There were more screams and shouts, male and female voices; and every now and then the blast of a shotgun.
“Sounds like a full-out war,” said Benny.
“You still want to go back?” asked Nix.
Benny said nothing.
“Look,” Nix said, “Chong knows which direction Lilah took. He’ll head that way, and if those machines chase him, then Lilah will hear it. She’ll know what to do.”
When Benny still said nothing, Nix touched his arm.
“Benny, let’s find the others and see what they want to do, okay?”
He sighed and nodded, and kept to himself so many things that needed to be said.
Before Nix turned away, they shared a moment of silent eye contact. Benny ached to say so many things, and he was sure Nix did too. It was just that . . . he was afraid to hear what those things were. Her thoughts, and his.
He turned away first, and the ground seemed to be tilting under him, as if the world was no longer properly mounted on its axis and everything was tipping the wrong way.
I want to go home, he thought.
Deep inside his mind, Tom whispered, Be careful, little brother, or you’re going to lose Nix forever. Everything’s hanging by a thread.
They began walking, angling through a dry wash that was thick with tumbleweeds.
“I like the slingshot,” observed Benny, half because it was true and half because he felt a peevish desire to score a point on Nix. “Quiet and nasty. We should get one. Chong used to be pretty good with one; maybe we could all learn.”
“Slingshots are stupid,” muttered Nix. “Something a kid would use.”
“That girl was pretty tough,” Benny said.
“You thought that cow looked pretty?”
“I said ‘pretty tough,’ Nix. Don’t start, okay? She was tough and dangerous with that slingshot and the firecrackers and all. Saved us from the lions.”
“Oh, please,” sneered Nix. “And what kind of name is ‘Riot’ anyway?”
Suddenly there was movement behind them, deeper inside the forest. They spun around and saw another man standing a mere dozen paces away.
The stranger was tall, with dark eyes set so deep that they made his pale face look skeletal. His head was shaved, and his entire scalp was tattooed with a pattern of thorny vines. He wore black trousers and a billowy black shirt, and his legs and arms were wrapped with bloodred ribbons. On his shirtfront was a beautifully rendered chalk drawing of angel wings.
A reaper.
In Benny’s mind, Tom’s voice whispered, Benny . . . run.
31
CHONG DID NOT MOVE.
The reaper cut the air with the scythe again and again. With each pass he called out in a gravelly voice. “Hiding only makes it worse. The darkness wants to take you. Give in to it and there is only beauty. A touch is all, and then you are free. Free!”
Chong held his breath.
The reaper listened to the silence and shook his head. “Struggle against it and you beg for pain.”
It was clear that the reaper did not know exactly where he was; he kept turning, shouting to different parts of the surrounding woods. It was a trick, and not a very good one, Chong mused. No one would be crazy enough to fall for it.
Then a second man stepped out of the woods on the far side of the clearing.
It was Carter. His clothes were torn and splashed with blood, and his hair and eyes were wild.
He looks like he’s just been through hell, Chong thought. And he wondered where Sarah and Eve were. And that girl, Riot.
When the reaper saw Carter, he nodded approval. “Smart choice, brother. This reaper honors you and offers the gift of darkness to end your suffering and—”
“Skip the sales pitch, ‘Brother’ Andrew.” Carter pointed his shotgun at the reaper’s chest. “I’m not interested in anything you have to say. I’m going to give you one chance, because you used to be my friend. Drop the cutter and walk away. Leave me and mine in peace.”
“Peace?” The reaper, Brother Andrew, shook his head, and Chong thought there was real regret in his face. “There is no peace left on earth, Carter. You of all people should know that. How many have you lost to the gray wanderers? Your first wife? Your son? Your sister? How many more do you have to see consumed before you understand that earth no longer belongs to mankind?”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“We’ve been called home, brother,” insisted Andrew. “Saint John and Mother Rose have shown us the way.”
“They’re murderers, and they’ve brainwashed the whole bunch of you into believing in some crazy made-up god and a bunch of lunatic ranting. They’ve blinded you with this darkness nonsense.”
“No,” said Andrew, “they’ve opened our eyes and our hearts to the truth.”
“What truth? All you do is kill.”
“No!” said Andrew, looking hurt and surprised. “We don’t ‘kill.’ There is no ‘murder’ left in the world. Why can’t you get it through your head that the gray plague was not a virus or an accident? It was the will of our god. Like the Death of the Firstborn in your own Bible, Carter. He has reached out his hand to erase the mistake of ‘life.’”
“‘Mistake’? Life is the only thing that matters.”
Andrew shook his head. “No. God—the true god—meant for mankind to leave the physical form and transition into the formlessness of the darkness. That was his will, his plan for the redemption of everyone.”
Carter shook his head. “Horse crap. It was a plague, and it didn’t kill everyone. There are a lot of people left and—”
“There are maggots crawling on the festering corpse of this world,” countered Andrew. “Everyone who draws breath does so in defiance of the will of God.”
“You still seem to be sucking air, Andrew.”
The reaper placed one hand over the wings on his chest. “The reapers are the holy priests of our god. We have been asked to remain here and usher the last of the lost—the last of those like you who refuse to believe—into the darkness.”
“Sure. By murder. Very compassionate of you.”
“But it is compassion, Carter.” He set the butt of his scythe down, and there was a slight shift in his body language and his phrasing. Less forced formality. “Listen to me, man; when the dead rose, I was right there in the thick of it with you. We brought all those people out of Omaha. We built Treetops and we started a life.”
“Right, which is why—”
“Let me say my piece,” interrupted Andrew. “Just hear me out.”
Carter sighed and gestured with the barrel of his shotgun. “Make it quick.”
