"They are being interrogated, Lord, but thus far our efforts have not been very successful. Most of them know nothing of value to us. But one whom we think does know important things, he is proving very resistant to our methods."
The Great Master indicated silence. "It is of no moment. Let the interrogations continue, if you want, but we know all we need to know to make Operation Rippling Lava a success." He signaled to one of the female attendants. "Lie with him," he commanded, pointing at the Over Master.
That unexpected reward was indeed a sign that the Great Master was in a particularly good mood and that his own courage in reporting the bad news had raised him slightly in his commander's estimation. One never knew with the Great Master which way his mood would fluctuate. Ahhh, the Over Master reflected as he let the female guide him to her mat in a dark corner of the room, things were going well, very well!
Traveling only by night in two landcars, it took Zechariah Brattle and his small party two days to reach the tenuous refuge of the caves they'd used on the way out. During the trip, as her father carefully guided the landcar using the onboard navigation system and infrared sensors, Comfort watched him closely. Her father had changed since they embarked on this foray. Always before he had been a serious man, not without a quiet sense of humor once you got to know him, but somewhat dour to the world at large. Now, especially since they found the landcar, the weapons, and the beer, he was different. Zechariah, whose every personal trait she thought she knew intimately, was now like a man who had suddenly found a new interest in life, something he'd been searching for unsuccessfully for years but never knew he wanted until it was unexpectedly presented to him. She realized it was the present emergency that had changed him. Her father was right. God often acted in very strange ways. She hadn't quite made up her mind yet, but she was beginning to think she liked the change in her father.
"Daughter," Zechariah began, but the bouncing of the car over the rough terrain made him pause briefly to concentrate on his driving. "Comfort," he tried again, "those folks from New Dedham sure came prepared." He slapped the hand-blaster that was now a permanent attachment. His teeth flashed redly in the dim glow of the vehicle's console as he grinned at his daughter.
"Father, have you ever killed anyone?"
"No. Not even in the wars, when I was mobilized. And I don't want to now, daughter. But there comes a time—you know this very well from your scriptures—when men must turn their hands to war. This is one of those times." He concentrated on his driving again, slowing the vehicle in order to take a forty-percent grade down a rock slope into a deep arroyo. It was nearing dawn and they were still a long way from the caves, so they would have to find a place to hide when the sun came up. They had used the very same spot on the way out.
The car following behind braked on the lip of the ravine, until Zechariah had successfully made his descent, then it came on cautiously. "I'm going into a slide!" Amen Judah shouted over the two-way communication console. "My brake proportioning system warning light is flashing! Get out of the way, we're coming down!"
"Hold on!" Zechariah advised Comfort as he gunned the engine and their car jumped forward, out of the way of the descending vehicle. Amen applied his brakes, but that just cut off the inertial braking system designed to negotiate steep grades without interference from the driver. When his vehicle hit the floor of the ravine, it bounced and rocked heavily before coming to a stop in a swirl of dust. "Are you all right?" Zechariah asked.
The other vehicle began moving toward them. "We're okay. A little shook up, Zach, but we're all right," Amen reported. "Sorry." He paused and then laughed. "The console was telling me, ‘Check with your dealership's service department as soon as possible!’ But the warning light's out now. I'll just be more careful taking grades."
Zechariah smiled. "Okay. I guess we'll have to check in at the nearest dealership." He laughed. "The Lord will provide." Switching off, he turned to Comfort and muttered, "I just wish the Lord would provide until He provides!"
"Father!" For her father to have said such a thing was tantamount to his taking the Lord's name in vain, which she had never heard him do.
"Daughter, even our Savior must have had to laugh once in a while during His time among us." Comfort stared at her father. She said nothing because she did not know how to respond to such a remark.
Zechariah maneuvered the vehicle up under a rocky overhang, brought it to a stop, and shut down its power plant. It was the same spot they'd camped in on the way out. They would be safe from surveillance during the day.
