Charley muttered, “He really is a cop, then. A damned vigilante.” He reached into the policeman’s pocket, found a small shining computery-looking machine there, put it to his ear and listened a moment and nodded. Then he stepped on it and ground it to pieces. “Now he’s out of contact,” Charley said. “But now we got to get rid of him. Getting rid of a cop: sheesh!”
“You leave the looney in charge of the van, that’s what you get,” Stidge said.
“All right,” said Charley.
“Wasn’t such a good idea parking the van there neither,” Stidge said.
“All right. All right ”
“Where you want me to drive?” Mujer asked.
Charley said, “Turn left here. Then keep going straight. When you see signs to the Golden Gate Bridge, you get on it, head north, get out of the city. And take it easy driving. Last thing we need now, stopped by highway patrol.” He shook his head. “God damn, what a mess.”
“We leaving San Francisco so fast?” Tamale said.
Charley swung around. “You feel like staying? We got a dead man on board, we got a kidnapped cop, we got two guys we got to get rid of, you want to stay? Check into a hotel and give a tea party for the mayor? Jesus, Tamale. Jesus Christ.”
“That’s the bridge sign there, right?” Mujer said.
“What you think that says?” Charley asked. “Golden Gate Bridge, big as life.”
“I wasn’t sure that was what it said,” Mujer replied.
“Mujer, he got a little trouble reading,” said Stidge. “He didn’t learn how so good, huh? Huh?”
“ Chinga tu madre, ” Mujer said. ” Pija! Hijo de puta !”
“What’s he saying?” Stidge asked.
“Telling you how much he likes your nice red hair,” said Choke.
Buffalo said, “We not staying in San Francisco, then where we going to go, Charley?”
“I’ll tell you later, okay?” Charley said. “Mujer, when you get off the bridge, you take the first exit and follow on down until you hit a country road. Then go out toward the beach.” He shook his head again and slapped his hand against the side of it. “Dumb, dumb, dumb, this whole thing. We could’ve stayed in San Francisco all summer, and now look. Dumb. I don’t remember ever screwing anything up this bad.”
“This the right road?” Mujer asked.
“Yeah. Yeah. Stop here.”
Tom said, “The Last Days are almost upon us. It will be the Time of the Crossing soon. Spare them, Charley. Don’t deprive them of the Crossing.”
Looking at him sadly, Charley said, “I wish I could, Tom. But we don’t have no choice.” He gestured to the others. “All right, get them out of the van. By the side of the road.”
The San Francisco policeman was still lying face down, moaning a little. Stidge dragged him out. Nicholas and Buffalo hustled the two farm boys after him. They huddled together, trembling. One of them had wet his pants. They were eighteen, nineteen years old, Tom guessed.
Tom said, “And He had in His right hand seven stars, and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was as the sun shineth in His strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. And He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last. I am He that liveth, and was dead; and beyond, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and death.”
“That’s enough for now, Tom,” Charley said. “Line them up by the edge of the ravine. That’s right. Okay, step back.” He cocked his laser bracelet and fired three quick bursts, the policeman first, the older farm boy, the other one. None of them made a sound as they died. “Son of a bitch,” Charley murmured. “What a lousy unnecessary mess. All right, throw them down the ravine. Far down.”
Choke and Buffalo threw the vigilante cop. Nicholas and Mujer and Tamale and Stidge took care of the other two.
“Now Rupe,” Charley said. “Take him a little way down the road; throw him over too.”
Choke looked up in surprise. “God’s sake, Charley—!”
“What do you want to do, carry him along with us for a keepsake? Or give him a Christian burial? Come on. Throw him over. And then let’s get the hell out of here.”
“You tell us where we’re going?” Buffalo said.
“Yeah. I can tell you, now that we don’t have to worry about them overhearing. We going north, up to Mendocino County. Lots of woods around there, lots of good places to hide. Because that’s what we need to do, now. We need to hide real good.” He paused, watching as Nicholas and Tamale and Stidge dragged Rupe’s heavy body from the van and hauled it to the edge of the ravine and sent it tumbling down into the dense underbrush far below. “Okay,” Charley said. “Let’s get moving.”
“We taking the looney?” Stidge asked. “Ain’t that a risk now that he’s seen what he just seen?”
“He goes with us,” Charley said. “Wherever we go. Right, Tom? You stay with us.”
“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord,” Tom said, shivering a little, though it was much warmer on this side of the bridge than it had been in San Francisco. “Which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”
“That’s right, Tom,” Charley said softly. “That’s right. Come on, now. Into the van. Everybody into the van.”
3
“Jesus, the heat!” Jaspin said, amazed, as the tumbondé caravan started to flow down out of the mountains into the broad flat expanse of the San Joaquin Valley. He found himself smothered in a great stagnant apocalyptic mass of sizzling air that was almost too hot to breathe. Jaspin’s battered old car was third in the long straggling procession, just behind the pair of creaky buses that housed the Senhor and the Senhora and the Inner Host. “I don’t believe it. It’s incredible, that heat. Where the hell are we going, into the Sahara?”
“Toward Bakersfield,” Jill said. “We’re just a little way south of Bakersfield.”
“I know. But it’s like the Sahara here. Like two Saharas piled one on top of the other. Christ, if we’re really heading for the North Pole I wish we were a little closer to it now.”
He thought the sky was about to break into flames. It was as though all the heat in the whole Valley had come rolling south like a white-hot bowling ball and had banged up against the wall of the Tehachapi Mountains and now was lying here waiting to engulf them.
“I think we’re stopping for the night,” Jill said. “You see? The flags are going up.”
“It’s only three o’clock,” Jaspin pointed out.
“Nevertheless. Look at the Senhor’s bus. The flags are up.”
She was right. He peered out the window and saw that a couple of tumbondé men were clambering around on the roof of the lead bus, putting up the gaudy banners that were the signal to halt and make camp for the night. The bus turned left off the edge of the freeway and into an open field. So did the second one. Jaspin, with a shrug, did the same. And behind him the whole strange caravan of buses and cars and wagons and trucks that had been coming down the pass like some weird motley giant caterpillar turned left too, one by one, following the bus of Senhor Papamacer out into the field.
Jaspin pulled his car up next to the second bus, the little orange-and-black one in which the eleven members of the Inner Host and most of the statues of the gods were traveling, and got out. He turned and shaded his eyes against the fierce mid-afternoon sun and looked back up the little ribbon of steeply rising roadway into the mountains out of which they had just descended. The line of vehicles stretched on and on as far as he could see back toward the summit. It probably went all the way back without a break to Gorman at the very least, and most likely a lot farther than that, on beyond Tejon Pass maybe, as far as Castaic, even. Incredible. Incredible. This whole thing is absolutely incredible, he thought. And for him one of the most incredible aspects was his own presence in it, right here in the front of the procession, just one notch behind the Inner Host. He was here as an observer, sure, as an anthropologist. But that was only half of it, maybe less than half. He knew that he was here as a follower of the Senhor also. He had made the surrender; he had accepted tumbondé; he was going north to await the opening of the way and the coming of Chungirá-He-Will-Come. Last night, lying in uneasy sleep on an air mattress next to the car on some desolate abandoned street in what once had been Glendale or Eagle Rock, he had had a vision of one of the new gods moving in serenity through a world where the sky and everything else were green; and the god, that shining fantastic creature, had greeted him by name and promised him great happiness after the transformation of the world. How strange all this is, Jaspin thought.