Lost Souls

chapter 63

By 6:40, the parking lot at Pickin’ and Grinnin’ contained more than thirty trucks and SUVs, though not a single car. Fifteen minutes later, no additional vehicles had arrived.

The monthly family social of the Riders in the Sky Church was under way. They were all folks with jobs, who needed to change clothes after work and corral the kids, but none of them ever came as late as seven o’clock to this event.

Inside, country-western stars both long-revered and new were rocking the jukebox. The church couldn’t afford live music for the social. Anyway, no one who ever played in Rainbow Falls could outsing Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, or any other of Nashville ’s best.

The buffet tables were piled high with homemade food, enough for everyone to stuff themselves and still take home two days’ worth of leftovers of one another’s finest treats. Being a prizewinning cook of comfort food wasn’t a hard-and-fast requirement of membership in the church, but those who joined with no kitchen skills learned from their betters and, within a year, could turn out a perfect cake, an adequate pie, and passable biscuits of numerous varieties; and in two years, they were taking home some prizes.

Tables were set aside for kids to play card games and board games, and to work puzzles of all kinds in teams. No mind-stunting video games were allowed, and no one seemed to miss them.

Beer was being consumed, and a modicum of whiskey, because the Riders did not forsake the pleasure of spirits. Even the Lord drank wine, as any Bible plainly showed. The trick was moderation, which was all but rarely observed in respect of the women and children.

Fewer of the Riders smoked than had people of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but they found no virtue in driving tobacco farmers into poverty. Those who smoked elsewhere, however, abstained at church functions.

Simple folks, none of them rich, they nevertheless dressed up for the evening, though in the case of the men, dress up meant hardly more than making sure their boots were shined and wearing sport coats with their jeans.

They were a noisy crowd, filling the roadhouse with laughter, sharing family news and also that kind of news that’s called gossip, mostly gossip of a benign nature, although some that in all honesty could be called mean, as well. They were not saints, after all, but merely souls in the long and often meandering journey from sin to salvation.

At seven o’clock sharp, Mayor Erskine Potter locked the front doors from the outside, using chain and a padlock.

Simultaneously, Tom Zell padlocked the fire exit from the bathroom hall and Ben Shanley chained the kitchen exit.

The fire exit from the private dining room had been barred earlier.

Now the mayor and the two councilmen met as planned at the backstage door, by which they entered the roadhouse. With the blue-velvet curtain between them and the Riders, they double-padlocked that final exterior exit.

In the main room, where everyone was meeting and greeting, the three men went behind the bar, by way of the service gate. Zell and Shanley busied themselves with nothing important, using their bodies to shield the mayor from view as he locked the two deadbolts on the door between the backbar and the service corridor.

Erskine was excited about being able to watch the Builders at work, a spectacle that he had never seen before. But the best thing of the night would be the killing of the children.

None of the Community would ever be born as a child. They all came into this world as adults, grown and extruded in mere months. And because they were not only sterile but were also incapable of sexual activity, they could never produce children.

Procreation was an inefficient method of reproduction. Not only were children inefficient, they were also alien to the minds of those in the Community. And not merely alien but repellent.

How fine the world would be when, one day, there was no small voice anywhere in it, no childish laughter, no laughter at all.