The Living Read online

  I can hear “vulnerable” humming just beneath this. Oh, Paul taught them well. I give Lindh an acidic smile, but he keeps going.

  “Can I get you a coffee and share a little about our community?”

  “Where are my friends?” I say, forcing myself not to growl.

  “Okay, sure,” he says with an agreeable nod. “I actually just saw them walking with Nora and wondered where you were. Everyone’s heading up to God’s House for the special service.”

  “Special service?”

  “Pastor Bark is revealing our new calling. God is moving in a big way. Mind if I walk with you?”

  I brush past him and plunge back into the woods, ignoring his earnest pleas, rushing to put this armored circus and its unnerving noises out of my boiling thoughts.

  • • •

  The road emerges from the forest behind a building that might be a hospital. I hear more strange noises from inside it, groans and muffled screams, but I’m drawn to the louder ones ahead: the tense burbling of a large crowd.

  Stepping onto the main street is like falling into a river. The cheery procession from the town below catches me and carries me along, bouncing and spinning me like a leaf until I’m sucked into the drain of the church’s front doors. I try to hide in the back again, but the current drags me forward. By the time I manage to find a seat, I’m only ten rows from the front. I lean forward and hold my face in my hands, watching through my fingers as Pastor Bark takes the stage.

  “Hello, Ardents,” he says into his headset. “Are you hungry? Are you ready for some meat?”

  Hoots and murmurs from the congregation.

  “Good, because we’re really going to get into it this morning. We’re at war, and there are no desk jobs in God’s army. All of us are in the shit!”

  I scan the sea of faces around me. Are they here? Is she here? How do I address her now? Are we still lovers? Were we ever?

  “But the tide is turning,” Paul says, spreading his arms wide. “I’m sure you’ve all heard the news by now, what God’s doing in the far east…”

  A surge of applause.

  “That’s right. Fire isn’t the only cleanser. Wind, water—all the elements serve God’s will. New York City, the biggest shit we ever took on God’s perfect world, has finally been flushed.”

  He allows a moment for the cheering to subside.

  “And with their den destroyed, guess who’s on the run? Guess who’s moving their whole parade of blasphemy right next door? That’s right. Our good friends, the Axiom Group.”

  He paces the stage a few times, looking pensively at his feet, a signal that the interactive phase is over and it’s time to listen in earnest.

  “Ardents,” he says, “we are approaching a moment of testing. And I’m here to tell you, I’m worried we won’t pass.” He runs his eyes across the congregation, nodding. “I am. I really am. Because we’ve grown complacent.” His voice abruptly jumps to a shout. “We’ve grown soft. Despite all our prayers for God to take us home, we’ve gotten comfortable here, wallowing in our disease. And I can hear you saying, ‘But Pastor Bark, we surrendered four towns last year! We gathered hundreds of souls into our flock! I think we’re doing pretty good!’ And to that I say fuck ‘pretty good.’”

  He looks around as if waiting to be challenged, then nods, that’s what I thought.

  “While we were out there burning half-abandoned backwaters that no one but God will even notice, Babylon’s been rising right down the street from us. We’ve allowed not one but two new enclaves to grow in what was once an empty ruin. And not just tents around a campfire but thriving mini-metropolises with agriculture and industry and government.” He paces faster, shaking his head in disgust. “The Post stadiums carry all the DNA of civilization, and we’ve allowed it to grow unchecked, from a little cluster of cells to a massive, throbbing tumor. So my question for you this morning is…do we have the balls to cut it out?”

  My eyes stop wandering. He has my attention now.

  “Everything God hates is gathering in one place. He’s never given us a clearer command. Do we have enough faith to obey it?”

  The congregation is quiet. I see some brows knitted in uncertainty.

  “Now I know what you’re thinking…” He adopts a faintly effeminate tone. “‘But Pastor Bark, how would we surrender a fortified enclave? We don’t fight our war with weapons! Only God has the right to take life!’” He lets out a reluctant sigh, as if defeated by this weakling objector. “Well, you’re right. We’re not invaders. We can’t surrender Post unless God decides to open it to us.” His downcast frown rises into an enigmatic smirk. “But what if he’s already decided? What if he’s been holding out his hand this whole time, just waiting for us to bring him a sword?”

