“What’s your name?” Samson asks the spy, crouching down to eye level. The man’s been beaten, one eye swollen shut, enormous bruise on one cheek, blood matted in his hair. Samson looks up at the squad who brought him in, at their leader, Lieutenant Volkov, standing at attention.
“Jensen,” the man says, voice thick and slurred.
“That a first or a last name?”
“Dunno. Just Jensen.” His eyes aren’t tracking very well and go in and out of focus. Probably has a concussion.
“We been clearing the streets since Vermont. You’re the first person we’ve seen hasn’t taken a shot at us. Everybody else has cleared out. How come you haven’t?”
“Live here. Not gonna run just ‘cause somebody’s shootin’ the place up,” Jensen says.
“A man of principle,” Samson says, remembering how King used that word in many of his sermons, though he’s never really understood what it means. “Okay. But I don’t believe you.”
The man’s eyes snap into focus on Samson’s face, then drift back into their lazy orbit. “It’s the truth.”
“I think you’re a spy. From Hollywood. Here to check on us, see how strong we are, what we’re doing. That right, Jensen? You a spy?”
“Just live here.”
Samson backhands him with a fist wrapped in a leather sapglove, the lead weights in the knuckles cracking the man’s cheekbone and sending him to the floor. To his credit he doesn’t cry out, just hisses in pain.
“Don’t lie to me. I’ll just make it hurt more,” Samson says. The man lets out a croaking whisper, words too quiet for Samson to understand. He leans down close, grabs the man’s face in a crushing grip. “What was that?”
“I said you can burn in Hell.”
That’s when Samson sees that Jensen’s hand isn’t empty, sees the wires from the device in his fist disappearing into his sleeve. Samson tears the man’s shirt open, revealing the bricks of plastic explosives strapped to his chest.
There’s a click as Jensen thumbs the detonator, and Samson doesn’t remember anything after that.
***
Samson wakes to the sounds of gunfire in the distance. He coughs up plaster dust, pushes aside bricks and debris. The building is a ruin, but he, miraculously, is not.
“God provides,” King says, reaching down to help him up. Samson waves away the assistance. If he can’t get up on his own, he doesn’t deserve to get up. He can’t see out of his left eye, his left forearm is broken, and he’s covered in cuts, many of which are going to need stitches, but he’s in better condition than he has any right to be.
“I shouldn’t have survived that,” he says.
“Like I said, God provides.”
Samson stands and looks out at the ruin around him through his one good eye. There’s a charred lump of exploded meat where Jensen was, bits of him still burning. He’s not sure, but he thinks most of the explosives didn’t go off, just burned. But then how did the building come down around him?
He gets his answer a second later when a high–pitched whistle pierces the air. The ground quakes with the explosion of another building. Of all the weapons God’s Militia has collected, they’ve never been able to lay their hands on artillery. Seems Hollywood hasn’t had the same problem.
There’s a groan from the corner. Volkov slowly drags herself from the wreckage. Samson hobbles over to help her out.
“You all right?” he says, once he’s gotten her standing. She nods, her eyes clearing. She’s cut up just as bad as Samson, a wide lump on her forehead with a bruise that spreads down the side of her face.
“What happened? How did he have a bomb? Who checked him?” Samson realizes he’s shaking her and then stops, takes a deep breath, waits for her answer.
“Warner did, sir. He—” She stops as she sees the other members of her squad, broken limbs and blasted bodies scattered through the rubble. “He checked the prisoner. None of us thought to check him a second time.”
A traitor. Samson had already guessed that much. He couldn’t remember which one Warner was, though. The army had gotten so big so fast that he couldn’t keep track of everyone anymore.
Another whistle of mortar fire, another explosion. They’re coming closer together now, louder. They’re walking the block, back and forth, laying waste to the entire area. It’s a good plan. Samson wishes he could have done it to them instead.
“Come on. Back up the hill.” Samson guides Volkov out to the heavily cratered street, dodging falling brick, flaming chunks of wood. There are bodies everywhere. The few of his people still standing are taking cover, trying to regroup, but with no officers to take charge, they’re just an unruly mob dying by the score.
Communication is a shambles. Most of the radios were held by officers, and many of them are dead or dying. By the time Samson finds everyone and leads them back up Western to Los Feliz and out of the way of the mortar fire, they’ve lost dozens more. A quick triage to see how badly beaten they are—very, as it turns out, down by at least two–thirds of their original strength—and Samson has them back on the move.
Samson knows if the roles were reversed, he wouldn’t wait long before he sent troops in to mop up, and with his army in such disarray, it won’t take much to finish them off.
Retreat is just a nicer way of saying “run away,” and it goes against everything in Samson’s being, everything he’s ever preached about, but as he looks around at the dead and wounded, he knows there’s no way they’ll survive a fight. There just aren’t enough of them left. So he has the strongest take up the rear to watch their flank and gets as many of his people out as he can.
He looks behind him as they head toward Vermont and he swears he sees James King hanging his head in shame.
–9–
“Do not mistake God’s message for God himself.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, Season 5, Episode 9
“The tough part was the mutant elephants,” Cyrus says, walking through the open doorway, the doors long since torn from their hinges.
