CHAPTER 1:
Sage
Some
people are just wolves in sheep’s clothing; we all know that now.
All that glitters is not gold, and so on and so
forth. We all learned the hard way, and
now, all of us were living in raw, cold fear.
We
were running from Nero 24/7.
When
he burst onto the scene in the Senate in 2104, most of us didn’t really know
who he was. I was too young anyway. That wasn’t his name then, of course: it was Constantine
Jedidiah Goodfellow. But history has always been rewritten by those in
power as they see fit; it’s happening even now, certainly. There will be no mention of forced edicts, or
worship…or even the Guardians. But we
know they exist. I definitely do. My whole family knew they existed just before
they were shot down and deprived of life, right after dad hid me.
We should have seen it coming. With a
name like his, you might think that such a person was all good. Constantine means steadfast. Jedidiah means beloved of the Lord. Goodfellow means, well, good fellow.
That’s why no one saw it coming.
I wish the stupid virus had never
happened. That unquestionably set the
stage for Nero to do what he did, and we, in our foolish blindness and extreme naiveté,
trusted him. But all such wishing is
futile, right? You can’t go back. None of us can. You can’t go home again. Forward is the only
option, even if forward is through grinding metal and scorching flames, and all
of us depending on the guy next to us to toe the line and hold firm in the
faith.
No one even really knew how the virus
happened. Unfortunately, there was a lot
of supposition that Christians had spread it.
There was nothing empirical ever presented for that accusation, but Nero
ran with it, using it as grounds for further dissent. And then you had the wackos, the
nationalists, and the crazies who whipped a lot of people up into a frenzy with
scare tactics and polarizing viewpoints that galvanized people into negative
action. You had Christians committing
assassination attempts, thinking Nero was the antichrist. You had Christian preachers going crazy and
stirring up dissension against him. The
simple, pure message of the gospel itself got swallowed up in message dilution. People erroneously relinquished the gospel in
favor of something far more aggressive.
That’s when the riots happened. A bunch of hotheads cried out for justice,
pleading with others to take back our capitol, take back our country, take back
our world for Christ. Their intentions
were honorable; their execution sucked.
That just added more fuel to the anti-Christian fire and spawned a lot
of negative sentiment toward those who called Jesus Lord. It ended up being far too much to recover
from reputationally, which gave Nero far too much license to stamp out Christianity
for good. A lot of us did it to
ourselves, frankly.
And then, no one was strong enough to
oppose him. Before we knew what hit us,
he and his military tech were empowered beyond measure. Beyond restraint. And where you have empowerment without
oversight, you have a god complex.
Christianity itself, once the bedrock
of our country’s democratic and ethical principles, became the scourge of the
world: of ill repute, undesirable, and a government-labeled ‘unholy threat.’ All
because Nero was at the helm.
And then came The Cleansing.
I was lost in thought, shaking my
head at the memory and the horror of all of it.
“Sage, you still alive over there,
buddy?”
His question jerked me out of my
reveries. My eyes were released from the
mesmerizing amber licks of the fire. I
turned to Hunter, my best friend. His
brow was furrowed as he watched me, his face framed by the fake flames coming
from the artificial fireplace in front of us.
But not just the flames. From the back of his neck came the amber
glow. The glow from the mark.
Same as me. Same as nearly everyone in here.
I nodded. “Just thinking. About time to hit the hay anyway,” I replied
in a melancholy drone.
“Man, you said it. I’m worn out.”
“Me too. I’ve done three years’ worth of Remembrance in
just one night.”
He chuckled and nodded solemnly.
Remembrance.
That’s what Swifty called it. It
was like what the Vietnamese and other cultures did. The Kinh people believed that the incense
they lit would lead those who had died to safe passage. They believed it would guide them home as
well. They did it in remembrance, and
they were very intentional about it.
I guess when over half of the world’s
population has been wiped out by a virus, and a malevolent, paranoid delusional,
Machiavellian psychopath now occupies the highest throne on the planet, it’s
good to do a little bit of Remembrance.
Even if it’s only ever filled with pain.
On this New Year’s Day – which was now
little more than just another day – there was no celebrating; there was only
remembering.
Maranatha. Come, Lord.
Ξ Ξ Ξ
We’d been at Maple Park for three days now. The flight from Dekalb had been terrifying; we lost four on the way. The Guardians were definitely getting faster. Whether that was through software or hardware upgrades, or they may have even been new models, was anyone’s guess. They had some kind of new scanners that could pick up if we were branded, whether they could see our necks clearly or not. Awful. Awful and unfair. All we had now were our collective prayers for strength to patiently endure.
