All Bad Things Read online

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “Sure, sure. But it’s still pretty funny. Got you a tiny little pecker here, too. Wish you hadn’t burned ‘em all.”

  “I don’t like them. And I don’t know why you’d want to keep them around.”

  “Oh, quit being such a hardass. This is me, Samson. And these? These are nothin’. Hell, this, the little raids into our territory, all their radio jamming bullshit, it all just means we got ‘em on the run.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Besides this crap, Hollywood’s been pretty quiet. We got converts coming in from all over. Things are going pretty good, right?”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “And that’s the problem.”

  Samson frowns, remembers that his frowns make people uncomfortable. His murder face, Cyrus calls it. He pushes his expression back to neutral. Ever since he stopped seeing King, he’s been trying more and more to live the way he thinks the man would want him to live. So he’s been studying the tapes more and more. And not just the ones that made it onto the air. The raw footage, too. And something he’s noticed is that King didn’t do or say anything until he was damn good and ready to do it. And that extended to his face. When he was angry he used the anger. He didn’t just let it wash over him. He was always in control. And that’s one thing that Samson has always had a problem with.

  “Go on,” he says.

  “Enemies are more than just people tryin’ to kill you, Samson. They’re also there to be used. Why would someone want to eradicate the Church—sorry, the teachings of James King, the path of true righteousness—if it didn’t threaten their heathen ways? The fact that they’re trying to stop us only proves that we’re doing the right thing.”

  “Having enemies who tell us we’re wrong only proves that we’re right?”

  “Exactly.”

  Samson tries to twist his brain to follow what Cyrus has just laid out, and he can’t do it. Much as he’s had disagreements with Cyrus, much as he doesn’t always trust the man’s commitment to the cause, Cyrus is still the smartest man Samson knows. Certainly smarter than Samson is. Always has been.

  “I prefer faith that we’re right because our cause is just,” Samson says, remembering something he’s heard King say in his shows.

  “Yeah, I know. Logic ain’t your thing. Doesn’t make me any less right. Point is that this gives us something to get the people riled up about. Folks have been getting complacent. They need to be reminded that there’s a den of perverted heathens just down the street.”

  Now that’s something Samson can agree with. The Church’s little potshots at Hollywood, their patrols destroying contraband, none of this is furthering God’s plan. He may not be talking to James King anymore, but he knows the sermons. He knows King’s teachings. He knows what God wants.

  God wants the heathens to burn.

  “You have an idea?”

  “Yep. You may run the militia, Samson, but I got spies. And stop lookin’ so shocked. We need intel and this is how we get it. They tell me there’s another group of these cocksuckers coming in, only this time they’re not ringing the doorbell and dropping off literature.”

  “An attack? They don’t have the numbers.”

  “They don’t need numbers. They’ve got a bomb. A big one. Military ordnance they got from who the hell knows where. They’re planning on carting it into our territory on a truck and setting it off.”

  “A truck? Where did they even get the fuel?”

  “Who cares? Point is they’ve got it and they’re coming to us with it.”

  “That’s stupid. We’ll kill them before they get close enough to hit the Temple.”

  “They don’t need to hit the Temple. They just need to set it off in our territory. They’re not trying to kill us with the bomb, they’re trying to prove that we can’t protect our territory. They’re sending a message to everyone that we’re under siege. It gives them the upper hand, and it makes this shit”—he tosses the dog–eared tract into Samson’s lap—”look like the pointless crap that it is. They set that bomb off and they’ve won the propaganda war.”

  Samson doesn’t know what propaganda is and he doesn’t see how blowing up a bomb that doesn’t kill anybody important matters, but he gets that it’s a threat and it has to be stopped.

  “What road are they taking? Not many between us are clear enough to drive a truck through.”

  “Wilshire.”

  “Okay. We’ll send the army and crush them,” Samson says. “We turn that thing around, drive it to the center of Hollywood and set it off there. Then I bring the army in while everything’s still burning, and I finish it.”

