The Wrath of the Just (Apocalypse Z)

by Manel Loureiro

  “Is that true?” The officer looked at the Mexican soldier, whose face was unreadable. “He didn’t touch either of you?”

  “No.” Lucia wasn’t sure why she lied. “He didn’t touch us.”

  “OK, but please don’t approach this area without telling us first. Those men are dangerous criminals, the worst kind.”

  “Good-bye, Lucia.” Mendoza waved and took a swig from a flask. “Don’t forget Carlos Mendoza. If you need me, say you’re one of the Just. You never know when our paths’ll cross.”

  “The Just? What’re you talking about?”

  But Mendoza had turned and was headed back into the bowels of the ship.

  Lucia walked slowly back to the stern, petting Lucullus as the first drops of rain splashed onto the hot metal deck. She felt light-headed, and her thoughts were racing. That man wasn’t immune, and yet the virus didn’t affect him. It made no sense. She’d seen the crew cast several soldiers into the ocean. TSJ had killed them. But Carlos and the giant black soldier with the tattooed arm were still walking around as if nothing had happened, even though they were infected.

  She couldn’t get the man’s bold smile and his bright, defiant eyes out of her mind. The more she thought about him, the better-looking he got.

  12

  Reverend Greene had never been good-looking, but the sour expression on his face that morning didn’t help. He was short, skinny, and in his seventies. Age spots dotted his leathery skin. He was dressed the same way he’d dressed for over forty years: gray suit, a bolo string tie with a silver slide, and a Stetson hat. Even though his sermon at the morning prayer service had been particularly inspired (Praise the Lord Jesus Christ forever, amen, hallelujah!), the reverend wasn’t happy. He sensed something was wrong. Rather, his knee sensed something was wrong. And his knee was always right.

  Back in 1974, in Waynesboro, Virginia, some drunks had broken that knee because they didn’t like his looks. The fracture wasn’t serious. It was common among athletes, dancers, climbers—and victims of angry drunks. Most people were good as new in a few weeks. (Praise the Lord, amen, hallelujah!) However, a few found that their broken knee reliably predicted changes in the weather. They could forecast that a lovely spring day would turn into a stormy night.

  Reverend Greene’s case was slightly different. After five long weeks in the county hospital, he was finally discharged. Back out on the street, his knee started to throb. The pain was mild at first, but it got worse as the time went by until he thought it was going to explode. He wondered if he should go back to the hospital.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  One day, he was walking down the street when two masked men ran out of a jewelry store, firing shots left and right. The store’s earsplitting alarm was going off, drowning out any other sound. An old man chased after them, clutching a shotgun big enough to hunt large game in Africa. Probably the owner, Greene thought. The robbers had held him at gunpoint during the robbery, but the guy had found a way to activate the alarm.

  “Get back here, you sons of bitches!” The man planted himself in the middle of the street and shouted at the top of his lungs. He jerked the rifle up to his shoulder and aimed at the fleeing robbers. “No one fucks with me!”

  The shotgun’s recoil threw the old man back several feet, but he raised it and fired again. Bright-red blood bloomed like a flower across the back of one of the robbers, and he collapsed on the ground. The other robber turned and took aim at the old man. His .38 looked like a toy compared to the jeweler’s shotgun, but at that range, size didn’t matter. The first bullet pierced the old man’s side; the second bullet went through his right eye, killing him instantly. In a final reflexive gesture, the jeweler’s index finger pulled the trigger even though its owner was dead. The shot sent the old man’s limp body flying backward as the robber’s head turned to jelly and splattered in every direction.

  The whole thing only lasted ten or twelve seconds. The street got very still, except for the wailing alarm. The smell of gunpowder, blood, and shit hung in the air. Greene had flattened himself against a wall during the shooting. As he backed away from the bodies, he heard police sirens in the distance.

  Then it dawned on him: his knee had stopped hurting. It felt good as new.

  Greene didn’t give it much thought until the next week. His knee was throbbing again as he sat in a coffee shop, pondering what to do with the last twenty-seven dollars in his pocket. Just then a dump truck ran a red light right in front of him, crushing a Chevrolet and the family of five inside it. Everyone was killed, including the truck driver.

