Hybrid, page 5
There was always the priest—Reisch’s other obsession. But here again, there were reasons to allow him to live. He had been infected for more than a month now and, unlike all the others, showed no signs of dying, or evolving as Reisch had. He never really expected the priest to evolve, but then he never really expected to have to kill him, either.
***
Like Rucker, Father John Oliver had come to the attention of Reisch through Greg Flynn. Newly retired, Flynn began spending a fair amount of time volunteering at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and working with its associate pastor, a short, stout Chicago transplant in his early sixties. Thinking that the priest could be an easy avenue to Amanda, Reisch had introduced himself to Father Oliver as a new parishioner.
“I have come ahead of my wife and son. They are still in Brighton.” Reisch had donned his proper British affectation. It was one of the few times he had directly engaged someone, but the risk was acceptable. The priest would not remember his visitor well, except possibly that he was very tall.
“So you’re from England. Is your wife English as well?” The priest seemed sincerely interested, which unnerved Reisch.
“Actually, she grew up in Colorado Springs and graduated from this very high school. I was supposed to look up some of her old classmates, but I have been having a bit of trouble tracking anybody down.” Reisch smiled at the cleric, hoping he would take the hint.
“Well, we are a fairly mobile society. Do you know if any of them are still members of Sacred Heart?” Oliver asked.
Reisch fumbled in his jacket for a moment and retrieved a PDA. “No, I’m afraid I do not. All I have is a list of names and old addresses. I would guess that a number of the names have changed as well. Does your parish have an online database that would be helpful?”
“We’re not nearly so organized. Was there anyone in particular you were hoping to find?”
“Yes, my wife’s closest friend was Amanda Larson. She married a young man named Michael Flynn. I think they have a son who should be school age by now.” Reisch felt the priest’s mind darken. Suspicion played around his face.
“Michael and Jacob died several years ago in a plane crash,” Oliver replied. “It was before my time, so I don’t have very many details.” His affect and demeanor had changed almost instantly with the mention of Amanda. He looked up at Reisch with open skepticism. “Tell me why you really want to find Amanda,” he said bluntly.
Reisch was surprised. The priest had seen through the subterfuge fairly quickly and, while that was somewhat remarkable, what really impressed him was the fact that Oliver addressed the deception so directly. Most people when confronted with an obvious lie are more circumspect, less confrontational. Reisch tried to search the priest’s mind, but all he saw was Greg Flynn. Oliver had no idea where Amanda was; in fact, he had never even met Amanda. Reisch realized that he had wasted his time with this silly little man. He tried to cloud the priest’s mind and blur his memory of their encounter, but the priest, now on guard, resisted the confusion and remained focused on the tall, dark man. Reisch backed off, his mind withdrawing from Oliver’s.
“I don’t mean anyone harm, Father,” he lied, then quickly grabbed the priest by the neck and exhaled strongly into his startled face. Caught off guard by the sudden and strange assault, Oliver’s guard fell, and Reisch seized control of his mind. Five minutes later, Oliver awoke in his office alone and confused, his encounter with Reisch now as fragmentary as a nightmare. He coughed violently, but it was much too late. Virus particles by the hundreds of millions had already penetrated his lungs and were invading all of his major organs.
***
But the priest didn’t die, as Reisch had wanted, and that meant he was worthy of further study and manipulation. Maybe have him commit suicide during Sunday Mass? Reisch smiled at the thought. That would be beautiful, but it would take preparation, and his need for violence was immediate. So, whose life would satisfy both his intellect and his monster? Then the perfect solution came to him.
Chapter 5
Father John Oliver walked through his dark church collecting missals. It wasn’t actually his church; it belonged to the Roman Catholic Church and the diocese of Colorado Springs. He wasn’t even its pastor, just associate pastor. For five years, that had been enough. Associate pastor was all he had ever wanted or would want. It fulfilled every spiritual need without overly burdening him with the worldly responsibilities that running a church demanded. He had earned the respite. For twenty-two of his twenty-nine years as a priest, he had been a missionary. He had brought the Word of God to some of the most remote places on Earth. Like Saint Paul before him, he had laid the groundwork, sometimes literally, for churches all over the known world. His role was to get things started and then turn the fledgling parish over to someone else. Fourteen churches carved out of deserts, jungles, and swamps bore his blood, sweat, and tears. At the age of fifty-two, he had his first heart attack. By fifty-seven, he had two more and a triple bypass. God had decided that John Oliver was needed elsewhere.
His order had sent him to help the pastor of a burgeoning parish in Colorado Springs. Oliver had never even been to Colorado and had never really been a parish priest. He arrived in the dead of winter, when the ambient temperature was eight degrees below zero, and there was a foot of new snow on the ground. Father Francis Coyle had picked him up at the airport. Father Coyle, a sixty-four-year-old Dominican, had been an academic for most of his professional life. He spoke five languages, including Latin, and could read ancient Aramaic. He had taught philosophy at the University of Notre Dame for twenty years before asking his bishop to grant him the opportunity to put philosophy to work. Like Oliver, he had been sent to Sacred Heart as an associate pastor and, also like Oliver, when he had started, he had felt like a fish out of water.
