All Bad Things

—10—

Samson pulls his sledgehammer from the pulped remains of an Unbeliever’s head and slings it over his shoulder, bits of bloody brain and skull still clinging to it. The rest of them, six men and women spreading printed tracts about the dangers of the Church, lie dead in the street. Each one of them carried a backpack filled with almost a hundred of the little books.

Samson wipes blood from his hand onto his pants, picks one of the small picture books out of a pile on the ground. They’re about the size of a playing card and only a few pages long, but their pictures are telling, even if Samson can’t read the words.

“Is this supposed to be me?” he says, showing the tract to Knight Captain Volkov. She takes it from him, leafs through it.

“Yes, sir.”

“Is my nose really that fat?”

“No, sir.” She hands the book back to him. “Do you think they’re from Hollywood?”

“Where else would they be from? These things take paper, ink, a press. Who else could it be?”

It’s been three years since the Church’s defeat on Western. Hollywood stays in Hollywood, the Church stays in Echo Park. Silver Lake sits as a no man’s land where neither side holds sway.

Not that the Church hasn’t tried moving in, of course. But every time they do, those Hollywood bastards beat them back. They hit them at night with small strikes that whittle them down until there’s either no one left or not enough to hold the ground. Sneaky fucks, every last one of them. Though they don’t seem to want to expand their borders, they refuse to let the Church expand. And so an uneasy détente has settled over the area. Instead of all–out war, both sides have been fighting with radio signals. The Church transmits its sermons over the airwaves, Hollywood jams them on the same frequency, turns around and transmits their lurid commercials for whorehouses and drug parlors, and then the Church jams those, changes frequencies to transmit and then Hollywood jams… Just like on the ground, neither group totally controls the airwaves.

The tracts are just their latest strategy. Hollywood doesn’t fight fair. They can’t. The Church has numbers on its side. So Hollywood uses subterfuge, lies. Spreading their vile rumors about Samson and his followers, trying to undermine their influence. Trying to push everyone away from God’s grace.

“I want all of these disgusting books gathered and burned.” Samson says. “And kill anyone who has a copy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This one has you fuckin’ a dog,” Cyrus says, flipping through the pages of one of the tracts and laughing. He sits in his office in the Angelus Temple, his feet up on a heavy oak desk left over from when the Locos ran the place.

Samson shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He’s never liked being in Cyrus’s office. Makes him feel small, like he’s done something wrong. He knows it’s a trick. Cyrus has the desk on top of a raised platform so no matter what it gives the impression that he’s looking down on people, but it bothers Samson, anyway.

“It’s disgusting.”

“Sure, sure. But it’s still pretty funny. Got you a tiny little pecker here, too. Wish you hadn’t burned ’em all.”

“I don’t like them. And I don’t know why you’d want to keep them around.”

“Oh, quit being such a hardass. This is me, Samson. And these? These are nothin’. Hell, this, the little raids into our territory, all their radio jamming bullshit, it all just means we got ’em on the run.”

“What do you mean?”

“Besides this crap, Hollywood’s been pretty quiet. We got converts coming in from all over. Things are going pretty good, right?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“And that’s the problem.”

Samson frowns, remembers that his frowns make people uncomfortable. His murder face, Cyrus calls it. He pushes his expression back to neutral. Ever since he stopped seeing King, he’s been trying more and more to live the way he thinks the man would want him to live. So he’s been studying the tapes more and more. And not just the ones that made it onto the air. The raw footage, too. And something he’s noticed is that King didn’t do or say anything until he was damn good and ready to do it. And that extended to his face. When he was angry he used the anger. He didn’t just let it wash over him. He was always in control. And that’s one thing that Samson has always had a problem with.

“Go on,” he says.

“Enemies are more than just people tryin’ to kill you, Samson. They’re also there to be used. Why would someone want to eradicate the Church—sorry, the teachings of James King, the path of true righteousness—if it didn’t threaten their heathen ways? The fact that they’re trying to stop us only proves that we’re doing the right thing.”

“Having enemies who tell us we’re wrong only proves that we’re right?”

“Exactly.”

Samson tries to twist his brain to follow what Cyrus has just laid out, and he can’t do it. Much as he’s had disagreements with Cyrus, much as he doesn’t always trust the man’s commitment to the cause, Cyrus is still the smartest man Samson knows. Certainly smarter than Samson is. Always has been.

“I prefer faith that we’re right because our cause is just,” Samson says, remembering something he’s heard King say in his shows.

“Yeah, I know. Logic ain’t your thing. Doesn’t make me any less right. Point is that this gives us something to get the people riled up about. Folks have been getting complacent. They need to be reminded that there’s a den of perverted heathens just down the street.”

Now that’s something Samson can agree with. The Church’s little potshots at Hollywood, their patrols destroying contraband, none of this is furthering God’s plan. He may not be talking to James King anymore, but he knows the sermons. He knows King’s teachings. He knows what God wants.