  And just like that, his damn knee stopped throbbing. The deaths he witnessed seemed to soothe it.

  At first he told himself it was just a grim coincidence. But the same thing happened again and again, no matter where he was or what he was doing. The pain started out dull and pulsating, then grew until it was searing. Sometimes the pain went away when he left the place where it had started. When he consulted the newspapers or watched TV the next day, he’d learn that the place had been the scene of a bloody accident or crime after he left.

  Other times, morbid curiosity got the better of him. When the throbbing started, he’d follow his macabre knee, guided by the pain the way sonar guides a bat. When he reached a spot where the pain got really bad, he’d hide and wait. Something always happened.

  Over the next thirty-five years, he witnessed fifteen car wrecks, nineteen murders, an accidental decapitation, and two rapes that ended in death. To his surprise, he enjoyed every one of those tragedies, though he never admitted it—not even to God.

  As the years went by, Reverend Greene developed a strange image of himself. He came to believe that his visions were a gift from the Lord (Praise His name forever, amen, hallelujah).

  He could sense the presence of evil. More importantly, he could anticipate evil. In his mind, that qualified him as a prophet, one of the Lord’s chosen few. If he could prophesy the coming of evil, didn’t that make him the Lord’s mouthpiece, announcing the inevitable arrival of the Antichrist?

  Greene had been an itinerant preacher in the South since he was a teenager. The seventh son of barely literate farmers from Alabama, Greene never went to college. He set out to preach the word of God because he thought he felt the call. More likely he was fleeing his alcoholic father, who beat him, and his mother, who was schizophrenic. His words were stirring, but his knowledge of Scripture left a lot to be desired. That was a drawback for an itinerant preacher in the Bible Belt, where evangelical Christianity had deep roots and influenced every aspect of daily life.

  But after the injury to his knee and the tragedies that the pain foretold, his sermons changed radically. Now he saw himself as the harbinger of the Apocalypse—and that changed everything. His obsessive message reached a fever pitch. The Lord would punish the sins of His wayward children. Those who lacked piety or were sodomists, Democrats, blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Muslims, Communists, or anyone who listened to rap music all fit into the huge cauldron where Greene cooked up his sermons. In the eyes of the Lord, anything that deviated from the tried and true principles of the old South was offensive. The Lord (Praise His name forever, hallelujah, amen!) was enraged and would soon unleash His righteous anger.

  One day, the pain in Greene’s knee became rhythmic and intense in a way he’d never experienced. He assumed an especially awful crime was about to take place. He waited for a few days, but nothing happened. Yet the throbbing got stronger. He downed Vicodin like candy, but the pain didn’t stop. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he decided he didn’t want to witness whatever horror that throbbing foretold. In the middle of the night, he took down the tent where he preached his sermons, loaded it in his camper, and fled farther south.

  Even then, the pain followed him like a faithful dog. For fifteen days, no matter where he went, the pain stuck to him the way dog shit sticks to a shoe. Disoriented, almost de
lirious, Greene instinctively drove on. If he’d listened to something other than Christian radio stations, he’d have learned that a pandemic was spreading around the world and that it had landed in America. When Reverend Greene reached Gulfport, Mississippi, he had no clue that the Apocalypse he thought he was destined to proclaim had already started two weeks earlier. What he did learn was something else again.

  His knee stopped throbbing. The pain disappeared completely.

  That had to mean something, but so much was going on in Gulfport, he couldn’t figure out what. The National Guard was evacuating all residents to a Safe Zone in nearby Biloxi. Two-thirds of Gulfport’s inhabitants had already fled; the rest were rushing around, packing up their belongings. When Greene drove his old camper down Main Street, hardly anyone noticed him. But Greene saw it all very clearly. That was what he was destined for, what he’d been waiting for all those years. The End of Days was upon them, but he knew where the Righteous could take shelter. He knew where they’d be safe from the wrath of the Lord—where the pain couldn’t reach him.

