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Chapter 19

 
"Evil admits of no alternatives."
—Conrad Bland

 

The south end of Hod wasn't Just a meat shop; it was a barbecue shop.

Jericho had no trouble sneaking off the plane and leaving the airport. His problem was making sense out of what remained of Hod.

Once a teeming city of 200,000, filled with tall angular buildings and bustling thoroughfares, its population had been cut in half, its structures burned and bombed, its streets destroyed. He was certain that Bland couldn't have been expecting him here this soon; it had to be the result of some morbid, bloody whim on Bland's part, nothing more.

The streets—such portions of them as remained intact—were littered with garbage and glass and burned-out wrecks of vehicles of all shapes and sizes. And in among all the other useless rubble on the streets were the bodies: some shot, some slashed, some charred beyond recognition, all of them dead.

Jericho had gone less than half a mile from the airport when he realized that a whole and healthy man would attract more attention than just about anything else in Hod. He walked into the blackened skeleton of a small home and went to work, emerging a few minutes later with burn marks all over his body, his left arm in a bloody sling, his clothes tattered and bloodstained, and a severe limp. Then, with a properly glassy-eyed expression on his face, he began trudging through the ruins.

To his surprise, he passed some other people who were in even, worse condition that he himself appeared to be. The sick, the wounded, and the maimed paid him no notice, and there was no one else around to question his identity. From time to time he could hear the explosive sounds of projectile weapons in the distance, but since the city had been slaughtered rather than occupied he couldn't imagine who the shots were being directed at.

He limped on, unhindered, for the better part of four miles, taking in the carnage. There had been massive firebombing, but the pilots who had dropped the bombs had hardly shown pinpoint accuracy. Certain sections of the city had been hit three and four times, others—though not many of them—had been totally missed. But even in those relatively destruction-free areas his battered appearance seemed to be the rule rather than the exception and he drew no unwarranted attention.

He didn't know where to begin looking for his contact, but it stood to reason that if she was still alive she would have to be in a section of the city that the firebombs had missed. He toured the largest such area with no success, spent the night with a number of lost butchered souls in the lobby of a burned-out hotel, and proceeded to a different unscathed area the next morning.

The sound of gunfire became more frequent, and twice it was so near that he instinctively hurled himself to the ground. No one was around to see the agility he had displayed on either occasion.

And, at noontime, he found it: a locked palmistry shop with a photograph of a white-clad woman in the window and an "Out of Business" sign pasted on the door. He waited until a few walking wounded had moved out of sight, then quickly jimmied the door and entered a small anteroom. Tense and alert, he walked to the back of the room, pushed aside some beaded curtains, and stepped into the main room.

A middle-aged woman sat by a window, staring dully into the alley.

"We're closed," she said tonelessly, without looking at him.

"Not anymore," he replied, taking a seat.

She turned and scrutinized him. "You want a hospital, if there are any left; not a seer."

"Suppose you let me be the judge of that," replied Jericho, idly fingering a pack of tarot cards that lay on a pentagonal end table next to him. "The White Lucy thinks I need a seer."

"Jericho?" she said hesitantly, staring at him in morbid fascination.

He nodded.

"What happened to you?" she said at last.

"Nothing."

"But you're all—" She stopped herself short. "But of course: what could be less conspicuous in a slaughterhouse than one of the cattle?"

"Why didn't the White Lucy tell you what disguise I'd be wearing?" he asked, only now taking his arm out of the sling and stretching it. "I would have thought she'd be following my progress every step of the way."

"She's very ill," said the woman.

"What happened to her?"

"Stroke, old age, who can say? She's kept in sporadic contact, but most of her thoughts have been irrational and rambling. I suspect she's dying."

"Has she managed to tell you anything useful in her moments of lucidity?"

"Yes. The only city between here and Tifereth where you'll have even a minimal chance of survival is Binah."

"Binah," he repeated. "That's only about eighty miles from Tifereth, isn't it?"

She nodded.

"By the way, what's the reason for all the gunfire I've been hearing?"

"You are," said the woman.

"Me?"

"Bland figured out sometime yesterday afternoon that you had bypassed Netsah and were on your way to Hod. He had his men announce that if you weren't killed in Hod, he'd be back to destroy what's left of it. So far they've killed about fifty people in the hope that one of them was you."

"He'll be back anyway," said Jericho.

"Of course he will. Hod was bombed almost two weeks ago, before he even knew of your existence. He bombed Hod because it pleased him, and he'll be back for the same reason."

"How many men has he got stationed here?"

"No more than two thousand."

"And how do they travel between here and Binah?"

"Let me ask the White Lucy," she said, closing her eyes and frowning. She looked up at him a moment later. "It's no use. She's practically deranged. Nothing she's sending makes any sense."

"All right," said Jericho. "Perhaps you can tell me a couple of things without having to call upon the White Lucy."

"I can try."

