Grim Reaper: End of Days

Sixth Circle The Heretics

Their arrival at the southeastern end of the reservoir had presented the journey’s next hurdle, for the fence separating the jogging track from the southern retaining wall offered no exit point or weak link. Paolo continued paddling, following the stone barrier as it circled to the west. Francesca’s light finally revealed a break along the wall — a small boat ramp — the incline partially blocked by a large flatbed truck.

Climbing out first, Paolo dragged the bow of the raft up the cement ramp, then helped his pregnant wife out of the boat.

The truck’s rusted metal flatbed was tilted at a thirty-degree angle to the reservoir, stained in frozen blood. Francesca wrapped her scarf across her face. “They must have used the truck to collect the dead, dumping them right into the water. Why would they do such a thing?”

Paolo peered inside the window of the empty cab. “The more important question is, why did they stop?”

“The plague must have spread so fast, they couldn’t dispose of the dead quickly enough.” Shep searched the night sky. “We need to keep moving, before another drone tracks us down.”

They continued on, following a snow-covered bridle path, the bonfires glowing somewhere up ahead.

David Kantor made his way south along Central Park West. Gun drawn, he moved in the shadow of stalled vehicles. Cloaked in darkness, he was surrounded by death. It was slumped in the cars and sprawled on the sidewalk, rained from apartment windows to mangle awnings and decorate snow-covered lawns. Every fifteen seconds, he paused to make sure he was not being followed. The paranoia allowed him to stretch his hips and lower back, already aching from hauling his life-support equipment. I’ll never make it to Gavi’s school like this. I need to find another way.

He rested again. His stifling face mask collected a pool of sweat. Pulling open the rubber chin piece, he emptied the excess, his eyes locked in on the bizarre buildings on his right. The Rose Center for Earth and Space cast a diamond-shaped void against the lunar-lit heavens. The Museum of Natural History blotted the night like a medieval castle, its drawbridge guarded by the bronze statue of President Theodore Roosevelt on horseback.

The sight of the Rough Rider brought with it a memory of his youngest daughter’s first visit to the facility. Gavi was only seven. Oren had come along, too, David’s son insisting they skip the train and drive into the city so the boy could listen to the Yankees game on their way home. The day germinated in David’s mind.

Checking the periphery in his night scope, he jogged up the museum steps to the sealed main doors, arguing internally whether he was wasting valuable time.

The doors were locked. He looked around again, determined he was alone, and shot out one of the plate-glass doors with his sidearm.

The museum was dark inside, save for the fading glow coming from an emergency light. David moved quickly through the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, the deserted entry unnerving. Diverting past the Rose Gallery space exhibit, he searched for a visitor sign he knew was posted somewhere in the dark corridor up ahead.

“There.” He followed the arrow to the parking garage, praying for a small miracle.

The spots reserved for motorcycles were located just past the handicapped row. His heart raced as the beam from his light revealed a Honda scooter and a Harley-Davidson, both vehicles still chained to their posts. He contemplated hot-wiring the scooter, but worried that the vehicle’s engine would draw the attention of the military.

Then he saw the ten-speed bicycle.

The bridle path ran past Summit Rock, the highest elevation in Central Park, before descending into a forest valley. Ahead was Winterdale Arch, a twelve-foot-high sandstone-and-granite underpass buttressed on either side by a retaining wall that extended east and west through the park. Illuminating the underpass were a dozen steel trash barrels, their contents set ablaze.

Beyond the fires, guarding the entrance of the granite tunnel, were a dozen men and women. Self-appointed gatekeepers. Heavily armed. Each wearing a fluorescent orange and yellow vest removed from the back of a deceased construction worker.

A procession of people milled about outside the guarded portal — families, lost souls, streetwalkers, displaced businesspeople, and the indigent — all waiting to be allowed to pass through the Winterdale Arch.

Paolo turned to Virgil. “This is the only way through, unless you want to risk the main roads again. What should we do?”

“Patrick?”

Shep continued watching the night sky, anticipating another aerial assault. “We’re safer in a crowd. Let’s see if they’ll allow us through.”

They approached the last person in line, a big man in his mid-fifties. Despite the frigid temperatures, he was wearing a ski vest over a tee shirt, his bare arms covered in tattoos of the United States Marine Corps. The words: Death Before Dishonor were emblazoned across his upper right biceps. He was holding a woman wrapped in a blanket. From her stiffness and body position, Shep could tell she had cerebral palsy.

“Excuse me—”

“Welcome, brothers, welcome sister. Have you come to witness the glory of God?”

“What glory is there in so much suffering and death?” Shep asked.

“The glory comes from the Second Coming. Isn’t that why you are here?”

Paolo pushed in, his eyes wide with excitement. “Then this really is it? The Rapture?”

“Yes, my friend. The twenty-four elders have assembled. The Virgin Mother herself is said to be inside the park walls, preparing to grant immortality to the chosen among us.”

Paolo crossed himself, trembling. “When the plague was first announced, I had a feeling… How do we get inside?”

“They’re bringing us up in small groups. They need to determine who is clean.”

“We’re clean.” Paolo pulled Francesca to his side. “No plague, you can check us.”

The big man smiled “No, brother, by ‘clean’ I am referring to the soul. Everyone must be escorted inside, at which point the worthy will be separated from the heretics. No sinner shall be granted access by the Trinity.”

Shep looked to Virgil, who shook his head.

“What about the plague?” Francesca asked “Aren’t you afraid of being contaminated?”

“Sister, it was Dis that summoned Jesus’s return.”

“Dis?”

“The disease,” the woman said, straining to adjust her blanket so she could see. “Vern, explain it to them the way Pastor Wright explained it to us at the mission.”

“My apologies. We’re the Folleys, by the way. I’m Vern, this is my wife, Susan Lynn. We flew in Saturday night from Hanford, California, for a two-day medical conference. We were scheduled to fly home this afternoon, only they shut down the city before we could leave. We wandered the streets for hours, somehow ending up at the mission.”

“It was God’s will,” Susan Lynn chimed in.

“Amen. When we arrived, Pastor Wright was telling hundreds of people that he had just spoken with the Virgin Mother. She had incarnated herself as a Christian woman. The Virgin told him that Manhattan had been selected as ground zero for Revelations because of all its wickedness.”

“What made him believe she was the Virgin Mary?” Francesca asked.

“There can be no doubt, sister. Pastor Wright actually witnessed a miracle when the Virgin cured the infected. Seeing the pastor, the Holy Mother instructed him to gather his flock in Central Park for the Rapture, that Jesus would be coming before the dawn. The Virgin would determine who would be saved and who would be cast out into Hell.”

Paolo turned to Virgil, tears in his eyes. “Then it’s true, this is the End of Days.”

The old man gave him a wry look. “There is spirituality, Paolo, and there is religious dogma. The two are rarely compatible.”

Vern’s expression darkened. “Stay your tongue, old man. Any words perceived as blasphemy may burn you and your flock.”

“It’s time!” A bank security guard wearing a fluorescent orange vest waved his handgun at the crowd. “Single file, stay together. If the Furies ask you a question, answer honestly. Each of you will be instructed where to go once you reach the amphitheater.”

The crowd jostled one another, several pushing past Shep to secure their place in line. “Vern, who are the Furies?”

“It’s Judgment Day, fella, and the Furies are the judges. All three Furies are women personally selected by the Virgin Mary.”

“But what is the Furies’ purpose?”

“To administer the Lord’s vengeance. One of the guards told me they’re especially hard on anyone who raped or killed women and children. Once the Furies begin their process of vengeance, they won’t stop, not even if the guilty party repents.”

The crowd moved quickly through the arch, the armed detail signaling for Shep and his entourage to join the line.

Paolo pulled Shep aside. “No hallucinations. You need to find a way to control yourself. Francesca and I must be among those chosen for salvation.” Before Shep could argue, the Italian and his pregnant wife fell in line behind the Folleys, trailing the couple through the Winterdale Arch.

Shep and Virgil looked at one another before joining the moving herd. They passed through the granite tunnel, following the bridle path up a steep slush-covered hill, accompanied by a howling wind that bit deep into their exposed flesh.

Patrick was operating on autopilot. His feet were numb from the cold, his legs moving just enough to keep pace with the faceless bodies in front of him. He felt lost, physically and spiritually, as if he had been transported into a waking, disorienting nightmare.

This is a wasted effort, an intentional walk before the manager visits the pitcher’s mound, takes the baseball, and pulls you from the game. Just lie down now. Lie down in the snow and the cold of night and die. How bad can it be?

“Ow… damn it!” Lost in thought, he had walked headfirst into an immovable object. It was a bronze statue, Romeo caressing Juliet in a loving embrace. Shep stared at the immortalized figures, his heart yearning again for his soul mate. Was that supposed to be a sign?

“Let’s go! Keep moving!”

The path circled through pitch-darkness, sending hands to grope the brick facing of a large building. Another sixty feet, and the forest suddenly yielded to a spectacle of religious fervor gyrating across the Great Lawn.

The assembled were everywhere, their numbers revealed by the glow of tangerine flames dancing from a thousand torches. It was an orgy of faith — forty thousand lost souls — all competing to gain entry into Heaven. Some scrambled atop the timeworn crags of Vista Rock, others pushed forward in random tides of desperation, drawn to the base of Belvedere Castle, the Gothic mansion rising above an undulating sea of humanity… the modern-day equivalent of the Israelites waiting for Moses’s return from Mount Sinai.

The building Shep and the others had just circled was Delacorte Theater. The horseshoe-shaped arena that had once hosted Shakespeare in the Park now served as the pit for a raging bonfire. The remains of a large vinyl banner hung over the amphitheater stage, its city of n.y. presents disney on ice message purposely torn to read:

Situated on a blanketed perch of rock, silhouetted by the crackling bonfire that raged warmth at their backs were three women, each clad in a black robe taken from the quarters of a circuit court judge.

The “Fury” seated on the left was Jamie Megaera. Five-foot-one-inch tall, endowed with a thirty-eight-inch D-cup, the twenty-five-year-old single mom had given up custody of her daughter three years earlier to pursue an acting career in the Big Apple. The closest she had come to performing onstage was dancing nude from the birdcage hanging from the strip club where she worked.

Jamie’s identical twin sister, Terry Alecto, was seated on the right. As a high-class prostitute, Terry earned three times more money than her sibling, $500 a trick. Like her sister, she was also separated from her family, her husband serving a nine-year prison sentence for promoting the prostitution of his wife (Terry having been a minor at the time of his arrest). The twin had no qualms about her line of work. In fact, she saw herself as providing a service, just like the local hairdresser or manicurist. She had had sex three times since she first noticed the swollen buboes on her neck.

Situated between the twins was sixty-five-year-old Patricia Demeule-Ross Tisiphone.

A product of alcoholic parents, Patricia had married when she was seventeen and spent thirty-nine years in an abusive relationship. Her daughter was addicted to pain pills, brought on by the suicide of her husband. Her sister and best friend, Marion, had moved in with Patricia after finally divorcing her own alcoholic husband, who had physically and verbally abused her since she was twenty. The two elderly women had been subletting an apartment to the twins, having “adopted” the girls as granddaughters.

By three in the afternoon, all four had been stricken with plague.

Feverish, infected by painful buboes and coughing up mouthfuls of blood, the four women had made their way to Central Park to “die in peace with nature.” Marion had gone first, succumbing in front of her favorite spot, the Bethesda Fountain’s Angel of the Water sculpture.

Patricia and the twins lay dying by her side, all three holding one another, trembling in the cold and pain but not in fear.

Pastor Jeramie Wright had administered last rites from a safe distance when the former biker had observed a woman approach the fallen females. Clad in white, she knelt on the ground and kissed all of the infected women on their open mouths, inducing them to swallow her “spit.”

Within minutes, the three dying women were sitting up. Reborn.

Having witnessed the miracle, Pastor Wright approached the woman in white. “Who are you? What is your name?”

“I am Mary the Virgin. Baby Jesus has been born. Assemble the flock, for tonight, Revelations shall come.”

Word of the Virgin’s miracle had spread quickly. By nightfall, tens of thousands of frightened, abandoned New Yorkers were flocking to Central Park to be saved.

“Each one of you shall bow before the Furies, so that they may determine your place at the Rapture. You… state your name and occupation.”

A tall woman with an hourglass figure bowed her head. “Linda Bohm. I’m visiting from California. I work as an assistant buyer at Barnes and Noble—”

“Why are you here?” the older Fury asked

“I was visiting a friend. We were on a bus. One of the passengers was coughing. None of us knew about the plague.”

“You’ve got Dis?”

She nodded, wiping back tears. “Can the Virgin cure me?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, but I don’t think so.” The twin on the right brushed her long, wavy, brown hair, smacking her gum. “Bohm sounds like a Jewish name. Linda doesn’t believe in the Virgin Mother, and that makes Linda a heretic. The Virgin Mother specifically told us to purge all heretics into the arena.”

“Are you a Jew?” asked the twin on the left.

“No. I’m… Episcopalian.”

“She’s lying. Mother Patricia?”

The older woman scrutinized the frightened tourist. “It’s so hard to decide. Still, I suppose it’s best to err on the side of caution. Toss the heretic into the flames.”

Shep’s eyes widened in horror as two orange-vested guards dragged the screaming California woman toward the amphitheater. Before he could react, a third guard doused her with gasoline and she was coldly heaved into the mouth of the conflagration, her flailing body igniting in an ethereal white flame.

Shep swooned, the black smoke rising from the pyre — not over the amphitheater but over a brick enclave surrounded by wood barracks and barbed wire herding living skeletons wearing striped uniforms and despair.

Auschwitz…

“Who’s next? You… one-armed man. Tell us your name.”

Shep shook the vision of the Nazi death camp from his mind, only to find himself staring at the voluptuous twins. Wind swirled around the jagged rock, whipping up the conflagration—

— loosening Jamie Megaera’s and Terry Alecto’s outer garments. The twins smile seductively at him, exposing their ample breasts as they stand to perform, gyrating in place.

“Come closer, Patrick Shepherd.”

“Yes, Patrick. Come closer so that we might taste you.”

He takes a step closer—

— his face battered by a blinding gust of sleet that whipped through the park, dousing torches and swirling bonfires, sending the Furies crawling down from their perch to seek cover.

Thunder rolled in the heavens, followed by a blast of trumpets that cut through the night like a scalpel. Having been officially summoned, the swell of forty thousand followers pushed forward as one, crowding the base of Belvedere Castle.

Virgil yelled at Paolo, shouting above the wind to be heard. “Find us a car, anything that’s mobile! Patrick and I will watch over your wife!”

“No! It’s the Second Coming! I need to be here!”

“Remain here, and your son shall never see the dawn. Tell him, Francesca!”

She looked at the certainty in Virgil’s eyes. “Paolo, do as he says!”

“Francesca?”

“Go! We’ll meet you at the 79^th Street Transverse.”

Unsure, Paolo looked around, got his bearings, then pushed through the crowd, heading for the stretch of tarmac known as West Drive.

A slice of spotlight cut across the Great Lawn’s periphery. For a moment, Patrick feared it was an Army helicopter, but the beam was coming from atop the Delacorte Theater. It settled on a lone figure standing on the third-story balcony of Belvedere Castle — a pale woman, dressed in a hooded white robe.

Loudspeakers crackled to life, powered by two backup generators. Cheers rose across the Great Lawn as the white-clad figure took the microphone from its stand to address her flock.

“Then the seven angels with the seven trumpets blew their mighty blasts. And one-third of the people on Earth were killed by this mighty plague. But the people who did not die still refused to turn from their evil deeds… refusing to repent their murders or their witchcraft or their thefts.”

The woman in white retracted the garment’s hood, revealing herself to her followers. Her frightening appearance elicited gasps from those standing closest to the castle’s foundation. A moment later, her image materialized on the theater’s big screen for all to see.

Beneath a shock of greasy candy-apple red hair was a face plagued hideously pale. The tip of her nose was blotched grayish purple, matching the circles beneath her olive green eyes. Scythe had rotted her teeth and gums black, and her psychotic expression was more demon than deliverer.

Virgil pulled Shep closer. “Patrick, I’ve seen this woman. She was in the VA hospital. They were moving her into an isolation ward.”

