Ballistic

-1- Are You Ready for the Apocalypse?

The young man who calls himself Zachariah blinks against the neon of a megawatt Manhattan night. Cocks his head and hears dueling symphonies in his brain. A thunderstorm of Wagner on the port side, a cannonade of Tchaikovsky to starboard. Schizophrenia in stereo.

Zachariah steps off the curb and pulls up the collar of his trench coat. Rain pelts him. Cleanses him, he thinks, as clueless tourists and scummy gutter rats surge by on both sides. Yokels and locals. Sinners all.

Hookers in halter tops, goosebumpy in the wet chill. Gangbangers in leather, pimp-rolling, toe-walking, trash-talking skull crackers. Corn-fed, name-tagged conventioneers, heehawing across the big city, checking out the bars, Singapore slinging watery drinks at nine bucks a throw.

Lifting his face to the rain, eyeglasses steaming, he splashes through a puddle. Stops at a kiosk filled with filthy magazines. The devil’s own diaries. Creamy breasts and pouty lips. Who will save them?

Splashing through a puddle, wagging his finger at Bernie behind the counter, telling him, “All the animals come out at night.”

Bernie looks at the young man through rheumy eyes. “You’re telling me.”

Zachariah sweeps his arm across a panorama of lustful sinners. “Some day a real rain will come and wash this scum off the street.”

“How many times you seen Taxi Driver? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, Zack, it’s making you even weirder, if that’s possible.”

A radiant light amps Zachariah’s mind, a divine glow inspired by the Truth and heavenly doses of mescaline. He reaches into his trench coat and hands Bernie a pamphlet. On the cover, a drawing of an ornate temple exploding, pillars shooting into the air like flaming spears. Zachariah levels his gaze. “Pilgrim, are you ready for the Apocalypse?”

“Hell yes.” Bernie tosses the pamphlet aside. “But to tell the truth, I thought it already happened.”

Outside the store, the neon flashes “Adult XXX.” Inside, the pot-bellied clerk with the retro sideburns hacks up a wad of phlegm, cursing the weather and his own clogged sinuses. He empties an ashtray, counting the butts, and curses himself for his three-pack a night-shift habit. He switches channels on his seven-inch black-and-white, then looks up to see a clean-cut young man stroll into the shop, trench coat spotted with rain. Wiping raindrops from his wire-rim glasses with his tie, another accountant or salesman copping a cheap thrill.

The clerk glances at the bland, nothing face. Always check them out, watch for a thug with an attitude and a Saturday night special. Trench Coat tries to flip through “Salt and Pepper Studs,” but it’s stapled shut. Peeper doesn’t even know the rules. He loops around a free-standing display of dildos and cockstraps and approaches the counter.

“If you’re looking for the video booths, they’re in the back,” the clerk says.

“My visions need no video,” Zachariah answers.

“So whadaya want, buddy?”

“Salvation for all eternity.”

The clerk shrugs. “Eternity’s expensive. We charge a quarter a minute for video. Fifty cents for live peeps. Ten bucks for the live sex theater.”

“Sodom and Gomorrah are upon us, and you, sir, are the gatekeeper of hell.”

Ah, one of those. The clerk hacks again, then spits into the trash can. For minimum wage and no health plan, why put up with this shit? “Hey, buddy, if you wanna buy… buy. If you wanna look… look. If you wanna preach, haul your ass out to the street corner.”

Zachariah pulls two quarters from a pocket. “I shall buy. But, as it is written in Revelations, ‘I know where you live. It is the place where Satan has his throne.’”

“You got that right, fella. I live in the Bronx.”

A whorish red sign with a flashing arrow points to “Live Peeps.” Hallucinating now, Zachariah feels as if his feet are slogging through a wet slime, the vomit of hell. He enters a dark booth the size of a toilet stall. Latching the door, his senses hypertuned, he inhales the tang of disinfectant barely masking the ocean saltiness of semen. Through tinny speakers, he hears the Red Hot Chili Peppers urging, “Give it away now!”

He slips the quarters into a slot. A shutter slides up and light streams through a window from the miniature interior stage where a bored stripper bumps and grinds, her backside facing a booth directly across from him. She chews her gum and pastes on a smile of slutty sincerity, smacking the other guy’s window with her mushy ass. Naked except for her red spiked heels, she dances across the stage toward Zachariah.

Come to me, Jezebel. The angels screech her name in his ear.

He steeples his fingers under his chin, studying her. A scar, fibrous and purple, jags across her belly. She is pale under the glare of the lights. Her hair is dyed a coppery red, top and bottom. Shaved into a design down below, what is it? A cross! Blasphemous bitch. She will pay. They will all pay.

She wiggles and pouts. Then, boom! The music stops, and so does she. Stands there a moment, hip shot, then points to the tray in the window, waiting for her tip. He folds a pamphlet over twice and places it in the tray.

On the other side of the glass, she picks up the pamphlet and unfolds it, her eyes going hard as she read aloud in a Southern twang. “‘Are you ready for the Aypo-ca-lipsee?’ You think I can pay the rent with this shit?”

She looks up, ready to shame a couple of bucks out of him, but he is gone.

Zachariah climbs the stairs to the second floor. Two middle-aged men pass him on their way down, averting their eyes. Confront your sins, heathens!

He hands a ten-dollar bill to a burly Hispanic man with a ponytail and the tattoo of a snake wending across his knuckles, then enters the small theater. Four geezers are spread out, one to a row, hands disappearing into their laps, watching the stage where a naked punk is slipping it to a skinny woman on a soiled mattress.

The woman’s bare, dirty feet are wrapped around the punk’s pimply back as he listlessly pumps away. Neither makes a sound, though the mattress is wheezing, and one of the scuzzbags up front is breathing so hard, he might go into cardiac arrest.

Zachariah heads down several steps and hops onto the stage. The heavy breather in the front row huffs out a “Hey!” The couple untangles, the punk’s pecker hanging forlornly at half-mast. “It ain’t amateur night! Get outta here.”

Zachariah turns to the audience of disgruntled whackers and lets his voice slip into the sing-song of his beloved Brother David. “Babylon, mother of prostitutes, abomination of the earth, hear the Word!”

“Aw, shut up!”

“Chingate!”

“What a meshuggeneh!”

Forgiving the fools who know not what they do. “Behold a pale horse!”

The door bursts open and Snake Knuckles hauls ass toward him.

“And his rider’s name was Death!” Zachariah unbuttons his suit coat and extends his arms. Jesus on the Cross. A battery pack hangs from his belt, and packets of Semtex are taped to his waist.

Snake Knuckles leaps onto the stage but Zachariah sidesteps and calls out, “And Hell followed him!”

He pushes a switch on the battery pack…

At his kiosk, Bernie sees the orange flash before he hears the thunderclap. An explosion that spews glass and plaster across the street, barely missing him. Pedestrians duck and run as the shrapnel rains down, and where there had been a tawdry little porn shop, now there is a gaping crater of flame. A hot wind sucks piles of magazines from Bernie’s counter, tumbling them down the street, plastering them against windshields, and inhaling them into the inferno.

And still no one has answered the question, “Are you ready for the Apocalypse?”

-2- In the Belly of the Beast

Deep inside the missile silo, Sergeant Jack Jericho dangles at the end of a rope and pulley, a harness buckled around his waist. Above him, the sky is crystalline blue. He is a shade under six feet, broad of shoulders and shaggy of hair that has not been regulation length since basic training. He has slate-gray eyes and a nose that has been broken twice, once by a slag bucket that slipped its winch in the coal mine and once by a fist that found its mark.

Jericho pulls in rope, hand-over-hand. Closes his eyes and imagines himself scaling a lodgepole pine in a shaded forest. Climbing up the hard, scaly bark, grabbing a sturdy limb overhead. Catching the crisp scent of the high timberland. White aspens, Douglas firs, and a thicket of snowberry and juniper. Bluebells, too, sprouting out of the rocky soil of an upland clearing.

Mind over matter, it works for a moment. What had the doc called it? Creative visualization. “The mind’s eye can see whatever the brain wishes.”

Yeah, and a lot the brain doesn’t wish. Try not thinking of a brick wall. Or of a mine shaft filling with water, men screaming to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Jericho opens his eyes, reaches up and grasps the handle of the exhaust tube cover. He catches a whiff of the oily slickness of metal and hears the thumpa of the generators far below him in the sump. Damn. Tries to bring back the forest, tries to summon the sound of rippling water in a rocky stream. Thumpa-thumpa. Like the heartbeat of a leviathan.

He looks up. The bluest of skies is still there, visible only because the six-foot thick concrete cap is open. He looks down toward the drainage sump and the polished steel floor of the silo.

Jericho uses his legs to kick away from the silo wall, and the rope spins out of the pulley, giving him slack. He propels himself several yards, extends a soapy brush to a grimy spot on the wall, then begins scrubbing. Sweating now, though it’s a consistent fifty-eight degrees inside Chugwater Mountain. Sweating not from the heat, but the confinement, the sense that the encircling wall is closing in.

In the belly of the beast.

He breathes heavily, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt just above the three stripes. Again, he unwillingly conjures up the mine. The creak of the timbers, the explosion, the rushing water and the darkness. Then the screams, and finally the silence. The doc knew all about the dreams. Had his own from Vietnam. He was a clinical psychologist, on retainer for the union. Wore a ring in his ear, tied his hair in a ponytail. Some of the older miners called him a pansy, until they got close enough look him in the eyes. Glacial ice. Jericho didn’t want to know what those eyes had seen. He visited the doc in his office, a trailer at a job site, and asked a question.

“Will the dreams go away?”

“Scars fade but never vanish. Create your own dreams, sing your own songs.”

“I can’t go back in the ground. I need to get out of here, go somewhere far away.”

“There is nowhere far away.”

