Rise Again Below Zero (41 page)

“Come all ye faithful,” the Preacher cried. “Those of you who see the evidence of the world and the world beyond with your own eyes, who have felt the pain of suffering and the agony of the spirit which has outlived the very plan for which God intended it, O you poor suffering bastards, come ye on up here and get yourselves anointed and let the unbelievers marvel and the undecided think back on the moaning and the howling of their dead and
repent
. It’s none too soon, sinners. None too soon. But God has given ye one more chance and any minute now he might revoke the offer and there you are, doubly unrepentant. The hottest fires and the sharpest teeth and the worst death forever, that’s your reward for doubting. Step on up.”

The first few rows of congregants all but climbed over each other to get up to the front; they formed a rough line two across up the aisle of the church, shoved into position by the four monks, who had stepped forward at a gesture from the Preacher. People were already pulling their shirts up over their heads; apparently this was part of the ritual. Danny saw that most of the exposed backs were striped with scabby wounds, roughly parallel lines carved into the flesh across their shoulders. This must be part of the feeding rites. It was alien to her to stand mutely at the edge of the action like this; she felt a growing sense of urgency, the familiar instinct that something was wrong and she ought to stop it. But she’d learned a great deal of circumspection in her last year of survival. She stood impassively and watched.

The ritual was obscene.

“You miserable worthless bag of meat!” the Preacher bellowed at the first of the congregants in line, a middle-aged woman with scraggly gray hair. “Is this enough to save you?”

“No!” cried the congregant, almost collapsing to her knees, bent double, her sweater flung over her head to expose a wound-striped back.

“Have you suffered enough?”

“No!” she pleaded.

“In a world of horrors, have you suffered enough to join the bosom of God?”

“No!” the congregant shrieked.

“So you’re fucked, unless you go the full distance. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Who
ever eats his flesh, and drinks his blood, has eternal life; and he will raise him up even now,
after
the last day. For his flesh is meat indeed, and his blood is drink indeed. Like the man said, ‘He that eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, dwells in me, and I in him. As the living Father has sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eats me, even he shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eats of this bread shall live forever, undead or alive.”

At this moment, the Preacher’s arm snaked out and struck at the cowering woman and a strap of bright blood appeared on her back, spilling down over her shiny white flesh. The congregant’s knees buckled, and in that moment the foremost monk caught her up; the second dashed something from a bottle onto the wound and applied a scrap of cotton to it, then roughly yanked the sweater back down over the woman’s skin. She stumbled to the foot of the crucifixion behind the Preacher. Already the next true believer was receiving the wound.

Now Danny could see what the Preacher had in his hand—it was some kind of woodworking tool, like a draw chisel. It must have been scalpel sharp. He was slicing short strips out of his parishioners’ skins.
Chicharrones
, Danny thought. Pork rinds. But why?

The next act in the ceremony answered her question. She felt hot bile stinging the back of her throat. It felt like she did nothing but puke anymore. Danny swore she’d keep it down this time.

The woman in the sweater stood below the crucified zombie, and that thing looked down at her, teeth bared, pale eyes rolling. The third monk was stationed at the monster’s feet, his hood at about the same level as the rail spike that transfixed both insteps of the Risen Flesh. He held a long pole, probably a length of old-style iron sprinkler pipe; on the end was a leaf-shaped spearhead. The monk dipped the spearhead into a dish on the altar.

Danny didn’t catch this detail until the third wound had been inflicted: The Preacher tapped his slicing tool against the edge of the dish on the altar, and a worm of bloody flesh fell into it. The monk with the spear caught up the first of these bits of skin on the tip of the spear and raised it up—hundreds of eyes followed its course from the congregation—and there was a collective sigh of relief or awe or horror as the flesh was transferred into the snapping jaws of the zero on the cross. The creature was
feeding
on the flock. A spurt of vomit flew into Danny’s mouth. She swallowed it, grasping her belly in her hands. Everyone on the balcony around
here was watching the rites; none of them seemed disgusted by what they witnessed.

But the worst was yet to come.

The first of the worshippers had been processed in a matter of seconds, from the incantation to the cutting, bandaging, and taking up of her position beneath the blasphemous effigy. Now there were three congregants crowded behind the altar, as the call-and-response went on:

“Have you suffered enough?”

“No!”

“In a world of horrors, have you suffered enough to join the bosom of God?”

“No!”

And another worm of flesh was stripped away. Danny couldn’t understand what they were waiting for. Only one of the monks seemed to be standing by at this point, on the side of the cross opposite the spear-handler; the thing on the cross wasn’t doing anything but sucking down pieces of human flesh. Otherwise everyone was busy. Then the zero raised its barbed-wire-wreathed skull and moaned to the rafters, and a moment later a dark stream spilled from its side.

There must have been a puncture there, all the way into the creature’s entrails. It was
digesting
. The monster had begun to process the feast. Whether this filthy stew was yesterday’s feeding or the bleeding scraps now being thrust between its yellow fangs, Danny couldn’t tell and didn’t care. She felt she was suffocating. It might have been her imagination, but she thought she could smell the ichor spilling out of the belly of the monster. Her skin was cold, but sweat was pouring down her own back, a cold evocation of the mutilations being done to the congregants below. Now there were a dozen people in the line, already processed, blood dappled through their clothing, faces raised to the undead.

The fourth monk raised his hands. All of them, Danny now realized, were wearing surgical gloves. Even the Preacher. The monk pressed a finger into the bubbling slime that ran from the monster’s wound, then drew a cross on the forehead of the first congregant, the woman with the sweater. Then he dabbed the slime on her outstretched tongue.