“Isolation?” Shep stared at the figure, recalling his last conversation with Leigh Nelson as she dragged him up the stairwell to the VA hospital’s roof. “One of my patients, a redheaded woman we had in isolation, she released a man-made plague…”

Mary Louise Klipot moved to the edge of the Victorian balcony, the crowd silencing itself to listen to the woman’s words. “Babylon has fallen. Our once-great city has fallen because she was seduced by the nations of the world. Babylon the great… now mother of all prostitutes and obscenities in the world, hideout of demons and evils spirits, a nest for filthy buzzards, a den for filthy beasts. And the rulers of the world who took part in her immoral acts and enjoyed her great luxury will suffer as the smoke rises again from her charred remains… the heretics who sought to destroy her… who sought to destroy America shall suffer God’s wrath.”

Yellow-tinted lights illuminated the second tier of the castle directly below Mary’s perch, revealing three hastily constructed gallows. Lined up in rows, held at gunpoint, were several hundred people, their wrists bound behind their backs, their mouths duct-taped shut. Gays and lesbians, Muslims and Hindus. Old and young, men, women, and children… all predestined to be sacrificed… at least in Mary Klipot’s jumbled thoughts.

“Bring forth the first group of heretics!”

The first three people in line — a Hindu family — were segregated from the condemned.

Manisha Patel convulsed in the grasp of hooded men adorned in the robes of the archdioceses. She screamed through her gag. Her knees buckled, her bridled angst sending her body writhing in contortions as she witnessed men grab her daughter, Dawn, and forcibly shove the girl’s head through the noose on her right.

The rope on her left was occupied by her husband, Pankaj, who was being wrestled into submission by four men dressed in religious robes.

The crystal dangling around Manisha’s neck sparked with static electricity as her own head was forcibly thrust through an awaiting noose. The rope was tightened around her jaw, forcing her up on her toes in order to breathe. “God, please spare my child. Spare my child. Spare my child!”

As Manisha moved, her hearing dulled, muffling the voice of the redheaded witch as she drove the crowd into a feverish frenzy. Barely conscious, the necromancer grunted each painful breath — an arctic inhalation that burned her throat while causing her nose to run. Her entire body trembled as she danced on the rope, waiting… waiting—

“Stop!”

Manisha opened her eyes, her dilated pupils too blurred with tears to focus.

She found him on the big screen. He was standing atop the third tier directly above their gallows, his face partially concealed within the dark hood, his right fist holding the witch upright by her hair, his bloodstained scythe poised at her neck.

Patrick Shepherd dragged Mary Klipot past the two skinhead “elders,” who lay bleeding on the stone deck, and leaned over the microphone to speak, the blinding spotlight glistening on his steel prosthetic arm. “And then another angel appeared… the Angel of Death. And the Grim Reaper said, Release those innocent people now, or I’ll cut off this ugly bitch’s head and send her and the rest of you straight to Hell.”

The moon slipped behind storm clouds, once more casting him from West Drive’s snow-covered tarmac into darkness. Unseen branches tore at his clothing and face, unseen roots caused him to stumble and fall. He was hopelessly lost, separated from his wife, exiled from deliverance. Regaining his feet, he groped his way forward another eight paces—

— only to run into fencing along the edge of a partially frozen wetland. The impasse unleashed a wave of panic. His bearings gone, his faith diminishing rapidly, he knelt in the snow and prayed, more an act of desperation than of salvation.

The wind died down. Then he heard it… the gentle strumming of an acoustic guitar.

Wiping back tears, he followed the sound, finding his way through rows of American Elms before coming to a clearing that intersected with a vaguely familiar path.

The man was in his forties, seated alone on one of a dozen benches situated around a circular mosaic. Oily brown hair hung past his shoulders. A gaunt pale face, framed by long sideburns. The signature wire-rimmed glasses were slightly tinted. He was wearing worn jeans, a denim jacket over a black tee shirt, and appeared not the least bit concerned about the cold. The guitar rested on one knee. He was measuring each chord as he felt his way through an acoustic rendition of a song recorded nearly four decades earlier:

“…playing those mind games forever, some kinda druid dudes… lifting the veil. Doing the mi… ind guerrilla. Some call it magic… the search for the grail. Love is the answer, and you know that — for sure. Love is a flower… you got to let it… you got to let grow.”

John Lennon looked up at Paolo Salvatore Minos and smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, lad. Truth is, I thought about singing “Imagine,” but that would have been a bit clichéd, don’t you think?”

Paolo knelt by the Imagine mosaic, now visible in the returning moonlight, his body shaking with adrenaline. “Are you real?”

The deceased Beatle tuned a string. “Just an image in space and time.”

“I meant… are you a ghost, or is it this damn vaccine?”

“Don’t believe in ghosts, don’t believe in vaccines either.” A roar grew louder in the distance. “Listen to them… murderous bastards. Praying for Jesus to arrive on his white steed like some rock star… as if Jesus would have any part of that chaos.”

“They’re not sinners. They’re just looking to be saved.”

“Yes, but salvation, according to John the bloody Apostle, is a right reserved only for Christians. Ironically, that would exclude Jesus, too. Toss Rabbi Jesus into the fire pit on the right, lads, the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and the rest of the lot into Satan’s pit on the left. Once they’re gone, we can reserve the infighting strictly among the Catholics and Protestants, the Lutherans, Episcopalians, Pentecostals, Mormons, Baptists… who am I forgetting? Wait, I know, we can call for another war in the Holy Land, this one to sort out whose church is the real church of God.”

Paolo grabbed his head. “No, I can’t hear this… not now, not on Judgment Day. You were such a hero to me, but this… this is heresy.”

“Aye. And be sure to count Rabbi Jesus among the heretics.”

“Stop… please!”

“Paolo, listen to me. We’re all God’s children. All of us. The real sin is man’s refusal to become what we are. Spirituality isn’t about religion, it’s about loving God. Two thousand years of bickering, persecution, hatred, and war, all caused by some silly competition over who Daddy loves best. All we have to do is love unconditionally. When each man becomes his brother’s keeper… that’s when everything changes. It’s not too late. Look at me. I grew up angry, then I found my purpose.”

“Your music?”

“No, lad. Music was merely a channel, a means of delivering the message.” He strummed a chord. “Love is the answer… Sorry, I’m a bit off-key.”

“John, I need to know… is this it? Is this the end?”

The former activist put down the guitar. “Destruction is a self-fulfilling path, but so is peace. Murder has become a billion-dollar industry, with greed and selfishness leading mankind toward oblivion. It must be stopped. As a Christian taught to believe out of fear, you need to decide what it is you want more — the destruction of the world and the so-called promise of salvation, or the peace, love, and fulfillment that transforms every human being on the planet.”

“But how can one man… I mean, I’m not you.”

“You mean you’re not an insecure, egomaniacal, angry musician who abused drugs and alcohol?”

“Come on, John. You risked your career… your life to speak out against the Vietnam War. You mobilized millions, you saved lives—”

“And how many lives have you saved by feeding the hungry? If history has taught us anything, lad, it’s that one man, one voice, one mantra can change the world. Now tell me, what is it you really need?”

Paolo wiped the tears streaming down his face. “I need… a car.”

John Lennon smiled. “Follow the path across West Park Avenue to my old building, the Dakota. There’s a parking garage next door…”

With the spotlight in his eyes he could not see the crowd, but he could feel their negative energy, their hatred. For a fleeting moment Patrick Shepherd was on the mound at Yankee Stadium, forty thousand hometown fans booing him unmercifully.

A thousand feet overhead, the night lens of the Reaper drone’s camera zoomed in on his face.

“Listen to me! Those people… they’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Liar!” Tim Burkland was standing on the back of a WABC radio van loaded with speakers. The former punk rocker and talk-show blogger was a self-described “polemic journalist,” his radical views, wrapped in religious dogma, helping to secure a New York cable show in which he battled “the lies, injustice, and cruelty of American socialism and the systematic destruction of the Church.”

“You listen, freak. Christ died for our sins, for our imperfections. Jews need to be perfected. Homosexuals need to be perfected. Muslims need to be perfected. Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim. Allowing these people to exist within our Christian society is a sin against our Lord and Savior!”

Burkland’s supporters roared, chanting, “Hang the heretics! Hang the heretics!”

The redhead squirmed in Shep’s grip, turning to face him. “And He shall destroy all who have caused destruction on Earth.”

“Shut up.” Shep yanked her head away from the microphone, catching a whiff of her foul, diseased breath. “All of this hatred, all of this negativity… it’s fueling the plague. Hundreds of thousands have already died, none of us may live to see the sunrise. Every one of us here has wronged our fellowman. Is this really the last act you want to commit on Earth before you’re to be judged? Whose side would Jesus defend if He were here? Would He support the hatred spewing from the mouths of these false prophets of the entertainment world who desecrate His message of peace so they can earn millions in book royalties and over the airwaves? Would Jesus be so easily deceived that He would stand by and allow innocent children to be hanged? Mark my words — if one of these people dies tonight by your action or inaction, then all shall be judged!”

The crowd grew silent, contemplating Shep’s words.

Dozens of men and women wearing fluorescent orange vests approached from either side of the balcony, aiming their guns. Pastor Jeramie Wright stepped out from the group, the big man pushing his followers’ shotgun barrels toward the ground. “Strong words, son. It’ll mean nothing if you harm the Virgin Mary. Let her go.”

“This woman is not the incarnation of the Virgin Mary. She’s Typhoid Mary, the one who unleashed the plague.”

“Now that’s a lie. I witnessed the miracle myself.”

“What miracle?”

“I saw her spit into the mouths of the inflicted and cure them.”

The armed men raised their shotguns.

Shep tightened his prosthetic arm around the redhead’s chest, freeing his right hand so he could pat her down.

“Rape! Murder!”

The crowd surged forward.

“Stop, or I’ll slit her throat!” He pressed the blade of his mangled prosthetic until he drew a ring of blood around her neck, halting the armed men’s advance—

— while his right hand felt for the plastic vials located in an internal pocket of the redhead’s hospital robe. Removing several, he tossed one to Pastor Wright, holding the rest up to the crowd. “This is what your so-called Virgin Mother used to cure the inflicted — plague vaccine. The sickness is called Scythe. This woman helped develop it for the government, then she unleashed it in Manhattan. And now you want to worship this murderer?”

The mob on the balcony looked to Pastor Wright — unsure.

A murmur rose from the thousands watching the big screen.

Her moment of transformation stolen, Mary Klipot struggled to free herself, growling at Shep like a rabid dog—

— while on the balcony below, Manisha Patel strained to remain on her toes, the rope’s friction peeling away the skin along her throat.

A few catcalls rose from the crowd. “Give us the murderer!”

“Give us the vaccine!”

Shep reached beneath his overcoat, pulling out the wooden case. “You want the vaccine? Here it is!” He flung the case into the crowd, then turned to face Pastor Wright and his followers. “There’s more in her pocket — you deal with it.” He shoved the redhead toward the security detail—

— as Tim Burkland and his followers reached the second-floor gallows directly below his balcony, the radical talk-show host intent on hanging the roped victims himself.

“No!” Patrick Shepherd jumped down from the third-story ledge, landing feet first on the wooden gallows. He swung his steel appendage wildly toward Burkland and his mob, backing them away—

— while on the ground, thousands of plague-infected men and women tore into one another in an attempt to grab the wooden box.

And then all hell broke loose.

The heavens bellowed, the frozen ground reverberating beneath the sonic rumble generated by five turbine jet engine Air Tractors. The industrial crop dusters rolled overhead in a standard inverted-V formation a mere two thousand feet above the park. The crowd never saw the planes or their dispersing payload — a partially frozen mist laden with carbon dioxide, glycerine, diethylene glycol, bromine, and an array of chemical and atmospheric stabilizers.

The fighting ceased, all eyes gazing at the heavens as the gas elixir mixed with the moist air, causing a chain reaction. Frozen CO2 and bromine molecules expanded rapidly, creating a dense, swirling reddish brown cloud that coagulated as it sank, reaching neutral buoyancy a mere 675 feet above Manhattan.

To the amped up crowd, the Rapture had arrived. Thousands already swooning with fever collapsed and fainted. Those still conscious dropped to their knees in fear.

The noose around Manisha’s throat loosened, the sliced rope falling across her shoulders. She bent over, wheezing, as Shep cut through her duct-tape bonds, freeing her arms.

Daughter and husband rushed to her side, the family weeping and hugging one another in an emotionally spent embrace, the kind that comes only from death’s reprieve.

Shep grabbed Tim Burkland by his coat collar, dragging the radical TV host to his feet. The blade of his mangled steel pincer pressed alongside the man’s Adam’s apple, drawing blood.

“Please don’t! I was wrong. I’m asking for absolution.”

“I’m not God, asshole.”

“You’re the Angel of Death… the Grim Reaper. You have the power to spare me.”

“You want to live? Free these people — every one of them.”

“Right away! Thank you… bless you!” Burkland crawled off—

— as an explosion of white-hot pain stole Patrick Shepherd’s thoughts in a frothing wave of delirium — the blade of the axe buried deep inside his left deltoid, tearing muscle and nerve endings before being blunted by the coupling of his steel appendage. Crying out, he collapsed to his knees in agony, his body wracked in spasms, the wound gushing blood.

The encapsulated night sky ignited to the east and north, turning what was left of the heavens into a rose-colored aurora. The military flares illuminated the face of Patrick’s attacker, who stood over him, the axe poised above her forehead, the blade dripping his blood.

“And the first angel blew his trumpet, and hail and fire, mixed with blood were thrown down upon the earth!”

Shep’s eyes widened—

— as Mary Klipot’s red hair thickens into coiling serpents, her eyes pooling with blood until the overflow pours down her stonelike face, the Medusa screeching at him.

Paralyzed in shock, Shep remained frozen in place as the axe plunged toward his skull—

— its wooden shaft intercepted by Pankaj Patel, who tore the weapon loose from Mary Klipot’s hands. “Begone, witch, before I chop off your ugly head and feed it to the ducks!”

As if tossed from a trance, Mary stumbled backward, then dashed from the gallows, disappearing down the stone stairwell.

Manisha Patel knelt by Shep. “Pankaj, he’s in shock. Look at his arm. She cut clear down to the bone.”

Dawn Patel gathered strips of torn duct tape, the ten-year-old attempting to seal the gushing eight-inch-long wound. “Mom, hold that in place while I wrap his shoulder with my scarf.”

An old man with long, silvery white hair tied in a loose ponytail bounded out of the open stairwell. “Patrick, we have to go, the military’s coming.”

“He can’t hear you,” Manisha said, her hands covered in blood. “He’s in shock.”

Virgil looked at the Patels, his blue eyes kind behind the tinted teardrop glasses. “We have a car waiting for us on the other side of this castle. Can you get him on his feet?”

“This man saved our lives, I’d carry him through Hell if I had to.” Pankaj slid his left shoulder beneath Shep’s good arm, hoisting him off the ground. Manisha wrapped the scarf tightly around the duct-tape bandage, then assisted her husband in carrying the unconscious one-armed man down the Victorian temple’s steps.

They exited Belvedere Castle to the south by Vista Rock, where Francesca was waiting. “Virgil, what happened to Patrick?”

“He’ll survive. Where’s Paolo?”

They turned as gunfire erupted to the north.

“Francesca?”

“He’s down below, on the 79^th Street Transverse. This way.”

The two black military Hummers bounded across the Great Lawn, their four-wheel-drive vehicle with its bulletproof tires tearing up the snow-covered softball diamonds. Turret-mounted guns spit lead-laced tracer fire above the crowd, scattering the multitudes like bleach sprayed upon a fire ant’s nest.

Major Steve Downey was up front in the lead vehicle, relaying instructions from the Reaper drone’s crew to the second Hummer. “He’s leaving the castle, heading south. Head southeast past the Obelisk and Turtle Pond. We’ll head west around the castle, trapping him at the 79th Street bridge.”

In order to create an uninterrupted natural flow of lakes, streams, glades, woodlands, and lawns, Central Park’s engineers had had to sink the roads that crossed the venue so that they actually ran below the landscape. Their biggest challenge had been the 79^th Street Transverse, a section of road that connected the Upper West Side with the Upper East Side at East 79^th Street. To submerge the street meant carving a tunnel out of Vista Rock, the remains of an ancient mountain that became the foundation of Belvedere Castle.

