As if to reaffirm this, there was a rattle of automatic gunfire followed by three spaced shots. A military M-4 and a Glock nine. Unique in their way, but commonplace since the Fall.
The Fall …
The concept of it was old in his mind. Saint John had expected it, prepared for it, known that it was coming ever since that day when he was reborn in the blood that flowed from the thousand cuts on his father’s flesh. That’s when the Voice began speaking to him in his mind, telling him of the Fall that would come. That was years ago, and it was old and sacred knowledge to him. However, to the people around him, the panicked masses dwindling down to a scattered few, the Fall was immediate. It was their All, and in their panic they probably did not remember the world as it was before. Saint John was sure of that. He could see it in the eyes of everyone he met.
And yet the Fall, in societal terms, was only a few months old. A few weeks, if you start counting from the day when the offices of the CDC in Atlanta were overrun by mobs desperate for vaccines for the pandemic flu. Someone had begun a campaign on the Net saying that the CDC was hoarding stockpiles of the vaccine and selling it only to the super rich. The story was probably spurious, but the pulse of the nation had quickened to a fever pace. Atlanta had become a rallying point for protests, and the crowds surrounding the Centers for Disease Control had swelled to an ocean of angry, frightened people. Hundreds of thousands of them. Saint John had been among them; not because he believed the nonsense about the hoarded vaccines, but because the atmosphere of panic brought with it an apocalyptic flavor that he found delicious and uplifting. He was there on that Thursday morning when the temperature of the crowd had reached the boiling point. Like a field of locusts they went from sanity to insanity in the blink of an eye, and the National Guard troops were crushed under the sheer numbers. Shots were fired—shotguns loaded with beanbag rounds, Tasers, and finally bullets. Blood perfumed the air, but the crowd was in motion now, a mass mind bent on smashing down doors and walls.
In one of the last newscasts Saint John heard before the TVs all went dark, the authorities expressed fears that in an attempt to find the mythical stockpile, the mobs had crashed into labs and hot rooms and viral storage vaults, inadvertently releasing many more diseases into the population. Saint John did not know how many viral vaults had been breached, but he suspected that there were seven of them. Seven seals were broken. As the plagues spread, the riot became a constant state of being, and it was then that Saint John revealed himself and walked among the diseased and dying, the murderous and the mauled, his knives in hand, a walker following in the hoof-prints of the Horsemen.
He smiled at the thought and stretched out a hand to catch a soft piece of white ash. Then something closed out those sounds and drew Saint John’s attention from the burning city back to the steps on which he stood.
A woman came running down the street, weaving and tripping and staggering under the weight of pain. She wore only a green T-shirt and one low-heeled shoe. Her thighs were streaked with blood. She screamed continuously in a red-raw voice. He watched her reel and stumble, but she was beyond the ability to focus her mind and muscles on the task of running. It made her clumsy and slow.
“There she is!” cried a voice. Male, out of sight around the corner. Saint John took a half step back, allowing the shadows of the entry arch to enfold him.
A moment later two men came pelting down the street after the woman, yelling and laughing. Saint John winced at some of the things they said. One man was completely naked, his semiflaccid cock swinging and bouncing against his thighs with each step. The other, a college jock type in SpongeBob boxers and Timberlands, had the distinctive lesions of the AL3 strain of smallpox blossoming on his face.
“Here kitty, kitty,” called the Jock, laughing as his words drew a flinch from the woman. Her screams faded to a choked sob.
She turned toward a parked car and ran for it. Saint John wondered what sanctuary she thought it would afford her. The windows were broken out, the tires long since slashed. But she stumbled and fell before she got within a dozen paces of it, her knees striking the asphalt hard enough to pull fresh screams from her chest. Her eyes were wild, and even though she looked briefly in Saint John’s direction, it was clear that she did not see him standing in the shadows. She fell forward onto her palms and tried to crawl toward the car, but the Jock caught up with her and used his body to slam her to the ground. The Naked Man’s cock was stiffening in anticipation as his companion used his knees to spread the woman’s legs.
This was clearly the latest act in a play that had started hours ago. Saint John had no doubt. Intervening now could not save her. This woman was broken. If not by the rapes and abuse, then by whatever else she had lost. Whatever else had been torn from her. Family, safety, personal sanctity, perhaps even purity. Gone now, as most things were gone. What did not burn was plundered in the food riots, and what was not plundered rotted as the pathogens swept their way through the dwindling herd of humanity. This woman was a corpse whose ghost was still too shocked to leave its shell. That was sad, he thought, because to linger was to experience—with whatever sense and perception remained—all of the further indignities these monsters needed to inflict so that they could convince themselves that they were still alive.
Saint John did not like that. There was no beauty in this setting, and suffering without beauty was disgusting. It was crass and vulgar. Artless.
“You got her?” yelled a gruff voice, and a third man emerged from the shadows. He was massive, a construct of anabolic steroids and overdeveloped muscle; he had turned himself into a freak even before time had decided that all of humanity should share in freakism. This one did not run. He swaggered slowly, his thick fingers undoing his belt buckle and zipper with the kind of deliberate calm that was itself a statement. An alpha to this small pack of dogs.