The woman clasped her hands in a gesture of passionate thanks and rushed past the crucifixion behind the altar and circulated back down into the crowd, where she was lost to view among the swirl of congregants pressing forward to donate their gram of flesh.

The monk carried on with the next congregant and the next, anointing them with zero filth made out of their own flesh.

Without warning, Danny vomited. She threw her hands in front of her mouth, but didn’t have enough fingers to stop the stream. The men and women on either side of her made noises of revulsion—as if
she
was the disgusting one here—and stepped apart, their shoes spattered with thin bile. Danny shoved her way to the back of the balcony, hands pressed over her face as much to conceal her features as to suppress the waves of nausea that threatened to overtake her at every step. She stumbled down the creaking scaffold stairs that led down from the upstairs window, stumbled outside, and heaved out her guts on the littered ground beside the church, ignoring the sneers of the people crowded outside the windows watching the ceremony within. The smell reminded her of the acolyte’s blood and brought on a fresh wave of retching.

Empty, dripping with puke, Danny made her way to an old garden faucet on the brick foundation of the church and washed herself off. She still could not believe what she’d seen.

These insane people were feeding themselves to the undead—and taking infected tissue into their mouths.

The entire new religion was centered on making more infected half-zombies out of gullible, scared fools, as far as Danny could tell. These people believed they had to become part of the feast to atone for mankind’s sins. Where did it end? Would there be a splinter cult that hacked off their own limbs and fed them to the zeroes? Or would they capture victims and make them into sacrifices?

This had all happened in the past. Such violent religions had flourished for thousands of years. It seemed impossible that it could be happening again in the fresh ruins of a once-civilized place like America. But Danny had seen it with her own eyes. And already there were Tribespeople involved. The message was convincing to them. More than
her
message, whatever that had been. Why not a wrathful god demanding flesh?

Perhaps she should have given them something to believe. Now, unbelievably, they were joining up with the undead.

Danny’s own back, with its thick web of scar tissue, would never make a suitable sacrifice for the Risen Flesh. She had already given that part of herself to another cause.

She drank some of the frigid water directly from the flow at the faucet, crouching low, and with her head at an angle, she surreptitiously observed
the bank building across the intersection. She saw the curtains of the Architect’s office twitch, thought she could see the wink of spectacles in the shadows of the room behind them.

The Architect was an evil son of a bitch, collecting children for his feasts, or making them into followers, or whatever he had in mind. The Risen Flesh was equally evil, stripping tidbits off the living backs of his followers, selling them fear, exposing them to zombiism. Which one should she attempt to destroy? She’d only get one shot, and time was running low. But Danny knew the answer to the question, now.

They both needed to go.

A
fter the service was over and the crowd had spread out, milling around in the town center, Danny walked back up the steps of the church, ignoring the ushers who remained standing beside the doors. Were they half-living? She didn’t think so. They were too easily examined in the daylight. Their exhalations smoked in the cold like warm-blooded breath ought to do. The mood in the street was ugly—the place was split down the middle between church and state, and many of the people who had been outside during the service weren’t just overflow, but hecklers. She thought things were going to get rough no matter what she chose to do. Maybe not today, but soon.

The church seemed darker within, now that the congregation was gone. She stood in the doorway and let her eyes adjust, at the same time locating the acolytes; she could see three of them. One was on the ladder pressing a bandage to the wound in the Risen Flesh’s side; two of them were clearing up the altar, ragging off stray droplets of blood and tissue.

The crucified zero saw her (or smelled her, she didn’t know which) as she advanced up the aisle. The acolytes, seeing her, immediately formed a defensive rank in front of the crucifix—which was absurd, because the only way to get at their mascot would be with a gun, and they weren’t going to reach up and grab the bullets out of the air.

“Close the door,” she called over her shoulder.

One of the guards looked in, eyebrows raised.

The closest of the acolytes glanced up at the crucified zero, and there must have been some subtle signal between them, because the acolyte turned to the door and said, “Do it.”

The doors banged shut behind Danny and it was darker in the church, making the sunlit windows look like multicolored fire by contrast.

“I hope you enjoyed the show,” the Risen Flesh wheezed, once the guards were sealed off outside. “But I’m told you spoke with my rival across the street.”

“He made me a damn good offer,” Danny said. “You didn’t.”

“You got the best I could give,” the thing said, and ran out of air. It drew a long, hoarse breath and continued, “I let you go free and didn’t give you away. My bargain was to absolve you of sin, so to speak, not to enrich your life—besides: My acolytes here, they’re very upset about the death in the family. We’re all
avoiding
death, you understand. We are coming from it, not going to it. Dying isn’t our thing.”

At this moment the last of the acolytes and the Preacher stepped out of the back room from which Danny had emerged in the dark only hours before.

“Has she come to confess her sins?” the Preacher asked, and laughed a little.

“Fuck off,” Danny explained. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“She’s charming, you have to admit,” the Risen Flesh said. “Duncan, meet the Sister of the Dead.”

“An honor,” the Preacher said. He looked like a commercial rock star, Danny thought. A decorative bad-ass exterior wrapped around the core of a corporate lawyer. The Preacher turned and looked up at his accomplice on the cross: “Pardon the interruption, but it’s official. We’re running out of places to strip the skin off the true believers. We need a bigger flock, you need a diet, or we’re going to have to find somewhere else to get the flesh from.”