Leesa stepped out of her tiny lab and creeped across the compound, staying within the flickering shadows, striving for invisibility. In the jumpy orange glow of the firepit, the congregation danced and howled and sang, naked and glistening. She had to admit to herself it wasn’t just a craving for coffee that brought her out—the nightly Sacrament held a bizarre fascination for her. It was interesting, she thought, in the way a lock-down ward in a nuthouse might be interesting. As she made her way in shadows across the compound, toward the dining hall, it occurred to her that she had found an excuse to observe the proceedings every night since arriving. She chided herself for her voyeurism, took a final look, and stepped into the dining hall.
Compared to her lab, the little cafeteria was almost airy, with clean, white-painted walls. The tables were bare, the dining room empty. All others on the compound, save those on watch, were cavorting at the fireside, sizzling their brains in the synaptic fire kindled by their Sacrament, 2-4-MCD. She filled a cup with inky, overcooked brew from a neglected coffeepot, thinking wryly that her neurons could use a little sizzle themselves, if a more prosaic one. Sipping it, grimacing at the taste, sipping again, she stared out the window, watching Antioch’s disciples thrash and spin. Through the intervening night, she heard them: laughing, crying, singsong jabbering, inarticulate nonsense.
As always, it made her think of her parents, and she turned away. Was she really capable of giving Antioch the means to infect the world with that madness? She thought of the money, told herself hell, yes, and tried to ignore the self-loathing that welled up within her. After all, she would also give the world the means to fight Antioch’s sickness. For a price.
She lit a cigarette and sat at one of the long Formica tables. Antioch and his followers frowned on smoking, but she was alone, and they had made many allowances for her. She’d not had a cigarette for hours (it was too dangerous to smoke in the lab) and the first bolus of nicotine was like the caress of a lover—soft, warm, pleasant. She smoked, and cast out the memory of her parents.
But shoving aside memory left her with nothing but the present, the reality of living on the compound. Nuthouse? Or lion’s den? Smoking, staring into her coffee, freed for the moment from the rigors of her work, Leesa was face to face with her peril. At the very least, she had become a criminal. But life on the compound carried a vague, constant threat of more intangible dangers. Arrest was one thing, but...
You’re still playing with snakes, she thought. And you still don’t know why.
"Working late?"
She looked up, and Gregory Antioch smiled at her. He must have entered from the kitchen, silent as a cat. She was surprised she hadn’t felt his approach. Gregory Antioch was the kind of person who entered a room like a sharp charge of ozone.
"Yeah," she said, and puffed her cigarette, knowing it annoyed him. "So are you, I guess." She eyed the cartridge belt and holstered sidearm slung across his narrow hips. "Guard duty tonight?"
He nodded, smiled and sat across from her, wrinkled his nose at the smoke. Antioch was fiftyish, tall, snow-haired and gray-eyed, with sharp, regal features and a proud, almost military bearing. The founder of the Church of the Neural Christ did not exempt himself from the various rotated duties necessary to maintaining the compound, and on more than one occasion Leesa had seen him washing dishes or picking carrots. Even when he was cleaning toilets he emanated a sort of raw nobility, an irresistible field that made people want to be around him, to talk to him or hear him talk. Tonight Antioch was one of twelve disciples who had drawn guard duty, and skipped Sacrament.
"You’ve really taken an interest, haven’t you?" he asked. He had a pleasant voice, gravely and resonant.
"Beg pardon?""I’ve noticed that you often watch the Sacrament. Taking an interest."
She shrugged and blew smoke. "You all get naked and thrash around the firepit and howl like banshees. You have to admit it’s quite a spectacle."
He nodded. "It’s even more of a spectacle from our point of view."
She laughed. "I’m sure."
"But be fair, Doctor Saul. Surely you’ve observed that there’s a more contemplative aspect to Sacrament."
