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Yazoo City, Mississippi
The Angel and John Fortune reached Yazoo City by morning. The land through which they’d driven had changed from mountainous to flat, though the road became older, bumpier, and no easier on the old van. Sometimes the Angel thought it would take a miracle to get them all the way to Branson. Sometimes it seemed that it was only her faith that kept her going on this mad cross country trip, her faith and the eager innocence of the boy Savior sitting next to her, his eagerness for life radiating like heat.
“What’s planted in all those fields?” John Fortune asked as they rolled by mile after mile of flat Mississippi Delta country whose rich brown soil nourished rows of waist high plants.
“Cotton,” the Angel answered briefly. Cotton was still king in Yazoo, as it had been for centuries before her time. As it would be, probably, forever. It was a king she had no love for, nor loyalty to.
They broke through the flat landscape and ascended the rolling hills that hemmed in Yazoo City, seat of Mississippi’s largest county, home to ten thousand citizens. The rest of Yazoo County’s population was scattered in small hamlets and rural enclaves, on farms and plantations, around swamps and along the Yazoo River itself.
“Where’re we going now?” John Fortune inquired patiently. “Are we going to get to Branson soon?”
“Soon,” the Angel assured him. She hadn’t told him about her planned detour. She could barely articulate the reason for it to herself, let alone John Fortune. “I want to stop here first and visit my mother. If that’s okay.”
“Sure.” John Fortune said. He looked out the window, which had been rolled all the way down due to the van’s lack of air-conditioning. “Sure is hot.”
That it is, the Angel thought.
Heat was the most common sensation she recalled when she thought of her childhood. Wet, sticky heat that plastered her blouse to her back as soon as she put it on in the morning. That squeezed beads of sweat through her pores to trickle between her breasts and down her rib cage if she exerted herself the least little bit. Or even if she sat quietly in church while the fans rotated uselessly overhead.
Although miles from the twisting bends of the Mississippi River as it flowed down to the Gulf of Mexico, Yazoo was moist. Alligators still roared in the night in her acres of swamp and the catfish raised in her myriad lakes was an important cash crop. There was more than a touch of the primeval about it. The Angel felt they’d turned back the clock to somewhere to the middle of the last century. Or even the century before that.
“Nice houses,” John Fortune commented as they passed through a high-toned residential area. “Though some could use a new paint job.”
“Old money trying to stretch,” the Angel told him. “It doesn’t go as far as it used to.”
They drove by whitewashed two story homes and entered a part of the town where the houses were smaller and even more in need of paint. The lawns were wilder than the manicured yards of the affluent district, with cars up on blocks and ancient appliances scattered about as if their owners hadn’t enough energy to carry them further. Some—an old wringer washing machine here, and old sink there, even a toilet or two—had been turned into planters brimming with a profusion of flowers of all colors and descriptions, from tiny daisies white, blue, and yellow to columnar hollyhocks thrusting up to Heaven. Other abandoned appliances, especially the ancient refrigerators, were just rusting deathtraps, waiting for some kid to lock themselves in and suffocate.
The Angel took the narrow, twisting lanes automatically, turning without thinking until on the edge of the poorest part of town she drove through an open wrought-iron gate into a tree- shaded park with a scattering of white stones and gray monuments like candy tossed on a gently rolling field of felt. She parked the van and it gratefully shuddered to a well-deserved rest. John Fortune looked at her from the corner of his eye, without turning his head.
“Your mom’s here?” he asked.
“That’s right,” the Angel said. She got out of the van and after a moment he followed her.
It was quiet in the cemetery, and cool. Her mother’s grave was on the side of a hill sheltered by a giant pecan tree that spread its branches above a score of graves like a benediction. The slab was small, and bore only a name and two dates, 1961 - 2001. The Angel stood before it, then sank to her knees in the cool grass, putting her hands on the earth as if to caress that which lay underneath it.
“Hello, Mama,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve come to see you again.” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “I know it’s been a long time since I been able to come by. I know I’ve been out in the world, which you told me was so evil and so dangerous, but there was just nothing here for me. Nothing for me to do, Mama. No way for me to live. You must understand that.”
Her mother had not wanted her to go out into the world. She had told her, over and over again, of its traps and perils. After all, she’d gone out herself and had gotten nothing out of it but a bloated belly and a daughter cursed at a very young age. Probably from the tainted blood of her beastly father, whom she never spoke of. But maybe, just maybe, by the evilness of her own contaminated soul.
“And I’ve been out in the world doing good. Really, I have. I bought someone to see you.” The Angel turned and beckoned to John Fortune, who was standing a respectful half a dozen paces back, watching uncertainly. He came forward as she gestured, and nodded briefly.
“Hello,” he said.
“You’re in Heaven, Mama, so you must know who he is. You must know something of what is planned for us poor sinners on Earth. You—”
“Must know he is the Devil incarnate,” a voice said behind them.
The Angel whirled, instinctively shielding John Fortune with her body. Behind them was an ancient mausoleum. Shimmering upon its cracked stone wall was a circle of darkness, a tear through the fabric of space. Two men and a thing had come through the tear. She recognized the Cardinal. The man with him was restraining something with a collar and leash that might have been human, but walked like a dog on four limbs. That had an inhuman face with deep set eyes and slavering jaws, and a long snout whose damp nostrils quivered as it sucked in great lung-fulls of air and tried to lunge at the Angel and her charge. A third came though the doorway and laughed. He was big and handsome as an angel with golden hair and large blue eyes and a strong, dimpled jaw. The Angel felt her stomach clench. She couldn’t tell if it was with fear, revulsion, or desire.
