die. But a whole town? Hell. That’d be something. So what goes under the knife? Who’s out here? Drifters? Criminals? All out here under this strange little altar?”
Leo said nothing.
“How many of them know?” asked Connelly.
He didn’t answer. Connelly took the knife and pushed it a quarter inch into his sternum. He squealed and tried to wriggle away, a thin trickle of red running down his chest.
Connelly removed the knife. “How many?”
“All of them!” he cried. “The entire town! All of them.”
“Christ,” said Hammond. “Jesus goddamn Christ.”
“Reap day,” said Connelly softly. “Reap day. And what does he get in return? Safe haven? A place to stay when he needs it? Where is he? Where’s the scarred man, Pastor? You’ve been feeding him all this time, so you got to know where he is.”
“I thought you a man of God, Pastor,” Pike said over his shoulder. “Do you know what I would like to do to men who claim the name of the Lord and then do acts such as these?”
“You’ve seen what’s out there,” Leo snarled. “You’ve seen how hungry this world can be. Wouldn’t you do everything you could to keep what you loved fresh and alive? Wouldn’t you? We haven’t had a child or a mother die in labor in thirty years. No more sickness, no more accidents. The guns we have are all older than their owners, near enough. The youngest death we’ve had has been seventy-six, in bed. And in return for what? Drunks? Criminals? Thugs and vagrants? Tell me you wouldn’t do the same.”
“Maybe,” said Connelly. “That doesn’t matter anymore. You killed my friend. Tried to kill us. Makes things pretty simple, doesn’t it?”
Leo bowed his head and tried not to sob. “God… You’re not… not going to…”
“Where is he, Pastor? Where’s he at?” asked Connelly. “Or do I even need to ask? He’s up in that farm up there, ain’t he? Where the wolves are supposed to be? Where it’s not safe to go, yet it looks down on this very town right here?”
“You can’t go up there,” said the pastor. “You can’t.-H-He’s getting ready. You don’t know what’s happening up there.”
“When’d he come in?”
“Two days ago. He was falling apart. You’re killing him, you know.”
“Yeah,” said Connelly. “Yeah, we know. And he said to get rid of us, didn’t he? Said some boys would be hot on his trail and wouldn’t it be nice if they wound up dead. Right?”
The pastor nodded.
“Right. Okay,” said Connelly. “Okay, then. I want to know one more thing. Where’s some kerosene?”
“Kerosene?” he asked.
“Yeah. Where?”
“I don’t know. There’s a garage over where you all came in.”
“Okay. Fair enough.”
The pastor shuddered. “-I-I have a wife. Children. A little girl—”
The knife flashed forward and Connelly buried it up to the hilt in the pastor’s neck. Warm red sprayed from his collarbone and his eyes went wide and he coughed and soon it dribbled from his mouth and nose. Connelly twisted the knife in his neck until there was a thick red river running down his shirt and the man quivered and pissed himself.
“I had one, too,” Connelly said to him as the man died.
He lay still. Connelly wiped his hands and the knife on the dead man’s nightgown and stood.
“What are we going to do?” asked Hammond.
Connelly put the knife back in its sheath. “Show them what they’re worshipping.”
* * *
They found a drum of kerosene in the garage and they filled up three tanks with it and divided a box of matches between them all. Then they split up, each working the outskirts of town, splashing the houses and the fields and the church and the barns. They moved quietly, carefully rationing out the foul-smelling fluid.
Connelly carried a shovel with him, digging small trenches to carry the kerosene, running under porches and bushes. He made a crude sort of irrigation that might or might not really work, he was not sure. He labored quickly but carefully. The town seemed deserted. After they had killed the fire in the barn they must have gone home to peaceful slumber.
“Everyone sleeps here,” he murmured to himself. “Bastards. All of them. Bastards.”
He was dousing a trellis of one house when he heard a voice say, “What are you doing?”
There was a young girl at the side of the house, no older than Hammond. She leaned around the corner and then took a few steps out to see. She wore a white nightgown and her hair was gold and her features sharp and childlike. Her eyes were as green as the hills around her, like sunlight filtering through leaves. When Connelly turned to see her she took a step back.
“You!” she said. “You’re the drifter-man. You ain’t supposed to be out here.”
“Go back to bed,” said Connelly.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” she whispered. “Dead and gone.”
“Don’t you… Don’t you cry out or damn you, I’ll beat you raw,” Connelly said.
She smiled. “You wouldn’t. You ain’t the sort of person to hit a girl.”
“I would.”
“No you wouldn’t. You’re just a big softy. Just a big old softy.”
Connelly stood up to his full height. “Don’t you do nothing,” he said quietly, “or I swear… I swear to God…”
“Swear what? That you’ll kill me?” She laughed. An angelic sound. “You ain’t the type. Why, I bet I could open my mouth right now and holler bloody murder and they’d come running, wouldn’t they?”
Connelly did not move.
“Sure they would. And you wouldn’t do nothing. They’d find you and cut you to ribbons,” she said, and smiled wide.
Cold green button eyes, mean and merciless. Flat and shallow like a muddy pool.
“Watch,” said the girl, and took a deep breath.
The shovel bit deep into her skull under her right eye and the force of the blow sent the eye flying out, spiraling away and down onto her cheek. A gout of blood poured from her mouth and nose and she fell to the ground and began madly twitching and a ribbon of black began seeping from her exposed sinus. In the moonlight her crumpled head made her look far from human, some twisted, mindless inversion, and Connelly stood over her and brought the shovel down again and again on her neck. Soon she stopped twitching and he was glad. It was as though in decapitating her he made her human and recognizable again.
He stood over the slain girl and dumped the kerosene out and lit a match and tossed it behind him. Then he started to run.
Exactly when it happened he could not say. He saw the firelight flickering on the trees ahead and felt the heat on his back, but it was not until he heard the guttural burp and the shrieking roar that he knew it had really caught. He turned and backpedaled and saw jets of fire shooting into the night. Twin blazes were on his left and right and he knew somewhere Hammond and Pike were making for the woods.
He ran into the hills of the mountain and climbed a ways. Then he heard the screams. Maybe a man, maybe a woman. A child, perhaps. Then more. He turned and looked out on the inferno he had left in his wake, the crumbling cottages and the blackening church, the thick pillar of black smoke that reached up into the sky. He tried to silence the dreadful part of his heart that sang and danced joyfully at the sight of his hellish wreckage but found he could not.
“Look at that,” said a voice.
He turned back around. Roosevelt was sitting on a stone, smiling at the fire.
“You made the sun come up, Connelly,” he said. “You made the sun come up.”