Leesa nodded, flicking her ashes into her half-finished coffee. "Yeah, I suppose." In an hour or so, Antioch’s flailing disciples would wear themselves out, and spend the remainder of the evening sitting quietly, staring into the fire, praying, searching for truth and enlightenment with a little help from their friend, 2,4-methoxy-cis-diphenylperindole. At about midnight, the Minister (usually Antioch, but tonight it would be one of his Deacons) would recite a short meditation or some words of wisdom, and the group would disband after chanting a short prayer that Antioch had cobbled together from various pilfered sources. As far as Leesa was concerned, Antioch’s "Church" was just a cult, an arcane mishmash of Christian mysticism, pop psychology, yoga, drug abuse, health food, and tax exemptions. All of which, she thought, made it no better or worse than any other religion she’d ever heard of. The second-oldest profession in the world.
And Antioch was a scam artist, she thought, looking at him. He was also just about the most charismatic, intelligent, and magnetic person she had ever met. He had no trouble recruiting disciples—his reputation alone might have been sufficient for that. Before graduating to the leadership of one of America’s funkiest neo-religions, Antioch’s peculiar brand of pop-psych had garnered him tremendous popularity, wealth and notoriety via books, TV and cyberspace. More importantly, his imposing appearance and personal magnetism attracted people like flies to a No-Pest strip. Leesa felt it. She was almost 15 years younger than Antioch, and thought he was the hottest piece of action she’d ever seen.
But he was still a scam artist. And dangerous.
And her employer.
He looked at her. She fidgeted, almost took a sip from her polluted coffee, flushed.
"If you’re going back to the lab may I walk with you? I haven’t had an update in a while."
She shrugged again, and they left the cafeteria, stepping back into the night. Antioch’s disciples—about 150 lived on this compound, one of a dozen colonies scattered all over the world—had begun to calm, seating themselves around the huge firepit in two concentric rings. Antioch and Leesa walked in the shadows. She felt his quiet power pulling at her, an effortless attraction that exuded from him, like the well of gravity around a star, pulling her into his orbit.
He took her hand as if it were the thousandth time instead of the first and she felt a pleasant, vaguely terrifying rush. His hand was rough, callused and warm. He let go when they reached the oversize Quonset hut that served as her lab and dorm, but the sensation stayed with her, an inoculation of warmth and energy that spread from her hand to her heart and head.
She had tried to keep the lab neat, but it was a bit too small for the work and had taken on a barely-controlled wildness and clutter. Antioch watched her as she went to the ultracentrifuge and pulled out her samples—ten tiny Eppendorf tubes, each filled with a small amount of fluid over a pellet of white material.
"What’s that?" he asked, staying out of her way.
"Homogenates from the neuroblastoma cultures. I want to make sure the Clock hasn’t affected transcription." She spoke matter-of-factly. Antioch followed her explanations with ease. He read voraciously, and was interested in everything. It was he, in fact, who had dreamed up the entire project.
Leesa set the little tubes in two rows on a rack, popping each one open with her thumb. She used a pipette to add a drop of fluid to each sample. The first three tubes showed no reaction.
"Controls," Leesa said.
The next tube flashed light blue when she added the indicator.
"Bingo," Antioch said.
"Yep. There’s the perindole."
Each of the remaining tubes displayed the blue color to varying intensity.
"It works!" Antioch said in a hushed, excited voice.
"Just hold on," she said, smiling, pleased with her success and his approval. "That just indicates the perindole. I’ll need to run spectrophotometry to see if we’ve got MCD."
"You’ve got it," he said, touching her shoulder with that warm, callused hand. She felt his electricity arc into her, light her up.
"Probably," she said, smiling nervously, and turned back to her work. She didn’t want to be attracted to the man, but his presence was like an intoxicant, and his touch lingered on her like a warm balm.
She opened the first set of vials again, and used a micropipette to load samples into cuvettes for the spectrophotometer. She was acutely aware of him watching her, could feel his eyes wandering over her body. She struggled to focus on the task at hand, not wanting to make any mistakes. The work was going too well.
