And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted…
—Ephesians 4:32
The carnage.
God. The carnage.
As I stare at the body of a father who had broken the neck of his infant as soon as the Graces set upon the crowd, I remind myself of the babies drowned in the river. These are the people who would cheer to see my friend’s bodies hanging from the gates. These are the people who prayed for me to slaughter what little remains of the human race.
They did this to the world. This is their own fault. They brought this upon themselves.
But that doesn’t make me feel better. Nick told me it’s okay to be scared, and looking out over a field of corpses, I am terrified.
Dominion—Theo—lies in the grass at my feet. His brain is dead, but the virus hasn’t gotten the message, snaking through his suffering body. The Graces, the ones still alive, flee to the far corners of New Nazareth, unsure of where to go but understanding that the safest place to be is away.
Is this what the martyrs of Judgment Day witnessed before the Flood took them too? Was this the smell? Was this the silence?
No. Not silence. Someone is shouting.
“Stand down! Don’t shoot!” Nick. Nick. Oh God. “That’s Benji! Put your guns DOWN!”
I turn just in time to see Nick collapse into Erin’s embrace; a shivering, blood-soaked ball with his arms clamped over his head.
Those who need help are taken back to the ALC. The rest stay in New Nazareth to deal with what we’ve done.
Sarmat and another large boy, Rich, build a stretcher for Nick since he can’t walk on his own. He refuses to take a big scrap of cloth away from his face. At first, Nick shoves Erin away when she tries to coax him onto it. She gently points out that we didn’t lose anybody, we didn’t lose anybody, we’re all okay, it’s over. That’s enough to get him to agree to leave, but not enough to get him onto the stretcher. He stares at it like it’s the greatest form of humiliation he’s ever seen. Erin tries to reason him on, but Cormac shakes his head and says, “All right, go then,” and Nick tries to get to his feet but falls. “That’s what I thought. C’mon, boss.”
Faith goes; the wound on her arm is too bad, the one on her face too painful. Salvador goes too, because xe walks out onto the lawn and sees the expressions of the dead and can’t stop sob-laughing long enough to breathe. Sadaf goes with them, wiping blood off her hands and telling Lila to deal with the rest. Aisha lets out one long, muffled wail, but after Cormac helps her to her feet, she’s shockingly okay.
“I’ll lose my shit in a few,” Cormac says, glassy-eyed while Aisha clings to his arm, trying to regain her balance. “Give me some time.”
Erin leans against my gnarled arm and stares past the bodies toward the towering buildings of New Nazareth—Kincaid Chapel, the health center, the student union, the dormitories.
There are no questions about my body. We all heard Nick well enough.
“So,” Erin says. “What do we do first?”
I don’t know where to start. “The ears, I guess?”
Aisha says, “We don’t need them anymore.” She flings a hand at the landscape as if it’ll hide her shaking. “We’ve got—we’ve got all this. Fuck the Vanguard. Condescending, cowardly pieces of shit!”
It’s a glorious roar, and it sets off every living soul standing in the wasteland of blood and mess. We’re screaming at the Vanguard, at the Angels, at every motherfucker who has done anything to us. Erin flings her arms around my neck and staggers, squeezing her eyes shut. Across campus, Graces wail in so much pent-up anger that I can feel it flowing through my veins, a flood, a real flood, and we are alive.
We are alive, we are alive, holy shit, we are alive.
We decide we’ll search a few buildings for supplies to bring back to the ALC, to tide us over until we decide what to do. Everyone but me, that is. I said I’d deal with the bodies alone. Nobody argues, because nobody wants to deal with the blood, organs, and limbs. I don’t either, but I’m the one who can stomach it.
I need to see the dead.
Reverend Brother Ward and my engagement ring are stamped into the dirt. Sister Kipling’s corpse curls around the wound in her chest as if she could survive if she held it tight enough. I find every soul I know and then some, and I press my face into the dirt and breathe in, breathe out the stench of Judgment Day.
I find Mom.
She bled out from a hole in her face. The bullet went in by her nose and came out by her ear, but she’s recognizable the same way Dad was. How fitting that she went out like her husband did. To lose both of my parents to the same senseless war. We will return to the earth for out of it we were taken; for from dust we were made and to dust we will return.
