Waiting for the Galactic Bus (11 page)

Charity stared up into the darkness with emotional second thoughts. They had sinned — well, not much since they were practically married, but still a sin. Come down to it, she wasn’t sure bad girls got punished all that much. What they got were children.

Which it’s just about the same thing in this town. I love Roy, I guess, so it’ll be all right when we’re married.

How? How would anything be all right or even different? She had married friends; when did anything change for them?

The though was so clear and frightening that Charity blotted it out, shifting closer to the warmth of Roy beside her. There were a lot of thoughts like that in the last year that she kept from Roy and Woody, notions she barely had words for. Like Reverend Simco saying most of the world was unsaved. That meant a lot of people. All those people and the way they lived, were they
all
wrong? Like, when you were poor, you couldn’t afford to waste anything. Saving got to be a part of you, so God must hate waste as much as she did.

So would he waste all those million-billion people just because they’re not exactly like us? Gol-lee, that’s like chopping down a whole forest just to get one toothpick. If I got better sense than that, God sure has.

Roy lay on his side facing her. In the dim light she could just see the dark smudge on his shoulder that would be his White Paladin tattoo with the skull. He got more excitement out of belonging to the Paladins than anything else. All those secret communications with groups in Alabama and maneuvers in the woods, when all Charity could see was a bunch of out-of-work hunks who liked to play with guns, drink beer and talk about the “coming Armageddon.”

They ought to get up soon and go home...

She must have dozed. Charity was suddenly aware of Roy turning over. The air in the room smelled horrible. Roy sniffed distastefully. “What’s that?”

“Like sulphur.” Charity tested the air. “Ten times worse.” Besides the intolerable odor, something else. “Roy,” she quavered. “L-look.”

“What?”

“There,” said Charity, terror rising like a tide. “There!”

“Where? There ain’t any —”

“Look!”

The darkness around them had taken on the hue of blood. As Charity stared, numb with fright, the blood resolved to a smoky, infernal scarlet. With a deafening
whoosh
the room seemed to implode. The light went garish fire engine red as the far wall sprang up in a solid barrier of flame.

Charity screamed. Roy tried to.

Against the wall of fire, amid the choking stink, two nightmare images were silhouetted. One of them Charity knew in every detail from God-fearing childhood: the horns jutting from the narrow, saturnine head, the pointed beard, eyes like hot coals. The lashing tail and hooves. Her deepest fears incarnate.

“Heel, Damocles!”

The huge figure of Satan jerked at the chain wound on his wrist. Straining at its check, something scaly with large bat wings gurgled uncleanly and slavered at Charity. As she and Roy cringed on the bed, Satan stroked his beard with the back of one claw and smirked at his leashed minion.

“I call him Damocles because, like the mythical sword, he hangs over wretches like you.” An exquisite sneer. “Just waiting to fall. And you yourselves have cut the thread.”

Charity felt for the silver cross around her neck. It felt hot. “Please... God in heaven, please...”

“Too late for that,” Satan told her in tones that would have thrilled Bellini or Gounod. “You’re both dead.”

“Dead?” Roy found his voice somewhere. “We’re too young to die.”

“Coronary, you clods. Both of you. Unusual in humans so young, the more so during a fornication not rigorous enough to tire a terminal emphysemic. Nevertheless, dead in the act.”

“With no relish of salvation,” the scaly demon paraphrased in a voice that made the
Exorcist
demon sound like Linda Ronstadt. Damocles’ leathery wings flexed with impatience. He ravaged the rug with his foreclaws.

Charity and Roy were jolted upward from the bed like shells ejected from a rifle breech to hang suspended and nude in mid-air. Satan gestured negligently at the bed, where two forms gave a convincing impression of very dead.

“Dead and damned.”

“We can’t be,” Roy attempted pathetically. “We’re members of the Tabernacle of the Born Again Savior. Good Christians.”

Damocles chuckled, a sound like scratching on a coffin lid. “Our favorite kind.”

“No.” Roy groped for the nearest part of Charity to hang on to. “My White Christian God —”

“Oh, shut up. Where do you think my authority comes from?”

Roy found a vestige of his courage. “You ain’t no Christian, never were. You look like a lousy Jew.”

“A touch of the Levantine.” Satan bowed. “Beelzebub and all that. A touch of the Egyptian as Set, various Etruscan and Roman... this is really a set piece. Benet did it so much better. In the main, Mr. Stride, a Wasp like yourself. Hit it, Damocles.”

Damocles pointed a foreclaw at the two shuddering wraiths. “You have the right to remain silent —”

“Never mind the Miranda,” Satan prompted. “Skip to the appeal.”

“All right,” Damocles sulked. “You get a phone call.”

