The world is full of dead people, and that is the first grief I’ve heard.
“What the HELL IS THIS?! DAMN IT! GOD! DAMN IT! GOD!”
Everything looked oddly unhooked. A wind through the door could knock this building into the sky.
“Hey!”
Michael turned.
His brother was running to him, dashing as fast as a little boy who is rounding third and heading for home. But this isn’t home. No, this isn’t home at all. A wave of homesickness, sharper than any he had ever felt, threatened to overwhelm him.
Patrick collided, hooping Michael’s waist like steel, hugging him with fierce need. And for some reason, the homesickness felt so much worse.
Across the hall, Holly sat on a cot, her back locked straight, her eyes big and dully hard, like unpolished glass.
Patrick said something into his right thigh, the skin tickling there. Michael looked down, which seemed to take a very very long time.
“Is Bobbie gonna play, still?” Patrick said.
Michael watched his brother from the far theater of his own skull. He knew that he should flick out a lie, a comfort. But all that came to his mind were funeral scenes from games like Gears of War.
She was a good grunt, a damn good one! Raise your guns to her, men! She’ll be missed!
“Where is she?” asked Patrick.
Michael said, “She’s out.”
And now the hugeness of her death seemed to send a dizzying kind of vertigo to his heart. She was dead. Away away. Call in a thousand doctors; collect a million med kits; none of it would help. Jeezus, it is not fair that she died. That was a stupid thought, what everybody thought when anybody died. But that didn’t make it untrue.
If I’d just seen the Bellow . . . If I’d just been quicker . . . Bobbie would have been fine, Michael thought. And maybe she wouldn’t have stayed out there by herself at all if it wasn’t for me trying to make her feel better.
“But how come?” Patrick said.
Michael lifted his head, began taking in other things around him. Their shapes and meanings vague at first, like pixels seen too up close. He looked at the walls. And understood that Hank’s screams were not totally grief.
During the captain’s “mission” into the city, his Capitol had been invaded.
Crucifixes glimmered on the walls. Letters flickered in the twitching light, like runes.
GUIDE OUR HAND, ALL MIGHTY WRATH. Shadow. GOD O WE BEG FOR THE SON. Shadow. THE SON O GOD GIVE US THE SON. WE SACRIFICE
WE SACRIFICE ALL
WE SACRIFICE OURSELVES TO YOU
Michael swooned with distant horror, because he realized that the markings slashed across the walls were red—and the red did not look like it was paint.
The Rapture are sacrificing each other now, he thought. Not just other people who try to hurt the Bellows.
’Cause, you know what Rulon is doing now, Michael? He’s changing the rules. You know how he’s making his followers believe that they can be saved?
Just look at the walls.
He’s making them feel their blood.
“What’s ‘out’? Why? Bellows aren’t s’posed to h-h-hurt people,” Patrick was saying. He was not even trying to hide his rising anxiety. “Was Bobbie hurt real bad?” He grabbed his right ear and twisted on it once, hard.
“Bub, don’t—” Michael said.
Patrick lowered his hand, but his chin still trembled. “I l-l-like Bobbie, she said Mommy was going to see me soon. Where’s Mommy?”
“They were here, Captain!” Hank said, striding past Michael. The captain had entered from the night, through the double doors. “The Rapture. Bastards came and broke right in!”
“What gave it away, Detective?” the captain said softly.
Hank blinked. “The walls—the—over here, see?”
The captain looked at Patrick, trying to smile sadly about Hank’s stupidity or something.
“There was a letter nailed on the door,” Hank said. He handed Jopek a closed envelope, which was addressed like this:
TO THE DEVIL IN CHARGE
Jopek took it, half interested. Nodded. “Class-A move with that knife in the car, by the way.”
Hank frowned, blushing and wounded.
Suddenly, Jopek whirled, drawing his weapon, and firing into the darkness of the hall at his back.
“I see you, sumbitch!” he shouted, and his machine gun belched a ten-second, sweeping burst. The gun flashed the empty halls, the rotunda, the dome above.
As randomly as he’d begun, Jopek stopped. “Checking,” he muttered. “I think they’re gone. But, shit, they broke into my base, didn’t they? Got past all the land mines and into my city, didn’t they? Even stole the weapons in the fence maze, I saw. Bet they stole my caches in the Capitol, too. But