I shook my head. "Something happened. I don't understand. It wasn't just that the vampires glamoured their way in. Something changed in our land."
"Evil," Alex said. "Not just the contagion. When people are forced into a crucible like that, they start biting each other like rats. Power becomes an end unto itself. Evil is an inevitable sociological fact."
I frowned. I could not dispute that idea with logic. "I don't believe that everyone is corruptible."
"Everyone is corruptible. We all just have different limits."
We walked in silence for some time before Ginger said: "How many do you think have survived? If this is a biblical thing?"
I knew that she wanted comfort. She wanted to believe that her husband and children were alive. Just as Alex wanted to believe that his parents were. As I wanted to believe that my parents and sister would live.
"Revelations says that a third of mankind will be killed." I couldn't lie to her. That was what the book said, but doubts crept in on me. "The rest will flee to the mountains. There will be the End Times of Tribulation, and then Jesus will cast Satan out for a thousand years."
"The idea of End Times isn't specific to Christianity," Alex said. "Islam, for instance, believes in a Judgment Day. At that time, terrible creatures called the Gog and Magog will slaughter everything they can get their hands on."
"Sounds familiar," Ginger said.
"There's also the idea that a mystical smoke will descend on the earth. Nonbelievers are stricken with grave illness, and believers only get a case of the sniffles. Allah then sweeps a wind over the earth, which steals away the lives of the believers, leaving the nonbelievers behind until judgment.
"Mormonism has the idea that darkness will cover the earth, and that the evil will burn in fire."
"If we were only that lucky," Ginger muttered.
"Hinduism believes that there's a cyclic life and death in the world, moving from purity to impurity. It's not really an End Times in the Western Protestant sense, but there's also the idea in Buddhism that the teachings of Buddha will be forgotten and that people will degenerate into a destructive cycle until the appearance of the next Buddha," Alex said. "So there may be some grain of truth in many traditions about what's happening here."
"I struggle with this," I said frankly. "I know that this keeps me safe." I patted the pocket containing the Himmelsbrief. "But your tattoos also keep you safe."
"And before communications were cut off to the rest of the world, we knew that people were safe at the mosques, Shinto shrines, synagogues, temples," Ginger said. I'd fallen back to walk beside her heel, and she leaned over to pick bits of grass from my hair. Motherly fussing. It felt normal, and I relished it.
"I'm struggling with it too," Alex said, scratching self-consciously at his chest. "I never thought I really believed in God, deep, down deep, like you do." He gazed at me with eyes the color of winter skies. "I've got a healthy respect for the religion of ancient Egypt, you know. But nobody really practices it anymore. It is, for me . . . an intellectual curiosity, I guess. The idea that Osiris rose from the dead, that there is some concept of eternal life . . ."
"But you believe, in some fashion," I said. "Or else it wouldn't work." I touched the back of his hand. "I guess I don't understand how we can come from such different perspectives and have the same result."
I was accustomed to thinking that there was one right way to live, one way to achieve favor. "Evil" for me had been a broad category once upon a time. Evil had included transgressions great and small, from murder to failure to submit to God's will with grace to immodest dress. Now . . . now I found that my definition of evil was shrinking. I feared that rather than rising to the challenge of the Tribulations and becoming strong in my faith, I was growing weaker. Decaying, like the rest of the world. And that frightened me.
His fingers closed around mine. "I don't know," he said helplessly. "But it works."
In some ways, I think that I loved him.
And I shouldn't have.
He was an Englisher. Wholly inappropriate, based on just that fact. He wasn't even Christian. He was older than I was, by a handful of years. Worldlier. He had seen and experienced things I couldn't even imagine: the ocean, airplanes, computers. His world had been much bigger than mine, glamorous and exciting.
But now our world was the same: bleak and frightening.
Alex shook his head. "In the Gnostics' Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said: 'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.' What's in me is not gonna save anyone."
I gazed at him. "I believe that what you have within you is good and beautiful."
"I wish I could believe that," he said. I heard the doubt and fear in his voice.
"I believe for you," I said.
***
The sun always seemed to move too fast.
Growing up Plain, I had always been conscious of the sun. We rose with it, conducted all our business under its light. The cows were milked, fields plowed and harvested, and animals fed with its warmth on our faces. We went to bed when it set, when the crickets and spring peeper frogs emerged in the warmer seasons. During the short days of winter, we would sometimes play checkers by lamplight for an hour before submitting to the moonlit darkness muffled by snow.
This was the same, but different. Then, it had been an easy connection to nature. We told time in the fields by squinting at the sun. I still did, in fields not so different from those, but for much different reasons. I could feel Darkness bearing down on us, behind every shadow and patch of shade.
We were running. There was no objective other than simple survival now. No livestock that needed us to care for them, no fruit that would rot on the vine without our intervention. We just needed to find enough to eat and keep from being eaten.
We waded through the fields until the sun pushed our shadows long to the right of us. I shivered, with the knowledge not only that night would come soon, but that frost was coming. Frost would kill the last of the blackberries and gooseberries that I'd found for us to subsist on. The acorns were long gone. I'd been lucky to find a crab apple tree three days ago, but I didn't think that we'd be that fortunate again. The animals, like birds and squirrels, who had been accustomed to scavenging the leftovers of humans, were now stripping trees and bushes bare.