The vector, of course, had been easy—inactivated retroviruses were being increasingly used in molecular medicine and could be bought commercially with the right licenses. Antioch had taken care of that. The development of an enzyme pathway to convert L-dopa and tyrosine into the Sacrament, and the creation of the enzymes themselves, had been the biggest problem, but with new techniques in reverse biocatalysis engineering that hurdle been cleared. From there it had been easy to construct the DNA sequences for each enzyme, and to build the polycistronic gene that would code for the entire pathway.
But Antioch had insisted that the Sacrament be delivered to the disciple at regular intervals, once each night. That had been a little trickier, but Leesa had been a leading authority in the molecular biology of the cell cycle. The enzyme pathway had presented more of a technical challenge, but her real masterpiece was the "Clock" she had built into the insert, a regulatory element that responded to hormonal fluctuations in the circadian rhythm and turned on transcription of the gene cluster only at night. The effect of the Clock on the faithful expression of the entire polycistronic gene was best examined in vitro, by the experiment she was doing now. It appeared that all had gone well, and she was confident the spec results would bear out Antioch’s optimism.
Then she could take her money, and leave.
It had been less than four months since Antioch had approached her with his proposal. At the time, she’d been nearly desperate, and his offer had been too good to be true: lucrative, technically challenging, and highly illegal. For Leesa, it was an irresistible combination.
Still playing with snakes.
Antioch was looking at her as if he could pluck the thoughts from her head. He took her hand again. What was with him tonight?
"Soon," he said, "you’ll be finished. You’ll want to leave, I suppose."
She willed herself to pull away. Instead, her mutinous hand returned Antioch’s squeeze.
"I suppose," she said. Her voice sounded rough and raw.
"I’ll be unhappy about that. I’ll miss you."
She tried to put on a sour face, but her hand remained in his. She had been so long without real human interaction, without intimacy. At this moment, nothing could be more delicious than Antioch’s touch.
She tried to keep her voice from shaking. "This is news," she said. "Up ‘til now, you’ve been all business."
He smiled. "Only on the outside. You had work to do. Now you’re almost done."
"Almost."
He took her other hand, facing her, and nodded toward the metal door that led to her tiny room in the back of the quonset hut. "Have you been comfortable in there?"
Since her first meeting Antioch the secret part of her had nurtured a set of wicked fantasies about him; now they rose up and tangled together into a primitive, immediate longing. She tried to smirk at him, but felt a shy girlish smile on her face, and damned herself for it. "Aren’t you on guard duty?" she asked, with as much distance as she could muster.
"Yes," he said, and led her toward the metal door. She followed. The spectrophotometer hummed at its work.
#
"You could stay," he said, afterwards.
She laughed and lit a cigarette, almost hoping the smoke would drive him out. "And do what?" she asked. "I’m not one of your followers, Antioch."
He winced, and she wondered if it was from the smoke or her tone. She wondered, too, why she was being like this. He had been sweet, gentle, then deliciously fierce.
"What will you do out there?" he asked. "What do you have to go back to?"
"Once you’ve paid me, I’ll have plenty," she said.
"Ah, yes," he said, propping his head up on one hand. "Your dreams of a biotech firm."
"That’s right," she said, flicking ashes.
"Staying with me wouldn’t prevent that," he said. "And our way of life—"
"I told you, I’m not one of your followers." Even as she said it, she felt the opposite truth growing within her, saw herself falling into his orbit, felt an almost biological urge to let go, to let him become her center. She hated him for it, fought him, struggled to stay on her own trajectory.
"I don’t want you to follow me." There was hurt in his gray eyes, and it picked at her resolve.
"I’m sorry," she said. "But, Gregory, this....all this...I just don’t buy into it. I think you may believe in what you’re doing, but I don’t."
"I can make you a believer," he said.
She smiled and ran her hand across his belly, into his crotch. "You just did," she said.
