The Revelation (10 page)

The man was crazy, Gordon realized. He did not know whether Brother Elias was an ex-hippie who had turned to Christ, bringing his fried brain along with him, or whether he was a fallen fundamentalist, but he knew that the man was not one of your ordinary everyday Bible-thumpers.

Gordon picked up the pen from his lap, grabbed his forms and stood up, preparing to move to another seat.

Brother Elias stood up as well.

"I know what has befallen you and your loved ones, and I want to help you," Brother Elias said. "You are suffering the consequences of the wicked." He knelt on the lobby carpet and reached up to grab Gordon's hand. "Sit here and pray with me and we will put it right."

Gordon pulled away, shaking his head, staring in disbelief at the kneeling man. "No."

""The field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one. And the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the close of the age."

Matthew 13:39."

Gordon looked around the lobby to see if anyone else had caught this, to see if anyone else was watching. But the few people sitting in the overstuffed chairs were either staring out the smoked glass of the window onto the parking lot or looking at the carpet, contemplating their own miseries and misfortunes. No one was paying any attention to Brother Elias.

Brother Elias bowed his head. "Praise Jesus!" he said. "Praise the Lord!"

Gordon stared. Why the hell had this guy decided to pick on him?

Brother Elias looked up. "If Christ had been hung instead of crucified, we would today be worshiping a noose."

Gordon walked over to the front desk. He tapped his hand on the white countertop to get the headsetted woman's attention. "Excuse me, miss," he said. "But is this man supposed to be here?" He pointed toward Brother Elias, still kneeling on the floor of the lobby praying.

The woman took one look at the business-suited preacher, at the Bible and the stack of pamphlets on the carpet next to him, and pressed a red key on her switchboard. "Security?" she said. "The reverend is back again. Would you please escort him out of the hospital? .. . Thank you." She looked up at Gordon and nodded.

Gordon returned to his seat, but this time Brother Elias did not follow him. "Pray," the preacher said, walking voluntarily toward the glass doors of the front entrance. He looked back at Gordon. "Pray for your wife. Pray for your daughter. "For I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother."" His black orbs bored into Gordon's for a moment, then he was gone, walking out of the building just as two uniformed security guards entered the lobby from another door.

Gordon picked up his pen and the sheaf of insurance forms.

On top of the stack of papers was a small cheaply printed pamphlet.

The large bold letters on the cover of the pamphlet said: "SATAN is using YOU! HE is here NOW!"

He did not even bother to read the leaflet. He crumpled the paper up and deposited it in the ashtray of the table next to him.

He got to work on the insurance forms.

It was nearly four o'clock when Marina finally emerged from behind the swinging double doors, a different nurse wheeling her out. Gordon, who had been situated in a chair by the front window, staring at the doors and waiting for Marina's return, stood up immediately and went over to her. She looked tired, but she was smiling, and she stood up from the chair as soon as she saw him. "Good news," she said.

"Really?" He could not believe it. He had been preparing himself for the worst, and her announcement took him by surprise.

"I think so. The preliminary tests look good. But it'll be tomorrow before we know for sure." She smiled at him, her eyes twinkling.

"Better start thinking up girls' names."

"Are you sure?"

"No, I lied."

"I mean, it really looks promising?"

She laughed. "It looks that way."

He hugged her, squeezing her close. They kissed. "Let's celebrate," he said, pulling back. "Let's go out somewhere to eat. Somewhere expensive."

Marina shook her head. "I'd rather not. I don't really feel all that well. Some of those tests, you know ..." She shook her head and rolled her eyes in an expression of un believability leaving the sentence unfinished. "Let's just get home."

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather stay overnight in the Valley and drive back up tomorrow?"

"You have to work tomorrow."

"I'll call in sick. Brad won't care."

She looked at him as if he'd just said something outrageous. "You're joking, right?"

He smiled. "All right."

"Besides, we need to save all the money we can. We're going to be proud parents."

He thought of her earlier ideas about an abortion and wanted to ask her what her thoughts were now, but he decided against it. "I get the hint," he said, smiling. He offered her his arm and she took it. "We'd better get started if we want to get back before dark."

They walked out of the lobby into the parking lot. Although it was late afternoon, the temperature was still well over a hundred and the sun was high in the clear blue, cloudless sky. There were no monsoons to relieve the heat in Phoenix. They got into the Jeep, leaning back into their seats slowly. The vinyl upholstery of the car felt hot even through their clothing. Gordon rolled down his window and turned the air conditioner on full blast, trying to drive out the hellishly heated air. He was already sweating.

"Thank God we don't live here," Marina said.

"That's a fact."

They pulled onto Washington Avenue, heading west toward Black Canyon Highway.

A few minutes later, they passed Brother Elias, calmly standing by the side of the road in his business suit, hitchhiking. The preacher smiled directly at Gordon and waved as they drove by THE REVELATION /

How did be know my car? Gordon wondered--but Gordon continued driving and stared straight ahead, ignoring him. He thought he could feel those intense black eyes cutting through the glare of the windshield and boring into him. Marina did not notice a thing.

On the way out of Phoenix, they stopped at a Dairy Queen where they each got a sundae for the long trip home.

Old Mrs. Perry was going to have a baby.

Phil Johnson, director of the Randall Rest Home, shook his head and tossed a twisted paper clip into the wastebasket as he reread the doctor's report. It was inconceivable. The woman was well over eighty and just this side of senile. On her best days she was barely coherent. On her worst days she was little more than a blubbering overgrown infant.

