VIRGA REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS when a sponge was thrown across his face. No, not a sponge, he decided momentarily, but rather his swollen and bloody hand. He remembered the awful sound of bones giving way, like sticks broken by powerful hands, and wanted to be sick but could not move. He forced down the bile that rose, burning, to the top of his throat and tried to get his bearings.
He looked up at the bright stars as they whirled their divine patterns. But night was not old; a faint tinge of purple in the sky showed the path on which the sun had slipped the horizon. He was moving, being jostled and bounced on thick tires, and there was the loud roar of an engine. There was no longer the smell of gulf salt in the air. Now there was only the dry, bitter smell of the desert cooling into night.
Virga's knees were drawn up tightly, his legs cramped. He had been slammed onto the rear floorboard of a Land-Rover and it was only when he twisted his head to the side that he realized his mouth was gagged with coarse cloth. At the driver's seat was a man Virga had to concentrate to recognize. Yes. The fair-haired man from Baal's library. And in the other seat was the darker disciple. He had seen them for only a split second before his vision was blocked out by a fist. Both of the men wore pistols at their belts.
How far into the desert they were Virga had no way of knowing. He didn't know where they were headed or why, but he made no noise or motion to indicate to the disciples that he had awakened.
His head pounded fiercely. It was a fiery ache that raged just behind his eyes. The pain of his head and the pain of his shattered hand were two brothers who met somewhere at his shoulder.
He realized that the crucifix had saved him, had amazingly repelled the man, as if he were a vampire. Another moment and Virga would have been swept away by an awesome combination of horror and euphoria, sweating and screaming. The man's eyes remained in his mind, circling in mockery of the stars.
The Land-Rover dipped and swayed over desert dunes like a craft at sea. The two men never spoke or moved; the guns they wore spoke for them. Virga thought he was either going to be killed or held somewhere until he agreed to aid Baal. Perhaps he would even be tortured. These were men like their eerie master, without shame, without guilt, without mercy.
Virga fought off a new wave of unconsciousness that crept subtly over him. His fingers, crushed and crooked, had turned blue. Veins throbbed in his wrist and the injured hand had swollen hideously to twice its size. Like Job's disease, Virga thought, almost humored by that recollection. The Land-Rover, jarred by rocks, brought him back into the terrible present and the realization that he must at least try to escape.
He stretched slowly, watching the men's profiles. There seemed to be no injuries other than the hand. But his legs were very stiff. If he could leap from the Land-Rover and find a hiding place in the darkness, perhaps... but he feared that his legs might not hold against the shock. If his knees buckled they would simply run him down, if they meant to kill him, or jam him into the vehicle again if they meant to hold him captive. He worked his shoulders free, painfully, and was able to glance about in the darkness. On all sides the desert was bare and forbidding. The only lights he saw were cast by the headlamps of the vehicle, revealing flat sand and outcroppings of rock. He drew his head back down.
He would not get two chances. The element of surprise would have to carry him. He would have to take the risk of not being able to find a hiding place. If they meant to kill him it was the logical thing to do; if they meant to torture him it was the logical thing to do because he would rather be dead than help this madman who called himself Baal. His breath hissing under the cloth, he worked his legs free. He tensed to jump and then untensed, tensed and untensed, waiting for a rush of adrenaline to boost him. His heart pounded almost audibly.
The Land-Rover was climbing a bluff. Rocks thumped beneath the tires. This was the moment.
Virga gritted his teeth and, shoving out with his legs, dived over the side of the vehicle.
He cradled his injured hand but his elbows hit rocks when he fell, shredding his jacket. He cried out involuntarily and knew that the muffled sound had carried. As he slid across rocks to smooth sand at the base of the bluff, he saw the two men look down at the Land-Rover's empty rear floorboard.
The Land-Rover turned sharply, its yellow headlamps searching like spider eyes.
Virga scrambled to his feet, sweating with the awful pain, and ran. The sand, sucking at his shoes, slowed him. Behind him the vehicle roared louder and louder. He did not dare took around. Suddenly there came the crack! of a pistol shot and sand kicked up viciously to his right, less than a foot away. Virga knew they meant to murder him. Before him stretched a plain of sand and rock; the Land-Rover would soon reach him on this terrain. Already his silhouette ran ahead of him, framed in the headlamps that were rapidly gaining distance. He cursed and felt cold panic rising. There was no place to hide!
But no! Virga ducked his head and ran, smelling the swirl of sand from the heavy-ribbed tires. Ahead, the plain suddenly dropped off into jagged darkness: a narrow chasm. If he could reach it the Land-Rover couldn't follow without turning turtle. But there was no way of judging its depth. It could be a fall of only ten feet to deep sand, or it could be a fall of twenty-five feet to razor-edged rocks. There was no time to weigh a death by bullet against a death in free-fall. The Land-Rover roared at his heels; the next bullet screamed past his left ear. Virga took a deep breath and, reaching the edge, leaped out into space.