Completed in January 1861, the rock tunnel was 141 feet long, 18 feet high, and 40 feet wide. To access the transverse from inside the park, pedestrians descended a hidden stairway by the 79^th Street bridge, which overlooked the subterranean roadway.

A swarm of humanity pushed, prodded, and shoved past Francesca in the darkness as she led Virgil and the Hindu family carrying Shep away from Belvedere Castle and through the Shakespeare rock garden. Disoriented, swallowed by the fleeing masses, she quickly lost her way.

Flares exploded in the distance. The pink glare illuminated the surreal brown ceiling of clouds, the surreal light revealing the 79^th Street bridge. Feeling her way along the stone wall, Francesca located the 150-year-old niche and stairwell. Reaching for the iron gate, she was shocked to find it padlocked. “No… no!” Francesca yanked hard on the shiny new combination lock, unable to free it from its rusted hardware.

The roar of the military vehicles grew louder, drawing Patrick Shepherd from his stupor. He was leaning against a stone wall covered in ivy. Through a haze of pain, he gazed at the ten-year-old brown-skinned girl perched three steps above him. He blinked away tears, unsure if what he was seeing was real.

Hovering over Dawn Patel was a spirit. The luminescent blue apparition appeared to be playing with the girl’s braids as it whispered into her ear.

Pankaj Patel ushered the pregnant woman aside, his right hand wielding a rock.

“Dad, wait, you’ll only jam it. Let me, I can do it.” The girl grabbed her father’s wrist, attempting to stop him from smashing the lock.

“Dawn, we don’t have time—”

“Let the girl try.”

All heads turned to Patrick, who was now standing on wobbly legs.

“Go ahead, kid. Open the gate.”

Dawn slipped past her father. She spun the tumbler several times, her ear to the lock as she slowly turned the numbered dial, the spirit clearly guiding her.

Headlights appeared behind them, the military vehicles within a hundred yards.

With a metallic click, the lock’s shackle miraculously popped open.

“You did it!” Pankaj hugged his daughter.

“No time for that.” Francesca pushed the iron gate open, its rusted hinges squealing in protest. Carefully, the pregnant woman made her way down a winding set of stone steps to 79^th Street and a white Dodge Caravan, parked on the street below.

Paolo saw his wife and hurried to assist her. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“We’re being chased. Get in the car and drive — wait for the others!”

Manisha and her husband helped Patrick down the steps, followed by Dawn and Virgil. They climbed inside the van, Paolo accelerating east into the darkness, using only the parking lights to guide him through the 79^th Street tunnel.

The two military Hummers skidded to a halt by the 79^th Street bridge. Receiving instructions through the communicator in his mask, Major Downey quickly located the concealed stairwell leading down to the 79^th Street Transverse. “Damn it all!”

The iron gate was sealed shut… as if it had been welded in place.

Lost Diary: Guy de Chauliac

The following entry has been excerpted from a recently discovered unpublished memoir, written by surgeon Guy de Chauliac during the Great Plague: 1346–1348.

(translated from its original French)

Seventh Circle The Violent

The cloak over her head paralyzed. It constricted each breath. It turned her blood into lead. Her body became a corpse, supported beneath each arm and carried away into oblivion.

Down the basement steps. Dragged by the two MPs.

Leigh Nelson’s heart jumped as punk rock music suddenly blared from speakers, the Ramones’ “Blitzkreig Bop” assaulting her inside the black hood. She twisted against unseen foes forcibly pressing her body down upon a hard surface, her head angled lower than her feet.

“Oh God oh God, please don’t do this! I swear I had nothing to do with that woman!”

She kicked blindly at powerful hands that restricted her legs, her assailants duct-taping her ankles to the backboard. When they taped down her chest, the terrified physician and mother of two expelled a bloodcurdling scream into the black hood.

Hey ho, let's go… shoot ’em in the back now—

A hand pinned her skull to the board while raising the hood above her mouth and nose.

What they want… I don't know. They're all revved up and ready to go—

In the frightening darkness in the dank basement in her worst nightmare a thousand light years from home, the suddenness of cold water poured into her upturned nostrils sent the bound woman into a full-body convulsion. Liquid suffocation. No breath to hold or release. The terror a hundred times worse than drowning in an ocean or pool.

The board was raised. The music lowered.

She vomited up water, her purged lungs struggling to gasp a life-sustaining breath. Finally, her esophagus cleared as she wheezed air and tears.

Captain Jay Zwawa spoke slowly and clearly into her right ear. “You helped the Klipot woman escape, didn’t you?”

Leigh sobbed and choked, unable to find her voice.

“Lower her again—”

She shook her head emphatically, buying precious seconds, the confession rasped. “I helped… I planned everything!”

“Did you inject her with vaccine?”

“Yes! Ten cc’s into her IV.”

“What was in the vial?”

“Tetracycline… other stuff.”

“What other stuff?”

“I don’t know, I can’t think–

The board was lowered.

“Wait! Get me inside your lab, I’ll figure it out!”

Zwawa signaled his men to cut her loose, ending a performance necessitated by Lieutenant Colonel Nichols and the Pentagon Nazis who still insisted torture yielded valuable field intelligence. The fact that Leigh Nelson had been cooperating up until then was a moot point, as was the reality that the terrified physician would have confessed to the Kennedy assassination and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping had it meant avoiding another waterboarding session.

“Get her warm clothes and clean sheets for her mattress.”

“Sir, shouldn’t we take her to the lab?”

Heading up the basement stairs, the captain ignored the MP.

The white van raced east through a tunnel of rock nature had made impervious to the all-seeing eyes of the Reaper drones. The pitch-darkness forced Paolo to use his headlights. He powered them off the moment the vehicle cleared the tunnel, and the billowy brown sky reappeared overhead, the light from the luminous pink flares dimming as he distanced them from Belvedere Castle.

Ahead was Fifth Avenue. Central Park’s eastern border was blocked by a wall of cars and buses.

Paolo swerved onto the sidewalk, bulldozing his way south in the darkness.

Thump… thump! Thump… thump! Each collision rocked the van like a speed bump. Francesca was seated up front between her husband and Shep. With outstretched arms, the pregnant woman braced herself, using the dashboard. “Paolo, those are people you’re running over!”

“Dead people.”

“Get off the sidewalk.”

“And drive where? The streets are blocked.”

Manisha was in the second seat, holding Dawn’s head in her lap. Her daughter was coughing violently, expelling specks of blood. The necromancer turned to her husband, desperation and anger in her eyes. “We should have never left the cab.”

“Easy to say now,” Pankaj retorted. “How much longer could we have remained there?” The van lurched again, the jarring blow forcing everyone into seat belts.

“Paolo, enough!”

“They’re dead, Francesca. We’re still alive.”

“Excuse me,” Manisha interrupted, “but how are you still alive? None of you even looks sick.”

Francesca motioned to Shep. “Patrick has plague vaccine. At least he had it. He threw what was left into the crowd.”

Shep struggled to turn around, the pain coming from his severed left deltoid pushing him in and out of consciousness. “I still have vaccine left.” He half grinned at Virgil, seated behind him. “I emptied the box into my pocket before I stormed the castle.”

Reaching into his right jacket pocket, he retrieved three small vials of the clear elixir.

Virgil stopped him before he could pass them back. “What about your wife and daughter? Have you forgotten the reason we’re trying to cross Manhattan?”

Manisha’s expression of hope vanished, her mouth quivering. “Your family… where do they live?”

“Battery Park.” Shep grimaced as he searched his jacket pockets again.

“When did you last… I mean, are you certain—”

“Manisha!”

“I am so sorry, forgive me. My husband is right. I cannot take from your family to save mine. You’ve already risked your life—”

“No wait, it’s okay. There were eleven vials to start, I still have six left, two for Bea and my daughter, one for Virgil. Virge, maybe you should take yours now?”

“Hold on to it for me.”

Shep passed the three vials back to Manisha. She trembled as she accepted the gift of life, kissing Patrick’s hand. “Bless you.”

“Just be careful, the drug causes wicked hallucinations. Back in the park… I imagined something hovering over your daughter. I swear, it looked like an angel.”

Dawn raised her head. “You saw her?”

“Saw who?”

Her hands shaking, Manisha hurriedly uncapped the vial. “Dawn, swallow this. It will make you feel better.” She poured the liquid into her daughter’s mouth, fearing the one-armed man’s line of questioning.

“Her? Are you saying what I saw was real? What did I see? Answer me?”

Dawn looked to her mother.

“My name is Manisha Patel, this is my husband, Pankaj. I am a necromancer, a person who communicates with the souls of the dead. The spirit you saw hovering over Dawn, she shares a special bond with our daughter.”

The van lurched again, the impact nearly popping a shock absorber.

Francesca screamed, slapping Paolo on his arm. “What’s wrong with you? She just said she speaks to the dead. Stop running them over!”

“Sorry.” Spotting a break in the wall of cars, he veered across Fifth Avenue, working his way east along 68^th Street.

“Manisha, this soul… you called it a she?”

The necromancer nodded at Shep, swallowing the tasteless vaccine. “She has been my spiritual guide ever since we moved to New York. She warned us to leave Manhattan, but we were too late. How is it you were able to see her?”

Shep winced as the van rocked wildly, the pain in his shoulder excruciating. “I don’t know. Like I said, the vaccine causes hallucinations. To be honest, that’s all I thought it was.”

“What you glimpsed,” Virgil interjected, “was the veiled Light of the soul. Remember what I told you back in the hospital, that our five senses lie to us, that they act as curtains that filter out the true reality of existence. In order to be visible, light requires an object to refract upon. Think of deep space. Despite the presence of countless stars, space remains dark. Sunlight only becomes visible when it reflects off an object, like the Earth or the moon. What you saw was this companion soul’s Light reflecting off the girl.”

“Why her?”

“Perhaps the girl possesses something very special, like her mother.”

“And what is that?” Pankaj asks.

Virgil smiled. “Unconditional love for the Creator.”

Manisha gazed up at the old man, tears in her eyes. “Who are you?”

The high-rise apartment was heavy with the scent of aroma candles. The dying flames flickered within designer glass jars aligned across the granite kitchen table, reflecting off the stainless-steel surface of the Sub-Zero refrigerator. Powerless, the double-sized doors lacked the vacuum to remain sealed.

Forty-four-year-old Steven Mennella moved through the condominium as if he were wearing a lead suit. Steven was an NYPD sergeant, his wife, Veronica, a career nurse who had recently taken a job at the VA Hospital.

Steven grabbed a scented candle from the kitchen and carried it into the master bedroom. Leaving it on his bedside table, he stripped off his uniform, meticulously hanging it up in the walk-in closet. Searching by feel, he removed a recently pressed collared white shirt from a hanger, along with his favorite gray suit. He dressed quickly, then selected from a tie rack the patterned tie his daughter, Susan, had given him on his last birthday. He knotted the silk tie, slipped on his leather belt and matching dress shoes, then did a quick check in the closet mirror.

For a brief moment, he contemplated making the bed.

Leaving the bedroom, he returned to the living room. The apartment was situated on the thirtieth floor, twenty feet above the dense layer of an ominous brown maelstrom. At the moment, the night sky above the balcony was starry and clear, offering a bizarre view of a cloud city — Steven imprisoned in this penthouse nightmare… alone.

Veronica was lying on the U-shaped leather couch. The Veterans Administration nurse’s pale face was no longer pained, her blue eyes fixed in a glassy, red-rimmed open stare. Steven had washed the blood from his wife’s lips and throat, covering the frightening black tennis-ball-sized welt on her slender neck with the wool blanket.

Leaning over, he kissed his deceased partner on her cold lips. “I left the kids a letter, along with instructions… just like we talked about. Wait for me, hon. I’ll only be a minute.”

Steven Mennella blew out the candles. Clearing his throat, he strode toward the open French doors leading out to the balcony. The full moon was low on the horizon, revealing the thick bank of mud-colored clouds gyrating below. A frigid wind greeted him as he gracefully stepped up onto his favorite chaise lounge, balanced himself on the aluminum rail—

— and stepped off the balcony.

Icy crystals formed on his flesh as he plummeted through the noxious man-made chemical cloud, the wind howling in his ears…

There was no warning. One moment, Paolo was veering around a mailbox—

— the next, the van was struck by a human meteor.

The hood detonated, the impact crushing the engine block and bursting both front tires. Paolo jammed on the brakes, sending the crippled vehicle skidding sideways into a light pole. Antifreeze exploded out of the damaged front end, soaking the windshield, which looked like a burst watermelon across the spiderweb shattered glass.

The horn wailed and died, yielding to the whimpering chorus of hyperventilated breaths. Francesca palpated her strained swollen belly. “What the hell was that?”

“Everyone out of the car.” Shep kicked open the passenger door, ventilating the van with toxic steam from the antifreeze. For a moment, he stared at the remains of Sergeant Steven Mennella, the corpse embedded in the hood, face-up. Then he turned away. “We need to find another vehicle that runs.”

Not waiting for the others, he sloshed down East 68^th Street, his legs calf deep in a moving stream of cold water by the time he reached the intersection of Park Avenue. Main must’ve broken. Maybe a fire hydrant?

Then he saw the nightmarish scene and prayed it was the vaccine.

Park Avenue’s six-lane boulevard resembled a scene straight out of Hades. High-rise office buildings and condominiums formed an ominous corridor squeezed beneath a ceiling of roiling brown clouds. Functioning as insulation, the man-made atmosphere had encapsulated the heat from dozens of car fires, the rising temperatures melting the snow that had been piled high along the curbs, transforming one of Manhattan’s major arteries into a river. Contaminated with gasoline, the floodwaters sprouted pockets of flames that burst and receded across the hellish scene.

Whomp.

The distant sound was somehow familiar, causing the hairs on the back of Shep’s neck to stand on end.

Whomp. Whomp…

His eyes locked onto an object as it dropped out of the clouds a block away. He never saw the impact, but he heard it as it struck a parked vehicle, setting off a car alarm.

Another object dropped, then two more. Shep swooned, having realized what he was witnessing.

Manhattan was raining its dead.

But not every object was corpse. Plague-infested suicides leapt from candle-lit apartment windows, dancing in free fall before pulverizing the roofs and hoods and trunks of the countless vehicles that clogged Park Avenue, their insides splattering on impact.

Paolo joined Shep, the two men dumbstruck. “Is this an illusion?”

“No.”

The flood became a swiftly moving current as it swept around Park Avenue onto 68^th Street, dragging an object with it. The glow from a burning vehicle revealed the body of a small child.

The image triggered a collage of remembered images that staggered Shep. His heart raced, his senses blinking in and out of reality until suddenly he was no longer in Manhattan—

— suddenly he is back in Iraq, standing along the banks of the Shatt-Al-Arab waterway.

It is dusk, the horizon purging sunlight into orange flames, squelching the heat of day into a tolerable climate. David Kantor is with him, the medic assisting an Iraqi physician. Dr. Farid Hassan drags a headless body from out of the shoreline’s weeds.

David inspects the remains. “Looks like more of al-Zarqawi’s work. Dr. Hassan?”

“I would agree.”

Patrick Shepherd, two months into his first tour of duty, responds with a belch of acid reflux. “What I wouldn’t give to line those bastards up one at a time.”

The Iraqi physician exchanges a knowing look with the American medic. “Dr. Kantor tells me this is your first time in Iraq, yes?”

“Yeah.” Shep searches the weeds for more dead.

“He says you played professional baseball. My son, Ali, he also loved sports. A natural athlete, my son.”

“Hook us up. I’ll teach him how to throw a slider.”

“Ali died four years ago. He was only eight years old.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“But these are just polite words. Are you really sorry? How can you possibly feel the sadness in my heart?”

A cramp-like stitch grips Patrick’s chest. He winces in pain, yet neither David nor Dr. Hassan seem to notice.

In the distance, a small boat approached. A lone figure stood in the bow, its cloaked outline silhouetted by the setting sun.

