The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

SAINT JOHN By Jonathan Maberry

SAINT JOHN WALKED through cinders that fell like slow rain, and he found twenty-seven angels hiding behind the altar of a burning cathedral.

AN HOUR BEFORE that he found a crushed and soiled rose.

He stole a wheelbarrow from a hardware store and filled it with the weapons he had collected since the plague began and wheeled it to the cathedral. Saint John sang songs in his head while he worked. He did not sing them aloud, of course. God had told him years ago to sing all of his songs of praise in the temple inside his head. He left the barrow by the curb and walked up the stone stairs. The door was ajar, the lock chopped clumsily out of the wood by an axe.

There was an explosion behind the far row of buildings, and Saint John turned and stood on the top step as golden embers fell. He tilted his head face upward, eyes closed, tongue out, smiling as he waited for a piece of ash to find him. When it did he pulled it in with the tip of his tongue and savored it. The strongest flavor was the uninspired taste of charcoal that had to melt before he could enjoy the other tastes. Ghosts of flavors. There was sweetness there, like meat. A sharpness like ammonia. The tang of acid sourness. He did not know what this ash had been. Something alive, that much was certain, but that could be as true of a tree as of a dog, a pigeon, or the postman. He wished that he could discern which, but a learned palate was an acquired thing, its subtle perceptions honed through practice, observation, consideration, and repetition. Saint John did not believe that he would have the time to sample and catalogue the many flavors and combinations of flavors of this apocalyptic feast. The fires would not last as long as his appetites.

Pity.

There was an explosion off to his left. He cocked his head and replayed the boom in his memory and then listened to the echoes as they banged off the building that surrounded the stone library. He smiled faintly. This was something he knew well. The blast was ordinary, not military ordnance. Probably a car gas tank rupturing from superheated gases as the vehicle burned. Semtex or C-4 each had its own unique blast signature, much like the calibers of bullets, weights of loads, and makes of guns. Each possessed a unique voice that whispered its secrets to him.

As if to reaffirm this, there was a rattle of automatic gunfire followed by three spaced shots. A military M-4 and a Glock nine. Unique in their way, but commonplace since the Fall.

The Fall …

The concept of it was old in his mind. Saint John had expected it, prepared for it, known that it was coming ever since that day when he was reborn in the blood that flowed from the thousand cuts on his father’s flesh. That’s when the Voice began speaking to him in his mind, telling him of the Fall that would come. That was years ago, and it was old and sacred knowledge to him. However, to the people around him, the panicked masses dwindling down to a scattered few, the Fall was immediate. It was their All, and in their panic they probably did not remember the world as it was before. Saint John was sure of that. He could see it in the eyes of everyone he met.

And yet the Fall, in societal terms, was only a few months old. A few weeks, if you start counting from the day when the offices of the CDC in Atlanta were overrun by mobs desperate for vaccines for the pandemic flu. Someone had begun a campaign on the Net saying that the CDC was hoarding stockpiles of the vaccine and selling it only to the super rich. The story was probably spurious, but the pulse of the nation had quickened to a fever pace. Atlanta had become a rallying point for protests, and the crowds surrounding the Centers for Disease Control had swelled to an ocean of angry, frightened people. Hundreds of thousands of them. Saint John had been among them; not because he believed the nonsense about the hoarded vaccines, but because the atmosphere of panic brought with it an apocalyptic flavor that he found delicious and uplifting. He was there on that Thursday morning when the temperature of the crowd had reached the boiling point. Like a field of locusts they went from sanity to insanity in the blink of an eye, and the National Guard troops were crushed under the sheer numbers. Shots were fired — shotguns loaded with beanbag rounds, Tasers, and finally bullets. Blood perfumed the air, but the crowd was in motion now, a mass mind bent on smashing down doors and walls.

In one of the last newscasts Saint John heard before the TVs all went dark, the authorities expressed fears that in an attempt to find the mythical stockpile, the mobs had crashed into labs and hot rooms and viral storage vaults, inadvertently releasing many more diseases into the population. Saint John did not know how many viral vaults had been breached, but he suspected that there were seven of them. Seven seals were broken. As the plagues spread, the riot became a constant state of being, and it was then that Saint John revealed himself and walked among the diseased and dying, the murderous and the mauled, his knives in hand, a walker following in the hoof-prints of the Horsemen.

He smiled at the thought and stretched out a hand to catch a soft piece of white ash. Then something closed out those sounds and drew Saint John’s attention from the burning city back to the steps on which he stood.

A woman came running down the street, weaving and tripping and staggering under the weight of pain. She wore only a green T-shirt and one low-heeled shoe. Her thighs were streaked with blood. She screamed continuously in a red-raw voice. He watched her reel and stumble, but she was beyond the ability to focus her mind and muscles on the task of running. It made her clumsy and slow.

“There she is!” cried a voice. Male, out of sight around the corner. Saint John took a half step back, allowing the shadows of the entry arch to enfold him.

A moment later two men came pelting down the street after the woman, yelling and laughing. Saint John winced at some of the things they said. One man was completely naked, his semiflaccid cock swinging and bouncing against his thighs with each step. The other, a college jock type in SpongeBob boxers and Timberlands, had the distinctive lesions of the AL3 strain of smallpox blossoming on his face.

“Here kitty, kitty,” called the Jock, laughing as his words drew a flinch from the woman. Her screams faded to a choked sob.

She turned toward a parked car and ran for it. Saint John wondered what sanctuary she thought it would afford her. The windows were broken out, the tires long since slashed. But she stumbled and fell before she got within a dozen paces of it, her knees striking the asphalt hard enough to pull fresh screams from her chest. Her eyes were wild, and even though she looked briefly in Saint John’s direction, it was clear that she did not see him standing in the shadows. She fell forward onto her palms and tried to crawl toward the car, but the Jock caught up with her and used his body to slam her to the ground. The Naked Man’s cock was stiffening in anticipation as his companion used his knees to spread the woman’s legs.