“I told you Blood would find her eventually,” the Witness said.
Contarini nodded. “Start with the girl. The boy is for later.”
He let go of Blood’s leash and the joker/ace leapt forward on all fours like a hound, drool frothing on his gaping jaws. The Angel tossed a stern, “Stay here,” to John Fortune, and stepped to meet him.
Blood sprung into the air screaming. She met him with a grim scowl, catching him with one hand on his throat and one on his crotch, pivoted, and slammed him to the ground with most of her strength. He hit like a bag of cement tossed from the roof of a five-story building, grunted, and got back to his feet. But he wavered as he came towards her, breathing heavily. The Angel could see that his heart was not in this.
She smiled. Even though he was bigger than her, he was no match for her righteous strength. The only thing that had saved him from the full force of the body slam was the thick sward and soft dirt he’d landed on. Nothing, she thought, could save him from her fists.
He leaped at her again, his powerful haunches launching him like a tiger. This time she met him with a hammering upper cut that spun him end over, sending him flying back in the direction he’d come. Contarini had to dodge his flailing limbs as he flew by.
The Cardinal ground his teeth in rage. “Useless creature,” he spat at the cowering joker who tried, but couldn’t get up. He turned to the Witness. “Take care of her! Teach her a lesson.”
The smiling ace stretched like a cat. His knuckles made crackling sounds as he clenched his hands into fists. He approached slowly, smiling confidently. Smugly, really. He had a reason to be smug, the Angel thought. He was still the most handsome man she had ever seen.
“Remember the lesson I taught you before,” he said as he approached. “Now it goes further.”
The sudden sound of the van’s horn startled them both. The Angel whirled to see John Fortune behind the wheel, a determined expression on his face, leaning on the horn and bouncing up and down on the seat as the van rolled over the bumpy sward, bearing down on them.
The Angel leaped away just as Fortune slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel. The van sideswiped the Witness. He didn’t even try to get out of the way. There was the thud of metal slamming into flesh and the van flung the Witness twenty feet in the air where he hit the spreading branches of the pecan tree that was nodding over the nearby graves. Branches cracked and broke and fell along with the Witness.
John Fortune wrestled the van to a stop and shouted out the driver’s side window, “Get in! Get in!”
The Angel responded to the panic in his voice. Her first thought was to check to see if the Witness was still alive, and if he was, to kick his ass as hard as she could. But she realized John Fortune was right. They had to get out of there. Fast.
The sliding door on the driver’s side was crumpled inward, but was still holding on the frame. That was good. The van engine’s was idling at such a high rate that it was threatening to sputter out at any second. That would be bad. She reached the passenger’s side door and pulled it open. John Fortune floored the gas pedal before her butt hit the seat. The van slewed around crazily for a moment, then the tires gripped the turf and they headed for the unpaved road running though the cemetery.
As the Angel glanced back she saw Cardinal Contarini crouched behind one of the monuments, shaking his first at them and screeching something in Italian. The joker looked up groggily, a blank expression on his inhuman face. The Witness was still laying under the broken tree limbs on her mother’s grave.
That was close, she thought, leaning back in the seat. She looked at the boy who, beyond denial, was her savior. He was concentrating on guiding the van over the winding cemetery lane, but he glanced back at her.
“See,” he said. “I told you I could drive.”
She smiled at him. His smile glowed back at her like the shining sun. They left the cemetery, hitting the city streets. The van rattled along making alarming sounds as John Fortune cruised at a sedate thirty miles an hour. The Angel realized that there was no way it was going to get them to Branson. It would be lucky if it got them beyond the city limits. She guessed that this situation could be classified as an emergency, and she reached for her cell phone. She hit The Hand’s number on the speed dial.
“President Barnett’s of—”
“Sally Lou!” the Angel said, trying hard to control her voice so that John Fortune wouldn’t get more worried than he already was. “Let me speak with President Barnett—fast!”
“He’s in conference now,” she said in the snootily superior voice that she liked to use on the Angel.
“I don’t care if God the Father Himself is in there planning Armageddon with him,” the Angel said in a tone that made John Fortune stare at her in surprise. “Connect me with him. Now.”
Pleased when Sally Lou connected them without another word, she barely gave The Hand the chance to say Hello before she blurted out their situation. He took it like he took everything else. With calmness and poise.
“Can you hold out for twenty minutes, honey?” he asked sedately.
“Twenty minutes? I don’t—”
“You’re going to have to,” he said just as soothingly. “Twenty minutes. That’s all. I promise you.”
The Angel took a deep breath. She had The Hand’s assurance. Though he was just a man like everyone else and a sinner as well, he had never let her down. In any important sense, anyway. “All right,” she said. “Twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes,” Barnett confirmed. “Where are you, exactly?”
She told him.
“Fine. Get to the highway. Wait by the Yazoo City on-ramp. Don’t move from that spot. Help is on the way. Gotta go make it happen.”
He hung up. The Angel listened to the dial tone than looked at John Fortune, who was gazing at her with a trusting expression.
“Help is on the way,” she told him. Though how in the world it would arrive in such a short time was utterly beyond her.