“Elephants?” Samson follows him in and stands at the edge of the pit just inside the entrance and looks at it through his one good eye. The patch over the socket where the other one used to be itches, and if he focuses too hard on anything, he gets a headache. He hefts his sledgehammer over his other shoulder.
Was the pit a well? A firepit? It’s wide and not very deep. If it was for fires, it’s a pretty piss–poor design. There’s no chimney. The whole building would fill with smoke. Maybe it was for gladiators like they had at the Arena. There’s enough room for a couple of fighters at the bottom if you didn’t want them to maneuver very much.
“Yeah. Fuckin’ things were in the zoo when the end times happened. Now they’ve got tusks the size of a fuckin’ Buick and they eat meat. Who knows where things went wrong for ‘em? Radiation? Chemicals? But man, were these things big. And the fucking giant, acid–pissing meerkats.”
Samson doesn’t know what a meerkat is, and he doesn’t much care. His mind is on other things. “But you cleared them out?”
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise,” Cyrus says. “They’re still out there, though. You can hear ‘em at night. We’ll want to set up some guns on the perimeter before we can really get things set up here.”
Samson looks up at the cracked mural on the ceiling. Water has seeped in over the years, and black mold has spread through it like a rotten tooth. Was it supposed to be the sky? Stars? He can’t tell. There are other murals at the tops of the twelve walls of the room. They haven’t fared much better. They’re scenes of people, but doing what he has no idea.
“What was this place?”
“They call it the Observatory. Lookout post, I guess,” Cyrus says. “You saw those big domes on the roof? They had spotters there, or something. I’m not sure. Saw some signs for telescopes. Not much left in the domes, of course. Some scaffolding, something that looks like it might’ve been a cannon mount. I figure it was used to watch ove
r the city before everything fell to shit.”
“It’s a good position,” Samson says. “Easy to defend. Good sight lines.” The building, an immense structure on the edge of Griffith Park, looks down at Los Feliz from a hilltop. Odd that he’d never known it was here, but from the street it’s hidden behind the layers of overgrowth, mutated trees and shrubs making it almost invisible. And nobody in their right mind goes into Griffith Park. The things Cyrus encountered were only one reason. There are rumors of other things in the woods—cannibals, monster bears, worse. He’s heard that some of the Leather Jerks moved up into the higher hills a while ago, and that there’s some group calls themselves the Mannerites wandering around the Glendale edge of the park, but no one from the Church has ever seen them.
He wonders if this area had been like that before the bombs dropped. If it was a no–man’s land like it is today. Probably not. They would have wanted to keep the sight lines clear so they could see the city below, and whoever built a place this impressive would want others to see it.
“How big did you say it was?” Samson asks.
“Not as big as the Temple, but it’ll hold the army well enough and then some. I was thinking we could call the building ‘The Bastion of Faith.’ How does that grab ya?”
Samson nods approval. In the last two years since their rout on Western, they’ve been slowly rebuilding the army, but it’s still nothing like it was. And Hollywood hasn’t given them a moment’s peace—not that Samson’s giving them any, either.
He follows Cyrus down a short hallway and past a pyramid–shaped device wrapped in metal coils with a ball at the top shoved into an alcove.
“What’s this?”
“No idea. Electric, I think. We’ll know once we get some power up in here.”
“I don’t think we have enough people to clean this place up,” Samson says. “But I can ask some of the militia to help defend.”
Cyrus grits his teeth, but a blink of the eye later and he’s all smiles. “Thanks,” he says. “We’re gonna need ‘em. Besides the monsters from the zoo, there are mutants out there, maybe some of those Hollywood fucks, too. Wouldn’t put it past them to try to set something up in the park. Not to mention the fuckin’ mutants trying to run us out.”
“How many people have you lost?” Samson says.
“No idea. Too many, I suppose.”
Samson snorts. Even now, when every person is vital to keeping him alive, Cyrus can’t be bothered to pay attention to the dead. He wonders if he even knows any of their names.
“I was thinking we could move most of our operations up here and keep the Temple for services.”
“Closer to Hollywood?” Samson asks. “Is that a good thing?”
“There are only so many ways up into the park. And to get all the way up here, it’s the tunnel or nothin’.”
From what Samson could see coming up here, the only route clear of debris is through a dubious–looking tunnel that they’ll need to reinforce. The other roads heading toward the building are bombed–out craters so choked with fallen trees and overgrowth it would take a team with explosives at least a day to cut through.
“And it’s a good staging ground for when we hit those bastards again,” Cyrus says. Not if, Samson notes, but when. He wants to see Hollywood fall as much as Cyrus does, maybe more. Those fucks took his eye, after all, but as time goes on, he’s less convinced that it’s ever going to happen.
“Won’t we have to clear the plants? Won’t that make it easier for them to hit us?” Samson is thinking of the mortars that made his life a hell on Western.
“We got our own artillery now,” Cyrus says.
