He took the caffeine pills first. A whole package, washed down three at a time with half a bottle of flat Coca-Cola. After a few minutes he felt a little jittery, but that could’ve just been nerves. After a quarter of an hour he started to twitch. His breath came fast and hollow, his chest felt tight.
He looked down at the vial in his shaking hand. He’d caught glimpses of it in Keller’s mind, knew it contained about ten thousand doses of acid. It was still more than half-full.
He took a deep breath.
“Down the hatch,” he muttered aloud, and tossed back the contents of the vial like a shot of whiskey.
He closed his eyes, as best he could anyway. There was so much caffeine coursing through his bloodstream that his eyelids were spasming, and he could feel his heart pounding against his ribs.
It happened fast now. Less than five minutes after he swallowed the acid he was hallucinating behind his closed eyes, and less than five minutes after that he’d moved past the hallucination stage as his body did the extra thing it did, turned the acid into some new chemical that in turn turned his brain into a giant radio antenna.
When he opened his eyes, there was the by-now familiar scrim, faint objects—today it was mostly ribbons of color, vivid but translucent—wafting over the real world, but if he concentrated on something—say, the modernist wedge of the gas station in the rearview mirror—it emerged in sharp relief. There were faint whispers, too, so real that he even turned and looked in the backseat until he realized they were coming from the minds of the people back at the station. Hurry it up, buddy, he heard someone think, and he decided to take the suggestion to heart.
He got out of the car and walked down the center of the road like a gunslinger in an old Western, getting ready to push through the swinging doors of a saloon and shoot the place up. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ …
The gas jockey was back outside, moving slowly but efficiently between the vehicles. Joe Gonzalez, Chandler learned now, the information absorbed as effortlessy as sight and sound. That was the gas jockey’s name.
There were four cars in the station. Chandler could see five, possibly six shadows in the cars. But if he ignored the evidence of his eyes, he could tell that the four vehicles held seven occupants—there was a baby in the backseat of the Chrysler driven by Mae Watson and her spinster sister Emily. The baby’s dreams were little flickering flashes of color, and it was these Chandler let out first. Orange and yellow lights began to pulse across the empty fields.
“Fireflies,” Dan Karnovsky, sitting alone in the Buick behind Mae and Emily, mused to himself. “Nice tits,” he added when Mae leaned out of the car to tell Joe Gonzalez to check the air pressure in the tires.
But Chandler didn’t just want to pull images from other people’s minds. He wanted to see if he could make something himself. It was hard to isolate. Between the hallucinations and the bits and pieces of other minds, his own thoughts were hard to find.
Concentrate, Chandler!
Mae turned to her sister.
“Did you say something, sis?” About my breasts, she added, but silently.
“Huh?” Emily said, but Mae didn’t hear her.
Neither did Chandler.
Push, he said to himself, and screwed his eyes shut. Push!
In the Watsons’ Chrysler, Baby Leo woke up crying.
Joe Gonzalez, pulling the nozzle from Jared Steinke’s Dodge, stopped dead in his tracks. Fortunately, the handle he was holding was closed, and only a few drops of gasoline spilled on the stained concrete. But Joe didn’t see them because he was staring at the sky.
“Dios mío.”
A flash of light was tearing a hole in the air above the crosshairs of the intersection. Silent, smokeless flames belched skyward, but instead of dissipating into the atmosphere they remained tightly knitted together like bolts of lightning emanating from a single dense thunder-head. In a moment the figure had taken shape. The legs, the arms, the head. The open eyes and mouth. He wasn’t a boy now. Not anymore. He was a warrior. A messenger from God. A roiling, fiery seraph more than a hundred feet high.
A Ford on the highway veered sharply to the left and bucked through the shallow drainage ditch and through a barbed-wire fence.
Chandler opened his eyes, looked at the figure in the sky with as much disbelief as the eight people in the gas station (and Wally O’Shea, the driver of the Ford, which had skidded to a stop in the middle of a fallow pasture). First Millbrook, then San Francisco, now Texas. It was as if the seraph was following him, as if he was trying to tell him something.
“Who are you?” he demanded, even as the figure turned to look at him, its mouth open, silent, desolate, yet mocking at the same time. “Go away!” Chandler screamed. He waved his hands at the flaming figure. “Leave me alone!”
But the figure lingered on, the flames of its body so bright they cast shadows for what seemed like miles in every direction. An arm lifted from its side, raised up, pointed. As if to make sure there was no mistake, it reached out and out and out till it was inches away from Chandler’s face. Though it was easy to see the finger as some kind of accusation, Chandler saw it more as a summons, a selection: a heavenly version of Uncle Sam’s “I Want You.”
“No!” he screamed at the warrior. “I refuse! I do not accept this responsibility!” He swatted at the finger like a cornered kitten swiping at a rabid Saint Bernard. “Go away!”
And just like that, the warrior disappeared. No flash, no flicker, no poof. It was simply gone, leaving Chandler alone at the edge of the parking lot with eight pairs of terrified eyes staring at him. For a moment there were only the screams of Mae’s baby, and then Joe Gonzalez coughed.
“¿Señor? ¿Eres el diablo?”
Washington, DC
November 14, 1963
Naz led BC in a slow two-step around the sitting room. She’d put a record on the turntable, and quiet jazz wafted from hidden speakers, but her fingernails bit into BC’s shoulders like an eagle’s talons, as though she wanted to rip him apart.
“Don’t you understand?” she hissed into his chest. “That man will kill him.”
“His name is Melchior,” BC whispered into the dark waves of Naz’s hair, “and I don’t think he will. Chandler’s too special.”
“I’ve thought this through,” Naz insisted. “The only way he can get Chandler to obey him is if he threatens me. But if I escape—if Chandler finds out I’ve escaped—he’ll refuse to do what Melchior tells him to. And then Melchior will kill him.”
“But how would Chandler find out you got away? Melchior would never tell him.”
“Trust me. Chandler will find out.”
Naz’s tone discouraged further questioning, but BC knew what she was referring to. The reason he was here. The reason Chandler had been taken in the first place. Orpheus.
“Melchior’s no amateur. Neither are the people he works for. They’ll experiment on Chandler till they find out how his power works, how they can duplicate it. Once they’ve created willing subjects, they’ll dispose of him. Believe me, you risk more for Chandler, as well as yourself, by waiting.”
“There are risks no matter what we do. That’s what happens when these people start to meddle in your lives. Believe me when I tell you, it will be easier for Chandler to find me than for me to find him.”
“I spoke to Dr. Leary, Miss Haverman,” BC whispered. “I know about Persia. About your parents and Mr. Haverman and the way Eddie Logan blackmailed you into giving people LSD. But you can get away from them. You can take them down, if you go public with your story, rather than try to beat them at their own game.”