This was clearly the latest act in a play that had started hours ago. Saint John had no doubt. Intervening now could not save her. This woman was broken. If not by the rapes and abuse, then by whatever else she had lost. Whatever else had been torn from her. Family, safety, personal sanctity, perhaps even purity. Gone now, as most things were gone. What did not burn was plundered in the food riots, and what was not plundered rotted as the pathogens swept their way through the dwindling herd of humanity. This woman was a corpse whose ghost was still too shocked to leave its shell. That was sad, he thought, because to linger was to experience — with whatever sense and perception remained — all of the further indignities these monsters needed to inflict so that they could convince themselves that they were still alive.

Saint John did not like that. There was no beauty in this setting, and suffering without beauty was disgusting. It was crass and vulgar. Artless.

“You got her?” yelled a gruff voice, and a third man emerged from the shadows. He was massive, a construct of anabolic steroids and overdeveloped muscle; he had turned himself into a freak even before time had decided that all of humanity should share in freakism. This one did not run. He swaggered slowly, his thick fingers undoing his belt buckle and zipper with the kind of deliberate calm that was itself a statement. An alpha to this small pack of dogs.

The Big Man was smiling, lips curled back from rows of white teeth. He came and stood over the woman, and it seemed to Saint John that he was so into this moment that he did not blink. He grinned and grinned, and never flinched when bombs went off in the next street. He let his trousers drop and grabbed for his crotch, massaging hardness despite the limitations of steroids and other drugs. Saint John knew this type. If he could not rape he would brutalize, and it was all the same to men of his kind; his actions were completely unconnected to sex. Pain was the pathway to ecstasy for him.

Saint John knew that, and understood it from a height that gave him a much clearer perspective.

The Big Man pushed the smaller Naked Man out of the way and pawed at the woman, driving more screams from her.

Saint John stepped down. A single step, but it was his first movement, and the three men had not noticed him any more than had the woman.

Saint John took a second slow step, and the kneeling man looked up and snarled. “Fuck off! This whore is ours.”

Ah, and that is how worlds turn. On a word or phrase. Ill chosen and ill timed.

This whore is ours.

This whore.

Whore.

Saint John sighed. Such an unfortunate choice of words. Few words were less welcome to his ears. Not even the tough Aryan Brothers in the cell block had used that word around him — not after his first week in the Supermax. One of them had, but their surviving members passed warnings down the line, to big stripes and little fish. Even though the word was tattooed on Saint John’s own flesh in blue letters on his back, with an arrow pointing down between his shoulder blades to his buttocks. Burned there ages ago by an ex-con friend of his father’s; the act performed back when Saint John was the child Johnnie. Burned into him with a Bic pen, a lighter, and a pin while the boy who was not yet Saint John lay stretched out and bound with duct tape. Whore, it said. Branded fast while his father and the ex-con laughed and belched and spat on each letter as they waited for their dicks to get hard.

The ink had not even dried, the burns had not yet stopped singing their white-hot song, when his father had shoved the tattoo artist aside to show why he had wanted those words put there. The tattoo artist had gone next. And then the other men. A pig roast, they had called it. Friends of his father’s. Men who shared the same appetites.

Men like these men.

This whore is ours.

And now these three men who crouched in the ash around the half-naked woman had conjured with that word.

Whore.

Saint John took another step.

There had been nine men back then, on the day the word had been fixed with boiling ink into his skin. The boy that he had been had survived it and the next day had fled. When he had come back in the night a month later and looked in through the window, he saw the tattoo artist burning those same letters in another child’s flesh. A girl, this time. Gender had not mattered to them. They coveted what they could dominate, what they could force.

Her screams made the men laugh.

As this woman’s screams made these men laugh.

Whore.

Back then, on the day when he had been marked, it was not the first time he had heard that word. Not nearly the first.

But it was the first time that another voice spoke inside his mind.

The Voice had told him to go into a sacred place inside the mansion of his thoughts. The Voice guided him there, and with each inward step the laughter and grunts of the nine men diminished until they were no more than a faint and unimportant background noise.

The Voice had guided him back to the world later, when his body had been cut loose and thrown into the corner between the fridge and the stove. It was there to tell him what to pack and when to run, and schooled him on how to live after he’d fled. It brought him back to the house on the night the men had strapped the girl down, and it spoke great secrets to him when he begged for answers.

He had done everything exactly as the Voice instructed. Saint John later understood that it was the Voice of God, and upon that realization he had begun the transformation from Johnnie to the saint. He was glowing with holy purpose when he returned to his father’s farm. There were always gallons of gasoline in the barn, standing in a row beside the posthole digger, near where a machete hung from its peg. When the Voice of God spoke, the lessons were always simple, always clear. The lessons were about clarity and simplicity.

And about fire. Ahh … fire was such a beautiful doorway.

Saint John took another step down. The cathedral had lovely white granite steps and an archway carved with the austere faces of a hundred saints. Fellow saints, and Saint John wondered if each of them had been given the gift of the Voice. Probably. Why else would they be saints? How else could they be?

The Jock and the Naked Man looked up at Saint John. They looked up from what they were trying to do, shifting their eyes reluctantly from dirty flesh and bitten skin to this annoyance. This intrusion.

Saint John did not move with haste. Haste caused rabbit reactions, quick and defensive. He wanted to see the dog reactions. The jackal reactions. That happened best if he moved slowly, giving each of them the opportunity to make slight perceptual shifts as his personal bubble extruded outward and pushed against the outer edges of their self-confidence. It was very much like subtly shifting to stand too close to a person in a crowd — at first they think you’re leaning in to hear better, to catch every drop of conversational juice, but then they notice that you do not lean away when they’ve finished speaking. That’s when the hound that dwells in the middle of their brain raises its head and lifts its ears to tufted points, sniffing and smelling the wind.

