"Look after Tesla," he instructed them. Then he went after the Death-Boy and his prize.
Tommy-Ray was within sight of the car, or rather its ghost-form in the moonlight, when his foot slid from beneath him. In his effort to keep hold of gun and vial, both went from his hands. He fell heavily, face down in sharp dirt. Stones stabbed his cheek, chin, arms and hands. As he got to his feet blood began to run.
"My face!" he said, hoping to God he'd not damaged his looks.
There was more bad news to come. He could hear the sound of the Ugly Fuck following down the hill.
"Want to die, do you?" he grunted to his pursuer. "No problem. We can supply. No problem."
He scrabbled for the gun but it had skidded some distance from him. The vial was there beneath his hand, however. He picked it up. Even as he did so he realized it was no longer passive. It was warm in his bloodied palm. There was motion behind the glass. He grasped it more tightly, to be certain it didn't slip from him again. It responded instantly, the fluid glowing between his fingers.
Many years had passed since the rest of the Nuncio had worked its work upon Fletcher and Jaffe. This, the remnants, had been buried, out of sight, amid stones too revered to be turned. It had grown cold; forgetful of its message. But it remembered now. Tommy-Ray's enthusiasm woke old ambition.
He saw it push against the walls of the vial, bright as a knife, as a gun-flash. Then it broke its cage, and came at him, between his fingers—spread now against its attack—up towards his already wounded face.
Its touch seemed light enough—a spatter of warmth, like a jism when he jerked off, hitting his eye and the corner of his mouth. But it flipped him over on to his back—the stones bringing blood to his elbows, ass and spine. He tried to yell but no sound came. He tried to open his eyes, so as to see where he was lying, but he couldn't do that either. Jesus! He couldn't even breathe. His hands, touched by the Nuncio as it leapt, were clamped to his face, blocking eyes, nose and mouth. It was like being screwed down in a coffin made for someone two sizes smaller than he. Again, he cried out against the gag of his palm, but it was a lost cause. Somewhere at the back of his head a voice said:
"Let go. This is what you want. To be the Death-Boy, you first have to know Death. Feel it. Understand it. Suffer it."
In this, as in perhaps no other lesson in his short life, he was a good pupil. He stopped resisting the panic, and went with it, riding it like a wave at Zuma, towards the darkness of some unmapped shore. The Nuncio went with him. He felt it make new stuff of him with every sweating second, prancing on the points of his stiffened hair, beating a rhythm, death's rhythm, between the throbs of his heart.
Suddenly, it was full of him; or he of it; or both. His hands came off his face like suckers, and he breathed again.
After half a dozen gasps he sat up and looked down at his palms. They were bloody, both from his cut face and from their own injuries, but the stains faded before a more insistent reality. Granted a grave-dweller's sight, he saw his own flesh corrupting before his eyes. The skin darkened and swelled with gases, then broke open, the lesions spilling pus and water. Seeing, he grinned, and felt the grin spreading up from the corners of his mouth to his ears as his face split. It wasn't just the bone of his smile he was showing; the rods of his arms, wrists and fingers were appearing now, as decay uncovered them. Beneath his shirt, his heart and lungs sank into sewerage and drained away; his balls were washed with them; his withered dick the same.
And still the grin grew wider, until all the muscle had gone from his face and he was smiling the Death-Boy's smile, wide as any smile could get.
The vision didn't linger. Once given, it was gone, and he was left kneeling on the sharp stones, staring down at his bloody palms.
"I'm the Death-Boy," he said, and stood up, turning to face the lucky fuck who'd be the first to see him transfigured.
The man had stopped in his tracks, a few yards off.
"Look at me," Tommy-Ray said. "I'm the Death-Boy."
The poor shit just stared, not understanding. Tommy-Ray laughed. All desire to kill the man had gone out of him. He wanted this witness alive, to testify in days to come. To say: I was there, and it was awesome, seeing Tommy-Ray McGuire die and rise again.
He took a moment to look at the remains of the Nuncio-fragments of the vial and a few spots of spilled fluid on the stones. There was not enough to gather up and take back to the Jaff. But he was bringing something better now. Himself, changed; cleansed of fear, cleansed of flesh. Without looking back at the witness, he about-faced and left him to his confusion.
Though the glory of corruption had left him now, a subtle aftersight remained—which he didn't comprehend until a piece of stone underfoot caught his eye. He bent to pick it up; a pretty thing for Jo-Beth, maybe. Once in his hand he realized it was not stone at all, but a bird's skull, fractured and dirty. To his eyes, it gleamed.
Death shines, he thought. When I see it, it shines.
Pocketing the skull he sauntered back to the car and reversed down the hill until the road offered space enough for him to turn. Then he was away at a speed that would have been suicidal on such bends and in such darkness had suicide not been one of his many playthings now.
Raul put his fingers to one of the splashes of Nuncio. It rose in beads to meet his hand, winding into the spirals of his fingerprints, then climbing up through the marrow of hand, wrist and forearm, before petering out at his elbow. He felt, or imagined he felt, some subtle reconfiguration in his muscle, as though his hand, which had never quite lost its simian proportions, was being coaxed a little closer to the human. He let the sensation delay him only a moment; Tesla's condition concerned him more than his own.
It was as he went to make his way back up the hill that it occurred to him that the drops of Nuncio left in the ground might somehow help heal the woman. If she didn't have comfort of some kind soon she'd surely die. What was there to lose in letting the Great Work do what it could?
With that thought in mind he started back towards the Mission, knowing that were he to attempt to touch the broken vial it would be he who received its benefit. Tesla would have to be carried down the road to where these precious drops were scattered.
The women had set their candles all around Tesla. She looked like a corpse already. He was swift with his instructions. They wrapped her up and helped him carry her down the road a little way. She wasn't heavy. He took her head and shoulders and two of the women supported her lower half, a third held the bundled shirt, now thoroughly soaked, to the bullet hole.
It was a slow process, stumbling in the darkness, but having been twice touched by the Nuncio, Raul had no difficulty finding the spot again. Like called to like. Warning the women to keep feet and fingers clear of the spilled fluid he took Tesla's weight entirely into his own arms and laid her down, her head haloed by splashes of the Nuncio. The remains of the vial itself still contained the bulk of the fluid; at most, a teaspoonful. With great gentleness, he turned her head towards the vial. At her proximity the fluid inside had begun a firefly dance—
—the poison brightness that had rained on Tesla as she fell before Tommy-Ray's bullet had solidified in seconds: become a gray, featureless place where she lay now without any sense of how she'd come to be there. She couldn't remember the Mission, Raul, or Tommy-Ray. Even her own name was beyond her. It was all outside the wall, where she couldn't go. Perhaps would never go again. She had no feelings either way about this. With no memory, she had nothing to mourn.