He pulled back, giving her a look that made her feel vulgar and inferior.
"I’m serious, Leesa. You’re intellectually brilliant, but deeper down you’re a mess. You think you’re special, that the rules don’t apply to you. You’re wrong. You need salvation, like everybody else."
She swung her legs over the bed, turning her back to him, sucking her cigarette. "That’s the last thing I need," she said. "Just drop it, Gregory."
"The last thing you need? I think the last thing you needed was to trash your reputation, to lose your job because you doctored your data, to lose every—"
She stood and turned on him, furious. She had long suspected that he knew, but this was the first confirmation of it.
"You spied on me!"
"Did you really think I’d approach you with a project like this without checking your background?"
"Not that it’s any of your business, but I was trying to protect my funding from the university’s bureaucratic nonsense, to protect research that could have saved thousands of people a year!"
"Well, you failed," Antioch said, piercing her with his eyes. "Perhaps if you’d had some spiritual guidance—"
"Let me tell you how I feel about spiritual guidance." She sneered at him, pulling a sheet around herself, suddenly aware of her nakedness. "You probably know this already, what with all your snooping into my life, but I grew up in one fucked-up house. My parents were into this same kind of shit—bizarro religious mumbo jumbo. They didn’t take drugs. No, they thrashed and swooned in the pews and jabbered nonsense and played with snakes. After I turned 10, they made me do it, too, and I had to play along like it all meant something to me. Bunch of crap! And when I was 16, I watched my little brother die of pneumonia and dehydration because they wouldn’t take him to a doctor. So much for spiritual guidance, Father Antioch."
"We’re—"
"You’re not one whit better, Gregory. You’re just a clever variation on the same ancient scam. You’re no better than the Catholics or the Baptists or the Buddhists or anybody else. Face it—you’re all grifters."
She could see he was struggling to maintain his composure. "But you’ve helped us bring the Sacrament within," he said. "You’ve protected us ‘grifters’ from the those who would destroy us. Your work here will allow us to reach out to more people, whom you would doubtless consider ‘marks’ or ‘victims.’ What does that make you?"
Her guilt assailed her. She crushed out her butt and searched for her clothes. "I was paid to do a job. I did it."
Antioch’s counter-accusation had triggered a familiar revulsion. Leesa could not deny that the insert, if successful, would vastly increase the Church’s prospects for survival. The hallucinogenic Sacrament was rare and expensive, of dubious purity when available, and of course highly illegal. Those disciples who took Sacrament were Antioch’s most devout followers, but he had been forced to keep this inner circle small and confined to this single compound. Even so, he faced enormous risk. Inevitably, the compound would one day get a visit from DEA shock troops. By abrogating their need to purchase or posses 2,4-MCD, giving Antioch and his disciples the power to make it within their own bodies, she had given them the means to survive and grow.
No, not just grow, she told herself. Conquer.
As she pulled her tee-shirt over her head, the spectrophotometer beeped loudly in the other room. She slipped on her sandals and went outside. Antioch, fully dressed and armed, followed her a few moments later.
She looked up from the spec readout, into Antioch’s waiting eyes.
"Success," she said.
#
A few days later, he came to the lab with a small package, and she held up one of a half-dozen 30cc-vials of clear liquid.
"The insert?" he asked.
"The insert. Each vial contains enough inoculum for a thousand doses. The dose is point-five ml, sub-Q."
He nodded. "Excellent."
She held up an optical minidisk. "And here’s all the data, in case you use up all the inoculum and need to make more."
He took the little silver plate, smiling. "We will," he said. "Now we can grow."
She turned away. "Be careful with that," she said, stacking the vials in the minus-eighty freezer. "It’s the only copy on optical disk. The data’s also stored in the hard drive of the lab’s computer, but you may eventually want to get rid of that. In any event, it’s done."
He grinned at her, a little sadly. "And so are you, Doctor Saul."
