Johnny pounded on the door and said his name. No one answered. I thought we might have to look for an alternative entrance when I heard the convent lock turning and the looming door opened.
Mother Superior and Sister Maeve stood there alone, their faces taut and heavy with exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. No one else was around. Sister Maeve had removed her habit and her heavy dress, probably so she could run more easily. She was smart. She still wanted to live. She took two steps forward and began to drop and Johnny caught her and let her sob against his chest. He held her in a show of compassion I didn’t think he was capable of, quietly shushing her. He stuck one pistol back in its shoulder holster so he could have a free hand to brush her hair with.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“The sick… they left us,” Mother Superior said. She still appeared strong, hard, and tough, despite the last few nerve-wracking days.
“Left?” Johnny said. “Where the fuck’d they go?”
“When we realized we couldn’t help them, we hid. We had no choice. We had to hide. They roamed the halls for days, laughing and whispering, calling our names. Saying… saying such dreadful things.”
“It’s all right now,” I told her.
“Prophecies. Revelations. Curses. How did they know such things? How?”
Johnny kept his guns up and kept turning, checking down the dark corridors. He looked back outside at the empty buildings. “I don’t like this. It feels like an ambush. I keep expecting the streets to fill up and those things to come running at us.”
Mother Superior was weak and leaned against me. I helped her to a pile of furniture that they’d used to blockade the main doors which had been strewn all over the marble foyer. I righted a chair and sat her in it. “Is there anyone else here besides Sister Abigail?”
“No. They’re dead. Or infected. They were all bitten. The children. The priests, the other nuns. We tried to save them, but… everyone we thought we were saving we were killing.”
“You’re badly dehydrated. Couldn’t you have taken off your damn habit instead of sweating out all your salt beneath the cowl?”
I helped her out of the habit. I was shocked to see that despite her age, her lack of makeup, the pain and fear worn into the planes and angles of her face, and the short silver hair, she was actually quite a handsome woman.
“It started with her,” she said. “Your aunt.”
I nodded. Maybe it was true. She’d kissed the palm of the altar boy who’d bitten Niko. The kid who prepared the wine and the host, who’d spread the virus to all the congregation of St. Anne’s. Maybe she was just one such saint among dozens or hundreds or more across the nation or all the nations of the earth.
“Go,” Mother Superior said, pushing at me. “Go do what it is you do.”
I left her there and took the stairs two at a time until I hit the fourth floor landing. In front of my aunt’s door was a ton of furniture. I started pulling chairs and benches aside and pushing them away, digging to get at her. I knew I might be digging my own grave. I knew that the God virus burned inside her. I thought of all the dead, all the missing, all the murdered, some by my own hand, and wondered why she’d been chosen.
I kept tearing away at the furniture until there was a small enough hole in all the debris for me to crawl through. I got to her door and tried the knob. It was locked. I took out my pistol and fired three shots to splinter the wood around the heavy metal knob plating. I shoved my shoulder against the door and burst into the room.
“St. Peter denies you entrance,” my aunt said, her habit drenched with sweat, her gaze a million miles off. She was hunched down low, shrunken, burned up, hollowed out. Her mouth hung open in the ugliest smile I’d seen yet on any of the biters. Her teeth were stained red and infection oozed across her lips. I held the 9mm trained on her.
“What’s doing this to us?”
“It’s in your blood, Tommy Flowers. It’s in our blood. We can’t help ourselves.”
“Try to hold on. Try to help me.”
She did a weird little dance and whispered and sang. Her eyes shifted to me every so often and the laughter continued. I stuck my pistol back in its holster. I held my hands up to her to show her I meant her no harm. The act itself made her laugh even harder until she was spitting up blood.
“How do I stop it?” I asked.
“We do the Lord’s work.”
Her fever lit my fever. My pulse burned. My heartbeat tripped along, doubling its rate. My blood flared. I let out a groan and went to one knee. I tried to steel myself. I was stone. I did not shatter. I held myself there. Sweat coursed into my eyes. I thought I saw all the plastic idols of Christ, the Virgin, the saints, the martyrs, all of them, turning now to face me and take my accounting.
“Where is everyone?” I asked. Perhaps I was asking her. Perhaps I was asking them.
The crows pecked at the glass. The echoing retorts of the machine gun and M2 rattled the windows and my back teeth. A picture of the sacred heart of Christ on the wall, bound by thorns, pumped on the wall.
She was no more than eighty pounds. Her heinous smile seemed to understand every secret and every forgotten shame I possessed. I didn’t have many, but those I did showed up in the bloody glaze of her teeth. She was my last relative. She might be the last saint, the final martyr. She might be the start of this plague or the end of it. She was no more known to me than the will of God or Allah or nature.
She trundled to me. She giggled and talked around me and at me and to me and to the idols that spoke back. I drew my pistol and held it in my quaking fist. I shook so badly that I almost dropped it. She took my free hand and pressed it over her slathered yellow lips. She kissed my palm. I tried to be stone but the pain made me spasm and squirm. I held on and she held me. I was surprised to see she was still capable of crying. The tears rolled down her face even as she snickered and leered. I had nothing to say. I had too much to say. I couldn’t remember my prayers. She folded my fingers so that I was cupping her tears. She touched me on the wrist. I placed the muzzle of the 9mm against her forehead. She passed out.
