“About-face!” Apostle Ames shouted, and the Witnesses turned toward the battered exterior of a small plain temple. Even the rushing wind couldn’t dilute the rotten smell emanating from it. The temple’s paint had bubbled and peeled away, and the steeply pitched roof buckled in on one side, but the structure looked stable otherwise. Gabi breathed through her mouth and dipped it below the collar of her jacket, trying to ward off the oppressive odor as Ames and Sykes conferred. Aiming her headlamp at the ground, she saw that the wet puddles under her feet weren’t water at all, but congealed pools of blackish-red muck. She swallowed a scream.
“Don’t look down,” she warned Marnie in a strangled whisper.
“Too late,” she croaked. “Jesus fucking Christ.” Farther down the line, someone threw up.
“Quiet!” Apostle Ames said, sweeping his flashlight over the lineup. “Headlamps off! We’ve brought you all here because there are several Junior Witnesses among you, and we must ensure that you harbor no illusions about the work we are about to do. In the early days, Witnesses were Samaritans. We were met with gratitude and a thirst for receiving God’s Word. Those days are gone. The majority of those who could be Returned to his flock, have been. The rest are mounting their final assault on his chosen people. You, or most of you—” And here Ames paused, drilling Gabi in the face with the beam of his flashlight. “—have been chosen for this mission because of the qualities you demonstrated in prior missions or during your Witness exams.”
The flashlight beam moved on. “If you fail to perform your duties as a Witness to the highest possible standard, you will endanger yourself and every one of your teammates, as well as our mission. This will not be tolerated, politics be damned. The mission comes first. What you are about to see are the wages of demonic possession. In converting the Tribes, we have tried to undo the devil’s work, but in the Lilim, Satan has found his strength.” Gravel and debris crunched under Ames’s boots as he paced the line, broken by a wet splash when he encountered one of the dark puddles. “Do not forget this moment. Use it to motivate yourself in the days ahead, when you will be called upon to exact vengeance. There is much worse to fear in this world than death.”
Ames turned and marched into the temple, gesturing for all of them to follow. When the last of the Witnesses stepped from the nave into the reeking sanctuary, the Apostles aimed their floodlights at the scene before them. What Gabi observed just before she heard Jordan’s body hit the ground was that the chairs were still perfectly arranged and the seated congregants had been torn to bloody shreds.
CAMP WAS silent during dinner that night, except for the sounds of muffled weeping from one of the tents and the metallic scrape of plates being emptied into a shallow trench for burial to deter scavengers. Though it was the Witnesses’ first hot meal in days, no one was hungry except for Apostles Ames and Sykes, who licked their plates clean, then swilled water across them and drank the soupy liquid. Even the veteran Witnesses only picked at the rehydrated potato mush and meat-speckled gravy before consigning the rest to the trench.
After Jordan had recovered from his faint in the temple, he’d started talking again. Now it seemed as if he might never stop. “I’ve been to that meeting a hundred times,” Gabi heard him chattering to Marnie at one of the small campfires. “I would have been there if I hadn’t been at the training center. It was a weekly prayer meeting for teens. Netta Barnes always sits close to the front because she has a crush on Brother Vick. She was there. She was definitely there.” Jordan had shrugged off Gabi and Marnie’s attempts to comfort him once they’d overcome their own shock at the carnage. He couldn’t stand to be touched and couldn’t seem to hear anyone’s voice but his own. He just talked and talked with a feverish glint in his eyes, staring into the fire as if he might find his parents there. Parents, Jordan insisted, who had safely made it onto one of the evacuation buses before the Lilim got hold of them.
Gabi felt guilty for leaving Marnie to comfort Jordan on her own, but the fires would be banked soon and everyone sent to their tents for an early start the next day. They would keep driving until the convoy either ran into a raiding party or reached the Witness base camp east of Babylon, which was the name Unitas had assigned to the sliver of unclaimed territory between the foothills of the Cascades and the coast. Babylon, dwelling place of demons. If Gabi wanted to talk to Mathew, she had to do it now.
Mathew was wielding a towel at the dishwashing station, mostly sending the plates back to the wash bucket where Bradley was halfheartedly dunking them and passing them on still caked with glops of potato. Though Ames hadn’t said a direct word to Gabi, he seemed to have taken a special interest in making Mathew’s life hell. While everyone else was given a rest before making camp to recover from the ordeal of
