The Acolyte (2 page)

“Tell us, cadet Murtag.”

Naked. Laid out on a marble slab. Where? A meatpacking plant? Condemned factory? The marble was ice-cold up the knobs of my spine.

The initiation happened years ago. I am speaking from memory now.

Men in crimson robes clustered around me. Their faces stared from lush, reddened hoods: my instructors, chiefs, and captains. Though it was pure blasphemy to think it, their faces looked to be poking from the folds of impossibly large and terribly loose vaginas . . . though of course I’d never seen a real vagina. An anatomical diagram, once, in a library book that survived the Great Purge, but never in the flesh, as it were.

“What is your secret, cadet Murtag? So we can trust you.”

Hollis, my future chief, was asking the questions. Beyond the ring of hoods stood my fellow top-ranking cadets: Garvey and Cruikshank and Applewhite. All stripped buck naked, hopping foot-to-foot on the stone floor.

“You will see the banned texts,” Hollis went on. “You will come to know the heathen gospels, the tracts and treatises of their backward faiths. We must trust you’ll not be corrupted, and so—we must trust
you
.”

They already knew everything about me. What schools I’d attended, how many shekels in my bank account at First Divinity, what I tithed last year, that I had scarlet fever as a teenager, the high school essay I’d written called “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

The point was to
make
me say it. Confession being good for the soul. Confession
is
good for the soul. God is good. The Prophet is good. The Republic is good.

Our way of life—
good
.

I said, “My mother was given The Cure.”

“She was an insurrectionist?” said Hollis. “She wished to see the downfall of the Republic?”

“She said things she shouldn’t have. This was back near the beginning of it all. I repeated those things in school—”

“Ratted her out?” Hollis grinned. “Your own mother?”

“No,” I said. “It was accidental. My teacher told someone. She . . . said some foolish things. Had sinful thoughts. One day they came and took her away.”

Hollis said, “Do you still see her?”

“Occasionally. Birthdays, Mother’s Day. She doesn’t even recognize me half the time.”

“Do you hold any lingering animosity toward the Republic for what was done?”

“No.” And I meant it. “She deserved it.”

A golden sheet was wrapped round me. All those scarlet-ridged faces stared at me with newfound solidarity. All those grinning vagina-entombed heads.

I had done it. I was one of them.

An Acolyte.

Routine Roundups

The house is a gabled two-storey with ivy creeping up one side. Near the Stadium SuperChurch but not within the exclusive ring set aside for Ministers and dignitaries. A house you’d peg a Deputy Minister to live in: a hard-charger and his photogenic three-and-a-half kids.

But this particular gabled two-storey was packed full of homosexuals. We’d known about their cell for a while. They were a harmless passel of nancies. But it was a slow night.

Angela Doe, Garvey, and I were hunkered in a van idling streetside. Upon the van’s exterior was painted a garish mural featuring
Buckles the Birthday Clown
.
BUCKLES IS A FULLY LICENCED AND REPUBLIC-VETTED ENTERTAINMENT SUBSIDIARY
read the small print looping over the wheel wells.

The house was bugged. The three of us wore headphones. Scratchy voices fed into them:

Voice 1: “Now look—
look
. This is about impulse control, okay? Look but don’t touch. Or look but don’t give the impression you
want
to touch.”

Voice 2: “But then that’s not impulse control, is it? It’s a mask.”

[INAUDIBLE CROSSTALK]

Voice 1: “. . . and in time, that mask can become permanent. Take every impulse, put it behind the mask—the mask becomes you.”

Garvey’s face pinkened. Especially intolerant of gays, was Garvey.

“Let’s get in there,” he said darkly.

“Would you be so upset,” Doe asked, “if it were a bunch of queer women?”

Garvey stared at her. “What do you think? Don’t even talk to me about it—don’t put the image in my
head
.”

We exited the van. Riot shields and tactical shotguns—check. We crept up to the porch. The door was unlocked. Garvey booted it in anyhow. Pure cowboy.

“Faith Crimes Officers! On your knees!”

The homosexuals—I counted eight—were seated in the front room. They were dressed conservatively, button-down shirts and tan slacks: the drab look of husbands and fathers, as I’m sure a few were. For some reason I’d been expecting decadence and debauchery: guys swanning about in pink feather boas while a naked midget tinkled away on a grand piano.

“Face down,” I said. “You are in direct violation of Republican law.”

Their leader held up a bunch of silverfish-eaten pamphlets from Exodus International.

“We’re trying to change,” he pleaded. “We want to cure ourselves.”

Doe and Garvey started slamming them to the floor and cuffing them with zip-strips.

I repeated the Republic mandate: “Any Follower who harbours impious thoughts is to report to the nearest conditioning facility to undergo faith counselling—”

“And then what?” their leader shrieked. “They cut your head open and burn the sin out! They turn you into a vegetable!”

I headed into the dining room: mattresses butted end-to-end on the hardwood floor. Throw pillows tossed about. Pornographic magazines . . . upon closer inspection, they were just yellowed Sears and Roebuck advertising supplements. The “Summer Fling” editions: chiselled men in swimwear and jockey shorts. One pic showed a shirtless guy fly-fishing in his underwear. Garvey joined me. He picked up a catalogue, and gave the half-naked fly-fisherman a good long gander before flinging it away.

“Sickos, these guys.”

I left him to bag up the catalogues. I headed to the van and radioed the meat wagon. When it showed up, we loaded the criminals in. They’d be cooling their heels at the nearest Reconditioning Centre within the week. Or they’d have a Come-To-God moment.

Night.

