by Jase Kovacs
And so we lived on, on our little island. We fished the blue lagoon. We beat palm trees into sago to eat and spent endless hours weaving pandan leaves into walls for our houses and sails for our canoes, day after day, week after week, life and time rolling on, as eternal as the surf and the tides and the rise and fall of the sun and moon. The cycles of life, ancient and immutable, as they always were, as they always should be.
But, of course, there were those for whom peace was an anathema, whose night thoughts were not sated by full bellies and happy families, who dreamed of power and coveted what others had and they did not. So came the slow, winding path that we now found ourselves on, as factions in both the local and expat camps sharpened their rhetoric and looked hungrily across the stream.
How will the news of Deborah's people affect Madau? Somewhere I know I am moaning, crying out at the pain in my sides and back. I'm in a cold place with a damp floor. A man I know leans over me, shushing me, murmuring words in a foreign language that soothes despite my incomprehension. I swim in a deep well of pain, and through a distant slit I see the night stars.
We have to go back. They have to know. Their island sanctuary has become a castle under siege, for the enemy is at the gate, the wolf is at the door. Our defences are wide open while we sleep the untroubled sleep of the innocent.
I sleep, I drift, I stir. I have to wake. They have to know. I cannot sleep, for evil never does.
***
Light pierces the gloom. It spills into the cell from two slit windows set high on the wall. I lie in the corner, the cinder blocks hard and cool against my shoulder. My ribs ache, and the back of my head throbs with a dull, pulsing agony. I dimly remember Deborah rising in full rant and then a harsh blow knocking me to the ground. Then kicks and punches raining on my prostrate form, a senseless beating without purpose or question, as if all I were only a lightning rod to the hates and frustrations of a lost people. And after that, darkness — but it was the darkness found when we watch a movie on Duncan's computer at night, where the lives and loves of strangers play out on the other side of an impermeable screen, in a manner untouchable and preordained.
"Eh, you are awake? Shh, don't move." Enzo crouches over me. His face is strangely mottled in the gloom. He raises a bowl to my lips. "Just a little drink."
I sip. The water has a nasty aftertaste, but even so I have to resist the urge to gulp it down. My mouth is fouled with grit and thick phlegm. I struggle with my swollen tongue to find words. Pain jets through my jaw as I finally manage, "The others?"
Enzo sets the bowl down on the floor. He's squatting on his haunches, dressed only in his old pair of shorts. I can see now that his chest and face are mottled with ugly purple blotches, as if a spring of orchids grows under his skin. He shakes his head. "I do not know. The children disappear, then Matty and I split up to find them. The big man, with the axe—"
"Dan."
"He surprise me. We have fight but… I am not so good. I mean, I kick his ass a little bit, but he has friends, yes?"
"Your shotgun?"
"Ah, well. They hit me with the axe handle first. After that, pow, pow, pow until I go to sleep. I wake up here. At night. You already here. What happened?"
"I thought they were… I thought Deborah's people were Christian missionaries that had gone off the deep end. But they're into something much weirder than that. She started going on about how God abandoned us and only their Green Lord is a true god."
"The Green Lord? What is this?"
"I don't know. I haven't heard of him before. It could be some god they've come up with… or a local tradition they've co-opted… "
He looks at me intently as my voice trails off. His eyes squint, but that might just be the swelling from his red, tight cheeks. "But yes? You think of something?"
An idea comes to me. Despite the pain, I sit up, excited by what has just occurred to me. "How much did Matty tell you about the alpha? The one on the Black Harvest?"
"Oh, very little. Just what she say at the Council meeting, that he could lead the other zombi and make them attack. What is it you think?"
"Something Matty said, when she was in quarantine… she was sick, raving. We didn't want it in the official record, it could have set off panic. She said the alpha invaded her mind and possessed her."
"But this is impossible, no?"
I try to shrug. It hurts too much, so I settle for a slight inclining of my head. "The other thing she said was that the alpha called himself the Pale King."
"Yes, and so?"
"And Deborah also used that name. When she kicked off ranting about the Green Lord and dark stars."
"You go too fast. What is dark star?"
"Sorry. My head's not in order."
"Is okay. Your head looks like mine." There is a ghost of a smile on his split lips. I notice there is a fresh gap in his front teeth, where one is missing. "We are two handsome guys, no?"
"Deborah started talking about her dark lord… no, wait, that's not right. Give me a moment to gather my thoughts." I close my eyes and try to picture her rising up, the shock of her wounds and scars and sudden nakedness. The way she gathered righteous fury around her like a pillar of fire. "She said the true god was the dark star, the lord of the void, who sent his prophets among us. The Pale King, the Green Lord and… I think the others were a God of Creeping Things and the other… it's a strange word, like pneumatic."
"But that is an air cylinder, yes? For hydraulic systems."
"Yeah, I said it sounded like. I don't know—"
The cell door swings open, and Dan comes in, pressing the door against the wall with his axe. He looks us over as he would bad meat in the marketplace before grinning at Enzo. He taps the side of his face, the same side that is mottled and dark on Enzo. "How's the head, Frenchie?"
