“So what’s next? Anyone we should be worried about?”
Abby chuckled ruefully before answering. “Oh yeah. There’s a town a few days from here that’s full of religious nut-jobs and their psychotic leader. They tried to burn me alive.”
“Holy shit, man,” said Todd, who was nearby and listening in on their conversation.
“But I think we can make an appeal to their reason, for some of them,” Abby continued. “They follow their leader, Isaiah, because they believe it’s the end times. If we show up, show them that normalcy is returning, maybe they’ll snap out of it. Fear is how he controls them, and we’ll fight that with hope.”
“You really think that’ll work?” asked Hiamovi.
“I believe it will, yes,” Abby replied. “Either way, we have to try. Isaiah is a cruel, sadistic man, and every day that he’s in control of his following is another chance for him to kill somebody. We can’t let that happen.”
“You know I respect your commitment to nonviolence, Abby,” Jax said, “but I have to ensure the safety of my boys here. So I need an honest answer: will these freaks try to kill us the minute they see us?”
Abby thought for a moment, then said, “No. No, I don’t believe so. There were a few of them that ambushed me out here, but I killed them. As for the rest of the town, they didn’t turn violent until they heard that I’d killed their friends.”
“So maybe you should hang back again when we get there.”
“Maybe, yeah.”
“Well, alright then. Everyone get yourselves ready to leave, looks like we’re going to hear a sermon.”
***
“I’ve got a question for you, Abs,” said Chad, pulling his horse up alongside Abby.
“I’ve got an answer,” she replied. She didn’t particularly care for the nickname ‘Abs’ that Chad and a couple of the others used for her, but at least it meant she was fitting in with the group.
“Why didn’t you stay in the military after everything went down a few years ago? You’re obviously suited for this kind of work.”
Abby shrugged. “It didn’t feel like my calling at the time. Plus my vow to not kill anyone would have complicated that a bit.”
“So you’re really committed to that? What if someone is trying to kill you?”
“I’ll hope I can disable them and stop them.”
“No, seriously. I mean, pretty much everyone agrees that killing someone who’s trying to kill you is pretty goddamn justifiable. Not even then?”
Abby turned to look at Chad, squinting as the setting sun was just above his head. “It’s not about what’s justifiable and what’s not,” she said, “but about the act of killing itself. I’ve done a lot of killing, and at this point I’d rather die than take another life.”
Chad nodded his head. “Well, fuckin’ kudos for the conviction, at least,” he said.
“What about cursing? I’ve noticed you don’t really do that much, either,” said Nate.
Abby shook her head. “Nope, I try not to do that either. I picked up a lot of bad habits as a teenager, and once I hit rock bottom I decided I needed to make some big changes in my life, so I hit reset on everything I could think of. That included the cursing, drinking, and smoking.”
“Fuck that, I couldn’t give up fuckin’ cursing,” said Chad with a laugh. “I’d have to quit talking altogether.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” said Hiamovi.
“Yeah, yeah, real funny, ‘Movi. Sounds like you’re just afraid I’ll charm the pants off your girlfriend.”
Hiamovi laughed. “Yeah, I’m so worried she’ll fall for that silver tongue.”
“In your dreams, Chad. And you better not even dream about it,” Abby said, laughing along with the others. But her laughter was a cover-up for the guilt that began to gnaw at her stomach. Chad had meant what he said as a joke, and that’s how everyone else took it, even Hiamovi.
But not Abby. The simple fact was that she had been charmed away from Hiamovi once before. She could laugh it off and make jokes about how that’d never happen, but it had already happened once, so who’s to say it couldn’t happen again? What if she did fall for Chad, or someone else? What if she betrayed Hiamovi’s trust a second time?
Her silence took her out of the ensuing conversation, so Chad eventually rejoined the others behind her as they continued to talk amongst themselves. Night settled in as the sun disappeared behind the horizon, and the group set up camp for the night in a field, coming together in a circle. Sleeping out in the open like this wasn’t ideal, but they were far from any kind of structure, and Jax didn’t want the group moving in the dark.