She nodded, sighing like one who’s just finished mid terms or boot camp. "So am I."
"When are you leaving?"
"Tomorrow. That is, if you can...you know..."
He laughed. "Don’t worry, I’ll have the cash ready for you. We may need your services again, someday. I want you to be satisfied with our relationship."
She let that pass, but felt herself tingle with a sensual memory. "What’s that?" she asked, eyeing the package he’d brought.
"Champagne," he said, pulling a bottle and two glasses from the bag. "I thought we’d celebrate."
"Isn’t it time for you to give the Sacrament?" she asked, trying to suppress a smile. The prospect of "celebrating" with Antioch was not entirely unpleasant, nor entirely comfortable. The ever-present, inviting pull of the man was more dangerous and delicious than ever, now that she was so near to escaping him.
"One of the Deacons will handle it," he said. "I...I wanted..."
He seemed to be at a loss for words, almost shy, and it was so uncharacteristic of him that she found it endearing, irresistible. Suddenly he was an equal, a supplicant. She led him in back.
Later, he broke the seal and popped the plastic cork on the champagne bottle. Laughing, they drank champagne and made a dozen silly toasts.
"To molecular evangelism!" she said, a little too loudly, raising her goblet. Halfway through her second glass, she already felt drunk.
"You should lay down," he said, and it seemed like it took him an hour to say it.
"Yeah." Nausea flushed through her. "I think I will." Her head sank into the pillow.
"Close your eyes, Leesa."
He didn’t have to tell her again. The room pitched about her, and closing her eyes helped quell the vertigo. But instead of darkness under her lids she found a neon geometry lesson. An undulating, fluorescent landscape embraced her, sucked her down into psychedelic vortex. The sudden realization that Antioch had somehow spiked her glass with the Sacrament was simultaneously terrifying and unimportant.
She spiraled up, or down, in or out, she couldn’t be sure. A simultaneous expansion to the edges of the cosmos and contraction to the particle dance of matter...her mind oscillated like the outer shell of a dying star, like the pulsations of a tadpole’s heart, like the fluctuations of an electron cloud.
There, at the edge of creation, she met Antioch’s god.
But, oh, not just Antioch’s. The progenitor of all god-images resided here, both within her and without, a proto-intelligence at the foundation of all matter and energy, both directing and directed by the laws of its cosmos, the same mind that had animated the flesh of the Christ, of Siddhartha, of the Prophet of Allah, awesome, absolute and terrible. Here she finally knew the presence that had filled her mother and father in their wild gestures and incoherent ramblings, the light that had come to comfort them at the death of their son, the light that had eluded her all her life. There was no charlatanism here; this was no mere acid trip, no hustle or dodge. This was the Real Thing, Supreme Being, I Yam what I Yam, Ruler of the Universe, Compassionate Killer of Children, Giver and Taker-Away, Crafter of Quarks and Quasars, Intangible Inhabitant of Unleavened Wafers and Magic Mushrooms, a vast uncaring machine intelligence, winding down into death and darkness, Cosmic Clockwork.
It was more horrible, repugnant and real than anything she could have imagined.
Antioch had made her a believer, after all.
#
When the world re-crystallized, he was there, seated next to the bed.
"You son-of-a-bitch." Her voice was a dry croak.
"Drink some water," he said, and gave her a beaker of clear liquid. She took it, felt coolness going all the way down.
The effect of 2,4-MCD always came on suddenly, usually lasted three to four hours, and tended to resolve quickly. Leesa figured it had to be around midnight. She checked the clock at her bedside: about right. She drank more water and flopped back into her pillow, exhausted.
"What did you see?" Antioch asked.
She closed her eyes, turned her head away. "Nothing."
"You’re lying," he said, with his characteristic self-assurance. "You don’t have to lie anymore, Leesa. We didn’t just start using MCD at random. We chose it as our Sacrament because it’s true. Did you know that the rapture of a holy roller, the quiet ecstasy of a Benedictine monk and the zazen of a Buddhist are very similar neurologic states, that they all demonstrate EEG’s and neurotransmitter profiles almost exactly like those triggered by MCD? Our Sacrament is real, Karen. That’s how I know you’re lying. You saw. You can see everyday for the rest of your life."