“If you were truly sorry, Sergeant, you would be home playing baseball, telling your many American fans that the war is wrong. Instead, you are in Iraq, carrying an assault rifle, pretending to be Rambo. Why are you in Iraq carrying an assault rifle, Sergeant Shepherd?”

An internal switch flips, his blood again running cold. “In case you didn’t get the memo, we were attacked.”

“And who attacked you? The September 11 hijackers were Saudis. Why aren’t you in Saudi Arabia, killing Saudi children?”

“American soldiers don’t murder children. I mean, with all due respect, no one ever means to hurt a child. Help me out here, Dr. Kantor.”

“Sorry, rook, it’s time you opened your eyes. There is no Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny’s dead, and everything you think you learned about war from Hollywood and Uncle Sam is bullshit. You think Cheney and Rumsfeld give a rat’s ass about WMDs or Iraqi freedom? Newsflash, Shep: This invasion was strictly about money and power. Our job is to control the populace so Washington can control the oil and make a bunch of rich people a whole lot richer. And those billions allocated for reconstruction? The money’s being spent on military bases, lining the pockets of private contractors like Haliburton and Brown and Root. Bechtel was given the contract to control the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and they’re reaping a fortune while the locals are left with water that’s no longer potable. Money and power, kid, and the real casualties of war are the children. Of course, I doubt that story will ever air on the nightly news.”

“Again with the children? Sir, with all due respect… what are you talking about?”

“Half a million dead children, to be precise.” The Iraqi physician’s dark eyes fill with rage. “When you invaded our country back in ’91, your military purposely targeted our civil works, a calculated yet immoral act that violated the Geneva Convention. You destroyed the dams we used for irrigation. You destroyed our pumping stations. You destroyed our water-purification plants and sewage-treatment facilities. My little boy was not killed by a bullet or explosive, Sergeant Shepherd. My son died from diphtheria. The drugs I would have used to treat Ali’s inflamed heart were banned from entering my country, thanks to American and British sanctions imposed by the United Nations.”

The flatboat moved closer. Shep could make out a hooded figure standing in the stern. Paddling slowly.

“We are not a backward nation, Sergeant. Before the first American invasion, Iraq possessed one of the best health-care systems in the world. Now we are fraught with cholera and typhoid, diarrhea and influenza, Hepatitis A, measles, diphtheria, meningitis, and the list goes on and on. Five hundred thousand children have perished since 1991. Hundreds more continue to die every day because we no longer have access to safe drinking water. Human waste is rampant, leading to infectious diseases.”

Shep spots the body, submerged in weeds…

“—one in eight Iraqi children now dies before its fifth birthday, one in four is chronically malnourished.”

He lifts the seven-year-old girl’s drowned corpse to his chest, his body convulsing as he recognizes her face—

“So please, do not tell me you are sorry for my son’s death. You have no idea what it feels like to lose a child.”

— Bright Eyes.

“Patrick, watch out!”

Flames flared up as a pool of gasoline ignited. Shep staggered back, clutching his face.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded at Paolo, pulling his hands away. His blood ran cold. The flatboat from his daydream was moving slowly down Park Avenue.

A lone figure stood in the wood boat, the Grim Reaper using the stick end of his scythe to guide his craft along the flooded thoroughfare.

Shep backed away as the current swept the craft down Park Avenue and onto 68^th Street. The Angel of Death turned its wretched face to him as he passed. The supernal creature nodded, beckoning him to follow.

Shep slogged through the flooded street after him.

The flatboat spun out of the current and over the submerged curb, coming to rest along the sidewalk leading up to the darkened entrance of a neoclassical limestone structure. Nearly a century old, the four-story building, located on the northwest corner of East 68^th Street, had large arched windows that wrapped around the first floor and octagonal windows on the upper floor, all situated below a cornice and balustrade roofline.

An engraved sign reads: council of foreign relations.

The floodwaters were washing down the curbside gutter, which inhaled everything the rapids drew into its orifice. Including the remains of the dead.

The Grim Reaper stared at Shep. The two orbital cavities within its skull were filling with dozens of fluttering eyeballs, the unnerving image resembling a honeycomb overflowing with bees. The Death Merchant waved the olive green blade of his scythe at the sewer.

The flooded crevice widened into a massive sinkhole. Tainted water swirled down the oval gullet as if it were a drain, the aperture twenty feet across and still growing. Pools of gasoline ignited, illuminating the subterranean depths below in a fiery orange radiance.

The Reaper pointed a bony index finger at the void, silently commanding Shep to peer into the abyss.

Patrick refused.

The Angel of Death raised its scythe, pile driving the blunt end of the staff against the flooded sidewalk. The resounding tremor unleashed a ring of foot-high waves that cascaded down 68^th Street.

Shep glanced around. Paolo, Francesca, Virgil, and the Patels stood rigid as statues, as if they now existed in an alternative dimension from his own. It’s just the vaccine… it’s just another hallucination.

He moved to the edge of the breach. Knee deep in water, he braced his quadriceps muscles against the tug of the icy current as he looked down.

“Oh, God… no. No!”

Patrick Shepherd was peering straight into Hell.

Stone Street was a narrow avenue in Battery Park, its road paved with ancient cobblestone, the ground level of its buildings serving as storefronts to many popular eateries. Seventeen hours earlier, locals and tourists had been ordering lunch at Adrienne’s Pizzeria and buying desserts at Financier’s Pastries. Five hours later, they were crowding the Stone Street Tavern, the pub one of many public refuges for out-of-towners with no place to go to escape the mandatory curfew.

By 7 P.M., the free-flowing alcohol had transformed Stone Street into a raucous block party. Music blared from battery-powered CD players. A doomsday “anything-goes attitude” had paired women off with men they had just met, converting the backseats of parked vehicles into temporary bedrooms.

Families with young children abandoned Stone Street, initiating a pilgrimage up Broadway to Trinity Church.

By 10 P.M., the music had stopped playing. By ten thirty, the inebriated turned violent.

Fights broke out. Windows were smashed, businesses vandalized. Women who had consented to sex hours earlier were gang-raped. There was no police, no law. Only violence.

By midnight, Scythe had delivered its own version of justice to the debauchery.

Five and a half hours have passed since the calendar date changed to the dreaded twenty-first of December, the winter solstice transforming Stone Street into a fourteenth-century European village.

There were no lights, just the orange glow of embers smoldering from steel trash cans. A ceiling of mud-colored clouds churned surreally overhead. The cobblestone streets and alleyways were littered with the dead and dying. Melting snow had drenched their remains. Thawed blood flowed again from their nostrils and mouths — drawing rats.

Rats outnumbered the dead and dying sixty to one. High on fleas infected with Scythe, the vermin converged upon the fallen in cannibalistic packs, their sharp teeth and claws gnawing and stripping away husks of flesh, each meal contested, igniting another blood-frothed frenzy.

The black Chevy Suburban turned slowly onto Stone Street. For the last five hours, Bertrand DeBorn’s driver had squeezed and bulldozed and maneuvered the truck around endless avenues of abandoned vehicles that had restricted their speed to six miles an hour. Reaching another impasse, Ernest Lozano swerved onto the sidewalk, the truck’s thick tires rolling over human speed bumps, crushing rodents refusing to abandon their meals.

Sheridan Ernstmeyer was seated next to him, riding “shotgun.” The female assassin had killed anyone approaching within ten feet of the Suburban.

Bertrand DeBorn stirred in back. The secretary of defense’s glands were swollen, the low-grade fever building in his system. Eyes closed, eyelids fluttering, he rasped, “Are we there?”

“No, sir. We’re about a block away.”

“What the hell’s taken so—” DeBorn succumbed to a twenty-second-long coughing fit, his rancid breath filling the vehicle. The two bodyguards readjusted their own face masks.

Lozano turned right on Broad Street, New York Bay coming into view. The street was completely gridlocked with vehicles, the sidewalks clogged as well.

“Sir, we’re blocked. But the apartment building’s just up on the right.”

“The two of you bring her to me. Shepherd’s daughter, too.”

The two agents looked at one another.

“Is there a problem?”

“No, sir.” Ernest Lozano shifted the gear into park. Exiting the vehicle, he followed Sheridan Ernstmeyer down the corpse-laden, rodent-infested street, heading for the apartment building of Beatrice Eloise Shepherd.

For Patrick Shepherd, time appeared to have stopped. The floodwaters, the flames, the members of his entourage — everything within the physical dimension Virgil had referred to as the Malchut was frozen.

Several hundred feet below his Park Avenue curbside perch was another reality.

The widening aperture reveals three distinct levels of the seventh circle of Hell. The first, running beneath the CFR Headquarters for as far as his vantage will allow, is a vast river of blood, as long and as wide as the Mississippi, fed in part by the gradually progressing waterfall sweeping its refuse from the Sixty-eighth Street gutter.

The stench of the river is as unbearable as the plight of those caught in its chop. Somehow, Shep can sense their aura — a deep, slowly reverberating malevolent pulse of energy, its negative frequency as asphyxiating as Hell’s stink. Men and women. Naked and bleeding.

The souls of the violent.

Countless thousands, their faces appear, then disappear, like tainted baptized meat within a broiling vermillion broth. Gasping desperate sustaining breaths before being forced to submerge once more. Clawing over one another, their focus is on saving themselves rather than on working together to charge the shoreline.

Patrolling the shallows and shoreline are the Centaurs. Half man, half horse, the creatures greet every emerging soul with the business ends of their pitchforks, stabbing the condemned until they are forced to retreat back into the river.

It takes Shep a moment to realize that these wretched men and women are surfacing en masse not just to breathe; they appear to be attracted to the Light coming from above—

— his Light!

Patrick shudders, terrified. Tyrants and murderers… is this the fate that awaits me?

“Help me. Please.”

Shep’s eyes track the plea to a crater-sized hole just beyond the shoreline. The vent reveals a second level beneath the first — an alien forest, the trees leafless, bearing only thorns. The voice is coming from a man in his forties, wearing a gray business suit, collared white shirt, and patterned tie.

Shep recognizes him. It’s the guy who landed on the van… the suicide.

As he watches, the man’s feet become rooted in the ashen soil. His limbs stiffen into branches, his fingers sharpening into thorns.

Flapping their way from branch to branch on this newly formed suicide tree are Harpies. Half female, half bird, the creatures are searching for leaves, plucking each green growth the moment one sprouts from the human/tree appendage.

Shep cannot see what is happening below the Wood of the Suicides and into the third level, but he can hear the echoes of screams, accompanied by tortured shouts of blasphemy, all aimed at God.

A now-familiar sensation causes Shep to look up. The Reaper is staring at him through eyes composed of hundreds of fluttering pupils, the creature’s grin curdling Patrick’s blood. A bony hand reaches out from the dark robe for him—

— another hand forcefully dragged him away from the seventh circle of Hell.

Shep shouted as he wheeled around to face Virgil.

“Are you all right? No, you’re not, I can see it in your eyes.”

Dumbfounded, Shep looked around for the Grim Reaper. Both the Angel of Death and the aperture were gone.

“Patrick?”

“I can’t take it anymore, Virgil. The hallucinations… the guilt. But worse, far worse, is the loneliness… always feeling empty inside. It’s like a poison that slowly eats away at every cell in my body. Only the fear of what happens to suicides in the afterlife has kept me from killing myself all these years. I feel so lost… surrounded by darkness.”

“It’s not too late, Patrick. There is still time to change, to bring Light into your vessel.”

“How? Tell me!”

“Allow yourself to feel again. Where there’s love, there’s always Light.”

“All I feel is emptiness.”

“That’s because you’re afraid to feel. Stop bottling up your emotions. Allow yourself to experience pain and suffering. You must be willing to face the truth.”

“The truth about what? What do you know, Virgil? What did your buddy, DeBorn, tell you about me?”

Paolo rushed over to join them, his eyes wild, his mind in the throes of his own hallucination. “Look! In the sky! Do you see it? A demon!”

Shep and Virgil looked up.

The Reaper drone was hovering just below the swirling brown clouds, its crimson camera lens spying on them from above.

Virgils squinted at the flying object. “It’s not a demon, Paolo; it’s a military drone. Where are the Patels?”

A gray Volkswagen van swerved around the sidewalk, its tailpipe belching exhaust as it skidded to a halt, the mechanical beast’s heavy idle scattering waves across the flooded street. Pankaj was driving, his daughter and wife up front. Francesca was lying down in the third seat.

Pankaj rolled down his window. “Soldiers are coming. Get in!”

Shep yanked open the sliding back panel, ushering Paolo and Virgil inside. The relic bashed and squeezed its way south along Park Avenue, heading for Lower Manhattan.

Eighth Circle Fraud

The stairwell was empty, a good sign. David Kantor reached the second-floor landing, his legs dead tired, his quadriceps burning with lactic acid from the long bike ride.

Running out of time… come on!

Grabbing the rail, he dragged himself up the steps, each exhaled breath crackling in his headpiece.

The journey through Manhattan on the ten-speed bicycle had been treacherous. David’s military equipment had played havoc with his balance, his boots barely able to remain on the pedals. But the bike’s narrow width had given him the ability to maneuver through gridlocked streets, and the quiet ride helped keep him from being noticed by the military.

As it turned out, they were the least of his problems.

Racing through the Upper West Side, he had made the mistake of following the Avenue of the Americas. The CBS Building. The Bank of America Tower. W.R. Grace. Macy’s. The stretch of city blocks known as “skyscraper alley” had been transformed by the roiling brown clouds hovering below the glass-slab structures into a gothic scene resembling something straight out of a Wayne D. Barlowe nightmare. Burning cars, flooded streets. Bodies falling out of bizarre clouds… flying sacks of flesh and blood. A woman nosedived onto the roof of a yellow cab. Not from high enough to kill her, so she lay moaning, broken and disfigured.

The sudden jolt of adrenaline had quelled his fatigue. He sprinted past Rockefeller Plaza, refusing to gaze at the multitudes of dead piled high on the ice rink. He continued on through the Garment District and Chelsea. Passing through the arch at Washington Square, he entered Greenwich Village, a Bohemian neighborhood where he had spent most of his college years. He cut across the sidewalks of his alma mater, New York University’s campus deserted, its student body thankfully on Christmas break. He diverted past his parents’ old row house, traversing by the familiar basketball courts on Desalvio and Bleecker Street, where he had logged thousands of hours of pickup games. Like the ice rink, the asphalt rectangles had become drop-off points for Scythe’s unburied dead, the adjacent playgrounds a battleground for unbridled gang members determined to turn the Village into a shooting gallery.

Without warning, machine-gun fire erupted from out of the pitch, and suddenly he was back in Iraq, the unseen assassins seemingly nowhere and everywhere. One bullet grazed his shoulder, another ricocheted off a manhole cover and struck his bike, forcing him to take cover between rows of abandoned cars. Remaining low, wheeling the ten-speed through the narrow spaces, he managed his way out of the contested turf into SoHo.

The trendy shopping area named for its location South of Houston Street resembled a demilitarized zone. Eight hours earlier, waves of locals had run amok, looting and vandalizing the neighborhood’s shops. They had been met by SWAT teams wearing environmental suits and little tolerance. Bullet-ridden remains had been left over shattered store windows beneath the colorful tattered awnings as a warning to other curfew violators.

It had taken David Kantor almost ninety minutes to finally reach Tribeca.

Situated between SoHo and Manhattan’s Financial District, just west of Chinatown, Tribeca derived its name from its location — the Triangle below Canal Street. Once an industrial district, the neighborhood had become one of the Big Apple’s wealthiest areas, its warehouses having been converted into residential buildings and lofts, many providing second homes to some of Hollywood's biggest stars.

Claremont Prep was located just south of Wall Street in the former Bank of America International Building. The private elementary, middle, and high school consisted of 125,000 square feet of classrooms, art studios, laboratories, a library, café, gymnasium, outdoor play areas, and a twenty-five-meter swimming pool. The student body came from New York's five boroughs as well as New Jersey. Well-to-do parents, seeking the best education for their offspring. Twelve hours earlier, the entire school had been in lockdown.

Now it was left to David to see if anyone had survived.

Having accessed the Bank of America building’s stairwell, the Army medic continued climbing. He was panting heavily by the time he arrived on the third-floor landing. He tried the stairwell’s fire door. Locked. He banged on the steel barrier, using the butt end of his assault rifle. No answer.

