Electric Church

XXVIII A BOTTOM-FEEDING FISH, BLACK AND SWOLLEN AND COVERED IN SPIKES

An icepick in my chest, tearing apart blood vessels as it slid along my arteries, propelled by the sluggish, back-and-forth tide of my blood, bloating me with a sudden, razor-sharp heat that sank into every unprotected organ. It was a bottom-feeding fish, black and swollen and covered in spikes, puffing up as it neared the surface, ready to explode. I opened my mouth to scream but found myself biting down on the strip of leather instead. It kept coming. It was too large for my arteries, it tore through and began swimming in my guts, perforating and wriggling, headed unerringly toward my heart. It tore through my pelvis, it lacerated my lungs. Gasping, choking in the open air, it bloated up through my chest and slammed into my heart and exploded there, sending spikes shooting through my insides, landing with wet, shivering force in my spine, my bones, my cartilage.

I stiffened, my whole body going taut as a fuzzy numbness burned its way from my feet upward. I shook and shivered, biting through the leather strip in my mouth, staring pop-eyed at Ty Kieth, who silently took a step backward, eyes on the exits.

Then, suddenly, everything went dark as I passed out.

When I came to, my vision snapped on, as if God or someone had flicked a switch. One second, nothing, the next, I was staring up at Brother West’s hideously cheerful mask of a face. It loomed over me, waxy, pale, permanently smiling.

“Mr. Cates? I do not know if you can hear me, but I want to assure you I will keep my end of the bargain. Mr. Gatz assures me you will keep yours. It is time to go.”

His head floated away, and I was staring up at the ceiling. There was no noise. Then some sounds I couldn’t identify: a swishing sound, a sharp, metallic clang, a tearing sound. I struggled to bring my thoughts into line, but they squirmed and writhed out of my grasp. I wanted to shake my head to clear it, but couldn’t.

Then the pain started to come back.

At first it was just a buzzing in the background, a dim memory of something terrible, teasing at the ends of my thoughts. It gathered like distant thunder, growing in ominous volume until it broke over me like terror, like bamboo shoots under my nails going deeper, further, faster.

I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. I wanted to howl and writhe and attack anything around me, to pass along the infection, expend some of it, but couldn’t. I stared up at the ceiling, my vision turning red, my skin peeling off, my bones splintering. On top of the pain there was a thick layer of numbness, my arms, legs, every part of me dead and without feeling. Underneath, in the core of me and sinking deeper every second, were razor blades, broken glass, thumbtacks.

I tried to quiver, and couldn’t.

I was lifted, then, the ceiling drawing closer and then sliding away, and carried out of the kitchen area. Gatz’s head suddenly loomed into my vision, pale and waxy like the Monk, but with a film of sweat on his taut, gaunt face.

“I Pushed him hard, Ave,” he gasped. “If you can hear me, I Pushed him hard. I’ll stay close, keep it up as long as I can. I’ve got your back.”

His face disappeared, and there was just the sound of moderate physical effort, and the ceiling, and the pain.

“Set him down a minute,” I heard Milton say. The world tilted, and I was lowered to the floor. At the last second Gatz’s hand slipped, and I dropped the last foot pretty hard. My head flopped over to the side, and if I could have, I would have crawled backward, cursing, because Marilyn Harper was staring at me.

She was sprawled on the floor and looked startled, as if she’d somehow fallen that moment, and was just lying there in shock. Her hands were still tied, her arms were bent uncomfortably back. Her hair spilled wildly over her face, red and stiff. Her mouth was open slightly. Her eyes were wide open, her face a mask, the ragged hole torn in her forehead still dripping.

“That’s a fucking shame.” Tanner sighed, sounding out of breath. “That fucking old man is pretty harsh, huh, Wonderboy?”

Gatz didn’t say anything.

Her accusing eyes bored into mine, and I couldn’t look away. I’d lived too long, held on selfishly, and this was the result? I hadn’t had any affection for Marilyn Harper, but this wasn’t civilized. She hadn’t done anything to rate this, shot in the head by Cainnic Orel. That was how I deserved to die, and I couldn’t help but think that she’d caught my bullet.

With my bones being burned to ash inside me, I wanted nothing more than to turn my head away.

