“Let it lie, Doc,” Ryan said quietly, so quietly that the old man didn’t hear him above the murmurs of the crowd outside the church.
“I said shield and buckler, Brother Tanner. That was what I said.”
Doc laughed croakily. “My point, my point, sir. That is a plain tautology.”
“What the fuck you blatherin’ about, you triple stupe?” Owsley snapped.
Doc didn’t hear, or ignored, the hostility in the sec man’s voice. “A shield is a buckler. And a buckler is a shield. They are one and the same thing. I believe that what you meant to say was sword and buckler.” A long pause. “Or, mayhap, you might have said sword and shield. One and the same thing, Brother Wolfe. They are one and the same.”
“That is so interesting. By the cherubim and seraphim, Brother Tanner, but I am so pleased that you saw fit to correct my foolish error.”
The sarcasm was tainted with a red-mist anger, barely under control.
Mildred sensed it, stepping between Wolfe and Doc. “That’s enough of errors, Doc,” she said, taking the old man by the arm. “Let’s go and have us some churching.”
“But of course, madam. I shall mark your footsteps, goodly page, and follow in them closely. And the wolf and the moth shall not corrupt us. While the rabid wolf shall lay down with the lion. I could wolf down some good communion wafers and wine. Wolf them, Brother Wolfe.”
Owsley moved in on Mildred, his eyes tight with rage, the tip of his tongue flicking at his suppurating lips like a rattler tasting the air. His hand was on the butt of the Hawes Montana Marshal. “You just shut—” he began.
Ryan’s fingers closed on the SIG-Sauer, and he expected the whole afternoon to erupt into gunfire and bloodshed.
But Joshua Wolfe controlled the moment.
“No!” he snapped, gesturing with the stump of his missing hand. “No, Brother Owsley. It doesn’t signify at all. I’m interested to learn about my mistake.”
The hair-trigger instant came and went. There was a whisper of conversation, overlaid with a touch of disappointment, and they all went inside the church.
THE INSIDE DECORATION of the building wasn’t like anything that Ryan had ever seen before.
Most churches he’d encountered had religious pictures on the walls. Saints at their labors, or resting, in all styles and patterns. One near Zuni had Christian imagery pictured through Native American art, the apostles as kachina figures.
This was different.
“Dad, this is something else,” Dean breathed as he slid along into one of the front oak pews, on the right side of the narrow, maroon-carpeted aisle.
Josiah Steele sat next to Ryan at the end of the row. “Not many churches look like this, do they, Brother Cawdor? You could walk the length and breadth of all Deathlands and never see its like in any ville.”
Ryan nodded. “Can’t argue with that.”
Joshua Wolfe had gone to the front of the building, standing with arms folded, hooded eyes watching as his congregation settled into their places.
“Welcome to the first Church of the Children of the Rock in the holy sanctuary of Hopeville.” His voice was deep and solemn, the words sounding as though they had been dragged out of some cold underground catacomb. “Amen.”
“The Church of Jesus Christ the paramilitary fundamentalist welcomes all.”
That was the motif repeated endlessly around the walls and windows of the building. The same theme even decorated the arched ceiling.
Christ was portrayed as a white man in his thirties, with neatly trimmed hair and a small goatee beard, his blue eyes glittering fanatically. In most of the paintings He was wearing a smart set of camouflage fatigues and carried a whole range of weaponry. The main stained-glass window behind the altar—which was made from ammo boxes riveted together—showed him hefting a Kalashnikov, flames spitting from the muzzle.
In one of the side windows, highlighted in garish reds and yellows, the Savior was carrying an antique Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle, with a bayonet fixed. Blood dripped from the steel blade.
Spread all across the ceiling was the military Jesus, complete with a halo of golden barbed wire, leaning from the cockpit of an unidentifiable tank that was driving over a mountain of pulped corpses, most of which were clearly of different, nonwhite ethnic origins.