The Falling Away (27 page)

Dylan felt his stomach tighten. “A message?” he asked, barely able to make his voice a whisper.

“From . . . Claussen? Does that sound right? You know a Claussen?”

Dylan cleared his throat, wishing for another bottle of water. He didn't want to hear the next words, didn't want to hear them at all. He needed to stop Webb before he went any further. “Maybe you should just rest—”

“He said . . . he said you were chosen because of the pillbox. That you needed to remember the pillbox.”

Kill box
, Joni said inside.

Shut up
.

Webb shook his head. “No, no, no, no. It wasn't pillbox. It was kill box. Remember the kill box.” Webb looked at him, hope and wonder in his eyes.

Dylan closed his own eyes, took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “I'll remember.”

When he opened his eyes once again, Webb was fast asleep, a look of peace and satisfaction on his face. Dylan felt a hand on his shoulder, jumped. But this time, Quinn didn't take her hand away.

And this time, he was glad she didn't.

44

Twenty minutes later, back in Dylan's motel room, they still hadn't spoken.

Too many images swirled in his mind, threatening to drown him. And yet, for a change, he resisted the urge to divide the thoughts, to send them to the kill box.

Suddenly, he needed to distance himself from the kill box.

Quinn had spent the last twenty minutes in the chair at the desk, remaining absolutely still, as if in some kind of deep trance. Dylan wasn't even sure he'd seen her blink in that time.

But at last she stirred. “He'll sleep. He'll forget,” she said, obviously referring to Webb in the adjacent room.

“Well, I'm pretty sure I'll never sleep. Or forget.”

She shrugged, which wasn't the reassurance Dylan had hoped would come.

“That what you did to me?” he asked. “That . . .”

“Prayer?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Sure, I've prayed for you, Dylan. Prayed over you. But you're not the same as Webb. You're . . . more complicated.”

“How so?”

She stood, went to the sink and mirror at the far end of the room, ran some water and splashed it on her face. Grabbing a towel, she turned and looked at Dylan once again. “You're a chosen, for starters.”

Chosen. Why wasn't he surprised that word had entered his life once again. Only problem was, all he'd ever been chosen for was pain and suffering. Joni. Claussen. The drugs. And now this. Not that he believed any of it.

Quinn went back to her seat, spoke again. “Those of us who are part of the Falling Away, we're what you might call . . . a spiritual army.” She stopped. “No, that's not quite right. We're more like inoculators. We find people infected by demonic activity and inoculate them, keeping them from spreading their disease. Like you just saw with Webb. That's what we do. We find the demon infestations—like HIVE—and we cleanse them before they can spread the infection.”

“A demon virus.”

“In a way, yes.”

“Yeah, well, I wondered when you were going to pull out the elevator pitch. I don't live in the sixteenth century; I don't believe in demons.”

She shrugged. “You can choose not to believe in bullets. Won't stop one from killing you.”

“Look, I've heard the whole come-to-Jesus thing before. Guy I was stationed with in Iraq.”

“What'd he say?”

“Said I was . . . chosen.” He felt uncomfortable saying the word. It was one thing to have the religious zealots toss it around; it was quite another to say it himself. Especially because it was so untrue.

“Claussen,” Quinn said. “The man Webb mentioned.”

“Yeah.” Dylan swallowed, tasting the bitter tang of rising fear. “'Course, he said he was chosen, too, and he got killed on a highway outside of Baghdad. Fat lot of good being chosen did him.”

Quinn stared. “The explosion you were in? The bomb? Did he die in that?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about that.”

Dylan was mad now. “What do you mean, tell you about that? What's to tell? Farmer with a donkey hit a pressure plate on an IED; Claussen was the closest one to him, and he got killed.”

“But you didn't.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Dylan went quiet. After a few moments, Joni spoke inside:
Tell her
.

“Yes, Dylan. Tell me what you're trying to hide.”

