For the first time, he wondered if a soul could disappear or be bought. A seed of doubt, planted in his mind by those hollow black orbs, asked what kind of God could allow this blasphemy. Some dark tendril of fire gnawed at the back of his mind, answering that only a mad God or no God at all, could have placed this shell before him.

  The empty eyes had once belonged to a member of his flock. The creature’s name had once been Peter Walters. Now the body, which had formerly housed Peter’s soul, housed only a void as bottomless as the pupils of those cold, dead eyes. An empty vessel, its memories and desires vacated for colder climes. It stared blankly, no longer capable of Peter’s warmth, or even the bitter laughs of regret Sonntag had once been able to elicit from him.

  Sonntag clasped his hands together, covering his nose and his mouth. His eyes were clenched tightly, locked in prayer or meditation. Or perhaps simply deliberation. Slowly, he opened them again and turned around.

  Peter (back when he had been fully Peter and not just a shell), had been widowed in the fire. He rarely spoke of his wife. Perhaps it was too painful to do so out loud. But her memory preyed constantly on his mind and haunted his face. Perhaps Peter thought he could have fooled himself. But deep down he knew. He must have known. After that, he had thrown himself into his missionary work with redoubled zeal. There was nothing else for him.

  “Are you in there?” Sonntag asked.

  The creature lunged forward, snapped its jaws as it often did. Only a few feet of heavy chain and a collar around the former Peter Walters’s neck provided Sonntag with any buffer whatsoever. He had no doubt in his mind the creature would sink its teeth into his flesh given half an opportunity, as a million of its comrades had tried to do a million times before. He owed Peter more, though. He had to try.

  Sonntag stood up and walked down the rough-hewn floorboards of the rustic church. Peter had lived lightly, a simple man without many possessions. He had lived out of a knapsack. Sonntag struggled to clench the strap of Peter’s backpack with his arthritic fingers, and finally tossed it over his back. After a moment of deliberation, he reached for Melanie’s bag as well, and carried them both down the aisle back to the creature.

  It stared attentively at him, like a cowed but untamed puppy. It would listen out of necessity, but not out of any sense of respect. Respect was what Sonntag wanted, respect or understanding. Glancing up to make sure the chain was still holding, Sonntag unbuttoned the flap to Peter’s simple burlap bag. With a little more difficulty, he unzipped Melanie’s plastic yellow Spongebob Squarepants backpack. Their bags reflected a fundamental difference between the lovers. Peter had always been a pragmatist, Melanie a dreamer. They had been different, but a perfect match.

  Sonntag drew a dog-eared Bible out of Peter’s sack. He held it up, his hand quivering just a bit.

  “Does this mean anything to you?”

  The creature cocked its head inquisitively. Sonntag opened the book with a sigh, flipping through to see if Peter had ever highlighted any favorite passages or made a margin note on something meaningful. True enough, he had underlined a passage in John 11 with a black pen.

  “’This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.’”

  Sonntag looked up to see if the words were having any effect on the thing. It continued to snap its jaws, more as though testing them than actually to bite through something. With a sigh, Sonntag placed the book down on the pew next to him.

  “Well, you never were much of a reader,” the reverend said. “Don’t get me wrong, a dedicated servant to Christ, but always a doer rather than a thinker or a talker. Sometimes, I wish I had the strength left to do more than talk. The strength or the youth. Oh, what I wouldn’t trade to have your youth.”

  Sonntag instantly regretted saying it. He rummaged (if “rummaged” was the right word for what his aching fingers could do) through Peter’s sack and caught hold of what felt like a small paper parcel. He drew it out. Photographs. Actual photographs, developed and printed, not kept on a computer as most folks did these days. Thank God for a little tradition, Sonntag thought.

  He stood up with some difficulty and approached as close to the creature as he felt comfortable in coming. He flipped through the photos. A few didn’t come out. One was of a riverbank. Another was some of the local birds, out of focus.

  “Guess you weren’t much of a shutterbug, Peter,” Sonntag said. “Ah, here’s a decent one.”