First comes speculation as distances are judged and given value; then confusion as those values are ignored. Then defensive caution as the social bubble pops to demonstrate that it never really offered any protection. It was an abstract bubble after all.

Then comes alarm.

He watched for this in their eyes. The Naked Man was less focused, his eyes continually drifting down to what the Big Man was trying to do. His penis was more erect than the Big Man’s, and bigger, but he was not the alpha of this pack and he knew that he would have to wait. The Naked Man licked his lips in nervous anticipation.

The Jock was the one who looked up at the stranger descending the steps and briefly smiled. Maybe he thought that this newcomer wanted to join in and he was preparing a stinging rebuke. Maybe it was an uneasy smile. Maybe it was a smile that would include an invitation to be the fourth car in this train.

The Naked Man flicked a glance up, then down at the woman, and back up to Saint John. For a moment there was a fragment of shame in his eyes for what he was doing. Not for the woman or her humanity, but for his own participation in something they all clearly knew was wrong. Anarchy did not yet completely own this man’s soul.

Saint John marked that one in his mind. A flicker of remorse in the presence of continued action was not a saving grace. It spoke to understanding, and complicity here was proof of corruption. A man like this would not initiate a rape, but he would always go where a door was opened. There had been men like him on the night that ugly word had been burned onto Johnnie’s skin. One of them had even whispered, “I’m sorry,” as he had hunkered over and thrust. Saint John had spent a lot of time with him later on.

The Naked Man looked away. He was a loose-lipped slobbering buffoon. No muscle tone, skin like a mushroom. White and spongy.

It was the Jock who first realized the danger. As Saint John descended another step toward the screaming thing over which the men crouched, the Jock’s inner hound finally came to point.

“Hey — jackass,” he snarled, “what the hell are you doing? I told you to fuck off.”

Saint John smiled. “You must stop this and go your way,” he said. “Man’s hand was not fashioned by God to lay waste to that which the Lord has made.”

The Jock stared for a two-count and then burst out laughing. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be? Church isn’t until Sunday, dumbass.”

The Big Man paused to punch the woman in the thigh, angry that he was having so much trouble getting hard enough to penetrate her.

Saint John descended one final step. Now he stood above the tableau. The woman’s dirty blond hair cobwebbed the asphalt.

“It is Sunday,” murmured Saint John, but the reply was lost beneath the woman’s screams. Saint John wore white bed-sheets as clothes, the material lashed to his limbs and torso with strips of white tape on which he had written crucial passages of scripture. Not from the Bible, but new scripture the Voice had spoken to him. The sheets were tattered now from all that had happened since the city had begun to burn, and the tatters floated on the hot breeze, like streamers of pale seaweed in a sluggish tide.

The Jock was still in dog mind, bolstered by the presence of the pack and the alpha. The others were, too.

Saint John wanted to laugh, to kiss each of them for that ignorance. It was as delightful as it was false. So entertaining.

But he did not laugh. Instead he cast his face into the beatific smile he wore at such moments. Like Leonardo’s model, his smile was a tiny curl of the lip that promised secrets but not answers. He spread his hands high and wide. He had long arms and longer fingers tipped with nails that had each been painted a different shade of night gray.

The Jock nudged the Big Man, pack dog alerting the alpha to the possibility of something wrong. When the Big Man looked up, the smaller man bent and tried to kiss the woman. Even to Saint John such a kiss was strange and awkward. Obscene.

The Big Man growled deep in his chest as he saw Saint John standing there with his arms outstretched.

A ripple of explosions troubled the air close by, and the three men looked over their shoulders. Even the woman looked.

That amazed Saint John because he could not imagine in what way the destruction implied by those blasts could possibly matter to any of them. How could anything beyond the confines of this moment matter to them? Were these men in particular too stupid to grasp the importance of now?

Apparently so.

One by one they turned back to Saint John.

The Jock said, “Fuck off, you little faggot.”

“Get your own,” said the Naked Man.

The Big Man could not be bothered to pay a moment’s further attention to the interruption. It’s why he had a pack. Instead he glared down. “Lay still, you bitch.”

Saint John caught a flicker of movement, and he looked across the street to see a fourth man standing by the corner. He was a shifty, nervous little thing. Clearly a junkie or a drunk suffering through DTs. He shifted from foot to foot and grabbed his crotch, but he didn’t cross the street. He was either too afraid of the three more aggressive pack members, or he had not yet crossed the line that separated social depravity from personal destruction. The man caught Saint John looking and immediately whipped his hand away from his crotch. He stood there, staring back, mouth open like a silent ghost.

The three men surrounding the woman laughed and told her the things they were going to do, and told her how much she would like it. And the penalties that would be imposed if she did not like it.

The predictability of this drama, and the triteness of the dialogue, began to wear on Saint John. He lowered his arms and said, “Let me share with you.”

They all laughed, confirming that they were too stupid to understand what was going on.

“Let me share,” repeated Saint John as he reached into the folds of his blowing white clothes and brought out his toys. They gleamed in the smoke-stained firelight. They were small and elegant, each polished to such a perfect shine that they seemed to trail sparks as he once more brought his hands out to his sides. A delicate blade extended the reach of each hand as he stood cruciform on the step above them.

The Jock and the Naked Man stared in awakening horror as everything froze into a bubble of time in which they all floated. The woman lay supine, her mouth strained open to cry out for mercy from a God who most of the survivors of the plague believed was either dead or mad. The Big Man knelt between her thighs in a mockery of a supplicant. On either side of him crouched the Naked Man and the Jock, their hands pressing the woman’s wrists to the ground as above them an angel spread its glittering wings.

