Route 666 Anthology Page 2

  The Quince got like that sometimes, mouthy and hard-bitten. Tyree put up with it, because the Sergeant was a Top Op, and she’d need his recommendation if she wanted to advance herself off her cyke into a cruiser and then up the chain of command. She had been a Trooper a month or so too long as it was. Put a tunic on her, and she would make a dandy lieutenant. Then captain. Or colonel. It could happen.

  “What do you reckon about their outfits?”

  “Don’t rightly know, Burnside. Let’s take a closer look.”

  Without too much evident distaste, Quincannon examined the corpse, unpeeling a section of the man’s jacket from his crushed chest. It had a treadmark in it. The dead body was wearing a simple black suit, and a shirt that had been white once but was now mainly red and purple. The shirt was buttoned to the throat, but there was no tie.

  “Funny thing,” said Quincannon. “No pockets. No belt. And, look, no buttons…”

  The dead man had fastened his coat with pegs.

  “We found this.” Burnside handed the sergeant a broad-brimmed black hat.

  “Strange. He wasn’t with any gangcult, that’s for sure. The people who spread him out might have taken all his weapons, but they’d have left the holsters or grenade toggles or something. This damfool wasn’t even armed.”

  “Do you reckon he was an undertaker? All in black, like. Or a preacher?”

  “Second guess is more likely, Leona. Although what the hell he was doin’ this far into the sand is beyond me.”

  “The others are dressed the same.”

  “Just a gang of pilgrims, then. Looking for the promised land.”

  “The Amish don’t use buttons. And the Hittites.”

  “As far as I know, the Amish were wiped out in ’93 by the Kansas Inquisitors. But that’s a good thought, Burnside. Plenty of religions about these days if a man has a fancy to pick a new one. Or an old one.”

  Quincannon stood up, and dropped the hat over the dead man’s face.

  “What should we do?”

  “Bad news, Leona. You found ’em. You gotta scrape ’em up and bury ’em by the roadside. I’ll call it in. Burnside, dig out the tools and give the lady a hand. Then we’ll go up the road a ways, following the tracks. There are tracks?”

  Tyree nodded. After the pilgrim-flattening session, the killers’ tires would be bloody enough to paint a trail for three counties. The Cav got more convictions that way.

  “Thought so. Anyway, we’ll see who’s at the end of the trail and, if we’re very lucky, we’ll get to kick some badguy ass before suppertime.”

  The Quince saluted. Tyree and Burnside returned the salutes, and pulled their neckerchiefs up over their mouths and noses. No sense getting more of a whiff than was necessary.

  “Snap to it, men.”

  In the Outer Darkness, the Old Ones swarmed, awaiting their call. The Summoner could feel their excitement, their activity, reaching through the Planes of Existence, focusing upon his own beating heart. The Power was almost too much to contain in one mere physical body.

  Blood had been spilled. The Channels were opening. Not enough yet, but a start had been made on the Great Invocation. The ritual, more ancient even than those it was to summon, had been commenced. Again.

  The Road to the City must be marked out for the Dark Ones and their Servitors, just as landing lights mark out an airfield runway. The spilled blood would guide the Dark Ones to the Earthly Plane, to the Last City. More blood, more blood!

  The Summoner assessed his work, and was well pleased. He had travelled this route before, spilled blood before, and been thwarted, but he had had time to wait, time to live, and now the cycle could commence again. Lines came into his head, and he followed them through…

  Turning and turning in a widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned…

  The Irishman had known more than he understood, the Summoner mused, and had died to soon to realize what he was talking of. They had all been fools, playing conjuring tricks, never really grasping the cosmic significance of the old rites they went through. He had known them all, and seen them for what they were: the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, A.E. Waite, Arthur Machen, the Si-Fan, the Illuminati, the Adepts. Fools and children.

  Now, the secret societies, the love cults, the freemasonries were gone. The poets and philosophers dead, the dilettantes and madmen in their graves. But the Summoner breathed still, alone in the knowledge that the Time of Changes was truly imminent.

