Flesh & Bone (31 page)

“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

F
OR A LONG TIME
C
HONG 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. Then 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.

“You already know what it is,” he asked quietly, “don’t you?”

Riot nodded.

Chong closed his eyes for a moment. Instead of it being dark behind his eyelids, he saw twisted threads of bright red forking like lightning inside his personal darkness.

Then he opened his eyes and took a tentative sniff. He smelled what she had smelled.

“No,” he said, and his denial matched frequency with hers. This wasn’t something you just could refuse to accept.

Riot said nothing.

“Why . . . why would anyone
do
something like that?” demanded Chong.

“Why do you think?”

The answer was obvious, but it took all his courage to say it. “So . . . even if he just wounded someone . . . they’d . . . they’d . . .”

Words failed him.

Riot sighed and sat down on the floor, placing the arrows well away from Eve.

However, the smell lingered in Chong’s nose. He knew exactly what it was, and why it smelled like cadaverine.

The archer had dipped his arrows in the infected flesh of the living dead.

And now that infection was burning its way through Chong’s flesh.

62

“H
ONORED
O
NE
!”
CRIED
S
ISTER
A
MY AS SHE DASHED OUT OF THE WOODS.

The saint and Brother Peter turned and waited for her to catch up with them. Amy was badly winded, and she dropped to her knees before them, bending to kiss the red tassels on their legs.

When she could speak without panting, Sister Amy told them about finding the ranger named Joe, and watching as he rescued a white-haired girl, tended to her wounds, and spoke with her. She told the saint everything and saved the choicest bit for last.

Saint John listened, and when she was finished, his eyes blazed with inner light.

“Nine towns,” he murmured. “In central California?”

“No militia,” mused Brother Peter. “Living up there in the mountains, they probably think they have nothing to fear except wandering gray people.”

“From what the girl said,” added Sister Amy, “they seem to believe that everything beyond their fence lines is wasteland.”

“How naive,” said Saint John. “How arrogant.”

He turned and looked toward the northwest as if he could see across all those miles.

“Nine towns,” he said softly.

63

“W
E BETTER NOT STAY HERE LONG,
”
SAID
B
ENNY
. “L
ET
’
S TAKE A QUICK
look through this stuff, then get the heck out of here before those reapers come back. And we have to find Lilah and Chong. They don’t know about all this crazy stuff.”

Nix gave a noncommittal grunt as she set to work searching the cabinets and closets in the cockpit.

A few seconds later Nix opened one cabinet and jumped back as papers, maps, and other items came tumbling out. A mouse squeaked and dropped to the floor before scurrying into a tiny opening in the control panel. Benny squatted down and began poking through the papers. Nix picked up the maps and began unfolding them.

Benny saw a sheaf of papers on a clipboard hanging from a hook inside the cabinet. He pulled it down and began leafing through the pages in hopes of finding something that might provide answers to the mysteries that were stacking up all around them.

What he found instead dried the spit in his mouth and made his heart begin pounding like the hooves of a galloping horse.

“Nix!” he hissed. “My God . . . look at this.”

“What is . . . ?” She trailed off as she began reading.

What they read changed their world.

McREADY, MONICA A., M.D. / FIELD NOTES