A young woman carrying a bowl of water comes in. She sets the bowl down on the floor and lifts a wet sponge from it. Then she looks at Dan until he shrugs and goes out, pulling the door shut behind him.
She beckons to me, and I kneel before her, waiting for some explanation. She holds my chin and looks into my face. She is tanned nut brown, her hair is black, and her eyes are luminous in the dim light of the cell. I would guess she is twenty-five. "I need to wash you both," she says. "If you give me any trouble, I'll call Dan in here."
"Wash?" asks Enzo. "How about some good drinking water?"
She smiles sympathetically, as if we are friends to whom she has to deny hospitality. "I'm sorry, but you must be cleansed for your supplication." She begins to wipe my face with the sponge, her soft dabs tender and kind. "It is a hard covenant, but a necessary one."
"It would help if we knew what you're talking about," I say.
She pauses, looking at me quizzically. "Would it? I'm not sure. You must think us harsh. But we were not always this way. This is the new scripture for a new world. Deborah says we must offer to the Green Lord, and so we do." She stops washing me but still holds my chin as she looks closely at me. The moment is strangely intimate. "I do not like it. But there is much I don't like about this new world."
I take her damp hand in mine. She drops the sponge into the bowl and returns my gaze. What I thought was the luminosity of spiritual arrogance in her eyes are actually flickers of doubt. For a moment, I get an inkling of how Matty sees the world; I see a fleeting opportunity, and I recklessly push forward to seize it. "Deborah's is not the only way. What's your name?"
She dips her eyes as she murmurs, "Abigail."
"Abigail, Deborah follows a false god. She has led you all under his thrall."
"No." She bites her bottom lip, briefly confused. "No, that's not true. She is rightly guided. His covenant is hard but necessary." Her second use of that phrase tips me off: it's a mantra. She shivers, and I see that she follows Deborah not out of love but out of fear. "Those chosen by the night are—"
The door bursts open, slamming against the wall with a clang so loud we feel it as jets of pain in our bones. Light floods the
room, harsh and blinding. Dan comes in, his face dark with anger. Enzo half rises, and Dan punches him in the face to send him sprawling. Abigail is on her feet, shouting, but he ignores her. Another man grabs me by my arm and drags me outside.
My eyes struggle with the bright light. Everything is blurred with my panic, and I struggle to get my feet under me. I'm shoved to tumble in the dirt. Angry voices rise on all sides, but all I see are stars as a foot hooks into the side of my head.
Through the red wash of pain comes a young face framed with white hair. He spits words at me, each one a bullet of venom, but I only hear the rush of blood in my ears, a churning as if I tumble in the breaking waves of the surf. Hands drag me off the ground and shove me onto my knees. I'm dimly aware of Enzo held down next to me as the blond man shouts one word over and over, a word that slowly pierces the veil of my shock.
"Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!" It's not just the blond man chanting but a whole crowd of his followers. The tattooed man is at his side, his wood axe swinging loosely in his huge hands. I know these people, I know their names, but for the moment the meaning escapes me, as does the importance of the word they keep shouting. "Murderers! Murderers!"
The blond man lifts a red container in his hands. It's somehow familiar to me, a can that I haven't seen in a long time. He raises it above his head, and the crowd roars its approval. Enzo jerks, struggling against the men who pin his arms. I look at him curiously, my mind still fuddled by the blows, wondering if he knows the meaning of the strange word written on the side of the can: GASOLINE.
The young woman with dark hair, who moments ago showed me kindness, comes between us, shouting in the blond man's face. The tattooed man pushes her aside, and the blond man steps forward, holding the red can as if he's presenting an offering.
The crowd parts again, falling back, their chant faltering uncertainly in many throats as a woman forces herself forward. I know this woman. She is the shouting one, the one who summoned the storm that rained blows down on me yesterday. I cringe, but she does not look at me. She strikes the young blond man, hitting him hard across the face. He lowers the can and raises his hand to his angry, red cheek as the crowd goes silent.
"Who are you to steal from our Lord? These two are promised to him!" shouts the woman, right in the man's face.
His answer is quiet and deliberate but carries just as much anger as hers does. "I have spent all night in communion with our Lord, Mother. He has told me that these two must answer for our brother's murder."
"Would you steal from our Lord's table, boy?"
"Of course not."
"But yet, here you are, ready to deny these heretics the trial of the cross! For does not the Lord say: offer up unto me the ungodly, the infidel, the Obsidian People, and those who offend against my flock, so that they might nourish the righteous armies of the night?"
He turns from her and says, "They murdered our brother. They should feel my pain!" But the tide has turned against him. The crowd looks to Deborah (the names and words come to me now) as she glares down at us with a furious hatred.
"Lock them away. Tonight, they will meet our Lord's children. Then they can beg for forgiveness for the murders of Brothers Joseph, Gad, and Zeb."
The man pinning my arms grabs a fistful of my hair and twists my head to force me to look at the field behind the prison, where a dozen crooked crosses stand around a muddy red lake. The closest cross bears a local. His body is a torn, wrecked horror. Everything beneath his ribcage has been ripped away. His head hangs low, his body twisted in a rictus of seized muscle, robbed of his spiritual dignity by the decaying chemical reactions of his dying body.