The doc had been right. Sleep came hard. Jericho bedded down with a bottle and a dreamscape of ghosts. Joined the Air Force, re-upped, and re-upped again. Now, two thousand miles from the West Virginia coal mines, he finds simple joys in the outdoors. An eagle soaring over the vast prairie, the haunting lunar landscape of a rocky basin, the startling quickness of a deer bounding through the grasslands.

Jericho finishes scrubbing the acidic residue near the exhaust tube and spins around in his harness. His job is to clean up after a test firing of the LEGG, the launch eject gas generator. Unlike other intercontinental ballistic missiles, the one with the Orwellian name of “Peacekeeper” is cold launched, propelled out of the silo by a burst of compressed gas. The solid fuel of the first stage ignites only after the missile is in the air.

Jericho drops his soapy brush into a pail built into his harness. He bristles when other airmen call him the base janitor, but even Jericho figures he is little more than the clown who follows the elephants with broom and pan. He looks up again at the brilliant sky, imagines himself in waders standing in the shallow water of a cool stream, whipping a fly toward a whirling pool where the big trout lurk. For a moment, he is out of the silo, out of the mine.

He kicks off the wall again, a little too hard, and… clang! He bangs into the nose cone of the missile that is suspended from cables, the Longitudinal Support Assembly in Air Force jargon. The cables are attached to the walls of the hardened silo, and in the event of an enemy’s nuclear strike above ground, the missile will sway, then steady itself, and be ready for launching. In theory. As with so much in the missile program, no one knows what really will happen in the event of thermonuclear war.

Seventy-one feet tall, a little less than eight feet in diameter, the Peacekeeper, or PK, is topped by a nose cone containing ten nuclear warheads. Each warhead is seventeen times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima and ushered in the nuclear age. At this precise moment, the seat of Jack Jericho’s olive green coveralls are polishing the nose cone. With a layer of dark rubber covering the missile’s four stages, the PK is sleek, breathtaking and black as death.

Jericho winces as the metallic echo reverberates through the silo.

“Yo, Jack! You turn this place into Chernobyl, the captain’s gonna be steamed.”

Jericho looks up to see Sayers, a senior airman standing at the edge of the elevated gantry one hundred feet above the floor of the silo. Sayers wears camouflage green and loam battle dress and polished combat boots. Compared to Jericho, he looks like an ad for GQ, a muscular African-American all spit and polished. “Captain’s already steamed,” Jericho says.

“No shit, look where he put you. Hey, if I had your detail, you know what I’d do?”

“What?”

“Kill myself,” Sayers laughs.

Then he jumps.

Jericho watches a perfect swan dive off the gantry, Sayers sailing into space, his body arcing down the side of the missile toward the steel floor below. Lower, lower, a millisecond from crushing his skull, then… BOING! A bungee cord catches and springs him back up toward the gantry. He bounces twice on the cord, swinging between the missile and the wall.

“You’re next, my man,” Sayers cackles.

Jericho continues scrubbing the wall. “Only if you put a gun to my head.”

“C’mon Jack. You need some excitement in your life.”

-3- Freudian Flim-Flam

Warren Cabot, the Secretary of the Air Force, spears a slice of rare tenderloin and turns to Christopher Harrington, the California congressman with the telegenic smile and a constituency of Orange County right wingers. Outside the windows, a light rain is falling, peppering the calm waters of the Potomac. A shell glides by, worked by six women wearing Georgetown University t-shirts.

“I’m not admitting weakness, Chris,” the Air Force Secretary says. “I’m recognizing the realities of the new world order. We’re dismantling more than half our missiles under START II. Blowing up the silos and filling them with concrete.”

“I didn’t vote for the damn treaty,” the Congressman says, as if to clear the record.

“Fine, but it’s a done deal, Chris. Question now, what’s the effect on the readiness of the remaining missile crews? That’s why Dr. Burns is with us.”

Secretary Cabot gestures with a fork full of filet mignon in the direction of Dr. Susan Burns, who gives her business smile and nods, then slices her poached salmon. At thirty-four, having earned a Ph.D. in psychology with a thesis on soldiers’ response to stress in warfare and an M.D. in general psychiatry, she will let the two stags bloody each other for a while. She wears her long, dark hair up, and today she omitted the makeup and dressed in the most conservative of her blue suits. Still, she had turned the heads of the brass — their medals clinking, ribbons rustling — when she entered the Joint Chiefs Dining room.

The Congressman gives Dr. Burns a grudging nod and motions toward the uniformed steward for a second Scotch on the rocks. “I just don’t believe in sticking pins and needles in our boys to find out if they’ve ever seen their mommies naked.”

“Boys and girls,” Dr. Burns adds with a pleasant smile. “Women command launch capsules, too.”

“Not if I had anything to say about it,” the Congressman fires back. “No offense, Dr. Burns, but I don’t put much faith in all that Freudian flim-flam.”

Dr. Burns stays quiet, admiring the American eagle on the fine china, arrows in one claw, boughs of peace in the other. No use further antagonizing the man who holds the purse strings on her project to test all soldiers with access to nuclear weapons.

“For the love of mercy, Chris,” the Secretary says, “why are you such a Neanderthal?”

“Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

The Congressman is still a Colonel in the Reserves, but so what? Susan is acquainted with plenty of Marine officers who accept women as equals… or close to it.

“The Corps was fighting the British before the Declaration of Independence was signed,” the Congressman continues. “We’ve made more than three hundred landings on foreign shores.”

Not that the Congressman has landed on any foreign shores himself, Susan Burns knows, unless you counted congressional junkets to Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. Now what’s he saying?

“We didn’t need women then, and we sure as hell don’t need them now, except for political expediency, and you know I don’t play those games.”

No? What about stirring the pork barrel for a California defense contractor that makes guidance systems for missiles that are being mothballed? Susan Burns could tell from the Air Force Secretary’s look that he was probably thinking the same thing.

“Our women pilots have excellent records,” Secretary Cabot says. “So do the women in support units.”

“If you ask me, we’re just appeasing the left-wing, fem-Nazi contingent.”

“Damn it, Chris! You’ve been in office so long, you’re starting to believe your own flack. It’s a new world out there, and we’ve got to make use of all the expertise we’ve got.”

“Including lady shrinks, I suppose?”

“I vouch for Dr. Burns, and that ought to be good enough for you.”

Susan Burns stifles a smile. The old Air Force eagle still has some arrows in his quiver. “Gentlemen,” she says, “this isn’t about me and it isn’t about women. It’s about the readiness of the missile squadrons. The enemies are monotony, boredom, and a sense of futility. Not one missileer in fifty believes he — or she — will ever turn the key. If the President ordered a strike, there’s significant doubt the missileers would fire. They’d get the launch code and think it was a computer malfunction.”

“Even if that’s true,” the Congressman says, “I fail to see how a shrink is going to help.”

“Our preliminary studies show a marked decline in alertness and discipline. We need to construct psychological profiles of the men and women in the launch capsules, compile hard statistical data, then treat the problem.”

The Congressman sips at his Scotch, then to the Secretary and waves his napkin, surrendering. “Okay, Warren. It’s your call, but if 60 Minutes comes calling about this boondoggle, I’ll refer them to you.”

The two men exchange smiles, and Susan Burns finally understands. It had all been a charade. The Congressman never intended to block the project. He merely wanted artillery cover if the news media likened the project to price supports for bull semen or thousand-dollar balpeen hammers. If that happened, Susan Burns could go back to treating bed-wetting teenagers in suburban Virginia. I’ve got a lot to learn about politics, she thinks.

A steward appears and silently slips a silver tray holding a small envelope in front of Secretary Cabot. Opening the envelope, the Secretary examines a note, his brow furrowing. “Isn’t that the damndest?”

“What?” the Congressman asks.

“You remember that break-in at the Denver Armory?”

“Yeah, the Army lost some ordnance.”

“Automatic weapons, ammunition and some obsolete land mines,” the Secretary says, looking around, then lowering his voice. “Plus enough plastiques to make the Beirut bombing look like a fraternity prank.”

“That wasn’t in the reports.”

“No, and neither will this. There was an explosion at a porn shop in New York last night. Traces of Semtex were found in the rubble. Based on the chemical composition, it’s special Army issue.”

“So why rob an armory to blow up a porn shop?” the Congressman asks.

“Excellent question,” Dr. Susan Burns says, patting her lips with a napkin, “and I’ll bet the answer can be found with a little Freudian flim-flam.”

-4- Hell’s Half Acre

The broad plains north of Rattlesnake Hills are broken by mountains and buttes rising unexpectedly from the flat earth. Wyoming is a land of contrasts. Towering mountains of granite that boiled up from inside the earth over three billion years ago. Flat prairies of wheatgrass and junegrass. Steppes covered with sweetly pungent sagebrush, the scent carried by the strong, continuous winds. On the arid badlands, eroded boulders form exotic sculptures in demonic shapes. Not far to the south, traces of wagon wheels carved into the rocks are still visible on the old Oregon Trail.

Near the south fork of the Powder River, in an area of dry buttes and rocky gullies, is Hell’s Half Acre, a canyon of eroded pink rock, forming pinnacles that could be the frozen flames of Satan himself. Three miles to the west, near a stream, is rolling ranch land. Some is fenced, and cattle graze serenely on the grasslands that are also the home to jackrabbits, cottontails and rattlesnakes. Mule deer and pronghorn antelope feed in the nearby woods.

Over a rise from the grazing cattle, farther from the stream, a man in commando fatigues uses wire cutters to snip through the bottom two strands of a barbed-wire fence. As he spreads the opening with gloved hands, eleven similarly dressed men wriggle through, belly-up, using their rifles to keep the wire from catching on their fatigues. In their wake, clouds of dust rise from the parched earth. In a moment the men are gone, and with the top wires still intact, the fence does not appear to have been breached.

The commandos flatten themselves to the ground and creep ahead through the scrubby brush, holding their M-16A2’s, official U.S. Army issue, in front of them. They move slowly in what marine rifle squads call the “low crawl.” The morning sun is in their faces, which are painted loam and light green to blend in with the surroundings. They wear Kevlar body armor and carry extra magazines of 5.56 mm. ammunition in pouches on their cartridge belts. Their helmets are covered in brown burlap.

