He told her about the rampant diseases that swept through a lot of the communities, and the resulting death toll.
“Plus there was radiation in spots from reactor meltdowns, and more radiation from the cities they nuked on First Night. Cancer rates are probably up a thousand percent. For a lot of people in a lot of places it pretty much looked like suffering was all there was and all there was ever going to be.”
“And that’s when they started listening to Saint John?”
“Yup. By then he’d managed to recruit a hundred or so followers. His reapers. They’d go into a town, and at first there were a lot of discussions and sermons about embracing the nonphysical and letting go of the struggle to hold on to a dying world. Crap like that. Saint John presided over mass suicides in one town after another.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It’s people,” said Joe as he began filling the gas tank from a red plastic bottle.
“But . . . how can the reapers convince people to commit suicide when—?”
“When they’re still sucking air? Yeah, well, this whole enchilada gets crazier and crazier. When they’ve wiped out all the heretics and blasphemers, they intend to kill each other, and the last man standing will hang himself. Delightful, huh?”
“Really stupid,” Lilah insisted.
“Not everyone is suited for survival, especially the way people were in the early twenty-first century. People had gotten really soft, really addicted to machines, electronics, and specialists who would come in and do everything from fixing the plumbing to pulling a tooth. Nobody knew how to do things for themselves. It was kind of pathetic.”
“You sound like you agree with Saint John.”
He set down the plastic container and replaced the quad’s gas cap. “No freaking way, darlin’. Just because there are a lot of sheep doesn’t mean everyone’s a sheep. There are a lot—a whole lot—of cases where people really rose to the challenge. They learned what they didn’t know, they built shelters, they rediscovered hunting and farming, they reclaimed those qualities that put man at the top of the food chain in the first place. And they became the leaders who gathered everyone else around them. Your own town, and the other eight there in central California, are examples of that. People pitching in together to make a better life for everyone.”
“How many towns did Saint John attack?”
“Too many,” said Joe bitterly. “Way too many.”
“Is there anyone left?”
He nodded. “Sure. Saint John never made it to North Carolina, and that’s where the real heartbeat of this country is. It’s the new capital. Granted, it’s a small start compared to what we lost, but it is a start. And there are a lot of scattered towns and settlements. It’s a big country, and Saint John hasn’t had time to kill everyone.” He paused. “If his army keeps growing at the rate it’s been going . . . then nowhere’s going to be safe.”
“You make him sound as dangerous as the plague.”
Joe nodded again. “Yeah . . . I guess he is. He uses Mother Rose to recruit people into the reapers so he has a big enough force to destroy any town that won’t simply roll over for him. It’s a useful model for conquest. Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great did the same thing, though their motives were different.”
“I don’t understand it, though,” said Lilah. “Why do so many people join him?”
Joe helped her onto the back of the quad. “Too many people have simply lost hope. As long as the Gray Plague is still happening and the zoms are still out there, it’s going to be hard for most people not to think Saint John has the only answer worth hearing.”
“But you said that Dr. McReady and the others were working on a cure. . . . ”
“They are, sure.” Joe sighed. “But most people don’t know that. McReady’s breakthrough, whatever it is, is new science. We don’t even know what it is yet, or whether it’ll really change things. And without McReady’s research, we’re still stuck on the same sinking ship.”
Lilah said, “Have you given up hope too?”
Joe adjusted the seat belts carefully around Lilah’s wound. “Not a chance.”
“You’re going to fight back?”
“Honey, I never stopped fighting.” He slid his katana into a slot on the quad. “So here’s the plan. We’re going to find your friends, and then you kids are going to help me search every inch of that plane. If there’s any chance that even some of McReady’s research survived the crash, then I need to secure it and get it into the hands of the rest of the research team.”
“Where are they?”
“Close,” said Joe. “McReady only took a small team with her to Hope One. The rest of the science geeks are split between a new lab in North Carolina and one they set up in a military base out here. They had to reclaim the base from the zoms, but that was no problem, and it was in great shape. It was what they called a ‘hardened’ facility, meaning that the EMPs didn’t knock out the power. Once they reclaimed it, the geek squad were able to repurpose the base from military research and development to a biological research facility.”
“A laboratory?” asked Lilah. “Out here?”
“Yup,” said Joe. “Really well-hidden but closer than you’d think. McReady named it Sanctuary.”
And he told Lilah where it was.
59
AS THE SOUND OF THE RANGER’S QUAD FADED, SISTER AMY ROLLED OUT from under the line of shrubs. Her mind burned with the things she wanted to tell Saint John. Needed to tell him.
Sanctuary.
And . . . nine towns.
Towns with no organized defenses.
As she ran through the woods she could not keep the smile off her face.
60
BROTHER PETER KNELT IN THE DIRT BEFORE SAINT JOHN. HE RESTED HIS weight on his fists, his head was bowed, and he waited for the storm of the saint’s wrath to tear the world apart.
