by A. M. Geever
Miranda recounted her meeting with the Prophet, the rest of the group gathering round as their jobs allowed. Delilah wagged her tail and trilled, harmony in the pack restored. Quiet filled the room when Miranda finished.
“Are you sure he doesn’t suspect anything?” Doug asked.
“No idea,” she said. “But I don’t think he knows I found it.”
“How are we going to get at it?” Connor asked. “She can’t keep throwing herself at him.”
“Why not?” Seffie asked. “Mario will be there for the ‘counseling’ sessions and that asshole would probably love a three-way.” She looked at Miranda, a crafty smile spreading across her lips. “Jeremiah wants to play Pygmalion and bang you. If he can do it in front of your husband, even better. He won’t waste time getting started, especially if he thinks it will take a while to reprogram you so he can keep what he likes while he upgrades the rest to Stepford 3.0. He’s probably jerking off right now just thinking about it.”
“That’s an image I could have lived without,” Miranda said, suppressing a shudder.
“For Christ’s sake,” Connor said. “This isn’t a game.”
Miranda was glad Connor was sitting across the table from her. Otherwise she’d slap him. “We’re trying to save the human race. I’m pretty clear on what the stakes are.”
“Marriage counseling with the Prophet,” Mario muttered. “And I thought things couldn’t get weirder.”
A buzz of excitement rippled through her. Mario was in. They would go see the Prophet, find a way to get the serum and get the fuck out of here. It was so close she could taste it.
“What about Finn?” she asked. “Did he come back with anything?”
“No,” Doug answered, sounding uneasy. Mike made a skeptical noise in his throat. Doug glanced at him and shrugged. “If he’s not genuine about helping us, then that was one hell of an act.”
“The no-show doesn’t do much to inspire confidence, but it’s the least of our worries,” Mike said. He looked over at Doug. “What next?”
Doug gnawed on his lower lip, taking a moment to collect his thoughts. Miranda could see her news had raised his spirits, but the day’s events had taken their toll.
“Christ, this place,” Doug said under his breath. He looked around the table, addressing the entire group. “I’m not sure any of us can think straight. Let’s call it a night, regroup in the morning. Miranda and Mario can throw themselves at that crazy SOB, and we’ll see if that gets us anywhere.”
An intense desire to giggle hysterically gripped Miranda—shock, fear, and adrenaline catching up with her. The room was too hot, too close, with the fire roaring. The heat made her feel almost disconnected from her body. She bit her tongue, afraid that if she gave in to the impulse to laugh, she would not be able to stop.
“We stay together,” Doug continued. “No more running off on your own initiative. Find whatever you can to keep on hand as a weapon. We’ll keep a watch and try to get some rest.”
Mike shook his head, a rumble of disagreement building in his throat. “Respectfully, Doug, that’s a bad idea. They’ve just shown us the nasty underbelly of this place. To the Prophet, an outsider’s first Faith Walk is a test, an initiation. Will we accept this new reality or reject it?”
Mike tilted his head toward the infirmary’s windows. “There are more patrols of the Prophet’s Guard tonight. Circling the wagons sends the wrong message. If our group cohesion gets stronger when we should be awed by the Prophet’s divine powers, then we’re not initiated. We’ve failed the test. The only thing that is going to buy us the time we need, apart from Miranda’s considerable charms, is if they think we’re part of this now. We should carry on as we have from the start. Miranda, Seffie, and Mario sleep here, and the rest of us in our shared quarters.”
Mike sat back and again kept watch on the door without seeming to. He must have been one hell of a Marine, thought Miranda.
“Okay, strike that,” Doug said. “It’s just me who can’t think straight. Sun Tzu here has a much better grasp of the situation, and I’m not stupid enough to disagree with a guy who never lost a battle.”
“Your weapon idea was good,” Mike offered.
“I don’t need your pity,” Doug deadpanned as he stood up. “We’re shoving off. You three, stay sharp.”
