“My leg is broken,” Barbie screamed. “My leg is broken.”
“Well,” Mallory said, “why don’t you pray to God and have Him heal it? Just pray to God, and I’m sure, if He’s listening, He’ll just go zap and put it back togther. Because, you know, it says in the Bible that if you pray you’ll be healed, so that’s going to happen.”
2
There were lawyers involved in this case, lawyers besides himself, Henry Wackford knew that, but he didn’t think this issue was ever going to be resolved in a courtroom. No, it wasn’t. This issue wasn’t about courtrooms, and it didn’t matter how many judges told these people that they were being stupid, that they were breaking the law—no, that didn’t matter either. Henry was having a hard time breathing. It was all so obvious to him. All of it. You had to make people see the truth, and it was a truth they didn’t want to see. No, Henry thought, most people didn’t want to see the truth even for a minute, and that was why you had things like this, that was why this country had descended into a medieval cesspit complete with torture chambers and grand inquisitors.
All right, Henry admitted. Not torture chambers. Not literally. But that was the problem, too. People took things far too literally. People thought that if somebody said that religion was good for them, that it made people happy and pleasant and industrious and kind, then that must be true, just because somebody said it. Or maybe because a lot of people said it over the course of a lot of years. Hundreds of years. He wasn’t thinking straight. Even so, he knew what he meant to think, and that was enough, at least until he got in front of a camera and made somebody listen to him. Religion was not good for people. It made them believe in delusions. It made them stupid. It made them vile. That was the message that had to get out, somehow, someday, if the good people were ever going to get this country back from the bumpkins and the idiots and the yahoos, if this country was ever going to be great and honorable—well, he wouldn’t say again. Henry Wackford didn’t think the country had ever been great and honorable before now, except maybe for a few years during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And even then, there was the racism to consider.
He really was spinning his wheels here, he thought. He made himself stop and take a deep breath. He was in his office, but he’d been outside just a little while ago, listening to the talk on Main Street. By now everybody in town had to know that Judy Cornish was dead, and that she’d been battered to death just the way Annie-Vic had been battered almost to death. It was a pattern, that’s what it was. It was obviously the same person, or persons, and they were following a pattern. He just had to make people see the obvious. They were all of them, out there—just like his ex-wife had been.
“What the Hell makes you get out of bed in the morning?” she would yell at him. “What do you bother to go on living? If it’s all going to end up in nothing, what’s the point?”
Yes, Henry thought, he understood, he really did. These people were afraid to face their own mortality. They were afraid to live every day knowing that it would all come to an end some day and that end would be the end, the absolute end, with nothing to make up for their disappointments or their failures or any of the rest of it. God wouldn’t reward them for being “good” and really pushing ahead to get that promotion, or not chucking their “obligations” to go off to school. God wasn’t there to make up for all the things they’d missed. God just wasn’t there. No wonder they got murderously violent, the whole pack of them. They couldn’t stand the thought that they weren’t important, that they didn’t mean anything, that if they failed they failed and there was nothing and nobody who could make it up to them. Here was the thing, though, Henry was sure. Down deep somewhere, they knew. They knew there was no God. They knew evolution was true. They knew the Bible was nothing but a pack of lies and fantasies. They knew it. That was why they had to kill anybody who threatened to prove it.
Henry took another deep breath. It didn’t do for him to think about his ex-wife, or the girls he’d dated in college, or even the decision, so long ago now, to come back home to practice law. He didn’t believe in dwelling on the past, for one thing, and for another it got him too worked up to think. He had to think now, it was important: first Annie-Vic, then Judy Cornish. There was no telling how many more attacks there would be before this thing was over. The FBI had two agents in place. Henry knew that. They weren’t even bothering to maintain a cover. They also weren’t taking any of this seriously. It was just like with the militias a few years ago. Those were the same kinds of people, too. Small-town backwoods Christians. And what came out of that? Timothy McVeigh, that’s what. Timothy McVeigh and that big gutted federal building in Oklahoma City. The woods were full of these people, and nobody ever paid attention to them.