The Fierce Reads Anthology(34)

My eyes strayed to the TV. On screen, the camera panned back, revealing the stage. Several identically dressed teenagers—the boys wearing crisp white shirts and white slacks, the girls in long white dresses—flanked Prophet on each side. Two of them were twins, a boy and a girl, with white-blond hair a shade more ivory than Prophet’s; both so tall and thin, they looked like they’d been stretched. Prophet’s entourage of adopted children. His Twelve Apostles, he called them, though I only counted eleven on stage with him.

Considering how Prophet had managed to brainwash millions of people into believing he was not just a man named Prophet, not just a prophet, but the prophet God had chosen to let us know the world was about over, I didn’t want to imagine the conditioning that went on in the privacy of the man’s home.

“He’s out there again…watching the house,” Mom said urgently. “The boy. Look.”

I bent to squint through the blinds into the bright sunlight. People passed by on the sidewalk, wandering aimlessly. The Displaced. Those whose homes had been destroyed by the earthquake. But I didn’t see any boy watching the house.

“What does he want?” Mom asked. Her hand fluttered to her face; fingers traced the knotted line of a jagged pink scar along her jaw.

“I don’t know,” I told her, hearing the despair in my voice, thick as an accent.

Her voice shook. “Everything is coming apart, and Prophet says things are only going to get worse. He knows what’s coming, Mia. God speaks to him.”

God. Oh, God, God, God. I was sick of hearing about God, maybe because I hadn’t heard much about him (or her, or it) since Mom’s mom—our fanatically God-fearing, Bible-thumping grandma—passed away a couple years ago. After that, Mom was free to stop pretending she bought into Grandma’s fire and brimstone theology. Grandma went to the grave thinking her daughter would someday join her in fluffy white-cloud heaven, instead of plummeting straight to hell, where my father was roasting on a spit with the rest of the unbelievers.

Mom always claimed she was firmly agnostic despite her extreme evangelical upbringing. She didn’t believe in anything in particular, and she was perfectly content to wait until she died to find out the real deal. I figured her obsession with Prophet was a phase born out of desperation, like people on an airplane who start praying when they go through a nasty bit of turbulence.

I touched Mom’s shoulder. It was a hard, protruding angle. She was nothing but bones under her bathrobe.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” I told her, even though the words had lost their meaning from too frequent use. I was always saying them to someone now, to Mom, to Parker, or to myself.

“Be careful out there,” Mom said, touching me briefly on my gloved hand before pulling away. “Take care of your brother.”

“I will.” I turned to go, and Prophet whispered over my shoulder, like he was standing right behind me. “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.”

“The time is coming,” Prophet said. “The end is coming.”





Was he going to throw up or would he be able to type? James Cutlass wasn’t quite sure.



TEST REPORT: MORS compound

January 14, 2024

Dr. James Cutlass, assistant to Dr. Elizabeth Massey

U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases



Jesus Christ, he was quaking in his seat. His hands shaking. Just typing in the header put him back there in the steel-colored observation chamber, flooded with light from the bright, white test room.

James needed to write the report. They wanted it two Fridays ago. Hell, they wanted it the day after it all happened. But James had spent that day in his room with the covers pulled over his head like a four-year-old.

He needed to write the report and get it in by five o’clock and it was four o’clock now and to make it all worse Brayden and his friends were down in the rec room, shooting pool.

James wiped the back of his hand over his eyes. It wasn’t cool to cry, when your seventeen-year-old son was entertaining. Had some pretty girls down there too. It was never cool to cry in front of pretty girls.

All right, it was just a test report. Like one of the many, many he’d written up in the past. Except that this time a copy of his observations had been requested by the CIA. And this time, several of the test subjects were dead.

There, then, start at the beginning.

After extensive testing on other primates, Dr. Massey and department head Dr. Savic decided that testing on human subjects was a necessary step to demonstrate the strength of the compound to Colonel Davidson, General Green, and General Montez, in order to receive permission to begin experiments with storage and release mechanisms.



How could he type when the godforsaken music was so ever-loving loud? If music is even what you’d call it. Screaming to a beat? Grunting in time?

James crossed out into the hallway and opened the basement door. If it was beer he smelled, he ignored it.

“Bray!” James shouted. “Turn it down.”

“Sure, Pops!” his son called.

James cocked his head. The music didn’t go down. Not a bit.

“Now!” he hollered.

Then it dipped.