Come to Dust

by Bracken MacLeod

  Ahead of them, everything looked the same. The trees were all identical in their patternless anonymity, and there were no paths to follow. To make matters worse, it was dark and getting darker and their surroundings were becoming more confounding by the minute; details that might have stood out in the daylight, became invisible at night.

  Mike’s legs folded twice more as they fled. The first time, Liana staggered, wrenching her back around, and letting out a short, sharp cry of pain, but saving him from falling. The second time, the cumulative fatigue of their efforts growing to be too much, they toppled together, collapsing in the bracken and dry underbrush. Mitch dropped next to them, waiting for the shouts of men to be turned in their direction. Still, they seemed to be evading detection. He tried to set Sophie down, but she clung to his neck and puled at him not to let go. He whispered to the girl, “I need you to help me help Li, okay?” She looked at Liana, who was gently rolling Mike up into a sitting position so she could try to get under his arm again. His head lolled and his eyes rolled once before closing. His face was as wan as a nighttime cloud. Sophie let go of Mitch’s neck, took his hand instead, and they went to help Liana. “Let me,” he said. Taking Mike’s arm from her, he crouched down on one knee and pulled the man over his shoulders in an attempt at a fireman’s carry. Although Mike was shorter and weighed less than any of them but Sophie, he was dead weight, and Mitch couldn’t get the leverage or exert enough brute force to stand from his crouch with him slumped over his shoulders. Liana helped pull him to his feet. In the still moment before he could get a foot forward, Mitch heard the patter of Mike’s blood trickling onto the leaves underfoot. More frightening than the congregation’s chants, or the gunfire, the soft pat pat pat pat was as terrifying a sound as he’d ever heard.

  Liana lifted Sophie and they moved on. Mitch’s footsteps were heavy and irregular, but he kept his head down and watched where he stepped. Eventually, they found the car. The road was quiet. As they laid Mike in the back seat, Mitch peered through the window into the woods they’d just emerged from, the feeling of being watched prickling his skin. He looked for a sign that someone was staring out at them, lining up a rifle shot. He saw nothing but trees. It didn’t feel like a someone to him though. More like a something. Some malign creature lingering just beyond his sight, unseen and vicious, was deranging the congregation and calling Hell down on them. An antlered beast of chaos and violence that demanded blood as a sacrament and offered death as its blessing. Nonsense! There were no monsters. None like that, anyway. Then again, he’d never believed the dead could come back to life. The proof of that was clinging in his girlfriend’s arms. So who was he to say some inhuman horror wasn’t lurking at the threshold of his perception, waiting for him to turn his back or let down his guard?

  He backed out of the car and took Sophie from Liana. He set her on the front seat, and climbed in after her. Liana slid behind the wheel while he buckled Sophie into the middle. Again, he felt the pangs of guilt at not having her strapped safely in a car seat in the back. But circumstances wouldn’t make exceptions for them. He had to cope with what he had.

  Liana peeled out of the pullover, her open-throated car tearing off down the road with a roar. “Where do I go?” she shouted over the engine and road noise.

  “Sophie and I got here in the trunk of a car,” Mitch replied. “I don’t even know what state we’re in.”

  “New Hampshire.” Liana leaned over and popped open the jockey box. Her smart phone slid out and dropped into Mitch’s hands. He woke it up and opened her maps app, typing “HOSPITAL” into the search box.

  “There’s a medical center a half an hour from here,” he said. Keene felt too close, too dangerous. “Should I find a different one?”

  Liana angled the rearview mirror down. “I don’t think we have time to take him anywhere else.”