The Big Man was smiling, lips curled back from rows of white teeth. He came and stood over the woman, and it seemed to Saint John that he was so into this moment that he did not blink. He grinned and grinned, and never flinched when bombs went off in the next street. He let his trousers drop and grabbed for his crotch, massaging hardness despite the limitations of steroids and other drugs. Saint John knew this type. If he could not rape he would brutalize, and it was all the same to men of his kind; his actions were completely unconnected to sex. Pain was the pathway to ecstasy for him.
Saint John knew that, and understood it from a height that gave him a much clearer perspective.
The Big Man pushed the smaller Naked Man out of the way and pawed at the woman, driving more screams from her.
Saint John stepped down. A single step, but it was his first movement, and the three men had not noticed him any more than had the woman.
Saint John took a second slow step, and the kneeling man looked up and snarled. “Fuck off! This whore is ours.”
Ah, and that is how worlds turn. On a word or phrase. Ill chosen and ill timed.
This whore is ours.
This whore.
Whore.
Saint John sighed. Such an unfortunate choice of words. Few words were less welcome to his ears. Not even the tough Aryan Brothers in the cell block had used that word around him—not after his first week in the Supermax. One of them had, but their surviving members passed warnings down the line, to big stripes and little fish. Even though the word was tattooed on Saint John’s own flesh in blue letters on his back, with an arrow pointing down between his shoulder blades to his buttocks. Burned there ages ago by an ex-con friend of his father’s; the act performed back when Saint John was the child Johnnie. Burned into him with a Bic pen, a lighter, and a pin while the boy who was not yet Saint John lay stretched out and bound with duct tape. Whore, it said. Branded fast while his father and the ex-con laughed and belched and spat on each letter as they waited for their dicks to get hard.
The ink had not even dried, the burns had not yet stopped singing their white-hot song, when his father had shoved the tattoo a
rtist aside to show why he had wanted those words put there. The tattoo artist had gone next. And then the other men. A pig roast, they had called it. Friends of his father’s. Men who shared the same appetites.
Men like these men.
This whore is ours.
And now these three men who crouched in the ash around the half-naked woman had conjured with that word.
Whore.
Saint John took another step.
There had been nine men back then, on the day the word had been fixed with boiling ink into his skin. The boy that he had been had survived it and the next day had fled. When he had come back in the night a month later and looked in through the window, he saw the tattoo artist burning those same letters in another child’s flesh. A girl, this time. Gender had not mattered to them. They coveted what they could dominate, what they could force.
Her screams made the men laugh.
As this woman’s screams made these men laugh.
Whore.
Back then, on the day when he had been marked, it was not the first time he had heard that word. Not nearly the first.
But it was the first time that another voice spoke inside his mind.
The Voice had told him to go into a sacred place inside the mansion of his thoughts. The Voice guided him there, and with each inward step the laughter and grunts of the nine men diminished until they were no more than a faint and unimportant background noise.
The Voice had guided him back to the world later, when his body had been cut loose and thrown into the corner between the fridge and the stove. It was there to tell him what to pack and when to run, and schooled him on how to live after he’d fled. It brought him back to the house on the night the men had strapped the girl down, and it spoke great secrets to him when he begged for answers.
He had done everything exactly as the Voice instructed. Saint John later understood that it was the Voice of God, and upon that realization he had begun the transformation from Johnnie to the saint. He was glowing with holy purpose when he returned to his father’s farm. There were always gallons of gasoline in the barn, standing in a row beside the posthole digger, near where a machete hung from its peg. When the Voice of God spoke, the lessons were always simple, always clear. The lessons were about clarity and simplicity.
And about fire. Ahh … fire was such a beautiful doorway.
Saint John took another step down. The cathedral had lovely white granite steps and an archway carved with the austere faces of a hundred saints. Fellow saints, and Saint John wondered if each of them had been given the gift of the Voice. Probably. Why else would they be saints? How else could they be?
The Jock and the Naked Man looked up at Saint John. They looked up from what they were trying to do, shifting their eyes reluctantly from dirty flesh and bitten skin to this annoyance. This intrusion.
Saint John did not move with haste. Haste caused rabbit reactions, quick and defensive. He wanted to see the dog reactions. The jackal reactions. That happened best if he moved slowly, giving each of them the opportunity to make slight perceptual shifts as his personal bubble extruded outward and pushed against the outer edges of their self-confidence. It was very much like subtly shifting to stand too close to a person in a crowd—at first they think you’re leaning in to hear better, to catch every drop of conversational juice, but then they notice that you do not lean away when they’ve finished speaking. That’s when the hound that dwells in the middle of their brain raises its head and lifts its ears to tufted points, sniffing and smelling the wind.
First comes speculation as distances are judged and given value; then confusion as those values are ignored. Then defensive caution as the social bubble pops to demonstrate that it never really offered any protection. It was an abstract bubble after all.
Then comes alarm.