Saint John stepped down onto the pavement, and two steps brought him to the curb. The Jock could have reached up to strike him. But he was unable to move. In his mind the pack was gone, transforming him from predator to prey.

“Thy will be done,” whispered Saint John, and a sob of joy escaped his throat as his arms folded like wings and the knives flashed a crisscross before him. Rubies of hot blood splattered the steps and his clothes and his face as veins opened to his touch. Before the Big Man could look up again, Saint John swept his arms back and forth, each movement ending in a delicate flick of his artistic wrists.

The Big Man finally looked up as blood slapped him across the face. Saint John appeared not to have moved, his arms held out to his sides. But on either side of him the members of the Big Man’s pack sagged to the ground in disjointed piles.

Saint John watched the man’s eyes, saw the whole play of drama. The brutal lust and frustration crumbled to reveal shock. Then there was that golden sweet moment when the Big Man looked into the eyes of the cruciform saint and saw the only thing more terrible and powerful than the portrait of himself as postapocalyptic alpha that he had hung inside his own mind. Here was the sublime Omega.

“No,” the Big Man said. Not a plea, merely a denial. This was not part of his world, not before or after the Fall. He had survived the plague, God damn it; he had fought through the riots and the slaughters. He had become more powerful than death itself, and he expected to rule this corner of Hell until the End of Days.

Yet the Omega stood above him, and the pack lay drowning in their own blood. So fast. So fast.

The Big Man tried to fight.

But before he could close his fists he had no eyes. Then no hands. No face.

No breath.

The Big Man’s mind held on to the last word he had spoken.

No.

Then he had no thoughts and the darkness took him.

ACROSS THE STREET the nervous little junkie was backing away, one hand clamped to his mouth, the other still clutching at his crotch. When he reached the corner he whirled and ran. Saint John did not give chase. If the little junkie and these dead men had friends, and if those friends came here, then there would be more offerings to God. If it happened that the offering included his own life, then so be it. Many saints before him had died in similar ways, and there would be no disgrace in it.

Saint John turned suddenly, aware that he was being watched. He looked up the stairs to the church. The doors stood ajar, and the faces of saints and angels watched him. Stone saints from the carvings around the arch.

But the angel faces? They watched from the open doorway. Cherubim and seraphim, hovering in the darkness. Saint John lifted a hand to them, but they were gone when he blinked.

Saint John wiped blood from his eyes.

Still gone. There were only shadows in the doorway. He nodded. That was okay. It was not the first time something had been there one moment and not the next. It happened to him more and more.

Even so, he let his gaze linger for a moment longer before turning away.

“Angels,” he said softly, surprised and pleased. He had only ever dreamed of angels before. Now they were here on earth, with him. And that was good.

THE WOMAN LAY CURLED in pain, drenched in the blood of the three monsters who had hurt her, her faced locked into a grimace; but the scream that had boiled up from her chest was caged behind clenched teeth.

She stared at Saint John. Not at his knives, because even in her horror she understood that they were merely extensions of the weapon that was this man.

Saint John took a step toward her. Blood dripped from his face onto his chest.

“God,” she whispered. “Please … God.”

Red splattered onto the cracked asphalt.

The saint knelt, doing it slowly, bending at ankle and knee and waist like a dancer, everything controlled and beautiful. The woman watched with eyes that were haunted by lies and broken promises. If she had possessed the strength, her muscles would have tensed for flight; but instead there was a weary acceptance that she was always going to be an unwilling participant in the ugly dramas of men.

Saint John bent forward and placed the knives on the edge of the curb with the handles toward her. Inches from her outstretched hands. Dead men lay on either side of her, but she watched this, darting quick glances from the bloody steel to Saint John’s dark eyes.

He sat back on his heels, letting his weight settle. The movement was demonstrably nonaggressive, and he watched her process it.

“What … what do you want?” she asked weakly.

He said nothing.

“Are you going to hurt me, too?”

“Hurt you?”

She jerked her head toward the dead men. “Like them. Like all the others.”

“Others?” echoed Saint John softly. “Other men attacked you?”

A cold tear broke from the corner of one eye. She was not a pretty woman. Bruises, battering, and blood had transformed her into a sexless lump. The animals who lay around her had wanted her because of some image in their minds, not because she fit their idea of sexual perfection. She was the victim of smash-and-grab opportunism, and that was as diminishing as being the tool by which men satisfied their need to demonstrate control.

“How many men?” asked Saint John.

“Just today?” she asked, and tried to screw a crooked smile into place. Gallows humor.

Embers still fell like gentle stars. Both of them looked up to see burning fragments peel off of the roof of the cathedral. The cathedral itself would be burning soon. Sparks floated down like cherry blossoms on an April morning.

The woman looked down and slowly pulled together the shreds of the T-shirt. There was not enough of it to cover her nakedness, but the attempt was eloquent.

“You won’t hurt me, too, mister,” she said softly, almost shyly, “will you?”

“No,” he said, and he was surprised to find that his mouth was dry.

“Will you … let me go with you?” It was an absurd question, but he understood why she asked it.

He shook his head. “I’m not a good companion.”

“You helped me.”

Helped, she had said. Not saved. The difference was a thorn in his heart, and he hated that he had allowed himself to care.

He said nothing, however. It would be impossible to explain.

The woman crawled away from the dead men and huddled behind a corner of the car. “What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?” he countered. He prayed that it would not be something symbolic. Not Eve or Mary or —

“Rose,” she said. “My name’s Rose.”

“Just Rose?”

She shrugged. “Last names really matter anymore?” She coughed and spat some blood onto the street.

