“No, sir. They’re saying five hundred easy.”
“This is a prank. Ha—fucking—ha. Big laughs all around. Now you fucking tell me the truth, you little shit, or so help me I will gut you right here and now.”
“Sir, if you don’t believe me, there are some survivors coming in from the fighting now. They’re hurt bad. Real bad.”
Cyrus lets the boy go. “Show me,” he says. There is no way that it can be that bad.
***
After three hours of interrogating the handful of survivors straggling in, Cyrus comes to one inescapable conclusion.
It is that bad.
They all tell him the same thing. Lots of explosions, street caved in, everyone swallowed up. Then the shelling started and soldiers came down the street to shoot into the pit. It doesn’t take long for Cyrus to realize what happened.
The subway.
The subway tunnels under Los Angeles got the worst of the flooding when the tsunami hit. Whole stretches of them were obliterated. Over the years they’d drain and fill up again and sometimes people would go down there, scavengers and people trying to find a place to live, but few ever came back up. He’d still hear rumors every once in a while about them, but for the most part nobody thought about them. What was the point? There wasn’t anything in them besides mutant rats and rancid swamp water.
Until now.
The bomb story had been a ruse, that was obvious now. Whatever bombs Hollywood had, they must have used them to seed the tunnels. Waited until the whole army was on top of them, then set off the explosives.
But how had they known the army would be there?
The answer comes to him in a flash and though he denies it, it won’t go away. It sits there and gnaws at him like a starving rat, sends him into a rage. He stalks the office screaming, beating the walls. He rails against the betrayal, his own hubris that led him to this point. It’s his fault there’s no army left and—
There’s no army left.
Fuck.
Cyrus runs into the halls, panic jumping through him like lightning. He grabs an Initiate, shakes him, yelling, “We’re leaving. We’re leaving right the fuck now.”
–12–
“They say that the truth will set you free. But those truths are not God’s truth. Those are the lies of vile men. And they will lead you to Hell.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, Season 18, Episode 1
Samson smells burning and stale water. A thick, cloying mélange of gasoline, hair, flesh, and mildew. He dimly remembers screaming and gunfire, but that’s all faded to an occasional pop, a low whimper as someone else is put down like a feral dog. He opens his good eye, but night has fallen across the city and the only thing he can see are the dim flickers of fires reflecting off scummy water.
“You can’t die yet, Samson,” King says close to his ear. “God isn’t done with you.” Samson jerks at the voice. Of all the time for King to come back for him he had to pick now.
“Was a trap,” he says. His tongue feels like shredded hamburger, his voice slurry thick.
“It was. You got your ass handed to you.”
“I deserve to die.”
“You do,” King says. “You failed. But God has bigger plans for you.”
“I’m not worthy of God’s grace.” He should have seen this as a trap, should have gone with his gut. Now his people are dead, the army shattered. Without them, the Church will be overrun by the Unbelievers in Hollywood. Everything they’ve done will be destroyed. God’s plan will be left unfulfilled.
“What, are you stupid? You presume to know God’s mind? Samson, if God wanted you dead, you’d be dead. Now get up.”
Samson gets his hands under him, sinks them into a foot of stinking tunnel mud, pushes hard. The rubble on top of him shifts, bricks falling to the side, dust and dirt pouring off of him in great clods that plop in the mud. He gasps as hot, stinging air hits his lungs, crawls out of the swampy, burning pit to the sidewalk high above him. It takes an hour.
Wilshire is a ten–block–long burning crater belching thick, oily smoke into the night sky. Troops from Hollywood patrol the sides, shooting down into it whenever they see movement. Samson’s salvation, it seems, is one of timing. He watches as a soldier tosses a grenade down into the pit where he had been only minutes before. Had he moved a little sooner or waited a little longer, he would have been caught.
“You need to go back,” King says. “Rebuild, grow stronger.”
“From this?” Samson says. “How? It’s gone. We have nothing. There is no army, there are no defenses. They’ll run us down like dogs. How do we rebuild from this?” Samson reaches out to grab King by his throat, the red haze descending on him, but his hands clutch at empty air as King fades away into the smoke.
Rebuild? Madness. There is no way they’re recovering from this. The Initiates and Novices who are left are all clerks and scribes, carpenters and plumbers. They’re people who keep the machines working, the lights on. But where will they be when there is no one to protect them?
Rebuilding simply isn’t an option. But King was right about one thing. He needs to go back. Warn everyone what’s happened here. Maybe they can move everyone up to the Bastion in Griffith Park. It’s almost ready and it has the last remaining soldiers.
Samson ducks through a space between two buildings, away from the killers mopping up in the street, careful not to trip over the cracked and uneven pavement. He wipes blood and sweat out of his good eye. One leg drags behind him. His vision blurs, the world tilts.
He falls and darkness takes him.
***
Somewhere along the line Samson has found a sledgehammer. Might be his, might not. He doesn’t really care. Its heft is comforting as he pushes past the pain and trudges slowly through the streets.
He knows at least a day has gone by since he passed out in the alley. He remembers drifting back to consciousness a few times to see the sun and the moon passing by overhead. He smelled the burning bodies, heard the screams and whimpers of survivors being put down. And then they stopped.