Brother Andrew nodded. “You and I survived when a lot of other people fell because we were used to roughing it. All those weekends out hunting and fishing before things fell apart. The years we humped our battle-rattle over the Big Sand in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were survivors, Carter, and we did survive . . . and we helped a lot of other people survive.”
Carter nodded.
“But for what?” demanded Andrew. “What have we really accomplished? What do we have to show for it? After that first season, after we holed up in that old shopping mall for all those weeks, we thought we’d slipped the punch. We thought that God smiled on us and we made it, right? But then what happened? That first winter we lost half the people we saved. Dysentery, three flu epidemics, tuberculosis . . . the list goes on and on. Disease killed more of us than the gray people ever did, and we’ve both traveled enough to know that this was happening all over. Remember Oshkosh? The whole city was dead from plague. Actual bubonic plague. Same with Bridgeport, and how many other cities? Same thing in Wyoming. Casper, Fort Washakie, Arapahoe—wiped out by the damn flu. That’s where the whole second wave of the gray people came from. Not from them biting each other or the army dropping nukes. Millions of people died from bad water, bad food, infection, bacteria, parasites. By the time we reached Idaho, how many people did we still have? One out of every six who started out with us?”
The story Andrew was telling confirmed the worst of Chong’s speculations about the world beyond Mountainside’s chain-link fence. The nine towns in the Sierra Nevadas lucked out by having a good doctor and a biochemist who knew how to make antibiotics. Chong’s father often said that those two men had saved more people than anyone who fired a gun or swung a sword. When Chong had told that to Tom, he agreed completely.
“What’s your point, Andrew?” growled Carter. “Are you saying that we worked all these years for nothing?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, brother,” insisted Andrew. “Since we settled down and built Treetops, when have we had a year without a major flu epidemic? When have we ever had a really successful harvest? We’re hunters, man, but we’re not farmers. Sure, we put a lot of venison and wild pig on the table, but it was never enough. Not by half.” He took a breath. “How long do you think people should keep pushing against things before they realize the truth?”
“What truth is that?”
“The only truth that matters,” said Andrew. “We’re dying off because we’re supposed to. The gray plague, the famines, the other diseases, the wildfires, and the other stuff. These are like the plagues of ancient Egypt. The true god has revealed himself and is calling us home, Carter, he’s offering us freedom from bondage.”
“Through murder?” demanded Carter.
“It’s not murder—it’s euthanasia, and it’s sanctioned by God. Look—before the plague, humanity, in its sinfulness and corruption, was like a cancer patient dying by inches, crying out for relief. Our god listened, Carter. Don’t you see? Our god. When your god abandoned you, the true god listened. That’s what Saint John and Mother Rose revealed to us. What the reapers are doing is holy work. This is God’s merciful way to end all this pain, all this torment.” Andrew shook his head. “How can you stand there and tell me that with everything out here—everything in nature—trying to kill us every single freaking day, we are meant to live on and suffer?”
“You’re insane. All of you.”
“Really? Think about it, Carter. Consider how many people have joined the reapers since Saint John began spreading the word. Thousands. Armies of them all over the west. There are probably more of us now than there are people like you. That’s not a couple of people going crazy,” said Andrew. “People already know that life on earth is over. They know. When they hear what Saint John has to say, they don’t think that it’s something bad. They’re relieved. That’s the truth of it, brother. People are just tired of struggling when there’s no real way they can win. Not here, not while they’re still trapped in the flesh.”
But Carter shook his head. “I don’t care how many people join you, Andrew, if your god tells you that it’s right to hurt people, to kill them—to kill my little girl—then that god is a liar. That god is a lie.”
Sadness darkened Brother Andrew’s face. He let out a long, weary sigh. “I tried, Carter,” he said sadly. “Because we have history, because we’ve been like brothers, I tried.”
Carter pointed the shotgun at Andrew’s face. “Sure, and because we were friends I’ll give you a chance, Andrew. Drop the cutter and get your ass into the wind and we’ll call it quits here.”
The reaper gave a sad shake of his head. “I’ll bet you don’t have any shells left. Otherwise you’d have given me the gift of darkness.”
Carter snugged the stock of the shotgun into his shoulder. “Want to find out?”
“Yes,” replied the reaper earnestly. “I want to die. How can you still not get that? So either pull the trigger or put the gun down and join us.”
“I’m taking my family away from here. You won’t have to worry about us ever again.”
“Away where?”
“Someplace where you can’t touch us. Somewhere safe.”
“Why not give it a name? Or are you afraid to say the name ‘Sanctuary’ out loud?”
Even from where he was hiding, Chong could hear Carter’s shocked intake of breath.
“C’mon, man, did you really think we don’t know you’re looking for Sanctuary? We know that Sister Margaret is with you. Some of the scouts saw her. There’s only one place she’d take you to try and keep you from us.”
“No, you’re wrong, we’re heading south. Besides . . . there’s no such place as Sanctuary,” said Carter, but even to Chong his voice lacked conviction.
Brother Andrew snorted. “How can a smart guy like you trust someone like Sister Margaret? She betrayed her own mother, her own people. What makes you think she won’t betray you?”
“We trust her. Riot’s protected us this far.”
Riot, thought Chong. She’s connected to the reapers?
“Protected you?” Andrew laughed. “That’s what you think she’s doing? Tell me something, Carter, has she actually told you about Sanctuary? About what it really is? Or did she just recycle that old garbage about it being—oh, how’s it go?—‘a place for the weary to rest’?”
Carter said nothing.
“Well, let me tell you something—Sister Margaret is nuts. I mean really out of her mind.” Andrew shook his head. “I know about Sanctuary. I know what goes on there, Carter, and believe me when I tell you that the darkness I’m offering you is a mercy. I’m giving you a chance to go out as a free man rather than spend the rest of your life in Sanctuary as a slave.”