  Samson is getting excited. This is perfect. He can crush Hollywood once and for all, take back the dignity they stole from him at the battle at Western. He can get James King back.

  “No.” Cyrus says it with such force that it stops Samson cold. “We are not blowing it up, and we’re not bringing the army in. We are going to capture it. Once we have it, we’ll figure out how best to use it.”

  “More waiting? They humiliated us!” Samson gets out of his chair and looms over Cyrus, slamming his meaty hands on the desk. “We’ve sat around too long as it is. We need to make them pay.”

  “And we will,” Cyrus says, waving Samson down. “We will. But we do it smart. We get that bomb and not only do we have a weapon that we can use against them, but more important, they lose it, and everybody knows it.”

  “Is this a propaganda thing?”

  “Exactly. Now you get it.”

  “No,” Samson says. “I don’t.”

  “Do you trust me?” Cyrus says.

  “Of course,” Samson says, though he knows he paused a little too long before he answered.

  “Good. So we’re agreed. Send a small force out there, grab that bomb, and bring it back here. We’ll figure out what to do with it later.”

  “I—” Samson stammers, not sure how he lost the argument. “Sure,” he says, but his heart’s not in it. “When’s this happening?”

  “Sometime in the next week. My sources are getting me more information tonight, but it’s definitely going down soon.”

  “I’ll pull a team together.”

  “A small team.”

  “Right,” Samson says. “A small team.”

  ***

  “Sir, you wanted to see me?” Knight Captain Volkov stands at the doorway to Samson’s office in the Temple. Unlike Cyrus’s, his is simple, sparse. He has a single table, two chairs, and maps of Los Angeles pinned to the walls. In one corner he has a TV and VCR playing on a continuous loop of James King giving a sermon, the volume turned off. Samson has seen these so many times that he doesn’t need to hear it to know what’s being said.

  “Come in, Knight Captain. I wanted your opinion on something.”

  “The bomb?”

  “Cyrus told you?”

  “He did. He wants to capture it. Send a small team to bring it back here and send a message to Hollywood.”

  The moment Samson stepped out of Cyrus’s office, he began to have doubts. The rout at Western came flooding back to him, filled him with uncertainty. He prayed for guidance, prayed for James King to come tell him what to do, but no one appeared. He needed someone else to talk to. Someone besides Cyrus.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Samson says.

  “It’s not,” Volkov says.

  Samson is surprised. “You don’t agree with him?”

  “Sir, Hollywood humiliated us. They—” She stops, looks at her feet.

  “What?” Samson says.

  “They humiliated you.”

  “They did,” he admits.

  “There’s one way to fix this,” Volkov says. “One way to fix you. We go get that bomb, we drive it right into the middle of Hollywood and we set that fucker off. Then we go in hard and fast and we fight and we don’t stop until there’s nothing left but ashes.”

  In his heart he knows she’s right.
Knows that this is what James King would have wanted. “We’ll need the whole army,” he says.

  “Just give the word, sir,” Volkov says.

  “Get everyone together. Quietly. If Cyrus finds out he’s gonna shit a brick. Take a couple of days. Leave the people at the Bastion of Faith.”

  “Are you sure? If we do this, we’re going to want everyone,” Volkov says.

  “No. It’ll take too long to get all of them here without Cyrus noticing. We don’t know how quickly Hollywood will start moving this bomb of theirs, and I want to move as quickly as we can.”

  “All right,” Volkov says. “You won’t regret this, sir.”

  He knows he won’t. Not if it brings James King back to him.

  –11–

  “God does not teach caution. Caution is for the weak, for the fools. Caution will be your undoing.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, Season 8, Episode 9

  It takes two days to get the army assembled without Cyrus knowing. Five hundred men and women armed with guns, clubs, hammers, machetes. They march down Alvarado, then turn west down Wilshire through the overgrown jungle of MacArthur Park.