“All right, Wonderboy.” Tanner finally sighed. “Let’s go. The Tin Man is waiting out back. It makes sense to the Monks if Cates is nailed here. More realistic. So let’s go, and then I gotta get into costume.”

As I was carried out of the Assembly Room I had a good view of Gatz’s shoulder, sweat dripping down from it, and I could hear his breath, strained and phlegmy, rattling in and out of his open mouth. I realized that my life was in his hands. If Brother West came out of the Push too soon I’d either get carved up or just be left to drift away. It was all up to Kev Gatz. I wasn’t afraid. I was ready. I was ready for it to be over.

When the pain ate the edges of my vision and things went dark again, I went down eagerly.

I came back groggy. In the distance, hover displacement, shouts, something that might have been a gunshot. Nearer, just above me: humming.

The red pain receded like water evaporating, leaving me blind, inside something, moving. The steady thump of heavy boots on the cracked, damp stone street led the way, wrapped in the dim, quiet hum of hydraulics. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I tried again, mentally flailing, screaming, pounding against the sides of whatever I was trapped inside. Nothing. Not even a wheeze of horror. I just lay, staring at blackness, listening to the heavy tread of Brother West as he conveyed me somehow to Westminster Abbey.

All I could see was Marilyn Harper’s eyes: wide, staring, just like twenty-six other sets of eyes I’d seen. An old man, startled up from breakfast in a cafй on Morton Street, nailed with a lucky shot that turned his nose into a pit of blood. Twin brothers collapsed back into their hover, staring blankly, blood running down their scalps. A woman, guns falling from both hands, hanging from an ancient fire escape, her foot caught between slats, staring down at me, blood dripping. All of them, bad people. All of them, dead. All of them, killed by me.

I hadn’t pulled the trigger, but I’d killed Harper just the same. Twenty-seven dead in twenty-seven years plus all the damn cops who’d stepped in front of my gun recently. And now my comeuppance was at hand.

I listened. I could hear-I knew it was probably pitch black inside the little hover I’d been loaded into as a new Church “recruit,” so maybe I could see, too. I couldn’t move, or breathe, or stop feeling the terrifying sharp-edged pain that lapped at every nerve with a razor tongue. My mind raced through the diagrams and flowcharts we’d worked on, scratched onto any available surface, Kieth’s neat script and my own huge scrawl. We must, I thought, be on one of the private transport hovers the Electric Church used to move its cargo-it wouldn’t do to have Monks cheerfully transporting recently murdered citizens through the streets, whistling. The Church had its own zoned air lanes for its hovers. All registered religions did, though most of them, I was pretty sure, weren’t using them to transport bodies.

I had no idea how much time had passed. A weird, electric hum of terror stabbed through me, and then again, and then it became a constant, searing presence. I wanted to scream and wave my arms about and beat myself senseless against the walls of my tiny prison, but I just lay there, my dead body mocking myself. If this was what death was like, if this was even just a second, a momentary horror right before you sailed off into infinity, I was all ready to sign up for my Monk suit.

There was a series of loud clanging noises, and then the scream of displacement. I couldn’t feel anything, but I knew the sound, and realized we must be descending. I oriented my mental map of Westminster Abbey, which was a freestanding wall of ancient-looking stone like a broken bone rising out of the ground in a large courtyard, surrounded by a thick, reinforced wall. The hover pad was not far from the building’s remnant. Everything was underground, and I knew that once we touched down I’d be wheeled onto a wide conveyor belt and sucked down into the belly of the whole place. I imagined my path as a red line that terminated in one of the small, square rooms that acted as entry points for the corpses. From these small rooms the bodies were conveyed on belts through narrow passages into the huge processing center, where the dicing and slicing was performed, largely by Droids, according to West.

If all went well, I’d end in one of the smaller rooms and not proceed past it, except under my own power, by choice-cataclysmically bad choice, maybe, but at least by choice.

An eternity passed, a numb, unreal current running through me, teasing my dead nerves into a believable imitation of pain. Then I was in motion; I could tell from the way I banged around inside the mobile coffin I’d been stuffed into, first this way and that. I did some mild calculations and decided I was being loaded onto one of the belts. According to plan, Brother West was right beside me, standing stock still and grinning mildly at nothing. He’d said that nothing ever varied in this process, that it was machinery and I was to be a cog, so he must be there, standing ready with the hypo to bring me back to life.

