It's Not My Cult!

  IT’S NOT MY CULT!

  A.X. Kalinchuk

  Copyright © 2019 by A.X. Kalinchuk

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Bad Fido

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  It’s Not My Cult!

  About the Author

  Preview from The Lucky Clover by Nick Heeb

  Preview from Guillotine by Paul Heatley

  Preview from Hipster Death Rattle by Richie Narvaez

  For a beloved person I see every day and all of the friends I think of and talk to.

  CHAPTER 1

  Left Behind, Leftover Blues

  Anthony

  My finely-tuned, almost feline senses detected a disturbance. Or maybe not so finely-tuned, not so feline, but there was no denying it: something HAD changed. There. Coming back from the coffee shop, I saw the black couch with a chili-pepper pattern in the alley behind the house.

  My soft, so familiar couch, sat beside a dumpster.

  “Hey!”

  That was all the sound I could make, Tuesday mornings before ten not being my most verbal time.

  “This isn’t happening!”

  I ran up the house’s front steps, a confused angry man with a disposable coffee cup in one hand, keys jingling in the other.

  Flinging open the door, there SHE was, moving a lamp stand into the vacant space where my couch used to be.

  “Hello,” she said, expression blank as porcelain tile.

  “Marcy,” I made myself say, but tamping down incredulous rage while my mouth fought for a way to tell my cousin’s wife how I felt about the missing couch. I had to choose just the right words so it wouldn’t be misreported to my cousin as a tale of a houseguest’s bad manners. I wasn’t ready to be homeless.

  “I guess I could learn to sleep under that lamp.”

  “You’ll have to,” Marcy said, blinking dirty penny eyes.

  “Or maybe I could nest in it like a bird.”

  “Oh, I’d like to see that,” she said.

  “Marcy,” I squeezed the bridge of my nose with my hand, shut my eyes, “is this some message? Because, well, I know we don’t talk.”

  We really didn’t.

  “No. Nothing to say. You’ve been our houseguest for weeks and you don’t pay rent. Nope. No comments.”

  “Marcy, you haven’t ever been targeted by a doomsday cult you used to lead, so I’ll explain.”

  “Oh good.”

  “What?”

  “Start with basics because I haven’t been paying attention this whole time you’ve lived with us.”

  I looked at her. Was she serious? I couldn’t tell, so I told her again anyway. Just in case.

  I mentioned head-butting with Carsewell over control of a cult I started when I was bored one summer. I mentioned that, then my disillusion with how we couldn’t help the people who so desperately believed in a patchwork theology I just threw together as part of a personal performance art project. But those desperate faces got to me until one night, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I confided in Carsewell. He assured me he’d fix the problems, then we got drunk. Or just I did, and then I said a lot of things into a camera, and the next day I woke up hugely hungover. But punching through that great headache and nausea I understood that I was being declared an apostate. And then I was forced to leave the compound some dying man had gifted me out of his delirium while Carsewell smiled down at me from the observation tower. Of course, it was only a matter of time before Carsewell hunted me down.

  “So that’s why,” I concluded.

  “Uh-huh. So. That means what?”

  And here came the tricky part of our chat. Although my cousin knew that the Sons and Daughters of Zot had marked me for death, his wife didn’t. She only thought they harassed me.

  She looked at me closely now, like I was a hair in her soup. Which, I guess to her, I was.

  “My coffee’s getting cold,” I said, not meeting her eye, now hurrying for the door to go back outside.

  And before I made the front door, before I went down the steps and out to the alley to mourn the loss of my couch, that’s when Marcy drilled me right between the shoulder blades.

  “Oh, and by the way, a Jennifer Lott knocked on the door while you were out. She’s looking for you.”

  Jennifer Lott was, of course, a follower of Zot.

  A man under siege needs a fort and for the last few weeks mine was Tenth Street Coffee. Whenever a little Marcy became too much Marcy, I bolted for this neighborhood café that sold hot cups of free trade Arabica and pretentious pastries.

  So ten minutes after leaving Tenth Street Coffee, I was back hoping to talk to Spike, the barista/pseudo-bartender I talked to whenever I had problems.

  Or I would’ve if he wasn’t already talking to somebody.

  She had sandy blond hair and what looked like a good body under a fast food uniform; black pants, non-slip shoes, purple polo, a ponytail flowing out the back of a visored hat.

  Spike saw me, flapped a pale thin tattooed arm’s hello.

  “Refill time?” he called out, looking like someone who needed help exiting an awkward conversation. A strange thing, since Spike sometimes made up sports scores, celebrity rumors, and obscure health tips just to share with customers.

  The patron he’d broken off talking with to acknowledge me, now turned to meet my eye. Coldly.

  “Hey, Anthony.” She made a small mean smirk, a bunny head-twist of a smile. “So, are you? Are you back for refills?”

