Jack Yeovil - Comeback Tour

She broke contact with the painted eyes, and stormed downstairs, with Elvis following.

"I never thought to see that face again," Elvis said.

Krokodil didn't understand.

"Mr Seth. He don't look no different now than he did back then."

"Back when?"

Elvis was preoccuppied. "The crazy days. The music days. Him and Colonel Parker ran me like a greyhound."

"This is the same man? Elder Nguyen Seth."

"Now you mention it, I suppose they are the same man. That ain't possible, is it?"

Krokodil remembered the memories that had bled into her mind from the Elder's.

"He'd have to be near a hundred years old."

"He's been around for a lot longer than that."

"Lady, what are you in to?"

She shrugged. "You don't really want to know, Colonel Presley. Just get me to the Cape."

"I'll try."

There was a small powerboat in a shack by the diner, gassed up and ready to go. They loaded scavved weapons and ammo into its storage compartments, and Elvis insisted on bringing along some of the more obviously pre-packaged foods.

"There ain't no charts," he said. "We'll have to steer by the stars when it's night. Still, if we cut across the peninsula until we come to the sea and turn South we'll have to find the Cape."

Krokodil didn't doubt that they would get there without getting lost. It was what would happen afterwards that worried her.

"This will slow us down some. Put a couple of days on the journey. And I don't know if there's enough gas in the extra cans to get us there."

"We'll deal with that when it becomes a problem."

"We surely will."

Elvis cast off, and the boat puttered out onto the waters, which rippled thickly as it cut across them.

It was late afternoon, and the insects were thick in the air. The Op was sweating heavily, even with his jacket off, and had to bat the bugs away from his face. They grew them big in this country. Even she was bothered by them. Doc Threadneedle had made her invulnerable to almost everything short of a direct hit with a nuclear weapon, but she could still be bitten by nuisance-value creepy-crawlies. That was science for you. They'd find a cure for cancer before they got around to licking the headcold.

He was humming under his breath. Krokodil wondered if he realized he had that habit.

It was an obscure American folk song, composed by someone called Alligator John Fogarty. She had only heard of it because Petya Tcherkassoff had done a cover version, with a bizarre Russian-accented twist to the English language lyrics, on his A Cry for Help album.

It was called "Born on the Bayou."

Sister Addams summoned him down to the control bunker. It was good news. Fonvielle had established contact with Keystone, the communications link of the Needlepoint Ring. If the satellite could be made to respond, then the whole chain would fall in line. And the Church of Joseph would wield unparalleled power over the nations of the Earth. His first impulse had been to order someone to report the good news to Elder Seth, but he held back. There was no harm in verifying the situation for himself.

Simone trailed along after him. He rather liked the obvious disapproval the Brothers and Sisters had to choke back whenever she was around. They were prudish fanatics mostly, even the ones who hadn't gone Donny-and-Marie yet. Given free rein, they'd like to stone Simone Scarlet, the Scarlet Woman, to death. They did that sort of thing all the time in Salt Lake, and Seth encouraged it. Spilling blood was all part of the ritual.

She didn't ask questions, but she was learning more and more. She wasn't much like the nervous indentee hooker she had been back in New Orleans. With Commander Fonvielle, she was only too willing to play the role of First Lady. The creature in the sea had unnerved her, but she had put up with all the other horrors without a murmur. The sacrifices were still baking on the tarmac as they strolled across the launchpad. Two were Josephites who had fallen beside the wayside and succumbed to doubt, but the one with a tail was a Suitcase Person. Duroc had ordered that the perimeter guards round a few of the monsters up for study. They had obviously been human once.

Bethany Addams was waiting outside the bunker, her best black dress and poke bonnet on. She had been with NASA before she joined the church, and knew what she was doing. She even remembered Fonvielle from the old days. She was of that generation of Americans that had wanted to be astronauts when it grew up, and been sorely disappointed when the ruinously expensive and dangerous space programme was dismantled.

Duroc looked up into the sky. It seemed close enough to touch. The Needlepoint satellites were up there somewhere. They had been frigidly unyielding for years, but the Frenchman knew they were just waiting to be seduced by the right touch.

They rode the freight elevator down to the bunker. Two goats were tethered in one corner. Ezekiel Astor, a dour Brother in shirtsleeves with a butcher's knife in his waistband, tended them. He was the Officer of the Sacrifice.

Sacrifice was the key to the whole thing. The Needlepoint Ring was lost to scientific endeavour. That had been proven in the '70s. But the Church of Joseph had other avenues of communication with the machine minds that controlled the heavy lases.

Duroc stepped off the elevator platform and strolled into the control room. Fonvielle saluted his president, and he returned the respect. The commander looked like Ben Gunn, but at least 75% of his brain cells were still firing.

Astor led the goats towards the console that had been opened up. The plastic casing was cast aside, and someone had carefully scraped away the jacketing of most of the wires. Astor gently picked up one of the goats and placed it in the nest of wires. He cut its throat and held its mouth shut as it bled into the machine's insides. There were sparks as the contacts were made.

Simone took it all as a normal rite. She was from the swamps. She knew voodoo when she saw it.

Sister Addams chanted softly as she engaged the monitors. The dying goat kicked feebly, and lay still, its life seeping into the workings.

The big board lit up.

"Contact," Fonvielle said.

There was some discreet cheering from the technicians.

"Keystone, Keystone," Fonvielle said into his throatmike, "do you read?"

The Satellite beeped its response. Later, they would engage its voicebox simulator, and converse in English. For now, mathematical signals would do.

Addams turned round, smiling beautifully. "On line, Elder Duroc."

Duroc quietly punched the air. There was another cheer. It was a shame the Josephites abjured champagne. This was one of those Moet et Chandon occasions.

"You have a subject?" Addams asked.

This had been one of Duroc's odd little tasks, the selection of a test subject. He had run his mind through a long list of people he had met and whom he thought the world would not be the poorer for the lack of. But then he realized they were so close to the End of All Things that settling one petty score among so many accounts due and soon to be paid was small-minded of him. Spontaneous human combustion had always been random in its nature, and so he decided on a genuinely random form of selection.

He had used the ZeeBeeCee Blotto Lotto RaLPPH, the most finely-tuned random-person selection machine in the world. The station claimed that it picked its winners without regard to any social, racial, sexual, economic, psychological, numerical, alphabetical, moral or sociological consideration. So, smiling a little at the thought of such ill-fortune following on the good, Duroc had picked Gavin Mantle of Springfield PeeZee, Massachusetts.

Gavin had been until recently a salesman for Kitchenmaster appliances. He was 32; married to the former Clodagh Hanrahan; father of little Tish and Reggie; a keen follower of the My Pal, the Biosurgeon soap; the star of his works bowling team; the sometime backstreet lover of Erik Kartalian, a bleached blond muscle builder, still a suspect in the embezzlement of five thousand dollars from the Kitchenmaster slush fund; and just on the point of graduating from zooper-blast and ju-ju pills to smacksynth and Method-1. Duroc supposed Gavin was a typical American. ZeeBeeCee had just given him one hundred million dollars in cash and a lifetime supply of GenTech medical care. His face had rarely been offscreen during the past week, as Lola Stechkin and the news team reported how Gavin was disposing of his fortune.