He watched for this in their eyes. The Naked Man was less focused, his eyes continually drifting down to what the Big Man was trying to do. His penis was more erect than the Big Man’s, and bigger, but he was not the alpha of this pack and he knew that he would have to wait. The Naked Man licked his lips in nervous anticipation.
The Jock was the one who looked up at the stranger descending the steps and briefly smiled. Maybe he thought that this newcomer wanted to join in and he was preparing a stinging rebuke. Maybe it was an uneasy smile. Maybe it was a smile that would include an invitation to be the fourth car in this train.
The Naked Man flicked a glance up, then down at the woman, and back up to Saint John. For a moment there was a fragment of shame in his eyes for what he was doing. Not for the woman or her humanity, but for his own participation in something they all clearly knew was wrong. Anarchy did not yet completely own this man’s soul.
Saint John marked that one in his mind. A flicker of remorse in the presence of continued action was not a saving grace. It spoke to understanding, and complicity here was proof of corruption. A man like this would not initiate a rape, but he would always go where a door was opened. There had been men like him on the night that ugly word had been burned onto Johnnie’s skin. One of them had even whispered, “I’m sorry,” as he had hunkered over and thrust. Saint John had spent a lot of time with him later on.
The Naked Man looked away. He was a loose-lipped slobbering buffoon. No muscle tone, skin like a mushroom. White and spongy.
It was the Jock who first realized the danger. As Saint John descended another step toward the screaming thing over which the men crouched, the Jock’s inner hound finally came to point.
“Hey—jackass,” he snarled, “what the hell are you doing? I told you to fuck off.”
Saint John smiled. “You must stop this and go your way,” he said. “Man’s hand was not fashioned by God to lay waste to that which the Lord has made.”
The Jock stared for a two-count and then burst out laughing. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be? Church isn’t until Sunday, dumbass.”
The Big Man paused to punch the woman in the thigh, angry that he was having so much trouble getting hard enough to penetrate her.
Saint John descended one final step. Now he stood above the tableau. The woman’s dirty blond hair cobwebbed the asphalt.
“It is Sunday,” murmured Saint John, but the reply was lost beneath the woman’s screams. Saint John wore white bed-sheets as clothes, the material lashed to his limbs and torso with strips of white tape on which he had written crucial passages of scripture. Not from the Bible, but new scripture the Voice had spoken to him. The sheets were tattered now from all that had happened since the city had begun to burn, and the tatters floated on the hot breeze, like streamers of pale seaweed in a sluggish tide.
The Jock was still in dog mind, bolstered by the presence of the pack and the alpha. The others were, too.
Saint John wanted to laugh, to kiss each of them for that ignorance. It was as delightful as it was false. So entertaining.
But he did not laugh. Instead he cast his face into the beatific smile he wore at such moments. Like Leonardo’s model, his smile was a tiny curl of the lip that promised secrets but not answers. He spread his hands high and wide. He had long arms and longer fingers tipped with nails that had each been painted a different shade of night gray.
The Jock nudged the Big Man, pack dog alerting the alpha to the possibility of something wrong. When the Big Man looked up, the smaller man bent and tried to kiss the woman. Even to Saint John such a kiss was strange and awkward. Obscene.
The Big Man growled deep in his chest as he saw Saint John standing there with his arms outstretched.
A ripple of explosions troubled the air close by, and the three men looked over their shoulders. Even the woman looked.
That amazed Saint John because he could not imagine in what way the destruction implied by those blasts could possibly matter to any of them. How could anything beyond the confines of this moment matter to them? Were these men in particular too stupid to grasp the importance of now?
Apparently so.
One by one t
hey turned back to Saint John.
The Jock said, “Fuck off, you little faggot.”
“Get your own,” said the Naked Man.
The Big Man could not be bothered to pay a moment’s further attention to the interruption. It’s why he had a pack. Instead he glared down. “Lay still, you bitch.”
Saint John caught a flicker of movement, and he looked across the street to see a fourth man standing by the corner. He was a shifty, nervous little thing. Clearly a junkie or a drunk suffering through DTs. He shifted from foot to foot and grabbed his crotch, but he didn’t cross the street. He was either too afraid of the three more aggressive pack members, or he had not yet crossed the line that separated social depravity from personal destruction. The man caught Saint John looking and immediately whipped his hand away from his crotch. He stood there, staring back, mouth open like a silent ghost.
The three men surrounding the woman laughed and told her the things they were going to do, and told her how much she would like it. And the penalties that would be imposed if she did not like it.
The predictability of this drama, and the triteness of the dialogue, began to wear on Saint John. He lowered his arms and said, “Let me share with you.”
They all laughed, confirming that they were too stupid to understand what was going on.
“Let me share,” repeated Saint John as he reached into the folds of his blowing white clothes and brought out his toys. They gleamed in the smoke-stained firelight. They were small and elegant, each polished to such a perfect shine that they seemed to trail sparks as he once more brought his hands out to his sides. A delicate blade extended the reach of each hand as he stood cruciform on the step above them.
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