Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (18 page)

I see a muscle twitch in his jaw, but I don't stop; I don't want to give him the chance to respond, the chance to win us over once again.

“I'm glad the Church brought you to Hollywood, Peter. I think this could be a great place for you. No hard feelings. In fact, Harp and I are here as friends. We thought you should know there's a small militia planning to detonate a bomb at the Chateau Marmont in three weeks. Don't ask for details,” I say, because Peter's head has snapped up. “That's all we can tell you. Liar though you are, we didn't like the thought of you dying here.”

I reach into my pocket and take out the remains of the sledgehammer necklace; I toss it at Peter's feet. He gazes at it, but his expression doesn't change.

“Now,” I continue, “if you want to call the Angels and let them know we're here, I think the least you can do—as someone who pretended to care about us once—is give us a head start.”

Peter just stares at the sledgehammer pendant. He finally looks up, bewildered.

“Wait, why would I call the Angels?” he asks. “If they find you here, they'll kill you.”

Harp laughs. “What a great coup for you—Taggart's son ensnares girl heathens! Not to mention the brownie points you'll get with God. High-fives all around at the pearly gates!”

The frown hasn't left Peter's face. The second he looks at the telephone next to the bed, the second he takes a half step toward us, I'll get out of here; I won't be caught in Peter's room.

“Hang on,” he says. “You guys don't think—do you think I'm a Believer?”

I look at Harp and Harp looks at me. She wears an expression that seems to say,
Was he always this stupid?

“. . . Yes?”

But Peter's started to pace the room; he runs his hands through his hair and stares at us in disbelief. “All that stuff about acting . . . You thought—I get it now, but when you said it I just thought—I assumed you guys knew what I was doing; I thought you were just disgusted by it.”

“What you're doing . . .” Harp echoes, confused. I feel a light, fluttery feeling at the center of me—a flare of hope not yet tangible enough to trust.

“I mean, you should be disgusted! Don't get me wrong! But how could you think—I didn't realize—how could you possibly believe that I
believe?
I was standing
right there with you
when Masterson and the others showed up in their angel costumes.”

Harp rubs hard at her temple, like she's got a headache. I barely register what Peter's saying. The relief is like a drug in my bloodstream, making me confused and drowsy.

“You're not actually a Believer.”

Peter looks at me and laughs the way he did the first time I ever made him laugh, at Harp's Rapture's Eve party—like he's caught off-guard by the joke, so giddily surprised to be laughing. “No, Viv. Jesus Christ! Of course not.”

It's happening too quickly: I'm letting my guard down too fast.
Pull it together, Apple!
I hear a voice in my head admonish. It sounds like Harp.

“How are you their spokesman, then?” I demand. “Last I checked, the Church of America wasn't totally big on recruiting teenage atheists to their PR team.”

Peter sighs as he collects his thoughts; he sinks to the edge of the bed. When he looks up at me again, the laughter has drained from his eyes. “Vivian, this wasn't some brilliant scheme of mine. I don't have anything close to a scheme! Every morning I wake up and think,
What do I have to do today in order to not get murdered?
And then I do it. It happened by accident, and it's kept me alive—but that doesn't mean I'm proud of it. It also doesn't mean it's been easy.”

“Oh, boo-hoo!” Harp waves her hand around, to indicate the clean, air-conditioned hotel room in which we stand. “It must be a real trial, reciting Book of Frick proverbs on TV, going on fancy black-tie adventures with Ted fucking Blackmore, sleeping in a nice warm bed every night. What suffering!”

For the first time, the pleading, penitent expression on Peter's face slips a little. He cocks his head and looks at her. “You two don't exactly look like you've been starving on the street. You look like someone's taken you in and given you unlimited Internet access—yeah, I know about the blog.” He smirks at the inquiring expression on Harp's face. When he looks at me and sees how unyielding I've forced myself to be, the smile fades. “Look, you guys ran. Back at Frick's compound, when the corporation came after us, you ran. I'm not scolding you,” he adds, because Harp has opened her mouth to protest. “I wanted you to run! I
told
you to run! But I didn't run. So my options were different. I'm not saying they were less. I'm just saying they were different.