"First of all, why do these people put up with this? Why don't they either mount an attack on Tifereth or get the hell out of here?"

"You must understand: They worship Conrad Bland. He is their Dark Messiah, and in their eyes he can do no wrong. If he thinks that Hod must be obliterated and its population wiped out, then he must be correct. These are not the half-hearted devil worshipers you encountered in Amaymon or even Kether. They are true Satanists, with all that implies. They believe in the power and the might of evil, they revere deception and humiliation and degradation, they dwell in sin and corruption and wouldn't have it any other way. They freely administer death to each other, they have no fear of dying, and they are fully prepared to start serving Lucifer in the pits of Hell."

"That's ridiculous. Nobody wants to die. Even the martyrs of old Earth, given the choice, would have preferred to change their societies without dying."

"True," she answered. "But their religious beliefs didn't glorify death and suffering."

"They glorified Jesus, who was tortured on a cross," Jericho pointed out.

"That's because he suffered for them. No one suffers for Satanists."

"It's crazy."

"Could Conrad Bland have accomplished so much on a sane world?" was her answer.

He shrugged. "That takes care of my next question. I assume that even here, even after what's taken place, there is no underground that I can work through."

"None."

"And if this is what Hod is like now," he said, glancing out the window at the broken buildings in the distance, "I don't imagine I'll have a contact in Binah."

"Yes you will, if she's still alive," said the woman. "Her name is Celia."

He considered it for a moment, then shook his head. "It's not worth the risk, not if the White Lucy is demented."

"As I said, she does have moments of rationality. It may not be worth the risk not to make contact with Celia."

"I'll take it under advisement," said Jericho noncommittally. "One last question: Is any kind of nonmilitary traffic at all moving between Hod and Binah?"

"Not to my knowledge. It's possible, of course, but I doubt it"

"Well, I guess that's everything," he said, rising and inserting his arm back into the sling. "Will you be safe here?"

"I'll be much safer here than you will be where you're going," responded the woman.

He forced a friendly smile to his lips, then limped out through the anteroom and into the street.

He continued walking through the city, eyes and ears and nose alert, his brain editing out the misery and the suffering, hunting for a means of egress from Hod. Finally, in midafternoon, he passed by a pair of troop transport trucks, both under heavy guard. He hobbled along the street, seeming to pay no attention to them, and kept walking until he was out of sight. Then he doubled back.

He entered the charred remains of a nearby office building, waited inside it until nightfall, and then went back out. The gunfire had increased somewhat in frequency, for it was much easier to mistake a friend or neighbor for a Republic agent in the darkness than in daylight, but none of it was coming from his immediate vicinity.

Finally he approached the trucks again, hiding as close as he dared in the shadows of some still-intact buildings, and waiting. Eventually one of the guards—there were six that he could see, and probably a couple of others hidden from view by the trucks—walked off in his direction, obviously on his way to a bathroom or a restaurant. Jericho backed away, waited for the man to pass him, then struck him a powerful blow on the back of the neck and another to the Adam's apple. He carried the lifeless body into the nearest building, immediately appropriated the man's clothes, and a few minutes later had assumed his face and identity as well.

A quick search of the man's few papers told him that he was Jacinto Vargas and that he made his home in Netsah, but Jericho could find nothing to tell him where the transports were going.

He considered returning to the trucks, for Vargas's continued absence would soon draw attention, but he decided against it: the last thing he needed was to find himself driving south. So he waited, out of sight, until members of Bland's forces began wending their way to the trucks in groups of two and three and four.

Finally a lone uniformed man approached, and Jericho dragged him into the shadows, throwing him onto his back and pressing a knife against the side of his neck.

"Where are those trucks going?" he whispered.

"Binah!" stammered the man, his entire body trembling.

"Where else?"

"Just Binah! I swear it!"

Jericho killed him without using the knife. The Vargas identity, though he'd had it for only an hour, was too dangerous to use now, and he didn't want any signs of blood on his next uniform. He quickly traded clothes with his victim, approximated his facial features as best he could under the circumstances, found that his name was Daniel Manning, and transferred Manning's identity papers to his own person. He toyed with leaving Vargas's papers on Manning's corpse in an effort to confuse whoever finally found the body but decided that they might come in handy in Binah, and stuffed them into a back pocket.

Throughout his journey he had always been able to keep his makeup kit with him, either in a small bag, a wrapped package, or else stuffed inside his shirt, but he knew that any packages or bulges would draw too much attention on the troop truck. Therefore, he withdrew a single tube of facial putty, another of black hair dye, and a small packet of facial rouge that could suggest a different complexion, and regretfully left the rest of the contents behind.

A moment later he approached the trucks, and shortly thereafter he was huddled in the back of one of them, next to the tailgate, his head slumped on his chest, feigning sleep and rubbing shoulders with Bland's troops while the trucks raced through the humid night air to distant Binah.

 

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