As they move higher on the ridge, the brush becomes heavier, and the leader, Gabriel, a rock-jawed man of thirty with squinting blue eyes, cautiously stands and extends both arms away from his body at a forty-five degree angle. At the signal, the men get to their feet and move into wedge formations, a point man with three riflemen behind him. The two side units break away diagonally as Gabriel’s middle wedge moves straight up the ridge. A dozen men in all.

Gabriel raises his right hand, and his unit stops. He reaches down, brushes some leaves away from the ground, exposing a trip wire, then leads his men around a buried land mine. At the top of the ridge, he signals again, and his men halt. Gabriel crawls to a vantage point where he can see into the hollow. Using binoculars, he scans the scrubby landscape. Four hundred meters away, halfway up the slope of the next ridge, is a bunker reinforced with sandbags, mounds of dirt, and logs. Twenty meters behind the bunker is a century-old miner’s cabin of blackened logs, its walls sagging into the ground.

The target.

To get there, his men will have to work their way down the ridge, cross the dry coulee in the hollow, then work their way back up the far ridge, in direct view of the bunker.

Suicide.

Gabriel knows the lesson taught every soldier since Gettysburg: one dug-in infantry man on high ground can stop three equally armed men advancing from low ground. He signals his RTO to crawl forward and uses the radio to call the point men of the other two wedges. “We’ll lay down some hellfire from here. You’ll flank them. Thirty seconds.”

His men take positions at the top of the ridge, stretching out into the prone firing position. Two prop their rifles on bipods. “Ten seconds,” Gabriel says, then counts it down. On his command, they erupt with a blistering barrage, their weapons set on three-round bursts.

But they must have been expected, for the return fire is immediate and overwhelming. His men flatten, grinding their faces into the ground, and for a moment, their guns are stilled. Gabriel, still standing, winces. He is a man with no fear of death. “Keep it steady!” he shouts, and his men resume firing. Good men, pious men. He prays for them to succeed, to overcome their fears.

Gabriel extends his right arm straight down, then moves it horizontally in the infantryman’s signal to fire faster. His men empty their magazines, clip in new ones and spray the hollow with shells, seldom hitting the bunker or its fortifications. They do, however, kill a lot of rocks.

So different here than on the firing range, Gabriel thinks ruefully, as the return fire zips over their heads. But his troops will learn. The firing slows as the men catch their breaths. Combat drains the adrenaline, exhausts the soldier who hasn’t learned to pace himself. “Keep it up!” he implores them. “Fire.”

At something, at anything, he wants to say. Gabriel is a generation too young to have served in Vietnam, but he has studied its history and knows the woeful inaccuracy of the infantry with the M-16A1. In many fire fights, it took an astonishing one hundred thousand rounds to inflict a single casualty. Lack of fire discipline and malfunctions. He knows that, at this moment, his men are firing wildly, perhaps blindly. He would have liked another month of training.

Gabriel peers into the hollow and a flash of movement catches his eye in the sagebrush. His riflemen see it, too. They turn and fire, finally hitting something. He watches as the brown hide of a large animal, a deer or elk tumbles into the underbrush.

Enough. If the distraction hasn’t worked already, laying down a few hundred more rounds won’t help. “Unit two, go!” he shouts into the radio. To his right, four commandos work their way down the ridge, but oblique fire from the bunker stops them just short of the coulee. They take cover behind dusty rocks in the dry riverbed. Unit two’s leader scans the left flank with his binoculars but cannot see any movement except for a jackrabbit that runs a zig-zag route away from the shooting.

“Unit three, where are you?” Gabriel demands. “Matthew, go now!”

“We’re halfway there. Relax, brother.” The voice is calm and reassuring. Halfway down the ridge, Matthew clicks off the radio as he leads his men through dense underbrush. He is tall with a thick neck and arms cabled with veins, his hands work-hardened. His men move quickly, breaking twigs, kicking over rocks, their movements masked by the blazing gunfire to their right. Speed, not stealth, is their ally now.

As they cross the coulee, the four men slide into the rectangular “echelon left” formation with Matthew at the point. They have flanked the bunker and have a clear shot up the ridge to the miner’s cabin. Moving at double-time now, with rifles at port arms, they break into the clearing twenty meters from the cabin.

Just outside the cabin door, a soldier has his back to them. He is peering down toward the bunker on the far side, his hand resting on an M-9 service pistol in a holster. They storm him, the soldier turning just in time to catch sight of Matthew slashing at his chest with a fixed bayonet. The soldier instinctively leaps backward, and the blade catches in his flak jacket. Matthew pivots and swings the rifle butt in a horizontal arc, belting the soldier across the jaw and toppling him to the ground. Two other commandos stand over him with rifle muzzles pointed to his chest as Matthew and a fourth commando burst through the flimsy cabin door.

They tuck and roll and come up in the firing position. Their rifles are pointed directly at the head of a long-haired, handsome man of thirty who sits at a redwood table reading the Bible. The man, who calls himself Brother David, calmly presses the button on a stopwatch, closes his Bible and looks at Matthew with dark, piercing eyes. “Your best time, to date, my brother. Sliced a minute thirty-five off last week’s maneuver.” His serene smile is that of a king pleased with a loyal subject. “I believe we are ready.”

Matthew takes off his helmet. His long hair is tied into a ponytail. “Perhaps two more weeks would be better.”

“God waits for no man.”

Matthew nods. His leader has spoken. “Thy will be done, Brother David.”

The soldier from outside staggers into the cabin, his chin in his hand. Blood seeps from his mouth as he approaches Matthew. “You broke my jaw,” he whimpers through swollen lips.

Brother David stands and clasps an arm around the wounded man’s shoulder. “That is nothing compared to the pain you will inflict on the army of Satan.”

-5- Graveyard Shift

The sun blinks through the tree tops on a crisp Wyoming morning. Towering blue spruce and Ponderosa pines form an umbrella over the two-lane road. It is September, and the Aspens are turning gold, their round leaves fluttering, whistling their songs in the wind. A red-headed woodpecker beats out a staccato beat against a fir tree, and somewhere in the underbrush, rabbit-like pikas are squeaking their distinctive sounds.

The Air Force Jeep emerges from the forest and begins climbing through the Rattlesnake Hills. Road signs warn of moose crossings. Whitecapped mountains are visible on the horizon.

Senior Airman Sayers is at the wheel of the Jeep, Airman Reynolds next to him. Jack Jericho is sprawled across the back seat, his helmet pulled over his eyes. “Sarge asleep?” Sayers asks.

“Asleep, hungover, dead, or all of the above.” Reynolds runs a hand over his crew-cut. A freckled redhead with a southern accent, he wore his hair in a pony tail before joining the Air Force, and even now, cannot believe the stubbly bristle he finds under his hand.

“Yo, Jack! You awake?” Sayers asks.

From the back seat, an unintelligible grunt.

“C’mon Jack. Get up.”

“Leave me the hell alone.”

Sayers jerks his thumb in Jericho’s direction. “That’s what two weeks on the captain’s graveyard shift does to a man.”

“Not to mention ten years of hard drinking,” Reynolds adds.

Sayers downshifts as the grade becomes steeper. A stream runs alongside the road, clear water tumbling over rocks as old as the earth itself. Above the bank of the stream, a porcupine gnaws at the trunk of a pine tree. Across the road is a seemingly endless chain-link fence topped by razor wire. “No Trespassing” signs emblazoned with the Air Force insignia dot the fence every several hundred yards.

“Uh-oh,” Sayers says, looking toward the sky and slowing down.

“What is it, Spike?” Reynolds asks.

Sayers’ first name is Timothy, but with his round glasses and narrow face, his buddies back in Brooklyn thought he looked like Spike Lee. Before he joined the Air Force, Sayers sometimes cadged free drinks and impressed aspiring models and actresses by claiming he was scouting the neighborhood for a movie location. He still tries the scam occasionally while on leave, but less successfully. At a bar in Laramie, he discovered, the locals didn’t know Spike Lee from Robert E. Lee.

“Buzzards dead ahead,” Sayers says.

Jericho stirs and sits up, sliding back his helmet, squinting into the morning sun. He’s unshaven and his eyes are puffy. He pulls a warm can of beer from a rucksack, pops the top and puts it to his lips. He gargles noisily, spits into the road, then opens the wrapper on a Twinkie and gobbles it in two bites.

“Disgusting,” Reynolds says. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Back home, I’d have hominy grits, black coffee and molasses bread every morning.”

“Hey Reynolds,” Jericho says, his voice thick from a case of the dry tongue. “If I gotta hear one more time about your momma’s eggs still warm from the chicken’s ass, I’m gonna puke.”

Sayers laughs. “Hell, Jack. You’re liable to puke, anyway.”

“I was just being friendly,” Reynolds says, pouting. “Besides, eggs don’t come out a chicken’s ass.”

Jericho ignores both of them and watches half-a-dozen turkey vultures drift in slow circles overhead. A year of perimeter maintenance duty with these two, and he still marvels at the weirdness of their conversations. Within a few minutes, they start up again.

“Hey Sayers, how many folks are there in Wyoming like you?”

“You mean handsome and manly?”

“I mean black.”

“Not many, man. Three thousand or so, not counting me.”

“That’s why there’s no graffiti.”

“There’s no graffiti ‘cause there’s nothing in this hayseed heaven to put it on ‘cept trees and rocks. Graffiti goes on underpasses and buildings in the projects, and if you got the balls, the po-lice station.”

“Yeah, well it ain’t so bad out here,” Reynolds says. “Even Jericho likes it when he’s sober.”

Now, Sayers stops the Jeep alongside the fence, then shoots a concerned look into the backseat. “More nightmares last night, Jack?”

Jericho’s grunt could be a yes, could be a no.

The buzzards are directly overhead, circling lazily in the wind currents, waiting. Now, the men see what the birds are after. A large elk with a full crown of antlers is caught in the fence, its hide bloodied from the struggle to get free.