  Fish would sprout from trees, and the sun would burn black. But first the blood ritual would be complete, the Dark Ones would walk the face of the Earth, and the common mass of humanity would be cast down. The battles would be joined, and the fires of ice would burn. The Age of Pettiness would be at an end, and the Great Days, the Last Days, would be upon them. It would be a glorious sunset, and an eternal night.

  And the Summoner would have his reward.

  “Nine ve-hickles, camped just off the road in a box-canyon, and maybe twenty-thirty citizens. Repeat, citizens, not gang members. No deathware in sight. All in black, like our friends back up the highway. They don’t look hostile, but they don’t look too healthy.”

  Quincannon spoke into the communicator. “Thanks, Burnside. We’ll be along directly. Do not establish contact until we’re with you. The Daughters of the American Revolution didn’t look too hostile either, until they slaughtered F Troop with those hatpin missiles.”

  “Check, sergeant.”

  Yorke was still driving. Quincannon was keeping watch on the scanners as the cruiser’s sensors took in the views. The roads here wound through canyons and passes. It was ideal ambush territory, and you had to keep your camera-eye on the horizons for sniping points. There had been no trouble, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be. Up on the roof, the swivel-mounted sensors swept the landscape.

  “So, what are we doing, rescuing or policing?”

  “Could be either one, Yorke.”

  The cruiser blip joined the Tyree and Burnside blips on the mapscreen. The Troopers were off their mounts again. Quincannon signed for them to saddle up and follow the cruiser. It was the regular formation again.

  “Okay, just slide her into the canyon, Yorke. Don’t make too much of a noise about it, but don’t be too stealth-oriented either. We don’t want to provoke any trouble. People in Situations are liable to get panicky.”

  Yorke took the cruiser off the road, and the suspension had to do some extra work as it bounced up and down on the dirt track.

  There were wheelmarks in the dust. They hadn’t bothered to cover their trail. The blood had given out a few miles back, so they couldn’t be sure whether these were the victims or the violators. The cruiser was gearing up for a fight, just in case. A row of lights on the dash went green, one by one, and flashed regularly. The laser cannons were primed, the mortars ready to slide out of their holes, the directional squirters keyed up for teargas, the maxiscreamers humming. If Custer had had just one of these cruisers, he would have come back from the Little Big Horn a live hero.

  “You hear that?”

  Yorke strained his ears, and Quincannon turned up the directional mikes, homing in on the noise.

  “Singing?”

  There was a faint, reedy whine. Several voices joined, none too professionally, in song.

  “Hymns?”

  “It’s a psalm, Yorke. ‘How Amiable Are Thy Tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts’.”

  Hymns gave him a bad feeling. “What do you reckon, Quince. The Bible Belt?”

  “Could be.”

  Yorke had bad memories of The Bible Belt, a motorized gangcult of Old Testament fundamentalists. They wore spade beards, linen robes, open-toed sandals and “Jesus Kills” tattoos. Their kick was doing the Lord’s work, and they we
re more inclined to Smite the Unrighteous and Put Out the Eye of Thine Enemy than Turn the Other Cheek or Love Thy Neighbour. They had moved into a couple of wide-open townships in Arizona, Welcome Springs and Coffin Nail, and renamed them Sodom and Gomorrah. Then, they had razed the places to the ground and slaughtered everyone in sight in the Name of the Lord. They could easily have moved this far North. Yorke had been captured by The Bible Belt three patrols back, and sentenced to die by the sword for having an ungodly Dean Martin CD in his walkman. He still owed Quincannon for pulling him out of Gomorrah, Ariz., alive. And he still owed The Bible Belt for the three plastik and steelspring fingers he was toting on his left hand.

  The cruiser entered the box canyon. There was a camp at one end of it, and a group of people stood together as if they were at a meeting. They were the ones doing the singing. Someone with a bigger, blacker hat than the rest was standing on the hood of a motorwagon, leading the congregation. He must be the only one who could see the Cav coming, and he kept on waving his arms, keeping the psalm going.

  Quincannon turned on the outside hailers, and spoke into the mike.

  “Attention. This is the United States Cavalry. We mean you no harm.”

