Teresita wants a second hole pierced in her right ear, and Hacker is able to do that. When Nat and the others raced away from the camp after the ambush, they made straight for the shack to warn Cubano’s team, but they were too late. They met Teresita and Brainerd and the others on the road, Teresita alone on Cubano’s bike. Got the bad news. They’d gathered up the dynamite they’d buried a couple of nights ago under the shack floorboards but forgot about the old stack in the woodstove. Cubano went back in to get it. “Musta been boo-bied,” she said. “That choza ain’ no more. Pile a fucken sticks.” She saw the bike Nat was riding, the blood on his face, and asked about Toad, and they told her about the four guys who’d got killed back at the church camp. She was upset about it, especially about Runt, even though Paulie had been an aggravation to her with his sexual craziness. Houndawg showed her Paulie’s head and she shook her head sorrowfully and crossed herself, though she’s not much of a Catholic and is even said to have killed a nun when she was younger. With her bare hands. She had also pocketed a body part: Cubano’s right ear, with the upside down cross in it. Now she’s going to wear two in the same ear as a kind of memorial to him. She started to throw the ear away when she cut the cross out of it, but Chepe Pacheco asked for it as bait for a trap. “Catch me a coyote. Como Cubano.” When Thaxton, trying to cheer her up, says she shouldn’t let it get her down — Cubano is probably up in Heaven trying to get into the Virgin Mary’s pants by now — Teresita says no way. “Cubano was a bad man. Beautiful, but bad. He gotta hope there ain’ no afterlife.” Teresita is a big-busted woman who wears tight sleeveless tees with pictures of a fierce Christ printed on them. She insists Jesus was a tough dude, a man of wrath who got turned into a creampuff by European faggots. That fits what Nat knows now. Littleface called Jesus the Joker, had a picture on his bike of the Joker with a halo over his head. When Cubano first brought Teresita around, Juice objected, saying he didn’t “want no fender fluff in the gang.” Juice was drunk, as he often was, and making jokes about fresh meat and back warmers and ground cover, thinking he was being funny, but he wasn’t. It was only insults. Cubano said, “I suggest you don’ fuck round with her, man.” “Yeah? Whaddaya gonna do about it, spic-shit?” “Me? I ain’ gonna do nothin’.” Juice made a move in his direction and the next thing he knew Teresita had him and he was up in the air and sailing. He rose up shaken but angry and charged her and up in the air he went again, coming down hard. He was really mad now and pulled a knife and Teresita smiled and said, “Ven, hijo de puta. Gimme that puñal. I use it. I have your machitos for supper.” Everybody was laughing by then and Juice was finally grinning too. “Praise Jesus, lady,” he said and put the knife away, raised his arms in surrender. “I believe!”
Nat came to this park some years ago on a school trip. He remembered thinking at the time it was a great place to hide out, so he brought the Wrath here last night, figuring that going back to the old man’s farm shack, where they’d stayed the first night, was too risky. The park is outside the county, and easier to defend, too. Guerrilla turf. The massive rock formations form above-ground caves of a sort, offering up places to hide and stay more or less dry. As a kid, he thought, if the Rapture comes, they won’t find me here. He knows better now. As he should have known better about that old man. Some big mistakes today. Got sucked in. How many people would dig up a dead dog, looking for dynamite? He didn’t ask that question, but should have. He would have answered that the cops might, but that was about it. But why would they refill the hole? Probably they wouldn’t. So someone else was involved. They’d show it to the old man whose dog it was, ask him questions. They might have suspected him of stealing the stuff, hiding it there. But they’d see how straight he was, wouldn’t do such a thing and wouldn’t disturb his dog’s grave if he did. Besides, everyone knew who’d broken into the mine buildings. So then let’s say the old guy finds the pile buried at the camp. His stepdaughter got banged down there, he’d be snooping around. He puts two and two together. That’s the second lot, he figures, and there’s probably more. There’s some kind of strategy here, he thinks. Meaning they’ll be back. So he sets a trap. Still not clear why he refilled the dog’s grave, but maybe just respect for his dog. Or because he didn’t want anyone else to know about the ambush he was setting. Probably. If the cops knew, they would have stopped him, wouldn’t they? And it wasn’t exactly a turn-the-other-cheek sort of operation, so he couldn’t tell the other campers. If Nat had thought all this through, they might have avoided what happened. Or even turned the ambush back on the old man. Just didn’t think. That’s why all those guys left. Baptiste, too, who should have been back by now, his distraction maneuver just an excuse. They saw Nat as someone who walks his people into death traps. Out of carelessness and stupidity. Can’t let that happen again.
