surprise.
“About a week after we arrived, me, Tomlinson, and a few others from my old squad were wandering around the capital when we saw an inter-city bus cream some poor kid that just ran out in the road. We were gonna try and see if we could help, but we couldn’t get near the accident. It seemed like people all of a sudden just appeared out of nowhere and surrounded that bus like a human wall. They didn’t do or say much of anything at first, like they were only rubbernecks or something. Then somebody shouted something and it set them off. First it was only murmurs and grumbling, but in a few minutes they were all shouting and angry as hell, buzzing around that bus like a bunch of hornets. It wasn’t long after that when they started in, attacking those poor bastards in the bus. Even then, the driver might have been able to get away, but he waited too long. He never should have stopped.” The memory gave him the shivers. “The crowd ripped open that bus like an army of red ants tearing into a caterpillar. They dragged all those people off, maybe a couple dozen, and beat every last one of them to death. They took the driver, who was probably already dead, and trussed him between a couple of skimmers. They took off in different directions, and that was the last of him.” He smiled grimly. “Then they turned on us.”
Jodi silently wondered if he had ever told this story to anyone before. She had only known the man for several weeks, but she felt she knew him well. In the daily battles they had fought, she had never seen him show fear; he had been an idyllic leader to his Marines, fierce and courageous, and a welcome support for her. It was difficult to imagine him being any other way. But, listening to his tale, she caught a glimpse of something else, of a time when Gunnery Sergeant Tony Braddock had indeed been afraid.
He looked back at the crowd that was beginning to gather at the city gates. “I had already gotten my people moving back down the street, away from the trouble, but it wasn’t soon enough.” He made a nervous laugh that caught in his throat. “You can’t imagine what it feels like to be running like hell, with the ground shaking under your feet and your ears filled with the screaming of a few thousand pissed-off indigs chasing after you. Lord of All,” he said quietly, “I’ve never been so scared by anything, before or since.”
“Why were they after you guys?” Jodi asked. “You didn’t do anything.”
Braddock shrugged. “Who knows? I guess it was because we were there, and we were different. Just like the people on that bus. They happened to be Muslims on their way through a Hindu town to somewhere else. But, from what we read later about the place, it just as easily could have been a bunch of Hindus in a Muslim town. Wouldn’t have mattered a bit.
“Anyway, we managed to get away with a few cuts and bruises from bottles and rocks, running fast enough to leave most of the rioters behind to look for someone else to beat up on. A few minutes later, a bunch of Territorial Army guys were heading back down the street to bust some heads and get those people under control, but it was too late for the people on that bus, and almost too late for us.” He shook his head. “The news reported that eighty people died and over three hundred were injured in the rioting that day. That’s what you get when religious fervor mixes with fear and hate. A bloody frigging mess.”
There were over four thousand adults in the village of Rutan, Jodi thought. What if Father Hernandez’s zealous pacifism was fired into righteous anger and fear? Jodi, while not an ardent student of history, had read enough to know that some of humanity’s bloodiest wars had been fought in the name of one god or another. And the Rutanians outnumbered her Marines by about two hundred to one.
“Jesus,” she whispered.
For one of the few times in his life, Father Hernandez was truly enraged. He was angry that he and his people were being held like prisoners within their own walls by the people who allegedly had been sent to protect them from the Enemy, from the powers unleashed by Satan upon the Universe. How ironic, he thought: the miracle for which he had prayed, and which he at first thought had been answered this very morning, appeared to be only an agent of the Evil One, a demon under whose enchantment the Marines beyond the gates had fallen. When he had seen Jodi’s face that morning, he knew that she had seen a sign, but he had been so sure that it had been from God that he had never even considered the possibility of Satan’s deceitful treachery. That morning he was certain that his call to God for help had been answered, and that an angel had been sent to save and protect them from the demonic hordes that had descended unbidden from the skies.
