“Listen,” said Joe softly, “I just brought back the last of the stuff from the plane. The scientists are going over it now. It was exactly what they needed. It… ” His voice trailed off.
“Go away,” said Benny. His voice was crushed flat and empty.
Joe walked around and stood in front of them, forcing them to see him, to react to him. He squatted down, resting his elbows on his knees. Grimm stood beside him, his eyes dark and liquid.
“I want you two to listen to me,” Joe said. “Straight talk here, okay? I know you’re hurting. I know why you left Mountainside. I understand why you’ve been searching for the jet. I know what it means to you. A better place than your little town. A chance at a real future. I get that. I’d have done the same. Tom must have thought so too, or he’d have never left and never taken you with him.”
“You don’t know anything,” said Nix.
“No? Well, I know this much,” said Joe. “You left a place that was dying on its feet. Mountainside and the rest of the Nine Towns are just going through the motions of being alive. Everybody knows that. You knew it and you got the hell out. You wanted to find a place to start something new and fresh.”
Benny glanced at him. It was almost the same thing Tom had said.
“You have,” said Joe.
“No,” said Nix.
Somewhere far away a coyote whined at the rising moon.
“You found the stuff in the jet,” said Joe. “You kids might have actually helped saved the world.”
“It’s not worth it,” Benny said. “It cost too much.”
Joe sighed and stood up. He looked up at the endless stars.
“It’s been a long night,” he said softly, “and there are still a lot of hours of darkness left. But… ”
He started to turn away, and Benny said, “But what?”
Joe gave him a small, sad smile. “No matter how long the night is, the sun always comes up.”
He nodded to them, clicked his tongue for Grimm, and walked slowly away. He climbed onto his quad and started the engine.
They watched him drive away.
After a while Nix turned to Benny. “Is he right?” she asked.
Benny shook his head. “I don’t know.”
He wrapped his arm around her, and they looked up at the lighted window.
The stars burned their way across the sackcloth that covered the sky.
— 5-
Saint John stood on a cliff that looked down on a black road. Brother Peter stood beside him, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed in thought. It was a beautiful night, with a billion stars and a fingernail moon. Crickets chirped in the grass, and owls hunted in the air.
The saint enjoyed being out here in the wild. The desert had reclaimed much of the road over the years, but it was there, and it ran straight and true to the line of mountains that formed the border of Nevada and California.
“Nine towns,” murmured Saint John. “And a place called Mountainside.”
“Praise be to the darkness,” said Brother Peter.
Saint John raised his hand, held it high in the moonlight for a long moment, and pointed a slender finger toward the road. Toward the northwest.
The desert behind him was like a sea of roiling black. The reapers came first, flowing out of the dark, and as they reached Brother Peter they formed into orderly lines, seven across. Then they followed Brother Peter down the road. Some of them prayed, some of them sang. It took twenty minutes for all the reapers to file past where the saint stood.
Thousands upon thousands of reapers.
Those who had thought themselves lost when the world ended, who now knew that all roads led through pain and into the healing darkness. Those who had lost faith in this world of disease and death and endless struggle, who now thrived with a purpose — God’s purpose. Many of them had once fought against the reapers and then, in their defeat, beheld the truth and took up their weapons again in the service of Thanatos, all praise his darkness.
The lost who had been found.
The blind who now saw.
The last army of the world, marching to fight the last war. The only war that ever mattered. The war to save mankind from its own sinful ways.
Saint John lingered a moment after the last of them was on the road. He closed his eyes and lifted a silver dog whistle to his lips, kissed it, and then blew into it, long and hard.
Behind him a second wave — ten times larger than the mass of reapers — moved forward. If the reapers were a sea, then this was an ocean, moving in a tidal surge under the watching moon. All the crickets were shocked to silence by the moan that rose from tens of thousands of dead throats.
Saint John smiled.
Nine towns waiting.
All those godless souls waiting, aching to be shown the way.
His reapers would open red mouths in the flesh of every man, woman, and child.
And then the gray people would consume them all, flesh and bone.