  It was, of course, Jen Lott.

  With two sets of eyes inside of my local coffee house scrutinizing me as if they were bacteriologists and I was a new unnamed germ, I grew, well, uncomfortable. Spike’s baby blues shined with curiosity, while Jen’s eyes stayed green and fierce. And I couldn’t answer her question. I suspect, however, that it was rhetorical.

  “Are you back for more, Anthony? You know, I just stopped by your place to say ‘hi’ and your cousin’s wife-Marcy?-she told me you’d be here. So I was asking for you.”

  Words wouldn’t come and maybe I thought I’d go the rest of my life like this, mute and guilty, and maybe Jen thought so too because then she said the other thing.

  “You look like you’ve seen the Third Coming of Zot.”

  That did it. That broke our teacup’s quiet.

  “That’s not funny, Jen.” I frowned.

  “Who’s Zot?” Spike asked.

  “Oh, Zot is everything,” Jen said, her smile tight as a zipper sealed with airplane glue. “He offers us life.”

  “Why are you here, Jen?” I studied her, decided she carried no weapon but her native sarcasm. “Why are you in that outfit?”

  She exhaled disgust, broke eye contact.

  I startled, now swiveling my head this way and that like a radar dish on some contested border following a flock of birds. Just because I didn’t see them, didn’t mean the Sons and Daughters of Zot weren’t nearby with tranquilizers and an unmarked van. Or worse, with firm orders and pistols.

  “Who are you looking for?” Jen asked, now glaring.

  I eyeballed the patrons, decided they were okay.

  “You know who.”

  “I’m not with them now.” She snorted. “Doesn’t that explain the Fish Hut uniform?”

  “Is the church sending members out to work?”

  “And I would do that? I’m not WITH them. I fell for it once, I’m smarter now. I have to be.”

  Yes, I knew why.

  “Hey, who is Zot?”

  We both looked at Spike.

  “Speak, o prophet,” she said with the hand flourish of a magician or a card sharp. It hurt. Hadn’t we been more?

  “You’re a prophet?” Spike rocked on his heels, while white-knuckling the marble countertop, like he was fighting to understand us.

  “Fallen prophet,” she said, “so save your hosannas.”

  “Jen, will you let me tell it?”

  “Go ahead.”

  But when my mouth opened nothing happened.

  “You missed the glory days, Spike,” Jen shrugged, “you should’ve seen him back when he could really talk. He had all of us on our knees. Some of us literally.”

  “It wasn’t like that!” And it really wasn’t. Before I learned the awful truth, before Reality slapped the back of my neck one day, I really thought Jen had liked me.

  I know that I liked her.

  “Well,” she said, frowning, “you can try and tell it, but I don’t have time for spaceship religions.
My shift at Fish Hut starts in an hour and I have to catch a bus.”

  “I’ll drive you. I’ll drive you to work, okay?”

  “Who says I want a ride?”

  But she went for the door, put a hand on the handle and raised an eyebrow at me. I left with her, but first I looked back at Spike and he was waving his pale thin tattooed arm at me from behind the bar. I never noticed that his medieval-style tattoo was of a woman spinning a Fortune’s Wheel.

  Even just sitting in Fish Hut’s lot, I could smell battered cod and grease. It was no complaint because I happened to love fish and grease. But Jen was unlocking her door, her Fish Hut visor pulled down low, like someone on a SWAT team.

  “I thought you wanted to talk,” I said.

  She shut the door, settled back in her seat.

  “Sure YOU want to?” she asked.

  She still drew me to her. We shared a lot of past, and I even hoped, that she remembered some of it fondly.

  “Sure,” I said, “let’s talk.”

  “It’s just,” she twisted her mouth, “that was the quietest ride to work I’ve ever had. Not a word. I mean, what was in that rearview mirror you wanted to see so bad?”

  “More like, what I didn’t want to see.”

  “You think the Zot people want you?”

  “I think Carsewell does, and if he says I’m an apostate who deserves death, you know someone’s going to try.”

  “To kill you? Wow. That’s either egotism or paranoia.”

  “Can’t it be both? I’m complex.”

  “Carsewell’s not even that powerful. He tries to inspire people, or at least he did before I left, but he’s not you. Back then you didn’t even know how great you were.”

  These words coming from her thrilled me, so I reached for her body like a plant reaches for sunlight.

  She pushed me off.

  “Easy!”

  She jumped out of the car, leaning down into it to curse me, my ancestors, and my every molecule.

  “What? What did I do?”

  “Oh boy Tony, I just don’t have time to tell you your old mistakes, now I have to start on your new ones?”

  Maybe my monkey-in-an-unpleasant-drug-trial-face wasn’t the response she wanted, or maybe she was being rhetorical. I don’t know. I never understood her, or even rhetorical questions for that matter, although she was once my favorite person ever.

