Ravenous Dusk (24 page)

"You'll never make it," one of them said, sizing him up, fear redoubling, bravado breaking down. "You might as well kill us now."

"Then I'll kill you and find out where it is by eating your brain." Bluff on bluff. He raised the rifle. Through the windshield, he could see a gray ribbon of car-choked highway. They were already off the base, probably headed for a safe house, or more likely a private airstrip.

"You better be a light sleeper, motherfucker," the agent said.

"I'm well-rested," Storch rasped. "Been sleeping for months. Just take me to the goddamned man in charge, and get me something to eat."

In the Bible, Karl Schweinfurter knew, the trials and troubles of others were told as object lessons to steer the faithful away from the pitfalls of sin. He figured his own troubles would make a fitting addendum to the Book of Job, but damned if he could tell what lesson one could take from it.

He sat on a bare wooden bench in Grossvater Egil's lodge. Snow-filtered moonlight cut blue runnels in the smoky gloom, which was only accented by the mellow red glow of the embers in the wood stove. The mounted heads of all the deer and elk in Idaho watched from the shadowy rafters. Even here in his private sanctum, Grossvater Egil did not display his
other
hunting trophies, but Karl knew they were here somewhere, because every young Heilige Berger got to see them once.

A Nazi SS stormtrooper in full parade regalia stood at attention beside the door. Karl knew it was only a mannequin, had pored over the medals and ribbons to while away the hours when the light was better, but now, as he drifted in and out of fevered sleep, the sentry seemed to shift its posture as if taking sly looks at him. The light came back as a sterling gleam off the silver gorget around the mannequin's neck, the ceremonial SS dagger in one gloved fist, the bayonet affixed to the Mauser Model 98 carbine rifle slung across its hollow chest. He did not know whether there was even a lock on the door, but he didn't want to try, because maybe it wasn't a mannequin, anymore, but a Jäger. It was just the sort of trap that Grossvater Egil would lay for him. It bothered him that he was scared of an empty uniform, but he was so absolutely terrified of every living man, woman and child in Heilige Berg that he far preferred its company to anything outside. The only thing that kept him thinking about trying to leave was that Grossvater Egil was coming back any minute, with a "surprise."

In the last week, life at the Heilige Berg compound had gone from bad to worse, and not just for him. About two days after he'd discovered their new neighbors, people at home started to get sick. First the Jägers, then the younger children and the old, then everyone had it. The sickness spread so fast that there was no time for hysteria, let alone careful quarantine measures. Those who could get out of bed at all moved like arthritic drunkards, and their foggy breath left beads of flash-frozen blood in their trails. He had been in the stockade for deserting his post since New Year's, and it was probably this that caused him to be spared.

Grossvater Egil retreated into his lodge and doubled the guard, though all other work in the compound ground to a halt. He issued only one statement: their enemies had stooped to biochemical warfare. Those who were still fit, if there were any, were to don gas masks and heavy protective gear and carry on the defense of the group; the rest should confine themselves to their quarters and pray. No medical treatment could save them from the cowardly weapons of the satanic armies of Z.O.G., but if they prayed, if they meditated on their greater reward in the next world, they would surely pass into grace, or be delivered back to fight on in this one.

Three days later, the combined prayers of the congregation had dwindled by half. The Jägers were nearly all gone, either bedridden or dead in the woods. The sounds of them screaming and coughing and shooting at nothing, or at each other, had gradually tapered off to silence.

In Karl's own house, there was only his wife left alive. Heidi had actually succumbed first, breaking down in coughing fits when she went to see him in the stockade. His parents had caught up with and surpassed her symptoms in a matter of days. He was let out and put to work caring for the sick, which meant cleaning up after them, since there was no medicine, and nobody knew what was wrong with them. Heilige Berg Church preached of the Living Power of God's Healing Word, and reviled all hospitals as temples of false pride.

