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“Don’t call me that,” Nix snapped.
“Oh, I am sorry. Is that phrase offensive to you?”
Oh boy, thought Benny. He wanted to brain this guy with his bokken.
Before Nix could serve up an acid reply, Tom said, “When we found this man, it was clear he’d been dead for at least a day, and he did not reanimate. I’m asking if you know anything about that.”
“No, Brother Tom,” said Preacher Jack as he stood, “I can’t say as I do.”
“Any idea who fed him to the dead?”
Benny noted that Tom used “dead” instead of “zoms.”
“That is also a mystery to me,” said Preacher Jack. “Why on earth would anyone do such a thing?”
“Any idea who he was?” Tom asked. “I hear you’re living out at Wawona. Did he come through there?”
“I never laid eyes on this poor sinner before.”
Tom almost smiled. “Sinner? If you haven’t seen him before, then how do you know he was a sinner?”
“We’re all sinners, Brother Tom. Each and every living, breathing resident of this purgatory. Even humble men of the cloth such as my own self. Sinners all. Only the Children of Lazarus are pure of heart and immaculate of soul.”
“How’s that work?” asked Benny skeptically. “They eat people.”
“They are the meek raised up from death to inherit this new Garden of Eden.” He opened his arms wide to include the green and overgrown expanse of the Rot and Ruin. “They have been reborn in the blood of the old world, washed clean of their sins, and they now walk in the light of redemption. It is only us, the dwindling few, who cling to old ways of sin and heresy and godlessness.”
“Um …,” Benny began, but realized that he was no candidate for a religious debate.
Lilah stepped forward. Her eyes looked a bit jumpy, and Benny realized that she was probably unnerved by having her weapon taken away from her so easily. The only other person who had defeated her was Charlie Pink-eye. “You are saying that we are all sinners? That we deserve whatever happens to us?”
“It’s not what I am saying, little miss; it’s what the Good Book says.”
“Being eaten by zoms is in the Bible?” Nix asked, giving him a frank stare; and Benny liked that she leaned on the word “zoms.”
“Not in words that crude.” He patted the book inside his coat. “But yes … the fate of all mankind is laid out in chapter and verse.”
“Where?” demanded Lilah. “Where does it say that in the Bible?”
Something shifted in the preacher’s eyes. Benny thought it was like a snake looking out through the eyeholes of a mask.
“It’s in there for those who read the scriptures,” the preacher answered quietly. “But I bet that you’ve never taken the time to—”
“You’d lose that bet, mister.”
Everyone turned. It was Chong who had spoken up. He had retrieved Lilah’s spear from the bushes and handed it to her. She accepted it without glancing at him.
Preacher Jack gave Chong an up-and-down evaluation with his eyes and dismissed him with a twitch of his smiling mouth. “I doubt that, son. From what I heard, this young lady’s been living hard and wild in these mountains, far from any church or congregation.”
“How does that matter? Does a sheepdog stop being a sheepdog if there’s no herd or shepherd?” Chong gave his dry lips a nervous lick. “Don’t raise theological questions unless you’re prepared to debate them.”
Preacher Jack’s smile still did not dim. “Well, well, well … what have you stumbled upon, Jack? A Sunday School class trip all the way out here in the Rot and Ruin?”
“Hardly that,” said Tom quietly.
“Then what?”
Chong, Lilah, Nix, and Benny all started to speak, but Tom snapped his fingers, a sound as sharp and urgent as a pistol shot. He gave a hand gesture, a palms-down press as if he was patting the air. It was one of the warrior hand signals he had taught them over the last seven months. Be silent but be ready.
