Whatever needs lifting here, it’s big.

Nautilus checked his watch: two minutes gone. He had maybe five. Nautilus scanned the penlight over the area. It was too small to penetrate the depth, so he strode forward while beaming it toward the walls and corners.

There … huge-ass boxes.

In a far corner sat a quartet of wooden containers, duplicates of the one that had come on the semi. They were about twenty feet long and eight wide, a fourth box as long, but only six feet in width and breadth. Checking his watch – two and a half minutes – Nautilus jogged the dirt floor to the containers, dodging wiring and debris scattered over the floor. The massive boxes were two feet taller than he stood, three of them bolted shut. But the smaller one was lidless, its top leaning against the corrugated wall. Still, it was too high to peer into.

Nautilus saw a meter-square crate a dozen feet away labeled Brackets-1025-M - 10-count. Nautilus pulled it to the container, glancing at his watch: Three and a half minutes gone.

Nautilus jumped atop the crate, leaned into the yawning opening and shone his penlight inside.

40

The jezebel had made a mistake, Frisco Dredd thought, sitting in his van on the downtown Miami street. Maybe it was because she lived just a few blocks from the hotel where she was now doing filthy and unspeakable things to a man, but she had parked her little red car in a lot two blocks away.

No taxi tonight. No stepping from the bright lights of a hotel with people on the street or looking out from restaurant windows. She had driven her own little car and parked it in a lot two blocks away. A lot that had but two lights, one now gone from a single shot with Dredd’s Crosman CO₂ pellet gun, the same one that had knocked out streetlamps along the stretch of road Teresa Mailey would travel.

Tick was the only sound the rifle made, and half of the lot went dark. The rest was just the waiting.

Dredd’s hand drifted to his shirt, making sure the top three buttons were undone. Jesus needed to see why the vixen had to be punished.

Harry Nautilus stared into the box, perplexed. Before him was the front segment of a rocket: four feet in width, tapering over its fifteen or so feet of length to a rounded point. It was burnished on the outer surface, sleek and beautiful and almost serene, like a Brancusi “Bird in Space” sculpture.

Nautilus aimed the light toward the tapered end, as round as an orange. He checked his watch: Four minutes gone. He startled to a horn honking stridently in the distance and retreated across the floor to the lights, retracing his route.

By the time the guard returned, Nautilus was sitting on his hood, drumming his thigh and whistling Ellington’s “Take the A Train”. He gave the guard a what’s-up eyebrow as the man jumped from the vehicle.

“Kids drinking, I expect. Found a buncha beer cans and trash. They’d built a fire. There’s over a hundred acres of scrub out there, old roads crisscrossing, and all sorts of drinkin’ and make-out spots. They musta seen me coming and took off. I flat-out mashed that horn to let ’em know I saw ’em.”

“That’s the way to handle it,” Nautilus said, thinking, What a yokel.

“Anyway, thanks, buddy. I’m gonna tell the honchos they gotta block off that side road.”

“Have a good one.”

Nautilus faked a disinterested yawn and climbed into the Hummer. Twenty minutes later, back in his digs, he grabbed a beer and sat on his balcony, staring toward the dark building.

A rocket in a biblical theme park? It made no sense. Illogical from every angle.

Conclusion: not a rocket. Something that resembled a rocket. Theme park, tapering, pointed steel assembly. Welding equipment. Tracks in the floor. A big-ass crane waiting to lift heavy pieces into place.

It was a ride. Some kind of monorail maybe. No, given the twin tracks, a train … a sleek aerodynamic train. Or … was it the front segment of some newfangled roller-coaster, the hoist waiting to build the support system?

That made sense.

But so did a restaurant, like the Gatlinburg or Seattle space needles, the elongated cone in the building forming the spire atop the restaurant. That made sense as well.

Whatever it is, Nautilus told himself, it had something to do with a ride or a restaurant and, like everything else in the strange land of Hallelujah Jubilee, was created to inform, entertain, and make money.

Nautilus blew out a breath. He’d risked his job to discover the park’s next big audience attraction. He put his feet up on the railing and leaned back, looking out over the pasture behind the motel. There, four hundred feet away, an elephant grazed slowly in the moonlight, beside it a donkey and a dromedary camel, off from their shifts in Ark Land. The camel lifted its head and called across the fields, a quivering moan that seemed to linger unnaturally long, as if trapped inside the air.

Though the night was warm, Nautilus suppressed a shiver.

Two hundred bucks a day, he reminded himself.

41

Roland Uttleman sat in the dimly lit kitchen of the Schrum house reading a medical text. The project was in the increasingly capable hands of Richard Owsley, soon to have his own program on the Crown of Glory network, an electronic store, so to speak, where he could sell taped sermons, books, branded bibles, tout upcoming live appearances. Owsley would soon be living the life he espoused, Paradise on Earth. Manna from every direction, including Eliot Winkler, who had more manna than Croesus.

But with the miracle of 1025-M nearing completion, it was time for Amos Schrum to have his own “miracle”: A healing. The next few days would bring cautious advisories from the COG PR staff – engineered by Johnson, no one from the staff allowed near the holy man – saying Schrum seemed to have been touched by God, his physical condition improved. The faithful wouldn’t need any medical information, God’s will that a great leader continue living, but there had to be a plausible explanation for the medical types who’d be yammering on news outlets.

Uttleman would be asked to comment, and was speaking possibilities into a pocket recorder, trying to be as authoritative as Hayes Johnson.

“Initially thought to be a cardiac event, but tests revealed a severe reaction to a medication Reverend Schrum had been taking …”

Nice, Uttleman thought, listening to the playback. But it couldn’t be purely medical, there had to be a sense of divine intervention. He expanded on the theme.

“An initial cardiac event followed by intense and recurrent bouts of arrhythmia with cardiac stress and enlargement suggested the worst scenario. I discovered the possibility of a toxic interaction between two of the many medications being administered to my oldest and dearest friend, and arrhythmia ceased. But I’m not sure even that discovery … no, that revelation, can explain the Reverend’s rapid recovery, nothing short of …”

Miraculous.

Perfect, Uttleman thought. Medical and mystical. There’d be the usual cynics and scoffers, but screw them … they didn’t fill the coffers.

Uttleman startled to the sound of breaking glass from upstairs. He bolted to the elevator, pressing wildly at the button as outsized footsteps thundered across the floor toward the front. He’s going to the window! Uttleman sprinted the stairs to Schrum’s room, seeing a weaving, lurching Schrum pulling at the balcony door. The twenty-four-hour vigil was below on the streets, two hundred or more, many camped there.

“Amos!” Uttleman yelled, crunching over a piece of broken glass, a shattered quart of vodka on the floor. “What are you doing?”

Schrum seemed perplexed by the doorknob, his white hair fallen forward on his head, the eyes glazed and darting. “I have to tell the truth, Roland. I … have to regain my soul.”