  The plan is to intercept the truck before it reaches Vermont, kill its crew with snipers, and take the truck and the bomb. Cyrus thinks they’re bringing it back with them. But Samson is going to turn it around and drive it up into the heart of Hollywood.

  “Check those buildings,” Samson tells Volkov as they stop at the edge of the park. “Kill anyone you find. I’m not walking into another trap. And I want one squad sent up ahead to see if they can spot the truck.”

  “Do you want them to engage, sir?”

  Samson doesn’t answer her for a long moment. There’s something he’s missing.

  “Sir?”

  “No,” he says, finally, unable to shake the sense that there’s something important that he’s not quite getting. “If they see it, I want them back here on the double. Give them a radio so they can let us know.”

  “Yes, sir.” She barks orders to her men, and multiple squads fan out to check the burnt–out husks along Wilshire Boulevard as another group heads down the street as quickly and quietly as they can.

  Samson shakes his head. The road in front of him is a cratered mess littered with rusting sedans, mud–drowned rubbish, and downed wires that haven’t seen power in fifty years—the detritus of a civilization long dead. How these people expect to get a truck full of explosives through it all, he has no idea. If this is what Hollywood sees as a good plan, they should thank him for working to wipe them out. They’re too stupid to live.

  “You think they’ll actually find anything?” Samson says after the buildings have been cleared out and the army is back on the move.

  Volkov scans the road ahead with her binoculars. “I’m sure there will be some—” A burst of static from the radio at her hip cuts her off.

  “We’ve found it,” a staticky voice says over the radio. “Wilshire and, uh, Normandy. About four blocks ahead of us. Orders?”

  Samson takes the radio from Volkov. “Stay there, stay in cover. We’re on our way.” He raises his voice. “Move out!”

  The army wends its way up the street slowly, Samson insisting on caution, on making damn sure that every single door, window, or overturned car that might be a trap isn’t.

  Two hours later, he sees what they came for. An old Peterbilt, a dingy tarp covering something big and bulky on its flatbed trailer, sits parked in the middle of Wilshire. Must have taken them hours to clear the road enough to get it this far. Samson scans the rooftops, looks over the truck through his binoculars.

  “There’s no one there.”

  “Maybe they abandoned it?” Volkov says. “We should get closer.”

  Samson says nothing. Stares hard at the truck, weighing his options. Possibilities bounce around in his brain until his head starts to ache.

  “Am I being too cautious, Volkov?” Maybe that’s why King hasn’t spoken with him in so long. Maybe it’s not that Samson lacks faith, but that he’s simply lost his edge. Before Western, he would have run right into this situation, trap or not. He was untouchable then. But now…

  “Perhaps a little, sir.”

  “All right. Send a squad to check it out. I don’t want to move any closer until we know what we’re dealing with.” The army is spread out behind him, snaking along Wilshire halfway back to Vermont. He doesn’t want them bunched up, doesn’t want a few stray mortar rounds to devastate them all over again.

  He watches as the squad runs up, gets to the truck, pulls the tarp off. His view is obstructed, but he doesn’t hear gunfire. A few minutes later the radio crackles to life.

  “There’s nothing here.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a bunch of junk on the trailer. There’s no bomb, and there’s nobody around at all.”

  A yawning pit opens in Samson’s stomach. It’s a trap. He knows it. But from where?

  And then it hits him. There’s nothing in the buildings, there’s no one in the area. But there is one place it never occurred to him to look.

  “Fall back. Get everyone out of here. There’s—” Samson stops as he feels a rumble deep under the street, a series of small pops like ammunition cooking off. The shaking travels up his legs. An earthquake? No. Something else.

  And then the street explodes beneath his feet.

  ***

  Discarded napkins, torn notepads, sun–bleached posters, chunks of drywall. They pile up along the walls of Cyrus’s office, stacks upon stacks of landfill with nothing in common except that they’ll take a mark.