“It doesn't make any difference. It was all coincidence, luck.”

“What was?”

“That Claussen blocked most of the blast, which saved me.” He felt tears stinging his eyes as he said it. So many times he'd thought about it since then. So many times. “So you see? He wasn't chosen. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“And now, Webb talking about you being chosen, mentioning Claussen's name, telling you to remember the kill box . . . I suppose that's coincidence too.”

You're still not telling her
, Joni said inside.

Dylan glanced at Quinn.

“Go ahead,” she said.

He sighed. It didn't appear there was any way out of this. And what did it matter anyway? It wasn't like any of it was real, was true, was part of his life.

“The morning before the explosion,” he said, then stopped and cleared his throat. “The morning of the explosion, I asked him why he always prayed before each of our missions, always asked God to show us we were chosen. His exact words—I remember them clearly—were always ‘Open our eyes to Your way, Lord help us to see life as Your loved and chosen ones.'”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, that always struck me. I mean, I went out on over three hundred missions with him, and he always prayed that. So I said to him, you've prayed that three hundred times now. If God hasn't opened your eyes—and you're a person who actually believes in God—what makes you think your eyes are ever going to be opened?”

“What did he say?”

“He said he wasn't praying for his eyes to be opened; he was praying for my eyes to be opened. And he figured, since I was asking about it, that it was a sign that it was starting to happen.” Dylan glared at her now. “And maybe he was right, but only for a few minutes. Maybe I was seeing something in what he'd been saying. But then God killed him while I watched, and I couldn't do anything about it. So yeah, maybe my eyes were opened by that morning, but opened to the reality that there is no God. How could He kill a man who prayed to Him each and every time we went out on a mission? If that kind of God exists, He's not anyone I can believe in.”

“So you think God killed him.”

“Exactly.”

“But you just told me God doesn't exist.”

Dylan hesitated.

“Well . . .”

“No
well
. Either He exists, or He doesn't.”

Dylan shrugged. “Okay, fine. We'll say He exists. Doesn't change the fact that He killed Claussen. Why would I want to know anything more about that God?”

“You're setting it up as an either/or, but those aren't the only possibilities.”

“Enlighten me.”

“You say either God doesn't exist, or He does exist and He killed Claussen.”

“Yes.”

“But what if God exists, and He
didn't
kill Claussen? Isn't that a possibility?”

Dylan couldn't believe the idiocy of this woman. “No, it's not. God's supposed to be all-powerful, all-knowing. So He could have saved Claussen; He could have killed me instead.”

“Once again, Dylan, that's not the world we live in. That's the original Falling Away, if you will: when we rebelled against God, we broke this perfect world we live in. So now there's disease, now there's death and evil. But that wasn't God. That was us.”

“You're letting God off the hook. He could wipe all that away, if He wanted to.”

“If you were a parent, you could put your kid in a giant cage, keep him locked away from injuries and pains and heartaches. You could wipe out any chance of his ever being hurt, if you wanted to. But would that child ever become a real person? Someone who could interact with the world? Would he ever experience real joy?”

“That's not the same thing.”

“Of course it isn't. That's one child and one parent. We're talking about all of humanity and all of creation. What might this world look like if God just locked away all of our struggles, all of our pains? If you want the potential for ultimate love and ultimate joy, Dylan, you also have to accept the potential for ultimate hate and ultimate suffering. That is the real world; that is the world we live in.”

Dylan went quiet, unsure he wanted to continue the conversation.

“You didn't die in Iraq, Dylan. But you've been acting like you're dead.”

Dylan shrugged.

“You feel guilty. That's natural. Survivor's guilt, they call it.”

“I had plenty of guilt before I ever got to Iraq.”

“It's because you were chosen, just like Claussen said. All of us are, in some way. But different levels. Some people are sensitive to the chosen . . . like your friend Claussen, it sounds like, or Couture, the guy Andrew took you to see. Some can sense even more than that.”

