Claudia Heart’s Special Chosen let out groans and guttural pleas. They begged and demanded. They stroked themselves and posed.
At first she called forth a small Asian man who sported an exceptionally wide erection. She made him lie beneath her and rode him while Max bit hard into the flesh of his thighs and arms.
The next lover was a tall and virile Mexican man. She was happy simply to swallow his sperm.
The next three men approached at the same time.
Max’s eyes flashed as he moved among the Chosen and howled. Claudia wailed with him.
Lonnie Briggs was breathing heavily. The uniformed state troopers, who couldn’t see what was happening in the room, were beginning to get restless. Miles Barber was wondering why he didn’t seem to care about sex or even if there was a crime being committed.
Then a man skulked into the room. He was different from the rest, inasmuch as he was fully dressed. But Barber could see that he too was greatly aroused by the woman. He avoided Claudia’s line of vision. Barber knew somehow that he was breaking Heart’s command, that he just needed to see her.
“Hey, Briggs,” Barber said.
“What?” the state agent answered in a husky voice.
“Ain’t that one in the pants Halston?”
Lonnie Briggs broke into the room with his uniformed state police force. The prone woman, barely larger than a girl, looked up and shouted, “Stop them!”
Briggs and his men found themselves set upon by twelve naked men.
“I was talking to the police, Inspector,” Claudia Heart-Zimmerman said to Christian Bonhomme.
He had been feeling a little light-headed ever since he’d entered the interrogation room with the suspect.
“You ordered your followers to attack Sergeant Briggs and his men, Mrs. Zimmerman,” the inspector replied.
“No. No, not at all.” The love goddess smiled. “I was yelling for your sergeant to stop them from raping me. They’d been raping me for weeks, you know.”
Claudia peered intently at Bonhomme, and he felt a vague pang of fear.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what you say. But Mr. Briggs calls it murder. He says that you ordered your men to fight to the death. The police officers were forced to respond with deadly force...”
It had been in papers all around the country, STATE POLICE FORCE ASSAILED BY NAKED ZOMBIES OF LOVE. Four of Claudia’s acolytes had been shot to death. Five others fought so hard against arrest that they were killed, or died later, from wounds they received while being subdued. The survivors were now locked up in a medical facility in San Francisco, suffering from some disease or withdrawal and committed to their escape and reunion with their queen. Claudia Heart and Robert Halston were arraigned in absentia because of the wounds they sustained.
Halston was subdued in the cafeteria. Claudia had run out into the desert with a dog. When the police approached her she fell, hitting her head on a stone.
She was captured, but the dog, after biting three policemen — who now were hospitalized with undiagnosed ailments — had been too fast for the law.
“I am innocent, Inspector,” Claudia said with a shrug, staring intently at the wavering Bonhomme. He noticed the sweat on her forehead.
“You are not, Mrs. Zimmerman.”
“Call me Claudia Heart,” she commanded.
“I don’t know what power it is that you think you have over men, Mrs. Zimmerman. But I am going to have you up on charges of assault and murder.” Inspector Bonhomme turned quickly and went through the interrogation-room door. He knew that if the woman had stood up and approached him, he would have gladly let her go.
“Should I have her transferred to a holding cell, Christian?” Lonnie Briggs asked.
“No. No. Leave her right where she is. Open that door only to bring her meals. Don’t talk to her. You hear me, Briggs? Don’t say a word to her.”
“Yes, sir.”
After snapping his ankle chain, Winch Fargo slammed his hard and skinny body against the ironbound door in the darkness. No one heard the dull thudding deep under the desert floor.
Sixteen
Gray Man walked through the towering forest, unconcerned with the beauty of the redwoods, unconvinced by their grandeur. His leather dress shoes were broken, his black jacket torn. Gray Man’s clothes were spattered with mud, but he didn’t care. He was waging a war in his mind with Horace LaFontaine, the first soul he’d ever met that he could not easily destroy.
He’d built Horace out of leftover memories, scraps of a wasted life in the shell of a body that had died. The persona, a loose association of thoughts, had been useful when Gray Man wanted to understand what humanity demanded of its citizens. Humanity — like rutting shrimp in a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. Humanity — globs of self-referential fats and amino acids that couldn’t know the source of existence even if they were spoon-fed that knowledge in the lap of their own pitiful God.
Horace was a perfect example of this primitive life-form. He’d absorbed the inaccurate language, shared the mindless lusts. He was seen as nothing even among the useless, and still his will had stymied the great Gray Man.
Grey Redstar, the Gray Man, the reaper of lost light. The one creature destined to cleanse the soul of its body. The harbinger of a newer and higher form of being.
But as powerful as he was, he could not stop the disease within him, this vague alliance of memories attached around the name Horace LaFontaine.
He’d crucified Horace, stripped his flesh down to the bone and crushed out the cells that remembered him. But every time, Horace had risen out of the depths of Death’s mind — whole again, though broken and afraid.
“Please let me alone,” Horace cried.
“Then die,” Gray Man answered. “Let your life stop and leave me to accomplish my own ends.”
“I cain’t die,” Horace cried. “I mean, I keep comin’ back. I don’t know why. I’m sorry. But if you leave Joclyn be, I won’t have to fight wit’ you no more.”
“You would threaten me?”
“I cain’t he’p it, man. I cain’t. It didn’t bother me when you kilt all them other ones. But I like Joclyn, and whenever she’s around, I just come up in your mind, like. An’ even if you wanna do sumpin’ bad to ’er, I still like ’er an’ don’t want that.”
Gray Man screamed in his mind, and for a moment Horace faded out of existence. But he was still there, there in the fabric of cells and light. Horace LaFontaine was like a mutating virus that had lodged itself deep in the cells of the god of death. The only cure would be to divest himself of the body and release the beautiful deep blue light into the heavens.
In the yawning space between earth and sky and the bright sun, she had stood for 734,906 mornings. From a sapling bole to branchling finger. From a straining prayer for light to the crashing death of her mother. And then that straight run upward and outward. Not even the black bear’s raking claws could stop her. Not gnawing worms or lightning bolts or shifting soft earth could hinder her stretching, yearning ascent...
... and then the different light, knifing down on her needles and sinking below the bark. Not for a year did she even feel it. Not for three did she know that she knew anything, and then she knew more than even the longevity of trees can witness. The tickling wings of butterflies and the nuzzling snouts of deer and lion and rat. She felt and knew the scrabbling claws of birds in her branches and among her leaves.
And then there was the sun shining. The pulsing story of creation humming again and again through her inner timber. So beautiful that it called a song from her depths, a song that flowed out through the atmosphere and deep into the soil and stone of the earth. She was calling to awareness the very atoms that composed the world. She purred and rumbled out the song of awakening that only a patient tree could know. She called and counted butterflies; she bathed in morning fogs and knew her sisters even though they were still unconscious as she was on the day before the light.