But there was silence.
After almost three excruciating minutes, Brother Peter raised his head and looked at the man who he worshipped more than the Lord Thanatos. His friend, his mentor, and in every way that mattered, his father.
Saint John stood there, hands clasped behind his back, head tilted to one side as he watched monkeys frolic in the trees. No storms of rage burned across the saint’s face. There were no tears.
There was nothing.
“Honored One?” ventured Brother Peter. “Did you hear what I—?”
Saint John spoke, his quiet voice overriding the younger man’s.
“When the world burned down,” he said, “I was alone. For many months before that, I was in a hospital, in a psychiatric ward—did you know that?” He did not wait for an answer. “They thought I was sick . . . mentally unstable . . . because I said that the god of darkness spoke to me inside my head. There are people with such sickness, you know; before the Fall and since. Some of them have joined us. Others have joined the way-station monks. After all, God speaks in so many different ways, and in the end he speaks to everyone.”
“Even heretics?”
“Even them,” agreed Saint John. “Although the heretics hear the voice of God and refuse to listen. Others—the lost ones—hear the voice and don’t, or can’t, recognize it for what it is. They are to be pitied. When we usher them into the darkness, it is always with kindness, with a gentler touch of the knife.”
The saint began walking, and Brother Peter rose and fell into step beside him.
“After the Fall, I wandered the streets of my city, watching it burn, watching the darkness grow. The Gray People never touched me. Not once.”
“A miracle, Honored One.”
“Yes. It was proof, you see. It showed others that I was indeed the first saint of this church.” They walked through the forest as casually as if the day had not been filled with screams and murder. Two scholars idly discussing a point of philosophy on a lovely afternoon. “And then I found Mother Rose. She was . . . merely ‘Rose’ then. A woman who had lost herself even before the
world fell down around her. I rescued her from savage men, heretics who saw the coming of the darkness as an invitation to hurt and humiliate those weaker than themselves.”
“I remember,” said Brother Peter faintly.
“I know you do. And you remember the years that followed, as Rose accepted the darkness into her heart and became elevated as the mother of all.”
“Yes.” Brother Peter could not keep the bitterness out of his voice.
“Those were good days. You were so young and yet so bright. So eager to learn the ways of the blade and the purity that is the darkness. Pride is a sin, but I will accept whatever rebuke is due me for the pride I felt in you. Then and now. You have been the rock on which I built the Night Church.” They walked a few paces. “You, Peter. Not her.”
Brother Peter bowed his head in humility.
“Tell me,” said Saint John, “when you look inside your head and your heart . . . at those times when you are in the depths of prayer and meditation . . . what does paradise look like?”
“Look like?” asked Peter.
“Yes. If you were to paint a picture of what waits for us—what you want to be on the other side of the doorway, what you truly believe is beyond this world—what is that picture? Describe it to me.”
They walked for half a dozen paces before Peter said, “It is the darkness.”
“And—?”
“The darkness is all. The darkness is enough. The darkness is everything.”
Saint John nodded. “That is what I see. That is what I believe is there.”
“But I—”
“And when you think about this world—when you imagine what this planet will be when the last of the heretics is gone, and when the last of us communes with our own blades so that our darkness joins with eternity—tell me, Brother Peter, what does this world look like?”
They were at the edge of the forest now, and they looked out on the vast desert that stretched away before them and vanished into the shimmering horizon. Brother Peter nodded toward the endless sand. “That is what I see, Honored One.”
“The desert?”
“The peacefulness. Empty of human pain and misery. Empty of struggle. Restored to the perfection of nature.”
“And all that man has made and built?”
“It will turn to dust. This world will heal of the infection that is man. The world will be whole and perfect again.”
They stood there for many minutes as they each considered this.
“Do you know,” asked Saint John at length, “that I always knew this day was coming?”
Brother Peter turned and stared at him.
“Mother Rose,” said the saint. “It was inevitable that she would betray me. It was ordained that it happen. Like in the Christian story of Jesus and Judas. The betrayal was always part of the plan. Judas was a good and righteous man for most of his life, but in a moment of weakness, or perhaps pride, he stepped off the path.”
Brother Peter nodded.
“For ordinary people,” the saint continued, “such a thing can be forgiven. It can be ascribed to human weakness. As with Thomas, who doubted, and Peter, who denied. Those are momentary weaknesses, forgivable sins.”
“But not Judas?”
“Not him for the Christians, and not Mother Rose for us. She is not an ordinary person. Neither are you, and neither am I. Why? We have looked into our minds and have seen the true face of our god.”
“The darkness,” said Brother Peter.
“The darkness,” said Saint John. “I fear that Mother Rose has turned away from the darkness and allowed herself to become seduced by the light. By this world. Not the pure world that will come, but the corrupt and infected world that existed before the Fall. I have long suspected that she enjoyed being in the flesh. She has become seduced by its illusion of power.”
