He looked over his shoulder, as if he could see the whole forest. Then he doused the fire with the remains of his soup and stood up. Grimm instantly got to his feet as well.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You have a choice—you can stay here or come with me, but I’ve got to go find Tom’s kid brother and your other friends, and I mean right now.”
“Why?”
Joe pointed with his empty soup cup. “Out there? Did you happen to see a bunch of Froot Loops running around? Bald heads, tattoos, angel wings on their chests?”
“The reapers. But who are—?”
“They are the bad guys, sweetie. They call themselves a religious movement, but that’s crap. They don’t want to save anyone. They want to kill everyone. The Night Church, the Church of Thanatos, is run by a total wack job called Saint John and a conniving, malicious witch named Mother Rose. They came out of nowhere about ten years ago, and since then they’ve converted thousands of people to their cause.”
“What cause?”
Joe handed Lilah the magazine to her pistol, then knelt to buckle the horned helmet onto Grimm’s massive head.
“They have a pretty simple agenda,” he said. “The total extinction of the human race.”
55
HER NAME WAS SISTER AMY. FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, BEFORE THE GRAY PLAGUE, she had been a bodyguard in the entertainment industry. Before that she had been a soldier. During the plague Amy had lost everyone she loved. Two sisters, a brother, parents, and grandparents. Friends. Everyone who made her life worth living. The gray plague had taken everything from her except her awareness of her own loss, her own pain.
For years afterward she was a ghost. She drifted from town to town, looking for something to believe in, looking for proof that the whole world wasn’t going to die. She found famine and disease. She found whole settlements that had starved to death, and settlements that had survived for years before finally falling to the gray wanderers.
She found nothing to believe in. Nothing she could save, and to someone like her, protecting and saving people was all that mattered. But she hadn’t been able to save her family, and in the wastelands of what had once been America she found nothing else worth saving. Nothing that would last if saved.
And then she met Saint John, and all that changed.
Now she was one of the
most trusted reapers of the Night Church. A true believer who worshipped Saint John as much as she worshipped Thanatos and the darkness. The saint had promised her—actually sworn to her—that when her time came, he would take his own sacred knives and open a red mouth in her flesh. With his own sanctified hands he would guide her into the darkness.
That was something she could believe in. A guaranteed end to pain, and a pathway to the sea of darkness in which the spirits of her family swam.
It was beautiful.
She would do anything for Saint John.
Sister Amy lay on the ground, her body totally hidden by a thick line of shrubs, her scent masked by the chemicals into which her red ribbons had been dipped. Those chemicals fooled more than the gray people. Even dogs avoided the smell. It did not trigger their aggression. It just made her scent . . . uninteresting, and that was the genius of it.
She lay in the hot darkness, her body utterly still, her breathing controlled, her mind quiet and receptive.
Listening.
To the ranger and the Lost Girl.
To strange tales of how, in the terrible days after First Night, the lost and lonely survivors found one another and built fences against the dead. How they built nine towns in central California. And how, behind the fences, they survived.
Nine towns, filled with heretics whose every heartbeat was an affront to God.
Nine towns that did not even know that the army of the Night Church existed.
Yet.
56
“THE AMERICAN NATION,” NIX SAID AGAIN. “I HOPE IT’S REAL. I HOPE IT’S not just a bunch of little towns like ours.”
“It has to be more than that,” said Benny. “They have planes. This one and the jet. Maybe more. They even made a flag. It sounds . . . I don’t know . . . big. Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen.”