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
“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?”