“Never told me this Wild Kingdom shit in the recruitment office,” Reynolds complains.

“All I ever heard,” Sayers says, “was that wild blue yonder jive.” He jams on the hand brake, and the three men get out and cautiously approach the elk.

When they are ten feet away, Sayers pulls a .45 from a side holster, but Jericho seizes his wrist. “No need for that, Spike.”

Reynolds lets out a low whistle in Jericho’s direction. “It lives! It talks, it walks, it brushes its teeth with Budweiser.”

Jericho grabs a saw-toothed survival knife from a sheath on his leg. “You two cowboys back off. I’ll handle this.”

Amused, Reynolds slouches against a wooden fence post and lights a cigarette. “Here we go again. Daniel Friggin’ Boone.”

Three feet from the trapped elk, Jericho stops, the frightened animal watching him through eyes the size of half-dollars. “Hoo boy,” Jericho coos. “You are a beauty.”

Blood oozing from its wounds, the animal bucks and stomps, lifting its head until it can no longer see Jericho. With startling quickness, Jericho leaps forward, grasps its antlers, and raises his knife to the elk’s neck.

“Jeez, Jack, we coulda shot him!” Sayers calls out.

But Jericho doesn’t cut the animal. Instead, he swiftly slices away the fence wire, then gently pulls it from the elk’s hide. He reaches into his pocket and brings out a handful of tiny red berries.

“Yo, Jack!” Sayers sounds alarmed. “That ain’t Bambi.”

“Mountain ash,” Jericho says. “For pain and healing.” He crushes the berries in his fist and lets the red syrup flow into the animal’s wound. The elk stiffens but doesn’t bolt, and Jericho gently strokes the tufted hide behind its ear.

“You learn that Tarzan shit back in Stinkhole, West Virginny?” Sayers asks.

“Sinkhole. Asshole.”

The elk, which had been paralyzed with fear, seems to relax as Jericho strokes its back.

“Hey Sayers,” Reynolds calls out. “You know what a West Virginian calls a deer caught in a fence?”

“What, man?”

“His first fuck.”

The two airmen laugh.

“He’s an elk,” Jericho says.

Reynolds shrugs. “Elk, moose, Rotarian, whatever.”

“Yo, Jack,” Sayers says. “How come you didn’t stay home and marry a coal miner’s daughter?”

Jericho steps back, and the elk bounds away, heading for the woods.

“Or your sister?” Reynolds chimes in.

It happens with electric speed.

Jericho whirls, and the knife flies from his hand toward Reynolds’ head. With a solid thwomp, it sticks in the fence post just inches above Reynolds’ crew cut.

Speechless, Reynolds reaches up to feel his scalp as the knife, buried deep in the wood, vibrates like a tuning fork.

“Shit man!” Sayers yells. “You’re crazier than the boys in the ‘hood.”

Jericho walks to the fence post and pulls out the knife. “My sister’s the only family I’ve got left.”

Then he walks away, watching the elk disappear into the woods, admiring its majesty, envying its freedom.

Sayers and Reynolds exchange baffled looks. From their hours of endless banter, they know Jericho is a loner. Until now, he had never said a word about his family or his life before the Air Force. Then the same thought occurs to each of them. They really don’t know Jack Jericho at all.

-6- Baptism of Beer

A few miles from the ranch where Brother David’s warriors of God live and train is the town of Coyote Creek. A tavern, a general store, a gas station, a rod and gun shop, a few dozen weathered wooden houses. Little to do, other than the annual rodeo.

Inside the Old Wrangler Tavern, an elk’s head is mounted on the knotty pine wall above a scarred mahogany bar, the antlers serving as a rack for cowboy hats, hunting caps, and even a jock strap. A bartender with a walrus mustache and an enormous stomach draws beer from a tap whose handle is the plastic form of a naked woman.

Half a dozen ranch hands and loggers stand at the bar, hands wrapped around mugs of beer. They are a scruffy, bearded lot, in soiled jeans and red plaid shirts, a few of the younger guys with bandannas on their heads instead of cowboy hats.

Above the bar, a TV is tuned to CNN where a blond female reporter stands in front of a gutted building breathlessly jabbering into a microphone. “The FBI reports no leads in the latest porn shop bombing. Tuesday’s explosion in New York killed five and injured thirteen. Like the earlier blasts, no group has claimed credit for the attacks.”

The bartender wipes the bar with a wet towel and shakes his head. “Why blow up a jerk-off joint?”

“A political statement,” says one of the bandanna guys. “A protest.”

The bartender barks a laugh. “Protesting pussy? You want a political statement, blow up the I.R.S.”

The others murmur their agreement. “The I.R.S. can listen to your phone calls,” says one of the grizzled men.

“Not only that,” another says. “Every car manufactured after 1979 has a computer chip built in. A bureaucrat in Washington hits a switch, and your engine will stop dead.”

“That why you still drive a ‘78 Chevy pickup, Will?” another guy says, laughing.

“Yeah, and it’s why I keep my thirty-ought-six in the gun rack with five thousand rounds of ammo and provisions for six months under the barn. When the revolution comes, I’ll be ready.”

“Me too,” the bartender says. “I got two dozen kegs of Coors in the shed out back.”

Which sets the others to laughing. Will turns toward a long-haired man standing alone at the end of the bar. The man is lean and muscular and wears a blue chambray shirt and khaki pants. “What about you, fellow? You think there’s going to be a second revolution?”

“A Second Coming,” Brother David says. “The angel poured out his bowl on the sun, which scorched people with fire. They cursed the name of God and refused to repent.”

“What the hell?”

“Revelations, chapter sixteen, verse eight. It is the Word.”

Will studies the man, decides there’s no use going down that road. His ex-wife was a Bible-thumper, used to drive him crazy. “Well, the Word’s making me thirsty.” He motions to the bartender for a refill.

No one moves to join Brother David at the end of the bar. He sips a cup of coffee and resumes watching television. On the screen, an anchorman with gray hair and a somber tone begins to speak, and the screen goes to a videotape of the President shaking hands with several men in the Rose Garden. “At the White House,” the anchorman says, “the President welcomed the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Commission, which today begins a tour of U.S. missile bases scheduled to be shut down under the START II Treaty.”

The bartender tosses his towel in the direction of the sink. “What bullshit! Business ain’t bad enough, they gotta pull out the Air Force.”

“See, I told you so!” Will puts down his freshly poured beer. “First the missiles, then our rifles. The U.N. and the Trilateral Commission are gonna confiscate our guns and give them to the Zulus and the Zionists.”

Brother David walks to a nearby table and sits, joining a younger man who nurses a bottle of beer and a woman who holds a cup of coffee, gone cold. There is an air of peacefulness, of knowing calm, about Brother David, who smiles placidly. “Hello, Billy. Rachel. May the glory of God be with you.”

“Thank you for coming, Brother David,” Billy says. Neatly dressed in jeans and an open-collar shirt, he is a baby-faced, twenty-four year-old with rimless glasses and pale blond hair. “I’ve looked to the Lord for answers, just like you said. But… ” Tears form in his eyes. “There aren’t any answers. Not for me, anyway. Kathy said she’d wait for me, and now she’s going to marry my best friend, and… ” His voice takes on a pathetic whine. “I’m stuck out here in the woods for another six months. What can I do?”

Rachel leans across the table and gathers Billy’s hands in her own. In her late twenties, she wears no makeup and hides her figure under a shapeless granny dress. “Brother David understands, Billy. He loves you. He’ll take care of you. And so will I.”

Brother David stares hard at Billy, then squeezes his eyes shut, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. When he speaks, his voice is a whisper, “I see a quiet house. In the Midwest, I believe. There is a child, just one, a little boy, but no man there. Still, the house has the feel of a man. In the closet, there is a uniform, as if he might come back.” He pauses a moment, takes several deep breaths, and continues, “There is the sense of loss. Was your father killed in the service?”

Billy’s lower lip trembles. “No, but he was in the Army. He left my mother. And me. He never came back.”

David’s gaze seems to trace an outline around Billy. “Your auric fields are weak. There is purple and gold, and that’s good, but the colors are muddy, not vibrant. You are unsure, misunderstood, still in the process of awakening, and are not appreciated for what you have to offer.”

“Yes,” Billy says excitedly. “Yes, it’s all true, but can you help me?”

Suddenly, Brother David grabs Billy’s beer bottle and slams it on the table. Foam erupts and streams down the long neck. David dips an index finger into the pool of suds that surrounds the bottle. He reaches across the table and draws the sign of the cross on Billy’s forehead, then touches the tip of his finger to Billy’s lips. “Drink of my blood.”

Billy takes Brother David’s finger into his mouth as an infant would his mother’s nipple. He stares, wide-eyed at the man he considers the Savior. David rewards him with a beatific smile, then withdraws his finger. He grabs Billy’s head, cupping his hands around the base of his skull. “Do you seek everlasting life?”

It isn’t a question so much as a demand. Billy can’t say a word, but he nods against the pressure of David’s hands.

“Good, William, good. Because you, Lieutenant William Riordan of the United States Air Force. You hold the key. And only I can turn it.”

-7- Blood of our Ancestors

Two hundred fifty thousand years ago, the weather cooled, and the polar ice sheets spread southward. Mountainous ice caps flowed down over the plains, carving out canyons, depositing giant rocks in improbable geometric formations. Glaciers sliced semicircular bowls called cirques out of canyons and shaved opposite sides of ridges into narrow, jagged crests. Left behind were blue lakes, deep gorges and spectacular rock formations, at once inviting and otherworldly.

The Air Force Jeep pulls to a stop alongside a craggy wall streaked with mineral deposits. Water trickles down the rocks like rivulets of tears. It is a spot of enduring beauty in the wilderness, a place marred only by the scar of the government fence topped with razor wire that lines the road.

The three airmen — Sayers, Reynolds and Jericho — get out of the Jeep and walk toward a Native-American man in buckskin who is kneeling at the fence.

