Apocalypticon (21 page)

“It’s a preacher,” Patrick said, surprised.

“
That’s
the kind of person who starts a fire in the middle of a serial killer’s forest,” Ben said. “The kind with irrationally strong belief in supreme protection.” He shifted his weight and stepped on a brittle twig. It cracked loudly and echoed around the woods. The man with the book stopped and peered out into the darkness.

“You’ve made your presence known to us,” he called into the darkness in an easy southern drawl. “Be you friend, we welcome you to our fire. Be you foe, the devil will welcome you to his.”

“Shit,” Patrick muttered. “What do we do?”

Ben shrugged. “We could make a run for it.”

“The two of us outrunning God’s army? Dammit, Ben.” He slapped the back of Ben’s head again. “This is
precisely
why we have the rule of the road.” He drew his machete from its sheath and held it tightly in his right hand. He pulled out the baton, too, and flicked it open with his left. “If we survive the night, I’m killing you in the morning.” He stepped out from behind the tree and approached the fire. Ben took a firm grip on his bat and cut out after his friend. Together, they pushed through the fog, weapons at the ready.

One of the women in the congregation saw them first. “There!” she gasped, pointing at them. The man with the book whirled around to face them. He was unarmed. He spread his hands wide in a sign of peaceable innocence and took a step into the darkness.

“We are unarmed,” he said, his voice booming through the woods. “You are welcome to our fire, but with weapons sheathed. My flock is peaceful, and we welcome peaceful sheep alone.” A few cries of
Amen!
went up from the congregation.

Patrick looked at Ben. Ben looked at Patrick. “He looks unarmed,” Ben whispered. “And old. I think we could take him.”

“They outnumber us by a thousand percent.”

“But they’re mostly old women. I think we can take them, too.”

Patrick weighed their options. It was unlikely an old preacher and his unarmed, elderly followers had climbed dozens of trees and nailed living (and presumably fighting) people there. And they had a fire, and a good number of people. He decided to go along with it, at least for the time being. “Here goes nothin’,” he whispered. “Out of the frying pan...”

He slipped the machete back into its sheath and pocketed the baton. Ben followed suit, flipping the bat over and grabbing it by the thick end. “Sorry if we caused any alarm,” Patrick said, walking toward the group with his hands spread wide like the preacher’s. “We saw the bodies in the trees, and we thought—“

“Abominations,” the reverend said sadly, shaking his head and clicking his tongue. “A sign that God has abandoned this world, to be sure. But we hope, and we pray, and we believe that He will return.” There were more cries of
Amen!

“You’re not concerned about the fire?” Ben asked. “That it might draw attention?”

“We built the fire for warmth. We will not be scared off God’s great gift of earthen providence by the likes of sinners.”

“But the bodies—“ Patrick started, but once again, the preacher interrupted him.

“There is a great strength in numbers. We are stronger now than we were before you arrived. The evil man does evil deeds, but evil finds him, too, in the end. If we must be that end, so be it.” A young man in dark trousers and a dirty white shirt whooped joyfully from the other side of the fire. “Amen, brother,” the preacher told him. He turned back to the newcomers. “I’m Reverend James Maccabee, and this here’s the New Herald Christian Church. You boys are welcome to stay for the night, or longer, if your souls are at peace here.”

“We really appreciate it,” Patrick said. “We won’t be a bother. We have our own blankets and food.”

“Dirty, thin blankets and canned food, I reckon?” the reverend asked with a smile. “Nonsense. You boys keep those things for the road, where life is hard. In our church, our guests are part of the flock. If you’ll allow, we’ll put you up in a tent, and you’ll share our meat tonight.”

“Did you say meat?” Ben asked.

The reverend nodded. “These woods are plentiful, for those who know where to look. The good Lord, in His mercy, has provided us with deer for tonight’s meal.” He gestured across the fire, and, indeed, two women were hunched over a deer, trimming its hide from the red flesh, preparing it for the fire. “With the Lord’s guidance, we never want for food.”

Tears welled in Ben’s eyes. He hadn’t eaten a morsel of real meat in over two years, and even that was a rotting pigeon that had been dead under the El for at least two days. The memory of dysentery still made his stomach turn. Fresh meat was a miracle. Surely these people were God’s own chosen ones. “Thank you,” he said, his voice trembling. “Just...thank you.”

The preacher clapped his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Thank the Lord, son. Thank the good Lord.”

Dinner that evening turned into a great feast in honor of the new guests. The church’s gatherers dug roots and wild onions from the earth and softened them together in a pot of boiling water. There was even a type of flatbread, made from ground wild grass and edible flowers set on a flat rock over the flames. The grease from the deer soaked into the crude, crisp dough and made it a pliable, earthy wrap. Patrick and Ben were given seats of honor in the inner circle around the fire, just to the right of Reverend Maccabee. The man said grace over the food, thanking God for his provisions in these dark times, and he prayed for their safety and protection. With a rousing
Amen!
the congregation began to eat. Patrick could not remember a more satisfying meal.

The congregation was in high spirits. Reverend Maccabee laughed and shared stories with Mrs. Goodson, an elderly woman Patrick assumed would be the administrator in a normal, pre-M-Day brick and mortar church. When they’d licked the last of the grease from their fingers, the reverend settled back against the log he used for a bench, and the conversation gradually became more solemn. A handful of the church members, the younger and stronger among the group, wandered off and began linking together a wooden scaffold off to the side of the little clearing, right next to the biggest tree in sight. Fire had left the burned earth hard and dry, and two young men struggled with a set of stakes that refused to be driven into the ground.

“Our altar,” Maccabee explained, seeing Patrick’s wondering gaze. “We’ll have an evening service before bed.” Ben offered to help the two men, and Maccabee reckoned that they’d be glad for the assistance.