“You okay?” whispered Hiamovi. He lay next to Abby on his thin, government-issue foam mat with a poncho liner serving as a blanket.
“Yeah,” she replied.
“You sure? You got real quiet earlier.”
Abby didn’t respond, unsure of what she should say about that, but Hiamovi seemed to guess what she was thinking.
“Is it about what Chad said?”
Abby turned to look at Hiamovi and nodded her head, still finding herself at a loss for words.
Hiamovi grinned and said, “Come on, Abby. You don’t really think I’m afraid you’ll fall for him, do you?”
“How do you know I won’t?” Abby whispered. “I’ve done it before when I promised I wouldn’t. What good is my word?”
“As good as gold. I trust you.”
“But you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust me after what I’ve done to you.”
“But I do.”
“Why?”
Hiamovi paused, then said, “Because you’ve changed. You messed up once, but that was years ago. You swore that you were going to change and improve yourself, and you actually did it. You walked the walk, which is a hell of a lot more than most folks do when they talk about changing. That tells me that you’re a really amazing woman who deserves a second chance.”
Abby shook her head as a single tear escaped from her eyes. “You’re wrong, I don’t deserve it. But I’m so happy to have it. I’m sorry for jerking you around like this.”
“You don’t have to apologize. This is…hard. Trying to patch things up like this.”
“Very hard.”
“So, are we still good?”
Abby hesitated before answering, her eyes avoiding Hiamovi’s loving gaze. The blow that Chad’s words had laid on her was unexpected and hurt quite a bit. The guilt that led her to push Hiamovi away for the last three years resurged and threatened to undue the progress she’d made in reconciling with him.
But this was the new Abby, the changed Abby that Hiamovi saw, and she didn’t let guilt drag her down into dark places.
“Yeah,” she said, a smile reclaiming its place on her lips. “We’re good.”
Hiamovi returned the smile, then rolled over and shut his eyes as Abby followed suit.
Yet another uneventful night passed, and the group was up and moving again just as the sun peeped over the horizon with Abby and Jax taking the lead, as usual. Conversation was limited this far now into their mission and so far from the relative safety of the Rocky Mountains. Out here they might as well have been on Mars for all they knew about the area.
The threat of zombies kept everyone on their toes, especially since their first encounter when they lost Kurtis. Having learned the hard way just how deadly an encounter with those monsters could be, the remaining Raiders took no chances. But the days wore on with no second such attack, and Abby was beginning to wonder if zombies had largely died out by now.
“Do we have any kind of contact with the other advance parties?” she asked Jax. “Do we know if they’ve had any encounters?”
“Last time I checked in with the main element, they said things were all quiet to the north of us. No zombies reported at all. Some Rangers down near the border have met small groups and loners, but nothing much else. We might be the only ones to have faced a large group.”
Abby
sighed and said, “Well, thank God for that. But trust me, that wasn’t a large group.”
“What’s the biggest group you saw?” asked Yuri.
A terrifying memory flashed before Abby’s eyes as she recollected the scent of fire and death in Little America, and the screams in the old prison as she, Zach, and Ross tried to make good their escape from a horde.
“I don’t know,” she said after a pause. “Dozens. Hundreds, maybe. Can’t say I stopped to count.”
“Good God, I can’t even imagine that,” Yuri said as he shook his head.
“It’s best you don’t,” Abby replied. “It seems like a good sign that no one else has had any problems with them, but let’s not get complacent either.”
The Raiders didn’t need to be told that twice, and they remained on high alert throughout the rest of that day and into the night.
***
“There,” Abby said about an hour after sunrise the following morning. She pointed at a derelict gas station along the side of the road in front of them as Jax followed her gaze. “That’s where my friend and I fought off four of their guys.”
