Judgement and Wrath

37

Jean-Paul St Pierre — despite what everyone said — wasn't a sickly child. His vitiligo condition was purely external, and though it earned him cruel taunts from other children, even the occasional beating, it had never affected his physical boundaries. So long as he was careful under the Louisiana sun and took his medication at the dosage prescribed he could live a normal life. His mother loved him dearly, cherished him. Her little angel boy. She gave him all the kindness and support he needed. And he loved his mother in return.

He never knew his father. In a drunken stupor he'd been flattened under the wheels of an express train when his alcohol-addled brain told him he had right of way at a rail crossing. It wasn't much of a loss. He'd got on fine without him.

He blamed his father for his condition. It was his father's seed that had cursed him. But his father's curse was also responsible for making him the man that he would become.

He wasn't a sickly child. No.

He was strong and resilient and he looked after his mother as a good son should. When it came time to grant his mother her greatest wish he'd had the fortitude to do so, willingly and without an ounce of selfishness or self-pity. She had longed for it, asked for it, begged her uncaring god for it. So he couldn't understand why he'd been taken away and placed under guard at Juvenile Hall. They called him a monster. They did not understand him. He'd only been doing what his mother had begged for whenever he'd found her crying. His mother had been sad since the day of his father's death, and Jean-Paul had only wished to make her happy. He was even mindful to cause her as little pain as possible when he shot her in the back of her head with his grandpapa's old 'coon rifle.

Sociopathic, his doctors had called him. Psychopathic. Others called him worse names. More personal and hurtful. But he wasn't any of those things. He wasn't sick. Physically or mentally. Couldn't understand why they'd kept him locked away for eight years.

' I know the pussy name you hide behind,' Joe Hunter had said to him. ' What is it with all you deadbeats, huh? Why the stupid name? All you sick-in-the-head motherfuckers do that.'

He had smiled at the inanity of it. He'd been hearing similar accusations all his life. They had been his bread and butter. They sustained him, nourished him, made him even more determined to show his doubters just how much further up the evolutionary ladder he was than they. They could not understand his singular take on reality, because they were blind. No one seemed to see it but him.

He had shown Hunter.

He was better than Hunter.

Primarily because he did not share Hunter's base weaknesses.

Where he would not have faltered in shooting through another person's head to kill his enemy, Hunter had paused. That was the difference between them, what made him better at killing than Hunter would ever be. Hunter was trained. His military masters had ingrained in him the technicalities of killing, but they had never fully eradicated that human foible: the reluctance to murder in cold blood another human being. Empathy and guilt are stronger than the finger that pulls the trigger.

That was why his doctors had proclaimed Jean-Paul a sociopath. No empathy. No guilt, they said. Just like his father, he supposed.

Hunter on the other hand did have empathy. He had it in bucket-loads.

Dantalion could use Hunter's weakness to bring all his targets to him. And he would kill them all. He would leave Hunter until last, so that his guilt was magnified tenfold. And, he thought, looking sideways at his hostage, he would start with Bradley Jorgenson.

His escape from the island was easier than he'd thought possible. When Hunter and the FBI agent had turned up, things had looked like they were stacking against him. Only the fortuitous arrival of Seagram stumbling around like something from a zombie movie had allowed him to get away. The bullet he'd fired through Seagram's head had diverted Hunter long enough for him to make it to the Lincoln. Then the Lincoln had given him the speed and power to ram his way out of the metal gates. They were designed to keep intruders out, not in. The cop who'd tried to halt him by standing in the way and pointing his gun should actually have fired the thing, although his skull had starred the windscreen as his body was catapulted over the hood and on to the roof of the sedan.

Now he was ten miles north, travelling at high speed, slaloming in and out of traffic heading up the coast towards Jupiter. He was enjoying the freedom that the huge town car demanded from the other road users. A Dixie Highway turnpike was somewhere ahead, he recalled. He had to get off the coast on to the main route, then find a way across country. The FBI agent would set all available manpower on his trail. Roadblocks would be in place somewhere ahead of him, and a convoy of blue lights and sirens rushing in his wake. There was no sign of it yet, but the pursuit would definitely come.

