“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… ”