Mike and Doug started for the door, but Connor stayed rooted where he stood, looking torn. “Can you give me a minute?” he asked Doug.
Doug looked from Connor to Miranda. “We’ll be outside.”
“I’ll take the first watch,” Mario said.
Mario blew out the oil lamp on the exam table. Seffie stomped on one of the stools, then pried the legs free. She handed one to Mario and tossed another on Miranda’s cot as she headed for her own.
As the light from the lantern by Seffie’s cot faded, the infirmary plunged into darkness, but the effect lasted only a moment. Flickering shafts of red-gold light escaped cracks in the grate on the wood-burning stove. The room felt stuffy and filled with an awkward vibe. Miranda sighed. When had she started to dread dealing with Connor? She motioned for Delilah to stay before taking Connor’s arm for support as they crossed over to the counter where only hours ago Bethany had stood, grinding herbs in the mortar and pestle. Moonlight streamed through the windows.
“Are you okay?” Connor asked, his voice just shy of a whisper.
“I’m better than okay,” she said. “We’re going to get the serum back and get out of here.”
“Going to the Prophet on your own… Anything could have happened.”
Miranda felt the slightest twinge of temper, but it petered out almost instantly. If he didn’t understand using whatever advantage they had to get the serum back, including herself, no amount of explaining would make any difference.
“I’m going to bed, Connor,” she said.
“Miri,” he pleaded, catching her hand in his. “Please. Don’t be like that.”
His hand around hers felt good. It felt right. Her body plunged into the sensation as her mind tried to ignore it.
“What do you want from me?” she whispered. “If we don’t get that serum back, we can’t break the monopoly on the vaccine. And if we don’t break it, nothing will change. We can end this: the zombies, the petty dictators, all of it. Maybe even have a world more like it used to be. I got results tonight and you’re giving me a hard time? The only person who needs to make it out of here with that serum is Mario, because he can use it to make more. The rest of us are expendable.”
“I just want you to be safe.”
“I haven’t been safe for ten years, Connor. No one has.”
Miranda disentangled her fingers from his. Her hand felt naked as she pushed away from the counter and limp-hopped across the shadowy infirmary. She heard the door open and close.
She sat on her cot and began to unlace her boots, not bothering to fend off Delilah’s efforts to lick her face off. She petted the pit bull’s big head with one hand as she wriggled underneath the blankets. She felt, for the first time, just how exhausted she was.
She lay still and listened: the creak of the building, the hiss and pop of the fire, Seffie’s soft snore and Delilah’s loud one, the distant moaning of zombies on the forest floor below. Bethany was down there now, a hungry, shuffling shroud. However inadvertent, they had helped put her there.
She closed her eyes, sure she would pass out immediately, but sleep eluded her. The room was too warm. She threw off the covers and concentrated on her breath as it slid in and out. She hovered at the edge of sleep, feeling its steady, drowsy pull, but a wisp of a question tickled the edge of her mind. Ill-formed, amorphous, it circled at the periphery of her consciousness, just out of reach.
Fuck.
She opened her eyes and sat up. Mario stood with his back to her, leaning against the exam table they had crowded around earlier. She stood, careful to not step on Delilah, and limped over. She hesitated for a moment before she rounded the corner of the table and
leaned against it to stand beside him.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Can’t sleep.” Without meaning to she added, “Connor wears me out.”
Mario smothered a laugh. Miranda grimaced, embarrassed.
“Like you really care. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Mario said, a trace of amusement in his voice. When she did not answer, he added, “Really.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” A pause, and then, “You did great tonight, Miri.”
“Thanks,” she said, caught off guard. She had not expected a compliment.
“That took guts.”
“Or crazy.”
“Maybe a little of both.”
A tiny smile quirked the corners of Miranda’s mouth. She could hear the amusement, even some pride in Mario’s voice. The cadence of his speech was like the ocean: slow, steady, unconcerned.