  Sonntag held up a picture of the two lovebirds embracing outside the still unfinished church back on Patusan. Sonntag must have taken that photograph himself, although he didn’t remember doing so. The spouses were both sweaty, and Peter was wearing his Panama hat and had a bit of zinc on his nose, which made him look ridiculous. Sonntag pointed at Melanie.

  “Do you recognize her?”

  The creature seemed to try to say something. All that actually came out was a prolonged moan.

  “Mel-a-nie,” Sonntag said, syllable by syllable.

  Squinting its eyes, the creature groaned again, but even with wishful thinking at his back, Sonntag couldn’t interpret the noise as anything but inexpressive twaddle. Sonntag tried a few different pictures, but the creature refused to speak anymore, if “speak” was the right way to describe it. Exhausted and frustrated, Sonntag sat back down.

  “Perhaps there’s nothing for it,” Sonntag said. “Perhaps the humane thing to do, as they say on the news, is to put you down. If a man has lost his soul, is he even a man anymore? It wouldn’t be murder so much as euthanasia. But even then, the Good Book tells us not to live in a culture of death.”

  Sonntag sighed and buried his face in his hands. He glanced up at the creature, as though expecting it suddenly to be wearing a smoking jacket and joking about something it read in The Journal the other day. Aside from lowering its arms, it had not in fact changed at all.

  “I could do it, I suppose,” Sonntag said, “I wouldn’t even have to. I could get one of those people outside to do it. Promise one of them they’ll be saved or some such. Wouldn’t even have to do it myself. No, I think maybe I have too much respect for you, Peter. Perhaps I should stop calling you Peter. Fido, then. I had too much respect for Peter to let someone else do this to you, Fido.”

  Sonntag stood up and made the long trip down to the rectory, or rather more accurately, the little shack attached to the church that he somewhat mockingly referred to as a rectory. There was a fireplace there, a nod to the rather cold nights that sometimes came upon the Hippoan countryside, contrary to what Sonntag ever would have thought about the tropics. He grabbed the fireplace poker and made his way, shuffling and limping, back down the aisle towards the newly christened Fido.

  As he passed by the first pew, he accidentally caught Peter’s old knapsack with his foot and gave it a good knock before disentangling it. A simple, MIDI-like song began to play. Sonntag stopped and turned to look down at the knapsack. Bending over gingerly, he reached in and drew out a small music box.

  Fido stood there, his eyes glazed over, like a man in the throes of a passionate memory. Sonntag dropped the poker, thankful to be rid of the heavy nuisance, and Fido was unmoved by the clattering.

  “You know this? For Elise?”

  The creature looked down at him, its mouth for the first time making a movement other than dumb animal chomping. It was frowning. It moaned pitiably and reached, not for Sonntag’s throat, but for the music box. Slowly, excited, but afraid of surrendering to false hope, Sonntag stepped up onto the altar and placed the music box in the thing’s hand.

  Fido didn’t smash it. Didn’t drop it. Instead, it caressed the box. And then, with shaking, uncertain movements, it undid a clasp and the box opened. A tiny porcelain ballerina did an infinite pirouette within the world of the box, forever twisting clockwise perfectly.

  “Wasn’t Melanie a dancer?”

  Fido looked up. It stared at the reverend for a moment and then…nodded. Sonntag stepped forward. He put his hands around the music box, and although the creature fought against him at first, he took the music box from its hands after a moment.

  “Do that again,” Sonntag said.

  The creature stared pitiably.

  “Can you nod again?”

  The creature gave no response. No longer interested in Sonntag’s succulent living flesh, it wandered off into the corner and sat down, Indian-style. Sonntag sat down right on the altar, his heart fluttering like it hadn’t since he had been a young boy chasing girls and pulling their hair. He clutched his chest and reached into his pocket to draw out a pill bottle. He took a single pill, his hand shaking, and slowly placed it in his mouth. His heart calmed.

  Slowly, he came to a conclusion. Of course, the photographs had meant nothing to him. Did his eyes even still work? Sonntag’s eyes hardly worked anymore, and he was still alive. And who knew what a two-dimensional picture meant to a creature with a whole different way of thinking. Nor had words gotten through to it. Like man after the fall of Babel, the creatures had lost their power of language.

