Brother Odd

together with the swiftness of a rose blooming in stop-motion photography.
        A third scuttling extrusion of the mother mass assaults, and Maxwell knocks it apart with both a swing and backswing, but the one he had first demolished, now reassembled, rushes him in full bristle and drives two thick barbed spines through his chest.
        When Brother Knuckles turns, he witnesses Maxwell pierced and, with horror, sees his brother transformed, as if by contamination, into a kaleidoscope of flexing-pivoting-rotating bones that shreds out of the storm suit as if stripping away a cocoon, and combines with the bone machine that pierced it.
        Fleeing the room, Knuckles frantically pulls shut the door and, holding it closed, shouts for help.
        Some consideration has been given to such a predicament as this, and two brothers arrive with a chain, which they loop to the levered handle of the door. They join that handle to the one at the adjacent room, ensuring that each door serves as the lock of the other.
        The noise from the elevator shaft grows tremendous, rocking the walls. From behind the closed lift doors comes the sound of the cab roof buckling, as well as the thrum and twang of cables tested nearly to destruction.
        Jacob is where he will be safest, between Sister Angela and Sister Miriam, whom surely even the devil himself will treat with wary circumspection.
        Reborn again, Death shunned me and turned toward the Russian, who proved just two steps faster than the Reaper. Snapping the spare magazine into the Desert Eagle, Romanovich moved toward the man whom I had once admired and shot him twice.
        The impact of.50-caliber rounds knocked John Heineman off his feet. When he went down, he stayed down. He wasn't able to imagine himself reconstructed, because no matter what that lost dark part of his soul might believe, he was not his own creation.
        The Death figure reached Romanovich and laid a hand on his shoulder, but did not assault him. The phantom focused instead on Heineman, as if thunderstruck that its lowercase god had been laid low like any mortal.
        This time Death deconstructed into a spill of cubes that split into more cubes, a mound of dancing dice, and they cast themselves with larval frenzy, rattling their dotless faces against one another until they were only a fizz of molecules, and then atoms, and then nothing at all but a memory of hubris.

CHAPTER 54
        
        BY ELEVEN O'CLOCK THAT NIGHT AS THE STORM began to wane, the initial contingent of National Security agents-twenty of them-arrived in snow-eating monster trucks. With the phones down, I had no idea how Romanovich contacted them, but by then I had conceded that the clouds of mystery gathered around him made my clouds of mystery look like a light mist by comparison.
        By Friday afternoon, the twenty agents had grown to fifty, and the grounds of the abbey and all buildings lay under their authority. The brothers, the sisters, and one shaken guest were exhaustively debriefed, though the children, at the insistence of the nuns, were not disturbed with questions.
        The NSA concocted cover stories regarding the deaths of Brother Timothy, Brother Maxwell, and John Heineman. Timothy's and Maxwell's families would be told that they had perished in an SUV accident and that their remains were too grisly to allow open-casket funerals.
        Already, a funeral Mass had been said for each of them. In the spring, though there were no remains to bury, headstones would be erected in the cemetery by the edge of the forest. At least their names in stone would stand with those whom they had known and loved, and by whom they themselves had been loved.
        John Heineman, for whom also a Mass had been offered, would be kept in cold storage. After a year, when his death would not seem coincidental with those of Timothy and Maxwell, an announcement would be made to the effect that he had died of a massive heart attack.
        He had no family except the son he had never accepted. In spite of the terror and grief that Heineman had brought to St. Bartholomew's, the brothers and sisters were agreed that in a spirit of forgiveness, he should be buried in their cemetery, though at a discreet distance from the others who were at rest in that place.
        Heineman's array of supercomputers were impounded by the NSA. They would eventually be removed from John's Mew and trucked away.