be easy with the tools at her disposal.

Starting with the adoption records. She'd
looked up her own before, of course, but--

Huh. Mr. Gonzales's password didn't
work.

Well, it worked, but it just redirected to a
blank page.

She opened the page's source code in a new
window. Whoever had updated the security protocol -- probably
Gonzales himself -- had overlooked an error in the php script.

"Sloppy sloppy... what the frick." There was
another level of redirect here, one she'd never have noticed if she
wasn't digging around in Gonzales's spaghetti code. Another level
of redirect, leading to two different databases of records. One
that was the records that she'd seen before, and one that was
older. One that hadn't been updated in almost a decade.

"Holy crap," she said, scanning its
contents, her mouth drying as anxiety rose from her guts to her
throat. "Oh my shit."

This was... this was big. Holy crap, this
was big.

She just stared at the screen, hands poised
over the keyboard, dread welling up from somewhere deep within her
soul, trying to deny the implications of what she was looking
at.

***

"Mom? Dad?" Lily
dropped her schoolbag on the couch on her way to the
kitchen.

Dad was at the counter, making himself a
sandwich. He smiled at her over his shoulder. "Hi, Pumpkin."

"How was school?" Her mother's voice came
from the laundry room.

"Fine."

Her dad tied off the bread bag. "Was that
Derek dropping you off? Is he coming in?"

"He's got practice," Lily said.

"Don't you have track?" Her mom asked.

"I wanted to talk to you guys, if you have a
moment?"

Dad clucked his tongue. "You shouldn't skip
practice. Not if you want to compete at your best."

"Please," she said. "This is important."

Her mother entered from the laundry room.
"Of course, darling, you know you can talk to us about
anything."

"I'm just saying that if track is important
to you, you can't skip." Dad punctuated his words with air-jabs
from his mustard-coated butter-knife. "It's not like you couldn't
talk to us this evening."

"Dear," Mom said.

"I'm just saying."

"Go on, honey."

Lily sat on one of the stools along the
kitchen island. "I was just wondering. You know. About how I was
adopted."

Her father slathered his bread, while her
mother stood, leaning back against the counter.

"I was just wondering... you know... about
my birth parents."

"What about them, dear?" Mom asked.

"I just..." Lily made a vague gesture,
trying to figure out how to articulate herself. "I just wanted to
know about them. You know."

"You know as much about your birth mother as
we do," Mom said.

Lily had heard the story when she was
twelve, and first asked her parents about it. She'd known she was
adopted, of course. Her parents had never made a secret of that,
and had even walked her through the concept when she was six,
explaining that while their family was different from the others in
Laton, even though she didn't look like them the way her friend
Jessie looked like her parents, they didn't love her any less. Lily
had never doubted that.

Her birth-mother was a woman named Delores,
who had come to town pregnant and given birth. She didn't stay, and
couldn't take care of a baby, so she'd left Lily with the hospital.
They were going to send her to an adoption agency in Odessa, but
Tom and Lisa Baker had quickly fallen in love with little Lily and
taken her as their own.

"Why did she come here to have me?" Lily
asked. "That never made sense."

Her mother opened the refrigerator and took
out a pitcher of sweet tea. "Things are different now, darling, but
you need to remember that people haven't always been kind to women
who find themselves in that situation. It was unusual in the
nineties, but young pregnant girls leaving town and coming back
without babies used to be the way people did things."

Her father reached past her mother to grab a
tomato out of the fridge. "Nobody talked about it, but everyone
knew what it meant."