“At first I thought I'd be able to catch up with you. I'd calm down Frick and my dad, and we'd be able to catch up. Then it would be simple, right? We'd get them in front of a camera and everyone would know the truth. But they were freaking out. My dad was upset that I was there, and Frick—he didn't understand what he had done, exactly, but he knew the Angels were angry. The two of them wouldn't move. And I knew I was stuck then—I could see the corporation's cars from the front door. I had to improvise. My only thought was,
Stay alive, stay alive, get to Viv and Harp.
” He pauses a beat, his stare fixed beyond me, so he doesn't see the heat rush to my face. “When the Peacemakers arrived—just guards then, I guess; they hadn't been rebranded yet—I told them who I was. I told them my real name. I said I'd come to pay homage to what I thought was my father's point of Rapture. I pretended to be confused about what he was doing here, alive. Confused but overjoyed—‘Praise Frick! What a miracle!' You get the idea.”

“They believed that?” Harp sounds skeptical.

“Sort of.” Peter shrugs. “They were suspicious, but what were they going to do? Shoot a kid claiming to be Taggart's son on sight? Blackmore arrived at dawn to interrogate me. I stuck to the story—devoted son, Believer, Frick be praised! That's where my apparently superb acting skills came into play. But I'm not sure I was actually that convincing—he just wanted to believe me. From what I gather, Blackmore doesn't test well with hardcore Believers. As spokesman, he never really matched that all-powerful kind of thing my dad did so well. When we spoke, he figured he could use me—he figured he could use my name. He brought me here to LA, vouched for me to Mulvey and Masterson, and they'd just decided to make me the new face of the Church when Harp's first blog post went up.”

“About that.” My voice is still hard. “How much have you told the Church about us?”

“Practically nothing,” Peter assures me. “They'd seen you on the security feed, so I couldn't pretend I hadn't gone there with you—I said I'd met you along the way and you'd given me a ride. I told them I'd tried to convert you, but you freaked when you saw Frick; you ran. Even if I'd wanted to tell them where you went, I couldn't—I had no idea! These days, I try not to ask about you—I try not to act too interested. I worked hard to make Blackmore trust me. I meet with him every day”—his voice sounds a bit thin, and he pauses to swallow—“and every day I think he's going to tell me that they have you, that they've hurt you.”

“Didn't Blackmore find the blog suspicious?” Harp asks. “Wouldn't it poke holes in your whole act, for him? I went into, like, serious detail about your make-out history.”

Peter's mouth twists. “By the time you posted, I was in too deep. Blackmore likes me a lot, and plus, he wouldn't have wanted to admit to Mulvey and Masterson that he was wrong about me. I told him you'd made it up, and that's exactly what he wanted to believe. I was his best weapon against you. The second they made me public, everything you said looked like a lie.” He cringes, a little apologetically. “Also he thought . . . he thought maybe if the Church made me public, you'd turn up wherever I might be.”

He politely avoids my eyes, and I'm grateful—my face is so hot I feel feverish. I hate that Harp was good enough at conveying how I feel about Peter that the Church was right about me.

“They were more confident in that than I was,” he adds, “being a swamp monster and all. I figured you were angry I was playing this part. Which, again, you should be. I sold you guys out. I made you look like liars. I said . . . terrible things about you on TV. I have no right to hope you'll forgive me.”

But when he glances up at me, I see that he does hope. Peter looks uneasy, quietly embarrassed, but still hopeful. Harp stares at me too. I realize they're waiting for me to make the call: Harp will follow my lead when it comes to Peter, and as much as he likes Harp, it's me Peter wants to hear. It's too much to process right now, an equation I'm not yet capable of solving. All I know is, I believe him. Maybe it's because his story seems plausible, but maybe it's just because I want to—because even now, every nerve in my body feels raw and electric by the nearness of him.

“If you hadn't convinced them you were on their side, they would have killed you,” I say. “You did what you had to do.”

