Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton (my reading book .txt) 📕

would stop there.

Several of the bikers were turning to give him glares of warning, so he dropped back to quell their suspicions for the time being. There would be plenty of opportunity to eliminate any of them who interfered with him later.

He counted twelve bikers and three pickup drivers. Even if he used two rounds apiece, he would have more than enough ammunition. When the time came, though, he would try to be more conservative than that.

He was, after all, a conservative man.

CATHY AND JEREMY

The government agent was dismounting the motorcycle as Cathy and Jeremy approached. He raised his arms to their Datsun as if in supplication.

“Oh, sure,” Cathy said. “We stop, you shoot us. I don’t think so.” She drove past.

“What a break!” Jeremy exclaimed. “Lucky for Oliver Vale that he doesn’t maintain his motorcycle well. If he did, Baldy would still be after him.”

“Baldy’s only been slowed up a little.”

“Maybe, but Vale and his friends aren’t even in sight.” Jeremy frowned. “Of course, that’s bad for us. If only we had Ringo…” He put a thumb and forefinger on his dog-eye and jiggled it. “I’m sure that I felt the link being replaced a while ago, but it still isn’t working. It almost feels as if Ringo is willing a transmission block.”

“Can he do that?”

“I dunno. He’s a dog. He might as well be an alien.”

“As usual, you’re full of excuses,” Cathy said. “But we don’t need Ringo to track Vale, because I know exactly where he’s going. You’ve been so busy fiddling with your eyeball that you haven’t even been paying attention to where the chase has taken us.”

Jeremy looked outside. “It’s dark. The ground is flat. I see oil pumps. It could be anywhere from South Dakota to South Texas.”

“Try South Kansas. We’re near the ancient physical site of our city, on the same road that we took out of El Dorado on the way down. That means—”

“Oh, no!” Jeremy cried. “Vale’s going to SkyVue!”

“What’s wrong with that? If we know where he’s going, we know where to find him. Our pro-flesh cousins won’t dare interfere with us.”

“It’s not them I’m worried about. Don’t you remember the words on SkyVue’s marquee? There’s a Willard rally there tonight!”

Cathy looked stunned. “How can I have forgotten that?” She glared at Jeremy. “Your stupid brain design, that’s how!”

She pressed the accelerator to the floor, but the Datsun would go no faster than sixty-five.

“Oh, please, please, don’t let them shred his flesh before we can help him!” Cathy pleaded.

“To whom are you speaking?” Jeremy asked.

Cathy looked puzzled. “I have no idea.”

SkyVue became visible when they were still four miles away. The marquee was brilliant white with splotches of red, and the visible sliver of the screen flashed with blues and greens. Searchlight beams swayed inside the viewing area, and diamond-bright strobes played about their bases. The yellow flame of the refinery burned above them all.

“I see flashbulbs,” Jeremy said. “They must be standing on their cars and taking pictures of the Reverend. Look at that! There are hundreds of them!”

“Enough to blind the bastard, I hope.”

“That’s an awfully fleshbound thing to say, Cath.”

“I’m in flesh. I don’t have a choice.”

As they reached the theater entrance, a string of motorcycles and pickup trucks rumbled past, heading south. The riders and drivers were all large and hairy.

“If we missed Vale, I hope that he doesn’t run into that bunch,” Jeremy said. “They don’t look like the sort to show him any mercy.”

“And if we didn’t miss him and he’s here, the Willardites will show him plenty, I suppose,” Cathy said, steering the Datsun into the drive.

Two men in dark brown three-piece suits blocked the drive beyond the ticket booth, and a woman with blond hair as stiff as a helmet leaned out of the booth and smiled a beauty-queen smile. Cathy stopped the car and rolled down her window.

“Two adults to hear Reverend Willard denounce Satan’s broadcast?” the blonde said brightly. “You’re in luck. The program is running just a teensy bit late, and the Reverend himself hasn’t spoken yet. Forty dollars, please.”

“Take American Express?” Cathy asked.

“Of course, sister.”

Cathy handed over the card, and when the blonde handed it back, the brown-suited men stepped aside. As the Datsun rolled past, Jeremy shuddered. “Ringo’s eye tingles when I look at those guys,” he said. “Think they have something bad in their jackets?”

“No doubt. I’ve seen those suits on TV. They’re ministers of the Corps of Little David.”

The Datsun passed through a gap in the tall wooden fence that hid the theater grounds from the road, and Cathy and Jeremy became engulfed by the rally. Cars and trucks crammed the lot, and people stood on the roofs snapping flash photographs. Others wandered among the vehicles, clapping and shouting. Women spoke in tongues and men writhed on the asphalt. Children cried and dogs fornicated. On the movie screen, a woman who might have been the twin of the one in the ticket booth was singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Her voice spewed from a thousand speakers hanging from poles and car windows.

The Datsun crawled as Cathy looked for a place to park and tried to avoid running over several hundred people who seemed unaware that they were standing in a roadway. Meanwhile, Jeremy craned his neck to gaze at the screen. “I wonder if that’s real-time,” he said.

Cathy pointed at the snack bar/projection building, which sat in the center of the ten-acre lot. The woman whose face was on the screen stood on a platform on the building’s roof, surrounded by floodlights, musicians, video cameras, and Corps ministers. A cameraman on the boom of a small crane hovered over her like a mechanized angel. A crowd thronged about the building, singing along with the woman.