They leaned against the table, the silence almost companionable. Miranda looked around the darkened infirmary. The salves, tinctures, herbs, and plants that Bethany had collected were everywhere. It must have been so frustrating, knowing what was possible but being forced to use such crude methods. She thought of Naomi, of the terrible burns the young woman had suffered. In a real hospital, Bethany might have saved her.
“Why did you—” she started, then thought better of it.
“What?” Mario asked.
“It’s stupid, forget it.”
“What is it?”
She should make something up—it would be easier—but instead she asked the question.
“Why did you want to bring Naomi with us?”
Mario’s face seemed to shutter closed as his eyes narrowed.
“I was just wondering if Bethany might have been able to help her,” she said.
Mario looked at Bethany’s tools of the trade in the dim room. “Not with what’s here,” he said. “Naomi was going to die no matter what we did.”
“Then why did you want to bring her with us? Why make leaving her harder?”
Miranda’s curiosity was genuine. The Mario she had known had been kind, but not sentimentally foolish. Not with something so important on the line.
“Having one more person’s blood on my hands,” he finally said. “I just couldn’t stand it.”
Miranda was surprised to find that she wanted to tell him Naomi’s death was not his fault. But comforting him felt too strange, too alien, so she stayed silent.
“Miri, I’m— I’m sorry, for what I did to you,” he whispered. “I told myself it was the only way but if I had known what it would do to you…”
He reached to trace the inside of her forearm. The familiar warmth of his fingers skimmed the slim pink lines of newly healed cuts that overlay the lattice of faded ivory scars.
“It wasn’t worth it.”
Miranda’s heart jumped into her throat, the skin beneath his fingers aflame. When she first learned the truth, an all-consuming rage had engulfed her, made worse by the lack of an apology that acknowledged the damage he had wrought. Now he was, and all she felt was relief. Not validated or vindicated, but relieved, as if a great weight was slipping from her.
“Oh,” she said, more in response to the feeling of relief than his apology. “I don’t— I—” she stammered, feeling the need to draw into and protect herself, to retreat from this sudden intimacy they had stumbled into. She pulled her arm away from his hand. “Thank you.”
Neither of them spoke. His apology and her acknowledgment hung in silence.
“You’ll be on watch after Seffie,” he finally said. “You should try and get some sleep.”
She pushed off the table but didn’t move further. “Can I ask you something else?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“Why no lecture about how dangerous it was to go see the Prophet on my own?”
He just looked at her. The moonlight puddled at their feet and reflected up, limning him with an otherworldly glow. The intensity of his stare bored right through her. When his silence was starting to make her uncomfortable, he finally said, “Remember the early days, when you did all those things that needed doing? The sewers and clearing out buildings, and how I begged you not to?”
He stopped. When Miranda realized he was waiting for an answer, she nodded.
“I thought it was about loving you, the begging and pleading, but it was selfish. You needed a clear head and what did I do? I let you know that I didn’t believe you could take care of yourself.” He snorted softly, then said with an edge of bitterness, “And you always made that smart-ass remark: ‘I’ll see you soon. Don’t get dead.’”
“I didn’t…” she said, voice trailing. His confession made her feel thoughtless, but what the fuck did he think she was, especially back then? A mind reader?
Mario sighed and shook his head. “I sure as hell didn’t succeed, but I think I tried to make you as scared as I was so you’d quit leaving safe places for dangerous ones. So you’d quit leaving me. I should have just told you that I loved you and was afraid for you, afraid of losing you, but it felt like tempting fate.”
Loved, past tense.
Even after his apology it stung, being consigned to the past. Rejected. Some desperately foolish part of her had believed that an apology might change things between them, might open up possibilities that just an hour ago would have been absurd, but it didn’t seem to have changed anything for Mario. Miranda felt her gorge rise in her throat as a wave of nausea roiled her stomach. Could she be any more pathetic?
The acid-drenched tone of her voice surprised even herself as she said, “You don’t have to waste your time being afraid for me anymore.”