"No!" she staggered out of bed and pulled herself into the john. She fell to her knees before the toilet and vomited, violently.
"You’ll get used to it," he said. "It gets easier-"
"Get out!" she moaned, vomit dripping from her lips.
"Leesa—"
"Get out!"
The next morning, one of Antioch’s disciples brought her a briefcase full of cash, and drove her into town.
#
The bartender brought her a third gin and tonic, and she saw that she’d trained him to toss in the extra lime.
"Thanks."
"Nothing to it," the big greasy guy said, ogling her breasts as he’d done since she’d arrived. "Listen, you asked me to remind you. Your flight leaves in forty-five. You can probably board about the time you finish that drink."
She nodded her thanks and lit up. She told herself she wanted to be seriously soused when she got on board, but she’d never been afraid of flying. She certainly never said prayers at takeoff. Aside from Antioch’s spiked champagne, she hadn’t had alcohol in months, and figured she should be pretty toasty by now. But so far the gin had only a mildly pleasant, dulling effect. As nightmare repellent, it wasn’t cutting the mustard.
After Antioch had left, after her sickness had released her, she’d lapsed into a stone sleep. Early in the morning, just before waking, she’d found herself seated before the cold ashes of the compound’s sacramental firepit, shivering. Her little brother, Dean, had stepped out of the shadows to sit beside her. A diamondback rattler hung over his shoulders, tail end wrapped through his shoulder. The fire roared to life, warming them.
"I believed," he’d told her, stroking the viper’s smooth scales. "I didn’t understand, really, but I believed."
"You were too young to know what you believed," she said. "You believed what you were told, accepted the only cosmology you ever knew."
He put his arm around her, transforming from a dying 14-year-old into the young man he never was, handsome, strong and gentle-eyed. "We’re all too young to know what to believe," he said. "There’s not enough time in this world for us to learn. We all accept what we’re told. We have to believe without knowing what to believe."
"You certainly didn’t have enough time," she said, stroking his cheek. She had loved him fiercely, had missed him every day since his death.
"I had all the time I needed. I died a believer. And now, so will you."
The fire roared louder. Dean got older. The snake crawled into her lap. Leesa shuddered, cold again despite the flames.
"Yes," she had said. "I believe. But I don’t want to. There’s nothing sublime or beautiful or loving about it. It’s heartless and horrible. If that’s God, I don’t want to believe."
"That’s what it’s all about," he said, growing gray and distinguished. "It’s about making people believe, whether they want to or not. Evangelists and crusaders, conquistadors and missionaries have known this since the dawn of time. The truest believer is not the one who takes comfort or bliss from his belief. That requires no more faith than a carafe of wine. The truest believer is the one who comes to faith at swordpoint, whose image of God is the most terrible and terrifying."
She’d looked at him, and found Antioch staring back at her.
"You’re a true believer now," he’d said. "My dearest disciple."
She held the snake in her hands now. It struck, fangs sinking into her cheek.
Awakening, she’d gone to the john for round two, dry heaves. The sun had come up. When she could, she’d packed her things and waited for her money.
There would be more money when Antioch’s Sacrament exploded into the world, lots more. That prospect, though, had been drained of its appeal. She gulped her gin, and told herself wryly that on the other end of her flight she’d feel a lot better about being enormously wealthy. She’d get used to it.
And the image forced on her by Antioch and his Sacrament would fade, just another bad dream. She’d be far better off than his disciples, and the millions of others who would come under the spell of her insert, forced to face the Ultimate on a nightly basis, whether they wanted or not. Once he’d repackaged her insert into a fully competent, infectious retrovirus, Antioch would become the ultimate evangelist. Millions of true believers, brought to faith at swordpoint.