Standing back, David aimed the gun barrel at the lock, then squeezed off a round, shredding the mechanism. Terrified over what he might find, he yanked open the door and entered the dark confines of his daughter’s school.

They had driven without lights, cruising along sidewalks and tearing through store awnings. Leaving Park Avenue, Pankaj had tried to avoid the major thoroughfares, finding it easier to maneuver south down the less congested northbound streets.

Midtown East was especially dangerous, the military presence still heavy surrounding the United Nations. Diverting west again across Park Avenue, Pankaj managed to work his way through Murray Hill before cutting back to the southeast through the quiet, older areas around Gramercy Park.

Entering the East Village, he had had little choice but to head south on the Bowery.

The crystal around Manisha Patel’s neck immediately began to vibrate. “No, this is the wrong way.”

“What choice do I have? Traffic is backed up from the two bridges; there’s no place to drive.”

“My spiritual guide says no. Find another way. Take us south through Chinatown.”

The Minoses were in the third seat. Paolo comforted his pregnant wife, who was lying down with her head in his lap, her swollen belly contorting. “Your son is abusing his mother.”

“Look how well he kicks. He will be a great soccer player.”

“He wants out, Paolo. I was afraid to tell you. My water broke back in the park while we were waiting for you to return.”

Overwhelmed, feeling utterly helpless, Paolo could only muster enough strength to squeeze Francesca’s hand. “Try to hold on, my love. We’ll be at the docks soon.”

Virgil was seated in the middle seat next to Shep. Exhausted, the old man snored in his sleep.

Patrick Shepherd leaned against the driver’s side back door, his injured left shoulder throbbing, the constant pain keeping him awake. Through heavy eyelids, he gazed at the young Indian girl seated up front between her parents, his psyche somehow drawn to her aura.

Ever alert, she sensed him staring. “Are you in terrible pain?”

“I’ve hurt worse.”

Unbuckling her seat belt, the girl turned around, kneeling on her seat to face him. “Give me your hand.” She smiled at his hesitancy. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”

He reached out with his right hand, allowing her to take it in her soft, delicate palms. Palpating his flesh, she closed her eyes, her fingertips resting on his pulse. “So rough. So much pain…”

“I was a soldier.”

“This is much deeper… a pain that comes from a prior journey made long ago. A terrible misdeed… so many dead. The burden weighs you down.”

“A prior journey? What kind of—”

“—something else… a great disappointment, all-consuming. Your actions haunt you.”

“Dawn!” Manisha turned around, apologetic. “Patrick, my daughter… she is young—”

“No, it’s… all right.” He looked at the girl. “Your name is Dawn?”

“Yes.”

“You have such pretty brown eyes. When I first looked into them back in Central Park… well, never mind.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s just… they remind me of someone I knew.”

“My mother says the eyes are the windows to the soul. Perhaps we knew one another in a prior life.”

“Perhaps. And what do you see when you look into my eyes?”

She made eye contact, staring easily at first, then deeper.

Patrick felt himself trembling.

The girl’s expression changed. Her lower lip quivered. Losing her composure, she suddenly released his hand and hugged her mother.

Shep sat up, trying hard not to freak out. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

The sobbing girl buried her face in Manisha’s lap.

“Come on, kid, don’t leave me hanging.”

“Forgive my daughter, Patrick, she didn’t mean to upset you. Reading a person’s face is tiring work on a good day. Dawn is exhausted, but there is nothing to fear. Dawn, tell Patrick you are sorry for upsetting him.”

“I’m sorry for upsetting you, Patrick. Please forgive me.”

“Yeah… sure, no worries.” Unnerved, he turned away, staring coldly out the driver’s side backseat window. Somewhere in the distance was FDR Drive, beyond that the East River. There was only darkness out there, save for two towering infernos — the Manhattan Bridge to the north, the Brooklyn Bridge to the south. The two expanses had been destroyed seventeen hours earlier, yet the incendiary thermite used in the blasts still burned, the chemical compound melting right through the steel girders—

— just as it had on September 11, 2001.

Three buildings had collapsed at near-free-fall speed. Two had been hit by hijacked planes, the third building — Building-7, a forty-seven-story structure — had folded like a deck of cards hours later, floor after floor, the skyscraper having been hit by nothing more than debris. While most Americans never questioned what their eyes had seen, scientists and engineers were baffled by events that defied every known law of physics, engineering, and metallurgy known to man.

In the end it came down to a simple numbers problem: How could jet fuel, which burned off rapidly at 800 to 1200 degrees Fahrenheit liquefy steel girders, which melt at 2500 degrees, more than twice the jet fuel’s highest recorded heat? There was no doubt steel had melted; molten steel was videotaped pouring from windows moments before the collapse, and a lake of molten steel had burned beneath the World Trade Center foundation for months after 9/11, despite firefighters’ best efforts to quell the fire with millions of gallons of water and Pyroccol, a chemical-fire suppressant.

Homeland Security had shut down all access to Ground Zero, effectively preventing any close inspection of the debris; still, resourceful engineers had managed to collect plenty of particle samples — their analysis revealing the presence of a foreign substance that should not have been in the wreckage: Thermite. A pyrotechnic material used by the military and construction engineers to collapse steel structures, thermite generated temperatures at a superhot 4500 degrees. Thermite also burned for extended periods of time. And it could be applied as a paint.

In response to independent experts’ unsettling discoveries, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a thousand-page report containing explanations that contradicted every known case study of high-rise-building fires. The report never accounted for thermite residue; nor did it acknowledge the mysterious lake of molten steel. NIST officials also refused to address the series of explosions reported by hundreds of eyewitnesses moments before the towers collapsed. Or the videotape evidence of Building-7's collapse, which clearly showed squibbs — puffs of smoke created by demolition explosions — coming from each floor as the tower pancaked at near-free-fall speed.

More than four hundred independent architects and engineers disputed the NIST findings — to no avail. America had been attacked, and Americans wanted retribution, not ridiculous conspiracy theories.

It was during Patrick Shepherd’s second deployment that he first learned of the controversial 9/11 Truth Web sites from a fellow soldier. The accusations infuriated him. So what if the towers were known health hazards, filled with asbestos? So what if Building-7’s collapse was reported by the BBC forty minutes before it actually happened? Or that the tower housed the second largest covert CIA station in the country, as well as the SEC offices investigating Enron’s and WorldCom’s frauds. True, Larry Silverstein, the new owner of the World Trade Center, had shut down a few of the Twin Towers’ elevator shafts for “upgrades” a month before 9/11, but so what? How could any loyal Americans believe that elements within their own government could have aided and abetted such a nefarious terrorist attack, using the event as an excuse to invade Iraq? It was utter nonsense.

The mainstream media refused to buy into it, and most Americans, Patrick among them, refused as well. But as the years went by, and the deployments mounted, Patrick’s mind began to warm to the evidence, and the toxic thoughts turned his heart stone-cold.

He learned that modern history was littered with false-flag events — acts of violence, organized by ruling elites designed to direct blame at an enemy in order to amass the public’s support. In 1931, the Japanese blew up sections of their own railway as a pretext for annexing Manchuria. In 1939, the Nazis fabricated evidence of a Polish attack against Germany to justify their invasion of Poland. In 1953, the United States and Britain orchestrated “Operation Ajax,” a false-flag event that targeted Mohammed Mosaddegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. Nine years later, President Kennedy stopped Operation Northwoods, a Department of Defense plot that would have blamed Cuba for a rash of incidents, including the hijacking and crash of a US commercial airliner. Years later, another false-flag operation — the Gulf of Tonkin incident — escalated the Vietnam War.

Three thousand innocent people had been murdered on September 11. As horrific as it was, the numbers were almost negligible when compared to the history of modern warfare. Hitler had exterminated six million Jews. Pol Pot had systematically eliminated over a million Cambodians. The Chinese were massacring Tibetans on a daily basis. Genocide had wiped out a million in Rwanda. The US invasion had killed a million Iraqis… even though Saddam had had no weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq considered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda a sworn enemy.

To the military-industrial power brokers and Wall Street’s elite, three thousand casualties were nothing compared to Iraq’s oil reserves and a trillion dollars in no-bid contracts and military expenditures.

Seated in the backseat, Patrick recalled the moment the truth about September 11 had finally clicked. It was the last day of his fourth and final deployment, the day he had realized that the country he loved had been taken over by the corporate elite, that he had killed innocent people to support their empires of greed, and that he was destined to burn in Hell for his actions, never to see his soul mate again.

Staring at the burning bridges, Patrick registered the familiar copper taste of hatred in his mouth. It was a hatred that had blinded him for the better part of eleven years, an anger so deep that it smothered every ounce of love he had ever felt, destroying every decent memory, blocking every speck of Light. And in this sudden moment of clarity, another truth surfaced its ugly head…

“They’re going to incinerate Manhattan.”

His fellow passengers turned to face him.

Paolo gripped his wife’s hand. “Who’s going to incinerate Manhattan?”

“The feds. The Department of Defense. It’ll happen soon, probably when the sun comes up. It might have happened hours ago had they gotten hold of this vaccine.”

“How do you know this?” Pankaj asked.

“Back at the VA hospital, I overheard Bertrand DeBorn threatening to spill the beans about anthrax and the attacks back in 2001.”

“Kogelo’s secretary of defense?”

“What does anthrax have to do with—”

“The anthrax originated from CIA-run labs. I’m guessing Scythe was designed in a similar lab.”

“For what purpose?” Paolo asked.

“To invade Iran. Since we lack the manpower to take over another country, the intel guys came up with a new plan. We unleash a biological like Scythe, gut the country’s militia, then ride in with the vaccine and negotiate peace.”

“I don’t believe that,” Francesca stated emphatically. “I refuse to believe it. This is Manhattan, the Big Apple. No one’s going to incinerate the most populated city in America.”

“They don’t care,” Shep said, closing his eyes. “We’re simply numbers on a ledger sheet, acceptable losses. They’ll incinerate Manhattan, blame Scythe on a bunch of terrorists, and the next thing you know, it’ll be World War III.”

Alone in the darkness, marooned on the moldy mattress on the damp concrete floor, Leigh Nelson’s body convulsed as she heard someone cross the first floor directly overhead. Terror gripped her mind as the heavy-footed soldier descended the wooden steps.

She cried out as he approached.

“No more waterboarding, I promise. I brought you something to calm your nerves. Can you sit up?” Jay Zwawa helped Leigh Nelson into an upright position, the female physician’s muscles trembling. He handed her the open bottle of whiskey.

She forced it to her lips and drank. Drained a third of the bottle before he could take it from her. Her insides were on fire, the internal heat soothing her frayed nerves.

“You okay?”

“Why did you torture me?”

“Why? Because I was following orders. Because the world’s gone crazy. Because common sense got tossed out the window the day presidents decided chicken hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld and DeBorn knew more about running the military than men who had actually served in the armed forces.”

“I hate you and your damn wars, and your insane biowarfare programs. I hope and pray every maggot and warmonger involved burns in Hell.”

“I suspect you may get your wish.”

She cowered as he reached into his jacket pocket—

— withdrawing a cell phone. “Call your family. Tell them you’re okay. Nothing more.”

With a trembling hand, she took the device and dialed.

“Hello?”

She broke into a sob. “Doug?”

“Leigh! Where are you? Did you get out of the city? I’ve been calling you all night!”

She gazed up at Captain Zwawa through a pool of tears. “I’m okay. I’m at an Army base on Governor’s Island.”

“Thank God. When will you be home? Wait… are you infected?”

“I’m okay. Are you okay? Are the kids safe?”

“We’re all here. We’re okay. Autumn’s right here next to me. Autumn, you want to say hi to Mommy?”

A groggy child’s voice said, “Hi, Mommy.”

Leigh burst into sobs. Her throat constricted as she talked. “Hi, baby doll. Are you taking good care of Parker and Daddy for me?”

“Yes, Mommy. Are you taking care of Patrick for me?”

Leigh’s heart pounded in her ears.

Jay Zwawa’s eyebrows rose, his expression darkening.

“Honey, Mommy has to go. I love you.” She powered off the phone, terrified. “I took him home to meet my family. He bonded with my little girl.”

The captain pocketed the cell phone. Without another word, he trudged up the bare wooden steps, locking the door behind him.

Leigh Nelson crawled off to a corner of the basement and retched.

Ernest Lozano followed Sheridan Ernstmeyer into the apartment building lobby, their guns drawn. The small marble foyer was dark, save for a lone yellow emergency light blinking along the ceiling.

Shadows crawled. Moans rose from coughing victims. Muffled screams reached out from first-floor dwellings. The foul air reeked of death.

Lozano was losing his composure quickly. “This is bullshit. DeBorn’s infected, he could be dead before we even make it back outside.”

“Shut up.” The female assassin searched for a stairwell, her cardiovascular system amped up on adrenaline and amphetamines. “Over here.” She yanked open the fire door, releasing a cat. The skittish house pet scurried past them into the darkness.

“Floor?”

“Huh?”

“Shepherd’s wife, what floor is she on?”

“Eleven. Sheridan, this is a fool’s errand.”

Turning to face him, she aimed the barrel of her 9mm at his mask. “DeBorn’s a survivor, he’ll make it out of here alive. Will you?”

“You’re crazy.”

“You mean I’m a crazy bitch. That is what you were thinking, isn’t it, Ernie? Go on, make a menstrual reference. We’ll see who will be the one bleeding.”

The eyes peering at Lozano from behind the woman’s mask were frenetic. “Let’s just find Shepherd’s wife and get the hell out of here.”

She poked his chest with her index finger. “Yeah, that’s what I thought you said.” Backing away, she turned and headed up the concrete stairwell.

The death of a child was profoundly unnatural, a perversion of existence. Children were simply not supposed to die before their parents. When it happened, it unleashed boundless grief, a pain so intense, the emptiness so encompassing that it could spiral the bereaved parent into oblivion.

David Kantor had been to war. He had treated children missing limbs. He had held their lifeless bodies in his arms. After five deployments spanning two wars, the medic had never grown immune to any tragedy involving children. Only this was different. A sight so heart-wrenching that only the overwhelming need to find his daughter prevented him from a mental breakdown.

David staggered from one classroom to the next, the beam of his flashlight uncloaking Scythe in its most evil form. Infected by plague, the youngest had huddled together on the floor like a newborn litter of puppies, drawn to one another’s body warmth. Human snowflakes stained in blood.

She won’t be here. These are the elementary-school students. Find the seventh graders.

David heard someone moaning. Moving quickly toward the sound, he cut across the corridor into the library, his flashlight homing in on the source.

The headmaster was lying on the carpeted floor, his head propped on an encyclopedia. Rodney Miller opened his eyes, each labored gasp exhaling a breath of blood.

“Miller, it’s David Kantor.”

“Kantor?”

“Gavi’s father. Where is she? Where are the older kids?”

The headmaster struggled to form words. With a final gasp, he muttered, “gym.”

A driving wind whipped the East River into a rabid chop, stirring the muddy cloud bank hanging over Manhattan into an atmospheric maelstrom. Below the toxic ceiling of carbon dioxide and chemical compounds, the survivors of Scythe huddled on rooftops, each patch of elevated asphalt a refugee camp, the buildings’ apartments having long been abandoned to the dying, the streets to the dead.

Pankaj Patel ground the gears of the gray Volkswagen microbus as he drove southwest along Henry Street, the bonnet of the clunky five-speed relic sideswiping awnings and everything else littering the tight sidewalks. He passed beneath the remains of the Manhattan Bridge. Turned right on Catherine Street. Drove another two blocks before he was forced to stop.

The north — south thoroughfare known as the Bowery was a virtual pileup of cars, buses, and trucks that occupied every square foot of asphalt and sidewalk as far as the eye could see. Most of the passengers caught on the Bowery had long since abandoned their vehicles, seeking bathrooms and food. Those few who had steadfastly remained inside their cars managed to avoid the pandemic into the night, only to find themselves trapped on their island of sanctuary with nowhere to go.

The silhouette of Chinatown’s redbrick buildings and rickety fire escapes loomed beyond the Bowery’s moat of vehicles like a medieval castle.