  He was obliged by law to say that before he shot anyone.

  “We are here to offer assistance.”

  Yorke pulled the cruiser over, and saw the blips converge again, as Tyree and Burnside parked by them. He still had the wheel, and was supposed to stay at it, in case the hymn-singers proved dangerous. It was the spot he liked. It felt a lot less dangerous than getting out and talking to strangers in the desert. The lights stopped flashing, and glowed steady. The weapons systems were just waiting for the touch of a switch to cut loose. Yorke wouldn’t even have to aim anything, unless he wanted a manual override. The cruiser was ready to blast any moving or stationary blip on its sensors without the photoactive Cav strip down its pantslegs.

  The hymn ended, and the singers turned to look at the newcomers. One or two of them went down on their knees and prayed out loud. They were either thankful for the rescuers, or making their peace with God before they got killed trying to kill someone else. The Bible Belt went in for praying in a big way. And torture. Somehow, the two always seem to go together.

  “See you later.”

  Quincannon stepped out of the cruiser, and walked up to the choir, empty hand outstretched.

  Tyree thought the Josephites were all damfool cracked, but they still seemed confident about their jaunt. Despite the dead folks they had left along the way. The ones they had found had not been the first. Apparently, there had been more than fifty resettlers when the wagon train set out from the Phoenix PZ. That meant at least twenty casualties. They’d crossed with Masked Raiders in the Colorado Desert, and Psychopomps back around Kanab.

  They just took it all, and kept singing their hymns, and following their damned yellow brick road.

  Surprisingly, the ’pomps had left them with all their food and water. Elder Seth must be a persuasive fellow, to convince a gangcult to leave them with supplies. And to get this whole crew out on the road in the first place. It was just one freaking miracle after another with him.

  It was nearly nightfall now, and Quincannon had spent the afternoon taking statements. The women were preparing a meal. Burnside had hoped they’d brew up a couple of pots of coffee—some rich folks could still get the real stuff brought in from Brazil or Colombia—but it turned out that coffee was one of the sinful, worldly things they abjured. Even recaff was off their diet sheet, and that bore about as much relation to good coffee as a flea did to a dog.

  Sister Maureen had told Tyree all about abjuration. And all the things she didn’t miss. Tyree thought Sister Maureen was cracked. Hell, without coffee, carnal relations and a good, clean gun, life wouldn’t be worth living. And the Quince had been faceslapped to learn the wagon train was dry. Back in Valens, the Sergeants’ Bar would be opening up about now, and Quincannon would normally be in his corner with his bottle of Shochaiku, yarning with Nathan Stack and the others. Tyree preferred to spend her downtime jacked into the combat simulators, bringing up her points average to impress the promo board.

  Being around these people, with their fixed smiles and their damfool passivity, made Tyree edgy. They didn’t display any grief for their dead friends, just smiled and said the departed were in a better place. The only thing these Josephites seemed good for was singing psalms. That might prove useful, though. The way they were headed meant they would be going to a lot of funerals.

  The Quince was still talking to Elder Seth, recording notes on his filofax. Tyree, bored now her interrogation quota was used up, wandered over to the lean-to by the main motorwagon, where the two men were doing their business.

  “So,” Quincannon said, “let’s get this clear, you’re… what did you call yourselves?”

  “Resettlers, sergeant. We are here to reclaim the promised land.”

  Quincannon was having trouble with the word. “Resettlers?”

  “Like the original pioneers, we are proceeding to the appointed place.”

  “Salt Lake City?”

  “The flower of the desert. It is the Rome of our faith.”

  “I know Salt Lake. Used to be a Mormon hang-out. But it’s a big ghost town now. The lake dried up when everything else did. All there is now is the salt. Maybe a few scumscavengers, a gangcult hide-out or two, but that’s it. There’s nothing for anyone in that hellhole.”

  Elder Seth smiled the insufferable smile of someone who knows something he’s not telling.

  “It will be resettled, sergeant. The deserts will bloom again.”

  “What are you, some kind of irrigation expert?”