  Mitch undid his seatbelt and got up on his knees, leaning backward over the seat. He tried not to topple over when Liana took a corner faster than she should’ve, and then another. He felt Sophie’s hand on his hip, as if she could steady him. Still, the gesture meant something. She was right. If they drove an hour or more into Massachusetts, Mike would definitely bleed to death. Hell, he might do that before they even got as far as Keene. They hadn’t had time to even make an attempt at dressing Mike’s wounds. He was pale and his head was rolling back and forth with the motion of the car. Mitch pulled off his shirt and wadded it up. Leaning over the seatback, he steadied himself with one hand and pressed the fabric into the exit wound in Mike’s chest with the other. Mike groaned and moved his head, but didn’t wake up. That was good; groaning meant he was alive. Mitch kept applying pressure. He had no idea if he was helping. All he was doing was plugging up an exit wound; the entrance in Mike’s back was still bleeding freely. He hoped that the pressure against the seat might help slow the flow of blood out of that end of the wound if he couldn’t.

  Liana pushed the car faster and faster, tires screeching and engine roaring. More than once, Mitch’s downward pressure on Mike’s wound was what prevented him from falling over as she barely kept the car on the road. He hoped he wasn’t hurting him too much. But at this point, pain was an inevitability. With or without him leaning on his chest, Mike was suffering.

  The rural road gave way to town highways, and eventually the city. Traffic thickened, but they made it to the hospital in a little less than the time the phone had predicted it would take. The shirt stuck to Mitch’s hands as he let go. He knelt back in the seat, staring at his stained hands, maroon and tacky. Not the fresh red wet of newly shed blood. Mike lay in the backseat still and silent as Liana pulled into the parking lot.

  An ambulance blocked the pull-through under the canopy in front of the ER doors. Mitch pointed toward an empty parking spot nearby. She pulled into the space and jumped out of the car, wrenching forward the driver’s seat. She leaned in, begging Mike to wake up, tapping his face. “Open your eyes, god damn it. We’re here. Mike! Wake up!” Tears dropped from her eyes onto his pallid face and ran down his cheeks. Tears he couldn’t cry for himself. Mitch leaned back over the seat and felt at his neck for a pulse. His inexpert fingers couldn’t find one. He wasn’t a doctor or even a nurse, and knew he could be wrong.

  He wanted so badly to be wrong.

  “Wait here; I’ll get help.” He turned to Sophie. “Stay here, honey. Stay out of sight, okay? Can you do that?” She nodded, unclipped her seatbelt and climbed down into the footwell. He scrambled out of the car and ran across the parking lot toward the emergency room doors under the bright fluorescent lights. Toward help—trauma teams and blood transfusions. He ran toward hope.

  Hope died as he rounded the ambulance parked in the bay and caught sight of a familiar figure that stopped him dead. A man in a God’s Warrior shirt stood near the doors smoking a cigarette with a policeman beside him, listening and taking notes. The only thing the parishioner was missing was a rifle slung over his shoulder. Mitch ducked back behind the emergency van, heart pounding. He listened.

  “Can you describe them?”

  “Yup. Three of ‘em. A man, a woman, and one of them dead kids. They came smashing through the parkin’ gate in a red RAV4 or a CRV—I don’t know. It was red. Anyways, they tore around the retreat shouting their hate. Deadophiles shouting about how ‘cadaver lives matter’ or whatnot. We’ve been telling you for months that they send us threats on Facebook and the e-mail all the damn time. It was just a matter of time before one of ‘em followed through. Never seen anything like it. They came blasting through just as we were lettin’ out service and people were tryin’ to get to the parking lot to go home. It’s like they planned it that way—when everyone was feeling good and walking across the street. They plowed right through Tim Standish, Junior Williams, and Dave Hutchens. Then they blew up their car like them chickenshit terrorists in Eye-raq. They’re Satanic, man. These people. They won’t rest until it’s Hell on Earth.”