  Greene immediately set up his tent on the road between Gulfport and Biloxi, and as he mounted his pulpit, a current of energy shook his body like an electric shock. For the first time in all those years, he felt the call of the Lord burning inside him. Not even the muscles he’d used to set up the tent were sore.

  “Listen to me, good people of Gulfport! Don’t run away. You have nothing to fear! The Lord has sanctified this place and the plague will not come here!”

  He ranted and raved at the top of his lungs for hours, but only a few curious onlookers or people too exhausted to go on stopped to hear his sermon. Then the Lord decided to help him, and Stanley Morgan crossed his path.

  Stanley Morgan, known to his neighbors as Old Stan, had been mayor of Gulfport for nearly twenty years. White, Southern Baptist—and Republican to the core—Stan thought there was only one right way to do things: his way.

  So when a spit-and-polish marine colonel with a Yankee accent planted himself in front of Stan’s desk and ordered him to evacuate the entire town of Gulfport to the Biloxi Safe Zone in forty-eight hours, Stan had to muster every ounce of self-control not to punch out the guy’s pearly white teeth.

  Nobody told Stan Morgan what to do, and certainly not a cocky East Coast marine colonel. Evacuate my city, my ass! Gulfport had weathered thousands of emergencies. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina leveled the city, but even then, it was never completely evacuated. They should name a library or a park after me. I deserve it, damn it! But Stan was sure that would never happen if he were known as the mayor who evacuated his beloved city.

  So he did everything he could to look like he was complying with evacuation orders, without actually lifting a finger. He kept one eye on the soldiers and the other on the TV, which showed the entire world crumbling.

  Everyone in his town also tuned in to CNN and saw the Undead spreading unchecked across the country. When the media informed them that the nearest Safe Zone was in Biloxi, they all panicked. Families shoved their belongings into their cars and took off. But with no organized evacuation, all they managed to do was shut down the interstate between the two cities, trapping tens of thousands of people in a massive traffic jam. In just a few hours, when the Undead closed in, it would be the scene of an unimaginable massacre.

  Stan did all he could to stop the people of Gulfport from leaving, but that proved harder than directing the floats at the homecoming parade. Panic kept everyone from thinking rationally. He argued, reasoned, pleaded, and cursed, but the imminent arrival of the Undead scared most people shitless. They said, “Sorry, Stan, really sorry, but . . .” then climbed into their cars and didn’t look back.

  That was until fate brought his town a half-crazy preacher yelling himself hoarse under a tent by the side of the road. Of course, the woods were full of guys like him: an itinerant preacher, living on charity, donations, and, Stan suspected, false miracles. He was yelling about the End of Days (a common theme in the Preacher’s Manual). The really interesting part was what this particular preacher added: Gulfport was the only safe place for thousands of miles. Gulfport. His city. That gave Stan an idea.

  Not pausing to ponder the situation, Stan climbed up on the preacher’s rickety stage and stuck out his hand, flashing the same fake smile he used to seal a real estate deal.

  “Good afternoon, Reverend. I’m Stan Morgan, mayor of Gulfport. I believe God has placed you in my path.”

  Two hours later, Reverend Greene’s little tent was gone. In its place stood a tent as large as a circus big top that held over four hundred people and had a sound system that could rival the one in the Gulfport Marlins’ stadium. No one on the interstate could miss Reverend Greene with Stan Morgan by his side.

  People were drawn by the combination of Reverend Greene’s magnetic preaching and the impressive figure of Stan Morgan, a man known to everyone in Gulfport. First, a couple of cars stopped, then three or four trucks. In less than half an hour, a small crowd had gathered under the tent, where Greene was declaring, in a raspy voice, that Gulfport was the only safe place in Mississippi. Stan knew that human beings were gregarious and would do what other people were doing, and soon, one after another, they followed their neighbors to the tent by the side of the road.

  Stan circulated among the crowd. Greene’s words were like a gentle hand stroking the back of a terrified dog. Suddenly, the mass hysteria was soothed. Before, their only plan had been to flee to the Biloxi Safe Zone. Now they were willing to listen to Stan.