The motion stopped. There was a humming sound, a vague, distant sound of voices. Then something heavy slammed into my container. There was a scrape, and then a smooth, rolling sensation. I just saw eyes. As I lay there, the pain swelled up again, the spiky fish bloating, piercing every bone in my body simultaneously until I wanted to claw my eyes out for relief.

When the lid was torn off, I didn’t realize it at first, because I was staring at the black side of the container. A thought kept racing through my brain, interrupting everything until I imagined I could see the words scrolling across my field of vision in bright red letters, flashing and jumping: Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Letmeoutletmeout!

I was turned over, the sudden light stabbing down into my eyes, and Brother West’s cheerful-fucking-face filled my field of vision as it leaned over me. It was so close I kept waiting for the blast of warm breath, but of course there wasn’t any. For several long, stretched-out seconds it hovered over me, fake skin and sunglasses.

Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Letmeoutletmeout-

“We are inside, Mr. Cates,” West finally said, but there was something off in its voice. The digitally smoothed, eternally calm tone that all Monks used was frayed at the edges. If I’d had any control over myself, I would have studied its face. As it was, I continued to stare just off-center, over its shoulder. In my peripheral vision, Brother West appeared to vibrate, a fuzziness around its edges as if something vital had come off the rails inside it.

“I will now-” It hesitated, and suddenly jerked its head violently to one side, then back toward me. “I will now inject you with the antidote provided by-” Another violent spasm. “By-” Again. “By Mr. Kieth.”

It turned away and disappeared from my sight.

Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Letmeoutletmeout-

It came back, a rising wave of nerve-shredding pain, burning through everything else and leaving me a dissolved puddle with shards of glass glinting in the sudden light. Through it, like squinting through a heavy rain, I could sense my clothing being moved aside and the needle being pushed, hard, into my chest. Brother West jerked and stuttered through the whole procedure, almost dancing. I wondered, dreamily, if he was tearing my heart open, if blood was rushing out of me, if this was where I would just bleed to death, a stupid sort of death.

Its rubbery face loomed over me again. “It is done, Mr. Cates,” it said. “I wonder-” It stopped and cocked its head, as if listening to something. Then it shuddered and oriented on me again. “I wonder if you will keep your end of the bargain, Mr. Cates. I so looooongggggg long long long to die.”

It snapped back to loom over me, suddenly calm. “I wonder,” it said, the creepy calm of the Monks back in its voice. “I wonder if you would permit me to speak to you about immortality, if I may, Mr… Cates, isn’t it? It will only take a few minutes, and I would appreciate your time.”

There was a moment, a part of a second, where everything was balanced. The pain had swollen inside me until I was sure I was going to explode, just pop like a balloon, but it held steady. Brother West stood still, watching me, its face frozen in that subtle smile, all I could see. There was no noise. I still could not move.

And then the pain exploded, shattered into billions of tiny particles scattering throughout my insides, burning on and pock-marking my bones. My body stiffened, my whole existence becoming one endless cramp. I felt my heart spasm and lurch back into motion, pushing the cooling blood in my veins. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out, my lungs deflated and unwilling to move. I sat up and froze, trembling, eyes wide and staring at Brother West.

“Mr. Cates,” it said. “Let me show you an endless-”

A gunshot tore the air, and Brother West’s abdomen, so recently repaired by Ty Kieth, exploded outward in a spray of wiring and fluffy white insulation. The Monk collapsed with a strange wheezing noise. My blood felt like splinters moving through me, and I sat in a strange black metallic container, trembling and unable to move.

Heavy, deliberate footsteps approached. I was able to squeeze a trickle of air through my constricted throat. After a few more seconds, as I was slowly forcing my lungs open, hunched over and dry-heaving, a Monk entered my field of vision, stepping carefully over West. I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, but there was obviously something wrong with it: Its robes were tattered and stained, its face smudged with dirt-though it still possessed the eternally satisfied expression of all Monks.

Somehow, when it turned to me and spoke, I knew who it had once been. Shivering and still semiparalyzed, a surge of adrenaline, like fresh ice poured directly into my veins, swept through me, making me choke.

“Mr. Cates,” the thing that had once been Barnaby Dawson said, “only Monks and dead people are allowed in here. One of us is not playing by the rules.”