Within half a minute he found the turnpike. Cars were backed up on the off ramp. He just went round them, forcing the car along the shoulder and leaving several vehicles minus their wing mirrors behind him. He swung into cross traffic and cars swerved and braked, and a refrigerated truck jack-knifed into oncoming traffic, effectively closing the road behind him. Dantalion watched the carnage in his mirrors, wondering what tally he should add to his book from the pile-up that ensued.

He sped up the highway, found a second exit on his left and blasted his way through the meridian across the path of more traffic at over sixty miles an hour. He almost lost control of the vehicle, but steered into the slide of the rear tyres, righted the sedan and took off at speed. The road went under another highway, swung north and then west, then he was rocketing along a single-lane blacktop, headed out into the swampy lands of the Floridian interior.

The road hadn't been designed for speed. It was ridged at its centre and there were more bumps and potholes than there were smooth patches. He could afford to slow down now that he'd lost any possible pursuers. He looked over at Bradley Jorgenson. The young man was oblivious of all that had occurred since Dantalion had jabbed him with the needle.

Dantalion backhanded him across the face.

'Wake up, Brad, you aren't going to be any help with your head in the clouds.'

Bradley's eyes opened but there was no recognition in their depths. He was mindless of the blood trickling from his nose and into the corner of his mouth.

Sodium amatol is sometimes inaccurately referred to as a truth serum. Movies show those who are drugged answering probing questions in a dull monotone, unable to deny their interrogators. Dantalion knew that was ridiculous. The drug did reduce a person's resistance to suggestion and had the effect of lowering their inhibitions, but it would never cause someone to give up their most closely guarded secrets. At a higher dosage it was no different than any other anaesthetic: it put you to sleep. Dantalion wanted answers, but he had other ways of forcing them from the man. He wanted Bradley awake and able to recognise the dilemma he was in.

He slapped him again.

Bradley muttered, turned his face away and promptly fell back to sleep.

Bradley would have to be woken by pain. Maybe the amputation of his extremities followed by a meal to remember.

On either side of the road scrubland was interspersed between the occasional irrigated fields. Tributaries of a swamp lying to the north were like the twisted fingers of an arthritic crone. Mangrove grew in dense clumps on hillocks standing above the streams. Birds broke from cover, startled by the passage of the Lincoln. Not the most densely populated area, but less wild than the swamps along the flooded banks of the Mississippi.

Bradley stirred beside him.

'Back with us?'

'Mmmmff!'

'Not yet, huh?'

Up ahead was a crossroads, giving him three choices. South, north, or continue heading west. Dantalion was all for choices, but occasionally you just had to throw the dice and go along with fate. He sped through the junction, the tyres kicking up gravel. The road ahead was as straight as an arrow's flight. Grass tall enough to conceal an elephant grew at both sides of the road, the upper reaches hanging over to create a natural tunnel.

The grass tunnel went on for the best part of a mile. Claustrophobia wormed at the base of his stomach, making him nauseous and out of breath. He was relieved when the Lincoln emerged into open space once more. A lake came into view on his right-hand side. Thousands of birds, myriad species he could not name, made the lake their home. Something splashed beneath the surface and moved away through the lake, leaving a wide wake on the surface.

There were trees ahead, then another one of those damn grass tunnels. Dantalion slowed the vehicle down and brought it to a halt. He'd seen something to his liking across the marshy field on his left. A collection of large red cubes surrounded by metal masts that glinted gold in the sunlight. Huge pylons made a forest of steel in the background. Power cables streaked away into the distant haze, and also towards him and over the Lincoln and across the lake. He could see another pylon on the far bank, standing tall above the slowly undulating marsh grass.

Dantalion nodded to himself, pushed the vehicle into drive and headed for the next grass tunnel. He had barely entered the green twilight when he nosed the Lincoln off the road and down the slight incline to the field of tall grasses. A flimsy wire fence was crushed under the tyres as he pushed the sedan into the grass's embrace. He didn't get far, feeling the car settling down almost immediately in the boggy earth. But he made it far enough into the tall grass so that the car wouldn't be immediately evident to anyone passing along the road. To make sure, he clambered out, wading through twisted stalks towards the road. His feet sank into the loam and were snagged by the tough grass, but he made it back to where he'd pushed over the fence. He righted the fence, even though it sagged from the nearby posts. Then he grabbed armfuls of grass and stood them upright against the wire. It wouldn't fool a determined tracker, but was good enough.

When he got back to the car, Bradley was gone.