“Hi!”
I whirl around to find the young man from the train grinning at me. He sticks out his hand.
“We met earlier. I’m Lindh.”
I look at his hand until he lowers it.
“Listen,” he says, “I feel convicted about the way I treated you yesterday. I was rude.”
I shrug.
“I could sense you were closed off, so I think I withdrew some of my hospitality, but today you seem a little more…open?”
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.