“I wonder how many people were seriously expecting to be taken away from this,” Alex said. He walked through the sunlit grass with his hands jammed in his pockets. “Did they just sit down and pray, waiting? Why?”
It was in his nature to question. He had been an anthropology graduate student before the end of the world came. He knew almost as much about the Bible as I did, but viewed it through the lens of a curious detachment, as an artifact and not the word of God.
I frowned. “I don’t know how many righteous children of God there are. I thought . . . I thought that we were faithful.” I squinted up at the sun. “I thought that my community was good. That we were doing as God commanded us. We followed the
Ordnung
, the rules.”
“I thought so too, Katie,” Ginger said. “We were all safe there . . . well, in our way,” she amended, glancing at Alex. Ginger had been safe until the Elders had caught her contacting the Outside world with a cell phone, had been accused of going mad. A bit of that had been true. She’d been safe as long as she was quiet and said nothing.
“They just locked you in a room,” he said. “Me, they threw out, once they found me.”
“That was my fault,” I said. I violated the Elders’ rules. They ordered that no one was to come into or leave the settlement. Alex was hurt when I found him. I brought him inside, and pulled the wrath of the Elders down on all our heads. And I had done more than that. I had lain with him, and they had discovered us. I had used up my virtue on an English man outside the bonds of marriage.
He kicked a stone. “I feel bad for that. You’d still be safe there if it wasn’t for me.”
I shook my head. “No. The vampires had come in anyway.” That was the fault of a boy I’d been intending on marrying. A boy who saw the brothers he thought were dead resurrected as vampires beyond the fence, and foolishly let them in. Elijah had betrayed me, turned away from me and toward something I didn’t understand. I was pretty sure it wasn’t God.
“The ground is no longer holy,” I lamented.
But I still ached for home. Before the end of the world, I could not wait for my
Rumspringa
, the testing of the Outside world. I was looking forward to being able to experience a different kind of life. Sit in a movie theater. Wear jeans. Perhaps learn to drive a car. And now . . . now that I was in the Outside world, it was more fearsome and terrible than I ever could have imagined.
I remembered when we’d been exiled, when we had been cast beyond the gate of my community. My family and the Elders had watched. I felt their sorrow pressing against my back as we walked down that dirt road with the horse, feeling the horizon too large before us and my familiar life shrinking behind.
I shook my head. “Something happened. I don’t understand. It wasn’t just that the vampires glamoured their way in. Something changed in our land.”
“Evil,” Alex said. “Not just the contagion. When people are forced into a crucible like that, they start biting each other like rats. Power becomes an end unto itself. Evil is an inevitable sociological fact.”
I frowned. I could not dispute that idea with logic. “I don’t believe that everyone is corruptible.”
“Everyone is corruptible. We all just have different limits.”
We walked in silence for some time before Ginger said: “How many do you think have survived? If this is a biblical thing?”
I knew that she wanted comfort. She wanted to believe that her husband and children were alive. Just as Alex wanted to believe that his parents were. As I wanted to believe that my parents and sister would live.
“Revelations says that a third of mankind will be killed.” I couldn’t lie to her. That was what the book said, but doubts crept in on me. “The rest will flee to the mountains. There will be the End Times of Tribulation, and then Jesus will cast Satan out for a thousand years.”
“The idea of End Times isn’t specific to Christianity,” Alex said. “Islam, for instance, believes in a Judgment Day. At that time, terrible creatures called the Gog and Magog will slaughter everything they can get their hands on.”
“Sounds familiar,” Ginger said.
“There’s also the idea that a mystical smoke will descend on the earth. Nonbelievers are stricken with grave illness, and believers only get a case of the sniffles. Allah then sweeps a wind over the earth, which steals away the lives of the believers, leaving the nonbelievers behind until judgment.
“Mormonism has the idea that darkness will cover the earth, and that the evil will burn in fire.”
“If we were only that lucky,” Ginger muttered.