The length of the fall made him shriek into the cloth. Brush and rocks ripped at him. And then, finally, he hit sand peppered with stone. His knees and elbows scraped raw, he rolled for cover against the chasm wall. With his good hand he ripped away the gag and panted heavily, listening for another shot.
Dozens of feet above him, the lights of the Land-Rover prowled the opposite wall. He could see the men looking over the precipice into the chasm's depths. Virga flattened himself against the wall of sand and stone, afraid that they might pinpoint him by his heartbeat. He tried to control his ragged breathing. After a few endless moments Virga watched the Land-Rover's headlamps move a dozen yards along the rim.
Virga's senses stirred. Perhaps they had lost him entirely. Perhaps they thought he was moving at the bottom of the chasm, or perhaps they even thought that he might be dead and now they were searching for the body. The Land-Rover slowly, slowly followed the winding course of the chasm. Virga watched the yellow headlamps move away. Yes! They'd lost him! But still he crouched in the darkness, ignoring the swollen agony of his hand; his eyes were narrowed and probing the depths around him, wary of some kind of trick. Perhaps one of the men had come down into the chasm and was now, gun in hand, stalking him.
But then he saw the two men begin to fire randomly down from the Land-Rover, spraying bullets in haphazard patterns. Slugs whined around him; he cringed and saw sparks fly along the chasm wall as bullets ricocheted off the rock. The men continued firing until Virga heard the clicking of empty chambers. They arranged themselves back into their seats and the Land-Rover tore away across the desert, leaving a tail of spinning sand.
It was a very long time before Virga reached the rim. Losing a foothold on rocks or a grip on brush, he fell twice before hauling himself over the edge. Very far away but still visible on the desert were the red taillights of the vehicle.
Watching the Land-Rover vanish in the night, Virga was aware of the pain that had crawled up his shoulder and spread across his chest, sending out razors as reconnaissance over the fields of flesh. It gradually and insidiously claimed his neck, numbing it, and when it reached his temples he slumped forward and lay with his lips pressed into the sand.
When he awakened he realized why they had not made a stronger effort to find him. In the harsh crimson light of the predawn sky he struggled to his feet, his hand hanging like a sack of concrete, and saw the immense empty expanse of desert that even now shifted and danced in veils of heat. For miles and miles and miles beyond stretched only the white dunes and sunbaked flats. God only knew how far it would be to a highway or a Bedouin waterhole. Soon the sun would burst over the far dam of land and drown him in an ocean of his own salt sweat. Around him, with the first blinding arc, came a solid drone of insects awakening in their sand nests. Flies began circling his head, darting down to suck at the sweat; they smelled the blood and attached themselves greedily to the crusted wound on his palm.
They had left him, not caring whether he was dead or not, because out here it was only a matter of time. He had no water and no hope of shade, though tire tracks were still clear in the direction in which the Land-Rover traveled. He blessed the deep indentations that stretched on, on, on out of sight, seeing in them at least the correct direction in which to walk. Virga pulled his jacket up like a makeshift Arab headdress to protect his face and bald head. He started walking, squinting as the sun whitened above the horizon.
The sun climbed. Maddening insects bit at his exposed flesh. When he ducked his head to escape their whirling cloud they descended too; they filled his eyes and clogged his nostrils. They smashed themselves to death against his face. He moved on, across rock flats and across dunes in which he sank to his knees. Overhead the sun was both a staring inflamed eye and an open bloody mouth.
Fever boiled in his brain. His legs cramped and knotted again and again; he had to sit in the sand and knead the muscles with his good hand until he could walk again. Soon he found himself dazed by the heat and drifting off the tire track. Shaking himself awake, he stared into the distance hoping to see telephone lines or the rise of derricks, but nothing altered the desolation. His lips cracked with the unbearable mid-day sun; the thought of cool water was driving him mad but it was difficult to think of anything else. He was past the point of either pain or fear, he concentrated on what seemed to be the blue shimmer of a river far, far ahead.
He remembered sailing the Charles with Katherine clutching his arm, her nose and cheeks windburned, her dark hair wild in the bracing wind. Above them the canvas billowed dramatically and he caught the fresh scent of the wide wonderful river; he wondered now, thousands of miles from that time and place, why he hadn't cupped his hand in the water and pressed it to his lips, gently, just like... this.
And when he opened his eyes he staggered and spat out sand.