“Rose,” he said, and nodded. Rose was a good name. Simple and safe. Without obligations.

“What’s yours?”

She asked it as he rose to stand in a hot breeze. The sheets he had wrapped around his body flapped in the wind.

“Does that matter?” he asked with a smile.

“You saved my life.”

“I ended theirs. There’s a difference.”

“Not to me. You saved my life. They’d have raped me again and made me do stuff, and then they would have killed me. The big one? He’d have killed me for sure. I saw him stomp another waitress to death ’cause she didn’t want to give him a blow job. She kept screaming, kept crying out for her mother.”

“Her mother didn’t come?”

Rose shook her head. “Her mom’s back in Detroit. Probably dead, too. No … Big Jack got tired of Donna fighting back and just started kicking her. It didn’t make no sense. He’d have worn her down eventually. They had us for almost a week, so I know.”

Saint John closed his eyes for a moment. A week.

Rose said, “I’ve seen what happened with other women. There’s only so long you can fight before you’ll do whatever they want.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “Donna was just nineteen, you know? Her boyfriend was in Afghanistan when the lights went out. He’s probably dead. Everybody’s dead.”

“You said everybody gives in. You kept running. Kept fighting.”

Rose looked away. “I got nothing left. These pricks … this was all I had. They won.”

“No,” he said softly. “You have life.”

She cocked an eye at him. “ ’Cause of you.”

Saint John wanted to turn, to look up and see if the angels were still watching from the shadowy doorway, but he did not. Angels were shy creatures at the best of times, and he did not want to frighten them off. If “frighten” was a word that could be used here. He wasn’t sure and would have to ponder it later.

When he noticed the woman studying him, he asked, “Would you have given in? Stopped fighting them, I mean?”

“Probably. If I did they would have treated me better. Given me food. Maybe let me wash up once in a while.”

“Would that have been a life?”

Rose looked up at the embers and then slowly shook her head. “Don’t listen to me, mister. They gave me some pills to make me more attractive. No — that wasn’t the word. What is it when you cooperate?”

“ ‘Tractable’?”

“Yeah.”

“They gave you pills?”

“Yeah. I can feel them kicking in now. Oxycontin, I think. All the edges are getting a little fuzzy.”

Saint John gestured to the knives. “Do you want these?”

She looked at the bloody blades. Embers like hot gold fell sizzling into the lake of blood that surrounded the three dead men.

Rose shook her head.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

A nod.

“These men,” he said gently, “there will be others like them. As bad or worse. There are packs of them running like dogs.”

“I know.”

“Then take the blades.”

“No.”

“Take one.”

“No.”

They sat and regarded the things that comprised and defined their relationship. The embers and the smoke. The blood and the blades. The living and the dead.

“Not everyone’s gone bad,” she said.

“No?”

She managed a dirty smile. One tooth was freshly chipped, and blood was caked around her nostrils. “There are guys like you out here.”

“No,” he whispered. “There is no one like me out here.”

They watched the embers fall.

After a while, she said, “You came and saved me.”

“It was someone else’s moment to die,” he said, but she did not understand what that meant.

“You saved me,” she insisted, and her voice had begun to take on a slurred, dreamy quality. The drugs, he realized. “You’re an angel. A saint.”

He said nothing.

“I prayed and God sent you.”

Saint John recoiled from her words. He felt strangely exposed, as if it were he and not this woman who was naked.

Then he felt the eyes on him again. Saints and angels from the doorway.

He stood. “Wait here for a few seconds.”

“Where are you going?” she asked with a fuzzy voice.

“Just around the corner. I’ll be right back, and in the meantime the angels will watch over you.”

“Angels?”

“Many of them.”

Her eyes drifted closed. “Angels. That’s nice.”

Saint John hurried to the corner and around it to a side street filled with looted shops. He did not linger to shop carefully; instead he took the first clothes he could find. A black tracksuit made from some shiny synthetic material, with double red racing stripes and a logo from a company that no longer existed. There were no sneakers left, but he found rubber aqua shoes of the kind snorkelers and surfers used. No underwear, no medicine. The last item he selected was a golf club. A seven iron. He smiled, pleased. Seven was God’s number.

With the clothes folded under one arm and the seven iron over his shoulder, Saint John left the store, stepping over the rotting bodies of two looters who had been shot in the head. It was impossible to say whether they had been killed by the police or other looters, and even if that information had been known, Saint John doubted that there was anyone still alive who cared. Certainly he did not.

He rounded the corner and stopped.

The woman — Rose, he reminded himself, her name was Rose — was gone.

Saint John set the clothes and the golf club down and ran the rest of the way, the streamers of his bedsheet clothes flapping behind him. The three dead men were there. His wheelbarrow of weapons was there. She was not.

Saint John looked for her for almost half an hour, but he could not find her.

As he walked back to the cathedral he found that he was sad. Saint John was rarely sad, and almost never sad in relation to a person. Yet, dusty and crumpled as she was, Rose had touched him. She had been honest with him, of that he was certain.

Now she was gone. He wished her well, and when he realized that he did, he paused and smiled bemusedly at the falling embers. It was such an odd thought for him. Alien, but not unwelcome.

“Rose,” he said aloud.

SAINT JOHN GATHERED up the weapons — knives, a club made from a length of black pipe, a wrench caked with blood — and carried them up the stairs to the church. There were guns in the wheelbarrow, and even a samurai sword that the former owner had not known how to properly use. Saint John had obliged him with a demonstration. The wheelbarrow was heavy with them; it had been a fruitful week. He carried them, an armload at a time, into the church, counting out his ritual prayers with each slow step. He wanted to get everything right; there was no need for haste, though. This was the end of the world, after all. To whom would haste matter? Inattention to details, however, could have a profound effect. Saints and angels were watching.