“Hinduism believes that there’s a cyclic life and death in the world, moving from purity to impurity. It’s not really an End Times in the Western Protestant sense, but there’s also the idea in Buddhism that the teachings of Buddha will be forgotten and that people will degenerate into a destructive cycle until the appearance of the next Buddha,” Alex said. “So there may be some grain of truth in many traditions about what’s happening here.”
“I struggle with this,” I said frankly. “I know that this keeps me safe.” I patted the pocket containing the
Himmelsbrief
. “But your tattoos also keep you safe.”
“And before communications were cut off to the rest of the world, we knew that people were safe at the mosques, Shinto shrines, synagogues, temples,” Ginger said. I’d fallen back to walk beside her heel, and she leaned over to pick bits of grass from my hair. Motherly fussing. It felt normal, and I relished it.
“I’m struggling with it too,” Alex said, scratching self-consciously at his chest. “I never thought I really believed in God, deep, down deep, like you do.” He gazed at me with eyes the color of winter skies. “I’ve got a healthy respect for the religion of ancient Egypt, you know. But nobody really practices it anymore. It is, for me . . . an intellectual curiosity, I guess. The idea that Osiris rose from the dead, that there is some concept of eternal life . . .”
“But you believe, in some fashion,” I said. “Or else it wouldn’t work.” I touched the back of his hand. “I guess I don’t understand how we can come from such different perspectives and have the same result.”
I was accustomed to thinking that there was one right way to live, one way to achieve favor. “Evil” for me had been a broad category once upon a time. Evil had included transgressions great and small, from murder to failure to submit to God’s will with grace to immodest dress. Now . . . now I found that my definition of evil was shrinking. I feared that rather than rising to the challenge of the Tribulations and becoming strong in my faith, I was growing weaker. Decaying, like the rest of the world. And that frightened me.
His fingers closed around mine. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “But it works.”
In some ways, I think that I loved him.
And I shouldn’t have.
He was an Englisher. Wholly inappropriate, based on just that fact. He wasn’t even Christian. He was older than I was, by a handful of years. Worldlier. He had seen and experienced things I couldn’t even imagine: the ocean, airplanes, computers. His world had been much bigger than mine, glamorous and exciting.
But now our world was the same: bleak and frightening.
Alex shook his head. “In the Gnostics’ Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ What’s in me is not gonna save anyone.”
I gazed at him. “I believe that what you have within you is good and beautiful.”
“I wish I could believe that,” he said. I heard the doubt and fear in his voice.
“I believe for you,” I said.
***
The sun always seemed to move too fast.
Growing up Plain, I had always been conscious of the sun. We rose with it, conducted all our business under its light. The cows were milked, fields plowed and harvested, and animals fed with its warmth on our faces. We went to bed when it set, when the crickets and spring peeper frogs emerged in the warmer seasons. During the short days of winter, we would sometimes play checkers by lamplight for an hour before submitting to the moonlit darkness muffled by snow.
This was the same, but different. Then, it had been an easy connection to nature. We told time in the fields by squinting at the sun. I still did, in fields not so different from those, but for much different reasons. I could feel Darkness bearing down on us, behind every shadow and patch of shade.
We were running. There was no objective other than simple survival now. No livestock that needed us to care for them, no fruit that would rot on the vine without our intervention. We just needed to find enough to eat and keep from being eaten.
We waded through the fields until the sun pushed our shadows long to the right of us. I shivered, with the knowledge not only that night would come soon, but that frost was coming. Frost would kill the last of the blackberries and gooseberries that I’d found for us to subsist on. The acorns were long gone. I’d been lucky to find a crab apple tree three days ago, but I didn’t think that we’d be that fortunate again. The animals, like birds and squirrels, who had been accustomed to scavenging the leftovers of humans, were now stripping trees and bushes bare.
The animals had known that Darkness was coming. I remembered when I had been back home, before any hint of evil. The ravens had known, taking wing in huge flocks that blotted out the sun. I saw no sign of any of them as we traveled.
I squinted, spying something white in the distance: a structure, with a gravel road leading up to it.
