“For days I thought you were dead,” she said, very slowly. “Every second of every minute of every hour of those days was hell. Worse than hell. It was like being dead in life. I never want to go through that again.”
Before I could stop her, she kissed me. The kiss was brief, gentle, and loving, but our saliva mixed.
“Now I’m infected too,” she said, calmly. “I choose it voluntarily. If that’s our destiny, so be it. I have to live the rest of my life with you, no matter how long or how short, until we draw our last breath. Now we’re joined forever.”
“Joined forever,” I repeated, overwhelmed by her devotion.
We kissed again, longer and more passionately this time. Never, no matter how many years passed, would I taste another kiss like that, there in the desolate ruins of Bluefont.
48
Bathed in sweat, the Reverend Josiah Greene woke up and felt for the lamp. Then his hand slid past his Bible to a bottle of Cladoxpan. His nightmare faded as he took a long drink.
He’d dreamed about that damn lawyer. He was riding on a mule, dressed like Jesus Christ with a halo encircling his head. Greene and the rest of the apostles were walking beside him, gazing up at him, but not understanding what was going on. The lawyer suddenly turned and said, “You are the weed in my vineyard, Josiah. You’re a snake in the nest. I must cut off your head.”
Greene protested and tried to defend himself, but the apostles surrounded him, grim-faced. The Son of God slowly trotted away on his mule. Perched on the mule’s withers was a huge orange cat that winked at Greene, smirking.
The apostles—all with Malachi Grapes’s face—turned into Undead and devoured him. A black shadow, dark as the deepest night, floated overhead, relishing the scene.
It was just a crazy dream, Greene told himself. But he couldn’t shake off the terror that had invaded his body. When he got up to take a piss, pain exploded in his right knee. The reverend screamed and grabbed his leg. It wasn’t the familiar pain he felt when something was about to happen. No. This was infinitely worse. A million times stronger. If the usual pain was the flame of a cigarette lighter, this pain was a nuclear explosion.
He dragged himself, cursing, to the bathroom. He lived on the top floor of city hall, in a space renovated to his specifications. There weren’t many luxuries: a twin bed, a wooden desk and chair, and a huge crucifix hanging on a wall. A safe was bolted to the floor in a corner of the room. That was all he needed. The Lord provided the rest.
He swallowed a handful of Vicodin to deaden the pain. Then he heard gunfire coming from the ghetto. He’d ordered the “cleansing of the ghetto” that afternoon. A voice told him it was the right time. Those who were not pleasing in the eyes of the Lord must die. Jesus Christ, in His infinite goodness, would allow him to save a couple thousand. They could atone for their sins by doing His work before they died. But that was all. The fire of the archangel Gabriel must lay waste to those sinners, and he was the archangel’s instrument. He leaned on the windowsill in the bathroom and waited for the painkillers to take effect, still trembling from his nightmare. It had seemed so real.
A dark foreboding flooded over him. Something really terrible was about to happen. His knee was never wrong. He yelled, louder than he had ever yelled before.
As if fate heard his cries, explosions erupted in the ghetto. Grapes must be having trouble taking out those helot bastards.
Grapes. He was getting too hard to control. He was very smart and fanatically loyal, but a streak of madness made him unpredictable. He’d been an effective instrument for the Lord, but his time was coming. Greene told himself he had to get rid of that man. Maybe an accident. Or poison. The Lord would show him the way.
As Greene pondered this, a massive explosion shook the building. A huge fireball rose in the sky over the refinery, sending glowing chunks of steel into the air.
Reverend Greene’s testicles shrunk into balls of ice. His knee throbbed with a steady beat he’d never felt before. Thump, thump, thump. Like drums at an execution.
Greene shook off those morbid thoughts and went back into his room. He threw on clothes and ordered the guards in the hall to be on alert.
Still half-dressed, he opened the safe. Inside, along with a file crammed with photos that were for the reverend’s eyes only and a couple of sacks of precious stones, lay his Colt M1911 and two cartridges. Greene loaded the pistol and stuck it in his jacket pocket. Time to defend his kingdom. The moment had come to be the instrument of the Lord. The black shadow asleep inside of him stirred uneasily.
Hong’s tanks made their way through the town like a hot knife cutting through butter. The convoy came up against just a few scattered groups of militiamen in the crossroads. They were no match for the colonel’s disciplined troops, who decimated them with insulting ease. Defending themselves wasn’t the problem. The damn problem was—they were lost.
In the dark, the city was a maze. They couldn’t stop to get their bearings because civilian snipers were firing on them from every direction. Little did those civilians know, a few minutes later, they’d face a far worse threat—wave after wave of Undead.
When his convoy reached an intersection, Colonel Hong grunted in satisfaction. At the end of a long, deserted street flanked by houses, he spotted the ocean. Anchored in port like a sleeping giant floated a huge oil tanker. Its lights were on and sailors prowled the deck. He’d located his target. But that wasn’t enough—not anymore.
“Kim, take half the men and attack the port. Seize that ship intact. Capture at least one crew member who can tell us where they got the oil. Start the engines and be ready to sail as soon as the rest of us are on board. We may have to fight our way there, so stay on high alert.”
“Yes, sir,” Colonel Kim mumbled, worried about the responsibility that suddenly fell on his shoulders. Avoiding the colonel’s icy stare, he dared to ask a burning question. “Where are you going, sir?”
Hong held up the bottle of Cladoxpan as if it were a priceless jewel. “I’m going to find the source of this.” The colonel could hardly contain his excitement. “When I find it, we’ll be celebrated for all eternity.”
The helots’ convoy sped toward the inner wall. Prit and I were crammed into a garbage truck with Mendoza. At the south bridge into Gulfport, a powerful spotlight shone down on us from one of the massive towers. A figure stood up and shouted into a megaphone. We couldn’t make out his words over the roar of engines and the explosions dotting the city, but you didn’t have to be a genius to guess what he meant. From the other tower, bullets rattled down on our tanks.
“Let’s get ’em!” Mendoza yelled into the radio.
The driver of the tank answered him by ramming the vehicle into the gate that separated Gulfport from the Bluefont ghetto. Unlike the outside gates, it wasn’t reinforced. With the first blow, one of its hinges flew through the air, but the second one held fast. From the towers, frightened militiamen started lobbing grenades. One of their grenades slid through the air vent of the tank in the lead. The tank exploded like a piñata full of firecrackers, bringing down the gate. Flames shooting out from the tank sent up thick smoke that curled around the tower, blinding the guards.
That’s when panic spread among the militiamen. Grapes’s convoy had just whizzed past them in the opposite direction, and they could hear explosions and gunfire coming from the other end of town. On top of that, two hundred armed and angry helots had just blown up their gate. The militiamen took off, racing home to protect their families. Ignoring the four Green Guards in charge, they scattered in a disorderly mess.