"Daughter, let us dine and then rest." Given the circumstances, the emergency stores they had found in the vehicle—concoctions they wouldn't have fed to their animals in ordinary times—seemed nourishing and very tasty.
They'd also discovered two Remchester 870 Police Model shot rifles, 1.27mm shoulder-fired weapons using shells 7.62 centimeters in length, each loaded with five tungsten-steel pellets weighing a total of approximately 7.76 grams. Each rifle had a tubular magazine fitted under the barrel that would hold three cartridges. One in the chamber gave the weapons a maximum load of four rounds. They were fed into the firing chamber by working a slide, forward from the open breach position, to seat a round; pull to the rear to extract the fired casing; and so on until all four rounds had been fired. They were designed for killing men at close quarters, precisely the type of weapon Zechariah had trained with in the militia.
The ballistics information printed on the ammunition boxes indicated the velocity of the tiny projectiles exceeded four hundred meters a second at one meter downrange; at ten meters downrange each pellet would strike its target with approximately seventy-two kilos of energy. Zechariah had seen what similar loads would do to a paper target, but he wondered what they would do to a man at ten meters—or one meter, for that matter. He shuddered. Well, he thought, Satan, get thee behind me 'cause you get in front and I'm going to put a hole in your ass big enough to drive this landcar through! Mentally, he slapped himself on the forehead. He was thinking like a soldier again!
It had been a while since he had fired one of these weapons, but Zechariah remembered that since the bores were open-cylinder, there were no chokes to constrict the shot patterns, so the loads would disperse 25mm for every meter fired down range. Zechariah considered this information carefully. "We can make some use of these," he said aloud as he carefully replaced the weapons in their compartments. He noted twenty fifty-round boxes stacked up in the compartments and gave a low whistle. Some of the boxes contained slugs. They would be devastating out to fifty meters, even without rifled barrels, which the Remchester 870s did not have; they were smoothbores.
After eating, they lay on pallets in the cargo compartment. None of the survivors had slept well over the last days, and Zechariah did not expect to sleep much now, but rest was still essential.
"Father, what are our chances of surviving?" Comfort asked as they lay there.
Zechariah did not respond immediately. "They are not good, Comfort. We are almost defenseless, even with the weapons we now have. And we are threatened by a vast and inimical force which you can be sure has advanced methods of destruction. Where it came from, what its intentions are, I do not know. Perhaps somewhere people are resisting. But we are too small in numbers and too weak to fight back."
"Shall we ever see home again?"
"Yes!" Zechariah answered immediately and with considerable feeling. "Yes, Comfort. As soon as we get back to the caves I'm going to load up everyone in these cars and we're going back to New Salem, to reclaim our homes."
Comfort smiled. Something else was new about her father. Before, he would often speak at public gatherings, but he was never the type of man who would step forward to lead. In fact he had always been a bit suspicious of men who volunteered to run things. But now he was talking as if he'd already made the decision to return home without consulting the others. And she knew they would follow him.
"Daughter!" Zechariah exclaimed, sitting up. "Let's
go outside for a minute." He grabbed one of the rifles and some ammunition. "Get the others and have them join us outside, and bring the second rifle," he said over a shoulder as he slid the car's pneumatic door open and stepped out into the deep shadow of the overhang. The sun was well up above the horizon, but its rays had not yet reached down into the arroyo where the vehicles were parked. Still, it was light enough to see.
Then Amen and Hannah of the other vehicle joined Zechariah, expressions of alarm on their faces. "I want to have some target practice," he announced. "You never know when these might come in handy. We found two of them." He showed them the rifle. "Gather 'round."
Zechariah explained the nomenclature and operation of the rifles to the others. He showed them how to inspect them to make sure they were in working order, how to load them, unload them, make them safe when loaded, how to adopt a proper shooting stance, how to aim and fire and reload in combat. He guided them through these exercises without ammunition, to get them used to working the actions. Then he set up targets, several empty drink containers, against the opposite wall of the arroyo, about ten meters away from where they stood. The more he made them practice, the more his own training of many years before took over.