With his first armload hugged to his chest, he stood on the top step. The faces of the saints regarded him, and shadows cast by flickering flames played across their mouths so that it seemed as if they spoke, whispering secrets. Some of them Saint John understood; some were still mysteries to him.

He did not see the faces of the angels. The open doorway was a dark mouth, but it was filled with empty shadows, and so he entered with his armload of weapons. He paused in the narthex and looked down the long aisle that ran from the west doorway behind him all the way to the altar at the eastern wall.

The cathedral was vast, with vaulted ceilings that rose high into the darkness. The arches were revealed only by stray slices of firelight through the broken stained glass windows, and in this light the lines of stone looked like bones. Saint John walked to the center aisle and stopped by the last row of pews, bowed reverently, and then walked without haste through the vast nave toward the altar table.

“I bring gifts,” he said. His voice was soft, but the acoustics of the cathedral peeled that cover away to reveal the power within, sending the three words booming to the ceiling.

As he walked to the altar the weapons clanked musically, like the tinkle of Christmas bells. He stopped at the edge of the broad carved silver altar table and laid his offering in the center. Then, taking great care, he arranged the blades and hammers and brass knuckles in a wide arc, the blades pointed toward the rear wall, pointing to the base of the giant crucifix that hung on the eastern wall. Jesus, bleeding and triumphant, hung from nails. Saint John knew the secret story of this man. Jesus had not died to wash away the sins of monsters like Saint John’s father. No, he had allowed his body to be scourged and pierced as part of the ritual of purification, then he had ascended through the pain into godhood. Saint John marveled that so many people over so many years had missed the whole point of that story.

Once the knives were arranged — seventeen in this armload — and the rest of the weapons, Saint John bowed and headed outside for more.

It was on his second trip into the church that he noticed the footprints on the sidewalk. Small feet. A woman. Rose? Surely hers, but there were other prints; much smaller and many of them. They were pressed into the thin film of fine ash that had begun to settle over everything. Delicate steps.

Angel feet?

Saint John stood for a moment, his arms filled with bloodstained weapons, contemplating the footprints. Then he went inside.

However, he paused once more as he approached the altar table.

On his previous trip he had placed seventeen knives on this very table, arranged by size and type, from a machete to hunting knives and steak knives to a lovely little skinning knife with which he had whiled away an evening last week. There were not seventeen knives now.

Now there were two. Only the long machete and an unwieldy Gurkha knife remained. The brass knuckles and clubs and guns were still there. Fifteen knives, though, were gone.

Saint John considered this as he laid his second armload down on the altar. He did not for a moment believe that he had only imagined bringing in those knives. Many material things in his perception were of dubious reality, but never blades. They were anchors in his world, not fantasies. The flying saucers he sometimes saw … those, he knew, were fantasies. Knives? Impossible.

Nor did he believe that someone — perhaps the little junkie — had snuck in here and stolen the knives.

He was considering possibilities and probabilities when he heard a soft sound. Barely a sound at all. More of a suggestion, like the sound shadows make when they fall to the ground as the moon dances across the sky. Soft like that.

He cocked his head to listen. The cathedral was empty and still.

Were demons moving silently between the pews? Had demons come to take his knives?

Saint John was suddenly very afraid.

Could demons materialize enough to be able to like a piece of metal? Before this moment he would have been certain of the answer to that question, but now he wasn’t so sure. The knives were gone.

Had the demons made the footprints in the ash? Were the demons here in the church, maybe preparing to hunt him with his own knives? Had the Fall of man made the demons bolder? Had it given them more power? Had it, in fact, kicked open the door between Hell and Earth?

These were terrifying thoughts, and Saint John whirled, drawing two knives from sheaths concealed beneath the white rags that covered his thighs.

“This is the house of God!” he yelled into the dusty shadows. “You may not be here!”

He heard the soft sounds again. Louder this time, and more of them. A scuffle of invisible feet moving in the shadows behind the screen that separated the altar from the choir’s chancel. The sounds were stealthy, of that Saint John was certain.

The fact of their stealthy nature injected a dose of calm into his veins. Stealth was a quality of caution, of fear. Predators are stealthy for fear of chasing off the prey they need to sustain their lives. Prey is stealthy to avoid being attacked. For both, fear was the key.

Fear, even in a terrible predator, revealed the presence of weakness. Of vulnerability. An invulnerable demon would not fear anything.

You are a saint, whispered the Voice inside his mind.

A saint. He nodded to himself. A saint in a church.

Saint John felt the fear in his heart recede. Not completely, but enough for strength to flood into his hands from the knives he held; and from his hands to his arms and the muscles in his chest, and to the furnace of his heart.

He could feel his mouth twist in contempt. He raised his arms to his sides, the blades appearing to spark with fire as they caught stray bits of light from the fires burning beyond the broken stained glass windows.

“I am Saint John of the Ashes,” he cried in his booming voice. “Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus … in nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi!”

A figure stepped out from behind the screen. He was dressed in filthy rags and held one of Saint John’s gleaming knives in his fist.

“Go away!” said the figure.

Saint John had begun to smile, but his smile faltered and then fell from his lips.

If this was a demon, then it was a demon wearing the disguise of a cherub. The fist that was wrapped around the knife was barely large enough to encircle the handle. Its face was round-cheeked but hollow-eyed, dusted with dirt and soot, dried snot around the nostrils, tear tracks in the grime. And upon the shoulder of the T-shirt he wore was a single bloody handprint. A child’s handprint.

The cherub pointed the knife at Saint John.

“Go away!” he said again. His voice was small and high, but there was so much raw power in it that Saint John was almost inclined to take a backward step. But he did not.

He asked, “Who are you to tell me to leave my father’s house?”