There was a nun here – the only one
left at this church – and her name was Sister Theresa. Saint Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church
had lost everyone except for Sister Theresa, who silently kept up the grounds
like a ghostly warden, providing shelter and praying for souls. She did it at great risk to herself. Half the church had been bombed right during
a service. It was amazing that any of it
was still standing, though it was now a blackened, bombed-out, husk of its
former brick glory. All of the religious
institutions like this one had, of course, been
mapped out, and the Guardians may have some thermal imaging available to them; we
weren’t sure. Thank God someone in their right mind had the prescience to build
a bomb shelter below it. That’s where we
now lived and worked out of.
I guess Nero regarded a blackened and
charred half-structure like this church – like all the churches – as fait
accompli because he moved on and
didn’t have them check here again. For
that, we were grateful.
Swifty sent us ahead of him, and then
he and six other guys held off Nero’s Guardians until they could regroup and
make a break for it. That’s when we
high-tailed it home, sticking to the crops and fields. For whatever reason, Guardians weren’t good
at picking out organic against organic.
If you were stuck somewhere in the metro, they had you. All that signal bounced off the aluminum and
metal, and they would zero you like you were in a 3D grid, and then they’d lock
and load. That’s why we steered clear of
the big cities. Chicago was
uncomfortably close, at only an hour and a quarter away by car. We were safer in the country.
When the eight of us finally made it
back to Maple Park, our mouths were dry and our lungs were burning.
The goal was a bit far-fetched, if
you ask me: to get to DeKalb Taylor Airport and see if we might be able to
catch a flight further out west. Maybe
to Seattle, and then off to Hawaii. Many
said that was pointless: Nero’s arm had grown long indeed, and his reach was
greater than any of us had ever known. Others
thought we should fly north and make for Canada. The prime minister was either dead or in
hiding, but maybe there would be some stout souls that would be willing to
stand up to Nero, enforce whatever remained of international extradition
policies, and provide us asylum, at least for a while. Most everyone shook their head no matter the
suggestion. The Guardians were
everywhere. It didn’t really matter
where you went; the Guardians were watching, which meant that Nero was
watching.
Hunter saved me.
Hunter Preston was my best friend.
I’d known him since I was eleven. Or twelve?
There’s no more clear record since we’ve been on the move so much. I have his back, and he has mine, and that’s
the way of it. I looked over at him now,
sound asleep, twitching. I stifled a
chuckle, watching him; he’s always had that nervous tick, and it even comes out
when he sleeps.
Hunter’s family was killed in a
blast, just as mine was. Except for
Heather. I heaved a sigh and thought
back, shaking my head. I didn’t want to,
but I had to. Trying to picture them in
my mind was the only way to keep them alive, to keep me going. I knew where mom and dad were; I knew where Heather
was. I knew. They were with Jesus now. With Jesus, basking in His warmth, while
Hunter and I continued to fight it out down here in the dark and cold, Guardians
always tailing us.
I closed my eyes and remembered.
Ξ Ξ Ξ
11 . 4 . 2099 ∙ Des Moines IA
Ξ Ξ Ξ
“Keep up, Sage, honey, we’re almost
there.”
“I’m hu-ungry,” I remember whining.
“I know, I know. Almost there, sweet boy,” Mommy encouraged me
again, and I went back to my FidgetBot, abandoning the notion of food for the moment.
My little feet trudged along next to
her, holding her hand, as she carried Heather.
Daddy was feverishly filling out the form on the tablet he had been
given. For something called a ‘census,’
though I had no idea what that meant. All I knew was that so many people around
us had died, and somebody called President Goodfellow had made a lot of
promises that made Mommy and Daddy so very happy.
We lost Auntie Leah and Uncle Ethan to
the sickness. They died.
Daddy said they went to heaven. A
few of my classmates too, but I don’t know if they went to heaven or not. Then they cancelled school altogether,
starting with the youngest. My preschool
was one of the first to go. They said
something about little kids being ‘cesspools,’ and I didn’t know what that
meant. Mommy and Daddy didn’t talk about
the virus with us much; every time the word came up, they just seemed to look
at each other and take a big sigh while their eyes went wide, and they’d tell
me it would be okay.