Pankaj turned to the others. “We have two choices: Remain here and die, or attempt to pass through Chinatown on foot. It’s a short walk to the Financial District from here, then it's clear on to Battery Park and Paolo’s brother-in-law’s boat. Manisha?”

“My crystal has calmed. My spiritual guide is in agreement.”

“Virgil?”

“Agreed.”

“Paolo?”

“Francesca’s water broke, she just had her first contraction. What happens when the baby starts coming?”

“We’ll have to make do… find a cart or something to wheel her around in. Patrick?”

Virgil nudged Shep awake. “Your wife and daughter are close. Are you ready to continue on?”

“Yes.”

Exiting the minibus, the seven survivors made their way across the Bowery on foot, climbing and sliding over the hoods and trunks of cars until they reached an eighteen-wheeler. The produce truck was lying on its side, blocking their entrance into Chinatown.

Sixteen hours earlier, the Asian enclave had been a crush of humanity, thousands of tourists filtering through dim sum restaurants and bargain hunting along the cluttered narrow streets. By mid-afternoon, the tourists had fled. By dusk, the Asian ghetto had segregated itself from the rest of Manhattan. Organizing quickly, Chinatown’s leaders had cleared the streets of vehicular traffic as far north as Canal Street, ordering access into the community sealed off from all outsiders, the borders barricaded with over-turned delivery trucks.

Pankaj signaled them to follow, the psychology professor having located an accessible fire escape. “We’ll climb up to the roof, then make our way south to Columbus Park.” Scaling a trash bin, he reached up and grabbed the lowest rung of a steel ladder, drawing it down from its slide axis.

Minutes later, the group was ascending the side of the building, the rusted slats of the fire escape’s steps creaking beneath their weight.

The emergency generator had been powered on, its tentacles rewired to distribute electricity only to the building’s six elevators. In the lobby, the process of disseminating Racal suits began, the self-contained hazardous-environment apparel loaded onto carts and sent by military escort to the suites still harboring survivors.

On the thirty-third floor, President Eric Kogelo and his staff had already received their suits. The leader of the free world has been awake for almost thirty hours, under enormous pressure. Throughout the long night, he had been assured by CDC physicians that his fatigue and low-grade fever were simply a result of exhaustion and not Scythe. Kogelo had pretended to accept their verdict but had chosen to isolate himself inside his private office “just as a precaution.”

That the buboes had swelled along his groin and not his neck had helped hide the truth from the rest of his staff. Only John Zwawa at Fort Detrick knew that the president had been infected, the colonel hell-bent on delivering a cure by the time Kogelo arrived at Governor’s Island.

“Mr. President, the vaccine is in Manhattan, being acquired as we speak. If the buboes only appeared six hours ago, then we still have time. I know it’s difficult, sir, but try to remain calm.”

For a while, Kogelo had remained calm, tasking himself to leave video messages to his wife and children, his vice president, Congress, and the American people. Internal hemorrhaging had forced him to stop, each blood-drenched cough raking his lungs with pain.

Now, as he lay on the leather couch in his Racal suit, he prayed to his Maker that he be allotted a little more time… to see his kids again, to hold his wife—

— and to forestall the war that would end all wars.

One level after another, they continued their ascent on the rickety fire escape. Manisha kept a watchful eye on Dawn, Pankaj assisting Virgil. Paolo helped Francesca up the narrow trellis-like steps, his wife’s progressing labor forcing her to pause every eight to nine minutes to “ride” a contraction.

Patrick was the last to step off the fire escape onto the eight-story building’s summit — an expanse of tarmac and gravel that revealed a disjointed maze of silhouetted rooftops. Some were flat, others angled, almost none equal in height, creating a labyrinth of shadows that concealed brick ravines and interconnecting bridges, pipes and heating ducts, air conditioners and chimney stacks, antennae and satellite dishes — all jutting out at varying degrees in the darkness.

“This way,” said Pankaj, certain of the direction yet unsure of the path. Ushering them to the west, he resumed the lead—

— when the asphalt suddenly rose before him in undulating waves, the shadows becoming people. Huddled beneath blankets, hundreds of Asian men, women, and children awaken to greet the invaders with utter silence, the dying light from their lanterns casting an unworldly aura upon the confrontation.

A boundary had been violated. Weapons were drawn.

Before Pankaj could react, before Manisha could register the vibrations of her crystal, before ten-year-old Dawn could scream or the Minoses pray, the mob cowered back into the shadows, dropping to their knees in fear.

Patrick stepped forward, his head and face concealed within the shadow of his ski jacket’s hood, his prosthetic arm held aloft as if it were the Angel of Death’s scythe.

“Paolo, I think it’s time I took the lead.” Pushing past the stunned psychology professor, Shep ventured forth, his presence parting the terrified sea of survivors.

The gymnasium was located on the ninth floor. David tried the doors — locked. Using the butt end of his assault rifle, he banged on the small rectangle of glass, shattering it. “Hello! Is anybody in there?” He shined his light inside. Heard rustling… whispers. “Who is it?”

“David Kantor, I’m Gavi’s father. I am not infected.”

Someone approached. A heavy chain was removed from the inside of the door. It was pushed open, and David entered. Dark inside, save for a fading emergency light. The students were spread out on the hardwood basketball court, silhouetted in blackness.

“Who’s in charge here?”

“I am… sort of.” The young man was sixteen. “There are eighteen of us in here. No one’s infected, as far as we can tell. We locked ourselves in around two in the afternoon.”

“Is Gavi Kantor in here? Gavi?”

“She’s not here.” A seventh grader stepped forward, an African-American girl wrapped in a blanket. “She wasn’t in school today.”

She wasn’t in school! Did she cut classes? Maybe she’s not even in Manhattan…

“Dr. Kantor, do you have enough environmental suits for all of us?”

A young boy in first grade tugged on his pant leg. “I wanna go home.”

Home? David ground his teeth. If they leave, they’ll become contaminated. If they stay, they’ll die anyway. What do I do with them? Where can I take them? There’s no way off the island…

They gathered around him like moths to a flame. “Please don’t leave us.”

He looked down at the seven-year-old boy. “Leave you? Now why would I do that? I’m here to take you home. But before we can leave, everyone needs to cover their mouths and noses with something. Use a scarf or a towel, even a sock… anything you can find. You older kids, help out the little ones. Once we leave the gym, you can’t touch anything… you need to breathe through your scarves. Leave your belongings here, you don’t need them. Only your jackets, gloves, and hats.”

The sudden reverberation of her crystal caused Manisha to jump. She looked around with a mother’s paranoia. “Pankaj, where’s Dawn?”

Her husband pointed ahead to where their daughter was walking hand in hand with the hooded figure of Patrick Shepherd. “She insisted. Is something wrong?”

“Everything is wrong,” Manisha whispered, trembling. “Our supernal guide is close.”

“Patrick, can we stop for a moment, I need to rest.” Dawn released his right hand and sat on an air vent, using the back end of her coat for padding against the frosted surface. “Sorry, my feet hurt.”

“Mine, too.” He leaned against the corner of the rooftop’s five-foot ledge, gazing below at Mott Street. “Columbus Park is only a few more blocks. Would you like me to carry you? I can put you on my back, just like I used to do with my own little…”

His voice trailed off, his eyes focused on the street below.

“What is it, Patrick? What do you see?”

The Chinese were efficient, he had to give them that. As the plague-infested bodies began multiplying, they had moved quickly, disposing of their dead directly into the sewers in the most efficient way possible — by dropping them headfirst down the open manholes. At some point, the seemingly endless procession of corpses had piled up below, clogging the makeshift burial ground. As a result, every manhole on Mott Street was stuffed with bodies, the legs of the last deceased protruding out of each open aperture upside down.

Inverted bodies, protruding feet first from the earth… The Scythe vaccine latched on to the long-extinct memory as if hooking a fish, dragging it up from the abyss and reeling it to the surface.

Wisps of gray mist rolled over Mott Street—

— revealing a muddy landscape that stretches for a thousand miles in every direction. The dead are everywhere — mottled, rotting corpses. Most lie in layers in the muck, others remain buried headfirst up to their waists in the bog. Prolonged exposure underwater had peeled the drowning victims’ clothes from their flesh, in some cases the flesh from bone.

It is a valley of the dead, a fermenting graveyard of tens of thousands, the aftermath of an unimaginable natural disaster… or an act of God.

Shep snapped awake, his body trembling, his mind still gripped by the terrifying images. Instinctively, he dropped to his knees and hugged Dawn with his one good arm, his shaken spirit somehow soothed by her aura.

“Patrick, what is it? What did you see?”

“Death. On a scale I could never imagine. Somehow… it was my fault.”

“You must go.”

“Yes, we have to leave this place.”

“Not us. Just you.”

“What are you talking about?” He pulled away—

— and that was when he saw the spirit. The luminescent blue apparition appeared to be hovering over Dawn, whispering in her ear, instructing the child as she spoke. “You must leave us to tend to another flock.”

“What flock? Dawn, is your spiritual companion telling you this?”

“Ten levels below us is Malebolge, a pouch of evil where the innocent are being accosted. Go to them, Patrick. Free them from servitude. We will meet you outside this circle of death when you have completed the task.”

Patrick regained his feet, his eyes transfixed on the Light as he staggered backward—

— nearly toppling over Virgil. “What’s wrong, son? Not another vision?”

“This was something different. Something much worse. Genocide. Destruction. The End of Days. Somehow, I was there for it, only it wasn’t me. But I caused it. I was directly involved!”

The others gathered around.

“Try to remain calm, we’ll sort this out.”

“I have to go.”

“Go where?” Paolo asked. “I thought you needed to find your family?”

“I do.” He looked from Virgil to the girl, the spirit’s light fading behind her. “But first I need to run a quick errand.”

She was drifting between the pain of consciousness and the finality of darkness, the terrifying presence of the three circling predators ultimately keeping her from passing out.

She was bent over the tabletop, her jeans pushed down around her ankles. Her body trembled, her skin crawling as they moved in for the kill.

She squeezed her eyes shut, but could not escape the abusive aftershave of the one called Ali Chino. The lanky Mexican lurked before her; still she refused to look at him. She gagged as he licked her neck. She trembled as the blade of his knife glided past her throat and down her blouse. He removed each button with a flick of his wrist. She involuntarily jumped back, discovering Farfarello.

The Sicilian was twenty. He tore off her bra and groped her breasts from behind, his hands as callused and cold as his soul. Her mind blotted out the Sicilian and Mexican, the two followers having been relegated to leftovers at the feast. It was the alpha male who caused her to tremble, the demon pulling down her panties, groping her from behind.

Wanting her for himself, Cagnazzo shoved Farfarello aside. The Colombian was a psychopath. A monster who lived to inflict pain and suffering. Gavi Kantor cried out as the twenty-seven-year-old’s blistered fingers probed her with one hand, readying himself with the other. He leaned forward. Whispered in broken English, “This is going to hurt. It’s going to hurt bad. And when I’m done, I’m going to do it again with my gun.”

For thirteen-year-old Gavi Kantor, there was nothing left. No more fear, no more spent nerves, no emotions or prayers. The butterfly had been broken on the wheel, the last hours of her existence taking with it her identity, her future, her past.

The Colombian bent her over the desk, getting no resistance.

And then, suddenly, there was another presence in the room — another predator.

There are three of them… and the girl. She is in her early teens, her shirt torn open and bloodied, her lower body naked, stretched belly down across a desk. Dark eyes greet him as he enters the den of iniquity. The teen cries out. The garbled words need no translation.

“This is not our battle, Sergeant. Leave the premises now!”

“Not this time.”

Cagnazzo looked up, startled. “Who the fuck are you?”

Patrick Shepherd’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m the Angel of Death.”

The prosthetic arm whipped through the air, its curved blade slicing cleanly through the front of Cagnazzo’s neck and esophagus until the steel edge lodged between the Colombian’s fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. Shep kicked the dead man loose from his scythe, then turned his attention to the other two slave traders.

Farfarello, pale as a ghost, crossed himself and fled.

Ali Chino, his body paralyzed in fear, watched the bloodstained blade loop upward from the ground, splitting the inverted V between his legs — tearing through his jeans as it sliced open his testicles. The castrated Mexican youth screamed in agony, then fell forward, clutching his gushing privates… knocking himself out on the desk.

Gavi Kantor covered herself, her body trembling. “Whoever you are, please don’t hurt me.”

“I won’t hurt you.” Shep retracted his hood, revealing himself to the girl.

The teen dressed quickly, staring at his face in the flickering candlelight. “I know you…. How do I know you?”

“You’re shivering. Here, take my coat.” He slipped off the ski jacket, handing it to her.

“My name is Patrick. We need to get out of here.” He searched the dead Colombian, removing a.45 caliber Smith & Wesson from his waistband.

“They kidnapped me… they were going to… oh my God—”

He put his arm around her as she lost it. “Shh, it’s okay. I’m going to get you out of here. Is there anyone else here? Any other girls?”

“They’re locked up in a room. Down the hall.”

“Show me.”

Sheridan Ernstmeyer arrived at the eleventh-floor landing first, sweat pouring beneath her rebreather mask and down her face. For a well-deserved moment, she luxuriated in the intense burning sensation in her quadriceps, the endorphin high always accompanying a good workout.

Turning back to the stairs, she looked down — Ernest Lozano lagged two floors below. “Anytime, Mr. Y-Chromosome. Preferably before the apocalypse.”

No answer.

“What’s the apartment number? I’ll handle this myself.”

“Eleven-oh-two. Why didn’t you tell me that nine floors ago?”

“You needed the workout. Man up while I grab Shepherd’s wife.” She yanked open the fire door, gun in hand.

The apartment was close to the stairwell, second door on the left. She knocked loudly several times. “Mrs. Shepherd, open up! Hello?” She banged again, readying herself to kick down the barrier.

Someone inside approached. “Who is it?” The voice belonged to a woman in her thirties.

“I’m with the military, Mrs. Shepherd. It’s very important I speak with you.” She held her identification up to the peephole.

A dead bolt was retracted. The door opened—

— revealing a thirty-two-year-old African-American woman dressed in a flannel bathrobe.

“Beatrice Shepherd?”

“No, I’m Karen. Beatrice is my mother.”

“Your mother? No, that can’t be right. Your husband… your estranged husband, Patrick… he needs to see you.”

“I’m not married, and my mother has been a widow for twenty years. I think you have the wrong person.” She attempted to shut the door, only Sheridan’s boot was in the way.

“You’re lying. Show me some ID.”

“You need to leave.”

The assassin aimed her gun at the woman’s face. “You are Beatrice, aren’t you?”

“Karen?”

The voice came from somewhere in the dark living room. Sheridan pushed her way in. Candlelight revealed a figure sprawled out on the sofa.

Fifty-seven-year-old Beatrice Eloise Shepherd lay in a pool of her own sweat and blood, the woman’s body wracked with fever. An obscene dark bubo, the size of a ripe apple, protruded above the neckline of her silk pajamas. She was clearly on death’s door—

— and she was clearly not the estranged wife of Sergeant Patrick Ryan Shepherd.

The female assassin backed away, then turned and left the apartment—

— running into Ernest Lozano in the corridor. “So? Where’s Shepherd’s wife? I thought you were handling it, hotshot.”

Raising the 9mm pistol, Sheridan Ernstmeyer calmly and coldly shot the agent three times in the face, bone shrapnel and blood spraying across her mask. “We had the wrong person.”

Stepping over the corpse, she hurried for the stairwell, enjoying the fleeting rush of endorphins flowing in her brain.

Ninth Circle Treachery

Major Steve Downey sat in the front passenger seat of the black military Hummer, his gaze focused on the live video feeds coming from the two Reaper drones hovering over Chinatown. For nearly two hours, his team of Rangers had maneuvered their military vehicles along sidewalks littered with the dead and dying, progressively working their way south as they tracked their quarry through Lower Manhattan. And then, somehow, Shepherd and his entourage had evaded them. By the time the Reapers had reestablished contact, Downey’s crew had reached Houston Street.

The east — west thoroughfare that separated Greenwich Village from SoHo was a wall of vehicles that could not be negotiated. With chopper extractions banned because of the cloud cover and the UN evacuation set for seven thirty, time was running out quickly.