I did too, for maybe a minute. I awoke trembling and cold. The crows tapped out signals to me. My aunt’s brow was unfurrowed and she seemed almost content for the moment. I carried her to her bed again.
I hadn’t done a full rosary since I was thirteen. I did one now, reciting the Hail Mary over and over, and then emphasizing the Lord’s Prayer every tenth prayer. On the last one I shot her in the head.
When I got back downstairs, Johnny was tending to Sister Maeve and Mother Superior. He’d gotten the provisions out of the car and was helping them to take small sips of water and bites of food.
“What happened?” Johnny said.
“You know what happened.”
He nodded. “Yes, yes I do.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Sure. One sec.”
Johnny drew his switchblade, snapped it open, and stabbed Mother Superior twice under the heart. There was no time to make a move even if I’d wanted to save her.
With his left hand he yanked his pistol and shot Sister Maeve center mass. She crumbled and turned over twice, her short dry hair wagging a little, her expression falling in on itself as the dreaded understanding of her own impending death overtook her. Her face filled with an immense loss and her gaze settled on me. She tried crawling but only made it a couple of feet before she lay dead with a kidney shaped pool of blood spreading toward the indifferent floorboards.
Mother Superior clutched at his lapels as she sank to the marble tile. Her eyes drifted to me. She didn’t hate me even now, she was just astonished by how events had unfolded like this, so quickly, so badly, in an unstoppable chain of fated moments.
“Fuck you, you old bitch,” Johnny spat at her. “You think I’d ever forget those beatings you used to give us kids?” He yanked off her headdress and used it to clean his blade and blood-soaked shirt. “Cunt ruined my tie.”
I gr
abbed him by the throat and thrust him against the wall. He smiled and said, “What, you believed me when I said I was thankful for that nasty old cooze? How stupid have you gotten?”
He dared me to make my move. I wondered why I didn’t, except that I was even more heartless than he was. I’d just killed my own flesh and blood, how pained could I be over the Mother Superior? He and I stared into each other’s eyes understanding that without each other we were totally alone in the world. He and I were the last ones alive to have any kind of real shared history.
I let him go, pushed open the door, and moved down the stone steps to the street. Johnny followed. He was deliriously happy with himself for finally getting his revenge on Mother Superior. He reached out and patted me on the back, consoling me or just urging me to shake it off.
“Those flying things,” one of the mooks said. “They’re circling the church. Look.”
Johnny craned his neck, shaded his eyes from the gleam of the sun lining the smoke-stuffed sky.
“So,” he said. “We’ve got one more mass to attend.”
Of course we did. Of course this was where we were supposed to be, what we needed to do. I’d been wanting to go to mass since the world had ended. Now I had my last chance.
I struck out down the sidewalk headed for St. Anne’s. “Let’s go.”
The mooks argued. The mooks asked why the hell we were going to the church. The mooks wanted to race back to the compound and get behind the wall. Johnny told them to shut the fuck up. He climbed in back. One mook drove the limo slowly alongside me. Johnny was making full use of the bar. He had what he’d always wanted. All the syndicate power that was left. He tried to make the best of it. He sipped his drink slowly. One of his boys shot the machine gun every so often out the window, up at the sky, probably just to feel its power. I kept walking. I waited for the backshot, but I didn’t think Johnny would ever go that way. He’d want to kill me while facing me. You could trust him that far when it came to murder.
At the church the driver went over the curb and parked at the bottom of the steps. One carried the M2, the other the M16, and Johnny took the auto rifle. Johnny’s eyes met mine. He was still grinning. We both had an idea what we would find. I’d said it aloud just a little while ago.
They’re still Catholic.
I pushed at the great doors. They swung wide and I was surprised by the silence within. I’d expected the laughter, the whispering, the guttural and disjointed warnings and threats, the hissing.
“Oh God,” the mooks said together. The stink was almost enough to drive someone insane.
The biters sat in the pews. They knelt on the padded kneelers. They blew out the candles and lit them again. The sick altar boys and infected priests offered up the divine host. The biters ate it. They crossed themselves. They offered up peace and blessings to one another. They couldn’t speak. They mouthed verses and songs. They were covered in the teeth marks of one another. Their twisted faces still grinned savagely but their eyes were filled with a kind of peaceful repose. The virus had mutated again. The infected had nothing left to say, nothing else to demand. They simply did what they’d done all their lives. They prayed. Maybe it was one last act of consecration allowed by the lord.
They drooled blood and pus but they appeared happier than they ever had at Vespers before. I almost wanted to join them. I almost wanted to offer myself up to be bitten, except they didn’t see me anymore. If this was a trial run of some biological attack, I wondered if those in charge counted it as a success or a failure.
The shadows of the seraph flying high above occasionally crossed the stained glass windows. The infected looked up, their faces full of joy.
“They don’t even see us,” Johnny said.
