Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [69]
Clown levelled his rifle at him with one hand, then lowered it again. The missionary was dead. His job was done without him having to pull the trigger.
He moved closer, puzzled by the grisliness of the tableaux.
The head the missionary was clutching was white, or at least those bits of the skin not daubed with drying blood were white. There was a clumsily-made hole in the left temple, and bits of grey matter were slopped around the abrasure.
Nice.
Clown tutted and turned to leave.
‘I have eaten God.’
Clown swung around, the rifle level in his grip once more.
The dead missionary was looking at him. Eyes vacant, mouth now closed and Clown could see the flecks of grey upon the lips. He spoke again:
‘I have eaten... God.’
Clown lowered the gun. The missionary was a lunatic –
that was evident – but still alive.
‘What happened here?’
Father Pieter looked right through him, and what should have been a disconcerting sight for any self-respecting missionary in his nice colonial house – namely, the sight of a mercenary with clown make-up standing in his living room pointing a gun at his head – seemed not to throw him at all.
He’d obviously seen worse shit.
‘I said, what happened here?’ he repeated when the Father said nothing.
The missionary looked down at the head in his lap. ‘You came home, my friend,’ he said in a voice weak with insanity.
‘You came home to find me... and how did I greet you?’ He was laughing now; a horrible, drooling hollow sound that almost raised Clown’s hairs. Almost, but no cigar. He was tempted to smoke the creep right now but he had things to sort out.
‘You’ve been a bad preacher man, haven’t you?’ He stepped past the armchair and its mad occupant, nudged the door to the hallway open with his army boot. Scanned the hall quickly. Nothing.
Looked like the preacher man was all on his own. ‘I said you’ve been bad: He returned his attention to the bizarre figure in the armchair. ‘Been writing a journal about the jayapul uprisings. Saying things the lovely President Sabit isn’t too keen on. You been sending reports home stating Sabit’s been staging the riots to discredit the OPG and justify Indoni army occupation... that’s right, isn’t it?’ He was wasting his words.
The man merely looked at him, drooling. Eyes not even clocking the Clown. ‘The journal, you old fool. I want to know where every report you’ve still got is kept.’ He sighed, and then smiled, although the expression was lost under the permanent garish lipstick grin already etched on his face. Sabit was worried about this sad sack of shit?
‘You’ve really been a bad, bad preacher of the Word, ain’t you?’
‘I have eaten God.’ The father raised the severed head until it was level with his own, and facing his own. ‘And now I can never eat again. My old friend, what did they do to you?’
He lowered the head and gave Clown a beseeching look. ‘Kill me. Please.’
Clown shrugged. ‘Well, what the hell else did you think I came here for?’ He ratcheted the safety and was about to press the trigger when he stopped. ‘No.’
The preacher implored him with bloody hands.
‘I said no. I don’t wanna do you any favours, you sick bastard. And I don’t wanna do Sabit any either. He need never know I didn’t carry out his “special duty”. No... I think I’ll just leave you with your cannibal buddies. Looks like you’re one of them now.’
He ignored the drools and whimpers and left the house.
Out on the walkways, there was still nobody around to explain what had happened, except for a black hunchbacked bird hopping among the carnage, and he wasn’t talking. Agat was a ghost town. A Blood Town. He’d read enough about the place to know that it had started out as a missionary outpost in the utmost wilderness of the jungle. The first attempts at creating a town had been drowned in blood as the cannibals reacted violently toward this unorthodox intrusion into their natural habitat. It looked like Agat had reverted to form.
He shouldered the rifle and headed for his cruiser, parked next to the ransacked police hut.
Some things you just really shouldn