The Influence(116)

Was today the day his troops would finally be called upon to defend their savior? Was this the day Magdalena would finally fall?

Or was today the day he would die?

It almost didn’t matter. He was ready for all of those eventualities, and he rolled off the cold body of the dead woman whose ass he’d been reaming, and pushed her off the side of the bed onto the floor, next to the other one. He was sore but sated, and he got out of bed, put on his underwear and dress, and walked downstairs, where he took his shotgun from its place on the kitchen table. April, the red flower that had grown out of the drain in the sink, whistled her little tune.

He hummed the song back to her, and she smiled at him.

Outside, he stood on the porch and fired the gun in the air to get everyone’s attention. As soon as the sound of the blast faded away, he shouted the words that he had been given: “Today’s the day!”

The cattle came first, or what was left of them: three hungry steers with permanent smiles and bright green gnats flying around their heads, wandering up one by one. The wetbacks and the churchies were all one big group, and they emerged together in various states of undress from their new home in the barn, all of them carrying weapons of one sort or another, ready to defend the angel to the death. There weren’t as many of them as there had been the last time he’d checked, and he wondered if the missing had been killed, eaten or run off.

It didn’t matter. They still had more than enough defenders to repel any intruders.

After the barn dwellers came the others, creatures that might once have been human or might have sprung fully deformed from the ground at the angel’s behest. He had no control over these, they answered exclusively to the angel, communicating on a frequency he could not hear, but he spoke to them anyway. He spoke to everyone. Standing on his porch, he told them that something big was going to happen. He didn’t know what it was, but they needed to be prepared for anything. “Today’s the day!” he said again.

Immediately, the others started running off in different directions. They weren’t running away, he knew. They were following orders other than his, taking up position in places where they would be most useful, probably intending to make sure that, if anyone was coming, they did not make it this far. Or perhaps setting up a perimeter to keep out undesirables because the True Angel was about to emerge.

Cameron hazarded a look toward the spot where the smokehouse used to be.

He still didn’t like to look at the angel. One reason was that he was not sure if he was allowed to gaze upon it, and he didn’t want to be punished for some stupid mistake he’d made during the interim once the angel was whole again. The other reason was, well…

Because it scared him.

He wanted to love the angel the way he knew everyone else did—

the way Jorge had

—but on a primal level he didn’t understand and couldn’t change if he wanted, the angel frightened him. No, not just frightened him. Repulsed him. It was akin to the feeling he’d had when he was camping and woke to see a big hairy spider bouncing up and down on its spindly legs, inches from his face, while his arms were stuck at his sides within his sleeping bag. There was something profoundly alien and unknowable about the angel, and looking at it now, all folded up in its cocoon, its open, silently screaming mouth morphed into a cruel black-toothed smile, its one visible red eye staring, staring, staring, Cameron was suffused with an unnamable fear that went far beyond the fear of death. Turning his attention back to the cattle and people in front of him, he was suddenly overcome with the conviction that today his luck was going to change again. For the last time.

The head churchie came up on the porch to say a few words to those assembled, but Cameron still couldn’t stand the prick, even if they were temporarily on the same side, and he wasn’t about to share a stage with the man and let everyone think they were equals. Without a word, he turned and strode back into the house, heading straight for the kitchen where, in the sink, April whistled her little song.

Cameron put his shotgun on the table, opened up the refrigerator, took out shotgun shells, a handgun and several rounds of ammunition. Just in case, he took out his Daddy’s old pistol. Humming along to the flower’s tune, he started loading.





THIRTY SEVEN




Lita was not herself. She was…a camera. A camera that floated over Magdalena, zooming in every so often to examine a particular area or particular person in closer detail.

She saw the ranch, their ranch, and the red flowers were gone but their corpses littered the landscape like dog droppings, little brown clumps of squishy smelly rot. Mickey was not in his pen but was running wild, a crazed look on his face as he chased a line of bright red moths that led him deeper into the desert. Every so often, he would catch one of the bugs, eat it, and for a brief fraction of a second, his entire body would flash a different color.