But of course, she’d have an answer for them. With Antioch’s seed money, it wouldn’t take long to start up her firm, and with her unique knowledge of the insert, development and marketing of her first product would probably take place very quickly. Those who preferred to live without Antioch’s Sacrament could turn to Leesa Saul, of Saul Biotech, Inc., and she’d save them from the truth. For a price.
The second-oldest profession in the world.
At that thought, gin-flavored gorge, with extra lime, percolated into her throat. She raced to the ladies’ room. When she was done, she went to the payphone in the lounge and placed a call to the DEA while her flight taxied down the runway.
#
When she got to the compound that evening, the guards kept her at the gate while they called Antioch. After an abbreviated conversation and a cursory pat-down, they let her pass, scowling.
She found Antioch seated in the cafeteria, one of the vials next to him on the table, inoculating his followers, raising little wheals in their forearms with tiny disposable syringes. There were only four or five others in the cafeteria, and Leesa guessed that all the others had already received the insert. Even now, she felt the pull of him, drawing her into his sphere. She fought the sick suspicion that this was the real reason she had come back, to stand one last time in the warm corona of his power.
She stood to one side, watching him swab the last forearm with alcohol, give the last injection. The disciple, a young woman, passed Leesa on the way out and gave her a wary smile.
"It’s a wonderful thing you’ve done," she said, and left. It made Leesa queasy.
Antioch looked up at her, smiling. They were alone.
"I’m glad you came back," he said. "I knew, once you’d had the Sacrament, that you would believe."
"Oh, yes, I believe," she said, and sat at another table, several yards away. She was weak, frightened, still a little drunk, and she wanted it to be over.
"Shall I?" he said, and held up a syringe. The pleasing resonance of his voice, the magnetic force of his personality, the kind light in his beautiful eyes, did nothing to make the offer any less obscene.
"Not on your life," she said.
She watched a dark, wary squint take over his features. "Then what are you doing here? Don’t you have a fortune to spend? A fortune to make?"
"I’m here to make right," she said. "If I can."
Antioch put the syringe down, glared at her.
"I knew what you were up to almost from the beginning," she said. "You asked just the right questions to tip me off. Once the insert was developed and working, and I was gone, you’d just have it packaged in a fully competent vector, one that could reproduce and spread, and release it into the world. You’d infect millions with your sick little faith, whether they wanted it or not. The ultimate evangelist. I knew all along, Gregory. I’m not sure whether that makes me worse than you or not. I don’t care. But I knew."
"Of course." He stood, smiling. "And I knew what you were up to. Biotech firms are a dime-a-dozen, Leesa. You don’t stand one chance in ten of making a go of it, no matter how brilliant you are. Unless, of course, you have a patent on the technology to remove my insert."
She felt the blood drain from her face.
"Oh, yes," he said. "It took me a while, but I figured it out."
She shook her head, overwhelmed. "But...you let me go."
"You wanted to leave. Besides, I had hoped that the Sacrament would bring you back. But even if it didn’t, I wouldn’t have tried to stop you. I had what I wanted. Your lucrative little anti-insert, once it appeared, wouldn’t have been a threat. Quite the opposite. Tension, competition, a feeling of belonging—they’re vital to a religion. The faithful don’t feel special if there aren’t outsiders. Look—I’m just a man who understands what people need. I’m not a monster, Leesa."
"We’re both monsters," she said, and put her head on the table. It was done. DEA had it all on tape.
The door to the cafeteria burst open. The sergeant of the guard, a heavily-muscled, big-boned black woman, strode into the room.
"We’ve got company," she said. "Six armored vans, coming up the access road. Local cops bringing up the rear. Choppers, too, I think. Be here any minute!"
Antioch’s eyes went wide. "What—?"
"DEA," Leesa murmured, lifting her head. "I called them this morning."
Rage overtook Antioch’s features. "You bitch!".