We were almost there. It was nighttime, and a cold wind was wafting
across the parking lot, with the occasional gust and chill. There were a lot of people with us,
filtering in and around us into the school auditorium, which was where I would
have had my first assembly. I barely
remembered it from the few times we went to see Heather in a school musical
performance. I was too distracted to
care, and it was too loud for me in there.
I remember really having to pee during one of those performances, and Daddy
got kind of mad that I couldn’t hold it.
He had to take me to the potty and was telling me to hurry; he didn’t
want to miss Heather singing. That’s all
I remember.
We walked right past the bathroom
where Daddy had taken me to potty, and he took a big sigh and told Mommy “okay,
I think I got it.”
“Yeah?” Mommy asked him back. I looked up and watched them both talk
quickly.
“Yep, basic stuff,” Daddy said, “address,
DOB, social security, all that. They
asked about religion, too, which I thought was weird, but whatever. I listed us as Christian.” I remember he dropped his volume on the last line.
“Proud of it, baby,” Mommy said,
smiling. I glanced up at her quickly,
remembering something she had said a few weeks ago about being careful who we
tell that to. As I did so, my big sister raised her weary head off Mommy’s
shoulder and yawned, looking around blearily and rubbing her eyes as she came
to.
“Daddy, what’s religion mean?”
I interrupted, not pulling my eyes away from my FidgetBot.
“Oh, it just means who we worship,
who we pray to, that kind of thing, kiddo.”
“You mean Jesus?” I asked him.
Daddy smiled and answered me almost
before I said His name. “Shhh, yes,
punkin,’ that’s right,” he said, scooping me up and looking around cautiously. “Thank you for being so patient. We’re gonna head right home after this and
get you a snack. I know it’s late.”
“Late is right,” Mommy said. “Why they needed this so urgently is beyond
me. Such a long drive.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Daddy
said. “But it’s November, ya know, turn
of the century. They’ve got a lot to get
back up and running, and I bet they just wanna get all the info they can as
quickly as they can in order to take care of everyone as best they can.” They looked at each other just then. “You have to remember this is the second
major calamity of this century after the alien invasions in the forties,
sweetheart.”
“Aliens?” I asked in surprise,
looking up, my mouth agape.
“That’s right, kiddo. Scary.
Tell ya another time.”
“You’re right, I know,” Mom said,
almost cheerily. “God forbid we need a third.
Everybody thought that was Armageddon. Next it’ll be locusts or something,” Mommy
snorted.
“With women’s hair!” Daddy teased back.
“Stop it,” she protested with a
smile. “This isn’t Revelation come to
life, you know.”
“Mommy, what’s relevation?” I
asked her while still playing on my FidgetBot.
“Re-ve-la-tion,” she
corrected, glancing down at me. “It’s
the last book in the Bible, punkin. It’s
about the end times.”
“That’s right,” Daddy replied. “Anyway, they’re just trying to keep people
safe.”
“From the sickness?” I asked him,
still not taking my eyes off my toy.
He kissed the side of my head, and I
wiped it off.
“Yep, kiddo, from the sickness.”
I looked at him to say something, but
then Daddy acknowledged someone who was talking to him and directing us over to
a line. Daddy nodded back and pointed at
ourselves questioningly. The man who was
looking at him had a dark outfit on and a cap.
He blew a whistle and nodded, apparently instructing us to move over
into the line. It was getting colder.
Daddy carried me over into the line
and lightly bobbed with me in his arms.
“Almost done, punkin.’ Almost done.
You’re doin’ great.”
“I want macaroni,” Heather breathed
through a yawn.
“Me too,” I said coolly, back to my
toy.
Before too long we went all the way through
the line, following a bunch of other people.
It took way too long. Daddy
stopped with me in his arms before a woman who was seated at a table surrounded
by other seated workers all around her assisting other families in line. Beside each of them lay a long black device
with a handle at the bottom and a translucent reddish cap on the end. I remember I couldn’t help but think it was
some kind of space gun.
“Hi folks. Name?”
“Uh, Maddox? Mark and Tracy Maddox.”
I watched the woman scan through her
list. “Here it is. From Cedar Rapids?” she asked warmly, smiling.
Daddy nodded. “Yes.”
“Hey, Cedar Rapids is where you grew
up, Daddy!” I exclaimed joyfully. “What
does hail mean?”
The woman looked up at me with
twinkling eyes and smiled. “That’s right, little one, good for you. Is it just the four of you then?” she asked,
dismissing my question. Daddy nodded again and Mommy said yes. “And these are Sage and Heather; they’re your
children?” she asked.