“Hello, Kenosha,” Jericho says, going down onto his haunches, showing respect by neither towering over the man nor asking him to stand.

Kenosha’s face is creased by the sun, his black hair pulled back into a ponytail. He could be fifty or seventy. Judging from his barrel chest and clear dark eyes, he is closer to fifty. He points to the smooth tears in the bottom strand of wire.

“Hunters?” Jericho asks.

“Hunters kill for food, not sport. Come.”

Kenosha scrambles under the fence, and Jericho follows.

“Yo, Jack!” Sayers calls after him. “We’re supposed to report the security breaks and keep moving. We’re already behind schedule, and Captain Pukowlski will have your ass if—”

“Puke can wait.”

“C’mon, Jack!” Now it’s Reynolds. “We got no time to pow-wow with the last of the friggin’ Mohicans.”

Jack stops and turns. Silently, he draws the saw-toothed knife from its sheath and gestures toward Reynolds. Turning to Kenosha, he says, “Should I scalp him or do you want to?”

Kenosha suppresses a smile and seems to weigh the question judiciously. Then he goes into his routine. “Red hair will bring plenty wampum. And I need ornament for rear-view mirror of pickup. Maybe his balls would do.”

“No. Too small.”

Reynolds turns to Sayers. Disgusted. “I told you Jericho had flipped out. What do we do now?”

“We wait,” Sayers tells him.

Jericho puts the knife away and follows Kenosha several yards along a path of fine, reddish-brown soil. Again, they squat on their haunches, and Kenosha points to footprints in the dirt. “Combat boots.”

Jericho nods and picks up several spent cartridges. “Five-point-five-six millimeter. Military issue.”

“I know. That is why I want you to see this.”

They walk up a rocky slope. Neither man speaks for several minutes as Kenosha leads them higher up the incline, the rocks yielding to a grassy ridge. Below them in the hollow is a dry coulee and on the far ridge is a sandbagged bunker and an old cabin of blackened logs. They work their way down the ridge, walking through waist-high, pungent sagebrush. A rustling in the bushes, and a jackrabbit bounds away. As they slow on the flat ground of the hollow, Kenosha gestures toward the underbrush. Jericho pushes his way through tumbleweed and grama grass, and half-a-dozen vultures beat their wings and take off, cawing out angry cries. Deep in the brush is the carcass of a moose, its hide peppered with bullet holes.

“Who would do this?” Kenosha asks.

Jericho shakes his head. “I know how you must feel. Just as your ancestors did when white men slaughtered the buffalo.”

“What are you talking about, Jack?”

“When the white man shoots animals for sport, he kills your brother.”

“My brother went to Utah State and sells tax-free bonds in Salt Lake City.”

Undeterred, Jericho goes on, “I understand your oneness with nature. The sap that flows through the trees is the blood of your veins. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth.”

“Jack, my friend, are you drunk?”

“Hell, no. I’m in touch with your spirituality.”

“You sound like some bullshit special on PBS”

“But I’ve read all about the Indian tribes of the West,” Jericho says, “your identification with nature, your pantheism.”

“Sorry, Jack, but I’m a Lutheran.”

“Oh.”

Kenosha motions him to follow, and they begin walking up the slope of the ridge beyond the old cabin, bracing themselves on rocks for the steep climb. With a wry smile, Kenosha says, “In case you’re suffering from any illusions, Jack, I’ve also got a satellite dish on the double wide, and I order imitation pearls from the Home Shopping Network. Every morning, I get the Chicago Tribune on the Internet, and I got a little money put away in an Individual Retirement Account, too.”

“I see.”

“None of us talk about that river and sky shit anymore Jack, except when someone sticks a microphone in our face. Maybe Tatanka Yotanka, who you would call Sitting Bull, talked that way. Maybe Chief Seattle really wrote that letter to the Great White Father in Washington, and maybe he didn’t. ‘What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires?’ If you ask me, Jack, a Hollywood screenwriter had a hand in that.”

“You’re a cynic, Kenosha. You’re not one with the land.”

At the top of the ridge, they pause. Kenosha turns to face Jericho. “Don’t get me wrong. I love nature. I get a calendar every year from the Sierra Club. Fine pictures of eagles and pumas.” He gestures down the slope toward the carcass of the elk. “I hate this as much as any decent man — red, white, brown or black — because I can’t stand to see needless death or needless waste. Animals are creatures of beauty, and I treasure them. But no more than you do, my friend.”

“I’ll write a report and try to find out who did this,” Jericho says, “but I can’t believe that anyone in the 318th would have—”

Kenosha silences him with a wave of an arm. He points into the next valley, a lush, irrigated landscape. Strands of trees, rocky cliffs, a tumbling stream, then open fields with grazing cattle… and finally, incongruously, a semi-circle of ten ugly concrete silo caps, blemishing the land like poisonous mushrooms. “The 318th did this, did they not?”

No use denying the obvious. “Guilty as charged. What do you suppose the old chief’s screenwriter would have said about our so-called Peacekeepers?”

“He would have said they rape our mother, the Earth.”

“We’re taking them out, filling in the holes.”

“I knew it would happen. Sooner or later, either you would do it, or the earth would do it for you. In the end, my friend, the earth will prevail.”

“You didn’t learn that on the Home Shopping Network,” Jericho says.

Kenosha locks Jericho with a level gaze. “No. Maybe a little of that tree sap still flows through my veins.”

-8- The Brass Are Coming

A battered VW Beetle with a roof placard, “Old Wrangler Tavern,” grinds its gears and chugs up the incline of a road made of crushed rock. Inside, Jimmy Westoff, a pimply seventeen-year old in jeans, denim vest and cowboy boots, stomps the accelerator to the floor and talks to himself. “Fuck me, this thing’s gonna die. Next time, I’ll take a mule.”

The car travels along a perimeter fence topped with razor wire. Jimmy laughs as he passes a rusted sign — “Rattlesnake Hills Sewage Plant — No Trespassing” — and drives through an open gate.

“Sewage plant,” he says, and spits out the open window. “Air Force is full of shit, that’s no lie.”

Another half mile up an incline, he pulls to a stop in front of a Quonset hut with a metal roof and no markings. At the sound of his squealing brakes, two Air Security policemen wearing berets and sidearms emerge from the hut.

The first one out, an E-3 with the name tag, “Dempsey, R.” slips a flask of bourbon into his back pocket. “Jeez, Jimmy, what took you so long? Those burgers are gonna be colder than Captain Puke’s heart.”

“Ain’t my fault Uncle Sam dropped you in West Jesus,” Jimmy says.

“Duty, honor, country,” the second airman, Carson, says without conviction.

“Yeah, well next time, you oughta ask for duty at a so-called sewage plant closer to town.”

Dempsey counts out some bills and gives Jimmy the money. “Ain’t no more next times. When they close this baby down, we got nowhere to go but back to the world.”

Jimmy hands Dempsey several bags of burgers and fries and starts to make change. “Keep it,” Dempsey says.

“Wow. Thanks, general. Two bucks. I’m gonna head to Las Vegas for the weekend.” Jimmy gets back in the VW and coasts back down the hill before popping the clutch to fire up the puny engine.

Carrying the burgers and fries, Dempsey hops into a Jeep just inside the perimeter fence. “Man the fort,” he tells Carson.

“Hey, you forgetting something?” Carson asks, tipping an imaginary bottle to his lips.

Dempsey shrugs, pulls out the flask and tosses it to his buddy. He hits the Jeep’s ignition and kicks up gravel pulling away. It’s less than a mile up the road to a windowless Security Building on the lower slopes of the mountain. A steel bridge with a barred door runs like an above-ground tunnel through the building and beyond it to a cone-shaped steel elevator housing cut into a rocky cliff. Several hundred feet beyond the Security Building is the silo cap, a circular pad of concrete six-feet thick and fifty feet in diameter.

The Jeep passes a small wooden barracks and a mess hall built in the shade of a strand of pine trees. A dam and a lake stocked with trout sit at the top of the mountain, and an aqueduct winds down the slope from the dam.

Inside the Security Building, half-a-dozen bored non-coms slouch at their desks shoving paper from the in-box to the out-box and maybe back again, too. Teletypes clack and security monitors scan the perimeter of the missile silo, both above and below ground. Lights show green on motion detectors, though they’ll blink red if either an Iraqi Mukhabarat squad or a field mouse crosses breaks the beam.

Captain Pete Pukowlski, a stocky 40-year-old with a brush cut and a menacing glare, walks through Security Command looking over shoulders, occasionally shooting glances at a bank of video monitors. Airman Dempsey’s face appears on the screen of one monitor, winking into the camera. A non-com buzzes Dempsey through the security door.

“Chow’s here,” Dempsey announces, handing out burgers. Captain Pukowlski grabs two and continues making his rounds.

An airman with loosened tie and grease-stained cuff picks up a ringing phone. “Three hundred eighteenth Strategic Missile Squadron, Airman Cooper speaking.”

In a grimy tee-shirt, Jack Jericho stands at a communications shed, somewhere in the wilderness, speaking into the phone. “Sixty-ninth bucket brigade, swab jockey second class Jericho reporting from behind enemy lines.”

Through the phone, he hears Cooper’s frantic whispers. “Jeez, Jericho, Captain Pukowlski’s shitting razor blades. You better get—”

From somewhere in the room, the captain’s voice drowns out Cooper. “Is that Jericho? Gimme that!”

Jack waits a moment, then there he is. “Sergeant, get your ass back by 1500 tomorrow, and be in uniform for once.”

“Why, you got a war planned?”

“V.I.P.’s are coming from D.C., so try to pretend you’re an airman. And don’t be bringing back any more road-kill raccoons.”

“Yes sir,” Jack says, “but those were possums, and last time you liked them… medium rare.”

“Jericho, you’re a friggin’ disgrace.”

“Captain, are you eating one of those Wrangler burgers, all the way?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“I can smell the onions, sir.”