Karl felt pretty bad when his parents died, it was all so sudden and so not like how people died in the movies, it was so ugly. They reminded him of the wasted human shells he'd seen on the buses that night, of the mythical matchstick-people of Auschwitz. Wherever he went in the compound, he heard the same gasping, gargling struggle for breath, as if the whole congregation were transforming into fish. His father, emaciated, palsied, died eating a moldy sandwich, face going purple, then black. His mother shrieked at him in German all night long until something tore inside her, and Heidi kept trying to tell him that the baby she carried was his, and that he owed her a decent Christian burial before she fell into a sleep like death herself. What bothered him most was that when they finally died, the bodies didn't go away. In movies and on TV, somebody always knew when somebody died, and they came to collect the body lickety-split. It took him until several hours after they started to stink before he realized he was the only somebody left.

He walked outside, then, bareheaded and without his heavy parka, walked into the brilliantly lit, crystal clear night, and he saw the strange golden dust blowing through the common field at the center of the compound. He looked up at the moon and saw the dust was streaming down from the pine trees: pollen from the cones, coming down like it was the high equinox. He could hear a few people crying in their cabins, but there were no lights on anywhere, no Jäger patrols between him and the gate. He looked up into the sky and felt as if he could leap up into it and come down anywhere in the world, anywhere it was warm and people didn't get all bent out of shape about Jesus and the Jews, anywhere that didn't have a Grossvater Egil.

He started to walk out, but then turned and went to the motorpool, for once having a good idea in time to benefit from it. Here, too, he found nobody, and noisily stole one of the stockyard trucks parked in the mechanic's garage. On the way out the gate, he turned up the radio on a Christian rock station out of Grangeville, and gave the compound the finger as he turned out onto the road. He never expected to come back again.

Of course, he'd expected to get more than eight miles away, too.

When the truck's engine seized up less than two miles out of White Bird, he screamed and cursed and prayed and pounded his fists on the steering wheel until they went numb, but to no avail. God was still intent on keeping his life interesting. Nobody in the Bible got to drive out of Sodom or Egypt in a truck, but nobody in the Bible ever froze to death, either. He slept in the cab, shivering in the thin jacket he'd thrown on and dreaming about those big furry hats that the Russians wore, with ear-flaps. He'd embrace Communism and all its evil ways for a furry hat, if God couldn't be bothered to bring him one.

In the morning, he searched the truck and came up with a brittle stick of Juicy Fruit gum, a half-used tube of Chap Stik, and about a dollar in small change from beneath the seats. The gum cut up the roof of his mouth, but he merrily chewed his breakfast and jingled his fortune in his pocket as he set off into the magnificent winter morning.

The sun beamed down through a rift in the rolling clouds, and before long he was warm enough to tie his jacket around his waist and apologize to God for the whole hat thing. He was at the foot of Heilige Berg valley, where the ragged terrain subsided as it merged with the broad prairie of the Salmon River valley and the I-95. With luck and God's admittedly stingy grace, he could get something to eat in White Bird and hitchhike out of here, maybe back home to Nampa. He'd go right to the press or the cops and make a big stink about what happened up here, and get help to those who could still be helped.

It was about then that he began to discover that he was pretty sick, himself. He felt a tightness in his chest, not from exhaustion, but as if his lungs were being squeezed. His stomach roared its protest over the trickle of teasing gum-juice, and his head started to hurt. His vision was shot through with ghostly rainbows, like the death-throes of a failing TV picture tube. He ate the Chap Stik and several fistfuls of snow to get his strength up, but his headache got worse, and he only felt weaker.

It was starting to snow again by the time he limped into White Bird. His jeans had frozen stiff on his legs, and only his waterproofed thermal underwear kept him from succumbing to hypothermia. He gave a ragged cheer and tried to offer up a hymn in German, but all he could remember was the Löwenbrau jingle. He tried to make it right, hoping God understood: "Heute abend, Heute abend, gibst nur Jesus Christ…"

The town proper was less than six blocks long and two wide, built between the junction of I-95 and State Road 117 and the frozen Salmon River, and consisted of a feed store, two gas stations, a sad strip mall and a Dairy Queen. Residential properties dribbled into the countryside in all directions, low, rambling ranch houses like forts dug into the snow, surrounded by monster pickup trucks and snowmobiles, and puffing hearty columns of wood smoke into the silver sky. Karl burned to go to one of them to ask for help, but he knew from the wisdom of the Jägers and his few experiences in town that the Heilige Bergers were not well liked in White Bird. Conservative redneck ranchers and poor townie trash that they were, yet they thought of Karl's people as a hostile survivalist cult, and not just purer followers of the same way of life they themselves held sacred. That they were a tax-free church which ran a thriving beef concern didn't warm their hearts, either.