  I hear no hoots or amens. Everyone hangs on his words, waiting for the payoff to this puzzling setup. But I am already halfway there, and I feel my skin prickling.

  “Lot and Sodom,” he says. “Joshua and Jericho. Moses and Egypt and the ten fucking plagues. It won’t be the first time God used his children as vessels for his wrath.”

  I hear myself whispering, “No…no…”

  “My dear Ardents,” Paul says, beaming with pride, “we have fetched God a sword. We have gathered him an army.”

  Silence.

  “Not of flesh and blood, but of clean, hard bone. An army God himself raised from our departed brothers and sisters, just like he promised in Ezekiel 37.”

  Comprehension spreads through the crowd in a slow murmur.

  “Yes,” Paul says, nodding fervently. “Yes. As much as we might fear them, these creatures are God’s creation. They belong to him. They’re a force without mind or will and their movements are ordained by God alone. Like a hurricane.”

  He stands in the center of the stage, gripping the narrow pulpit. The lights glisten on his sweaty forehead.

  “So we’re going to bring that hurricane to the gates of Post, and we’re going to set it loose to do God’s will. We’re going to put a sword in God’s hand…” He juts his chin and nods a few times. “…and we’re going to stand back and watch him swing it.”

  There is silence.

  It lingers.

  I see a flicker in Paul’s confidence. An encounter with a distant but shocking possibility: that he is alone in his madness. That he is the only one who hears this particular voice of God.

  Then a man in the front row lets out a throaty howl, pumping a fist in the air, and it spreads through the congregation in a wave of applause, hesitant at first but quickly gaining assurance, and Paul’s eyes grow misty with the relief of confirmation.

  I am surrounded by wide-eyed faces cheering for the death of thousands, and I begin to recognize some of them. There’s the boy who looked over my shoulder the night my angry scribbles leaked into reality. There’s the girl who got the maps and protocols from her firefighter uncle. There’s the boy who brought the gasoline. Most of the congregation is new, but these familiar faces hover around me like phantoms, aged but essentially unchanged, still pinched with pride and hatred and pride in their hatred.

  “Paul!”

  The cheering stops. I recognize my own voice in the echoes. Somehow, I have been transported to the center of the aisle. I appear to be walking toward the stage.

  “How many years, Paul? Ten? Fifteen? How can you still be the same?”

  Paul watches my approach with a cautious blankness, waiting for more information before choosing a reaction. He doesn’t recognize me. I don’t care.

  “How have you not moved past this? How have you not realized we were wrong?”

  I stop in front of the stage, hands clenched at my sides. Paul leans down and squints at me like I’m a hallucination. “Brother Atvist?” he whispers.

  My shoulders hunch at the sound of the name. I look behind me. The whole congregation is watc
hing, but I feel one stare burning hotter than the rest, blue eyes cutting through the crowd like a gas torch. She is sitting in the back row next to Nora, watching this sweet reunion with my childhood friend.

  What is she thinking? What dark visions does she see when she looks at me now?

  I pull my eyes away from her and narrow them on Paul. I leap onto the stage and grab him by his bristly shirt and shove him back through the curtain. He is still too stunned to resist. We emerge from the thick purple cloth into a typical theater backstage: cables snaking over black plywood floors, lighting rigs climbing up the walls—same as any other big show.

  “You can’t do this,” I growl, releasing my grip on his shirt. “There are thousands of people in Post.”

  But he doesn’t hear me. His eyes rove across my face, wide and rapt. “You’ve barely aged,” he says, tilting his head. “What happened to you? Did God take you up like Elijah?”

  “God didn’t take me anywhere. I found my own way into Hell.”

  “What—”

  “It doesn’t matter, Paul, I’m alive, and I’m…” I bite back the flood of words. I need to let him process his shock and get over the mystery of my appearance so he can actually hear me. “…I’m here.”