  The cop asked another question, but Mitch’s hea
rt was beating too hard to focus on what he said. His muscles were frozen and he couldn’t find the strength to pull himself away from the side of the ambulance. He looked around for another entrance into the hospital, but there wasn’t one he could see from his vantage. What he did spot were the two SUVs he’d seen leaving the compound through the front gate. Parked side by side just across from the ambulance bay, both sported white oval stickers on the back with the letters “NLC” inside, as if the New Life Church was its own country. In the rear windows were big sword-crosses with the familiar slogan surrounding them. The cars he’d seen leaving were carrying their wounded—people who’d survived being run down by Steve and Izzy, who were now being counted among the victims. The people who had been shooting at us, who shot Mike and wanted to throw Sophie in a fucking bonfire, are pinning the blame for everything on us! Mitch imagined himself going back to prison, only this time in New Hampshire, where they had the death penalty. He forced himself to move, knowing that if he didn’t, the cop or an EMT would come walking around and find him standing there, shirtless, bloody, and paralyzed. And then it’d be this upstanding church-going man’s word against his. He pushed off the van and ran back to the car, his conscience burning with shame for his cowardice.

  Liana stood with her back turned to the open car door and her face in her hands. Her bent back hitched with a sob. As Mitch approached without help in tow, she looked up at him with red eyes and said, “He’s gone.” She fell into his arms. He held tight, not knowing what else to do. He looked over her shoulder into the car at the man who had saved her life once a long time ago, and now had given his to help her save Mitch and Sophie’s too. Sacrificing everything for people he barely knew. “What do we do now?” she asked. Mitch didn’t know how to repay a debt like the one he now owed to Mike and Liana. And he didn’t have time to figure it out. He heard the ambulance engine turn over and the siren wind up.

  He helped Liana into the passenger seat. Sophie climbed up onto the seat next to her and snuggled tight against her. Liana latched the girl in and held her. He got behind the wheel and started the car. The ambulance pulled away, leaving him an unobstructed view of the holy warrior telling his lies to the cop. “The police aren’t going to help us,” he said. “No one is going to help us.”

  “Tony will,” she said.

  Mitch didn’t want to go to the funeral home. He didn’t want to put another innocent person in danger just to help him. But he didn’t know what other choice they had. Everything that wasn’t already lost, was leaving. He put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot, aiming them toward home.

  Interlude: Scenes from an Apocalypse

  42

  The news anchor stared into the camera lens as he read from the teleprompter beside it. His expression and inflection betrayed none of his own beliefs or leanings as he said, “Five state governors have pledged today to sign into law emergency bills passed by their legislatures exempting reanimate children from coverage under existing child protection laws while strengthening the rights of providers ranging from medical personnel—including pediatricians—to state licensed day care operators to refuse services to formerly deceased children without penalty. This, after two other state legislatures, New Hampshire and Maine, passed laws just last week enacting serious legal repercussions for people harboring those children without notifying authorities. The governors of both states signed those bills into law immediately. The so-called ‘Anti-Deadophile’ laws are expanding in the wake of a coordinated terrorist attack on a religious retreat in New Hampshire three weeks ago that left ten people dead including shooter, Kristin Freeborn, and the drivers of a car bomb, identified as Steven and Isabella Leigh, and their reanimate daughter, Michelle. Six other people, all members of the church, were injured in that attack, but survived the blast.

  “Opponents of these bills say that they unfairly target families and children who have done nothing wrong, and whose only offense is to have been given a second chance at life. However, alarming reports involving reanimate children have been reported from around the globe. And international tensions are rising as riots continue for the second week in Athens and Istanbul, and seem ready to spread. France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland have all agreed to accept European refugee families with reanimate children. In the Americas, however, only Canada has opened its borders to people seeking asylum. United States Secretary of State Lorena Rivera said in a press conference last evening that the U.S. government was looking at the situation, but was not at present considering lifting its travel ban prohibiting people with reanimate children from either entering or leaving the country.”

  In his earpiece, he heard direction from the producer and followed along seamlessly, turning to face camera B without dropping the pretense that his delivery of the news was conversational, not scripted. As the light on top of the camera blinked to life he introduced the guest at his glass table in the wide shot. “Sitting with me now is Pastor Gideon Roper of the New Life Church in New Hampshire, the scene of last month’s vicious shooting and car bomb attack that seems to have galvanized a frightened nation into action. Thank you for joining us, Pastor Roper.”