With the captain still puzzling over that one, Jericho hangs up the phone. Thinking about the brass from Washington coming tomorrow. Knowing the captain will put on a dog-and-pony show and not wanting to be either one.

-9- Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog

Midafternoon in Coyote Creek, and Brother David drives an old pickup truck with Rachel sitting next to him. David wears a ten-pocket bush jacket favored by Hemingway wannabees and newspaper photographers. Rachel wears a beige dress that comes to her ankles. A stenciled sign on the door of the pickup reads, “Eden Ranch.” Matthew is in the truck bed with a man who calls himself Jeremiah. Matthew’s shoulder-length brown hair is out of its ponytail, and his beard has the unkempt look of an ancient prophet. Jeremiah is an African-American man of 30 with chiseled features and an untamed Afro. A red bandanna is tied around his neck. Both men wear loose fitting pants and sandals.

The truck travels down Main Street, past the Old Wrangler Tavern and the gas station, pulling to a stop in front of a general store.

“Walk with me,” David says to Rachel, and the two of them get out and head down the sidewalk. Matthew and Jeremiah hop out of the truck bed and enter the general store.

Few pedestrians are about in this tumbleweed town. David smiles placidly at a couple of passing ranch wives. “Afternoon, ma’am,” he croons, tipping an imaginary hat, and the women’s pace quickens going by him.

“Your charms don’t seem to work here,” Rachel says.

“They fear what they cannot know.” David clasps a hand around her shoulder, and they stop in front of a rod and gun shop, David admiring a shotgun in the window. “On the other hand, your charm seems to have woven its spell over Billy.”

“He wants to believe. He may even think he believes. But he does not. He is weak and afraid.”

Brother David kisses her on the cheek. “Then we must make him strong and fearless.”

Matthew loads cans of beans and boxes of rice into the bed of the pickup truck. Sensing movement behind him, he turns to see three local toughs surrounding him. All three wear low-slung jeans and cowboy boots. A wiry ranch hand called D.D. because he spends every Saturday night in jail for Drunk and Disorderly, chews on a piece of straw. “Hey Jesus, get a haircut!” he calls out.

Matthew ignores him and continues loading the truck.

“Yeah, and while you’re at it, get a shave,” says D.D.’s husky buddy, a guy they call Hoss because he’s the size of a horse and just as smart. “And take a bath, for Christ’s sake.”

“Everything I do is for the sake of Christ,” Matthew says calmly.

“Yeah, we know,” says the third one, Cletis. “You Jesus freaks think the world’s gonna end.”

“Oh, it shall,” Matthew says, “precisely when it is prophesied.”

“Maybe we should put your lights out ahead of schedule,” Hoss says, and his buddies laugh.

Jeremiah comes out of the general store carrying a fifty-pound sack of flour. As he steps off the curb, Cletis trips him, and Jeremiah tumbles to the pavement. The bag tears, and flour spills. Jeremiah gets up, dark eyes blazing. Matthew lays a calming hand on his shoulder. “Let it go, Jeremiah.”

This sets Hoss to giggling. “Jeremiah? I thought it was Aunt Jemima.”

“Naw,” D.D. says. “It’s like the song.” Which he tries to sing, “Jer-e-miah was a bull-frog.”

Just as tuneless, Cletis joins in, “Was a good friend of thine.”

Hoss bends over and scoops up a handful of flour from the torn bag. Slowly, he approaches Jeremiah, who stands motionless, waiting. “We don’t like hippies, coloreds, or queers around here,” Hoss taunts him, “and you look like all three.”

“Yeah,” D.D. adds. “We know what you choir boys do out at that ranch. Pray all day and bugger all night.”

This sets Hoss to giggling in a high-pitched squeal.

Jeremiah is silent. Matthew doesn’t make a move.

Slowly, deliberately, Hoss extends his hand — palm up and filled with flour — toward Jeremiah. For a long second, neither man moves. Then, Hoss blows a cloud of flour into Jeremiah’s face. Cletis bursts out laughing. “Hey, Jeremiah, you got your wish. You’re a white boy now.”

Still, no movement from Matthew or Jeremiah.

“What’s the matter, waiting for the Lord to help you?” D.D. mocks them. Then he sees that Jeremiah is looking past him. D.D. turns to find Brother David and Rachel on the sidewalk behind him.

“The Bible tells us to turn the other cheek,” David says with equanimity. “But the Book also instructs that we must teach the children so that they will know. Therefore, we must show you the light.” He nods to Jeremiah.

It happens so quickly that Hoss never moves, never raises his hands, never even cries out. Jeremiah’s hip pivots and he throws a lightning age-zuki, the knuckles of his right fist striking Hoss squarely on the Adam’s apple. The big man topples to the street, gagging.

Matthew snaps out a mae-geri front kick, catching D.D. in the groin, then spins into a ushiro-kekomi, a thrust kick to the rear, which lands directly in Cletis’ solar plexus. Cletis drops to a knee, sucking wind. Matthew locks his hands together and drops Cletis to the pavement with a thunderous downward punch to the back of the neck.

Hoss gets to his feet and reaches under his pantleg for a knife sheathed to his leg. But he is too slow, Jeremiah peppering him with a flurry of jabs to the face. Hoss brings up his hands to protect himself, but he’s already spouting blood from gashes above the eyes and his nose is a leaky faucet. With Hoss warding off head blows with his arms, Jeremiah backs up and lands a kick squarely on his sternum, cracking it, and the big man goes down, clutching his chest, coughing up blood-stained mucus.

D.D. tries crawling toward the general store, but Matthew grabs him by a foot, drags him back, his nose banging on the sidewalk, letting loose a flow of blood. Matthew gives a hard twist, breaking D.D.’s ankle with a sickening snap. D.D. rolls over, clutching his leg, screaming in agony.

It had taken only a few dizzying seconds, and now it was over, the three locals moaning, begging for peace. With Rachel clutching his arm, David walks into the circle of destruction. Suddenly, the whimpering D.D. reaches into his boot and comes out with a short-barreled .38. Blood dripping from his nose, face twisted in pain, he points the stainless steel gun directly at David’s heart.

David’s response is a tranquil smile. He lifts his left palm to show that it is empty. He runs his right hand behind his back, slips it beneath the flap of his bush jacket and removes a hand grenade from a metal loop. He continues to smile as he holds the grenade toward D.D., then pulls the pin.

D.D. licks his lips and says in a shaky voice, “That thing ain’t real.”

“In twelve seconds we’ll find out,” David replies, holding the grenade in one hand and the pin in the other. “Nine, eight… ”

“Shoot him!” Hoss yells.

“Six, five… ”

Cletis scrambles to his feet. “Don’t do it, D.D.!”

“Three, two… ”

Looking into the bottomless depth of David’s penetrating stare, D.D. drops the gun. David swiftly inserts the pin in the grenade.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Hoss whines.

“Was it real?” D.D. asks, like the poker player who folds but still insists on seeing the winner’s hand.

“Oh, most assuredly,” David tells him. “Standard Army issue.”

“Then what’s the trick?”

“Ah, the trick,” David says, letting them see the warmth and wisdom of his holy countenance. Enjoying it now. He is the rabbi, which he knows from his studies of the ancient Hebrews, means teacher. “The trick, as you call it, is the essential message of life. The trick, my simple lost child, is having no fear of death.”

“Crazy fucker,” D.D. says under his breath, but David hears him, and approaches. D.D. staggers back a step, afraid of being hit. David stops, his face a few inches from the cowardly heathen, who cringes in fear.

“On your knees, sinner.”

“What?”

“On your knees before He who would save you.”

D.D. drops to his knees, his head level with his teacher’s groin. David feels the power now. Lording it over the fallen man, a King among peasants. David leans over and lifts D.D.’s head by the chin. “Now, what lesson have you learned today?”

“Lesson?” Even when he is not in excruciating pain, D.D. is not the quickest mind in Wyoming. Now, he is completely befuddled.

“Again, my child, what have you learned?”

“I don’t know,” D.D. says, fighting off tears. “I skipped a lot of Sunday school.”

“Then I must tell you.” David releases his grip, letting the infidel sink to the pavement. “The lesson, you woeful sinner, is this. Never fuck with the Lord.”

-10- The Trout Are Calling

Airman Sayers drives the Air Force Jeep, Reynolds next to him, Jericho sprawled in the back. The sun sizzles just below the mountains on the horizon, and the clouds shimmer with a lustrous glow over the valley. Folded beds of black and purple shale slope down toward a rock-strewn river.

A rancher in a dusty pickup pulls out and passes the Jeep on the two-lane road. The pickup coughs a burst of oily smoke. The Wyoming license, with its cowboy and bucking bronco, is personalized, “BEEF.”

Sayers flicks on the headlights as the Jeep approaches a bridge. “Captain’s got no cause to bust your chops, Sarge.”

Slouched with his helmet over his eyes, Jericho is silent.

“Only weapon the Captain’s ever held,” Sayers continues, “is the little one between his legs.”

“Which he only fires on solo missions,” Reynolds adds.

The Jeep rumbles across the bride. Jericho stirs and looks out at the water tumbling over small rapids in the moonlight. “Stop the Jeep!” he yells.

Sayers hits the brakes and the Jeep squeals to a stop. “What?”

Jericho’s head is cocked toward the river. “I can hear them.”

“Who?” Sayers says.

“The trout. They’re calling to me.”

“Nothing doing, Jack,” Sayers says.

“Spike’s right,” Reynolds says. “We’ll never make it back in time if—”

“Go on without me. I’ll meet you at the sentry post at 1500 hours tomorrow. Puke’ll never know.”

Sayers pounds the steering wheel in frustration. “You crazy? How you gonna get back? Call a cab, rustle up a buffalo? We’re a hundred miles from base.”

“Not as the crow flies,” Jericho says. “Fifty bucks says I beat the two of you there.”

Sayers and Reynolds swap startled looks. Then they exchange high-fives and, in unison, yell, “You’re on!”