  In the early days, paper was hard to come by. So Cyrus wrote the sermons on whatever he could get his hands on. He wrote with discarded pencils, scratched marks into soft clay with sticks, scrawled the passages of God with his own blood and feces. He took down every word, every verse, every hem and haw from King’s recordings, memorized them, showed them to the believers.

  Now with the radio, the Word spreads across the airwaves, but he keeps these records with him anyway. The physical is important. It acts as a reminder of what it was like in those early days. And what needs to be done to never go back.

  James King’s words might have been fine for a doomsayer from the 1990s, but he was dead, and in a world gone to shit they needed upkeep. So what if Cyrus changed “God” to “the Church” in the scriptures? What was the Church if not God’s will made real? What was it if not God’s blessed voice, His fiery retribution? His guarantee that His plan for the world would live on, even if His greatest preacher happened to die an untimely death?

  Cyrus knew Samson would have a problem with the changes—knew he’d want him to change them back. But Samson had always been so easy to manipulate. A few big words, a little twisted logic, and Cyrus had him wrapped around his finger. It was always so easy.

  Just like convincing him to take a small team to get the bomb.

  When Cyrus had heard about Hollywood’s plan to set off a bomb in Church territory, he knew it was the perfect opportunity. He hadn’t thought Samson would go for it so easily. Figured he’d put up more of a fight.

  The whole thing was tailor made and fit into Cyrus’s plans perfectly. Get Samson out there with a few of his most trusted lieutenants for witnesses—and then have Volkov kill him.

  Oh, she’d make it look like a Hollywood sniper, of course. That was the whole point. Kill Samson in front of the troops and then have her and the others come back with the tragic tale of his death to light a blazing fire in the hearts of the Faithful. Make them pledge their lives to the church forever. Nothing like a martyr to bring the people together.

  When Volkov had first come into his bed six months ago, he hadn’t trusted her. He thought she was just another whore trying to fuck her way through the ranks. But she was smart. Told him how she thought Samson was destroying the Church, how he’d gotten soft ever since the disaster on Western.

  It helped that she was really good in the sack
.

  And once they had each other’s trust, he asked her to kill Samson. At first she was hesitant, but then he promised to put her in charge of the Church’s armies, take the place of the martyred Samson and lead them in victory against the forces of Hollywood.

  He’d never seen anyone jump at an opportunity so fast.

  Running footsteps in the hall pull him out of his thoughts. This is it, he thinks. He hopes he can look sufficiently aggrieved, appropriately stricken at his friend’s death. He practiced all night in the mirror, rehearsed what he would say. He goes over it one more time, mouthing the words silently to make sure he remembers them right. He tried crying on cue, but it just made him look congested.

  “This tragedy will not stand before God. Our leader will be avenged, his death a symbol that we cannot be broken.”

  Yes, that will do it. He stands as the footsteps get closer, straightens his robes and picks at a loose thread. This is an important moment. He wants it to be perfect.

  A crying acolyte bursts into his room, tears streaming down his cheeks. “They’re all dead,” he says.

  “This tragedy will not—” Cyrus says and stops as he registers what he’s just been told. “What?” All dead? That wasn’t right. Samson should be the only one dead. Dumb bastard must have put up a fight.

  “The army. The earth exploded beneath them and swallowed them whole. And then there was shelling and then troops came running down the street and shot into the pits and—”

  “Hang on. What do you mean, ‘the army’?” Cyrus says. That sonofabitch. Cyrus offers up a quick prayer, hoping against hope that Samson hasn’t done what he thinks he’s done.

  “All but a few soldiers went down to Wilshire, sir. But it was a trap.”

  Cyrus grabs the acolyte by the collar, shakes him like a dog with a rat. “Don’t tell me that, boy,” he says. “That’s not true. It was a small team. Ten people tops.”