Dan steps in close to me, his mouth against my ear. "We gonna nail you up, heretic," he says with relish. I close my eyes against the horrific sight, but I can't shut out the smell of Dan's rotten teeth. "You gonna get et up real good."
I hear the cheerful, chirping calls of kingfishers as they dart and snatch at insects swarming over the lake. Then I'm dragged to my feet and shoved back into the welcome gloom of the cell.
***
"So, I think Matty is busy." Enzo stands in the middle of the cell, slowly stretching his arms, rotating them at the shoulder and elbow to work out the kinks and pains. He must be over forty years of age, but his body and muscles are lean and strong, the fruits of an active life. "Joseph was the thin man who has the glasses, yes?"
"You think she killed him?"
"Well, the people, they are very angry. I think she fight him better than I fight Dan. Good for her." He starts doing squats, his arms out straight, grimacing as his stiff thighs protest. "Is not so good for us, though."
"What are you doing?"
"You see the man on the cross? I am not going to end up like that."
"You're going to fight the entire town?"
"Is better than be shish kebab."
The idea in my mind has grown in depth and clarity until I am filled with an absolute certainty. "Yeah. Let me try something first."
I bang on the door, driving my fist hard against the steel, gritting my teeth against the jolts that race up my arm and bury themselves in my brain stem. Enzo looks alarmed. "What are you doing? I am not ready."
"Just let me try this first." I hear muffled talking on the other side of the door, our guards arguing over something. I raise my voice. "I want to talk to Deborah!"
While the people on the outside come to a decision, I study the dark stains on the concrete floor. Some large machine was once mounted in here. There are two raised rails of concrete where rusted retaining bolts protrude like fingers reaching up from a disturbed grave. A dark stain the size of a man lies between the rails, where oil dripped from a leaky sump. The machine is gone, but the stain remains. Motes of dust dance in the shafts of light that fall from the high windows, and the concrete glimmers with rainbows where the light falls on the black stain.
The stain makes me remember a documentary I watched when I was very young, back before the Fall, about the linen cloth that Christ had been wrapped in after his death and which still bore his image. The documentary told of a controversy, as to whether it was a true relic of Jesus of Nazareth or if it was a medieval forgery.
I wonder what happened to the Shroud. Does it still lie in the Cathedral of John the Baptist, in Turin? In the End of Days, when the plague sucked us down into the well of forgotten history, the church would have been full of the faithful, begging for salvation, for God's mercy, all clustered around the death shroud of his only son, the proof that not only did God forgive our sins but he held the power of life over death, the image being printed by the divine light that summoned Christ back to life at the Resurrection.
Is it still there, in a dusty church, the pews full of skeletons and the damned lying in torpor, waiting where they died for something living to summon them back to unlife? I don't think it matters in the end, whether the Shroud was real. All that matters is that people believed.
***
The door opens, and a tall man with a thick, spade-shaped beard steps into the room. He points Enzo's shotgun at me, the double barrels like two vast pits. "Lie down. Faces on the ground."
"That is my gun," says Enzo.
The man smirks. "Was. Get on the ground before I put you down."
When we're lying flat, a second man ties our hands behind our backs while the first covers us with the shotgun. Enzo manages to hold eye contact with him the entire time. When the first man yanks us back onto our feet and then shoves us down, so we're both sitting cross-legged against the wall, Enzo says, "You look after my gun. I get it back soon."
The man waggles his finger at Enzo before they both step out of the cell. Deborah comes in. She is calm and composed, moving with a slow elegance that is almost regal. She wears her white gown and has spread her hair so it cascades over her shoulders. "You have something to tell me?"
"We must know," says Enzo, his voice full of innocent inquiry. "How do you get your hair so white and clean? Is amazing, no? Is bleac
h? Conditioner? You must tell me your secret."
"Enzo, shut up," I say. "I'm sorry, Deborah. I misunderstood you when we spoke last. I offended you with my ignorance. I hope you can forgive me."
She gives no sign of having heard Enzo. Instead she looks down at me with a haughty arrogance. "Your ignorance was not offensive. Your lies and deceptions were the affront."
"How did I—"
"I will not waste my time entertaining your deceptions. We have been on your yacht. You people are not traders. You come from the island to the west."
Her words chill me as I feel the door of our escape closing before we can even attempt it. "You can't blame me for being cautious."
"I can blame you for my three brothers who your bitch captain murdered. But it is not my place to condemn, judge, or punish."
"That is the providence of the Green Lord?"
She moves forward into the centre of the room. The light from the slit windows makes her radiant, her gown and hair glowing with an ethereal aura. "You will join his children — or feed them. That is his will."
"Is it fair to condemn us before we have even had the chance to accept his Gospel?"
"You don't choose the Green Lord; he chooses you. He comes to you in your dreams and says 'Come and see.'"
"Is that what he did to you? Is that why you're here?"
She is serene. "It is."
"But did not we come as you did? Could we not have been called as you were?"
"But you weren't. You did not know of him, nor did I know of you. He would have told me."
"He still speaks to you?"
"Always."