-11- A Great Star Will Fall from the Sky

The setting sun slants through a stained glass window and across the altar in the Eden Ranch chapel. A beacon from heaven.

The chapel is a converted horse barn that still smells of straw, sweet molasses feed, and creosote. About eighty worshipers sit, ramrod straight, on wooden benches. Women without makeup in long, flowing dresses, men in baggy pants and sandals and a pack of children, many barefoot, digging their toes into the wood chips that cover the floor. Matthew and Jeremiah are in the back row, flanking the door.

At the altar, Brother David looks out over his flock. “I see your auras, and they are strong and vibrant,” he proclaims. “You are healthy in body and spirit, and your halos reflect your holiness.”

He goes on for a while about his parishioners’ energy fields and the body’s seven major chakras points. Finally, he slips from his New Age mumbo jumbo into fundamentalist Biblical preaching. Dropping his voice into a seductive sing-song, he calls out, “Our cities are sewers of pornography and sin!”

The congregation murmurs its righteous ire. In the front row, Lieutenant Billy Riordan, in jeans and a pressed blue oxford cloth shirt, stares in rapt attention. Next to him, Rachel laces her fingers through his and squeezes. He blushes. On the other side of Billy is a ten-year-old girl in pigtails who prays silently, but moves her lips.

“In Isaiah, it is written, ‘I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity,’” David chants.

“Amen!” they cry.

“In Revelations, it is written, ‘I have the keys of Hades and of death.’ It is our Savior’s proclamation that He alone has authority over hell and the grave.’”

“Amen!” the faithful chorus.

“And how, my brethren, do we achieve everlasting life?”

“From the Word!” they shout back.

David nods. “In chapter two, verse ten, it is written, ‘Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.’”

More prayerful “amens” are sung to the heavens.

David beseeches them, his voice thundering across the chapel. “Do you believe!”

A unanimous chorus of “hosanna” and “praise the Lord.”

“As is prophesied in Revelations, ‘The angel shall sound his trumpet and a great star, blazing like a torch, shall fall from the sky. The waters shall turn bitter, and the wicked shall die.’”

“Let the torch fall!” Billy screams from the front row.

“Amen!” the others roar.

“The Day of Reckoning beckons!” David cries out. “Are you ready for the Apocalypse?”

In the front row, Billy rises from the bench. “Yes! Praise the Lord, I am ready!”

From the back, bellows of affirmation, the crowd frothing with devout fervor.

“Are you ready to do the Lord’s work, no matter the price to be paid?”

“Yes!” screams Billy. Around him, the others join in.

David beams. His army of the righteous would follow him anywhere. Of course, they will have to. He closes his eyes. He has been listening to his own voice. Detached, floating above them. Tasting his words, believing them one moment, doubting the next. Am I the vessel of the Lord, he wonders, or the false Messiah? Not a charlatan, surely not that. For he believes. The voices he hears are real. But do they come from Him or from the fallen angel, Satan? What bitter irony there. Lucifer with his ventriloquist’s voice, leading the shepherd astray.

A final thought, too. Could the voices simply be his own? David pictures a second brain inside his skull, wrinkled gray matter festering with disease, polluting his thoughts. Didn’t his father send him to the shrink when he first saw the visions? Then later, the judge ordered him treated. But that year was a jumble. The shooting, the carefully constructed plea, the hospital with the sloping green lawn. An active imagination, his mother used to say about him. The shrink used a different word. Delusional.

David opens his eyes and lets his voice rise to the rafters of the old barn, maybe even to heaven itself. “The fools all around us will not listen! We cannot convince them with either reason or faith. Will you join me?”

The roar is deafening.

His eyes sparkling, David looks directly at Billy. “Then, my brothers and sisters, come and accept Paradise.”

David steps down from the altar and the worshipers drop to their knees, closing their eyes, and opening their mouths as he approaches. He places a pill, much smaller than a Communion wafer, on the tongue of each of his followers. Billy swallows the pill, his eyes closed in rapture.

“Bless you, my brother,” David says, lingering just a moment, before moving down the row.

The bunkhouse was once a tack room, and even now, old saddles, their dry leather cracked, hang over wooden rails. Rachel escorts Billy into the bunkhouse and gives him a sisterly kiss. By design, Matthew and Jeremiah have bunks on either side of Billy. Faithful lieutenants, they will report everything to David.

Rachel walks up the path to the main house past a target range where enemy soldiers made of aluminum pop up from the ground. The main house is a sturdy affair of flagstone and pine with gabled windows and a green-shingled, pitched roof. The ranch had been owned by four generations of Carsons, the first, Colonel Nathaniel Carson, a nephew of Kit Carson, the famed guide.

They were Wyoming cattlemen to the core, but the fifth generation — two brothers — wanted nothing to do with the freezing winters and blazing summers, the endless work and the isolation. The brothers put the ranch on the market, and Brother David bought it in the name of the Holy Church of Revelations. To come up with the cash, his followers sold their own homes and cars and maxed out their credit cards with no intention of repaying.

Brother David renamed the place Eden Ranch, and his followers still grazed some cattle and planted vegetable gardens. Now David lives on the second floor of the main house in what had been Colonel Carson’s bedroom. Walls of knotty pine, the mounted heads of a bighorn sheep and an antelope, and rifle brackets above a brick fireplace.

David holds an antique rifle, missing from the brackets. He embraces it, a look of distant sadness in his eyes as Rachel enters the bedroom.

“Billy is ready,” she says.

“Let us hope.”

David lifts the old rifle, aiming at an imaginary enemy outside the window where the sun has set over distant, purple mountains.

“You are distracted tonight, David.”

“I have seen the launch in a vision.”

Rachel catches her breath and does not even try to hide her excitement. “Is it beautiful?”

“It is heaven.”

“What else did you see?”

There is something else he remembers, a sheet of grayish white, billowing in the wind, flowing toward him. When he saw it, a chill swept over him, and even now, he feels its cold breath. “Nothing else,” he says. “I saw nothing else.”

He opens the breech on the rifle and holds it out to her. “This is a Springfield-Allin breechloader, a repeating rifle.”

“I am not interested in such things.”

“No, but you love parables.” He runs his hand across the smooth barrel. “At one time, this was the deadliest weapon known to man. In the Big Horn foothills, not far from here, thirty-five cavalry men were surrounded by fifteen hundred Sioux, their best warriors, led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. The soldiers were in the open but quickly circled their wagons and brought out these new rifles, the likes of which had never been seen before. The Sioux were fearless, the greatest fighters the world has ever seen, but they were cut down in charge after charge and finally retreated to the hills.”

“It’s strange,” she says, “but I always thought you would identify with the Sioux, not the cavalry.”

“It’s the weapon. The weapon makes all the difference. I must get it.”

“You will, David. You can do anything.”

He doesn’t answer but instead replaces the rifle in its brackets.

“You’re the Messiah,” she says.

“Am I?”

“If you don’t believe in your own power, we cannot succeed.”

He shows her a mysterious smile and sits on the bed. “We’ll die. You must know that success means death.”

“Death is the path to everlasting life.”

He sighs. “So it is written.”

They have been down this path before. She knows her role. Build him into the God he is. “David, they all believe in you.”

“They are sheep.”

“And you are their shepherd. That is how it is meant to be. But you must never show doubt. They draw their strength from you.”

“I dreamt of my father again,” he says abruptly.

Her face shows concern. “Tell me.”

“He called me the name. I had a gun and shot him twenty, thirty times. Like the cavalry with the Springfield, I just kept shooting. He was dead, but he kept taunting me.”

“Was your mother in the dream?”

“He was hitting her, calling her names, too.”

Rachel sits on the bed and wraps her arms around him. He lays his head between her breasts and she unbuttons her dress, exposing herself to him. With one hand, she guides a breast toward his mouth. His eyes closed, David sucks at her. She gently rocks him and hums a lullaby. Outside the window, it has grown dark and windy. The branch of a tree is driven against the wall of the house, the sound of a giant bird’s fluttering wings. Inside, as David drifts off to sleep, his last conscious thought is of his mother.

Billy lies in the bunkhouse on a cot, fully clothed, somewhere between sleep and hallucinatory semi-consciousness. He tosses from side to side, vaguely aware of a dryness in his mouth. Floating, floating ever higher, looking down on it all, seeing the Truth in brilliant colors, listening to Brother David’s voice echo in his brain, feeling the effects of the pill, a potent mixture of mescaline and peyote.

“As it is written in the Revelation of St. John the Divine… ”

On a hillside of the greenest green, two giant stags paw the earth, snorting sulfurous fire from their flared nostrils. They viciously lock horns and battle, powerful legs kicking up clods of dirt, then with a powerful jerk of its head, one stag breaks the other’s neck.

“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end… ”

Billy is in an elevator that plummets madly into a bottomless, rocky cave, the arrow above the door spinning wildly counter-clockwise as the elevator plunges, lower and lower.

“Who is and who was… ”

A combination lock clicks as the dial spins furiously. A computer screen flashes with six-digit numbers whirling by in a blur. Billy struggles with a key as large as he is, trying to lift it into a giant lock.

“And who shall give you the Morning Star.”

In a brilliant blue sky, the sun explodes, and Billy watches it, reflected in Brother David’s dark eyes. David smiles, but his face dissolves, melts in the heat of the sun, and now Billy sees only a mushroom cloud rising to the heavens, a joyous firestorm vaporizing everyone and everything on earth.

-12- Little Brown Jug

A bleak Air Force utility shed of corrugated metal stands in a dry basin alongside a darkened road in the Wyoming countryside. The two airmen will spend the night and return to base in the morning. Reynolds unrolls his sleeping bag on the concrete floor. Sayers opens a rucksack and pulls out plastic food pouches containing their M.R.E.’s, meals-ready-to-eat in military jargon, the source of endless complaints among the soldiers. He tosses one to Reynolds, who opens the pouch and pulls out what looks like a popsicle stick with a malignant tumor.