  Roper leaned forward in his chair seeming to expect the anchor to shake his hand, but not reaching across the desk. “Thank you for having me, Les. Let me begin by saying that the New Life Church categorically opposes violence, even as it is brought right to our doorstep, to our places of worship. What we seek is not violence, but a reaffirmation of God’s law and love and an understanding of his infinite mercy.”

  “Some are claiming, Pastor, that the reanimation of these children is a miracle from God. You disagree.”

  “Oh yes, we do. As it says in Hebrews 9:27, ‘It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.’ The Lord tells us the dead are truly dead—not yet even in Heaven or Hell. They are asleep until the last day. Anyone who says that after you die, you are not really dead, or can come back, is trying to turn you from your Father, straight toward Hell. We stand opposed to all the works of Lucifer’s agents on Earth.”

  The news anchor continued his interview without ever admitting that his own reanimate son was at home with his mother.

  Part Five: Sophie’s Forgiveness

  November

  43

  The flashing light in the sconce beside the French doors made Mitch freeze in the middle of the line he was quietly reading aloud to Sophie. He held his breath waiting for the next two flashes, the ones that signaled the all-clear. The view through the windows of the French doors separating the apartment upstairs from the stairway down to the funeral home lobby was blocked with blackout curtains hanging on a tension rod. Mitch couldn’t see who was at the door when Tony flicked the light switch, but if there was only one more flash instead of three, he had sixty seconds to grab Sophie and the bug-out bag behind the sofa, and start down the fire escape. When the next three flashes came after a short pause, he let out his breath. Things were safe. For the moment anyway. He finished reading the sentence he’d begun in The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Sophie had a half-dozen storybooks Tony had bought for her online, but this was the one she asked Mitch to read more than any other. It was her favorite, even though half the time he read it, the story made him tear up a little. It was melancholy for a children’s book. But she loved it, and he loved her, so he read it as often as she asked for it. And he promised her he’d read it over and over again until he couldn’t anymore.

  Tony pushed through the doors into the room. In the short time Mitch had known him, he seemed like he’d aged ten years. He looked tired; his beard had grown longer and wilder, and the gray in both it and on top of his head seemed to be spreading like ash in a fireplace. It seemed an impossible transformation in only a few months, but then, the whole world was changing every bit as rapidly. Maybe more so. It made Mitch feel afraid to look in a mirror. After escaping the compound, he’d shaved his head in an attempt to change his appearance, but when no one seem
ed to be looking for him, he let both his hair and beard start to grow out again. The media had picked up and run with the narrative that Steve, Izzy and Kristin were a terrorist cell of reanimate sympathizers. There were speculations they hadn’t acted alone—that others had conspired with them—other sleepers waiting to attack. People’s fears were elevated by the belief that churches weren’t off limits to violence any more. No more sanctuary. Another piece of America’s innocence lost, the pundits said. Mitch knew differently. If they only could see what the New Life Church, leading the way, was really like, with its apocalyptic banners and guns. He thought people should be able to see through Gideon Roper’s bullshit charade, but then, people believed things unquestioningly when they were scared. He figured that was how Roper and his congregation were managing him and Liana, Nicholas and Alexa, and Amye—if she’d escaped too—from a distance. As long as they were looking for the unnamed others who’d helped orchestrate the “New Life Assault,” none of them could publicly challenge Roper’s version of events. Panicked, terrified people would have Mitch strung up from a crane arm before he could say that it was Roper’s people who’d blown up the car, who’d started shooting first. Even if they listened to him, he didn’t want to be the face of the opposition. He wasn’t a revolutionary, or even political. And whether or not anyone believed they hadn’t planned the attack, he was still a “deadophile.” How he hated that portmanteau. He hated its given meaning as well as the heavy unspoken implication of it. But once branded with the word—and there was no way he could avoid it, not with Sophie in his arms—you were one of them. Mitch just wanted to stay out of trouble. Since going into hiding, however, he’d missed a meeting with his parole officer. Thus, “out of trouble” wasn’t on the menu any longer. Keeping his head down was his only remaining choice. That, and running away.