The cherub’s eyes were blue and filled with a fascinating complexity of emotions. His body trembled, perhaps with hunger or with sickness from one of the plagues; or fear. Or, Saint John considered, with rage barely contained.

This was surely no demon. He held a sanctified blade in a way that showed he understood its nature and purpose; and yet he appeared in the face and form of a child of perhaps eight. Or … seven?

That would be exciting.

That would be wonderful, perhaps miraculous; and Saint John was now convinced that he was in the presence of the miraculous. Or on its precipice.

Saint John took a step forward. The cherub — or child, if it was only that — held his ground, but he raised his knife a few inches higher, pointing it at Saint John’s face and giving it a meaningful shake. He held the knife well. Not perfectly, but with instinct.

“I’m not messing,” said the cherub. “Go away.”

Saint John was close enough to kill this child. He had the reach and the knives; but he merely smiled.

“Why should I leave?”

“This is our house.”

Ah. Our. A slip.

Saint John thought of the scuffle of footprints in the ash. And of fifteen missing knives.

“This is my father’s house,” Saint John said. “This is the house of God.”

“You don’t live here,” insisted the boy.

“I do.”

In truth Saint John had never been inside this particular church before, but that didn’t matter. A church was a church was a church, and he was a saint after all.

“Who’s there?” said another voice. A woman’s voice. Vague and dreamy and slurry. Saint John smiled.

“Rose …?”

There was a stirring behind the screen and the hushed whispering of many voices. More than a dozen, perhaps many more. Male and female, and all tiny except for Rose. Shadows moved behind the screen, and then Rose stepped out. She wore a choir robe that was clean and lovely in tones of purple and gold; but her face was still dirty and bloody and puffed.

“You’re real?” she asked as she stared at Saint John. “I thought I dreamed you.”

“Perhaps you have,” said Saint John, and he wondered for a moment if he, too, was dreaming, or if he was a character in this woman’s dream. “I am sometimes only a dream.”

Her face flickered with confusion. The drugs the men had given her held sway over her; however, she kept coming back to focus. Saint John knew and recognized that as the habit of someone who was often under the influence and practiced at functioning through it.

“Are these your kids?”

As she asked that, more of the cherubs came out from behind the screen. Many of them carried knives. His knives. The cherubs were tiny, the youngest in diapers, the oldest the same age as the blue-eyed boy who still pointed his knife at Saint John’s face.

Saint John counted them. Twenty-six. The firelight from outside threw their shadows against the wall, and their shadows were much larger. Did the shadows have wings? Saint John could not be sure.

“Go away!” growled the lead boy. “Or I’ll hurt you.”

“Hey,” slurred Rose, “be nice!”

“He’s one of them!”

Rose’s eyes cleared for a moment. She studied Saint John and his knives; then she shook her head. “No, kid … he isn’t. He’s the one who saved me. I prayed to God and He sent him to save me.”

The lead boy’s eyes faltered, and he flicked a glance at Rose. In that moment of inattention Saint John could have cut the child’s throat or cut the tendons of the hand holding the knife. He could have dropped one of his own knives and used his hand to pluck the knife from the boy.

He did none of those things.

Instead he waited, letting the boy figure it out and come to a decision. Allowing the boy his strength. The boy refocused on Saint John, and his eyes hardened. “Where’d they take Tommy?”

“I don’t know who Tommy is.”

“You took him. Where’d you take him?”

The other children buzzed when Tommy’s name was mentioned, and now their eyes focused on Saint John. He saw tiny fists tighten around knife handles; and the sight filled him with great love for these children. Such beautiful rage. They were ready to use those knives. How strange and wonderful that was. How rare.

How like him; like the boy he had been when whore was burned onto his back and he had first listened to the Voice and heard the song of the blade.

“I do not know anyone named Tommy,” he said. “I have never seen any of you before, except Rose, and I met her only a few minutes ago.”

“Bull!” the lead boy snapped.

“Shhh,” said Saint John. He took a half step forward, almost within the child’s striking range. “Listen to me.”

The boy’s eyes drifted down, and Saint John could see that he was assessing the new distance between them. So bright a child. When his eyes came back up, the truth was there. He knew that he was in range of Saint John’s blades and overmatched by his reach. Even so, he did not lower his knife — and it was his now. He had claimed it by right of justice, and Saint John was fine with that.

So Saint John lowered his own knives. He slid them one at a time into their thigh sheaths and stood apparently unarmed and vulnerable in front of this cherub. He saw the child’s eyes sharpen as he realized the implication of this, the threat unspoken behind the sham of vulnerability. Most adults would never see that. Only someone graced by the Sight could see that.

The boy hears the Voice, thought Saint John.

“Tell me who you are,” he said, “and tell me what happened to Tommy.”

THE LEAD BOY told the story.

They were orphans. They lived with four hundred other children at St. Mary’s Home for Children.

Mary. Ah. That name stabbed Saint John through the heart. Her name. His mother. Long gone. First victim of his father. She had tried to protect her son from the devil in their home. She had survived a hundred beatings, but not the hundred and first. A blood clot. Mary.

Mother of the savior.

Saint John already knew where this was going. He wasn’t sure he liked it, though.

The boy said that a line of buses set out from St. Mary’s two weeks ago, heading for a government shelter here in the city. There was a riot, fires. Gunshots. The driver was killed. The nuns were dragged off the bus. The boy did not possess the vocabulary or the years to understand or express what had happened to the nuns. He said that men did “bathroom stuff” to them. His eyes faltered and shifted away, but it was enough of an explanation for Saint John. He had been raped for the first time when he was younger than this boy. He knew every euphemism for it that existed in human language, and some spoken only in the language of the damned.

While the men were fighting with the nuns, this boy opened the back door of the bus and made the rest of the kids run. There had been forty-four of them on his bus. Last night there were only twenty-seven. Tommy had been playing on the steps of the church this morning, and men had come to take him away.

