Night of the Animals(136)
Some of the white-suited Neuters, meanwhile, had opened long silver staves that smoothly glided up from their soft pale wrists to deliver powerful quantum contra-fluxal shocks. Then the cultists began to work the staves, like stock prods, blue sparks flying out, jabbing the applicants and CIA agents and analysts and police officers, even some of the autoreporters who had shown up, herding them toward the table with the alcohol. There the shepherded were made to imbibe from blackberry-colored orbs of Flōt. It was dosed, Astrid suspected, with barbiturate. This was how the Heaven’s Gate cult killed you. Did they, she wondered, as they murdered you, slip their famous enigmatic $5 bill into your pocket right then, the currency meant perhaps to pay the toll of some intergalactic Charon, thus ensuring a steady stream of souls to their comet world?
The red-haired man was still resisting until he was thrust down and held in place with at least three of the alien stock prods. One of the cult members began to beat and shock him aggressively until he stopped moving, stopped making noise, and when that happened, Astrid felt sure that she was next.
Amid the chaos, the leader of the cult, Marshall Applewhite III, appeared in the door of the lift that the security team had used. He wore the same silvery tunic Astrid had seen him wearing when she watched the telly with Sykes at the Seamen’s Rest. It was a ridiculously campy garment one might see on some Venusian high priest from an old science fiction B movie. His tall frame and shaved head would have made him seem menacing, but his large blue fawn eyes, his good posture, his expression of barely repressed merriment, offered a sugared charisma. Astrid could almost see why so many followed him to their deaths. Almost.
“You’re freakstyle,” she said. “I must be close to the end now. You are the Flōt withdrawal talking. You’re a figment, you are.”
“I’m sorry,” Applewhite said, moving somehow closer to Astrid. “I’m as real as the comet,” he added, pointing toward the sky. “I’m sorry—do not be afraid. You’ll see. Everything is fan-ta-stic!”
Astrid wanted to shove the creep away from her, but he preempted this by moving himself along.
MOST OF THE PEOPLE being driven like cattle were only zapped a few times before taking their potion willingly. Applewhite himself was touring the operation like a kind of foreman inspecting the factory floor. He nodded and smiled and patted people on the back in a starchy, awkward way, and even tried to comfort prospective victims, giving quick hugs and laughing. “Exiting isn’t death,” he said. “In Level Above Human, you’ll all get new, eternal bodies built—and they’re so beautiful!—for space travel.” But if those herded and prodded ones did not become pliable, the Neuter soldiers squirted poisoned Flōt or champagne down their throats, sometimes stuffing in a handful of crackers and pills and a fig for good measure. At these ugly scenes Applewhite merely gave an exaggerated pout of sympathy and walked on.
“Let’s all be nice,” he said at one point.
Some of the regular embassy personnel queuing at the table didn’t appear rankled at all and required no abuse—indeed, they politely waited their turns.
Astrid herself felt the allure of the Flōt and the champagne. She was convinced that little of what she saw before her was really happening. Could a drink or two hurt? It would end the anxieties of the Death in an instant, and as she saw it, end this entire phantasmagoria of a night. Couldn’t she just get a sip, a little taste, of some Glenfiddich, and stir in a splash of Flōt, and a bite of cheese, without the downers? She pulled her hair into two thick tails and twisted it into a splayed chignon. The humidity of the chancery had given it waves, and it was as flyaway shiny and distracting as ever.
Marshall Applewhite III glided right in front of Astrid.
“Yes, it’s sooooooo OK,” he said, in a sibilant, not unfriendly voice. “We’re inside you, after all. We know you. We know about your unhappiness and your loneliness. And all those years of having no one but your mother, and now she’s dying of Bruta7, poor dear one, and it’s become so hard to believe in anything in . . . in this . . . this dirty world of petty kings and animals running amok and people acting like animals. Go ahead—drink away. It’s liberating, Astrid.”
Applewhite frowned a little. He showed Astrid a purple orb of Flōt and two shot glasses. She put her hand to her mouth, as if guarding it.
Out in the square, she heard a loudspeaker babbling about King Henry’s sins, and the death-groans of neuralpike victims, and the screams of an elephant. She was still without panties or trousers, her muscular legs still dripping with green sticky sap. She felt appallingly exposed but almost beyond embarrassment.
“This corrupt manimal,” said the loudspeaker in a nasally, bloodless tone, “this selfish manimal—this earth-bound manimal—this corrupt manimal—he has—corrupt manimal—he has appealed to Britain’s worst nature. Corrupt manimal. Let Harry9 die. Let him be gone with the rest of earth’s animals. Let him—” and on and on the voice droned. In the distance, Astrid could also just make out a new and alarming sound, both musical and corrosive, like the gold-throated shrieks of hundreds of dragons. Applewhite, too, seemed to hear it, and squinted suspiciously.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, god.”
After a long pause, she said, “But there’s St. Cuthbert.” She began shaking her head, taking a few steps back from Applewhite. “He thinks I’m his brother. Or some kind of forest messiah. He says I’m the Christ of Otters.” She turned away from Applewhite. “Cuthbert’s crazy, but he means something . . . to me, at least.”