Stephen Blackmoore: All Bad Things

Samson pulls off the mask, takes a deep breath of cool, clean air, then starts to cough. Barely a whiff of the stuff got through the mask, but his skin is already beginning to itch, and his eyes burn. A woman who helped pull him out of the building pushes him to his knees and pours water from a bottle into his eyes.

“This will help,” she says. “And we’ll want to get your skin scrubbed clean, too. But that can wait. Can you breathe okay?”

“Yeah,” Samson says, though his swelling tongue makes him wonder how long that will last. “Just my eyes sting is all.”

She hands him another bottle. “Keep flushing your eyes, sir. I need to get back to the doors, make sure nobody gets through.”

“Okay, Novice…”

“Initiate, sir. Initiate Katarina Volkov. Glory be to God and his Prophet James King.”

“Glory be to God,” Samson says, watching her retreat through blurred eyes.

“A few more minutes and our people will go in and finish up the survivors,” King says. “Every one of those godless sinners delivered unto the Lord. A glorious victory for God’s Militia, don’t you think, Samson?”

“Of course, Reverend,” Samson says. He wonders how many were in there. The Locos had a good hundred, hundred fifty members, and with so many wanting to see Samson’s head on a platter, there had to be a lot more than that in there. Two hundred, maybe? Three? He’s never seen that many dead. He has a hard time wrapping his brain around it.

“Something wrong, Samson?” King says.

“Just that we never gave them the choice. Even at the Market, even at the camps, we gave them a choice.”

“We gave them a choice here, too, son. You walked into their heathen’s den, let them subject you to beatings and torture. They could have stopped. They could have never started. The ones who went to watch your assassination in there, they could have stayed home.”

King shakes his head, puts a hand on Samson’s shoulder. “They didn’t have to participate in that barbarism, but they chose to, anyway. Never think they didn’t have a choice.”

Samson pours more water in his stinging eyes and trusts in James King that they did the right thing.

Four hundred and twelve dead. Samson sits on muddy grass, damp from the wet, fetid wind blowing through the city, and says it to himself again.

Four hundred and twelve dead. They declared the building free of corpses last night as they dumped the final one into the pyre burning in the emptied Echo Park Lake. The fires dance in Samson’s eyes, the breezes fanning them higher, as if God himself were stoking the flames with his hot breath.

The sky above is an overcast orange, low clouds underlit by the pyre, as the haze and smoke blow toward the coast.

“Smells like barbecue,” Cyrus says, sitting down next to Samson to watch the blaze. It’s been three days and Cyrus has been too busy to check on Samson. That’s fine. Plenty of other people have been checking on him.

Samson nods. It does smell like that, actually. His mouth is watering a little bit, and he could really go for some grilled possum. He hasn’t eaten much since he gave himself up to the Locos.

“How’d you know that plan would work?” Samson says.

“God told me.” Cyrus laughs at the look on Samson’s face. “Nah, you’re the one with the radio to the big guy. It’s just that I know the Locos, I know these people. They didn’t care why you were there, they just wanted your head. And the Locos wouldn’t just chop it off, either. They’d want a spectacle. So we gave ’em one.”

“We killed them all.”

Not everyone died from the gas, at least not right away. The ones hit first went fastest as their throats closed and their lungs shriveled up in their chests. They suffocated within minutes. Others took longer, but they died the same way. For Samson the worst were the ones the gas didn’t kill, just left them in shivering agony, blind, blood running from their burnt–out eyes. Most of those couldn’t even scream, just lay there, waiting to be put out of their misery by the Church’s soldiers going through the Arena with clubs and knives.

“That we did, my friend,” Cyrus says. “Every last stinking one of those sinners. And got ourselves a fancy new pad. Clean it up some, air it out. Gonna be a few days before we can go in without masks, but then, voila.”

“They’ll hate us even more now,” Samson says.

“Good. Easier to separate the saints from the sinners. We’re doin’ God’s work,” Cyrus says. “Somebody’s against us, they’re against God.”

There’s a hole in that logic somewhere, but Samson can’t find it, so he leaves it alone. Instead he says, “What now?”

“Now it’s time to regroup, get our act together, get ready to really expand. Did you know they have a radio in there? Stupid bastards didn’t even know enough to use it right. It’s just a big jumble in an office. Thinkin’ it’s time we powered it up and started spreading the good word to some heathens a little farther afield. Going to start transmitting the Sermon According to James King. Spread it all over the place.”

“Like how King had his television show?”

“Better. He had competition. People had lots of things to watch. But you turn on a radio today and you’re hearing some yokel going off about acid rain or a flare–up of radiation sickness somewhere. We get this thing going, and we are going to clean the fuck up. Spread the word farther and wider than it’s ever been spread. We can get all of Reverend King’s sermons onto the airwaves and out to everyone. The church is gonna be huge.”

“It’s not about the church, Cyrus. It’s about God. It’s about Reverend King.”

“Of course,” Cyrus says. “Sure. That’s what I meant.”

“Excuse me.” A shadow falls across them. Samson looks up to see a tall woman with long black hair and a red smock holding a bottle of water out to him. “Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you might want some water. The medic said you should flush your eyes out several times a day for the next week.”

“Novice Volkov,” Samson says, taking the water. “Thank you.” There’s something familiar about her that he can’t quite place. “Have we met?”

“You’re welcome, sir. Yes. I helped get you out of the Arena. And I got you water for your eyes. It was the least I could do. You sacrificed a lot for us, sir. It must have been awful in there. And it’s Initiate.”

“It’s Novice now,” Samson says. “I knew that God was watching over me. I had nothing to worry about.”

“Where you from, honey?” Cyrus says.

Volkov startles, as though just now noticing Cyrus. “Hollywood, sir. I’ve been with the church for about a month now.”

“I hear they’ve been expanding.”

“They were when I was there,” she says. “Refugees, mostly. People afraid to give themselves over to the church.”

Cyrus nods at the news. “You can go now.”

She bows her head and hurries away before Samson can even say goodbye. “What was that about?” he says. “You never ask where people are from.”

“Hollywood’s getting too—” Cyrus pauses. “Full of sin,” he says. “Whores and faggots and druggies and Communists. You asked what was next. That’s next.”

Samson had been wondering when they were going to have this conversation. He and Cyrus had been to Hollywood plenty of times to visit the whores before they found James King and everything changed. When he’d first been there years ago, it was little more than a camp, but it had grown since then into a decent–sized town. Last he’d seen it had almost a thousand people, and if what Volkov said was true, then it was even bigger now from all of the sinners the church had been driving into its arms.