They heard him screaming all the way down the block and around the corner.

“Describe the men who took him,” said Saint John. The boy did. Most of them were strangers. Two of the men fit the descriptions of the Jock and the Big Man.

Rose was fighting to stay awake, but when she heard those descriptions she jerked erect. “That’s the same assholes who — ”

Saint John nodded. “Tell me where they kept you, sweet Rose.”

“Why?” she demanded. “The kid’s gone.”

“No!” yelled the lead boy. Others did, too. A few of the younger ones began to cry. “I’m gonna get him back!”

Saint John shook his head. “No,” he said. “You won’t. You’ll stay here and guard your flock.”

The boy glared at him. There was real fire in the boy’s eyes; Saint John could feel the heat on his skin. It pleased him. It was like being a stranger in a strange land and unexpectedly meeting someone from your own small and very distant town. He had not expected to see that blaze here at the curtain call of the human experience.

“Tell me your name,” said the saint.

“Peter.”

Saint John closed his eyes and sighed. He smiled and nodded to himself. When he opened his eyes, Peter was still glaring at him.

“I am going to find Tommy,” said Saint John, “and bring him back here.”

Rose snaked a hand out and grabbed his wrist. “Christ, are you nuts? They’ll fucking slaughter you. There are like ten or twelve of those assholes over there.”

Saint John said nothing, and his smile did not waiver.

Rose finally told him where the gang lived and where they “played.” Saint John nodded. To Peter he said, “Stay here. Stay silent. Stay hidden.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

“No. I can only tell you how to stay alive.”

Peter scowled. “You’re gonna get killed. You’re gonna leave us like the nuns did and the driver did.”

Saint John could feel the weight of the knives hidden in his clothes. He said, “Doubt me now, Peter. Believe me when I return.”

And he left.

THERE WERE SIXTEEN MEN at the hotel that had been converted into a lair for rabid dogs. Sixteen men on three floors.

Saint John drew his knives and went in among them.

Sixteen men were not enough.

The skinny junkie was one of them. He was on the third floor, sleeping in a bed with a woman who was handcuffed to the metal bed frame. Her skin was covered with cigarette burns. Saint John revealed great secrets to the little junkie. And to the others. For some of them it was very fast — a blur of silver and then red surprise. For a few it was a fight, and there were two Saint John might have admired under other circumstances. But not here and not now.

Saint John painted the walls with them. He opened doorways for them and sent them through into new experiences. He took the longest with the two men who were in the room with Tommy. They were the last ones he found. So sad for them that circumstance gave Saint John time to share so many of his secrets. The boy was unconscious throughout, and that was good; though Saint John wished that Peter could have been here to serve as witness. That child, of all of them, would probably understand and appreciate the purity of it all.

Saint John left the adult captives with keys and weapons and an open door. He set a fire in the flesh of the dead men and on the beds where the women and this body had been. As he walked away the building ignited into a towering mass of yellow flames.

Saint John carried Tommy in his arms. Halfway to the church the child’s eyes opened. He beat at the saint with feeble fists.

“N — no …” the boy whimpered.

“No,” agreed Saint John. “And never again.”

The boy realized that he was wrapped in a clean blanket, and when he looked into Saint John’s eyes he began to cry. He tried to speak but could manage no further words. In truth there was no lexicon of such experiences that was fit for human tongues. Saint John knew that from those days with his own father and those vile, grunting men. The look the saint shared with the boy was eloquent enough.

Saint John bent and whispered to him. “It was a dream, Tommy, but that dream is over. Peter and your other friends are waiting.”

When he reached the square where the cathedral sat, Saint John saw that the fire on the roof had failed to take hold. The tiles smoldered, but the church would not burn. Not tonight.

The fire of the burning hotel lit the night, and as he walked, Saint John could see the other cherubs — the angels — and the dusty Rose standing in the doorway of the church, surrounded by the arch of caved saints, and every face was turned toward him.

Peter broke from the others and ran down the steps and across the street. He was crying, but he still held his knife, and he held it well. With power and love. Saint John approved of both.

Rose came, too; wobbling and unsteady, but with passion. Her face glowed with a strange light, and she reached out to take Tommy from Saint John. Her brow was wrinkled with confusion.

“Why?” she demanded.

There was no way to explain it to her. Not now. She would understand in time, or she would not.

Rose turned, shaking her head, and carried Tommy toward the church as the other angels flocked around her.

It left Saint John and Peter standing in the middle of the street. They watched the others until they vanished into the shadows, then turned and watched the glow of fire in the sky. Finally they turned to face each other. Peter slowly held out the knife, handle first, toward Saint John.

Saint John was covered with blood from head to toes. He had a few bruises and cuts on his face and hands. He sank down into a squat and studied the boy.

“No,” he said, pushing the offered knife back. “It looks good in your hand.”

The boy nodded. “You didn’t answer the lady,” he said. “She asked you why you went and got Tommy.”

“No,” Saint John agreed. “Do you need me to explain it to you?”

Peter looked down at the knife and at the blood on Saint John’s face, and then met his eyes. The moment stretched around them as embers fell from the sky. In the distance there were screams and the rattle of automatic gunfire.

“No,” said Peter. Saint John knew that this boy might even have tried to get Tommy back himself. He would have died, of course, and they both knew it. Peter was still too young. But he would have tried very well, in ways the men in that building would not have expected. The boy would not have died alone.

Saint John nodded his unspoken approval.

They smiled at each other. Together they crossed the street and mounted the stairs and stood on the top step, watching the city die. There were fires in a dozen places.

“It’s pretty,” said Peter.

“It’s beautiful,” said Saint John.

The boy considered. He nodded.

The golden embers floated down around them.