Peter looks rueful. “Maybe. But somehow I can't see you doing it.”

There's an uncomfortable silence. Harp twists a strand of hair around her finger—I can't tell whether or not she really buys the story. Peter leans forward, elbows on his knees. I remember again my first conversation with him: we sat side by side on the steps of the abandoned mansion the night before the Rapture, flirtatious but unable to actually communicate, both of us weighed down by the unwritten future, both of us preoccupied by the people we were and the people we wanted to be. I feel that same awkwardness now. If there were any time, I'd sit with Peter tonight until I understood every thought in his head and he understood every thought in mine—but it's late. We'll have to leave soon if we don't want Diego and Winnie to know we've been gone.

I clear my throat. “We should probably talk about that attack.”

“The bomb.” Peter sits up. “Right.”

“Winnie—my sister—she's part of this group. They're funded by a woman named Amanda Yee. Amanda wants to bring the Church to its knees, violently. She plans to have them detonate a bomb, here, in three weeks. Do you think you can convince the corporation to move out of the Chateau before then? Ideally, they should get out of Los Angeles altogether—they should move far enough away that Amanda doesn't have time to regroup.”

Peter considers this. “I can definitely try. I can tell them I heard a tip from a donor at the fundraiser. But I don't see them leaving Hollywood before the apocalypse—not if they're planning what I suspect they're planning.”

I hear the careful note of uncertainty in his voice. Harp looks sharply at him. “What? What do you suspect they're planning?”

He takes a breath. “First of all, you have to understand that as high-profile as they've made me, they still haven't admitted to me that they faked the Rapture. When Blackmore and I first spoke that morning after we broke into the compound, he told me I might have
thought
I'd seen Frick and my father in the flesh, but that what I actually saw were manifestations of the Holy Spirit, welcoming me into the fold.” He pauses to shake his head at the memory. “He's stuck to that line the whole time, and it's been easy for him to do it, because I haven't seen my dad or Frick since—I don't know where the corporation's hidden them now. I don't know what they did to the missing Raptured, and I don't know what they have planned for the apocalypse. As far as I can tell, the majority of Church employees are in the dark about all of this. The Three Angels know, and maybe some people directly beneath them, but everyone else seems to think, or at least hope, that it's all really happening.

“But here's what I do know: Without Frick, the Church is more fragmented than it used to be. The Angels are the perfect encapsulation: Michelle Mulvey's only concern is the corporation—developing new products, marketing aggressively, keeping the money rolling in. Ted Blackmore is all about the public face—recruiting new Believers, making sure the old ones continue toeing the line. Masterson . . . he's the one who really worries me. He's the one telling the stories. He interprets the Book as he sees fit, and lets that interpretation color everything Mulvey and Blackmore do. He has the same values as Frick, without the excuse of paranoid schizophrenia. The good news is, they're not on the same page; I think you'd only need to play them off one another to make the whole corporation implode. The bad news is, they know it. And I think they're trying to get that unifying force again.

“They hold these fundraisers every week. Big mansions in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Malibu. Hollywood people, lawyers, producers—people with money. I get up and give a speech Blackmore's prepared: welcome, Frick smiles upon us, and so on. Then every one—
every single speech
—makes reference to a messiah. ‘If we continue to abide by Frick's word, to show him our devotion through our actions and our generosity toward his Church, he'll have mercy on us. He will send us a savior.' It gets a big response: cheers every time. They've raised millions so far. But the thing is: there's no messiah in the Book of Frick. He's straightforward about that. ‘Don't believe in a savior; there's no such thing.' The way Frick saw it, the chosen would be saved and the rest of us destroyed, and nothing—no one—would be able to stop it.”

A knot begins to form in my stomach. Harp shakes her head slowly in dawning horror.

“And the other thing is—okay, maybe this is me just being paranoid, but every morning this week, at the end of my daily meeting with Blackmore, his assistant arrives with his eleven o'clock appointment. They all look the same: friendly-looking white guys with long hair and beards . . .” He looks almost sheepish. “They bring headshots.”