“So we’re close,” replied Jax. He gave a hand signal to the rest of the group behind him, warning them that they were approaching potential danger.
“Yup. If we keep following this road, we’ll head right into their town.”
“Roger that. You should probably fall back to the rear now, and pull that hat down a little lower.”
“Yut,” Abby replied. This response, which roughly translates to ‘okay’, was an acceptable response to just about any command among Marines, Abby had noted, and being around so many for so long had led to her adopting some of their terminology. She pulled the bill of her black hat down over her eyes and halted Reese while the rest of the patrol filed past her, waiting for Hiamovi to catch up with her.
“You ready for this?” she asked Hiamovi as she nudged Reese with her knees, directing him to resume walking.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Hiamovi replied. “Are these the same fanatics you told me about when we were younger?”
“Yup. The same people who tried burn me alive.”
Hiamovi shook his head slowly. “I never would have guessed things were so bad out here.”
“No one knew. With no rule of law, a lot of folks just formed their own enclaves and did as they pleased.”
“Just wait ‘til I get my hands on this Isaiah guy.”
“You can’t,” Abby said, turning in her saddle to face Hiamovi. “We’re not here to hurt people, even bad people like him.”
Hiamovi sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
“You promise you’ll keep your cool when we get there?”
“I promise,” Hiamovi said.
A few hours later, Jax once again sent Nate and Yuri ahead of the group to see if they could find a good overwatch location. Abby doubted that they would, given the terrain and layout of the town that she could remember, but didn’t blame Jax for taking that precaution.
Nearly another hour passed, and the group was less than a thousand meters from the town. Jax keyed in his radio and said, “Nate, Yuri, you boys set up or what?”
Silence.
“Nate, Yuri, radio check, over.”
Silence.
“Nate, Yuri, this is Jax. Talk to me, over.”
A mild alarm washed over Abby and the Raiders as they lifted their weapons and began scanning all around them. Why weren’t Nate and Yuri responding? What went wrong?
“Nate, Yuri, key in twice if you’re unable to respond right now, over.”
Silence.
“Gunny, this is Yuri, over.”
Jax let out an exasperated sigh before replying. “What in the fuck is wrong with you two? Why didn’t you roger the fuck up?”
There was another long pause, then an answer.
“We’re actually in the town, Gunny. The people are gone, but, uh… “
“But what?”
“You just need to come see this for yourselves. I hope you all liked your breakfast enough to taste it a second time though.”
Chapter Eleven
Several of the Raiders did indeed lose the contents of their stomach as they entered the town and walked their horses up the main road.
“Who does something like this?” asked Hiamovi after running a sleeved forearm across his mouth.
“Isaiah, that’s who,” Abby replied without looking at him. She and all the others were staring up at the grisly scene on both their left and their right. Through sheer force of will she had kept herself from vomiting, but that was an urge she had to fight with each passing second.
Even Jax, a man who’d seen more than his fair share of death in Fallujah, seemed dumbstruck by the macabre sight as he wandered up the road.
Crosses.
Dozens of crude crosses in yards that lined the main road.
Each one bore a body. Men and women, young and old. Some of the decomposing bodies had been hammered to their cross with large nails while others had been bound by ropes. Some even showed signs of torture, that or self-mutilation.
Most of the Raiders had regained their composure by now, though some still kept their gaze earthward, refusing to meet the lifeless eyes surrounding them, the eyes that accused and cursed the living from their crosses.
Abby followed behind Jax, saying nothing as she scanned the faces of the dead. She stopped in her tracks, staring up at a face that caught her attention.
“Bernie,” she said aloud.
Jax turned around and said, “Say again?”
“This one is Bernie,” Abby repeated, pointing up at the corpse in front of her. “He was the guy who murdered his brother back at the last neighborhood and tried to kill me.”
Jax grunted. “Well, good riddance. He deserved this.”
