He crouch-runs across the dark road, reaches the guard post, a one-person booth with a space heater and no door. He slips inside, keeping low. On the table ahead of him, small monitors show camera views from the other side of the gate. For a moment, not seeing Felix or the Prophet, Simon panics, but then he remembers they have mapped the range of the cameras and are hiding in a ravine. He casts around for the manual release lever. He has a flashlight in his pocket but has sworn he will only use it in an emergency.
Finally, his fingers find a metal and plastic latch. There is a handle attached to it. Simon hesitates. What if there’s an alarm? What if opening the gate triggers the apocalypse? But he shoves those doubts aside, pulls. He hears a solid clatch, and the handle goes slack. Simon lets go, crouch-runs back into the trees, and works his way to the gate, staying out of the light. The gate has swung open less than a foot. Simon whistles quietly, then again louder. A beat and then he hears hurried footsteps from the other side of the wall. He strains to make out details in the dark.
Felix’s face appears in the gap of the open gate.
“Get back,” he hisses.
Simon backs quickly into the trees. Felix pushes the gate slightly wider. It gives with an audible creak. Simon covers his ears with his hands, as if blocking the sound can erase it from the world. Felix curses, pushes again. The gate moves, protesting, one foot, two. And then Felix and the Prophet are through, running to join Simon in the trees. They have time only for a whispered Good job. Are you okay? And then they are running through the trees toward the main house. They hurry and slow, scanning the darkness for guards. Flagg has reported a security team of six men. Four work the day shift. Two stay up all night, mostly walking the immediate perimeter of the house, but sometimes straying wider, to check the wall.
Felix takes the lead. He is carrying his .38 snub-nosed on his hip, and an AR-15 Flagg offered him.
“You ever held one of these before?” Flagg asked.
Felix stripped the clip, emptied the chamber, checked the barrel and the sight in a way Simon had only ever seen in Michael Bay movies, before slapping the clip back home.
“That’s a yes,” said Flagg.
Felix lifts the gun to his shoulder with his right hand and raises his left in a fist. They stop. Simon’s heart is thundering in his chest. He feels someone take his hand in the dark. Claire? he thinks, but when he looks down, it is the Prophet who has grabbed him, who holds him palm to palm. Their eyes meet. The Prophet smiles.
“Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea,” he says, “and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.”
Felix lowers his fist, moves toward the side door of the house, knees bent, his rifle swinging left, then right as he looks for targets. Simon follows, his hand on Felix’s back, as he’s been taught, feeling the Prophet’s hand on his own back. They move in a chain through a pool of exterior light and into shadow. Any second now a siren will sound, floodlights cracking on. Any second now marines will rappel down from helicopters on fast ropes, or a sniper will pick them off one by one from the tower.
S is for Simon blown away from afar.
He thinks about the man he shot. How he literally blew him out of his shoes, like in a cartoon. Except it wasn’t a cartoon.
He can feel the Spanish-style stucco rough against his palms. Their backs are to the wall, waiting for the signal from Flagg and Katniss, circumventing the pool with night-vision goggles ($399 marked down at Walmart).
Beside Simon the Prophet whispers:
“Then Samson called out to the Lord: ‘O Lord God, please remember me. Strengthen me, O God, just once more, so that with one vengeful blow I may pay back the Philistines for my two eyes.’”
A strong wind kicks up, bowing the trees. Simon can feel the temperature drop. Somewhere a low-pressure system is battling a high-pressure system, a war waged in the clouds.
“And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars which supported the temple, and he braced himself against them, one on his right and the other on his left.”
From his hip, Simon hears his walkie-talkie click—once, twice, three times.
“Here we go,” whispers Felix. “We breach in three, two, one.”
They’ve surveyed the property, studying Google Earth images and drone footage, deciding that the kitchen door is the weakest. Glass panels line the top half of the door. On zero, Felix uses the butt of his rifle to smash the one closest to the knob, then reaches in and throws the bolt.
“On me,” he says, and goes in. Simon follows. He doesn’t pull his pistol. He has decided that he will never pull another trigger. He would rather die.
One day, when I’m old and wise
I’ll think back and realize
That these were all completely normal events.
And then they are inside the dark kitchen, but before Simon can get a good look at the room, electricity seems to flash, stuttering the walls blue, and Felix falls, shuddering. Simon stops, the Prophet crashing into him from behind. Around the room the shadows seem to be moving. And then he hears a shot and two thin wires arc over the kitchen island and hit Simon in the chest. Forty thousand volts course through his body. His muscles seize, his knees locking, his jaw snapping shut, taking a piece of his tongue with it, and Simon falls, flopping on the floor like a fish. There are no thoughts in his brain. He is a dancing monkey.
And the walls came down, and the temple fell.
And the last thing he sees before he blacks out is the Prophet falling to the floor beside him, his eyes rolled back, joining Simon in a lunatic pasodoble.
So endeth the Philistines.