Chapter Twenty-One

J OSEPH SUNK INTO the deep leather chair of the Learjet. It was a level of comfort he'd never felt before, and he couldn't believe it was actually happening now.

The pilot had come back and checked in with Joseph before they'd taken off, and that little touch was so telling about the whole private airplane experience.

Joseph felt like he'd stolen time back from the world because his security experience had been so quick. Granted, as a special agent with the government, he barely experienced what a civilian did, but it was still an annoying process to get onto a commercial airplane. Here, he'd shown up at the terminal and been escorted directly onto the airplane, which had waited for his go sign before it took off. It was incredible. And punctual. He was going to be in New York in less time than it took him to get home most nights.

He barely had enough time to think up in the air. Barely. His brain chewed quite hard on the various things he'd heard so far. About the cult. About the little bit he'd been able to get from Dulce, about the half-transformed human skulls, about the blood and the carnage. He thought about Robert, and Robert's assertion that the deaths had been a blessing. What kind of place was he saving if this was the reaction someone had to the deaths of so many people? Was the world worth saving? Was there any point to all the trouble and sacrifice his people had gone through to keep the people of America, and to a certain lesser extent, the world, alive?

There'd been plenty of people in the past, some that he'd even had to stop, who had believed that humans were too sick to continue. That the earth would be better off without humanity's infection.

But at the same time, he thought about his niece. She was young. Starting a family of her own, with no idea about the dark side of the universe and all the death within it. She probably didn't even realize the depravity possible in humanity. But she had a little girl, and a nice husband, and a little house in the suburbs with a little picket fence. And she invited Joseph over for each and every holiday, even when Joseph could so rarely attend.

Maybe that was enough.

Just one good family, one bright spot. Maybe that was enough to fight the good fight until death.

Or, you know, because beer tasted good, and he couldn't imagine eldritch horrors running a quality brewery.