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Saint John slowed from a run to a walk and then stood still as three men emerged from the darkness of the forest. They were tough-looking. Big and muscular, each of them armed with a vicious farm tool. One man had a pitchfork, another had a sledgehammer that he held as if it were a tack hammer, and the third carried a pair of sickles.
Carter’s people. Heretics. Their clothes were filthy and streaked with mud and blood. They were unshaven, and there was a desperate wildness in their eyes.
“Welcome, my friends,” he said.
“Welcome, he says,” growled the man with the sledgehammer.
“I’ll show him a welcome,” laughed the man with the sickles.
“I offer the grace and blessings of Thanatos,” said Saint John, “praise be to the darkness.”
The man with the pitchfork pointed the wicked tines at him as the men closed in and spread out to form a loose ring. “You bastards killed Andy Harper’s family, and the Millers and the Cohens and half the town.”
“More than half, I assure you,” murmured Saint John. “Many more than that.”
The sledgehammer man gaped at him. “And you stand there and make jokes?”
Saint John shook his head. “No jokes, brother.”
“My sister’s husband is nothing but ashes because of you,” said the sledgehammer man, “and her kids don’t have their father. How is that anything but the devil’s work?”
“If children grieve, then there is a path to release from all hurts and harms,” replied Saint John. “We offered it to you. That offer still stands.”
“Offer?” sneered the man with the pitchfork. “What kind of crap is that? You and your bunch are nothing but killers. You’re no different from the walking dead.”
“Oh, they’re different,” countered the man with the sickles. “The dead can’t think. They’re just mindless corpses, there ain’t no evil in them, ’cept in what they do; but this scumbag and that psychotic witch Rose—they’re pure evil.” He glared at Saint John. “Evil to the core, and may you burn in hellfire forever for what you’ve done.”
“There is no hellfire,” murmured Saint John. “There is only the red doorway and the darkness.”
“Red doorway?” demanded the sledgehammer man. “What the heck’s that?”
Saint John drew his two knives, and in the shadows under the junipers, he showed them.
The screams of the three men chased all the birds from the trees.
37
SO MANY THINGS WENT WRONG ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
Chong heard the twang of the bowstring.
He heard Sarah’s inarticulate cry of grief and hatred.
He heard sounds of impact. Meaty and wet.
He heard Eve’s shrill screech of horror.
He heard the laughter of the reaper named Brother Andrew.
Then all those separate sounds and all the disparate events snapped together into one terrible moment of action. Time whipped up and slammed into everyone, and suddenly the lives and fates of every person in that clearing changed forever.
Chong was no longer running.
He stood still, locked into a posture of attack, jerked to a sudden stop as surely as if he’d run into a wall. His bokken was in his hands, but the blade was shattered and the shock of a fading impact still trembled in his arms.
The woman, Eve’s mother, was falling slowly, slowly to her knees, her protests silenced in the ugliest possible way.
Eve’s face was covered with blood that was not her own, and her eyes danced with madness that was equal parts incomprehension and dreadful awareness.
