“They’re murderers, and they’ve brainwashed the whole bunch of you into believing in some crazy made-up god and a bunch of lunatic ranting. They’ve blinded you with this darkness nonsense.”
“No,” said Andrew, “they’ve opened our eyes and our hearts to the truth.”
“What truth? All you do is kill.”
“No!” said Andrew, looking hurt and surprised. “We don’t ‘kill.’ There is no ‘murder’ left in the world. Why can’t you get it through your head that the gray plague was not a virus or an accident? It was the will of our god. Like the Death of the Firstborn in your own Bible, Carter. He has reached out his hand to erase the mistake of ‘life.’”
“‘Mistake’? Life is the only thing that matters.”
Andrew shook his head. “No. God—the true god—meant for mankind to leave the physical form and transition into the formlessness of the darkness. That was his will, his plan for the redemption of everyone.”
Carter shook his head. “Horse crap. It was a plague, and it didn’t kill everyone. There are a lot of people left and—”
“There are maggots crawling on the festering corpse of this world,” countered Andrew. “Everyone who draws breath does so in defiance of the will of God.”
“You still seem to be sucking air, Andrew.”
The reaper placed one hand over the wings on his chest. “The reapers are the holy priests of our god. We have been asked to remain here and usher the last of the lost—the last of those like you who refuse to believe—into the darkness.”
“Sure. By murder. Very compassionate of you.”
“But it is compassion, Carter.” He set the butt of his scythe down, and there was a slight shift in his body language and his phrasing. Less forced formality. “Listen to me, man; when the dead rose, I was right there in the thick of it with you. We brought all those people out of Omaha. We built Treetops and we started a life.”
“Right, which is why—”
“Let me say my piece,” interrupted Andrew. “Just hear me out.”
Carter sighed and gestured with the barrel of his shotgun. “Make it quick.”
Brother Andrew nodded. “You and I survived when a lot of other people fell because we were used to roughing it. All those weekends out hunting and fishing before things fell apart. The years we humped our battle-rattle over the Big Sand in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were survivors, Carter, and we did survive . . . and we helped a lot of other people survive.”
Carter nodded.
“But for what?” demanded Andrew. “What have we really accomplished? What do we have to show for it? After that first season, after we holed up in that old shopping mall for all those weeks, we thought we’d slipped the punch. We thought that God smiled on us and we made it, right? But then what happened? That first winter we lost half the people we saved. Dysentery, three flu epidemics, tuberculosis . . . the list goes on and on. Disease killed more of us than the gray people ever did, and we’ve both traveled enough to know that this was happening all over. Remember Oshkosh? The whole city was dead from plague. Actual bubonic plague. Same with Bridgeport, and how many other cities? Same thing in Wyoming. Casper, Fort Washakie, Arapahoe—wiped out by the damn flu. That’s where the whole second wave of the gray people came from. Not from them biting each other or the army dropping nukes. Millions of people died from bad water, bad food, infection, bacteria, parasites. By the time we reached Idaho, how many people did we still have? One out of every six who started out with us?”
The story Andrew was telling confirmed the worst of Chong’s speculations about the world beyond Mountainside’s chain-link fence. The nine towns in the Sierra Nevadas lucked out by having a good doctor and a biochemist who knew how to make antibiotics. Chong’s father often said that those two men had saved more people than anyone who fired a gun or swung a sword. When Chong had told that to Tom, he agreed completely.