The Acolyte Read Online Free Page B

glass.
    I pulled up at a quarter past seven: with midnight curfew, a night on the town gets started early. I nodded to the pair of off-duty officers at the gate and rolled down the crushed gravel drive to the estate. The healthy oaks stunned me: we’d been on water ration for years. Last summer’s drought turned every tree in the city into husks.
    The mansion: 120 rooms, banquet hall, gold-trimmed toilet fixtures—or so I’ve heard. The courtyard was dominated by a fountain: a statue of The Prophet, twenty feet high and carved from alabaster marble, water welling from his cupped palms. The plaque at its base read BESTOWER OF ALL THINGS .
    A trio waited at the top of the terrace stairway. The Prophet’s eldest daughter and a pair of famished sycophants.
    Eve, the daughter: tall and lithe and gorgeous in a white evening dress. A gold crucifix drew attention to her cleavage. Her constant companion, a teacup Chihuahua named Erasmus, sat in a handbag at the end of her arm. A crucifix had been bleached into the fur between the little dog’s eyes.
    “You’re late,” she said as I opened the car door for her.
    I tipped an invisible chauffeur’s cap. “Forgive me.”
    She disappeared into the backseat, flanked by her human lapdogs: two girls as skinny as tent poles, arms jutting from the puffy sleeves of taffeta gowns. They looked identical: when people reach a critical point of malnutrition, they all look the same. Their heads were just skulls wrapped in crepe paper.
    I piloted the Buick into the city. The sun sank over the downtown core, reflecting off the skyscrapers. I cut down Gilead to Iscariot, skirting Kiketown. A thirty-foot-tall razor wire fence ran round the ghetto’s perimeter: Jews were permitted to work in the city proper but otherwise confined from ten o’clock at night until five the following morning within their ghetto.
    “Jimmy Saint Kincaid is playing tonight,” I heard Eve say. “I simply adore him.”
    “Oh, yes,” said one of the taffeta-clad hand puppets. “He is sooo pious.”
    “Have you heard his newest song,” said Eve, “‘Nailz Thru My Palms’?”
    “Love it, just love it,” the other hand puppet said. “I can feel the Lord’s love shining through his music.”
    “Eehhh.” Eve sounded bored. “He’s got a great ass, give him that.”
    The two hand puppets covered their mouths, shocked. They sat on either side of Eve: a pair of spindle-thin bookends. The Prophet’s wife, Effie—The Immaculate Mother, Virgin Mother of The One Child—was their idol. The Immaculate Mother looked like a driftwood skeleton; she was so wan you could see her facial veins magnified on the three-storey SuperChurch JumboTron TV every week.
    The Immaculate Mother said the Lord had come to her in a dream and told her that the devout must prove their piety through deprivation. Her profile graced bottles of the city’s best-selling beverage, Purity Purge. Ingredients: water, lemon juice, a mild laxative agent.
    I cut down Jericho and into the club district. A Daily Benediction Booth on the corner did brisk business. At a cost of two gerahs, the faithful could duck into the city’s many DBBs to receive a videotaped blessing from The Prophet. For an extra cost, the booths dispensed a thumbnail-sized wafer and a wine lozenge.
    We reached The Manger.
    I parked down a side street to avoid the front-door crush. My rap on a corrugated steel delivery door was answered by a huge black bouncer in a crisp white suit.
    “Bring her in,” he said.
    I guided my charges through the prep area and out a swinging service door into the club. High-ceilinged and well-lit—darkness breeds vice, you see—and packed with bodies.
    Music pulsed from the speaker system. Musicians in the Republic were not permitted to compose music with a tempo in excess of sixty beats per minute, as accelerated tempos encouraged “licentious bodily motions.” The current song, heavy on church organ, inspired a general malaise: patrons