“Say, I wonder if the snack bar’s open,” Jeremy said. “I could use a hot dog.”

“Wonderful. We’re trying to save Oliver Vale’s life, and you want food. It was your idea that we had a responsibility to help the jerk in the first place.”

Jeremy looked abashed. “Sorry. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is hungry.”

Cathy finally parked the Datsun at the back of the lot, beyond the last row of speaker poles, and she and Jeremy climbed onto the car’s roof to scan the crowd. The people atop the snack bar were silhouetted against the movie screen that displayed their images.

“Vale isn’t here yet,” Cathy said.

“How do you know?”

“Because if he were, these fleshbound larvae wouldn’t be singing or listening to anyone who was. They’d have what was left of Vale’s body hanging from the crane, and they’d be fighting over the remaining pieces.”

“But he was ahead of us, and we didn’t pass him,” Jeremy said. “Perhaps he just hasn’t been recognized. The Willyites wouldn’t expect him to be in a car with two companions.”

“Well, do you see the Barracuda anywhere?”

Jeremy squinted. “Can’t tell. These eyes aren’t working properly.”

The woman on the snack-bar roof stopped singing, and the crowd cheered. Simultaneously, the crane boom sank to the ground and was encircled by brown suits.

“Thank you so much!” the woman’s voice rang from the myriad speakers. “Thank you and God Bless! It’s now a little after midnight, and time to hear from the leader of our cause, the defender of our freedoms—”

The crowd erupted in a roar.

The boom rose, and a gray-pinstriped figure in the basket raised his fists. Every floodlight on the snack bar swiveled toward him.

The beefy, white-toothed, tanned, movie-star-father-figure face of the Reverend William Willard appeared on the screen. His expression was one of self-satisfied determination.

When the basket touched down on the roof, the Reverend stepped out as if he were the first man to set foot on another planet. He opened his fists to quiet the roar of his congregation.

“My dear friends!” he cried, his voice exploding from the speakers with the force of a bomb. “It is clear to me now that the Lord brought me to El Dorado, Kansas, tonight for a purpose. Friends, I have just been informed that the Antichrist’s representative, the man who stole our God-given American freedom of mass-media expression—”

The crowd booed.

“—has been seen coming this way! Yes, friends, Oliver Vale—how my tongue burns to speak the name!—is being delivered into our very hands!”

The crowd cheered.

“I have sent ministers of my Corps of Little David into the countryside to watch for his approach. If the Lord wills it, they shall bring him here to us—although I have no doubt that the Lord will bring him here one way or another! And when that happens, friends…” Bill Willy’s voice dropped, and the crowd hushed to hear him. “And when that happens, I ask for your Christian mercy. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, and I ask that you allow me to ensure that He gets it. Do not pummel this Vale creature into submission; do not rend his flesh; do not pull out his forked and flicking tongue.”

“Amen!” someone screamed, and the crowd’s voice broke free again.

Cathy and Jeremy climbed down from the roof of the Datsun and gave each other grim looks.

“Christian mercy, my fleshbound ass,” Cathy said. “He might as well have told them to shred him.”

Jeremy took a deep breath. “Cath, we aren’t going to be able to stop it. Not by ourselves.”

“So you want to give up?” Cathy sounded almost relieved.

“No. We need help, and our cousins are right here.”

Cathy was aghast. “The pro-flesh? This whole mess is their fault!”

“All the more reason why they should be able to help us find Vale. He’s their boy, and I can’t believe that they really want him to die.”

“Why not!” Cathy snapped. “Others have already died. Maybe the pro-flesh want a few martyrs.”

“Maybe,” Jeremy said. “I’ll ask them.” He began walking toward the distant movie screen.

Cathy hurried after him. “We don’t even know what their fleshbound shells look like! There are thousands of bodies here, and they could be in any two of them! And if they aren’t in the flesh anymore, we won’t be able to commune with them, because we are.”

Jeremy shrugged. “They’re here somewhere, Cath. We’ll just have to hope that our flesh hasn’t dulled our sense of them so much that it doesn’t intensify when we’re close.”

“We’ll have to comb the entire place!”

“Vale’s life, and perhaps the lives of others as well, are at stake,” Jeremy said. “If you have a better idea—”

Cathy charged ahead of him. “All right, all right! Let’s start at the snack bar!”

“Why?”

“Because I’m starved!”

They bought hot dogs and then searched for their fellow Seekers as the Reverend William Willard continued to exhort his flock.

Their cousins were nowhere to be found.

12

OLIVER

In the early morning hours of Friday, February 3, 1984, Mother died and left me alone in her house. In the early morning hours of Friday, February 3, 1989, I was driven from that house by Buddy Holly’s video resurrection.

I cannot help believing that the second event depended upon the first. After all, Mother’s death itself resulted from what had happened a quarter century before. The events of our lives affect each other not as a line of toppling dominoes, but as the links of a chain being used as a whip.

Mother would not have become pregnant if my father C. had not made love to her; my father C. would not have committed suicide if Buddy had not died; I would not have been born a bastard if my father C. had lived to marry Mother; Mother’s life