  But music! Something visceral, something meaningful, even to the dumbest of brutes. They could be reached. Something primordial in them could be touched. They still had…a soul.

  “Pete,” Sonntag said.

  It looked up. No, not “it.” “Him.”

  Sonntag stood and walked outside. A great crowd had gathered around the church, hundreds of the residents of the Hippoan “capital” Yuzna, and its outskirts, all waited with baited breath for his every word. Most of the Christians from the city were there, but that wasn’t as impressive as the head clothed Muslims, and even the occasional Buddhist monks. The Hippoans were a massive people on average, more similar ethnically to Samoans than the Malays and Bugis that populated Patusan. Many had become notable as boxers and Sumo wrestlers. Yet the crowd that had gathered here looked woefully undernourished, and the distinctive Hippoan paunch was scarcely to be seen.

  “You’re welcome to come back in,” Sonntag announced, and then led the tip of the throng inside.

  The crowd stopped at the back of the church as they saw Peter up on the altar. Undeterred, Sonntag walked up onto the altar, just out of reach of Peter’s snapping jaws. (He was a believer, not a madman, after all.) He held up Peter’s Bible.

  “It’s safe,” Sonntag announced, “you can come in.”

  Reluctantly, some of the flock came in. A few even sat in the rear pews, but none came past the midway point of the church. The cameras were there too, and the rest of the bloggers and media parasites. Essentially, what little media presence Yuzna could be said to have was all gathered. There were few enough, and most of them had come on his account, to hear what the mad missionary had to say to the world.

  Sonntag had developed a following around the world, because (he suspected) he was the only one to deal directly with the crisis. While Rome and Salt Lake City issued platitudes at best, and “listen to the authorities” announcements more often, Sonntag had directly addressed the plague as a biblical problem. He had given advice the world over on how to deal with the emotional and spiritual problems of losing a loved one to the crisis, and how to deal with them.

  So far, he had always recommended caution, keeping the creatures bound but alive. Who knew if a cure would be found? Perhaps they were dead, but death didn’t necessarily mean the end anymore. Now he knew exactly what to say.

  “I have had a revelation,” he said, “but first, a reading from the gospel.”

  He read them the rest of John 11.

  3. MARTIGAN

  The pirates brandished AK-47s, mostly. A few had dropped some serious cash for Uzis, and one, probably a swabbie at best, waved a baseball bat with perpendicular nails hammered into it. The four-and-a-half foot tall boss pirate started shouting first. Then his voice was almost immediately drowned out by a chorus of randomized phonemes, morphemes, and floating tones as his underlings joined in.

  “It’s just that I barely remember her, Skip,” the boat’s chief mate, the one the crew called Salt, shouted down to his boss.

  Captain Henk “Howling Mad” Martigan nodded wanly, not daring to say a word in reply for fear that lifting his head to speak would throw off his balance and send him tumbling to the deck.

  Martigan was as thin as a railway spike. He was neither as tall as his third mate, Kurtz, nor as thickly muscled as his chief engineer, Mo, but his men always knew when he was present, and, so far, his mouth hadn’t gotten him lynched yet. Charisma, his mother had told him. Luck, he called it, or when he was feeling more verbose, “the curlicue whimsy of fate.”

  Aside from a compulsive need to keep his face baby smooth, Martigan had a very laid back look to him. When plying the South Seas as he was now, he donned little more than mirrored sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and thick lambskin boots. (He had long ago learned the folly of wearing thongs or sneakers while shipboard.) His only concession to rank was a hat which had once belonged to a U-boat captain. It had been his father’s sole war trophy.

  Martigan clenched his arms tightly around the pole leading up to the crow’s nest, embracing it far tighter than he had ever hugged his mother or any of his ex-wives. Of course, if he had gripped one of them so tightly, he might have strangled her. He wouldn’t have objected to that outcome for at least three of his exes.

  “The hell of it is,” Salt continued, ignoring the menacing of the pirates and the discomfort of his boss in equal measure, “I always wore a rubber. Always. Well, not a rubber. I mean, we called them rubbers. They were sheepskin, though.”