Quinn paused, seemed to press at her hand. “Like those of us in the Falling Away. We see things, feel things most people can't; that's why we often develop these compulsions, these supposed delusions. Because we don't just experience this reality; we also get tastes of the spiritual reality all around us. Sometimes we have to channel those spiritual realities, those demonic diseases, out of people.” She paused again. “As you just saw. But you're a chosen. You're . . . in a way, it's like you're marked. People like Claussen and Couture can see it. People like me, in the Falling Away, can see it . . . and demons can see it.”

“Okay, you're starting to sound like a Keanu Reeves film.”

She smiled. “You're deflecting. Probably because you can feel it inside. You know I'm right.”

I'm feeling it
, Joni said helpfully.

Dylan ignored Joni. Wished he could ignore Quinn; unlike Joni, he couldn't just banish her to the kill box inside his mind. “Okay,” he said, sighing. “This chosen thing . . . what's it mean? So I'm marked. Big deal.”

“It's ancient, Dylan. It's in the bloodlines.” Quinn sighed. “It goes back to the Falling Away. In the first sense I talked about: humanity's falling away from God. Once we were in direct communication with God, but we began falling away, separating ourselves. You know the story of the Tower of Babel, from the Bible?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. People built the tower, God started splitting them, giving them different languages, that kind of thing. We have Apsáalooke stories like that. Crow.”

“I know what Apsáalooke is. Hang on to that thought. Anyway, the tower is just one of those things that were a part of the falling away that's been happening for generations. Each generation gets a bit further away from the original.” She shook her head, obviously frustrated she wasn't able to fully explain what she was thinking.

“Maybe that's the way to think of it: a copy machine. You start with your original, and it makes a clean copy. But if you make a copy of the original, and then you make a copy of that copy, and another copy of that copy . . . after several generations, it's blurry and unreadable. That's what humanity is, but instead of paper and type, we're bone and muscle and genetic code. We were meant to be originals, but we broke the machine; now we're all copies of copies of copies. From the outside, we're all still pages—like we were meant to be—but the information imprinted on us is garbled. We've lost what we were supposed to be.”

He cocked an eyebrow, but she continued, undeterred. “So the people who are sensitives, somehow their copies still carry a bit of that original information. It's still readable, right? Those of us who are part of the Falling Away, we carry a bit more. But people who are chosen, people like you . . . it's like you're copies of the originals, or something very close to it. Something in your genetics keeps the copies from deteriorating. There aren't many like that today.”

Dylan started to say something, and his mind flashed.
I won't make many of him
. An Apsáalooke story, like he'd just mentioned.

Biiluke
, Joni said inside.

“Biiluke,” he whispered.

“Biiluke,” Quinn repeated. “Your Apsáalooke story of Biiluke—it's the story I'm trying to tell you now. To show you that they're one and the same. That they're true. What did the Creator say when he saw the man lying in the water, filled with arrows and dying?”

“I won't make many of him.”

“Yes. In some ways, you can translate
Biiluke
as ‘chosen,' can't you?”

“But Biiluke means all of us, all of the Apsáalooke. You can't say we're all . . . chosen.”

“In a way, yes. Your people have stayed true to their roots, to their beginnings. There's a reason why, on the Crow reservation, 80 percent of the people can still speak the Crow language. Most other people have lost who they are in today's world. Your people haven't. So within that set of people, it becomes more likely that a chosen will develop. Think about it: what does
Biiluke
mean?”

On our side
, Joni answered.

“On our side,” Quinn said, nodding. She stood, shrugged on a jacket. “I think you need a bit of a break before we move on. Before I tell you the rest.”

Dylan just stared at the wall, unresponsive.

“I'm gonna grab something for you to eat,” she said. “And then we'll talk some more.” She went to the door, opened it, let a fresh gust of cold air inside the room before turning back to him. “While I'm gone, though, I want you to think about something.”