Alex and Ginger and I traded glances.
“What is it?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. I had never seen a house washed that white.
“It’s a church,” Alex said.
“If it hasn’t been defiled, this could be good.” Ginger sighed happily.
I regarded it closely as we approached. Plain folk didn’t have churches. Our worship services took place at our homes, on a rotating basis. We’d listen to sermons in backyards and on front lawns. In that way, our whole space had been sanctified. We lived and worked with God.
I had never been in a church before. The white structure was small, perhaps a story and a half, with wooden siding covered by paint that was beginning to peel. The windows were peaked, but closed with shutters. A large cross was nailed to the peak of the roof, and the gravel drive led up to the front door. A small stream meandered behind it. I doubted that it could contain half as many people as were held on my backyard on Sundays.
A hand-lettered sign on the front lawn read
CALVARY PENTECOSTAL APOSTOLIC CHURCH. ALL ARE WELCOME
.
I shuddered. I hope that wasn’t enough invitation for the vampires.
I ran my fingers over the black painted letters of the sign. I knew that the Pentecost was when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples of Jesus, after his resurrection. “A Christian church, then,” I said, comforted a bit by the idea of a traditional God that I could recognize.
Alex stared at the sign. “Yes,” he said. “Pentecostals have an experiential belief in God. They believe that the Holy Spirit can move within them, work miracles, make them speak in tongues, grant special rapport with animals . . .”
I pressed my lips together and thought about what that might mean. “Interesting.” Plain folk believed that God and man were separate. My body seemed confused and crowded enough with just my spirit inside. How strange it would feel to have God inside me as well . . .
Ginger climbed the steps. “Let’s see if anyone’s home.”
She rapped on the whitewashed front door. It was tall with black hinges. We waited, hearing the sound echo in the structure. A mourning dove was disturbed from one of the gutters and flew away in a flurry of cooing.
She knocked again.
I heard thumping inside, creaking, like something come to life. I held my breath as the door opened.
Ginger gasped and backed away.
An old man stood in the doorway, covered in snakes. The reptiles wreathed his head and shoulders and outstretched arms: blacksnakes, garter snakes, copperheads. He said something unintelligible, his rheumy eyes taking us in.
“Oh, yeah,” Alex said. “I forgot to mention the snake handling.”
The old man’s eyes fixed on us. The garbled words from his mouth untangled, and he clearly said:
“Welcome, friends.”
His voice boomed like a drum, and he smiled beatifically. His beard and mustache were white. A tiny garter snake peeped out and disappeared in the knotted mass, possibly down the collar of his flannel shirt. His eyes were so brown that they were nearly black.
I stood, rooted in place. I was afraid—I could feel the hair standing up on my arms—but also fascinated. The snakes seethed over his shoulders, wrapping around his arms. I was reminded of an old tree I knew as a child that had been struck by lightning. Half of it had turned black and rotted. The other half sprouted green leaves in winter. In the rotted half, snakes had moved in: large blacksnakes that wound around the wood, making it churn and still seem alive. Our Hexenmeister said that it had been touched in a bad way by lightning, by God’s wrath.
We all avoided that tree.
“Hello,” I squeaked.
Alex held up his open hands. He wasn’t holding his knife. That was probably a good sign. I took his lead. “We don’t mean you any harm.”
“We’re not vampires,” Ginger said, unnecessarily.
The old man laughed. “Darkness hates sunshine. You aren’t Darkness.”
I shuddered. He reminded me a bit of my old Hexenmeister. Though this man seemed hale and barrel-chested, there was something about his laugh and the way that he looked past us, through us. Something . . . that made me think he saw things that I couldn’t.
“And what have we here?” The old man walked down the wooden steps, regarded each of us in turn.
He paused before Ginger. He took in her borrowed Plain clothes, glasses, and her short haircut. “A mother without her children.”
“I’m Ginger,” she said softly. “Ginger Parsall.” She laced her hands behind her back. I was pretty sure that she didn’t want to shake hands.