“Yes.”
“It is why she has worked so hard to recruit new reapers.”
“But we need—”
“No. We have more than we will ever need. We have reapers in the thousands, and we have the Gray People in their millions. Mother Rose has never quite grasped that. Or rather, she has purposely ignored it. She wants people to stay alive.”
“Why?” asked Brother Peter, appalled by the very thought of it.
“For the same reason she has recruited so very many reapers.”
“And . . . why?”
Saint John smiled. “She wants to conquer the world, my son,” he said, “and then she intends to rule it.”
Brother Peter shook his head. “But she knows the darkness. She believes—”
“Don’t you think that Judas believed in the son of his god? Don’t you think that those people who flew planes into towers or strapped on vests of explosives believed in their god? There are misguided people in all faiths, and there always have been.” Saint John sighed. “Mother Rose has been very quietly recruiting from within the reapers. Brother Alexi, Brother Simon . . . others. The weak ones who think they are strong, but who long to be here rather than to truly be with the darkness. She will use them as her generals. They probably believe in her with their whole hearts. Some of them are quite lost. Others . . . well, there has always been corruption in any organized religion. Insidious people who exploit the honest faith of the masses. Mother Rose will use all that—faith, belief, greed, whatever tools she can find—and with those she will very likely conquer every settlement, town, and city in this country. She will make a kingdom for herself here on earth.”
He pointed into the desert.
“And I suspect she wants to make Sanctuary her Camelot, the seat of her power.”
Brother Peter felt stricken. “Then . . . we have failed?”
The saint turned toward him, his face filled with love but also with a passionate light. “No, my son, and do not fall to doubt now. Mother Rose does not know that we know. In her pride, she opens her throat to us.”
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Warrior Smart
Tom wasn’t one for he-man war quotes, but there were two that he liked.
“Si vis pacem, para bellum,” which was a quote from De Re Militari by fourth-century Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus. It translates as: “If you wish for peace, prepare for war.”
Tom said that the best way to ensure that you won’t be attacked is to be too strong to make it worth the other guy’s while. Or something like that. I mean, I never read much about samurai or armed soldiers getting mugged.
The other phrase was one from the samurai: “We train ten thousand hours to prepare for a single moment that we pray never comes.”
I get that.
61
FOR A LONG TIME CHONG FLOATED IN AN INFINITE OCEAN OF PAIN.
For hours, days, weeks . . . maybe years.
Time was meaningless.
Then he heard a voice.
“You in there, boy?”
“Don’t . . . call me ‘boy,’” Chong said thickly.
“I need y’all to wake up,” said Riot. “We need to have us a talk.”
Chong slowly opened his eyes. He was lying on his uninjured side and had to look over his shoulder to see Riot, who knelt behind him. She appeared to be studying the exit wound. When Chong looked down at the entry wound, all he saw was a red-black burn.
He expected it to hurt, and it did. The area around the burn was puffy and red. Chong felt hot, as if the heat of the cauterizing blade had infused his entire body. Sweat ran down his torso and pooled under him.
“I don’t feel too great,” he said.
Riot breathed in and out through her nose for a moment. “Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” she said. “We maybe got us a problem.”
“Really? A problem?” He arched an eyebrow. “Beyond arrows, burned flesh, an army of killers, and the end of the world?”
She did not smile.
“Riot—?”
Instead of answering, she picked up the arrowhead she’d unscrewed. She sniffed it, and her frown deepened. Th
en she picked up the quiver of arrows and studied the blackened tips of each.
“Oh, man . . . ,” she breathed.
“What is it?” asked Chong. “What’s wrong? Is it poison?”
Riot got up and walked around so she faced him. There was a haunted look in her eyes, and her mouth was drawn and tight.
“Is it poison?” Chong repeated.
“No,” she said faintly. “No, I don’t think we’re going to catch that kind of a break.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? It doesn’t look that bad.”
“You ain’t seein’ it from t’other side. Skin around the wound looks funny. It’s turning black, and there are some crooked dark lines creeping out from it.”
“God,” said Chong, feeling panic leap up in his chest. “That’s blood poisoning! You’re telling me I have blood poisoning?”
After a long pause, Riot said, “I don’t think that’s what we got here. The lines are black, not red.”
“But—”
“You’re running a fever . . . but the skin back here’s cool to the touch.”
“Then we need to treat me for shock. Do you have anything we can use as a blanket or—”
“No,” she said. “Ain’t shock, neither. I think we got ourselves somethin’ else. Something we maybe can’t fix.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That black goo on the tips?” Riot held one of the arrows under his nose. “Tell me what it smells like to you.”
Chong studied her eyes for a long moment. There was a bleak, defeated look in them that made him hesitate before he took an arrow from her. Even then he didn’t immediately raise the arrow to his nose.