By the time they reached the rectory, Oliver was starting to feel at ease with his new boss. Over the next four years, the two got along exceptionally well, despite their widely different backgrounds. They were often found embroiled in philosophical debate that to anyone else looked like a heated argument. Father Oliver approached problems from a pragmatic, reality-based point of view, while Father Coyle preferred the academic, idealist approach. They were a formidable team, and the parish prospered.
Oliver’s only sister had called six months earlier and broken the terrifying news that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was an especially cruel twist of fate as Mary’s deepest desire, to have and raise children, had never been fulfilled because of a condition called primary ovarian failure. Eugene, her husband, had died nine months earlier, which meant Mary was facing her ordeal alone. Oliver took a leave of absence and flew to Chicago. He hadn’t been home in almost thirty years, and his unease grew when he found a mere shadow of his beloved sister in a hospital room. She was dying, and dying badly. She looked more like a concentration camp victim than a fifty-eight-year-old social studies teacher. She didn’t have the strength to lift her head and kiss Oliver, and before either could say a word, they both started to cry.
Oliver stopped collecting the missals and recalled his sister in her younger days. He remembered the glow in her face as she raced her spider bike around the block, pigtails flying, skinned knees pumping away at the pedals, and peals of laughter echoing off the neighbors’ houses. He refused to believe that the person lying in that bed could at one time have been that little girl. He had seen terrible, horrible things in his work for God, but they all paled to insignificance when compared to the realization that this was his little sister. It was an obscenity beyond compare. How could God take one of his most perfect creations and distort it so? Every priest had crises of faith, and John Oliver was no exception, but he had always been able to find his way back to God. Despite all his experiences, his belief had never been truly tested until he watched cancer devour his sister, cell by cell. She was in severe, unremitting pain, and nothing the doctors or nurses did seemed to make a difference.
He stayed with her in the hospital for seven weeks and, with every tablet of Dilaudid she was forced to take, Oliver cursed his indifferent God. After the first month, he stopped eating, stopped sleeping, and stopped being a priest. He didn’t doubt the existence of God; he blamed Him directly for his sister’s agony.
Father Oliver sat down on the hard wooden pew and remembered a day in early December. He had been alone in the hospital’s garden, and everything around him was dead. “Your son died in three hours,” he yelled up to the gray sky. “Why are You being so cruel to Mary? Where is all Your mercy and love now that we need it the most?” No one answered on that cold, late fall morning. It wasn’t until the next day that God answered. Mary was being taken home; the hospital could offer her no more comfort than her own bed. A hospice team would meet them and assist with the transition.
For the next three weeks, the hospice team members lived with Mary and Oliver. A group of five did tag-team shifts around the clock, attending to her every need. They anticipated all the bumps ahead and helped the brother and sister negotiate them. Oliver watched in awe. The depth of concern they showed Mary was beyond any financial reward. These people weren’t doing this kind of work for a paycheck; their devotion was much too deep, too genuine. It was almost holy. Mary wasn’t a case or even a patient: she was an individual, she was a widow, she was a sister, and she was going through the most difficult period any person would ever face. They didn’t see an incontinent, eighty-six-pound, semi-comatose problem; they saw a girl in pigtails riding her spider bike around the block, laughing as loud as she could. They saw God in his sister, and Father Oliver began to see God in them.
Mary died December twenty-third, two days before Christmas Day, the birth of Christ. She was at peace now, and her brother slowly began to make peace with their maker. By the New Year, he had returned to Colorado Springs. He hadn’t recovered, but he was close enough to be a priest again.
He never talked with Father Coyle or his bishop about his experience, even though he knew he should. At a minimum he had to confess to someone, or perhaps talk it through, but it was too soon, still too sensitive. Everyone wanted to know how he was doing, but he just smiled and told them that he was doing just fine. It took another month before he actually began to feel fine again and, by that point, there was no reason to reopen the wound. That was when things began to happen.
Oliver set the missals down and knelt on the padded kneeler. He looked up at the crucified Christ hanging over the altar, but didn’t feel worthy to pray. He had never believed that God tested people. Life tested people, and Jesus had lived and died to show us how to survive those tests. Oliver had preached this a hundred times but, over the last six months, he had ignored his own preaching. And now, God was ignoring him.
“Hell isn’t a place; it is the condition that exists after a person has removed himself from the grace of God,” he whispered to the darkness. It was hard to believe that less than a month earlier, his life had been returning to normal. “Your torment was pure and redemptive; mine is deserved,” he whispered to Jesus. Unconsciously, he rubbed the fine scar that stretched the length of his right thumb.