That was one thing that had gone well in the last two years. On a raid, Samson had gotten hold of some of Hollywood’s mortars. Maybe not enough to turn the tide, but enough to make Samson feel a lot more secure. And even better, they got hold of some of their engineers. Once they were given a choice to make mortars for the Church or die, they converted quickly enough. Most of them, at least.
“How’s the game up here?”
“If you like mutant elephant, you can eat like a king.”
“All right, then. Let’s do it, I guess.”
“Samson, I’m getting the feeling you don’t trust me,” Cyrus says.
“It’s not that, Cyrus,” Samson says. “It’s—”
“No, it is that. I can tell. You don’t have much of a poker face, Samson. What is it? What’s eatin’ you? Is it the sermons? It is, isn’t it?”
Samson stammers, not sure what to say. It is the sermons, actually. Part of the reason he wanted to come up here himself. He was angry when he heard them on the radio, but he didn’t know what to do about them.
“They’re… not right,” he says, though he isn’t really sure how they’re not right. They say all the right words, but there’s something about them, something missing. No—something extra. Cyrus’s sermons have all been about how people need to follow God’s Militia, that the Church was the path to righteousness, not the Word of God, not the teachings of King.
Cyrus nods. “I hear ya,” he says. “You’re worried that we’re losing the message. That the Church is getting bigger than the Word.”
Was that what was bothering Samson? He wasn’t sure. It felt right, but he didn’t know for sure. He nods because he can’t think of what else to do.
“Samson, God’s Militia is the voice of God.” He pokes Samson in his chest. “You are the voice of God. You’re the one who talks to James King, not me. I just put his words out onto the airwaves. And yes, sometimes I make a change, but it’s necessary. If people are going to come to us, they need to know who to come to, right?”
“I… guess so?”
“So if I change some of his words to point people toward the Church, to bring people to us, it’s not only a good thing, but a necessary one.”
Samson is having a hard time with this, but he tries to give voice to what he thinks Cyrus is saying. “To teach the teachings, you have to change the teachings?”
“Exactly,” Cyrus says. “You totally get it.”
Except that he doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense to him at all. But then so little has, lately. Ever since the battle at Western, he hasn’t seen or heard from James King, and he’s felt lost, untethered. All he has left are the teachings, and if even those aren’t sacred anymore, then where is he? What is he?
“So will I have those guys up here next week?”
“Uh, yeah, I’ll have a squad sent up as soon as I get back to the Temple.” Samson walks out of the Observatory and starts back down the hill, confused and lost.
–10–
“The time will come for you to strike at the Unbelievers, the sinners and demons who plague God’s Chosen. And when that time comes, you must attack with all your might.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, Season 13, Episode 3
Samson pulls his sledgehammer from the pulped remains of an Unbeliever’s head and slings it over his shoulder, bits of bloody brain and skull still clinging to it. The rest of them, six men and women spreading printed tracts about the dangers of the Church, lie dead in the street. Each one of them carried a backpack filled with almost a hundred of the little books.
Samson wipes blood from his hand onto his pants, picks one of the small picture books out of a pile on the ground. They’re about the size of a playing card and only a few pages long, but their pictures are telling, even if Samson can’t read the words.
“Is this supposed to be me?” he says, showing the tract to Knight Captain Volkov. She takes it from him, leafs through it.
“Yes, sir.”
“Is my nose really that fat?”
“No, sir.” She hands the book back to him. “Do you think they’re from Hollywood?”
“Where else would they be from? These things take paper, ink, a press. Who else could it be?”
It’s been three years since the Church’s defeat on Western. Hollywood stays in Hollywood, the Church stays in Echo Pa
rk. Silver Lake sits as a no man’s land where neither side holds sway.
Not that the Church hasn’t tried moving in, of course. But every time they do, those Hollywood bastards beat them back. They hit them at night with small strikes that whittle them down until there’s either no one left or not enough to hold the ground. Sneaky fucks, every last one of them. Though they don’t seem to want to expand their borders, they refuse to let the Church expand. And so an uneasy détente has settled over the area. Instead of all–out war, both sides have been fighting with radio signals. The Church transmits its sermons over the airwaves, Hollywood jams them on the same frequency, turns around and transmits their lurid commercials for whorehouses and drug parlors, and then the Church jams those, changes frequencies to transmit and then Hollywood jams… Just like on the ground, neither group totally controls the airwaves.
The tracts are just their latest strategy. Hollywood doesn’t fight fair. They can’t. The Church has numbers on its side. So Hollywood uses subterfuge, lies. Spreading their vile rumors about Samson and his followers, trying to undermine their influence. Trying to push everyone away from God’s grace.
“I want all of these disgusting books gathered and burned.” Samson says. “And kill anyone who has a copy.”
“Yes, sir.”
***
“This one has you fuckin’ a dog,” Cyrus says, flipping through the pages of one of the tracts and laughing. He sits in his office in the Angelus Temple, his feet up on a heavy oak desk left over from when the Locos ran the place.
Samson shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He’s never liked being in Cyrus’s office. Makes him feel small, like he’s done something wrong. He knows it’s a trick. Cyrus has the desk on top of a raised platform so no matter what it gives the impression that he’s looking down on people, but it bothers Samson, anyway.
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