Reynolds examines his dinner in the light of a forty-watt overhead bulb. “What do they call this mystery meat, shit on a stick?”

Sayers reads the label, squinting through his glasses. “Mock shiskebab.”

“When I offered to die for my country,” Reynolds says, “I didn’t mean ptomaine poisoning.”

Sayers digs through the rucksack. “Jericho didn’t take his. Maybe we got another choice.” He comes up with a third pouch and reads the label, “Chipped beef on toast with brown gravy.”

Reynolds takes a look. “If we had truth-in-labeling, that’d be called, ‘diarrhea on shoe leather.’”

Sayers lights a match to a heating tablet, which begins to glow. He sticks the two M.R.E. pouches in a canteen cup, pours in some water, and holds the cup over the burning tablet. “It’s moving.”

“What is?”

“The shiskebab. Or maybe it’s the chipped beef. I think it’s alive.”

Reynolds crawls into his sleeping bag. “I’m not too hungry, anyway.”

Sayers turns off the light and douses the heating tablet. “Me neither. Let’s get some shut-eye, finish up tomorrow and go collect our bread from Jericho.”

In the darkness, both men try to get comfortable on the rock-hard floor. “Damn, Spike, what I wouldn’t give for one of those vibrating mattresses at the Shangri-la Motel in Casper.”

“Yeah, well this ain’t so bad. Think about poor Jericho. At least we got a roof over our heads.”

After a moment, Reynolds sniffs at the air. “You squeezed the cheese!”

“Did not!”

“Did so!”

“No way!” Sayers says. “The one who smelled it dealt it.”

Still in his sleeping bag, Reynolds tries to roll away from Sayers but only succeeds in banging into a steel post that supports the roof of the shed. “Damn! This is like being in jail.”

“We’re still better off than Jericho,” Sayers says.

The nighttime air is cool and scented with sagebrush. The moon casts a creamy glow over a stunning pylon of volcanic rock more than twelve hundred feet high. Twenty million years ago, this wedge of phonolite with its edged prisms was the core of an erupting volcano. Wind and rain over the millennia have erased the surrounding walls, but the hard rock core remains. Now, it catches the moonlight and reflects it over the valley and the small, tumbling stream.

Jack Jericho first saw Devil’s Tower in a movie. The extraterrestrials landed there in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Years later, stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, he had driven here on leave. He camped out in the shadow of the Tower, fished in the stream, and like the little aliens, was transported somewhere else, at least in the spiritual sense. When a maintenance position opened in the 318th Missile Squadron in Wyoming, less than 100 miles away, Jericho jumped at it.

Jericho would lie on his back and look up at the Tower. He knew all the Indian legends, the seven little girls who were attacked by bears while playing on the giant rock, then soared into the sky and became the constellation Pleiades, or Seven Sisters.

Tonight, in the moonlight, Jack Jericho plucks a mushroom from the embankment and tosses it into his helmet, which is filled with parsnip and acorns. He stirs the mixture, then pours it over a trout, which is sizzling on a rock in an open fire. He pokes at the fish with a twig to keep it from sticking.

“And now monsieur,” he says aloud, doing his best imitation of a stiff-lipped sommelier, “would you care for a fine Chardonnay to go with your terrine des poissons a la creme de caviar?”

Jericho grabs a small jug from his rucksack, pulls out the cork with his teeth, and sniffs. “Ah, robust, not subtle, with just a hint of Aunt Emmy’s corn and Granny Jericho’s barley.” With his eyes closed, he takes a long pull, swallows, then coughs and sputters like an old Ford pickup. “No,” he says, his eyes moist, “not subtle at all.”

Jericho takes the fish from the fire with a flat stone he uses as a spatula an begins eating with his fingers. Another pull on the bottle, and he breaks into song.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! You and me,

Little brown jug don’t I love thee,

Ha! Ha! Ha! You and me,

Little brown jug don’t I love thee.”

He takes a drink, licks his fingers. Another pull, and the jug is empty. Jericho staggers to his feet, grabs his saw-toothed knife, and cuts several low-hanging branches from a fir tree. When he has enough, he begins building a small lean-to. He pulls up several handfuls of long grass from the embankment for a bed, then cuts a cat-tail stalk. Crushing the bark of a spicebrush twig under a rock, he makes a paste which he squeezes onto the cat-tail. Then he kneels at the water’s edge and begins brushing his teeth.

A movement catches his eye and Jericho lifts his head. A white-tailed fawn, no more than three feet tall, stands on the opposite bank of the river watching him. Jericho salutes the animal with his cat-tail toothbrush. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” he sings softly. “Little brown deer don’t I love thee.”

Then Jericho resumes brushing his teeth, and the fawn lowers its head to drink from the river. They face each other across the water in peaceful harmony. Finally, the fawn turns and prances up the bank and into the woods.

The tumbling rapids echo along the riverbank, carrying Jericho into a deep sleep, but still the nightmare comes. The ground beneath him shudders. Above him, Devil’s Tower erupts in volcanic flames and lava spews from the earth. He wants to run, but there is nowhere to go, for now he is deep underground. The earth moves, slipping out from under his feet. Timbers crack, lights go dark, men scream. Somewhere he hears his father’s voice but cannot see him. His father, who took him into the mine when he was just a boy and gave him a helmet that sank over his ears. His father, who needs his help now. But which way? The foreman yelling for the men to follow him. And Jericho tries to move, crawling through the darkness, but in the dream, he’s slogging through quicksand. He can’t move. The screams grow louder. He is sinking. Deeper and deeper until…

A horse whinnies. A horse riding into his nightmare? And Jericho is half awake now, thinking it through, when the horse whinnies again.

He opens his eyes and rolls out of the lean-to onto the bank of the stream. A rider on a white horse looms over him. The morning sun is a fiery ball behind the rider’s head, masking his features in a halo of flaming spears.

“Are you with Jesus?” the rider asks.

“No, I’m with the 318th,” Jericho says, squinting, trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain.

“Then you are a blasphemer,” the man says.

“Blasphemer, boozer, brawler, and a few other words that start with ‘b,’ though brave and brilliant are not among them. Now, who the hell are you?”

Jericho squints but cannot make out the face of Brother David, who is dressed all in black, from his boots to his cowboy hat. “I am a servant of God.”

“I’ll bet the pay’s lousy, but a great retirement plan.”

“Do you mock me, pilgrim?”

“No, I don’t,” Jericho says, becoming serious. “I don’t mock anyone’s beliefs. I just go through life minding my own business. But if you were to ask me, I’d say God doesn’t want servants. He wants us to get on with our lives without hurting each other or doing too much damage to this good, green Earth.”

“That is not enough, pilgrim. Some of us are destined to carry out His will.”

“And how would you know just what He — or She — had in mind?”

“The aura of your chakras is a muddy brown, reflecting your confusion.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to take the old chakras into the shop for an aura change.”

The white horse gambols sideways, and the rider pulls tight on its reins. “The fool makes light of what he does not understand. As it is written, ‘They shall run to and fro to seek the Word of the Lord, and shall not find it.’ Amos, chapter eight, verse twelve.’”

“Amos said that? Does Andy agree?”

“Your soul is damned. It is all in the Book. It is all prophesied.”

“I never thought you could find answers in books.”

“Not books! The Book, for there is only one.”

“I didn’t learn a lot in school, but I do remember a teacher saying something like, ‘Beware the man of one book.’”

David seems to appraise him. “You are not quite the bumpkin you try to be, are you?”

Jericho’s eyes are nearly closed, the effects of a hangover accentuated by the glare of the morning sun. He puts some country twang in his voice. “I don’t hardly know what you mean.”

“Oh, but I think you do. The expression is, Timeo hominem unius libri. ‘I fear the man of one book.’ It is attributed to Thomas Aquinas.”

“Never met the fellow.”

“I suppose not. He probably didn’t make it to Possum Hollow, Arkansas or wherever you perfected this down-home persona which doubtless serves you well amongst the cretins you must deal with on a daily basis.”

“Sinkhole. I’m from Sinkhole, West Virginia.”

“How nice for you. How utterly perfect.”

“It surely is. Maybe you’ve been to the Club Med there.”

“Judging from your boots and fatigues, you’re in the Air Force. An enlisted man, I suppose.”

“Jack Jericho, E-5. You can call me Sergeant.” He shields his eyes from the sun with a hand. “Now, what’s your name, and why do you keep the sun behind you like a Sioux war party?”

“Why do you think, sergeant?”

“Well, you’re either hiding something or you just like to make other people uncomfortable.”

“What is it you are hiding, Sergeant Jack Jericho, under that mask of insouciance?”

“Damned if I know, but if you told me what in-soo-city-ants means, I’d take a stab at it.”

“You’re an interesting specimen, sergeant, but I don’t have time to show you the way.”

For the first time, Jericho notices the butt of a dark metal rifle protruding from a saddle holster. “Say, you haven’t been hunting moose with an M-16, have you, Reverend?”

David tugs the reins, and the horse angles a few steps to the side.

“Hear the word, pilgrim. ‘The angel shall sound his trumpet and a blazing torch shall fall from the sky.’”

“What is that, Bob Dylan? No, the Beatles, right? ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’?”

“The Bible teaches us to suffer fools gladly if we ourselves are wise,” David says.

“Must have missed that sermon.”

“You should join my congregation. Are you a believer?”

“Unless I was drunk as a skunk, I went to church every Sunday, up ‘til the time we lost our preacher ‘cause he was caught diddling one of the choir boys. I guess you could say my beliefs have been tested.”

“Do you know the Day of Reckoning beckons?”

“Funny, that’s what the preacher said when he was sober. When he was drunk, he said, ‘the day of Beckoning reckons.’”

“You are lost and wicked.” David yanks the reins to one side and roughly digs his heels into the horse’s ribs. The animal splashes across the river and bolts toward the woods, and in a moment, horse and rider are gone.

“I ain’t wicked,” Jack Jericho says to himself, blinking against the glare of the sun. “I’m just like most everyone else.”