“Correct,” Daddy replied, and then
squeezed me tighter to him, whispering, “It just means where you come from.”
“Daddy, I’m hungry again. Can we pleeease
go back to the car? I want a snack! And
what’s that?” I asked, pointing.
“Shhh, just a second, punkin,” he
said.
I growled at him, and I won’t forget
that, because he looked at me angrily.
“Not now, kiddo. Just wait,
please.”
“Hmm, oh, this?” asked the woman with
a rasp in her voice. “This helps us to
check if you’re all clear.” She didn’t
look at me; she just kept tapping on the tablet Daddy had been using, and then
turned and grabbed some kind of packet of information and handed it to him and Mommy.
“Okay, got it. Thanks for your patience, folks,” she said
with a sidelong glance, “I know it’s cold, and it sounds like these cuties want
some food. It’ll be just one more
second. Let’s start with Daddy, okay?”
She stood up, creaking at the knees,
and with a slight grunt, she lifted up the device that was sitting next to her
on the table. “It’ll feel hot for just a
quick second, but I promise you no lasting damage will be done. It’s just to check for the virus.”
I gasped. “You mean the sickness?”
“Uh-huh, that’s right, sweetheart,”
the elderly woman nodded and assured me.
“The virus gets into our brain stem and stays there, and it’s a bad
one. This little gizmo helps us see if
it’s in there or not. To see if Daddy’s
a carrier. Here, hon, turn around
please,” she said to Daddy.
Daddy did so and showed her his
neck. She aimed the device at the base
of his skull as I watched, curiously. I
glanced over at Mommy and Heather; they were watching too. “Okay, Daddy’s clear, say yay, kids!”
“Yay!” Heather and I cheered. “No sickness for Daddy!”
“That’s right! Okay, and now Mommy’s next,” the woman said,
directing her smile to my mother.
It took my mom the same amount of
time. She set Heather down, whirled
around and pulled the back of her coat down, raising her snow hat at the same
time, while the old woman raised her device.
“Guess what, looks like Mommy’s clear
too!” said the woman, happily.
“Congratulations, folks.”
“Yay, Mommy!” I said, as my stomach
growled. I remember feeling a sigh of
relief for both my parents as they were cleared. I felt it again when both Heather and I were
found to be clear as well. The old lady
said it would be ‘just a little zap. Come
to think of it, I don’t remember anyone in there being ‘found’ with the
virus. Everyone, seemingly, was
clear. I guess that was good news for
all of us, although my neck itched and felt hot following my little ‘zap.’
By now I was famished and was about
to throw my FidgetBot. I needed a snack
and was about to scream.
The lady put down her device and smiled
at me, and I didn’t return the smile. “These
are your clearance papers; you’re in what’s now known as ‘Sector 8.’ Food
vouchers, government stimulus claim form, and medical referral paperwork are all
included. New job onboarding materials are in there as well.” The mention of food made me scowl at her, but
she didn’t notice. “You’ll receive a
call in two weeks from a case worker for both vaccine intake and ramp-up to the
new health system. Any questions?”
“Uh, no, that’s great, thanks,” Daddy
said. “Okay, punkin,’ guess what?”
“What? And my name’s not punkin,” I growled.
“We’re going back to the car and
going home! You want a snack now?”
I felt the heat in my face dissipate
as a smile took over. “Yay! Yes, please, yes, please, yes, please, yes,
please,” I replied in a sing-song, while teeter-tottering my head in
excitement.
“Alright, folks, you’re all set,” the
lady said with cheeks knotted into a warm smile. “Nice to meet you and have a good night. Next?”
She turned to the people just behind us in line.
“Bye, lady. By the way, this is my FidgetBot,” I said,
waving its arm toward her in goodbye.
“Bye, FidgetBot!” she said with a
huge smile, leaning toward me as we walked through and then arced back toward
the van.
Bye, FidgetBot.
Bye, lady.
We ended up saying goodbye to so many others.
Ξ Ξ Ξ
1 . 1 . 2113 ∙ Maple Park IL
Ξ Ξ Ξ
My eyes flashed open, and I sat up, scrutinizing
the clock.
1:13 am.
I felt haggard and rubbed my eyes,
sighing in discontent and lying back down with a yawn.
But the yawn wasn’t from fatigue; it
was from nerves, just like a dog licks its lips and yawns when it’s nervous.
Nerves afire from treacherous
memories.
Hunter yawned across from me in his
bunk.
“Hey, you still up too?”
“Yep,” I confirmed. “Memories.