  I leave it there and wait.

  “You’re here,” he says, nodding. Then without any further analysis, a smile flickers through his confusion. Not smug, not cruel…hopeful. “Are you here to help finish what we started?” The smile broadens, lighting up his eyes. “Will you help me spread the Fire?”

  And suddenly I see him. He’s peering out at me through the eyeholes of this leathery suit of armor. The kid I grew up with, played pretend with, went to church with, feared the world with, feared our parents with, feared Hell with, feared our own bodies and minds until we detached ourselves from both. Another kind of Orientation.

  My anger collapses.

  “Paul,” I mutter, shaking my head. “It’s all wrong.”

  “We’re so close now!” He grips my shoulders. “We’ve come so far since they took you from us!”

  “They didn’t take me, Paul, I left. I got tired of waiting for permission to die. I decided to try living.”

  “Can’t you feel it in the air? God’s finally going to move!”

  There’s a strange glaze in his eyes, like he’s looking right through me, muting out my words, and I understand why. The math is simple: I was like him, so if something could change me then something could change him, unmake his world, blow down his fortress of belief and leave him exposed.

  Unthinkable. Impossible. There must be some mistake.

  “He’s going to set us free!” Paul gushes. “We just have to prove we really want him to!” He’s shaking me now. His eyes glisten. “I know it’s a hard doctrine, it’s hard to think about all those deaths, but who are we to doubt God’s will? Once we pass this final test…he’ll do it! He’ll burn this nightmare away and take us home!”

  “Paul…” I firm my face and look up, meeting his feverish gaze. “The world is our home.”

  He blinks at me and pulls back, holding me at arm’s length.

  “Yes, there are nightmares in it,” I tell him. “Horror and grief. But I’ve found good things, too. Things to live for. People to live for. I’ve found love here…” My voice cracks. “…and it’s beautiful.” My eyes burn but I keep them open. “It’s true, even when it changes. Even when it ends.”

  Paul’s face is contracting inward, his body stiffening, recoiling. “There were rumors,” he says in a suddenly lowered rumble. “About your family…connections to Axiom leadership…” His eyes narrow to slits, cutting off my view of what’s inside. “What have you been doing all these years since you left us?”

  I hear footsteps. I glance behind me. The young man from the armored circus—Lindh—is standing just inside the curtain, breathing heavily. “Pastor Bark,” he gasps, “we have a problem.”

  But Paul ignores Lindh like he ignored me. “Have you been led astray, Brother Atvist? Did you let the world corrupt you?” His face is contorting with anger and perhaps a little relief; the uncertain hope is gone from his voice and the theatrical bombast is back. “Did you come to help spread the Fire, or to sow doubt and dissension? Why are you here, Brother Atvist?”

  Lindh rushes to his side and whispers something in his ear. Paul’s eyes widen. His scarred face reddens. “You brought them here?” he asks me, but it’s more a gasp of disbelief than a question.

  I frown. “Brought them? What are you—”

  He advances toward me. He is half a foot shorter, but his body is a tight coil of rage. I back away from him. I feel the curtain slide around my shoulders and I’m on the stage again, the blinding lights, Paul’s voice booming through the PA. It suddenly occurs to me that our entire conversation was probably picked up by his headset. My eyes dart through the crowd, looking for Julie, but Paul is still advancing toward me.

  “Some of you may remember this man,” he bellows to the congregation, “but he is no longer the man we knew. He has left our fellowship and turned his back on the Fire and he has fucking betrayed us!”

  He shoves me in the chest. I stumble over the edge of the stage and land hard on my back; the stiff beige carpet knocks the wind out of me. As I struggle to inflate my lungs, two meaty hands clamp onto my shoulders and hoist me to my feet.

  “Time to go, preacher boy,” M mutters in my ear.

  I glance around, trying to get my bearings and make sense of this whirlwind, but M is dragging me toward the exit. I see Tomsen waiting there in the foyer, hopping from foot to foot.