Finally, he loaded one of the guns with four rounds of live ammunition. "I will demonstrate, and then I want each of you to come up here and fire four rounds." He took up a good shooting position, left foot slightly forward, knees slightly bent, leaning into the gun from the waist, safety off, trigger finger extended along the receiver until ready to shoot. He placed the tip of the butt in the hollow of his right shoulder and pulled it in tight. He put the bead of the front sight on a bottle, and when the rear of the receiver intersected the middle of the bead, he squeezed the trigger.
The rifle went off with a tremendous blast. Zechariah was momentarily stunned. He'd forgotten how loud such weapons were—and how heavy the recoil! The bottle was still there! "Hit in front, Zach!" Hannah shouted. She was enjoying this. They all were. He worked the action and fired the second round. This time he was ready. The bottle flew into the air, sieved with holes. He hit the other two in rapid succession. "That's how it's done," he told the others, gently rubbing his shoulder and smiling ruefully. "Comfort, you're next."
They spent the next hour practicing. Then he showed them again how to do combat reloads, holding the weapon steady with the strong hand and loading the rounds into the open breach over the top of the receiver with the weak hand. He gave one rifle to Comfort and the other to Amen. "These are yours now," he told them. "We three—and Hannah, if one of us goes down—must be alert always from now on, in case we have to use these."
"Will we have to?" Hannah Flood asked.
"We must be prepared to," Zechariah answered. "And if the devils come back, we must kill them. And now," he drew the hand-blaster, "we are all going to familiarize ourselves with this little baby."
The sun was just peeking over the wall of the arroyo when they finished. They retreated into the deep shadow of the overhang and rested.
"Zach," Amen said after taking a long drink, "how can these weapons be effective against devils?"
Zechariah paused before he spoke. "You know the devil never catches souls without the full cooperation of his victims. And he never appears in his true form because if he did, why, nobody'd have anything to do with him. So he works his evil through flesh and blood creatures. So whoever or whatever slaughtered our friends, they're mortal, and if we run up against them, we are going to do our level best to kill them before they kill us.
"Now," he got to his feet and stretched, "we've lost several hours' valuable rest. I'm going to retire, and when it's dark we'll rejoin our families. And then we are going home."
Chapter Eleven
So we are what are left of our once proud church, Zechariah thought as he surveyed the miserable group of refugees crouching and squatting in a rough semicircle about the fire. How doth the Lord chastise us. He looked into the faces. These were people he had known all his life—the Floods, Judahs, Sewalls, Dunmores, Maynards, Rowleys, and Stoughtons—all that was left of the City of God, forty pitiful survivors. The lineage of their church stretched back eight hundred years, and now they were all that was left.
But the people looked back at him with hope in their eyes. When Zechariah and Judah had driven up in the landcars a short while ago, they had gone wild, loudly praising the Lord like charismatics, dancing like savages, wild with happiness, wild with anticipation of news from the outside world, wild with joy that the party had made the trip and survived, and wild with the hope that some remnants of civilization and their old lives—the landcars—had survived.
When the travelers passed out the provisions they had brought with them, Zechariah could not stop the people from gorging themselves. They were all on the point of starvation, after all. Comfort looked at her father questioningly when he gave the order to share the provisions, but he just shook his head and passed them out into the eagerly waiting hands. He kept the beer hidden. The City of God was an abstentionist sect, but the people were desperate for any kind of nourishment and the effect of alcohol on empty stomachs would not have been a good thing.