You know how it is.”
He nodded silently through the dark,
thinking to himself. “Well, like Swifty
says, it’s better if we remember together, right? ‘Wherever two or more are gathered in His
name, there He is in the midst of them,’ right?”
I sighed. “Right.
Okay, let’s do it.” I stuck a
knuckle in my eye and sat up, yawning.
The concrete floor was icy cold for my bare feet. I moved back toward the wall so my feet could
elevate beyond the ledge of the bed. Hunter came over and sat next to me.
“That whole census had been one big
setup,” I began. “No one ever told me
until a few years later, after the sentries came, after the churches had been
blown up or smashed into, after everyone had been scattered, and I had been in
more hideouts than you could shake a stick at.”
Hunter nodded. His story was much of the same.
“The perfect setup,” he
agreed. “They told me later that
President Goodfellow had held a press conference about the church
bombings. He denounced these ‘dastardly
acts’ and said that they would not go unpunished. They told me that he even wept,
if you can believe it.
“But then I learned the real truth,”
he continued, “when they told me a few years later. Goodfellow had been unmasked; it was all at
his direction: all of it. But by then he had quashed all opposition,
and it was too late.
“Nero called it Directive 666, and
they scoffed at the number and what it implied.
They questioned his motive. The
census had been nothing more than to locate all Christians. Identify them and their families. Find out where they lived. And then hunt them down,” he finished sadly.
“And then hunt them down,” I echoed
grimly. “The Cleansing.”
“Yep.
The Cleansing,” he repeated.
“What a joke.”
“It had been launched to exterminate
those whose religious views were unfavorable and non-conducive to world
peace,” -here I employed my best tone of sardonic mockery- “so the leaflets
said. And my mom and dad, like so many, they
walked blindly into it, and boom, I was an orphan a few months later.”
“Me too.”
“Dad had the good sense to hide me in
the crawlspace of our home. Heather
wasn’t so lucky, as they looked in our attic and shot her onsite. The branding on her neck told the Guardians
everything they needed to know.”
“I barely remember my parents now,”
Hunter said sadly, staring off into space.
I turned to him. He had a
thousand-yard stare. It caused me to put
on the same. My brow furrowed, and I
frowned.
“Me neither,” I said with a difficult
lung-clearing.
We spoke no words for several
minutes.
Hunter finally broke the
silence. “That branding,” he said,
shaking his head and scoffing. “It only
took a few weeks for that indelible glowing mark to show up. Dad noticed it on mom first, fresh out of the
shower. And then she checked him and saw
the same thing. They ran to me and
checked me, and there was a lot of sobbing.
To their horror, it was then that they realized that they had been
duped. We all had.”
“Yep,” I agreed. “A total con.
We hadn’t been scanned for VZV2 at all,” I said, rattling off the new
variant of the Varicella-Zoster Virus. “We
were being branded like cattle without even knowing it.” I looked around. All the sleeping figures around us glowed
amber at the backs of their necks. The marks
burnt into them had a latent nascency: eventually, they all revealed their
hosts’ religion with a dim amber light, and the grim truth was simultaneously
revealed.
I could practically hear him shaking
his head in the dark. “All I remember
seeing was the glint of titanium and tungsten in the night, and those cold, amber
eyes. I remember hearing that whirr of
the air through their rotors and the fast-moving treads crunching gravel and
soot underneath as they wormed their way into our neighborhood – into every
neighborhood, dude – and hunted down every man, woman, or child who professed
the name of Jesus.”
“I remember running,” I told
him. “After they killed Heather. I eventually found my way out of there and
ran all the way across Indianola Avenue onto East Creston. I knew I had to keep quiet, but I was only
four, and the tears erupted into bursting sobs of incredulity as my little
heart quaked. I rounded a corner onto
East Creston, and that’s when I saw that teenage girl standing there, face to
face with a Guardian. Cassie, I think they said her name was. It was the first time I heard one of those
machines ask the question.”
He scoffed again. We mockingly said the foreboding words
together.
Citizen, this is your final warning. Do
you recant?
“Recant,”
I breathed scornfully, shaking my head.
“I didn’t even know what the word meant then. But I knew what a bullet-riddled human looked
and sounded like, and I witnessed it with my own eyes, as that girl shook her
head and the machine fired away in a hammer-smash of bullets straight into her
chest. A thudding cacophony, man. Blood
sprayed everywhere, and she fell to her knees as the Guardian finished her off.
She was a pile of meat. Others watching took off.”
