Messiahs by Matt Rogers (bookstand for reading txt) 📕

cut off your cash flow while you had a knife in his gut. He was funding you, right?’

‘It’s not a cult,’ the boy said.

‘Sure sounds like one.’

The boy got starry-eyed. ‘It’s much more than that.’

‘Where are you from?’ Slater said. ‘Can’t place your accent.’

‘Wyoming.’

‘Doesn’t sound like it.’

The guy’s accent was halfway between Australian and American. It combined the guttural twangs of each, strangely pleasant to listen to.

The boy said, ‘I was born in Wyoming.’

‘Okay.’

‘In my past life I lived in Sydney.’

King glanced at Slater.

Slater sighed. ‘You mean you were born again in Wyoming, right?’

‘Right. Reborn.’

‘Where specifically?’

‘Why?’

‘Tell us, kid. You’re not ready to die.’

‘I am.’

Silence.

For an indescribable reason Slater believed it. Something about the tone…

King said, ‘We’re just curious. You tell us and we’ll leave it alone. You keep stringing us out like this and we’ll start digging. Protect your brothers and sisters.’

Reverse psychology, but the kid couldn’t have been much older than eighteen, and he was susceptible.

He rolled his eyes like he was superior, like he wanted all this questioning to hurry up and end. ‘Fine. Thunder Basin. Good luck finding it. And if you do go looking … well, you’ll see.’

King recognised the name. ‘“Thunder Basin.” The Grassland? That’s where this cult is?’

‘Stop calling it that.’

‘Or what?’

‘Look,’ the boy said. ‘I’m eighteen, right? And it’s plain as day you ain’t gonna kill me. You’re both like twenty years older than me.’

‘You just killed Mickey,’ Slater said. ‘An eye for an eye. You heard that expression?’

‘Course I’ve heard it. Doesn’t make you any likelier to act on it. You work for Mickey, right, and you saw me do that, so if you were going to kill me you would have done it as soon as he went over that railing.’

‘We don’t work for Mickey,’ King said.

The boy hesitated.

Saw his situation in a new light.

He said, ‘Shit. What is this?’

Slater placed the Ruger Speed-Six on the centre console, in full view of the kid. No matter how fast he moved, he had no hope of picking it up and getting a shot off with his hands cable tied so tight they were turning white.

Slater said, ‘You’re in deep trouble. Start by telling us where you got this, and maybe we can work something out.’

‘You from a rival gang?’ the kid said, but he was fishing.

The boy had a narrow scope of experience in the world and, though he could kill, he couldn’t hold his own in an interrogation. Slater watched him squirm in his seat, on the edge of breaking down. Negotiating for his life was something he had little skill at.

Slater asked another question instead of answering the boy’s. ‘What’s your name, kid?’

‘Jace.’

‘Jace, how’d you get this gun into Nassau?’

‘I didn’t, obviously. I picked it up over here.’

‘From who?’

‘Some guy. I didn’t plan any of this. Mother Libertas handled it. Maeve just told me where to go and what to do.’ He stopped talking abruptly, trying to suppress all the emotions brought about by cortisol, and he looked out the windshield with damp eyes.

King said, ‘“Mother Libertas.” That’s what you said to Mickey. That’s your cult?’

‘Don’t fucking call it that.’

King raised an eyebrow. ‘Mother Libertas? I thought that was the name.’

‘He means “cult,”’ Slater said.

King twisted round further so he could look Jace right in the eyes. ‘Listen. You don’t get to tell us what we can and can’t say. You’re in more trouble than you think. Adrenaline’s making you feel superhuman right now because you just killed someone, but it’s going to wear off soon.’

Jace laughed.

There was something intensely strange about it, given his youth and his current predicament.

Each stab of laughter seemed to build on the last.

King said, ‘Shut up.’

Jace calmed down, a smile on his face like all was right in the world. ‘Here we go.’

Slater didn’t speak. He was watching Jace’s face closely.

The boy’s pupils had swelled to twice their usual size.

Slater said, ‘Did you take something?’

Jace cocked his head to one side, cracking his neck. ‘Yeah, man. I took something. I’m telling you, let me out of this car.’

King said, ‘You going to turn into the Hulk or something?’

‘Not quite,’ Jace said. ‘I just won’t give a shit about anything anymore.’

Slater said, ‘I’ve met my fair share of people like that.’

‘Not like this,’ Jace said.

He threw his head back and smiled to the roof and let out a moan that was near-orgasmic.

Slater froze.

9

King said, ‘You want to restrain him better?’

Slater said, ‘Probably smart.’

Jace didn’t hear a word they said. He was lost in ecstasy, hit by something he’d ingested prior to killing Mickey. Whatever it was, it came on fast.

Slater made to get out of the car.

The moment he moved, Jace took a deep breath, sucking in oxygen to the pit of his stomach, and strained like a madman. King saw every vein in the kid’s skinny frame throbbing from the exertion, his muscles utilising every ounce of lactic acid.

And then some.

Because instead of breaking out of the cable tie he simply pushed and pushed and pushed until the skin on his wrists tore off, and he jerked his palms apart in opposite directions. His wrists slid out of the blood-soaked plastic, taking all of the skin off the tops of his hands with it. Jace didn’t even recoil in pain.

King said, ‘What the fu—’

Slater twisted and made to grip Jace by the throat and pin him to the seat but he was lightning fast, aided by youthful athleticism and some devastating combination of substances racing through his brain, and he ducked under the arm and snatched the Ruger off the centre console.

King knew he should have moved faster, but your mind takes a second to compute the sight of a kid ripping his hands apart to get out of cable ties.

King roared, ‘Put that down!’ as Jace’s hand — now a mess of exposed muscle — snatched the gun.

His voice shook the car.

Slater dived over the centre console to crush the kid in a flying shoulder-charge.

He landed with all his two hundred pounds