“In the gated ghettos, whenever a nonbeliever is chosen for a work battalion, his family and friends hold a funeral for his day of departure because they know they’ll never see him again,” Bartholomew 3526 said softly to his fellow Guard, James 8188, in the darkness.
James 8188 grunted and held his Prayer Book of Saint Donald to his breastplate, mouthing verses.
Bartholomew 3526 clenched his fists, banishing butterflies before the arrest. Every Guard of the Pale Christ took the name of one of the Apostles, except Judas Iscariot, the betrayer.
Thirteen minutes later, at 0210 one raw March morning in the city of Christ’s Cross in the Heartland of the Holy Homeland during Year Four of the Bat Flu, the two civil officers of sacred law and order put on their black visored helmets and marched down the hallway of the fifth floor of Building Unit No. 6 and halted in front of Apartment No. 523.
A stillness descended. Bartholomew 3526 pictured the residents holding their collective breaths behind the thin walls of their apartments and hoping, no doubt, to become invisible to the policing eyes of the Pale Christ.
When their backup arrived, James 8188 banged on the apartment door with his mailed fist a dozen times.
“Guards of the Pale Christ!” Bartholomew 3526 shouted through his face mask, his voice amplified via the speaker in the high crest of his helmet.
They broke through, splintering the door jamb, and fanned out. A one-armed man, groggy with sleep and not wearing a face mask, stood shaking in the bedroom’s doorway. He had lost his left arm during the Second War of Expansion when the Homeland conquered the fertile farmlands of the northern prairies, according to the security file on him.
“What for?” the man stammered.
“Shut up, you papist!” one of the Guards barked.
“I renounced it years ago!”
James 8188 grabbed the man, slammed him against the wall, and pulled a black hood over his head. Just then, his gaunt wife and son peeked through the bedroom doorway.
Bartholomew 3526 took her by the arm and shoved her toward Simon 7142. They had a quota to fill.
“Our son!” she cried, staring at the Guard emblem on his black breastplate: a round red shield with a pure white skeleton on it, arms outstretched and legs together in the shape of the cross.
“It’s the cages for him,” Bartholomew 3526 said in a voice without inflection, handing the boy over to James 9503. The six-year-old would be renamed and fostered out to a good Christian family in the Farmlands, destined to be a field hand. It was the best a heretic child could hope for.
While the woman and child were masked and taken to the elevator, Bartholomew 3526 and James 8188 ran the man, clad only in his nightshirt and barefoot, down the five flights of wooden stairs to the lobby, through the building’s front door, and across the cracked sidewalk to the waiting black van where their lieutenant stood holding a tablet.
“We have the prisoner, Reverend Lieutenant,” James 8188 said.
They manhandled him into the back of the van and slammed the door. His wife and son were taken elsewhere.
“Go see the Reverend Captain for your next orders,” the lieutenant said, pointing down the street.
As the two Guards marched in quick step along the sidewalk, they saw a squad of masked Bible Boys, teenage members of the Pale Christ’s Youth Auxiliary, pummel an old, bearded man to the ground and kick him. An elderly woman stood several paces away, her hands to her mouth.
“Bats in the belfry,” the Bible Boys chanted. “Bats in the belfry.”
A bystander approached. “They’re going to kill him. Make them stop.”
“I can’t see it,” Bartholomew 3526 replied, giving the bystander’s face a shot of peppered mace spray, which made him double up and drop to the ground. That would teach the nonbeliever to respect his Christian betters and speak only when spoken to. The officer smirked.
They were culling the herd tonight in this part of the city to combat the spread of the virus. Victims of Bat Flu showed symptoms of dementia before losing control of their limbs and dying soon afterward. It was the only way to bolster herd immunity, the President’s Revered Leadership Council issued in its Divine Doctrine on the subject, titled “Purging the Virus.”
Meanwhile, a troop of Zealots wearing riot gear and wielding shock sticks and shields formed a phalanx and charged a group of nonbelievers clustered in front of an old department store building. The Zealots were practicing crowd control tactics for their deployment to one of the occupied towns in the northern prairies of what had once been the country of Canada.