Sighing, he stood up and folded the report, placing it in the top drawer along with several file folders. He flipped off the desk lamp and walked down the sterile white-lighted hallway to Mrs. Perry's darkened room. Slowly, quietly, he pushed open the door and looked in, staring down at her sleeping form. Her cadaverous chest rose and fell visibly with each rasping breath. Her back, propped up by a series of pillows, only accentuated her rising belly. His eyes shifted to her face. A thin line of mucus stretched from her small nose across the wrinkled mustached skin to her dried cracked lips. Even in sleep, he noted, her expression was not peaceful. Her brows were furrowed; her mouth curved down in a painful grimace.

He shook his head again. How could she be pregnant?

Who the hell would sleep with her?

The question was never very far from his thoughts. Who would sleep with her? What kind ofsicko would want to have sex with an eighty-year-old woman?

And how in God's name had she gotten pregnant? She was long past menopause. It should have been physically impossible for her to conceive.

But Dr. Waterston had checked her over thoroughly. Several times.

That rising midsection was not caused by overeating, malnutrition, some disease, or any of the other countless possibilities he had first considered. It was caused by the growth of the living fetus inside of her.

Phil quietly left the room, closing the door behind him, and started down the hall to the coffee machine in the kitchen. It was his fault things had gone this far. He should have noticed earlier, he should have kept a closer watch on her, he should have.. ..

But there were other patients in the rest home who also required constant supervision. Too many of them. And he was so hopelessly understaffed that it was a miracle there were not more problems.

Now it was too late for an abortion. In his report, Dr. Waterston said that such a procedure would almost certainly be fatal for the mother as well as the fetus at this stage of the pregnancy. Mrs. Perry's age and precarious physical health made it not only more dangerous but genuinely lethal.

Phil walked into the kitchen, got a Styrofoam cup from the half unwrapped bag on the counter and poured himself some coffee. The room was dark, and he did not bother to turn on a light. A diffused refracted light entered the kitchen through the open hallway door, and the edges of the room were bathed in shadow. He shuddered as he looked into the darkness and thought of what the poor baby would probably look like.

Years ago, as a medic in the army, he had assisted with the birth of an infant to a similarlyove raged woman in a small town in Italy. It had not been a pretty sight. The baby had emerged horribly disfigured, almost indistinguishable from the bloody afterbirth, and had died almost instantly. He had had nightmares about it for years afterward.

He downed half a cup of the lukewarm black coffee and poured himself some more. He looked up at the broken wall clock above the refrigerator, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight coming through the partially open kitchen curtains. The clock said two thirty. He mentally subtracted an hour, then added ten minutes. One-forty.

Another four hours and twenty minutes until Mrs. Stowe needed her medication. He could catch a little sleep.

He finished off the coffee then passed through the back of the kitchen to his bedroom. He set the small alarm on the nightstand for six a.m.

and sat down on the edge of the bed. He started to take off his shoes.

The scream rent the air of the rest home like a harsh and high pitched siren.

He jumped up, startled, scared. The scream came again; a hideously inhuman shriek of pure physical pain. He ran into the hallway. The instinctive fear left his body as quickly as it had come and was replaced by a trained sense of professional duty. The scream had come from Mrs. Perry's room, and he rushed over to her door, flinging it open.

The old woman sat straight up in her bed, her face contorted with agony. Unchecked tears ran down her wrinkled cheeks, and her mouth was wide open, screaming continuously without stopping for breath.

"What's wrong?" Phil called. "What is it?" But he knew she could not answer him, and he ran up to her, pulling the covers from her body.

He stared in shock.

The white sheet of the old woman's bed was covered with blood, which was seeping outward from the space between her legs in a rapidly spreading semicircle.

She was going to have the baby.

Phil pushed her back onto the stack of piled pillows, trying not to panic, telling her all the while to relax, things were going to be all right. Other people had gathered in the doorway by this time, and he yelled for someone to call Dr. Waterston. John Jacobs, a retired air force pilot and the most physically fit of the nursing home's residents, ran off to follow the order.

"It's going to be okay," Phil said, turning back to the old woman on the bed. "Don't worry." But he was not at all sure. It looked like she had lost a lot of blood, and that did not seem natural. More blood was still flowing from between her legs. Taking a deep breath, he held her bony chest down with one hand while he attempted to part her thighs with the other.

The baby was already halfway out.

Phil gasped. The baby's head was already protruding from the opening, flopping deadly back and forth on a too-small neck. It looked as though the neck had been broken by Mrs. Perry's panicked movements.

Holding his breath, looking away, trying to keep down his own feelings of panic and terror, he reached between her legs and gently grabbed the baby's head. It was soft, slimy, slippery--like a piece of pulsating raw liver. He felt a rush of horrified disgust in the pit of his stomach, but he held on. He started to pull.

The baby squirted out in one sickening pop.

"Towel!" he yelled. "Somebody get me a towel!"

A woman handed him a blanket, and he wrapped the baby up in the material, wiping off the blood. He bent down and pressed his ear to the newborn's tiny chest, but he could hear no breathing, no heartbeat.

The infant was not moving. Instinctively, he flopped the baby over onto its back and started pressing down on its midsection, trying to get its heart started, trying to get it to breathe. When that didn't work he covered the baby's mouth with his own and attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He could taste the sickeningly acrid blood on his tongue, and the taste, combined with the strongly rancid smell, almost made him retch. But he fought down his gag reflexes and kept on.