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Morgie smiled, nodded, and then turned away to vomit onto the ground.
Interlude Two Brother Mercy
SIX YEARS AGO
AUTUMN WAS BURNING OFF, AND a stiff wind proclaimed winter’s advent with frosty insistence. Leaves skittered past the wiry saint and the lean, wolfish boy.
“Honored one,” said Brother Mercy, “tell me about god.”
The question pleased the older man, but they walked a dozen paces before he made a reply. Saint John laid his palm flat over the angel wings on his chest. “Our god is the only true god. He is Lord Thanatos—all praise his darkness—who was the son of Nyx, goddess of the night, and Erebus, god of darkness. Although they were his parents, he grew in power and was soon more powerful than them and all other gods. He rules all of time and space.”
The saint paused as a hawk screamed in the air far above them. They both stared up but did not see the bird.
“There have been some people,” continued the saint, “who heard the song of our god in the whispering shadows and in prophetic dreams. Long before the gray people were blessed with endless life, these prophets took up their knives and opened red mouths in the unholy. They were reviled, hunted, imprisoned, even executed. Called madmen and serial killers, but those were the words of sinners who did not understand. I was one such man.”
“You… ?”
“Oh yes.” Saint John sighed and shook his head. “Prophets are never understood or accepted in their own countries. They chained me, beat me, and sentenced me to death.” He smiled now. “As if death was a punishment.”
They both laughed at that. A squirrel squatted on a tree branch, munching an acorn, watching as the two men in black strolled past.
“God was always moving in our lives, though,” said the saint. “My first proof of this was that the sinners put me into a cell with another prophet. A greater one. A man of perfect vision and extraordinary power.”
“What happened to him?”
“When that time comes, I will take you to meet him. My heart tells me that you and he will have much great work to do together.” He paused. “We will speak more of him another time. For now, just know that I spent much time with him before I was sent to another kind of prison, and escaped from it just as the gray people awoke and the glory of god’s plan filled my mind. I strolled through burning cities, reveling in the beauty of the new age that was dawning. God led me to a church of a failed faith, and there, hidden behind the altar, I found Mother Rose and twenty-seven angels.”
Brother Mercy already knew this part from the daily religion classes all reapers had to attend. A favorite story was about how Saint John discovered a group of orphaned children who’d fled from a gang of sinners of the worst kind. A woman named Rose was running from the same savages, and they caught her outside of the church. Saint John intervened on her behalf, sending the men into the darkness. Together, he and Mother Rose, along with those children, founded the Night Church. Brother Peter, the strongest of the little angels, became the first reaper. Brother Mercy loved Peter as the truest hero of the faith.
“It is the beauty of our religion,” said the saint, “that with the simple perfection of our sanctified knives we can cut the perversion and sinfulness from the flesh of the infidel, and in doing so release them into the infinite peace of nothingness. The physical world belongs to the gray people now. That was the purpose of the plague. Our lord called all of the living to shuck off the bonds of the flesh and join with the eternal darkness.”
“So… our purpose in life is death?” ventured Brother Mercy, still trying to sort through it all.
“Yes,” answered the saint.
“But we are alive.”
Clouds drifted across the sky, and as they passed in front of the sun their shadows painted the landscape. “We are alive,” agreed Saint John, “but only as servan
ts. It is our task to seek out any heretics who persist in being alive; they blaspheme with every breath.”
“But we fight to stay alive,” said Brother Mercy. “Doesn’t that make us sinners too?”
“We are not sinners,” assured Saint John, laying a comforting hand on Brother Mercy’s shoulder. “Many of our brothers and sisters were sinners, but since kneeling to kiss the knife they have become god’s chosen reapers in the fields of the world. We must bear the burden of life until the sinners have all been sent into the darkness, and then we shall join them.”
PART FIVE NEW ALAMO
“With fire and sword the country round Was wasted far and wide, And many a childing mother then, And new-born baby died; But things like that, you know, must be At every famous victory.”
—ROBERT SOUTHEY, “THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM”
24
GUTSY GOMEZ STOOD ON THE highest point of the wall looking down into the town. Alethea and Spider were with her, and so was Alice. She and Gutsy held hands. Sombra sat like a gargoyle, leaning out to sniff the air. They were all pale and haggard from horror and sleeplessness.
But they were all alive.
The walls of stacked automobiles that ringed the town were broken in places—burned, blown apart, pulled down, fallen. Many of the homes and buildings inside the town had burned down, and only desperate actions by brave people had kept the whole of New Alamo from being destroyed. Smoke still curled up from piles of rubble.