The Holy Homeland had been ordained to expand northward and southward after the East and West coasts were lost to the Great Flood in the previous generation. Only the Pale Christ’s blessing had stopped the flood waters at the Appalachian and Rocky Mountain ranges amid the chaos of melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, sunken cities, and vanished islands.
The two whistled the tune “He’ll Take Manhattan” from back then. The Great Flood was the Pale Christ’s judgment on the perversions practiced by the unbelievers, drowning their coastal homes and damning them to perdition. Only the Heartland’s Christians had been upholding righteousness before the Great Flood, they were all taught in Patriotic Divinity School, and were rewarded with sole ownership of the northern continent.
At the direction of the Reverend Captain, Bartholomew 3526 and James 8188 got into one of five armored vehicles for transport to the southwest quadrant of Christ’s Cross for another heretic roundup. This shift had turned out to be busier than usual in doing the Pale Christ’s good work.
After throwing their fifth prisoner into a black van for transport to Church, which was their nickname for the detention center, Bartholomew 3526 and James 8188 searched another alleyway for suspects. The lights atop their helmets threw twin pools of light onto the littered ground.
“By the Blood of the Pale Christ,” James 8188 exclaimed as they came across a white-haired man sitting cross-legged with arms outstretched in a crumbling doorway. His eyes were shut, and he seemed to be meditating.
“That is against our Sacred Scripture,” Bartholomew 3526 said with a kick. He bent down to get a closer look at the man’s face. He pulled up in surprise. The face was craggy with wrinkles, some thin, some wide, some twisted, especially around the eyes and mouth. There was no smooth spot on the wizened, ancient face.
“It’s a native heathen,” James 8188 observed. “Looks like a mummy.”
“I thought they died out years ago.”
“They did. Time for this one to join them.” James 8188 pulled his pistol from the shoulder holster.
The old man’s eyelids snapped open. His eyeballs were milky white with an inhumanly opaque thickness. He smiled thinly. Then a bright white light flashed directly into the eyes of the two guards, blinding them.
“One dies now. One dies forever.” They both heard the voice with their minds, not their ears. Their vision returned, and they beheld a skeleton standing with arms outstretched and legs together in the shape of the cross, mimicking their emblem, as a clay pipe spun off the doorstep and fell into the sound of shattering shards.
James 8188 took his helmet off, pointed the pistol at his temple, pulled the trigger and committed the sin of suicide while Bartholomew 3526 watched, devoid of emotion.
The surviving guard took off his helmet and let it fall to the ground. Robot-like, he walked, dropping his gauntlets, shoulder pads, breastplate, elbow and knee pads, and finally shin guards as he left the alleyway. His uniform was red to symbolize the Blood of the Pale Christ.
On the main street, he joined a line of marchers heading toward the city center. There was something insubstantial about them, and their footfalls were silent. He looked behind, and the line stretched as far as he could see. He wouldn’t be surprised if it went well past the far horizon.
An army of ghosts, he thought. He looked more closely at his neighbors. They were nonbelievers, heretics, and heathens. None of them looked like him. He was among the enemy. But an apathetic enemy. No one looked back at him. No one made a motion to draw away from him. It was as if he was one of them. But he wasn’t! He was…he was… He tried to think. Then he realized he did not even know his own name now.
They marched on, the street a soundless stage. After a time, they came to the city center, then passed through it.
They marched under the sky of the darkest night. After a time, they came to the capital city, New Washington. They marched toward the wide square in the exact center of the capital.
Forward! The word had sounded with each step he took from the moment he had left the alleyway in Christ’s Cross. It deafened his mind.
In the square, they passed by the towering statue of Reverend Grand Marshall Christian IV, High Holy President of Homeland for Life. The statue stared into the long night, and did not save him. And the Pale Christ did not come down from Heaven to save him. And he saw the Guards of the Pale Christ deploy for the next heretic roundup; they did not save him, either.
The ghosts marched and marched in a line that stretched on and on.
And after a time, they passed the statue of Reverend Grand Marshall Christian VII, High Holy President of Homeland for Life. And as they marched past the Rockies, he noticed water dribbling through the highest peaks. Inevitably, Holy Homeland would drown like the coasts, he realized.
Folly! The word boomed in his mind, in cadence to their march over land and over water, circling the globe over and over again for all eternity.