“Base to Serpent One.”

Downey grabbed the radio. “Serpent One, give me some good news.”

“The ESVs have landed. ETA for ESV-2 is three minutes.”

“Roger that.” Downey switched frequencies to speak with his second-in-command. “Serpent Two, the road’s being paved, prepare to move out.”

While the backbone of the US Army’s ground forces remained the Abrams and Bradley tanks, these heavily armored vehicles, weighing upward of sixty-seven tons each, often required months to transport to the battlefield. For assignments requiring rapid deployment, the Defense Department developed the Stryker Force, eight-wheeled attack vehicles that weighed only thirty-eight thousand pounds, could be airlifted via a single C-130 aircraft, and possessed enough armor to stop small-arms fire.

The two vehicles that had been off-loaded from flatbed barges in Battery Park and Hudson River Park were M1132 Stryker Engineer Support Vehicles, each fitted with a seven-foot-high, two-foot-thick arrowhead-shaped steel tractor blade mounted to the Stryker’s front end, converting the ESVs into fast-moving bulldozers.

Having deployed at Pier 25 in Tribeca, ESV-2 plowed its way east along Houston Street doing thirty miles an hour, its driver viewing Manhattan through night-vision and thermal-imaging cameras as he rammed his V-shaped blade into the gridlocked avenues, pushing vehicles aside and flipping buses as the Stryker cleared a twenty-foot-wide path through Lower Manhattan. Reaching Broadway, the all-terrain vehicle turned right, obliterated the wall of cars blocking the two black military Hummers, then headed south, the two Ranger teams following in its wake.

David Kantor exited the building’s southwest stairwell, the seven-year-old boy in his arms, the rest of the students in tow. The older teens looked around, in shock. “What happened?”

“Oh my… there are dead people everywhere.”

“Eww!” Children screamed, panicking the rest of the herd.

“It’s okay. Stay calm.” David looked around, desperate to find a means of transportation, even as he realized the futility of the task. “Kids, do you know where the school keeps its buses?”

“I do!” The sixth-grade girl pointed west down 41^st Street.

“Good. Okay, everyone stay together now and watch where you’re walking.” He followed the middle schooler through a tight passage between rows of cars, the older teens plying him with questions.

“Did these people all die of plague?”

“How are you gonna drive a bus? The streets are jammed.”

The sound was faint — popping sounds — like distant firecrackers.

“Manhattan’s been quarantined. How’re you going to get us off the island?”

“We were safer inside. Maybe we should go back?”

“Quiet!” David stopped to listen.

The disturbance was growing louder, approaching from the north, the popping becoming more of a bashing of metal on metal, accompanied by a deep, rumbling sound.

“That’s an ESV. The military must be clearing an evacuation route. Kids, come on!”

Sheridan Ernstmeyer heard the eruption of metal on metal the moment she exited the building lobby, the sound resembling a demolition derby. She approximated the location, then hustled back to the SUV. “Bert?” She shook the secretary of defense awake.

“Where’s Shepherd’s wife?”

“Dead,” she lied, “but the military’s here. There’s an ESV moving north on Broadway. Must be an extraction team.”

Bertrand DeBorn sat up, his mask spotted with specks of blood. “Get us out of here.”

The survivors — seven foreign girls wrapped in blankets — followed their one-armed angel and the American teenager through pitch-dark corridors and up a set of creaky wooden steps to the first floor of the Chinese souvenir shop.

The brothel’s 270-pound madam was standing before the store’s front door, the Mexican woman’s rotund mass blocking the exit. “And where do you think you are going, Chuleta?”

Patrick Shepherd stepped in front of the girls, aiming the dead Colombian’s gun at the madam’s head. “Move it or lose it.”

The madam smiled through bloodstained teeth. “You do not frighten me. I am protected by Santa Muerte.”

“Never heard of her.” Raising his right knee, Patrick launched a front-thrust kick into the obese woman’s belly, sending her crashing backward through the store’s plate-glass window.

The girls scampered over the body of their former keeper and into the night.

Pankaj Patel led his family and fellow plague survivors down Bayard Street to the perimeter fence. Columbus Park’s asphalt basketball courts and synthetic baseball field were covered in snow, the reflective alabaster surface offering a peek at the extent of Scythe’s infestation upon the rodent population.

Hundreds of black rats moved as one in a symbiotic dance of tug-of-war. Rendered mad by the perpetual bites of ten thousand starving fleas, competing packs of rodents swarmed and retreated across the basketball court like schools of fish. At the center of this blood-laced scrum were the remains of an elderly couple, their ravaged torsos left recognizable only by their tattered outer garments, which provided grappling materials for tiny claws and teeth.

The visceral battle caused the six survivors to back away from the fence.

Francesca moaned, her contractions coming more frequently with every passing minute. “Paolo, do something!”

“Virgil, my wife’s having our baby.”

“And what would you have me do?”

“Lead us away from this horrible place. Get us to the waterfront and my brother-in-law’s boat.”

“What about Patrick?”

“We can’t wait for him any longer. If what he said was true, then we’re running out of time.”

Manisha nodded at Pankaj. “He’s right. We cannot wait any longer.”

“Mom, no!”

“Dawn, sweetheart, whatever he’s doing, he’ll find us when he can.”

“Perhaps you should build a golden calf?”

The four adults turned to face the old man.

“Pray to the idol, perhaps it will grant you the salvation you seek.”

“Virgil, my wife is about to have a baby. We’re surrounded by death—”

“—and who led you across this valley of death? Who inoculated your wife and child from plague? Manisha, who was it who risked his own life to save your family from the hangman’s noose? Yet here you are, ready to abandon your leader as easily as the Israelites abandoned Moses at Sinai. Faith is easy when things are going right, when the challenges remain negotiable, not as much so when faced with your own mortality. But what if this is the very purpose of the physicality? To test one’s faith, to battle the ego, to trust the system.”

Pankaj broke into a cold sweat. He could hear the rats growling thirty feet behind him as they tore into morsels of human flesh. “What system, Virgil? What are you advising us to do?”

“Act with unquestioning certainty.”

Dawn pointed. “There he is!”

Shep was jogging toward them, accompanied by a small group of girls, ages ten to eighteen. The youngest — a Mexican child, clung to his chest.

Manisha burst into tears of shame, immediately connecting Patrick’s “errand” to the sex slaves he had just liberated. She took the child from him, allowing Shep to catch his breath. “We need to hurry, the sun’ll be up soon.”

Nodding at Virgil, the one-armed man led his growing flock west on Worth Street toward Broadway.

The Boeing CH-47F Chinook commercial transport helicopter flew low over New York Harbor, its tandem rotors kicking up the frigid waters, its pilots purposely avoiding the ominous layer of brown clouds swirling several hundred feet overhead. Reaching the East River, the heavy-lift airship headed north, following the narrow waterway to Lower Manhattan, landing at the United Nations Plaza.

A procession of delegates exited the lobby of the Secretariat Building, each survivor dressed hood to boots in an environmental suit. The ambulant occupied the permanent seats situated in the center of the Chinook. Those on stretchers were secured in the cargo area—

— President Eric Kogelo among them.

The sound reached them first — booming metallic collisions that rattled the night. The lights appeared next, blazing and bright, silhouetting a wave of vehicles tossed from the monster's path as it crashed its way east on Worth Street.

"This way!" Shep led them south into Foley Square.

Engines growled in the distance. Strobe lights illuminated the columns of the surrounding civic buildings. A Reaper drone loomed overhead, its camera catching Shep as he attempted to lead his followers up the US courthouse steps — the same steps Bernard Madoff had trod years earlier. As with the captured Ponzi schemer, there was no escape.

A midnight wave of Rangers swarmed in from all sides. They pinned Patrick Shepherd to the concrete, their flashlight beams blinding his eyes as they pawed every square inch of flesh and stripped the clothing from his body. He screamed in agony as two Rangers wrenched his steel prosthetic from his lacerated shoulder, tearing nerve endings and tendons as they amputated the limb by force.

Patrick writhed on the ground, his wounded body in spasms, his mind set on fire. He heard Dawn cry out in pain. He registered Paolo’s protests as gloved hands performed a cavity search on his laboring spouse.

The terror ceased, its victims left naked and shivering on the snow-covered lawn. Major Downey stalked the area. “Report.”

“Sir, we found three vials of Scythe vaccine on Sergeant Shepherd, nothing more.”

Downey straddled Patrick, pressing his boot to the amputee’s bleeding left deltoid. “Where’s the rest of the vaccine?”

“I sent it to your mother as a thank-you for last night.”

The Ranger wound up to kick Shep in the face when Virgil, lying on the ground beside him, grabbed his ankle. “He inoculated these survivors. Take them with you, they remain plague-free.”

“No one’s going anywhere, old man.” Downey activated his internal headset. “Serpent to base, we’ve acquired the Scythe vaccine.”

“Well done. We’ll meet you at the extraction point in five minutes.”

“Roger that. Okay, people, let’s move!” The Rangers double-timed it back to their vehicles—

— as a black Chevy Suburban skidded to a halt in front of the Hummers, causing the men to aim their assault weapons. A woman wearing a cloth mask climbed out of the driver’s seat, her hands raised. “Don’t shoot! I’m with the Secret Service. I have Secretary of Defense Bertrand DeBorn in back. We’re to be part of your extraction.”

Downey opened the back door of the Suburban, gazing at the white-haired man, who appeared to be unconscious. “It’s him all right. And he’s got full-blown Scythe. Load him on board, we’ll get him into a Racal suit back at the docks.”

“What about her?” One of the Rangers pointed to Sheridan Ernstmeyer.

“She goes, too.”

The female assassin breathed a sigh of relief.

Across the park, a slight figure in a white Racal suit stepped out from behind a statue. The Tibetan monk removed his hood, his opaque eyes glittering like diamonds at Bertrand DeBorn.

The secretary of defense gurgled on a larynx full of blood, tumbling from the open rear door of the Suburban.

One of the Rangers checked for a pulse. “He’s done.”

“Leave him, we’re running out of time.” Major Downey climbed into the front seat of the lead Hummer.

“Wait!” Sheridan Ernstmeyer grabbed at the closing door. “What about me?”

“Sorry, lady. Looks like your ticket out of here just croaked.”

Before she could react, the two military vehicles executed wild U-turns across the snow-covered park lawn, skidding their way back down Worth Street.

To the east, the slice of horizon beneath the false brown ceiling of clouds had turned gray, summoning the dawn. Retrieving their clothing, the accosted survivors dressed quickly, shivering in the cold.

Patrick dressed, his mangled left shoulder on fire. With his bare right hand, he gathered a clump of snow to press against the wound — revealing a small in-ground plaque:

Paolo comforted his wife, covering her with his overcoat. “It’s all right. God will not abandon us in our hour of need.”

“Wake up, Paolo. Look around you. God has abandoned us.”

“You should restrict your tongue from negativity. Especially with a child to be born.”

Francesca turned to see the bizarre-looking Asian. “Who the hell are you?”

Gelut Panim offered a slight bow. “A humble servant of the Light.”

Pankaj looked up. Seeing the Elder, he rushed over. “How?”

“It’s not important.” The monk scanned the group. “I seek the righteous one. Where is he?”

Heads turned as a yellow school bus barreled around Centre Street, skidding to a halt.

The front door squeaked open, releasing an ominous figure dressed in black.

The women screamed.

David Kantor removed his face mask. “It’s all right, I won’t hurt you. I saw the military vehicles drive off, and—”

“Dad?”

David turned, his heart pounding in his throat as his eyes sorted through a crowd of scantily clad women—

— finding his lost lamb. “Gavi? Oh, God, thank you.” He rushed to her, sweeping her up in his arms like a rag doll, crushing her in his embrace, his daughter weeping uncontrollably. “I was so scared. I’ve been looking for you! I went to your school—”

“They kidnapped me! They beat me. Daddy, I was so scared—”

“Who beat you?” He looked at her face. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. That man saved me. The man with one arm.” She pointed at Patrick, sitting slumped over on a park bench.

David stared at the gaunt figure. “Shep?”

“Daddy, you know him, don’t you? I saw a picture of you with him in Iraq.”

“Gavi, get on the bus. Get all these girls with you aboard, too.” David watched her go, then walked over to the bench, pushing past a small Asian and an old man.

“Shep, it’s D.K.”

Patrick looked up, his eyes swimming in pain. “Who?”

“David… Dr. Kantor. Don’t you recognize me? We spent three deployments together.”

“David?” Shep sat up, the pain snapping him awake. “What are you doing here?”

“The Guard sent me here looking for you. For the vaccine. That girl you rescued, she’s my daughter. Buddy, I owe you big-time.”

Patrick wiped back tears. “Wish I could have saved my own daughter. Bastards took the vaccine before I could get it to her.”

“Your daughter? Oh, geez.” David turned to the old man. “Are you a friend of his?”

“I’d like to think so. Patrick’s memory isn’t so good. Maybe you could help him?”

David sat on the bench next to his fellow vet. The others gathered around. “Shep, how could the vaccine help Donna?”

“Donna?”

“Your daughter.”

Shep’s eyes grew wide in recognition. “Donna. My little girl’s name… is Donna. I remembered Beatrice, but for the life of me—”

“Who’s Beatrice?”

“My wife. You know that.”

“Shep, did you get married while you were in the hospital?”

“David, come on… Beatrice! The only woman I ever loved. The mother of my child… my soul mate.”

David looked to the others, then placed his arm on Patrick’s good shoulder. “The surgeon said the explosion damaged your memory, but there was no telling how bad. Shep, I don’t know who this Beatrice is, but the woman you told me was your soul mate… her name was Patty. Patricia Segal.”

Patrick paled, the blood draining from his face.

“You used to call her Trish. I suppose it sort of sounds like Beatrice. Shep, the two of you never got married. You were engaged… there were wedding plans, but then her dad — your high-school baseball coach — he got sick. The cancer took him right before the Red Sox called you up. Right before the accident.”

An icy shiver ran down Patrick’s spine. “What accident?”

Across the park, the Grim Reaper stared at him… waiting.

David looked to Virgil, who nodded. “Go on, he needs to hear it.”

“Shep, Trish and Donna were aboard the flight from Boston… the one that struck the World Trade Center. Buddy, you lost your family on September 11.”

Francesca clutched her husband’s arm, doubling up with a contraction. Dawn swooned. Manisha grabbed her daughter before she fainted.

Patrick Shepherd’s chest constricted so tightly, he could not breathe.

And in that moment of revelation, a decade of pent-up psychological trauma suddenly released, freeing the synapses within his damaged cerebral cortex as if they were the clogged gears of a clock—

— and suddenly he remembered.

He remembers sprinting down Trinity Place after the second tower was hit.

He remembers thick brown smoke pouring into the heavens. People falling from the sky.

He remembers Trinity Cemetery and the funeral for his soul mate and his young daughter. He remembers filling their empty coffins with their belongings… everything put to rest beneath the sculpture of an angelic child… the very tombstone the Grim Reaper had been motioning at hours earlier.

There was one piece of the puzzle left… one final memory — the day he had realized the truth about September 11, the day he had pieced together the treachery—

— the day he had walked out of his barracks in the Green Zone and into the sunshine, the pin in his right hand—

— the live grenade in his left.

From across the lawn, the Grim Reaper opened his cloaked arms wide, beckoning an embrace. Shep leapt off the bench, sprinting awkwardly toward the Angel of Death, ready to end it all.

The Reaper smiled, disappearing into the shadows.

“Shep, wait!” David started after him—

— the old man blocked his way. “You are a doctor?”

“Huh? Yeah—”

“We have a pregnant woman in labor. Paolo, this man is here to deliver your son. Pankaj, get these people to Battery Park.”

“Virgil, what about you?”

“Patrick needs me. Now hurry, there’s not much time.” The old man patted Pankaj on the cheek, offering a wry smile to a transfixed Gelut Panim before following Patrick’s tracks through the snow.

David, Pankaj, and Paolo helped Francesca onto the awaiting vehicle, the interior of the bus fifty degrees warmer. Manisha escorted Dawn. But at the last moment, Dawn slipped past her mother and dashed across the lawn, retrieving Patrick’s mangled steel prosthetic from the short Asian man.