Maybe it would be better if I did believe in God, in Heaven, in Hell. If I could believe she’s going somewhere that will punish her for what she’s done. But I can’t. When I pick up her body—a sad, limp bundle of meat and bones—I can’t believe that. Maybe I’ll change my mind eventually, maybe something will happen, and I will finally feel that push, that call to faith, but until then, I’m okay not believing in anything at all.
I find Theo.
His body is the one that makes me stop. He looks like me, kind of, but what my corpse would look like after days of decomposition. A version of me long dead.
…Is that what he was? A queer boy like me who rotted under the weight of what happened to him?
How easy would it have been for me to end up just like him?
My eyes burn. My vision dissolves into blurry smears of color.
I plunge my hand into his flesh.
I pull together the Flood from his body, what lingers in his corpse, and build. I take out pieces, draw from his organs and bones, and sew it together with sinew. I cut apart his skin and pull out a little creature, eyes squeezed shut and shivering, wet from the blood and pus.
Theo loved me. I loved Theo. He was wrong and he was a monster, but I did. I do. Maybe I’m just a stupid boy, but I don’t know. Maybe in another world, one that didn’t ruin him, he could have been better.
I hold the tiny creature to my chest. There is no other world. Just the one we have here. And in this one, I am alive.
I pull my engagement ring from the dirt and fit it in the creature’s little palm—and I set them down. I wave my hand and whisper, “This world is yours. What do you want?”
They stay by me.
We come back to the bank late in the evening. Erin and Aisha and Cormac, Sarmat and Lila and Carly, all of us, have been talking the whole way—about the future, about what will happen to the Angels across the world, about how Acheson will change. By the time we make it back to the courtyard, though, we are quiet. The realization of what we’ve done and what’s going to happen swirl into a blurry mass of past, present, and future, of fatigue and occasional fits of disbelieving laughter. One erupts when Faith picks up the little Grace that’s followed us home and spins them around, saying, “Hello! You’re an ugly little thing, yes you are!” The people who didn’t come to New Nazareth, who stayed back to hold down the fort, gawk at me, touch my face, and ask if it’s me, if it’s really me. Does it hurt, am I okay? Are the Angels really dead?
Not all of them, I say, but enough.
I think it hits us all at the same time that maybe we’ll live long enough to grow up.
But as soon as I find a place to breathe, Sadaf comes up to me and says, “Nick wants to see you. He’s in the copy room.”
I run to him.
The copy room has been set up as a miniature version of Nick’s room in the ALC: a mattress, his beads, dim lighting, and not much else. I squeeze my massive body through the door, wincing when my wing catches on the threshold. It’s just the two of us here, alone.
Nick tries to smile. It doesn’t work.
He looks like hell. He’s sitting up on the mattress, supported by the wall, surrounded by stained bandages and shreds of clothing. Part of his pants leg has been cut away to reveal jagged wounds packed with gauze. His mask is down, but he’s holding the same ruined cloth to his face, and I realize with growing horror that he’s just as much of a death-squad soldier as the Angels who were torn to shreds by the Flood at New Nazareth.
He takes the cloth down.
A fault line has opened across his face, from the left side of his forehead down across his eye all the way to his chin. Teeth sprout from odd parts of his cheek. The affected eye sits low in its socket, the bone holding it up shattered.
“I could—” I could fix that. I know I could. But before I can finish the thought, Nick squeezes his eyes shut.
Too loud.
Okay. He’s here, and he’s alive. That’s what matters.
I lie down beside him, the only way to get down to his level, and my head settles against his knee. Not touching it, no, but close enough. His gaze sweeps over the broad forest of spikes, exposed bone, and feathers of my back and shoulders; the kink in my wing; the wounds, welts, and cracks in my skin.
We can talk about it all later. We don’t have to speak right now. We promised we’d speak after I came back from New Nazareth, and now we have all the time in the world.
Nick reaches for me. His fingers press against my weird, broken excuse for a nose, the ridge of my brows, the soft spot under my eye, the edge of my jaw. The rough skin smothering my skull, the sores on my neck, all the things the Flood has done to me.
And he grabs the back of my head and pulls me up, arms trembling with the strain. I scramble up to follow him. He pulls me in until our foreheads are pressed together again, and I don’t realize how much I’m shaking until he holds me tighter just to keep me still.
This is home. I am alive, these are my friends, this is my family.
Wherever the Watch is, I’m home.