“Yeah, the Guardians were landlocked
then, right? They weren’t in the air,
and that had been some saving grace. But
it was really only a matter of time before Nero began to think
three-dimensionally. I think it was 2105 when we saw them for the first time
over The Windy City,” he said.
“That’s why some of us were reluctant
to try the airport; the risk of interception was too great in the air.”
He nodded, numbly scratching at an
itch on his leg.
“Nero started deploying the AirGuard,
and we found they could hover with some kind of advanced propulsion. That’s
when he started calling himself that stupid nickname.”
“Prince of the Power of the Air,” we
both mocked.
“Yeah,” Hunter agreed. “I guess that’s what you get when you elect a
delusional, psychopathic, techno-trillionaire into office who creates
military-grade machinery and holds all the codes. To think he’d been building
all of that to sell to the government.
They were too afraid of him to not sign the contract with NeroTech.”
“But back then?” I jumped back to my
own story. “That little boy just crouched
there, concealed in the bushes in a cloud of fear, staring out past the foliage
at the dead girl. My little corduroys were
steaming with pee. I trembled for my
life, man, questioning every cracked twig around me. It was hours before I moved again, and I
could only stumble over to the next house as they took me in. I passed that girl’s corpse. She was turned on her side, and I could see
the back of her neck. Her mark was
fading, cooling, because her body was losing heat as she lay dying. She had professed the name of Christ, though. Probably the victim of an informant.”
“Informants,”
he hissed venomously.
“Hey,” I said. “Forgiveness.”
He rolled his eyes and sighed. “I know.”
“Anyway, I was too young to
understand any of it back then. I
understand all of it now.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. I shook my head as I remembered that sweet elderly
woman at the school during the census and ‘virus scan.’ That kind old woman had
no idea she was part of it. None of them
did. Nero used them like he had so many
others. It was all part of his master
plan. The woman wasn’t scanning us for
the virus in the elementary school. She
was branding us with infrared, a mark that would eventually appear for all to see,
and, in due course, be used to target us for elimination.
I took a deep breath. “Isn’t it sick? That virus was the perfect cover for a
branding operation. Those devices
weren’t scanning for viruses already present; they were implanting a
virus in us via infrared laser. They were
directly linked to the tablets that everyone filled out, my dad included. He had told them we were Christians. So, the device burnt an infrared mark into
all four of us.” I shook my head at the
memory. “All because my dad selected
‘Christian.’ The scanner was linked to
the tablet; the tablet was linked to our religion. My dad says we’re not Christian? No mark for
us. The family one aisle over at the census that said they were atheist? No mark for them, either, and they’re most
likely alive out there, presumably, subservient to Nero.”
Good for them, I thought blandly.
Hunter was quiet for a while. At last he turned to me. “What would you say
to him if you ever met him face to face?”
I smiled at my friend, but it felt
fiendish. I thought of someday infiltrating his ranks, sneaking up to him,
closer and closer. Like a jackal, gaining his trust and working my way in for
the kill.
“You know what I’d say?”
“What?” Hunter asked me.
“I’d look him in the eye and say two
things. ‘There is a God, and
you’re not him.’”
Hunter laughed abruptly, but his
laughter faded as he regarded my stoic expression. “But Hunt,” I said, “the sad truth is that I might
do a lot more than that before I could even calm down to speak to him.”
My friend stared at me quizzically,
but I knew that he knew what I meant. He’d expressed the same thing once or
twice. We would never sit down to a nice
coffee with Nero; we would kill him.
He was the man who was solely
responsible for the annihilation of Christians and the eradication of Christianity.
The man hunting all of us down as we
speak.
The man whose crusade had always been
to blame the virus, and all the
world’s misfortunes since the dawn of time, on us.
The man who we now knew believed he
truly was the Antichrist, and truly sought to usher in Armageddon. ‘To call God out,’ he had said. ‘Where is your God now?’ he challenged in his
first address as Nero.
But Nero had no idea who God was, and
he failed to recognize that God doesn’t work on man’s timeline. God works on God’s timeline.
I slowly ripped off my choker and could
see the wall splash in faint orange behind me in the dim light of the
bunker. My mark was glowing, like all
ours did. It helped the enemy to target
us better, and I’d had it since I was four.
I’d learned to live with it. And
to cover it up.
I wondered if one day we would be
equally as sinister in The Defiance. I
wondered if we could be that cold and heartless as we struck back.
I wondered if I could be a sheep in a
wolf’s clothing.