God wants the heathens to burn.

“You have an idea?”

“Yep. You may run the militia, Samson, but I got spies. And stop lookin’ so shocked. We need intel and this is how we get it. They tell me there’s another group of these cocksuckers coming in, only this time they’re not ringing the doorbell and dropping off literature.”

“An attack? They don’t have the numbers.”

“They don’t need numbers. They’ve got a bomb. A big one. Military ordnance they got from who the hell knows where. They’re planning on carting it into our territory on a truck and setting it off.”

“A truck? Where did they even get the fuel?”

“Who cares? Point is they’ve got it and they’re coming to us with it.”

“That’s stupid. We’ll kill them before they get close enough to hit the Temple.”

“They don’t need to hit the Temple. They just need to set it off in our territory. They’re not trying to kill us with the bomb, they’re trying to prove that we can’t protect our territory. They’re sending a message to everyone that we’re under siege. It gives them the upper hand, and it makes this shit”—he tosses the dog–eared tract into Samson’s lap—”look like the pointless crap that it is. They set that bomb off and they’ve won the propaganda war.”

Samson doesn’t know what propaganda is and he doesn’t see how blowing up a bomb that doesn’t kill anybody important matters, but he gets that it’s a threat and it has to be stopped.

“What road are they taking? Not many between us are clear enough to drive a truck through.”

“Wilshire.”

“Okay. We’ll send the army and crush them,” Samson says. “We turn that thing around, drive it to the center of Hollywood and set it off there. Then I bring the army in while everything’s still burning, and I finish it.”

Samson is getting excited. This is perfect. He can crush Hollywood once and for all, take back the dignity they stole from him at the battle at Western. He can get James King back.

“No.” Cyrus says it with such force that it stops Samson cold. “We are not blowing it up, and we’re not bringing the army in. We are going to capture it. Once we have it, we’ll figure out how best to use it.”

“More waiting? They humiliated us!” Samson gets out of his chair and looms over Cyrus, slamming his meaty hands on the desk. “We’ve sat around too long as it is. We need to make them pay.”

“And we will,” Cyrus says, waving Samson down. “We will. But we do it smart. We get that bomb and not only do we have a weapon that we can use against them, but more important, they lose it, and everybody knows it.”

“Is this a propaganda thing?”

“Exactly. Now you get it.”

“No,” Samson says. “I don’t.”

“Do you trust me?” Cyrus says.

“Of course,” Samson says, though he knows he paused a little too long before he answered.

“Good. So we’re agreed. Send a small force out there, grab that bomb, and bring it back here. We’ll figure out what to do with it later.”

“I—” Samson stammers, not sure how he lost the argument. “Sure,” he says, but his heart’s not in it. “When’s this happening?”

“Sometime in the next week. My sources are getting me more information tonight, but it’s definitely going down soon.”

“I’ll pull a team together.”

“A small team.”

“Right,” Samson says. “A small team.”

“Sir, you wanted to see me?” Knight Captain Volkov stands at the doorway to Samson’s office in the Temple. Unlike Cyrus’s, his is simple, sparse. He has a single table, two chairs, and maps of Los Angeles pinned to the walls. In one corner he has a TV and VCR playing on a continuous loop of James King giving a sermon, the volume turned off. Samson has seen these so many times that he doesn’t need to hear it to know what’s being said.

“Come in, Knight Captain. I wanted your opinion on something.”

“The bomb?”

“Cyrus told you?”

“He did. He wants to capture it. Send a small team to bring it back here and send a message to Hollywood.”

The moment Samson stepped out of Cyrus’s office, he began to have doubts. The rout at Western came flooding back to him, filled him with uncertainty. He prayed for guidance, prayed for James King to come tell him what to do, but no one appeared. He needed someone else to talk to. Someone besides Cyrus.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Samson says.

“It’s not,” Volkov says.

Samson is surprised. “You don’t agree with him?”

“Sir, Hollywood humiliated us. They—” She stops, looks at her feet.

“What?” Samson says.

“They humiliated you.”

“They did,” he admits.

“There’s one way to fix this,” Volkov says. “One way to fix you. We go get that bomb, we drive it right into the middle of Hollywood and we set that fucker off. Then we go in hard and fast and we fight and we don’t stop until there’s nothing left but ashes.”

In his heart he knows she’s right. Knows that this is what James King would have wanted. “We’ll need the whole army,” he says.

“Just give the word, sir,” Volkov says.

“Get everyone together. Quietly. If Cyrus finds out he’s gonna shit a brick. Take a couple of days. Leave the people at the Bastion of Faith.”

“Are you sure? If we do this, we’re going to want everyone,” Volkov says.

“No. It’ll take too long to get all of them here without Cyrus noticing. We don’t know how quickly Hollywood will start moving this bomb of theirs, and I want to move as quickly as we can.”

“All right,” Volkov says. “You won’t regret this, sir.”

He knows he won’t. Not if it brings James King back to him.