  “How about asking why I’m in town? All you care about is ghosts in the rearview mirror, then you grab me.”

  “I made a pass, you shot me down. Fine. I didn’t commit historical atrocities.”

  She sighed.

  “I get off at eight, if you want to pick me up.”

  “Should I?”

  “My god, after everything Anthony, you don’t think we have something to talk about? At least about Simon?”

  My mind blanked out at his name, as if I’d forgotten to pay a bill. Next thing I knew I was staring at the back of her purple polo as she bounded into work to deep-fry some fish.

  Maybe she was right.

  Maybe I should’ve at least asked about our son.

  Raymond

  “Do you believe it?” I asked Virgil.

  Through binoculars, I watched the fallen prophet of Zot, Anthony Dosek. Dosek sat in his car looking real un-prophet-like outside a Fish Hut. We’d tailed him from the coffee shop to a house then to here, and all without leaving our van. We’d driven by, seen him, U-turned and followed him here to kill him.

  Someone’s good luck is always someone’s shit luck.

  “I’m here and I don’t believe it,” Virgil said, his breath smelling like salsa verde from earlier when we stopped for breakfast burritos.

  “I mean, this is the fish jumping into the boat. Of all the people to see on a Tuesday morning in this city.”

  “The one we were looking for.”

  “Call it luck or fate.” I scratched my knee. “But don’t call it a miracle. Carsewell thinks he invented those.”

  “Yeah, Carsewell.” Virgil did a snuffle-laugh.

  “Don’t you repeat that at the compound, either.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Let’s get the sniper rifle out of the back,” I said, and when Virgil didn’t move from his car seat, I added, “That means, YOU get it.” And while he did, I watched Dosek sitting across the street. A girl in a Fish Hut outfit got out of his car and went inside and left him there in clear sight.

  His head bobbed like a balloon in a shooting gallery.

  I felt Virgil watching me long after I put the sniper rifle down on the floor of the van, and long after Dosek drove away from Fish Hut with his skull intact.

  “I don’t get it,” Virgil said.

  “Some events don’t lend themselves,” I replied, then got out, went around to back of the van to sit on the bumper. I could smell battered cod in the air although all I could see in front of me was a gas station, and behind that, an electronics superstore.

  I could’ve shot him. Aimed, pulled the trigger, thrown the rifle down on the van floor and blown out of there. I’d done it in the service when taking out enemy snipers.

  So why couldn’t I now?

  I heard the van door open and shut, then Virgil sauntered over to join me at the rear bumper. I felt his stare crawling over me. It was some time before he spoke so anyone looking might’ve thought we were watching the electronic superstore, the customers walking in and out, the people pulling their cars to the entrance to have purchases loaded up for them.

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Are you believer of Zot?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “So you know it’s just some kid’s summer project that turned into a money grab from unlucky bastards, right?”

  “I know that.” Then he went quiet, passed a hand over the back of his neck as if he were trying to rub understanding into his flesh. “It’s just…”

  “Just what? We don’t have to do this today, you know.”

  “You had a clear shot. We were one trigger-pull away from doing what we were sent here for. And you let him go.”

  That did it. Snapping out of my trance, I wheeled around on him, grabbing his shirtfront, pulling him up as we both stood. His eyes widened. Good. His fear glistened up at me.

  “Are you going to give me up? Tell Carsewell?”

  “No, no, I just, don’t get it,” he said.

  “So help me, if you’re lying-”

  “I won’t tell. I just want to know why.”

  His hands squeezed my wrists, finally that salsa verde breath in my face making my eyes water got to me. Lucky for him that we hadn’t gotten waffles instead that morning.

  I let go of him, ready to explain.

  “Good thing for you I didn’t want waffles.”

  Anthony

  I drove back to my cousin’s after leaving Fish Hut, still hearing that coolness in Jen Lott’s voice. At red lights I sipped my cold cup of 100% Arabica to deaden this taste Tuesday morning’s regrets. So many of them swarmed around me, it was like trying to chase flies off of summer roadkill.

  Pulling up to my cousin’s, I passed the alley, seeing again my beloved couch sitting next to a dumpster.

  “Goddamn,” I said.

  Flushing away regrets for all of my mistakes with Jen and Zot and Carsewell, I charged up the front stairs, stood in the living room to fight for the one good thing in my life.

  “Marcy, I still don’t know why or how you even got it into the alley by yourself, but I want my couch.”

  “You do.” She spoke to me from behind a glassy expression, and when she went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of tea, I followed her. She didn’t offer me any.

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “You’re aware of what a sovereign is, right?”

  “I don’t know political science. I’m no grad student.”

  “You paid attention. Gold star for you knowing I’m a poli-sci grad student. Yes. So what is sovereignty, Anthony?” She sipped her tea, then put the glass down on the table, and crossed her arms. “Just a basic Webster’s definition.”