“Are you coming with us?”

“I’d like that.” The Elder turned, looking for the old man.

Virgil Shechinah was gone.

The horizon had turned a light gray by the time Shep reached Ann Street. Ahead was Broadway. Looking up, he saw the Reaper beckon from atop a flipped vehicle, the olive green blade of his scythe again dripping blood.

“Bastard!” Gathering himself, Patrick crossed Broadway, continuing east to the corner of Trinity Place and Vesey Street—

— the World Trade Center construction site loomed ahead.

Pankaj Patel raced the school bus south on Broadway, following the path cleared by the second Stryker. Morning’s first light lifted the veil of a long night, exposing the true horrors of the runaway pandemic. Bodies lay everywhere, strewn across Manhattan as if the Big Apple had been struck by a thirty-story tsunami. Some hung from shattered windows, others still occupied the hundreds of vehicles that clogged every city block. Every sidewalk was a morgue, every building a tomb. Men, women, and children, old and young, ethnic and Caucasian, domestic and foreign — Scythe had spared no one.

The bus passed Trinity Church and the New York Stock Exchange, heading for the southernmost tip of Manhattan — Battery Park.

Francesca leaned back against Paolo’s chest. Her husband entwined his fingers around hers as David Kantor worked between her spread legs, the Army medic having shed his bulky environmental suit aboard the heated vehicle.

“Okay, Francesca, looks like you’re fully dilated.” He turned to his daughter, Gavi assisting him from the next bench seat. “Find me something clean. A towel or blanket would be great.”

Francesca trembled, her body exhausted, her nerves overwrought with fear. “You really are a doctor, right?”

“With all the degrees. I gave up my practice to go into business. Maybe I should have gone into pediatrics, this’ll be my second delivery today.”

Paolo forced a nervous smile. “See, my love, God has taken care of us. The first child you delivered, Dr. Kantor… what was it?”

David swallowed the lump in his throat. “A healthy little Hispanic girl. Okay, slight push on the next contraction. Ready… steady… push.”

“Ugh!” Francesca bore down, her unborn infant sliding farther down her stretching birth canal, the pain excruciating. Looking up, she saw the strange-looking Asian man watching her from across the aisle. “Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer!”

“My apologies. I am simply honored to bear witness to your miracle.”

“Miracle? You call this a miracle! I’m on a school bus, giving birth in a plague-infested city in front of a bunch of strangers.”

“Exactly. In a city taken by so much death, you and your husband have defied the odds and managed to survive. Now, out of the darkness, you bring forth a new spark of Light. And this is not a miracle?”

David looked up. “The man’s got a point. Okay, one more time—”

Hunched down in one of the rear seats, Sheridan Ernstmeyer watched the medic deliver the Italian woman’s child, her anger mounting.

The site had been sanitized. The crime scene scrubbed. Every ounce of rubble inspected, yielding everything from family photos to personal belongings to the smallest traces of DNA used to identify air passengers and office occupants. Everything except the virtually indestructible black boxes that had been aboard the two aircraft safeguarding the in-flight recordings.

Tons of steel shipped overseas. Replaced by gleaming fortified structures rising from Ground Zero’s excavated graveyard. Out with the old, in with the new…

Patrick slipped through a detached section of aluminum fence and entered the construction area, marking the first time he had returned to the site where his fiancée and daughter had been incinerated alive, along with three thousand other innocent people.

Trembling with emotion, he moved to the edge of a massive pit — the foundation of what would soon be another mammoth structure. A gray morning fog had rolled in off the Hudson, obscuring the partially constructed buildings looming across the site.

He registered the now-familiar presence and turned to his left. The Grim Reaper was standing beside him on the overlook, staring into the pit.

“Why have you brought me here?”

The Angel of Death raised its scythe to the heavens. The Manhattan sky was concealed behind a dense layer of swirling brown clouds — just as it had been on that day of treachery.

A dizzying bout of vertigo. Shep dropped to one knee as a sizzling wave of energy rattled his brain and extremities as if he had touched a live wire. Gasping a breath, he opened his eyes, disoriented and beyond confused.

The sky is a maelstrom of swirling dark storm clouds, the rain that pelts his exposed flesh as frigid as droplets cast from a frozen lake and as fierce as a monsoon. He is standing upon a raised wooden structure, towering fifty feet above a vast forest of cedar rendered into acres of stumps and saplings by the axe. The valley below is flooded. The floodwaters rising.

Advancing toward the wooden structure are people. Thousands of them. Carting children and possessions. Desperate and angry and scared. Standing in frigid water up to their knees, shouting at him in a Middle Eastern dialect.

His attention is diverted to a new discovery — he now has a left arm! Only it’s not his. He examines his left hand, then the right… both weathered. Knotty, and arthritic, his flesh bears a Sephardic tan. He palpates a gaunt face, the leathery skin pruned in wrinkles. He grips a handful of shaggy white hair and strokes a matching beard. His rail-thin body is cloaked in damp robes bearing the heavy scent of animal musk.

What’s happening to me? Is this another hallucination? I’m an old man…

The cries of the mob demand his attention. He walks to the edge of the wooden structure and realizes he is standing on the deck of an immense boat.

A crash of thunder rattles heaven and earth. The ground trembles, then the mountainside opens, the fissures belching molten rock, the magma setting the flooded landscape to boil.

The crowd screams. Many attempt to board, climbing atop one another, only the coracle’s steep sides and rounded bottom render the feat impossible. The raging current from the flooding Tigris River sweeps the ark from its pilings, the scalding waters searing the flesh of every man, woman, and child.

Shep bellows an old man’s wail—

— returning his consciousness to the edge of the construction pit.

Hyperventilating, his chaotic mind struggled to surf this last wave of anxiety, even as a new vision took form before his eyes.

From out of the gray mist appeared the Twin Towers. Scorched, yet still standing. The two World Trade Centers had shed their concrete facade, revealing floor after floor of steel beams. Standing in unified silence within the framework of every bared perch of exposed office space were the victims of September 11, their identities silhouetted in the shadows.

Shep turned, registering the heavy presence of these lost souls through the supernal being standing on his left. The Angel of Death gazed at him through three thousand fluttering irises rotating within his hollow sockets like percolating molecules. Dark blood poured from the upturned curve of his olive-tinged scythe — a steady stream that rolled down the wooden shaft, pooling and dripping from the creature’s bony right fist.

Without warning, the Grim Reaper dropped feet first into the pit, the entity’s gravitational vortex dragging Patrick Shepherd with it… into the Ninth Circle of Hell.

Pankaj Patel drove the school bus over the curb and across an expanse of snow-covered lawn. Reaching the waterfront, he jammed on the brakes, the front end of the skidding vehicle smashing through the construction fence surrounding Pier A.

The younger children screamed. Francesca Minos swaddled her newborn to her chest, shielding him from the jolt. “Paolo, find Heath. Help him launch the boat.”

Still overwhelmed with emotion over the birth of his son, Paolo exited the bus, Pankaj and David Kantor in tow. Pushing through the battered gate, the three men made their way to the southwest entrance of the pier, entering the dilapidated building.

The scent of plague was overwhelming.

Heath Shelby lay beneath the suspended hull of his ten-foot Cuddy Cruiser, the deceased still partially dressed in his Santa Claus outfit. His complexion was bluish-pale, his lips stained in blood. A plum-colored bubo was visible along his neck.

Paolo turned away in horror.

David repositioned his environmental hood and mask, then knelt beneath the boat by the dead man. “Your brother-in-law… he was repairing the hull?”

“Yes. He said… he promised he’d finish before we arrived.”

“I don’t know if these patches are going to hold.”

“You’d better pray they do.” Pankaj inspected the winch. “Paolo, how do we launch?”

“Start the winch, and the hatch will open beneath the boat.”

Pankaj activated the generator, then started the winch. Two steel doors beneath the boat slowly swung open, revealing the water eight feet below the pier. They watched as the Cuddy Cruiser was lowered into the harbor. It bobbed gently along the surface. Exhausted, the three men looked at one another, smiling at death’s reprieve.

And then the ten-foot passenger boat lurched to starboard, its bow heaving as its aft end filled with water—

— salvation sinking to the bottom of New York Harbor.

He was falling into darkness, the sensation accompanied by a rush of voices — distant memories — echoing in his ears. Sewer ball! Go fetch, German Shepherd… Not our battle, Sergeant… Well, you gonna stay down there all day… You pitched a helluva game today, son… Damn IED. Arm’s gone, skull’s fractured pretty badly… You said your good-byes three weeks ago… It’s a lot of gear, but you’ll be glad you have it… I love you, Shep… Blood pressure’s dropping! I need another pint of blood… I thought I was your soul mate?… Now pitching for the Red Sox—

God, why am I here?

“Life is a test, Patrick…”

The speck of light raced up at him from below, growing larger… wider—

— and suddenly he plunged through, submerged in clear, blue water. He panicked, disoriented… unable to breathe. He struggled, then kicked and stroked to the crystal azure surface, his bare arms tan, muscular, and intact. Swimming to the ladder, he hoisted his bathing-suit-clad body out of the swimming pool. Disoriented, he knelt on the slate patio deck.

An oceanfront beach house. The sun, warm on his face. Water rolled off his physique. The Atlantic Ocean pounded softly a hundred yards to the east beneath a cloudless blue August sky.

This isn’t real, it’s the vaccine…

“Hey, baby. How was your swim?”

He turned as she stepped out onto the patio, her body curvy and tan and irresistible in the skimpy red bikini, the wavy-haired blonde as gorgeous as the last day he had set eyes upon her.

“Trish? Oh God… is it really you?”

“It’s okay, baby. Everything’s gonna be all right.” She held out the hooded bathrobe for him.

He slipped it on, feeling light-headed. “You’re not real. None of this… it’s all in my mind, I’m hallucinating again.”

“Not this time, baby. This was the life the Creator stole from us… all to teach you a lesson.”

“A lesson? What lesson?”

“Humility. The pain of losing a loved one.”

“But the war… all that came after you and our daughter died. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Apparently, these were transgressions from a prior life.”

“This is insane. Why am I being punished for something I can’t even remember? Why am I responsible for some other guy’s mistakes? And why am I here… now? Is God rubbing it in my face?”

“This isn’t God’s doing, Shep. We’re in the eleventh dimension, a far-more-livable realm that plays by a different set of rules. All of the filtered Light here is controlled by the Adversary.”

“The Adversary? You mean Satan.”

“Relax, baby. There is no devil, no demonic force. In the eleventh dimension, we’re not required to jump through hoops or endure endless suffering. All we have to do is want. Don’t look so worried. Every one of us is born with the desire to receive, that’s the entire reason we were created in the first place. Lucifer isn’t the devil, Shep, he’s an angel who left Heaven to help man be happy. Our desire to indulge brings the Creator’s Light into the eleventh dimension — an endless existence of fulfillment without all the needless pain and suffering.”

A flash of light—

— and he was standing on the pitcher’s mound at Fenway Park, facing the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 7 of the World Series. The sellout crowd is going wild, chanting his name. The score is 1–0 Red Sox, top of the ninth inning, two outs, two strikes on the batter.

The scoreboard revealed that he was throwing a perfect game.

He wound up, launching a 106-mile-an-hour fastball that the batter missed by three feet.

His teammates rushed to him from all sides, their boundless joy intoxicating his soul. Fans poured out from the bleachers, delivering scantily clad women who pawed at his uniform—

“Enough!”

They were back at the pool, Shep lying outstretched on a cushioned lounge chair. Trish hovered over him, her oiled cleavage tantalizingly close.

“Baby, what’s wrong? Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“No… I mean yes, but I didn’t want it handed to me. I wanted to earn it.”

“Shep, honey, you did earn it. You earned it all… only He took it away. He took me away. He took our daughter away. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. And do you know why He took it from you?”

Shep felt the blood rush from his face. “Because I took it for granted. I didn’t appreciate it.”

“Nonsense. Of course you appreciated it. Sure, there were moments you slipped, but who doesn’t? Even the fight we had over this house… I knew you still loved me. We’re soul mates, after all.”

“We are soul mates. I swear it.”

“The truth is, I was the lucky one. Look at how you suffered after we died. All that pain, all that emptiness. Have you experienced a single moment of joy since we were taken away?”

He pinched away tears. “No.”

“War… famine. Endless suffering. Is that how a loving parent is supposed to treat his children?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Life isn’t about suffering, it’s about indulgence. Ask the rich and powerful if they’re suffering. This beach house is a perfect example. Had I listened to you and allowed you to buy it, your daughter and I would have never been on that plane. You were right and I was wrong, and you paid the ultimate price for our ignorance.”

“Oh, God…”

“Forget God. God is nothing but a concept… a fictitious figure sitting upon a throne, always asleep at the wheel. We never needed God. The Adversary has grown strong in His absence. The Adversary offers us his gift of immortality without any of these hidden tests.”

“What do I have to do, you know… for us to be together again?”

“For one thing, stop worrying. There’s no violence involved, you don’t have to kill anyone. Simply join me in a toast.” She reached for a carafe of wine, pouring the red liquid into a gold goblet.

“A toast? To who? Lucifer?”

“Baby, you have got to stop watching so many horror movies.” She straddled him, still holding the goblet of wine in her right hand. “Remember that course in Latin we took together as sophomores? Do you know what Lucifer translates to in Latin? Light-bringer. Lucifer wasn’t a fallen angel, Shep, he was sent to bring Light into our world through our actions. I mean, seriously, baby, does this look like Hell to you?”

“No.”

“Drink with me. Let us get drunk together from the fruit of the vine and connect with the Light.”

Connect with the Light…

Shep’s heart raced as his mind replayed a similar conversation he’d had with Virgil hours earlier in the cemetery. “Noah made one last mistake, the same mistake Adam made. The fruit that tempted Adam was not an apple, but a grape, or the wine that comes from them. Wine can be abused, placing man in touch with levels of consciousness that cannot sustain a connection with the Light…”

He pushed the goblet aside. “And when I’m lying here, drunk, will you castrate me?”

She forced a smile. “Shep, honey, what are you talking about?”

“You know… the way my son, Ham, castrated me when he found me lying drunk and naked on the ark.”

Her expression hardened, her eyes spewed daggers. “Drink the wine, Patrick.”

“You drink it, soul mate.” He stood, tossing her from his lap, the goblet spilling wine across her face and down her neck and cleavage—

— the liquid melting the flesh, exposing an ancient skull, darkened with age, the eye sockets fluttering with a thousand eyes!

Their surroundings shattered like a hall of mirrors, revealing a dark, massive pit, the skeletal remains of the World Trade Center looming overhead. Shep was standing on a frozen lake, surrounded by thousands of animated heads, the bodies trapped beneath the ice. Treacherous traitors of humanity, babbling in tongues. Each garbled word generated a tiny spark of light that floated through the rank air like a firefly, the accumulated specks absorbed by the massive creature frozen dead center in the lake.

Lucifer was being held chest high in the ice, and still his shoulders and three heads towered ten stories above the frozen surface. The winged demon was terrifying to behold, yet it appeared oblivious of its surroundings, as if it were a front — a giant balloon puppet. Animated by the sparks of negativity generated by the babbling heads of the tortured.

Hovering over Lucifer’s left wing was the Grim Reaper.

On the demon’s right was the Reaper’s soul mate.

Santa Muerte was dressed in purple satin robes, her hooded skull adorned with a wavy ebony wig. The abomination snarled as she saw Shep. Gripping her scythe in her bony fists, she advanced, swinging the deadly blade like a pendulum.

Shep attempted to run, only he slipped on the ice and fell. He looked up as the curved blade looped downward from its arc, slicing through his deltoid and lopping off his new left arm in one brutal motion.

He dropped to his knees on the frozen lake, the searing pain pushing him toward unconsciousness — only Santa Muerte was far from finished with him.

Raising the scythe once more over her bony shoulder, she swung the instrument of death downward, the bloodstained blade whistling through the air—

— its lethal blow intercepted by the scythe belonging to her male counterpart. The Grim Reaper stood over Shep, protecting him from the assault.

And then a golden beacon of Light reached down from the unseen heavens—

— whisking his consciousness out of Hell.