***
It had begun on February eighteenth, his mother’s birthday. He was just getting over a respiratory infection and, for the first day in five, he felt good enough to shave. For forty-eight years, he had used a straight razor without ever having a problem, but that morning, as he was reaching for it, he cut his right thumb. The blade sliced cleanly down to the bone. For the first instant, he marveled at the beauty of the glistening white tendons, his brain refusing to accept what had just happened. Then pain and blood forced the issue. He tried to squeeze the wound closed, but his palm quickly filled with blood. When it came to blood, Oliver had always been a “fainter” and, true to form, his head hit the floor just after the first drop of blood. He was out only an instant before consciousness began to re-form around him. His blurry eyes focused on the water-stained plaster on the ceiling, and his lethargic mind wondered idly who was going to paint it. It took a few moments for his head to completely clear and process how he had ended up on the floor. He had managed to wedge himself into the small space between the bathtub and the commode; his neck, twisted at an awkward angle, was beginning to ache. He rolled over onto his back and felt a pool of warm blood ooze into his nightshirt. He squeezed his lacerated thumb and managed to climb to his feet without looking at the bloody hand.
He was reaching for a washcloth when he suddenly felt everything around him change. The rectory had always been poorly insulated, and every morning the frigid winter air managed to seep through the porous walls, chilling the bathroom to just above freezing. This morning had been no exception, at least until now. The air abruptly became unnaturally stagnant and increasingly warm. The cold mirror began to fog over, and Oliver wiped at it with his good hand. It was hard to move through the heavy air and harder to breathe. He slowly wrapped his hand and was about to sit on the commode when it struck him that he was no longer alone.
At first, he thought it was nothing more than an after-effect from the fall, but the feeling intensified. He wheeled around but found no one. The sudden movement made him a little light-headed, but it passed quickly. He felt foolish. The bathroom was tiny, and it would have been impossible for someone to enter without him knowing. Besides, the door was locked from the inside. Still, the feeling that someone was watching him persisted. Blood began to run down his forearm and drip to the floor from his elbow, but he ignored it. He felt exposed, naked before an unseen presence that was growing stronger all around him. The hairs on the back of his neck began to stand and, despite the heat, he broke out in goose bumps. He wiped the mirror again as the room became steadily hotter, and he half expected to see a face besides his own in the reflection.
I’m in shock, he thought. Nothing more. He wrapped the towel tighter around his throbbing thumb and turned back to the door. He reached for the knob, and a loud click made him jump. He whirled back towards the mirror, only to find his crucifix swinging upside down from its rosary. He stared at the handmade, polished silver cross, which was his most prized possession. It had been a gift from the members of the very first church he had ever worked in. It had taken six people over a week to carefully mold each bead and to shape the crude figure. An unknown artist had long ago inscribed Mamhda, Kenya across the crossbar, the lettering barely legible after nearly three decades of use. It was precious to him, and it had been lost for more than a week. It clinked again as it tapped the glass of the mirror. The unseen presence had crossed the threshold that separated imagination from reality.
Believing in ghosts was of course a prerequisite for a Catholic priest, but this was Oliver’s first experience with one. His heart was thundering in his chest, and he felt the first squeeze of angina.
“Be gone, unclean spirit,” Oliver commanded, but the phantom ignored the order. He took his crucifix down and started to pray aloud. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .” He closed his eyes and concentrated on his God, ignoring everything around him. Before he reached the end of the prayer, Oliver realized that he was alone. He thanked God and opened his eyes. The room had started to cool down, but not yet enough to clear the mirror. Oliver’s heart then gave another squeeze. Written in the dissipating steam was a message: MARY SAYS HELLO.
***
Perhaps if that had been the only message, Oliver could have gotten past it. He was still kneeling, his head down, avoiding the eyes of the crucified Christ. It was funny; for the last month, his mind and soul had been repeatedly assaulted, yet his body seemed to grow stronger. For years, his doctors had told him that his arthritic knees needed replacement, yet he could now kneel and even run short distances, two things he hadn’t been able to do for decades. Even his heart seemed to be working better. The last time he had felt the all-too-familiar squeeze of angina had been a morning three weeks ago when he had awakened to the vision of his sister burning in unquenchable flames. She writhed in agony at the foot of his bed, calling his name, cursing him for her torment. He had reached for her, and a tongue of flame shot from the pyre and scorched his hand, and then she was gone. The skin of his hand was burned off, and only charred muscle and bone remained. He tried to scream, but the shock had stolen his breath. The pain was, in a word, beautiful. It was all-encompassing, filling every fiber of his being. Oliver had never experienced anything so absolute; not even the love of God was as complete.
He pleaded for it to stop, and then it was gone. Oliver examined his hand and was amazed to find that it was back to normal, right down to the age spots that covered his wrist. Intellectually, he knew it had all been just a hallucination, another manifestation of his ordeal, and that there was no reason to be surprised. He dropped his arm and stared through the now-vanished apparition. Illusion, nothing more, he told himself. Mary, his hand, the pain, they were all a trick. Only this illusion had a purpose—an intent. It tore away his façade of intellect and belief and exposed him for what he really was: a hypocrite and a fraud. A real pain in his chest began to intrude upon his reflection, and he reached for his Nitrobid. It was the last time he would need it, despite five more equally horrific and revealing visits from his dead sister.