Floating helplessly, hanging on to Roy, Charity stammered, “Wh-who can we call?”

“Why not God?” Satan suggested. “You’ve been bending His ear for the last few minutes. Give Him a buzz.”

Charity did. “God! Please help us!”

The air tore visually, like something out of a Cocteau film. An imposing patriarchal figure blossomed out of nothing, brilliant white against the crimson nightmare, very much like Charlton Heston in
The Ten Commandments.
He inspected Charity and Roy like smudges on glassware.

“Forget it,” God said, and disappeared. Damocles’ wings flared in triumph.

“Ha! Ours!”

“Appeal granted, heard, denied. Damocles, the lady was thinking of transports. Give her one.”

Foaming from an obscene mouth, Damocles plucked the two gibbering forms out of the air and tucked each under an unpleasant arm. Charity had just enough mind left to see Roy, eyes bulging and mouth working in a silent prayer, before the dark came down on her with a last sensation of falling...

“Don’t slaver so, Wilksey,” Coyul remarked as they descended. “They’ve got the gist.”

“Oh, but, Prince, how often do we have the chance for such good trashy fun?”

“Don’t get carried away. You have a makeup and costume change. Mr. Steiner, Mr. Shostakovich — cue music, please. The damnation bit.”

   II  

THE EDUCATION OF
CHARITY STOVALL

    11   

One man’s media...

Dead and damned. Alone. Roy, the world, life gone. Dead and damned. Stunned.

Charity couldn’t make a sound beyond a pitiful squeak forced out between chattering teeth. No sense of time. She couldn’t tell how long she’d huddled naked in the limbo of oily fog. Any attempt to think trailed off in whimpering terror.

Gradually she became aware of her surroundings. Limbo resolved as the fog sank to a thick, writhing carpet. No color, only barren black rocks jutting here and there. No hellfire as she’d learned from childhood and bad dreams, only damp cold and the fog coiling about her bare legs. Here and there, plumes of dark, stinking smoke rose out of the fog into a gray sky. Naked and shivering in a hell not cold enough to kill the sickening stench from the oily pools surrounding her.

And the sounds. She wasn’t alone. Even gratitude for that had to be fumbled at before she could be sure of it. Thin, piping agony floated eerily on the fetid air. At last Charity dared to stumble toward the nearest sounds that might at least mean companionship.

Incredibly, there was music, deep, booming and grim, of a piece with the total absence of color. Charity hugged herself tight against the chill. As she groped forward, she heard a shift in the music, a definite beat to it now, stroked on deep bass strings.

She moved timidly, expecting demons behind every dark-rearing boulder. “Oh!”

She started; a naked arm thrust upward out of the mist just in front of her. She felt herself beginning to sink in clammy ooze. The bog’s obscene odor clogged her nostrils. Charity scrabbled backward to firmer ground. The arm became a shoulder and then the head and torso of a man covered with numbers in red dye.

“Help me,” he moaned. “Mercy! A good pilot, anything. I lived by the media and died by the rating.”

The pitiful wretch went down again before Charity could summon the courage to help him. There were reaching arms all about her now, dyed with numbers, faces rising a little way out of the mist to implore her aid before falling back.

Charity wondered aloud, “Is this the hell for fornicators?”

“No, not quite.”

“EEEE!” Charity jumped as if she’d been goosed with a cattle prod. To her left, seated on a mountainous stack of
TV Guides,
a monstrous thing with television screens for eyes and a speaker mouth hulked over two tiny men cavorting between his cable cord legs. One gesticulated continuously. His head was no more than a huge mouth that worked furiously without sound but produced a constant shower of popcorn. The other puppet-thing giggled and gibbered, rocked back and forth with the edged inanity of an idiot brushed for one terrible moment by the truth of the world.

“This section is for the abusers of media,” said the electronic nightmare. “Actually designed for romance writers, but our place isn’t ready yet. What are you?” The blank eyes peered at her. “A televangelist?”

“No, I —” Charity shivered with the damp cold. “I’m just me. Charity Stovall.”

“Mm-hm. Don’t look smarmy enough, in any case. Now
this
one.” One jack-plug finger tapped the popcorn purveyor between its spindly power-cable legs. “He was a Fundamentalist politician who proclaimed himself God’s candidate.” The jack finger flicked at the laughing fool. “This one believed him.”

Dumb as the popcorn man, Charity backed away from the horror, remembering how she’d rung doorbells for the same cause in Plattsville.

“This, as you’ve noticed, is a rather Brontean neighborhood,” the monster said.

“It’s for gothic writers. How can you be gothic without bad weather? Ah-hah! Hear that? Please stand by.” The ugly head swiveled on its circuitry neck. “They’re coming for you.”