He presses on through empty streets, the only sounds his plodding footsteps, the metallic grind of the sledgehammer dragging behind him. Already deep within Church territory, he should be seeing people—not soldiers, they’re all dead—but the Church Faithful, the acolytes and followers. They’re not there. There is something deeply wrong.
It’s not until he gets to the Temple that he understands. The doors are flung open, the halls silent. Empty space glares up at him from the floor where furniture sat, doorknobs are conspicuous by their absence, bare wire hangs where light fixtures were torn away. The Temple is defined by what’s not in it.
A hundred scenarios spin through Samson’s addled mind. Horror stacks upon horror until he can’t think straight. Hollywood has been and gone and taken everything. He’s died and gone to Hell. Everyone in the Church has gone cannibal and eaten everyone else. He’s the only man left alive on Earth.
He shakes himself, takes a deep breath, pushes the crazy as far away as he can, knows it’s not far enough. Everyone is not dead, he tells himself. They haven’t eaten each other in an orgy of madness and blood. They’ve just realized that without an army to protect them they’d be sitting ducks for an invasion, so they’ve retreated to the Bastion.
Samson wanders the empty halls. He’s called this place home for years now, a thing he never really thought he would ever have. And now it’s been taken away from him. He tries to muster some rage, but mostly he’s just tired and sad. He tried to do a great thing here, tried to bring God to the Unbelievers.
“You failed.”
He turns, expecting to see King behind him, surprised when it’s not.
“Volkov?”
She stands inside the Relic Room, where they had brought all of King’s tapes and video equipment when they left the studio, filling it with banks of televisions and VCRs for the Faithful to watch. It’s empty now except for one cracked monitor and a VCR propped up agai
nst it, the readout blinking 12:00 over and over again, as if to say that time has run out.
“Do you even know what you were fighting for, Samson?”
“What are you doing here? How did you get out of the ambush?” He looks her over, his frown deepening. “Why aren’t you hurt?”
“Do you ever question God, Samson? Ever question your precious Reverend King?”
“What are you talking about?” He steps closer, hefts his sledgehammer over his shoulder. It feels like it weighs a ton, but he manages it, anyway. “Tell me how you survived the street collapsing, Volkov. Why didn’t you die like everyone else?”
“Or what, you’ll crush me with your hammer? Look at yourself. You can barely lift the thing. Fine. You want answers? Here are your answers.” She pushes the button on the VCR, and King’s image springs to life on the television screen.
Only it’s not King as Samson’s ever seen him. His face is haggard, hair disheveled, two–day stubble on his face. Tears streak his cheeks, his eyes red and puffy. He stares at the camera with his mouth half open.
“What is this?”
“His final show.”
“I’ve seen his final show.”
“No. This one was never aired. It’s from the day the bombs dropped.”
“Bullshit, there isn’t—”
“I don’t think I’ll live to see tomorrow,” King says, cutting Samson off. Samson stares. He knows that voice, knows its cadence. This is King, all right, but he sounds worn down, voice like gravel. “I don’t think any of us will.
“It’s time to come clean,” he says. “Whether my viewers see this or not, I don’t know that it will make any difference. But I wanted to say this before it’s too late. I… I’m sorry.”
Samson stares at the screen, his mind reeling. This can’t be happening. He’s watched every show King produced, saw every recorded image. Where did this one come from?
“I’ve said terrible things on this show. Terrible. Lies. Slander. Blasphemy, even. And for what?” King laughs, hollow and sick, like he can’t bear to answer his own question.
“I didn’t start this way. When I started in Cleveland, my show was the Hour of Light. I talked about spreading God’s love, about bringing peace to the world. Nobody watched it. I was canceled after one season. So I tried it again and again. Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago. And then one day I got mad on the air. Just couldn’t take it anymore. Went off on… I don’t even remember. Some teeny–bopper Madonna bullshit, or something.”
Tears are pouring down King’s face. His breath comes out in hitching sobs. “And you fuckers ate it up. You ate up all that bile, and the more I spewed, the more you came back. What the hell was I supposed to do? Give up the ratings, the audience? The money? Could you? I know what some of you have done in my name. I read my fan mail. It’s sick what you people do. Attacks on gays, on immigrants. One of you admitted to burning down a synagogue, another murdered a black man because you thought I told you to do it. Did I? Christ, I probably did. And every day you tuned in and watched me spew more hatred. You fed on it, and you put it back out into the world. You’re just as much to blame for all this as I am. Hell, more so. This is your doing. You people created me.”
King pulls a massive pistol out from under the desk. “They say the bombs are dropping today. That missiles are already in the air. What good is being rich now? All the money in the world won’t stop that from happening. This was all a sham. I don’t believe in God anymore, but I do believe in sin. And I’ve sinned against everyone.”
He racks the slide on the pistol, and the sound echoes from the speaker like God readying a thunderbolt. “Well, I can’t take it back, but maybe I can still do something about it for anyone who survives. If anyone’s still alive out there, if anyone sees this, just… just be good to each other. Please. Help each other out. All this hatred I’ve been spewing, that’s not the answer to life. I see that now, and I’m so, so sorry.”