Another thought occurred to him—he could walk to the Heilige Berg slaughterhouse, which was on the edge of town. As sick as everyone was, it was probably abandoned. He might find something to eat there, or steal another truck. But the idea of going anywhere near Heilige Berg property scared him more than freezing to death. They would take him back up there to die, they thought it was a mortal sin to see a doctor, and he was sick.

Not germ-sick, like the flu, but somehow worse. He felt heavy in the wrong places, his center of mass so badly thrown off that even when he gave walking his full attention, he still couldn't keep going in a straight line for more than a few steps at a time. His head felt like it was going to split open and cabbages sprout up through the burst sutures of his skull. He needed help, or he was going to die. If God had meant for him to die, he'd have left him up on the mountain, but he'd given him enough of a lift to make it within staggering distance of the town. It would be a mortal sin, he decided, not to carry out God's will and get help.

He fixed his gaze on the Dairy Queen marquee for the last mile, the tiny red dot swelling with agonizing slowness as he shambled along the shoulder of State Road 117, across the two-lane bridge over the Salmon River, and into White Bird. A few trucks passed by, but none stopped. He noticed one slowing down to watch him, saw eyes big and blank as marbles taking in his obvious plight, then passing on. He shuddered with more than cold. Maybe Grossvater Egil was right about the world. Maybe things were different in the new millennium, and the world truly was Satan's pitiless slaughterhouse.

In the Dairy Queen, they pretty much convinced him. The girl at the counter backed away from him and got the manager. In the pre-lunch lull, there was no one in the dining room but two gangly high school dropouts in DQ uniforms. His luck running true to form, the manager was a fat, middle-aged beaner, who came out and told him to beat it—
we don't serve choo people
. He didn't have the strength to argue, let alone leave. He pushed his change at them and asked for french fries one last time, then slumped across the counter.

The two boys dragged him out to the dumpster corral behind the Dairy Queen and kicked the shit out of him for about ten minutes. They came back after their shift was over an hour later and beat him up some more before they went home. When the sun began to set, Karl lay in a dumpster on a bed of wilted salad greens and rancid deep-fryer grease, too weak to blink away the snow settling on his eyes.

"Heute abend," he whimpered, "heute abend, gibst nur Jesus Christ…"

Someone stood over him. An angel of the Lord come to collect him, he hoped, but it was probably just the DQ jerks with a bunch of their friends.

"Der Meisterrasse, nicht wahr? Was machst du denn, in diese Mulltonne, Karl?"

"I'm sorry, Grossvater Egil," he managed, though the pain of moving his mouth brought fresh blood, and he swallowed one of his molars. "I thought it was God's will…that I go to get help. But—"

"All is God's will, Karl. Come home, boy. Your family misses you."

"What?"

"The rapture we have prayed for has come, Karl. Even for you, it will come." He did not remember being brought back to Heilige Berg, but he remembered the eyes, like the heads of steel nails in the dark, and the hands lifting him up, carrying him back, once again, to be purified.

And here he sat, waiting for Grossvater Egil and his surprise. It had been a day for surprises. When he'd awakened in his own bunk this morning, warm and dry, but still sick and sore, his mother and Heidi stood over him. Heidi held a baby. She was nicer to him than she'd ever been before, but she didn't try to tell him the baby was his, anymore. It was about three months premature, he figured; he'd never seen anything that tiny and unfinished alive outside of an incubator. It studied him with its lidless gray eyes, never making a sound, except once, it tugged Heidi's shirt and she leaned down to listen to it whisper in her ear, and then carried it out of the room. His parents were nice to him, too, so cloyingly sweet he had to get away.