Flesh-&-Bone(132)

Saint John raised his hand, held it high in the moonlight for a long moment, and pointed a slender finger toward the road. Toward the northwest.

The desert behind him was like a sea of roiling black. The reapers came first, flowing out of the dark, and as they reached Brother Peter they formed into orderly lines, seven across. Then they followed Brother Peter down the road. Some of them prayed, some of them sang. It took twenty minutes for all the reapers to file past where the saint stood.

Thousands upon thousands of reapers.

Those who had thought themselves lost when the world ended, who now knew that all roads led through pain and into the healing darkness. Those who had lost faith in this world of disease and death and endless struggle, who now thrived with a purpose—God’s purpose. Many of them had once fought against the reapers and then, in their defeat, beheld the truth and took up their weapons again in the service of Thanatos, all praise his darkness.

The lost who had been found.

The blind who now saw.

The last army of the world, marching to fight the last war. The only war that ever mattered. The war to save mankind from its own sinful ways.

Saint John lingered a moment after the last of them was on the road. He closed his eyes and lifted a silver dog whistle to his lips, kissed it, and then blew into it, long and hard.

Behind him a second wave—ten times larger than the mass of reapers—moved forward. If the reapers were a sea, then this was an ocean, moving in a tidal surge under the watching moon. All the crickets were shocked to silence by the moan that rose from tens of thousands of dead throats.

Saint John smiled.

Nine towns waiting.

All those godless souls waiting, aching to be shown the way.

His reapers would open red mouths in the flesh of every man, woman, and child.

And then the gray people would consume them all, flesh and bone.