Samson watches in horror as King places the pistol between his eyes. “All bad things must come to an end,” he says, and pulls the trigger.
King’s head explodes, spraying the world map behind him in a familiar stain of blood and bone, his body slumping to the floor. There’s a scream off camera. A woman runs to him crying and saying his name over and over again. A few minutes of this and the tape goes to static and then black.
“That’s your prophet, Samson,” Volkov says. “When the chips were down, he showed who he really was: a weak, blubbering liar.”
–13–
“All bad things must come to an end.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, unaired episode
“I thought he was murdered,” Samson says. “How did you find this tape?”
“One of your acolytes found it back when you were clearing out the old studio to bring everything here. He didn’t know what it was or how important. It was hidden in a vent behind some equipment. Gave it to Cyrus.”
“Cyrus knew about this?”
“He thought he’d destroyed it. Had the acolyte who found it murdered. He was so freaked you’d find out about it. But we got to it in time, replaced it with a blank for him to toss into the fire.”
“Who’s we?”
“Haven’t you figured it out, yet?” Volkov asks. “Hollywood. I’ve been a spy for them for years. Working my way up through your ranks, feeding them intelligence the whole time. Almost managed to kill you on Western when I brought in the guy with the bomb vest. I was even prepared to die for the cause that day. But goddamn, aren’t you one lucky sonofabitch.”
“I trusted you. You were my right hand.”
“You trusted your delusions, Samson. You trusted your hallucination of King to give you the justification to do what you wanted to do anyway.”
“No. No, that’s not—”
“You’re insane, Samson. You weren’t getting your cues from God, you were getting them from your cross–wired brain.”
“No. I talk to him. He’s saved me. He’s told me what to do. King was—”
“A lie. You’re not talking to King. He’s dead. He’s been dead for years.”
“Then who do I talk to when he comes to me?”
“Yourself, you crazy fuck. King was a lie that you bought into and Cyrus fed. Cyrus has never been a believer, you know that, right? Do you know Cyrus wanted me to assassinate you on Wilshire? He thought you were getting too big for your britches. I was supposed to shoot you and blame Hollywood for it and start a war. Dumb fuck didn’t know it was already on. You’ve been betrayed, Samson. By King, by Cyrus.”
“By you.”
“I’m not sure I count,” she says. “I mean, I’ve always been your enemy. You just didn’t know it. You know, the funny thing is that for all the horrors you’ve brought into the world, you’re an honorable man. You always treated me right, your people right. You even cared about the ones you murdered. I wonder who you’d have been if you’d never found King. Never found Cyrus.”
“Why did you come here? Why show me this?”
“Because I knew you didn’t die in the street. Hoped, at least. I wanted to see the look on your face when I showed you the lie you’ve been living for all these years. I’m sorry, Samson. I pity you, but you’re a monster. And monsters should be broken before they’re put down.”
Volkov pulls a pistol from her pocket.
Samson’s mind reels. The video changes everything—King’s teachings, the murders Samson and the Church have conducted in his name, God’s plan. It’s all built on a foundation of bullshit. Samson is a killer for a cause that never existed, the follower of a charlatan. All because he wanted something to believe in. He can feel it all coming apart in his mind. All the things he thought he knew disintegrating like sand in the wind.
“I can fix this,” he says. He has to fix it. If King’s teachings were all lies, then this isn’t God’s plan at all.
Volkov laughs. “Can you now? Can you bring all those people you murdered back to life? Can you rebuild the ca
mps you’ve torched, the families you’ve torn apart?”
“No, but I can change the Church. I know where they are. I can take this to them. I can turn it around.”
“Sorry, Samson. It’s too late for that.” Volkov fires, but Samson jogs to the right and instead of punching through his chest, the bullet digs into his arm, a searing pain blossoming through his entire left side.
He launches himself at her, tackling her to the floor. He doesn’t want to hurt her, doesn’t want to keep up the lie, but she shoots him again, this time grazing his scalp, and he punches her in the face over and over as the red rage fills him up and blinds him. When he comes back to himself, Volkov lies motionless on the floor, her head a pulpy mess of blood and shattered bone.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll fix this. You’ll see. I’ll fix it all.”
“I don’t see how you can.”
Samson turns to see King leaning against the doorjamb, half his head missing, chunks of brain plopping onto the floor.
“What are you doing here?”
“Weren’t you listening to her? You’re insane. I’m here because I’m your crazy, fucked–up brain. Maybe I’m a stroke. Or maybe I really am James King, here to lead you on the path of righteousness. Or maybe I’m the devil. I’m Satan and you’re just my puppet.”
Samson shoves the heel of his hand into his eye. Wishes it would all go away, that it would all make sense. He slows his breathing, counts to ten. Opens his eye.
“Still here.”
“You’re not real,” Samson says.
“I’m as real as you are, Samson. Maybe more so. How do you know Volkov was telling the truth?”
“Because I saw the video. I saw you admit it was all lies.”
“Maybe it was faked. Maybe your delusion is the tape and I’m actually real and you’re my delusion. Wouldn’t that be fucked up?”
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