"I don't mind it," he said in his smooth voice. "Never was big on sleeping, such a waste of time. And the Links don't come around here much. Once or twice a month we'll get a few visitors if we've been noisy during the day, but usually they just stagger on by, smiling like they're taking a leisurely stroll through the woods."
Emmit shuddered, but not from the cold. He kept seeing flashbacks of the woman Roy had nearly decapitated, the corpse’s neck visibly and audibly broken, its head on backwards but its darkened face still grinning up at him like a dead, drunken clown.
"It's creepy, how they smile like that," Emmit said. "Why are they all so... happy?"
The club rose and fell as the Reverend shrugged.
"I imagine it feels pretty good, not having a soul. Your mind wiped like an old hard drive, not feeling the pain of the cold because they're already dead. No conscience. No inhibition. All they care about is letting you know that they know what you've done wrong, and if they can get their hands on you, turning you. Beyond that, they just walk and smile like old folks in the park."
Turn you?
Emmit thought of the dark handprint now tattooed on his arm, and the one emblazoned across Roy's face like war paint.
"They turn you by touch? Do you... get infected? Like from a bite or something?"
The Reverend chuckled, and the sound of it was warm and friendly. Emmit didn't know the man, had barely spoken a word to him up until now, but he immediately liked him. Somehow, he knew he was different from the other men. They seemed more callous and evil, even if he himself had done something wrong. Sometimes, a criminal act was justified, wasn't it? Was a murder still a hateful act if someone broke into your house and threatened your loved ones and you blew them away with your family shotgun?
"This isn't Night of the Living Dead, new guy. The Links don't eat people, at least as far as I know. It's like they just want to recruit. They grab on to you and it spreads. Whatever it is, it's like an infection, even though it really isn't one. If you break contact in time, you're alright. You just have a new tattoo like your arm and Roy's face. But if not..." He mimicked a Link, relaxing his eyes and letting a goofy-looking grin stretch across his face. “If you die in one piece, as in… from exposure, it’s like you turn by default. That part is like the movies. If your corpse is intact, you get up and take a stroll.”
Emmit suddenly felt the urge to peel back the layers of clothing over his arm and look at his skin. His paranoia told him it was spreading now, the sensation of it like a swarm of baby spiders from a burst egg sac, skittering and climbing over each other in a desperate race to cover the rest of him. He knew it was all in his mind. The Reverend was a veteran here and he was brand new to this bad dream, and it probably wouldn't be wise to doubt his words.
"I'm sorry to keep badgering you with questions, I'm just so... god damn lost," Emmit said, tossing his hands up to the sky. It was brilliant up there in space, if it could be called the same outer space from what he was now thinking of as his reality, as opposed to this reality. The stars and (planets?) were visible tonight, and appeared to be in constant motion; slow, but if you kept your eye on them, they were always moving. The dark sky looked like someone had tossed a handful of sparkling jewels across a dark bedspread, where they tumbled and rolled in slow motion. Emmit watched, unaware that he had stopped speaking and was holding his breath, his mouth agape. He was transfixed as he watched one of the stars begin to swell like an inflating balloon, growing brighter and brighter until the night sky began to brighten like an early dawn. It began to glow a volcanic orange that shifted into a fiery red, like a single stoplight suspended in the void. Then it receded back down, collapsing in on itself before fading completely. Around it, the other stars moved and drifted like bits of moss in a lazy stream.
"Ah, I do love seeing those," the Reverend said, now using his club as an arm rest. "I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure that was a supernova."
Emmit nodded slowly, gazing up, silently wishing to see another one. He had always been a science nerd and knew what a supernova was, but who the hell ever got to look up and watch one? They took an exceedingly long time to occur, if he remembered his astronomy correctly. It was like when you were walking outside at night and caught the majestic sight of a meteor entering the atmosphere, one of the rare larger ones that trailed sparks and pieces like a failed firework. It was special somehow; almost as if it had traveled across the universe just to let you watch it die.
"I can't wrap my head around any of this," Emmit said, "But this part of it I think I could get used to."
The Reverend nodded, sighing, his lungs making a sound of relative peace that Emmit longed for.
"Looking up there reminds me of my office back in the church," the Reverend said, tearing his eyes away from the sky with visible effort to resume his watch. "No matter how much I cleaned it, it was always dusty in there. When the sun would shine in through the stained glass behind my desk, I could always see thousands of dust bits swirling around in it. They were like... magic dust or something. I guess it's weird to appreciate dust, but when
