Jerry suddenly felt that they should get out of there. He knew that he had to get Angel’s attention. He had read somewhere that it was dangerous to try to wake sleepwalkers. He hoped that the same wasn’t true of tongue-talkers.
He gripped her upper arms and tried to turn her to face him in the pew. “Angel!” Briefly he considered slapping her face, then thought better of it and tried to shake her out of her trance. “Angel! It’s Jerry—” Christ! He had forgotten what name she knew him by. “Jerry Creighton!” he amended swiftly. “Snap out of it! You’ve got—”
Her eyes focused on his, without a hint of recognition in them. Only anger.
“Shit,” Jerry said.
Angel shrugged, easily breaking his grip. He reached out to her and she grabbed his arm, pivoted, and threw him against the wall. She flung out her other arm, caught the pew’s backrest and shattered it into kindling. The people around them scattered as splinters flew among them like shrapnel. The band ground to an uncertain halt.
Apparently, Jerry thought as he crouched on the polished wooden floor, this was an unusual occurrence, even by their standards. He took a deep breath. Nothing was broken, though he’d hit the wall with the impact of a multi-story fall onto concrete. Fortunately, due to his wild card power, his bones were rather flexible.
He looked up to see Angel panting and staring at him. In other circumstances it might have been arousing. But her stare was fixed and it seemed that she was panting with anger, not passion. She launched herself at him, and Jerry did the only thing he could think of to possibly ensure his survival.
He curled up on the floor in a ball, his face buried in the crook of his elbows, his hands protecting his head, his knees tight against his gut. He felt something go by him like a train in the night and there was a mighty crash as Angel smashed through the church’s wall.
“Jesus Christ,” Jerry whispered, as if he was praying or cursing.
“Hey, man, you all right?” a concerned voice asked.
He didn’t have to turn around to realize who it was as Mushroom Daddy’s clinging aura of essence of marijuana announced his presence.
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “I guess.”
“Let me help you up, man.”
He gripped Daddy’s offered hand and the hippie hauled him to his feet. He clung to him for a moment until his head cleared. They both watched Angel run through the settlement, then stop suddenly and reverse her field.
“She’s coming back,” Jerry said. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
They watched in silence for a moment, then Daddy shouted, “No she’s not, man! She’s stealing my van! She’s stealing my frigging van, man! Man, that’s so not-cool!”
They watched in astonishment as Angel flung the van’s driver side door open and vaulted into the driver’s seat.
“How’d she start it without the key?” Jerry wondered out loud as the engine roared into life.
“The key’s in the ignition, man, where I always leave it.”
Jerry looked at him.
“What?” Daddy said. “We’re in the country man! Nobody steals shit here. Everyone’s, like, all honest and cool, man. Besides, before I thought about keeping it in the ignition I kept forgetting where I’d put it and then I’d have to go all the way to Middletown to have a duplicate made. Oh, man!”
He said the last in a disgusted voice as the chugging motor finally caught and Angel spun the wheel and roared down the unpaved road, kicking up a spray of dirt and gravel like a contrail in her wake.
Jerry sighed deeply. He turned around. Everyone in the congregation was staring at him, even the rattlesnake who was draped around Uzziah’s shoulders like a feather boa. The snake, in fact, had possibly the friendliest expression in the whole group.
“Sorry,” Jerry said with a tentative smile that no one, not even Mushroom Daddy, returned.
New Hampton: the Snake-Handlers’ Commune
This has been an unsettling experience all around, the Angel thought. She’d felt odd ever since getting out of the hippie’s van, but had turned away the strangeness with vast quantities of the snake-handlers’ unbelievably excellent food. She felt better after eating, but now she realized that she should have resisted Creighton’s notion to attend the ophiolatrists’ services. She wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with what went on in their places of worship. He mother had taken her along when she’d attended several such churches during her quest for spiritual enlightenment. They had also frightened her. The loud music. The crazed testifying. Tonight, for some reason, she felt herself terribly susceptible to their call.
She prayed to the Lord for strength to remain calm. But for some reason he chose to deny her prayer. Part of her watched in horror as some strange spirit rose up in her and she heard herself confessing her sins, her wanton desires, fortunately speaking in no language of Earth. Which, when she thought about it, frightened her even more.
Then she heard the Voice.
The Angel was terrified at the sound of it in her head. She had never really experienced anything like that before. Clearly, she was in the grip of the Holy Spirit and it frightened her. She knew that she was not worthy.
“John Fortune is at Kaleita’s Groceries—he’s being taken by a group of armed men. Someone has to rescue him! Someone out there who can hear this—please! Help!”
The voice of the Holy Ghost was deep and masculine. It spoke to her alone. At least no one else acted as if they heard it. It spoke with great urgency, telling her that the boy was in danger, telling her that she had to reach him, fast. It was clear that if she didn’t he’d fall into the hands of their enemies and The Hand’s plans would come to nothing. The Millennium would be denied and Jesus Christ would not take his place as God’s Regent upon the Earth. It was up to her and her alone, unworthy as she was, to rescue him.
She ran almost blindly from the church. The man called Creighton—useless as he’d been throughout this entire affair—stood in her way. She removed him. She had no time to find the door. She went through the wall.
As she ran down the hill the Spirit Tree cheered her on, the bottles tied to its branches clanking musically in the wind. She remembered the store on the county road, about two miles from where she stood. It would take her about seven or eight minutes to get there on foot, maybe less if she ignored the roads and cut cross country.
Too long, she thought. Too, too long. The boy’s kidnappers would be gone by then and the Holy Ghost’s warning would have been wasted.
Then she remembered the van sitting before the ramshackle barn and hope sprang into her breast. If only, she prayed. If only...
She ran to it, flung open the driver’s side door so hard that it rebounded and slammed against her backside as she leaned into the cab. Praise the Lord, she silently prayed. The idiot left his keys in the ignition.
She vaulted into the seat and turned the key, gunning the gas pedal. The engine groaned like a feeble old man with a hangover. Gently, she told herself. Be gentle and patient. For once... take your time...
She eased up on the gas and the engine sputtered to life. She engaged the clutch and winced as it sounded like she ground a few pounds of the transmission into metal filings. The van bucked and humped like an unruly mustang, but slipped into gear. The Angel shot backwards, scattering the chickens who’d been peacefully pecking their day’s ration of feed, ground another month’s worth of life out of the transmission, finally found first and headed on down the road.