I nodded. “They’re beyond us now.”
“They’re not beyond this–”
“No!” I shouted.
The mooks and Johnny cut loose. They blasted the hell out of everybody. Some they took their time with, carefully aiming for head shots. Others they just chopped down with big guns.
They reloaded four or five times. Candles shattered and flames burned wild across the vestry. The remaining hosts flew into the air and rained down across the congregation. The infected didn’t notice their own dying. The shadows spiraling in the distance continued their slow drift across the fire-seared arch of the earth.
When Johnny and his boys had finished the M2 and M16 were empty. The mooks stood their looking proud of what they’d achieved. Johnny was still smiling. The bodies were draped all around us. He’d been wanting to kill everyone in a church since he was eleven and we’d been altar boys. It was the thing that kept going around and around in his skull. The resentment built up against God and against man.
But I knew he wasn’t finished yet.
“You know what’s going to happen next too, don’t you?” he asked me.
“Sure,” I said.
I came down the aisle stepping over bodies, and Johnny Tormino and his boys came forward to me like old time gunslingers meeting in the middle of the dusty street. Johnny and his two mooks already had their handguns drawn. He was making his play.
“Johnny,” I said. “You really think this is the best time?”
“You want me to wait? Until when? Until civilization gets back on its feet?”
He smiled again. It was uglier than any of the smiles I’d seen on the sick. Worse than my aunt’s. Worse than Gina’s. Johnny checked my eyes and knew all my truths, the same way I knew his.
“Don’t be a moron,” I said.
“Stop talking that way to me! I’m the new skipper. The Ganooch is gone. His consigliere is dead. Someone’s got to run the business and I’m in line. You have no say. You have no right.”
“There is no business anymore, you maniac. You didn’t get a look at the sky? You can’t smell death on the wind?”
“Big deal!” It got him laughing. Then he stopped, and his face went blank, as if he’d never laughed at anything in his entire life. “You killed the old man, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re the worst, Tommy. You know that? You’re the worst thing I ever met in my life.”
The muscle-bound, no-neck thugs stalked left and right to cut me off from running, as if I ever would. I looked out over the brutalized corpses of my neighbors and a chord rang inside me that might have been pity or might have been disdain. The sweat ran over my face once again and the statues of Jesus and Mary and Joseph turned their heads my way, grimacing, almost comically so.
Johnny and his boys stood ready. They were eager for this. I thought of the four of us jumping behind pews, hiding behind the bodies, running around like kids in here playing with squirt guns. It made my head ache just imagining it. I stood my ground.
As a rule you didn’t throw blades, but I was good enough that I could draw and hit the two soldiers’ barrel chests. The knives wouldn’t kill them, but it would hurt and scare them. It would leave me open for Johnny to chop me down, but I knew it wouldn’t happen like that.
Johnny’s boys each held a .347 on me.
I reached out and hooked my fingers into the mouth of the nearest dead biter. I drew blood and infection and then flung it at Johnny and his men. The mooks shrieked like girls. The instant I released I spun aside and drew two of my knives from their scabbards. One on my left hip and the other from the small of my back. I hurled them both.
The blades sailed past Johnny to his left and right. There was enough force behind my throws for a knife to take one of the thugs in the neck. It barely nicked the guy’s carotid but it was enough to get a high fountain of arterial spray going. He could’ve pinched it shut with two fingers, but he overreacted and started screaming as his blood spurted up in front of his eyes.
My knife grazed the other mook’s window’s peak. It did absolutely no damage except to get him bleeding. There’s a lot of blood vessels close to the surface of the scalp and the blood poured down into his eyes. He flailed and tripped over a dead bit
er and fell into a pile of bodies and acted like they were eating him alive.
I’m a torpedo. I don’t waver. I don’t stand down. I have the willpower to beat my enemy. I can outlast them all.
I wasn’t anywhere near form, but I didn’t have to be. Johnny and I went for our guns at the same time. He was fast. Maybe even faster than me. But he lingered an extra fraction of a second, the way he always did. He wanted to take in the moment, the drama of the situation, and bask in it, and fill himself with it, and let it shine on him and from within him. He wanted to say my name. He wanted to make a speech. He wanted us to share a last drink.
I put three in his chest.
My last friend on earth was gone.
I put the mooks out of their misery.
I was alone in a church of the dead.
I fell into the back pew as I listened to my memories of the benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. I hadn’t heard it for years. It was an invocation for divine help, spiritual guidance, and forgiveness. I listened to my blood and disease dripping onto the floor.
I laid out on the pew and listened to silence of the empty world. The seraph didn’t trumpet or shout to one another. I kept waiting for some signal. I thought they would break through the stained glass windows and herald the second coming and either Christ or God or Lucifer would step through the great doors and expose me to my destiny.
I heard a distant sound coming closer. It was familiar and yet it took me a while to place it. Finally I realized it was a chopper banking in from the north.
I still had my phone on me. It still worked. Someone had followed the GPS chip in it.
I ran up to the roof and a transport chopper, modified for combat search and rescue, was landing.
Vespers Page 14