But it had not been so. As the last of the Marines followed the young Navy lieutenant down Waybridge Street toward the city gates, Father Hernandez had finally allowed himself the privilege of gazing firsthand upon the miracle God had delivered. At first, he was sure that his eyes were deceiving him, but then it became clear: an angel had arrived, no doubt, but it was not from above. As the thing made some unholy communion with its fellow demons, Hernandez understood that the angel before his eyes was the Angel of Death. He became sure of it as the beast suddenly turned upon its own kind in a ritual of slaughter designed to seduce the Marines in a demonstration of power, of a kind they could easily understand and accept.
Now, as he stood at the gates, he knew that Satan had won the hearts of these strangers with his clever tricks. The unbelievers stood now facing the thousands of Hernandez’s flock, uniformed victims of a plague that needed no rats to spread. He felt pity for them, especially Mackenzie and Braddock, whom he had come to like and admire a great deal. But they apparently had never had the strength of faith possessed by Hernandez and his people, and so they were unprepared for Satan’s insidious assault. God’s miracle would indeed come, but it would be wrought by the hands of His faithful servants. It was a thought that repelled Hernandez and his fellows because they so abhorred violence. But it also thrilled them that God was giving them this opportunity to strike back at Satan, using their own hands as the divine instruments of the Evil One’s undoing.
Still, Hernandez was a stubborn man, even in carrying out God’s just vengeance. He had spent most of the years of his life saving souls, and he would not be content with himself until every avenue into the hearts of the weak had been tested. Not every man and woman on Rutan had died in the last half century with the Savior in their hearts, but none of them had died without hearing Hernandez’s voice at least once in their lives, begging them to open their hearts to Him and be saved. He had encountered Satan’s mark many times over the years, and only on a few occasions had he been forced to concede defeat or resort to the staff and rod. He knew his enemy was tenacious, and he was determined to be no less so.
“Corporal!” he called to the nearest Marine on the other side of the wall. “You must allow us to see the thing, that we may know if it is Satan’s messenger!” Hernandez was as conscious as Corporal Tomlinson of the townspeople’s increasingly agitated state, but he viewed it from a different perspective. What Tomlinson saw as religious fervor about to explode into undirected violence, Hernandez viewed as the gradual massing of God’s power within his people. It was the means to slay the embodiment of Evil that had arisen, as champion of its own kind in a contest to be fought not for blood, but for the souls of Hernandez’s people. “Please, corporal, you must let me speak with Lieutenant Mackenzie!”
He saw the Marine speak into his communications device, but knew that this meant nothing. He was merely sending information to be used by the Evil One cowering among the trees. Around Hernandez, men with crude weapons – hoes, scythes, axes – quietly began to move from the rear of the crowd toward the wall, to act as the vanguard of God’s army.
Dread and excitement competing for dominance in his heart, Hernandez waited.
“I think we’ve got what’s called ‘a situation,’ el-tee,” Braddock said. “Farm tools and axes may not be much, but it’s more than a match for whatever force we can muster against them.”
“I don’t want that to happen, dammit,” she hissed. Tomlinson’s last report had been the first page in the last chapter of tranquility; the next move would be a very short-lived battle between the Marines and a few thousand frenzied villagers, and she and Braddock both knew that the Marines would not be among the victors. “Tomlinson,” she called over the comm link.
“Yes, ma’am,” answered the young corporal’s voice, a bit uneasily.
“Tomlinson, tell Father Hernandez that he and one other person – only one – of his choice, can come out here. Tell him, again, that we don’t want trouble, but that we’re dealing with something – someone – that’s very dangerous and his people need to stay where they are for their own good. You got that?”
“Roger, ma’am. Right away. Out.” He sounded relieved.
Jodi watched through her binoculars as Tomlinson called out to the priest who waited by the gates.
“Here they come,” Braddock said as Father Hernandez and a somewhat younger man whom Braddock knew to be on the council quickly passed out of the gate and came toward them at a brisk walk. Hernandez, in fact, was walking so fast that the other man occasionally had to trot to keep up. The gunnery sergeant went out to meet