"That doesn’t begin to do me justice," she said, laughing bitterly. "Surely, the great Gregory Antioch can do better than that."
He stared at her, wide-eyed and pale. Outside, shouting. Then gunshots and screams.
"Bring her here," he said.
Suddenly the guard was dragging Leesa toward Antioch. She offered no resistance, caring little. In moments, they would both be in custody, or dead. As the guard dropped her into a chair, Leesa saw what Antioch was doing: filling a syringe from the vial.
Adrenaline perfused her like lightning. "No!" she cried, struggling at last. But the guard was huge and powerful, and Leesa was weak from alcohol and fatigue and despair. Antioch managed to swab her arm, which struck Leesa, through her mounting terror, as an immensely ridiculous precaution.
Antioch picked up the syringe, struggling to hold her wrist with his other hand. "A gift," he said, grimacing. "I want one true believer, after I’m gone."
Outside, the clamor drew nearer. Leesa shrieked, and fought so hard she felt muscles rip in her arms, but Antioch and his huge soldier held her like a child. Pinprick, then an itchy white wheal in the flesh of her forearm.
Troops burst into the room just as he withdrew the needle. The guard, who had an ominous-looking weapon slung across her shoulder, was cut down immediately, shot in the back.
Leesa screamed. Antioch pushed on her chest, tumbling the chair, spilling her onto the safety of the floor. Then he stood and turned to the men who had invaded his sanctuary.
"Hands in the air, asshole!"
Sprawled on the floor, entangled in toppled chairs, table legs and blood, Leesa saw Antioch smile and reach into his coat for a weapon that wasn’t there. In the same instant, his torso exploded with a dozen bloody holes, obscene stigmata.
#
The evening klaxon gave its command just as Leesa pulled the harvester into its dock. Two years at this job had etched the rhythms of the work into her muscles, her nerves, her sense of time. Life on a federal work farm was nothing if not regular and predictable. Clockwork.
She parked the harvester over the floor bay, killed the engine and crawled down from the cab. She cranked open the floor bay doors, then opened the hopper and let the harvest spill into the bay. Watermelons. Genetically engineered.
She secured the rig, then joined her fellow Delinquents in formation. The guards shackled them together, and led them to the evening meal. As usual, she ate in silence, surrounded by hubbub. Her fellow delinquents, most of them here to work off a lifetime’s worth of drug taxes, were a boisterous bunch. For them, the end of the day was a meager treat, the opportunity to sit and eat and talk, to lay in their cells and read or watch TV.
Leesa preferred the work, which occupied her attention, gave her little time to think, and left her exhausted at the end of the day. Back in her cell, she undressed and voided and showered. In the other cells on her block, she heard the subtle sounds of respite and relief, sighs of relaxation.
Her relief would come in the morning. For her, the worst part of day was drawing near. After six months of cuts and bruises, she had learned to take it without flailing, avoiding minor injuries. But cuts and bruises were only the smallest part of the pain.
Of course, there would be no extraction of the insert. After the massacre on Antioch’s compound, Leesa had found herself one of only four survivors infected by Antioch’s polycistronic god. Infected, but not infectious. Development of the extraction, even with the data she had surrendered to the government, would have cost a lot of money, and spending money on drug delinquents was not a government priority.
Still, there was a strange comfort in the agony and terror, the torment that descended on her every night with a celestial precision. It had a pleasing symmetry to it, the kind of justice one appreciates only when she has learned that order and intelligence prevail in the universe.
Clockwork.
Like a monk in a cloister, she stretched out on her tiny cot and closed her eyes, waiting for her punishment and salvation, her torment, her reward, her redemption, her Sacrament. She waited, knowing it would come, a true believer.
Jonathon Sullivan MD is Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Wayne State University/Detroit Receiving Hospital. He is the recipient of an NIH research grant, to investigate molecular mechanisms of brain death after cardiac arrest. Dr. Sullivan lives in Farmington Hills, MI.