“But they didn’t,” Abby replied, sweeping her hand along the row of crosses. “They must have come here looking for help.”
Jax grunted again. “At least we know what happened to them.”
The group continued up the road, heading for the church. That was where Isaiah had been skulking when Abby first arrived in his town years ago, and she hoped they might find some more clues as to what happened here. She noticed more blackened remains of old houses as they went, recalling to mind the trial by fire she’d endured at Isaiah’s hands. How many more suffered that horrific fate after she escaped, Abby wondered. But she kept these thoughts to herself.
The white, wooden doors of the old church hung ajar on busted hinges, beckoning for Abby and the others to enter at once. Inside, the church appeared untouched by time. The pews still lay in neat rows, crimson hymnals placed at regular intervals along each of the wooden benches. The windows on either wall were clear and intact, and the pulpit still proudly bore its cross, though for the moment that symbol sickened even the religious among the group.
Abby, alongside Hiamovi, led the Raiders down the main aisle, the beating of their boots against the carpet being the only sound to break the eerie silence.
“Heh, ‘Movi and Abs walking down the aisle. Ain’t that romantic,” Chad muttered in a half-hearted attempt to lighten the mood. No one responded.
Behind the pulpit was a door, and this one too hung open to reveal what appeared to be a small study. Abby made her way into the dark room as Jax posted some of the men around the building to keep watch.
Abby switched on the flashlight on her rifle to illuminate the small room, and found it to be in a similar state as the rest of the church, sending a shiver up her spine. Why did everything here look so normal? Going from the scene of a mass execution to a tidy little church was a jarring juxtaposition, and it twisted Abby’s stomach into knots.
Shoved into the far corner of the room was an old desk. Neat stacks of paper within manila folders covered the top of it, and Abby stepped up to poke through some of the pages.
“What’s all this?” Hiamovi asked.
Abby took a moment to scan the first page. “It looks like a
journal.”
“Isaiah’s?”
“Yeah, going all the way back to The Crisis.”
Abby’s voice trailed off as she scanned the rest of the page.
“Looks like he really believed all the crap he spewed,” she finally said with a huff. “This whole page is talking about Armageddon, the Book of Revelation, all that stuff.”
“Did you think he was lying?” asked Jax as he stepped closer to the desk.
Abby shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t know what to think about him. All I knew for sure was that he was evil.”
“Do you suppose…suppose that scene out there wasn’t murder?” Hiamovi asked.
“What do you mean?” asked Jax.
“I mean that maybe it was a mass suicide, like some kind of ‘end times’ ritual to atone for their sins or something.”
“You really think all those people out allowed themselves to be crucified?”
“I don’t know, maybe. That one psycho convinced a bunch of people to poison themselves and their kids, didn’t he?”
“Maybe some of his followers would have, but not Bernie,” Abby said. “He and the others that came with him must have been murdered.”
Jax sighed. “Guess it doesn’t really make a difference does it?”
“Guess not,” said Abby. She tugged open one of the desk drawers and found to her surprise an old audio recorder with a tape already loaded in it.
“Does that thing work?” Hiamovi asked.
“Let’s find out,” Abby said, and she pressed the ‘play’ button on the small, black device.
“NOOOOO!”
A woman’s scream instantly shattered the silence of the church as the tape began to play, and Abby almost dropped the recorder as everyone jumped. She turned the volume down a notch as the others huddled as close to the room as they could to listen. The woman’s screaming, amplified by anguished cries from men and women alike in the background, continued before an older man’s voice began to speak.
“Isaiah, chosen prophet of Jehovah, Shepherd of the Lord’s people in these end times, speaking.”
***
“I know not the purpose, but Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to me in a vision last night and commanded me to make this recording. This final chapter of our story here, told in my own voice, must be preserved for future generations, when the saints return for the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, preceding the final battle against the Prince of Darkness, whom the angels called Lucifer.”
His Name Was Zach | Book 3 | Their Names Were Many Page 9