  “He’s a holy man,” Stan whispered, as he clutched hands and slapped backs. “He traveled across three states in that beat-up camper, surrounded by millions of the monsters, without getting a scratch on him. The Lord has surely blessed this man.”

  The frightened people looked at the reverend with changed eyes as they drank in his words. For weeks they’d lived in terror; the only news they heard was of death, devastation, and the mysterious plague of Undead headed their way. Greene’s rousing talk of salvation and safety in their own home was music to their ears.

  Thanks to the Apocalypse, for the first time in nearly forty years, the Reverend Josiah Greene addressed a congregation willing to listen to him. He was happy until months later, when the Ithaca sailed back into port, and his knee resumed its throbbing. The pain was slight, but unmistakable. Suddenly, Reverend Greene was afraid.

  13

  “Lucia! Prit! You gotta see this! I can’t believe it!” I gasped as the Ithaca entered the Port of Gulfport. A pair of tugboats, exhaling huge puffs of smoke, slowly guided the colossal ship through the channel and into its berth. Enormous jets of water shot up along the tugboats’ sides. People ran along the shore, cheering and waving their arms. Cars sped down the wide street along the waterfront as people leaned out the windows and honked their horns. The quiet town had gone a bit crazy.

  No wonder. All that oil in the Ithaca’s holds meant they’d have fuel for at least a year. Less than that if they continued to drive the six gas-guzzling Humvees that rushed toward the ship, a police car leading the way through the jubilant throng. I got worried when I got a closer look at them—they were the doorless version used in combat. A yellow school bus followed close behind. Crammed inside each Hummer were several men armed with assault rifles, each wearing a green band around his right forearm.

  “Mission accomplished,” Captain Birley said, lighting his pipe and surveying the harbor with a satisfied gaze. “With the Lord God Almighty’s blessing, we went halfway around the world and returned home in one piece. Blessed is the Reverend Greene and blessed is this ship, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I almost pointed out that the half-dozen men who died back at Luba and the other four who were dumped into the ocean as fish food wouldn’t agree. But I bit my tongue. Being cautious had kept us alive up till now.

  “Is the Reverend Greene in that convoy?” Lucia asked as it came to a stop.


  “Oh, no,” Birley chuckled. “That’s the reverend’s Green Guard. They keep the peace in the Lord’s city. They’re here to collect that rabble in the bow. I’ll feel a whole lot better when every one of those stinking lowlifes is off my boat.”

  “Hey, that’s a terrible way to talk about those people!” The anger in Lucia’s voice took me by surprise. “They risked their lives to fill your damn ship with oil. Without them, the trip would’ve been a complete failure.”

  Captain Birley stared at Lucia for a long moment with a menacing look in his eyes. He studied her as if he’d never seen her before, as if she’d magically materialized on his ship. He replied in an icy voice, drawing out his words.

  “Watch what you say, young lady. It’d be a shame to have to spank a girl as lovely as you. You’re a woman, so of course you don’t know what you’re talking about, but your menfolk need to teach you some manners.”

  “Who do you think you are, you piece of shit?” Lucia hurled insults at him in Spanish, which, fortunately, Birley didn’t know. “Racist asshole! Prick! Macho pig!”

  “Lucia, get ahold of yourself,” I whispered and held on to her so she couldn’t scratch Birley’s eyes out.

  “Did you hear what he said about those people? He’s fucking sick!” Lucia struggled in my arms.

  “I agree with you one hundred percent, but hear me out. I don’t know what the hell’s up with these people. One thing’s clear—if your skin isn’t white, you end up as cannon fodder,” I said, forcing her to look me in the eyes. “And these people saved us, we’re far from any place we can call home, and our lives depend on their goodwill. So, please, tone it down and apologize to the captain.”

  Lucia snorted in fury and shook me off. She stomped off to the other end of the bridge, brushing past Pritchenko, who watched her, stunned.

  “What was that all about? She looked like a pissed-off Siberian tiger.”