  Elder Seth smiled again. The sunset was caught in his mirrorshades, giving him burning eyes like the Devil.

  “That too. Mainly, I am a guide. I am just here to show these people the Way…”

  “The way to what? A dusty death out here in Nowhere City, Utah?”

  “Forget that name, sergeant. The Church is changing it. By presidential decree, this territory is called Deseret now.”

  “Desert?”

  “No, Deseret. It is an old name. A Mormon name, as you said. The Mormons were, in many ways, a wise sect…”

  That was an unusual thing for a Josephite Elder to say, Tyree knew. Usually, they didn’t have a good word for any other brand of Christian.

  “The whole state, and more, is legally the property of the Church of Joseph. You will not be surprised to learn that no one else wanted it. This will be where it all starts.”

  “What?”

  “The reseeding of the Americas. The Great Reversal.”

  Tyree felt tingly up and down her spine when Elder Seth spoke. His calm, even voice carried the unmistakable fire of the truth. She didn’t understand him, but she could understand why people followed him. Sister Maureen brought him a cup of some unsweetened chocolate drink, and he smiled upon her. If the Josephites hadn’t abjured carnal relations, Tyree would have sworn Sister Maureen had itchy drawers for Elder Seth. The preacher was handsome in a cruel son-of-a-bitch sort of way.

  “Well, that’s your right, Elder,” said Quincannon, turning off his filofax. “But you’re mad to come out here with no weapons. This is wild country.”

  “We have our arms, sergeant. Faith, and Righteousness. Nothing can stand for long against that.”

  “You might try explaining that to the fellas Leona here buried a couple of klicks back.”

  “They understood. They went to glory joyous in the knowledge of the Lord.”

  Quincannon was exasperated. He got up, and walked away.

  “Sister,” Elder Seth turned to Tyree, “was there something?”

  He was a tall man, and must be well-muscled under his preacher suit. Tyree realized she had no idea how old he was. His hair was as black as his hat, and there weren’t any lines on his face and neck, but there was a depth to his voice, a tone to his skin, that suggested maturity, even venerabil
ity.

  Suddenly, she was nervous again, watching the sun go down in Elder Seth’s shades. He drank his chocolate.

  “No, sir,” she said, “nothing.”

  The Daughters of the American Revolution had been racking up a heavy rep in the past few months. They had total-stumped some US Cav in the Painted Desert, and some were saying they had scratched a Maniax Chapter in the Rockies. But after tonight, their time in the sun was Capital-O Over. And the Psychopomps would rule!

  Jazzbeaux pushed a wing of hair back out of her eye, and clipped it into a topknot-tail. She took off the snazzy shades she had taken from the preacherman they’d jump-rammed this morning, and passed them back to Andrew Jean. No sense getting your scav smashed before it was fenced. She beckoned the Daughter forward with her razorfingered glove, and gave the traditional high-pitched ’pomp giggle.

  The others behind her joined in, and the giggle sounded throughout the ghost town. Moroni it was called. The War Councils of the gangs had chosen it at random. It was some jerkwater zeroville in Utah nobody gave a byte about.

  The Daughter didn’t seem concerned. She was young, maybe seventeen, and obviously blooded. There were fightmarks on her flat face, and she had a figure that owed more to steroids and implants than nature. Her hair was dyed iron-grey and drawn up in a bun, with two needles crossed through it. She wore a pale blue suit, skirt slit up the thigh for combat, and a white blouse. She had a cameo with a picture of George Washington at her throat, and sensible shoes with concealed switchblades. Her acne hadn’t cleared up, and she was trying to look like a dowager.

  More than one panzer boy had mistaken the Daughters of the American Revolution for solid citizens, tried the old mug-and-snatch routine, and wound up messily dead. The DAR were very snazz at what they did, which was remembering the founding fathers, upholding the traditional American way of life and torturing and killing people. Personally, Jazzbeaux wasn’t into politics. She called a gangcult a gangcult, but the Daughters tried to sell themselves as a Conservative Pressure Group. They had a male adjunct, the Minutemen, but they were wimpo faghaggs. It was the Daughters you had to be conce with.