Katherine, he said, closing his eyes to blot away the sun. Katherine. The world had revolved around her face, the center of the universe. He had watched her grow from a tomboyish Irish girl into a woman of charm and grace. He remembered that she spoke with her hands. They were always in motion like white butterflies and it intrigued him to watch their performance. She said it was a trait passed down from generation to generation on her mother's side, that constant conversation of weaving fingers. Katherine had been a fine woman; the memory of her was still fine. She had been energy and life, beauty and hope.
He remembered her joy at realizing she was pregnant. When she'd first thought, after two miscarriages, that she was destined to remain childless she had purposefully kept a tight grip on her emotions. Maybe, she had whispered to him while they lay beneath the blankets listening to the crack of logs in the fireplace, the muted music of rain against the windows, she was not meant to bear children.
"And how can you be a judge of that?" he asked her.
"I don't know. I feel it, that's all."
"Mrs. Virga," he said, taking on the tone of mock gravity, "beware. You're dabbling in theories of predestination."
"No. I'm serious."
He gazed into her placid eyes, those orbs of fathomless blue, and saw that she was. He said, "They say the third time is the charm."
"This is the last time," she said. "If something happens this time I don't know what I'll do. I don't think I could go through that again."
"Nothing," he said firmly, "is going to happen."
"I'm frightened," she said, drawing close to him. In the fireplace a log squealed. "Really I am. I've never been so frightened about anything before."
"I'm not." He looked deep into her eyes. "I'm not frightened because I know it'll be all right. Whatever happens, everything will be all right."
But everything was not "all right." It ceased being all right when, months later as she was swollen and radiant, she tripped on loose carpeting at the top of the stairway and, screaming out, plunged helplessly down the stairs.
He wondered what the child would have been like. A boy. Perhaps like Naughton.
He opened his eyes, the movement of his lids scattering flies. He'd been walking in his sleep. The sun was still as hot; the desert was still as empty. He might have been walking for days; he might have been walking in circles. He didn't know. Looking toward the horizon, he felt the knot of tension in his stomach explode in a burst of bitter pain.
Ahead the sand was endless and unchanging.
He had lost the Land-Rover trail.
In all directions there was only the blinding white. Nothing else. He reached into a pocket of his tattered jacket and found the small bottle of sunburn balm. He applied it to his face, feeling cracked skin and the beginnings of large watery blisters. Several broke when he touched them and fluids leaked down his face, attracting new hordes of insects. Still he moved on, stumbling along what he thought was a straight line leading directly toward the gulf, but after a while he decided no, this was not the right way. He turned and retraced his path; after several minutes he decided this was again wrong and began walking in yet another direction. His flesh burned, blistered, burst and then reburned all over again.
The sun ate through his skull to the brain. The great white circle darkened, darkened, darkened until it was as black as the eye of Baal. Virga saw the man's head as huge as a solar system, with one eye the sun and the other the moon. His captive planet was always beneath his gaze. Virga saw him in black robes towering over the cities of man. And he grew larger and larger, his shadow spreading across the face of the earth. Finally his awful form darkened the stars and all creation was pitched into the black stagnation of the abyss. Virga shook his head to free himself of the maddening visions but he could still see Baal's gigantic head suspended in the sky and his mouth opening to swallow museums and libraries and all the wonderful works of man.
Virga fell to his hands and knees. The flies swarmed thickly about his head; he waved them off weakly with a hand swollen black. This is the moment. He saw it scrawled on the sand, in the blazing sky, on the undulating horizon. Of all the hundreds who had proclaimed themselves messiah, all the madmen, all the cheats, this one was different.
Fluids from broken blisters dripped down his chin. He watched the pattern they made as they splattered in the sand.
This one was different. An animal and a man. The intelligence and cunning of a man, the savagery and power of a brute beast. This one... was different. He had already infected thousands; how many more? And thus the slaughter and chaos would continue until that final finger moved toward a button in an unlocked steel cylinder. And the blast would moan on four winds Baal Baal Baal. It would scrawl his name on ravaged concrete and scorched flesh. And then it would be too late. Could it be too late already? Could it? Virga trembled violently and shook his head from side to side. The Antichrist. He looked up to the sun for flaming mercy but it only burned him the more. The Antichrist. The insects' torment had his sanity hanging by a thread. Filled with his blood, they would fly to their nests to disgorge it and then return, newly hungry. They shrieked in his ears. Against the silence of the desert was a great multitude of people shouting at him from a distance: Antichrist Antichrist.
Virga could not hold on. Beneath his face there was a puddle of liquid, his liquid. His life. He saw himself reflected in it.
He loosened his grip on consciousness. As he fell forward the noise of the multitude rose in his ears until he was completely, totally deafened.