A tiny part of her brain, the part that felt like an alien observer, knew it was unfair to be angry or cruel. He was only answering her question. Mario had not forced her to ask, nor promised that she would like the answer, but she couldn’t seem to help it. Lashing out to defend herself, to get her guard back up when she was foolish enough to let it drop, was second nature to her now.
She pushed away from the table, rigid with self-loathing anger, but Mario caught her wrist. He studied her face for a moment as if what he saw was familiar—and sad.
“You’re so damn smart, but you still don’t see what’s right in front of you.”
He stepped closer and cradled the curve of her jaw, his touch weightless as a dandelion seed in the wind. Miranda’s heart beat so loud she was sure it would drown out his voice.
“I’m not afraid for you anymore, Miri. I’m terrified.”
48
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Mario muttered under his breath.
Miranda had one, too. Two days after her meeting with the Prophet, the sanctuary was bursting with people. The undertones of anxiety and fear that Miranda had experienced preceding the Faith Walk were absent. The inhabitants of New Jerusalem believed there was nothing to fear. Or in some sad, sick cases, anticipate. The nagging disquiet that began when they had been summoned for the sermon had blossomed into full-blown fight or flight. Mario, Doug, everyone in the group felt it.
They tried to sit scattered throughout the crowd to emphasize that they were fitting in and accepting New Jerusalem’s customs, but the Prophet’s Guard shepherded them into the front row, right in front of the pulpit. So much for lessening group cohesion. Miranda sat between Mario and Doug. Mike sat on Mario’s left, Seffie and Connor to Doug’s right.
Even now, in the middle of what felt like a full-blown crisis, Miranda felt distracted and anxious but not about their current situation. She did not understand why the revelation that Mario still loved her had thrown her so badly. Emily had told her as much. She had not believed Emily, but that wasn’t it. This was about her.
She was even more hyper-aware of him now, but it was more than proximity that had her attuned to where he was and what he was doing every single second. He had brushed against her as they went through the door earlier. Her entire body had leaned into it, even though she had not
actually moved toward him. She could still feel it, the reaching for him. It was driving her crazy.
As a hush fell, murmurs of ‘All-Father be Praised!’ and ‘As the Prophet Commands!’ began to grow from the rear. Miranda turned around and saw Jeremiah, surrounded by a phalanx of his guard. He looked excited. Finn followed his father, stony-faced and eyes forward, along with his cousin Dalton. Miranda turned to look forward as the procession passed by, praying the dread she felt was only her imagination.
The Prophet strode to the pulpit. Behind him, high on the wall, was the outline of a hollow man. Its white edges seemed to leap from the dark background like a malevolent gingerbread man. Finn and Dalton sat on a short bench against the wall on the Prophet’s right; the Prophet’s Guard stood in a line behind him.
“My Children,” the Prophet called out.
“God All-Father on Earth, Master of the Hollow Men,” the people answered. An expectant hush filled the room.
“It is never easy to be among the Heavenly Father’s Chosen. On all sides, unbelievers and blasphemers will assail the Truth of Our Righteous Judgment. Those of Us who have been chosen must be ever vigilant. The sin and decadence of the outside world will always try to undermine and pervert the holy teaching of your God All-Father. We must guard what We have built. Yet We must also open Our Heart to the Heavenly Father’s will. We must be open to others, as He is to Us, so that We may offer Our Salvation to those who seek it.”
The Prophet paused. He looked from one side of the room to the other.
“Our purpose in building this refuge was not just to stand apart from the old world that Our Heavenly Father has condemned, but to serve as a beacon of His Righteousness. A beacon that will shine so that others might join Us and know the Truth of Our Judgment. It is a difficult balance that We seek to maintain.” Jeremiah reached into his pocket and set a squat red vial of vaccine serum on the pulpit. “But We fear this balance may be in peril.”
Miranda felt the crush against her chest, as if she’d taken a punch to the solar plexus. Murmurs of apprehension filled the sanctuary. Almost instantly, Doug was on his feet.