“We’ve tried to give you time and space on this,” he said, “but I’m afraid both of those things are running out. All our intelligence suggests the Heavenly Kingdom is very close to another all-out assault. They’ll move on Waco in four or five days. They could be outside Austin in a week’s time.”

“You are free to make whatever call you want. Our offer to fly you to Austin still stands, mijo,” said Nana Yazzie. “But I am afraid we need you to make a decision now.”

“I’ll do it,” Manny said.

Almost everyone looked surprised. Donald coughed. Nana Yazzie’s eyes went wide. Reggie did a double-take. Skullfucker Mike just smiled and nodded at Manny. Roland didn’t look as if he’d been affected in any way. In fact, Manny was pretty sure he was drumming along to some music only he could hear. It might’ve been Ronnie James Dio’s “Holy Diver.”

Chapter 14

Roland.

Once he’d been dismissed, Roland had made it his immediate business to get as high as post-humanly possible before he was needed. This was not a difficult task. Rolling Fuck had been built to keep buzzes going.

The main roller’s bar stocked an assortment of beers mixed with LSD, laudanum, dimethyltryptamine, and a half-dozen Shulgin chemicals. Roland started off by sampling them all. He drank until the fireworks show in his head was indistinguishable from the actual fireworks outside. Are those real, or am I just fuckin’ LIT? Roland decided that answering that question wouldn’t make him happier.

He lost himself for a while and drifted from one of the Fondleboats to a dance party in a field underneath the main gantry. After hours of that, Roland had his fill of rhythm, so he found his way to a coke binge in a weird purple house atop one of the spindles. The rest of the night he spent testing the limits of his toxin filters and his tolerance for human contact.

The latter came first. He abandoned the coke party and stumbled through Rolling Fuck until he reached a small booth with baggies of Umm Nylokh, a DMT-based hallucinogen made from synthetically grown giraffe liver.

Things got fuzzy after that. There was a fireworks fight on a spindle that caught a shack on fire. He downed a shitload of mescaline as the sun breached. And then, quite suddenly, it was afternoon and he was lying on his back across the baking hot metal of one of the spindles. Skullfucker Mike stood above him, naked as the day he was born and holding some sort of frosty, purple beverage in a large tiki cup.

“Hey, man,” Mike said as he took a sip. “Nana Yazzie told me to find you. You straight enough to talk to people?”