“Do you have a service every night?” Patrick asked as Ben trotted off to struggle with a dull stake.

“Every night, and every morning. We build our altar where we can, if the Lord provides us with the means for Eucharist. Otherwise, we have a simple prayer service.”

“That’s nice,” Patrick said. He had never been much for structured religion (or unstructured, for that matter), but it was comforting to know that even in times like these, organizational worship could still exist. It was something left over from the time before. So much had burned away or died in the Jamaican attacks; there was little left to carry over into this scorched new era.

“It makes life worth fighting for,” the preacher agreed.

Patrick wondered if the people nailed to the trees had fought for their lives. He looked up at the blackened trunks above. There were no crucified bodies, at least not within sight. He was thankful to the fog for that much. “Do you know who did that to those people?” he asked, indicating the trees.

“The same one who is the source of all evil thoughts and deeds.”

“Miley Cyrus?” Patrick asked. The reverend didn’t smile.

“The devil himself. That Lucifer.”

Patrick started. “Lucifer. Light bringer!” he breathed, barely above a whisper.

The reverend nodded. “So he is called. A strange name for the Prince of Darkness. But then, he
is
the Great Deception.”

Patrick pulled out the notebook and circled “Light Bringer.”
Cripes
, he thought,
this first peril is a doozy
. He wasn’t sure how to word his next question without sounding like a loon. But, he reasoned, if there was one person who would take it seriously, it was a man of the cloth. “So...how would one go about...you know...fighting the devil? If one were so inclined?”

Maccabee spread his arms and raised his eyes heavenward. “With prayer.”

“That’s it?”

“It is our best weapon against the darkness.”

Patrick frowned. “I was hoping for something a little more actionable. Like, ‘with a crossbow.’”

“Well,” said the older man, a sly gleam in his eye. “Prayer is the best weapon, but that machete might just be second best.”

The preacher got up to go check on the altar progress, leaving Patrick alone at the fire. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the worn piece of notebook paper. He unfolded it carefully and held it down to the firelight.
We’re going to make it
, he thought, reading the scribbled print.
God knows I don’t know how, but we’re going to make it to the Magic Kingdom
.

•

Lucy shivered against the river wind. It was dark, and cold, and she was so tired, she just wanted to stop at the nearest bank and go to sleep. But that one guy, the skinny one, he had told her not to stop for anything, ‘cause it was so dangerous. But boy, was she miserable. Cold, and wet with river spray, and tired, and aggravated, and headed straight back to stupid freaking Hannibal with its stupid freaking Tom Sawyers and Becky Thatchers. Whose idea was it to keep
that
little tradition alive, anyway? Dressing up those kids was so freaking stupid. 

She had passed the Arch about an hour ago, so she couldn’t be that far from home. But jeepers, she was
tired
. She could almost close her eyes and drift off...

She jerked back awake just before the boat crashed into a heavy wooden dock. She jerked the wheel, just like the boys had shown her, and she zipped back out into the center of the river. “Holy hell!” she cried aloud.
That was close.

She was thirsty. She needed a Red Bull. Whatever happened to Red Bull? They probably went out of business when everybody died. People probably spent all their money on funerals and stuff. Not on Red Bull.

Poor Red Bull.

She saw a light flicker up around the next bend. She squinted through the foggy darkness and continued on toward it. Not like she had a choice. She scuttled around the bend and saw it wasn’t just a light; it was a torch. A full out fire torch, just like in
Indiana Jones
! She instinctively ran a hand over her whole body, clearing any snakes, spiders, mutant millipedes, or monkey brains that might be crawling around on her.
Ugh
. That movie was so gross.

The guy holding the torch was waving at her.
Oh, yeah, like I’m gonna stop and pick up a hitchhiker
, she thought.
Nice try, rapist
. She was glad she’d been directed not to stop. She tried not to look at the man as she sped past. Maybe he would think she hadn’t seen him. But dammit, trying not to look at something you really wanted to look at was impossible, because that made you want to look at it even more, and the fire drew her eyes, so she
did
sneak a peek, and she gasped when she was close enough to see his face. She turned the tiller and sped across the river at a diagonal, away from the man on the bank. She knew he couldn’t jump into the boat from where he stood, but still. She wanted to get far away. Even in the firelight, she could tell something was wrong with him. It was just a small discoloration, but it scared the bejeebers out of her. He had what her grandma called the Devil’s Eye.

•

That night, Patrick dreamed of fire demons on horseback chopping off the heads of crying children with axes of brimstone. The rotten egg sting of sulfur poisoned the air as the heads spun in the wind. When each head landed on the scorched earth, it burrowed deep into the ground, and a tall, gnarled tree exploded from the soil. The trees had human faces etched into their trunks, and they screamed and wailed as the fire demons galloped through them, slaughtering more fodder. The trees cried tears of yellow blood that spilled down their trunks and pooled at their roots. The yellow goo rose into a tide that washed over the forest and soaked everything with its bitter metallic stink. A great hole ripped open in the center of the forest, and the yellow blood began a quickening spiral into the core of the Earth, pulling and sucking the screaming trees and decapitated bodies down with it. The Earth sucked the forest dry, revealing an entire army of fire demons, armed now with sledgehammers and red-hot railroad spikes. Each demon turned to the creature on his left and drove the hot spike through its brain. Somewhere, beyond the plain of massacre, from deep within the hole in the Earth, their prince laughed.

Patrick opened his eyes with a gasp. Two dark eyes stared down at him from above. He lurched up in his bedroll and scooted back into the corner of the little tent. “Easy, son, easy,” said Reverend Maccabee. “You’re all right now. You was havin’ a nightmare.” Patrick looked around uncertainly. Ben was still asleep under his blankets. He heard the easy crackle of the fire outside. He exhaled heavily through his mouth.