West end of the city now, down along the river: storage barns and flophouses with whitened angles, everyplace looking like a black cardboard cutout. Wind scored the rusted docks and filled my head with the smell of steel.

“Ten to one we don’t need these suits of armour,” said Garvey, buckling his Kevlar leggings.

Doe cinched into a bulletproof vest. “What if you hadn’t been armoured up for that Mormon shakedown?”

A month ago we’d busted a cell of Latter-Day Saints worshiping in an abandoned warehouse. Their sentry had shot Garvey point-blank with 20-gauge wadcut buckshot.

“Mormons are kooks.” Garvey said, jacking shells into the breech of a Mossberg. “We’re talking about a religion founded by a guy who stuck a glowing pebble in his hat and followed it to some golden plates buried under a tree. Polygamous psychos.”

I scoped a lit window at the northeast corner. “These guys are kooks, too.”

“These guys are docile.” Garvey said, wiping down the face-shield of his riot helmet. “Harmless nutbars.”

Once we were buckled and strapped, I knelt in the alleyway. I led the prayer.

“Lord, we seek your blessing in this enterprise undertaken in your name. For the safety of your vessels, that we possess the courage to complete your good work, we pray to you, O Lord.”

“Lord, hear our prayer.”

“For the Divine Fathers at Kingdom City and their humble emissaries here in New Bethlehem, the power to enforce the glory and purity of the One True Faith. We pray to you, O Lord.”

“Lord, hear our prayer.”

“Amen.”

Doe flicked my face-shield down. “The Lord be with you, Acolyte Murtag.”

“And with you, Acolyte Doe.”

Garvey said, “What am I, the heathen scourge?”

Doe sighed. “And also with you, Acolyte Garvey.”

We stood in the hallway outside
the third-floor suite. Voices seeped through the cheap pressboard door:

“Let’s find another incident you feel you can comfortably face . . . okay, I got a blip there. Backtrack it with me.”

Garvey mouthed the words:
Auditing session
. Adrenaline throbbed my veins, a high hat tempo picking the underside of my neck.

I mouthed
Go
.

Garvey trained his shotgun on the doorknob. Blistered metal and
wood splinters. I booted the door, snapping the security chain, and we steamrolled in.

“Faith Crimes! On your knees!”

A well-lit room. Four folding tables. Eight collapsible chairs. Eight fugitives: six men, two women. Tacked to the wall: a silk-screened portrait of their messiah.

Milky pale. Toad-faced and onion-eyed. A silk cravat twisted round his neck.

L. Ron Hubbard.

Garvey kicked over a table and sent an E-meter flying. A willowy Scientologist stood up. Garvey tagged him with the butt of his shotgun. The Scientologist’s specs snapped over the bridge of his nose and he went down.

“Everyone on the floor!” he bellowed. “Suck shag!”

The Scientologists were half-deaf from the shotgun blast and half-hypnotized from their auditing sessions. Doe brought her boot down on an E-meter, which splintered under her foot like a cheap calculator.

“Know what it is?” she said to the whimpering zealots. “A gizmo that reacts to the sweat on your palms. Plastic and wires; costs eleven shekels to make. You’re all heading to Reconditioning Centres—for what? Playing with a
toy
.”

“Don’t listen to her.”

That willowy Scientologist staggered up. Blood flowed down the sides of his nose. His busted spectacles hung from one ear.

“What we do here, we do for the good of the human race.”

Garvey grabbed the fugitive by his lapels and jammed a forearm under his chin.

“Hate to break the news, but your whole faith is a cash grab. That guy”—a disgusted nod at L. Ron—“lived in the middle of the ocean on a yacht staffed by young boys, a pedophile perv, his crimes funded by morons like you.”

The Scientologist gagged but his eyes were bright and pure, filled with the zealous mania you tend to see a lot in my line of work.

“Do you actually believe,” Garvey went on, “that there are aliens living inside you?”

Garvey and Doe were simply executing directive 46.23 of the Faith Crimes charter:
Expose the gross inadequacies and inconsistencies of all false prophets and/or faiths
.

“Do you know how utterly
moronic
your religion is?” said Garvey.

“No more moronic than a saviour who dies on a cross and rises three days later,” the Scientologist said.

Garvey brought his shotgun’s stock down into the guy’s mouth. Teeth pelted the wall. The Scientologist went down twitching.

None of us paid attention to the lone Scientologist near the door. Tubby and pimpled in a purple angora sweater, displaying signs of life equal to your average houseplant. Nobody caught her hand moving under a table for the pistol duct-taped there.

The first slug drove into the wall behind Doe’s head. Purple Angora shot again: the slug shattered a ceiling tile. Then she was out the door. My head snapped to Doe—wide-eyed but unhurt—before I turned to trail her.

Purple Angora streaked down the hallway. She spun and fired. Plaster and wood chips flew. I hipped my shotgun and pulled the trigger.
Boom
. The centre of her body turned into red mashed potato. Tatters of purple fabric blew out in a starfish pattern.

I backtracked to the room. Doe hadn’t moved. I clocked the slug’s trajectory: it had missed her skull by an inch.

I touched her shoulder. “You alright? Hey.
Hey
.”

Doe’s short-clipped hair reeked of cordite. The ends were frizzed as if they had come close to an open flame. I leaned close. Knowing I shouldn’t—not now, not in front of the fugitives, not at all, not
ever
. My lips brushed her forehead.

“Angela, I’m sorry. She was my cover.”

Doe gave me a forearm shiver. I rocked back on my heels. She jammed her knee into a Scientologist’s spine and cuffed him.