Have to stay hard, too. Keep the purity. He had a soft spot for that old man. Thought they had an understanding of a kind. Made him too easy to con today. The old guy was trying to kill him and he couldn’t see that. Couldn’t see until it was too late how he was aiming straight at the old Warrior Apostles, who were down there in that field with Junior and the Collins bitch that day they did her. Four guys got killed because of that soft spot. Five. The old man got another of the Apostles at his old farmhouse, but he never knew it. Nat thought he knew that old man and what he was capable of and what not. Wrong again. Came close to making the same mistake with Royboy the night they brought the wrath down upon the sheriff. He didn’t have much choice, but Royboy did everything they asked him to do and more. He said he wanted to join their gang; he hated his old man and wanted to get out of this dump. He didn’t have a bike, but he’d steal some money and get one. Nat was tempted. He had known Royboy since grade school. They were in the same church. Their fathers were close and he knew what Royboy meant about hating his hardass old man and believed him. But he’d played slingshot war games in the street with Royboy, and because of that he knew him to be a bit slithery, and a coward when it came to a showdown. And now a loose-mouthed drunk. They were into something deadly serious here and they couldn’t risk a betrayal. “Do we let him go?” Toad asked. “No,” Nat said. “He’s just going to shoot at us or turn us in.” He was looking straight into Royboy’s eyes as Sick brained him from behind; together, they stuffed him in the trunk.
And then last night he nearly went soft on those young kids. The Wrath surprised them when they turned up at the state park. They were still frantically trying to get back into their clothes. Everyone had a good laugh about it and made remarks about the girl’s body, which was less than perfect. The two of them apologized sheepishly and hurried away, heading for the parking lot, obviously scared. Big Deacon watched them go and said, “We better not let them leave the park.” “We can’t kill everybody,” Nat said. Deacon smiled his beardy smile. “Yes, we can.” Probably he saw the hesitation on Nat’s face. “I mean, it’s Last Judgment time, right? Timer’s running down. We’re just only giving these nice kids a head start to glory. And if we don’t, we gotta leave here now.” Nat didn’t say anything, so Deac nodded at Rupert and Sick and they drifted off together. Everything is God’s will, Deacon likes to say. Even when that everything is something Deac has done or is doing. Great is the wrath of the Lord, he says with his Santa Claus grin, bringing the hammer down.
Rupert acts like a crazed rich man, talks like one, and maybe he is or was a rich man. He was riding with the Crusadeers, but he’s a pal of no one. The legend that trails after him is that he murdered his parents and burned their house down. He wears carefully knotted ties over colored T-shirts, shaves and trims his moustache and sideburns every day, files his fingernails, has swastikas tattooed on his biceps — which Houndawg, who considers himself a patriot, complained about. Religious exercises for Rupe are like doing calisthenics. Like Nat, he is a believer in the War of the Gods, says it’s why he stayed when the others left, but they don’t seem to be gods out of the Bible. “Nothing in this universe lasts or is meant to last,” he says in his precise tight assed way. “We are the gods’ agents, fulfilling the destinies they have assigned us.” Sick’s real name, the only one they know, is just the number he wears on both bony shoulders: 666. The number of the Beast. They took to calling him Sick for short, partly because he’s even more psycho than Juice, and it stuck. A glazy look and a fixed grin with clenched teeth, not so chummy as Deacon’s. Topknot wagging on top of his shaved head like a clownish hat. He and his pal X were survivors of a destroyed gang looking for a new connection, when the Wrath picked them up. Their old gang called themselves Avengers or Avenging Angels. Not clear what happened to the rest of them, Sick being too spaced out to be intelligible, X never speaking, just making guttural noises, an unshaven black-browed guy in raggedy black clothes, his staring eyes set wide on his cheekbones like they belonged to two different heads. What does X stand for? “It stands for I never learnt his name,” Sick said, “and he’s not talkin’.” Some of the mystery was cleared up when Hacker told them X’s tongue had been cut out. Sick said he didn’t know how that happened. By the time they first ran into Sick and X, Nat had already changed the name of the gang and they had fashioned new patches, and Sick said he admired the name and it suited his religion. It was Deacon who had suggested the change, just after he joined them. He said Warrior Apostles was too much like kid stuff and Nat agreed. They were already wearing tats like “The Burning Wrath” and “Rod of His Wrath,” and they were into something bigger and deeper. Something final. A great slaughter, like the Bible says. The sort vividly illustrated in the Eternal Forces comic. So Nat proposed The Wrath of God and nobody was against it. Deacon was especially pleased and from then on made sure whatever Nat wanted, he got. Their patch, which still has a mine-pick cross in a circle, also now has a fist with a bolt of lightning in it. When they added Spider to the gang, everybody got a fist and lightning bolt on their skin. Took to wearing upside-down crosses in the right ear. Rewrote their jacket studs. Swore fresh blood oaths.