  “Now, now, now,” she hisses at us. “Are they coming with us or not?”

  Julie steps into the foyer. Nora is behind her.

  Nora looks at M. Rage foams up in her like a chemical reaction and M tenses, but she looks away and swallows hard and seems to contain it. With her head still down, eyes to the side, she jabs a finger at him and mumbles, “Deal with you later.”

  But I’m only peripherally aware of their exchange. Julie is staring at me in a way I haven’t seen since we first met, when the question “What are you?” meant so much less. Her eyes roam my face like she’s searching for seams and zippers, and I want to grab her and kiss her and say You know me! with such conviction that she has no choice but to believe. But I say nothing.

  “Can you guys do whatever this is later?” Tomsen says, glancing between the four of us. “They’re almost here.”

  “Who?” I finally ask, but even as I ask it I hear the answer rising from somewhere outside, a rumbling hum like a bass chord with too many notes. It’s the sound of truck engines. Many, many truck engines.

  “Your co-workers,” Tomsen says. “Former, I hope.”

  Through the glass doors, I see a convoy of beige trucks cresting the hill in a cloud of dust. I see the jagged mandalas painted on their hoods.

  “Julie?” Nora says, shooting her a meaningful look. “I think I’m ready.”

  We skirt the town square and run into the leaf-strewn side streets, and Julie doesn’t talk to me. She stays at the front with Nora and doesn’t look back. I remember the youthful fantasy of the crisis that solves everything, the asteroid or alien invasion that renders all conflicts moot with no need for painful resolutions. But does this curative effect still work when we’ve already been through the apocalypse? Has disaster lost its potency?

  We pass the bookstore where we parked the RV but Nora seems to have another destination in mind. The humid heat makes my skin sticky before I even start to sweat. A few raindrops hit the back of my neck like a cold finger tapping a warning.

  A familiar building looms ahead, mossy and half absorbed into the forest behind it: the hospital, or whatever function it might serve now, with its hidden gravel road to a secret in the woods. Nora crashes through the front door and whirls left and right. “Addis!” she shouts, stor
ming from room to room, tripping over piles of toys and knocking aside strange medical instruments. “Addis!”

  A heavy, windowless double door opens a crack and an elderly woman in a lab coat peeks out. “Ms. Greene? What’s the matter, dear?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Addis? He’s still sleeping, along with all the others. Please keep your voice down.”

  “Addis doesn’t sleep,” Nora snaps. “He hasn’t slept once since—” She cuts off as she registers the lab coat, its spattering of mysterious stains. “What is that? What the fuck are you wearing?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  A shudder runs down Nora’s body. A tremor of rage and shame, like she has just completed a puzzle to reveal an image of her house being robbed.

  She shoves the door open so hard the woman tumbles over backward. I am momentarily horrified as her brittle body crashes into a table and tools rain down on her, but then my eyes take in the context of the room, and I understand.

  An echoing open space lit by the feeble glow of tiny windows. Dangling bulbs whose light doesn’t reach the ceiling. A few work stations with implements that aren’t quite medical or scientific: radios and stacks of photos, odd wooden rods and toy-like knitted things, like aids for some obscure form of therapy. And all along the walls, pacing slowly in chain-link cages: the patients.

  Julie speaks for the first time, a bleak murmur. “Everywhere we go. Over and over.”

  The patients are Dead, of course, hundreds of them, apparently sorted by decomposition levels. Nearest to us are the fresh ones: men, women, and children who look confused and hungry but otherwise normal in the dim light. In the middle: battered wrecks with dangling guts, gaping holes, missing eyes and faces—though no missing limbs, I notice. And at the back, hunching and lurching in the shadows like emaciated apes…the transitionals. Hairless, eyeless, naked and withered, hanging over the abyss and preparing to cut the rope.

  How versatile the plague is. What a variety of tools one can mold from its cold clay. Whichever direction your particular madness drives you, whether to build misery or demolish joy, the plague is ready to serve.