"God bless you, Zechariah Brattle!" old Sam Sewall shouted, slurping the last sweet juices from the bottom of a can of fruit. Sam had turned 102 the previous fall and was the oldest member of the group. But he was spry and had his wits about him still. Zechariah smiled inwardly. Always, since before he himself had been born, Sam had been the picture of neatness in personal dress and of probity in conduct. He was a sharp businessman, and he and his wife Esther, only ninety-eight last spring, had run their hardware store to show a handsome profit every year for the seventy years Sam had been in business. So had his father before him. Now he squatted before the fire dressed in rags, his chin stained with fruit juice. He wiped it off with a forefinger and then licked the digit eagerly.
The others took up Sam's praises, and Zechariah was embarrassed. But there was no doubt about it: they looked to him for leadership. Whether he wanted it or not—and he did not!—he had become responsible for the people. Zechariah loved them, they were his community, his friends, and his own family. But watching Samuel, reduced to a crouching scarecrow savoring the dregs of a can of fruit, Zechariah realized they were all too human. Now he understood how the Children of Israel, wandering in the desert, could have been tempted into idolatry despite the leadership of Moses, who spoke directly with God.
Zechariah raised his arms for silence. "Thank you, friends, but I—that is, Amen, Hannah, Comfort, and I—did only what you would have done for us. And remember what the Lord said to Moses: ‘Thou shalt take no gift: for the gift burdeneth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.’ And I'm no Moses," he said with a smile. Several people laughed. They were all feeling comfortable by then, their long hunger diminished.
"Friends, the news is terrible. So far as we know, we are the only survivors of our—" His voice cracked.
"There there." Judah stepped up and laid a comforting hand on Zechariah's shoulder.
He shook his head. No time for emotion now. "Friends, in short, the camp on the shores of Gerizim was wiped out and all who were left behind are slaughtered. I think we are the only ones to have escaped."
"Wh-Who did it?" Consort asked the question that was on all their minds. None would ever forget that terrible night on the road outside the camp at Gerizim.
Zechariah looked at Hannah and Judah. "We did not see them or their machines, and there was no trace of the killers. But the weapons of destruction they used were—were horrible beyond description . . . ."
"How did our brethren die?" Esau Stoughton asked.
"They—They were—it appeared to us that they were—dissolved, eaten up by some kind of acid," Amen Judah responded.
"It was the wrath of the Lord!" Abigail Judah shouted. "It was the vengeance of God upon the brethren who had sinned!"
"Possibly," Zechariah said. "But I think it more likely was the w
ork of Satan's minions, the same minions who have been inflicting such punishment upon the Army of the Lord and the other sects, the same minions whom the Confederation Marines can't seem to beat. It was just our turn, is all. And they struck with terrible vengeance."
Mehetabel Stoughton began to weep loudly.
"Mehetabel! Everyone!" Zach shouted. "You know that nothing happens without the Lord's will! Mehetabel, Esau," he addressed the Stoughtons directly, "you live! Your sons and daughters live! I see them here—Shuah, Reuben, Tamar, Benjamin, Levi, Elon." The children looked up as Zechariah called their names. "Paul," he said, addressing Paul Rowley, who sat with his arm around Sharon, his wife, "I see you there with your daughters, Amana, Leah, Adah, and Timna. You live and your family lives!" Young Benjamin Stoughton, just turned twenty, felt a strange sensation of excitement and pride when Zechariah called out his name. He stood and remained standing. The other men and quite a few of the women experienced the same reaction as Zechariah addressed them. Even Mordecai Sewall, at age sixty, Samuel and Esther's oldest son, felt a quickening of his pulse, as he always did when the militia had been called out to muster.
Zechariah took in the others. "Our brothers and sisters are in heaven. There is no reason to mourn them. But we should rejoice because they live in glory and the Lord has spared us. Do you know what that means, to have been individually spared by the Lord?" Unconsciously he rested one hand on the sidearm at his waist as he strode into the firelight. In the semidarkness, his voice ringing off the cavern walls, Zechariah Brattle looked bigger than anyone remembered him, as if he had taken on a new form. He had, but it wasn't physical, despite the effect the firelight and the sound of his voice was having upon them.
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