City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance Page A

feel much pain because the cold was seeping into his bones and everything was numb. Particularly, he couldn’t feel his right arm. He didn’t want to turn his head and look. What if the damn arm was gone completely?  That would’ve been too goddamn depressing to even think about.
    He gave his best effort toward lifting his head, but didn’t have any luck. The road scraped his jaw and fresh warmth trickled down his temple. But by casting his eyes up as far as they would go, he could see the tail end of the Sheriff’s Department transport van. The rear doors were thrown open, and one of the cops half-hung out of it. His hand dangled over the road. Three of his fingers were gone, from when he’d raised his hand to ward off the machete blow.
    Crowe couldn’t hear anything except his own heart pounding against the blacktop.  
    That was when the Ghost Cat came out of nowhere. It materialized before him, flickering like an ancient piece of film, black and white and ravaged by time.
    Black and sleek, with the white cross on its forehead, like a Pentecostal. It meowed, but the sound of it seemed far away. It wandered around amidst the spent bullet casings and blood, sniffing, searching.
    “Cat,” Crowe said, for no good reason.
    It looked at him with curious gray eyes, meowed again. He couldn’t hear it now. It sat on the cold road, licked irritably at its hind-quarters, and looked at him one more time.
    Then it disappeared. It just evaporated, like steam off the blacktop.
    “No,” Crowe said. “Come back.”
    He rolled his eyes back to a more comfortable position and saw Chester, about six or seven feet away. He was on his back, near the side of the road. He didn’t look so good, but as Crowe watched him he saw his chest moving up and down—very slowly, almost imperceptibly, but moving.
    The sonofabitch was alive.
    Not far from his head, metal glinted. Crowe focused on it. It was a gun, a revolver. Not his, he had no idea where his was, and not Chester’s or D-Lux’s. One of the cops, maybe. He grasped at it with his left hand. His fingers barely reached the barrel, but he managed to snag it and painstakingly drag it toward him.
    When it was close enough, he grabbed the grip. It was cold in his palm.
    “Hah,” he said to himself.
    He extended his arm in Chester’s direction, aimed the gun at the back of Chester’s head, pulled the trigger.
    The hammer slammed on an empty chamber.
    “Sonofabitch…” he said. “Sonofabitch gun…”
    He tried two or three more times, just for the hell of it, but no-go. He put the goddamn useless gun down next and closed his eyes. Death. Ghost Cat means death. I dreamed about it. I dreamed about the Ghost Cat .  
    That’s when the ice started coming down.
     
    He heard tires squealing as their back-up arrived, someone saying, “ Jesus Christ, what the fuck! ” and he thought about the lesson he should’ve known by now, the adage he’d had to learn the hard way, seven years ago: That’s what you get, fella, for going into something not knowing.
    That was all.
     

Our defining tragedy , Crowe once heard a melodramatic news anchor call it, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. What the assassination of JFK was to a previous generation, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or any number of horrible things you can think of. Crowe remembered it very well, because at the time he was beating a man to death in a seedy hotel room off Elvis Presley Boulevard, in Whitehaven.
    The little 13-inch TV was on the whole time, but he didn’t notice it because he was preoccupied. He was pulling Leon Berry up off the floor for the third time, getting annoyed because Leon kept laughing, even with a mouth full of broken teeth. “Not the time for chuckles,” Crowe said, and slapped him backhand across his jaw.
    Leon grunted, blood spilling down his chin onto his bare chest, and laughed again and mumbled, “You gotta… you gotta do better than that…”
    It took a great deal to get