  If he had a stronger stomach for heights, Martigan would’ve said, “That’s your problem right there.”

  “I mean, he doesn’t even look like me,” Salt ruminated, raising his voice to be heard over the rising shouting of the fast-approaching pirate dhow, “do you think he looks like me, Skip?”

  Martigan pressed his nose to the ladder, clenched his eyes shut, and yelled as loud as he could in what he knew was no doubt still coming out quite weakly, “He’s half white, Wilson.”

  Salt was nodding, probably. Reluctantly, Martigan opened his eyes again. He found that, having spoken finally, his stomach was a little more settled. Clutching twice as tightly with his left hand, he slowly, ever so slowly, just a bit too slowly, moved his right hand to his chest and lifted the spyglass to his eye. Someone had splashed a ridiculous color of paint on the pirate dhow.

  “Hot pink,” Martigan muttered, slipping into his native Afrikaans in his discomfort, “what were they thinking?”

  “What’d you say, Skip?”

  Martigan lost his grip, fumbled to keep the spyglass from falling, then, thinking better of it, just let it drop so he could throw both arms around the pole. The spyglass was dangling from a shoelace around his neck for a reason. He had already dropped it on the deck a hundred times on this voyage and given it a hairline crack, which bothered him to no end.

  Breathing shallowly, he craned his neck upwards to glance at his chief mate ten feet above him in the crow’s nest.

  Switching to English, he responded, “I said they don’t have much class, Mr. Salt!”

  Salt chuckled like a horny jackal.

  “They’re pirates, Skip,” Salt said, “why would they?”

  “Would you paint a boat neon pink like that?” Martigan asked, gesturing at the pirate dhow, and then quickly regretting it as he scrambled for purchase on the ladder and, catching it, hugged the mast close.

  Salt actually took the time to turn and take a look at the half-assed paint job on the enemy vessel. He looked it up and down, back and forth, and then nodded in approval, or maybe disapproval.

  “I’d say it’s more of a magenta, Skip.”

  His heart fluttering in his chest, and his arms losing blood as he clutched the mast a little bit too tightly, Martigan took a deep breath. Martigan hated being in the crow’s nest, but he also hated shouting over the wind from the deck to make himself heard to the lookout, and so he found himself in this ridiculous position halfway up the ladder, listening to his heart hammer in his ears.

  “Verdomp, you’re an asshole, Salty!”

  This time, Salt giggled for twice as long.

  “The hell of it is,” the chief mate said when he was done; “I can’t be the only white guy who ever made port in Port-Au-Prince. (Heh. Port in Port-au-Prince. That sounds funny.) I just can’t be. I mean, how does she know that I’m the father?”

  “Maybe you’re the only white guy she ever fucked,” Martigan wanted to say, but didn’t. He just let Salt go on talking. It’s not like there were more important things to do, like handle a pirate attack.

  “He doesn’t even look like me,” Salt ruminated. “Do you think he looks like me, Skip?”

  Martigan moaned, and not just because this was the hundredth time they’d had this conversation, and not just because he was stuck like laundry dangling from the line halfway up the mizzenmast.

  “For the love of God, Wilson,” Martigan said, “I told you I didn’t have to take him on. You said it was okay. ‘Okay,’ those were your exact words. Now, I’m getting down from here before I die.”

  “Okay,” Salt said.

  Martigan braced himself to clamber back down with eyes clenched shut.

  “Skip?”

  Martigan glanced back up.

  “There’s a bad storm brewing,” Salt said.

  Shaking his head and swallowing his fear of heights, Martigan clambered up into the crow’s nest alongside his chief mate, despite the tight fit. Martigan patted his old friend on the shoulder tentatively.

  “We’ll take care of them, Salty,” Martigan said. “We’ll come out all right.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Salt said, “well, that’s true, too, about the pirates. But look.”

  Salt pointed off into the distance. The horizon slowly blended from a light blue on white hue into a horrifying ball of raven-colored clouds. Lightning strikes were visible in the distance.

 

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