Chapter 161: Good Girl

/Stroud’s Third Person POV/

-Thup-thup-thup-thup-!

The church’s helicopter came home over the churchyard wall with every light off, low enough to blow the snow off the old yews by the gate.

Pastor Gideon Stroud stood at the edge of the pad in his long black coat, gloved hands folded over his stomach, and watched it come down, as he had on every run night for three weeks.

Under its belly, on twenty meters of steel cable, swung a cage built for moving lions, with a grey tarp lashed down over every side of it so nothing inside could be seen, and nothing inside could see out.

Dale Pruitt, the only man who could fly a helicopter in the entire camp, set the cage down on the gravel first, so slow and level that the tarp hardly stirred, and let it off the hook with a clunk Stroud felt through the soles of his boots.

Then he slid the helicopter to the far end of the pad and put the skids down without a bump.

-Thup... thup... thup...

The engine cut, and the blades kept turning over the pad, slower each time around, until the only sounds left were the tick of cooling metal and the boots of four men jogging across the churchyard from the old school, rifles slung across their backs.

None of the four needed to be told what to do.

Two to a side, they took the cage by its carrying bars, lifted it on Bert Coyle’s count, and walked it toward the vestry door on the south side of the church with their heads down.

And when a chain clinked against the bars under the tarp, every one of them missed a step.

Beyond the churchyard wall the holy land lay quiet, a hundred and three souls in tents and campers and parked cars between the old stone and the chain-link fence, with the lanterns on the tent poles left burning all night for the children’s sake.

A curtain in the nearest camper had been open an inch when the rotors started, and by the time the skids touched the gravel, a hand had pulled it shut.

Two tents down, a child’s voice started up in the dark, and a mother’s hush stopped it before it got past the first word.

They’d all been told what happened to anyone who looked at what the helicopter carried home, and every one of them believed it.

Stroud loved them for that, smiling at the shut curtains over the wall before he turned back to the elevated heli pad.

He was fifty-eight, built like the farm boy he’d been before the seminary, big through the shoulders and gone soft around the middle, with a broad pink face and a full head of white hair combed straight back under an orange knitted hunting hat that June Hart had made him three Christmases ago.

Under the coat he wore the black shirt and white priest’s collar he hadn’t gone a single day without since October, and he smiled often, with his whole face, the crow’s feet folding deep at the corners of his eyes.

Dale was still in the pilot’s seat when Stroud reached the door, a wiry man in his forties with a faded PRUITT AERIAL APPLICATION cap pulled down to his eyebrows and a crop-duster’s sunburn on the back of his neck that a month of winter hadn’t touched.

He had the headset clamped over his ears and one finger raised at Stroud, listening hard to the radio, while his other hand wiped itself dry on his thigh over and over.

"Did you eat anything out there, Dale?" Stroud asked the second the ear cup came off, before he’d so much as glanced at the cage.

"I... jerky, Pastor. I’m fine..." Dale blinked at him, thrown, and shook his head hard. "Listen... the gate’s been calling it up to me since we came over the ridge. That big bird that went over at dusk, the military one...? Lyle watched it from the gate till it dropped behind the willows, way out west. He heard the engines quit, and it never came back up... He says it’s sitting at the Hart place, or near as he can tell."

Stroud had heard it himself, halfway through the evening psalm, a roar that came in so low over the valley it rattled the old stained glass in its frames.

He’d watched a hundred heads turn toward the glass, then brought every one back to him before the end of the verse.

"The Hart place..." Stroud pulled his gloves off one finger at a time while he turned that over.

"That’s what Lyle says." Dale’s hand was back on his thigh, wiping. "Military, too, he’s sure of it... Painted dark, two engines by the sound of it, flying low as you like right across the valley... Pastor, a thing that size doesn’t run on fumes... Whoever’s flying it has fuel, and guns, and God knows what else."

"He does, Dale." Stroud reached in and patted the pilot’s shoulder. "God always does."

Walter Hart had company, and Walter Hart had refused the Lord three times.

Stroud had baptized all three of Walter’s boys in the stone font at the back of St. Jude’s, the youngest only sixteen years ago.

On the second morning of the end of the world, June Hart had called the rectory crying so hard he could barely make out a word, and he’d walked up the farm road to offer her youngest a place in consecrated ground.

He’d found Walter already in the yard with a pickaxe, and Walter had told him no without once stopping the swing.

Stroud had gone back twice since to offer the whole family the holy land, and been told no twice more, the last time from behind a new wall of raw grey block with a rifle barrel resting on top of it.

A stranger would have come to the lights. St. Jude’s was the only lit place there is, and that helicopter had flown straight past it to set down in Walter Hart’s field, so whoever flew it had known exactly which yard they wanted.

That meant family, and Walter had one son who’d been away at university in the city when it all began, the middle boy, Leo, six and a half feet tall, who used to fold himself into the back pew and fall asleep during the sermon.

So the boy had come home, and whoever brought him had put a helicopter down at dusk in a field full of demons, which was more than Dale had ever dared.

A man who could do that could do a great deal of good for a hundred and three souls.

"Sounds to me like the Lord sent us a helicopter..." Stroud pulled his gloves back on and smiled at the dark past the yews, where the farm road ran west toward the willows. "And set it down in the wrong yard."

Dale laughed, a short, high laugh that didn’t last, and his eyes went to the vestry door, where the four men had carried the cage inside. "What do we do, Pastor...? If they come over here with guns, asking questions-"

"Then they’ll find a church." Stroud laid a hand on the pilot’s shoulder and felt him shaking through the jacket. "Tomorrow, nothing... Let Walter have his boy home for a day... On the second day I’ll walk up the road and say hello."

"Yes, Pastor." Dale’s shoulders came down an inch under Stroud’s hand, the same as they always did. "We, uh... we got the coats, at least. Sixty-two of ’em, every size the mall had left, and the trucks are about an hour behind me."

Thirty-one children in the holy land had been sleeping in their parents’ sweaters for three weeks. Stroud closed his eyes and thanked the Lord for every one of those coats, and when he opened them again he was smiling.

"Go and get warm, Dale... The trucks will want you on the radio when they’re close."

Dale climbed down and went off toward the old school, glancing back at the vestry door twice before he reached it.

Two box trucks and a pickup were still out on the Dunmore road, running dark through forty kilometers of demons, and Stroud didn’t spare them a single worry. He had a tray to carry first.

The rectory stood across the churchyard from the church, and its kitchen was cold, with the woodstove banked down to save wood and one bare bulb burning over the sink off the parish generator.

The tray was waiting on the counter where he’d left it after the evening service, the big stainless steel one from the parish hall that the women’s guild had used for twenty years of harvest suppers, under a domed steel lid with a ring on top.

Stroud pulled off his gloves and the orange hat and set them on the table. Then he ran the cold tap, washing his hands with a bar of yellow soap, the backs, the palms, between every finger and around his wedding ring, as he had before every communion for thirty-one years, and dried them on a clean dish towel one finger at a time.

He hummed while he did it, low in his chest, the tune he always hummed on these nights. It was Amazing Grace, slow and a half-step flat, as his mother used to sing it over the washing-up.

Twenty-two days ago, the Lord had ended the world. Then He’d looked down at one small valley and decided to keep it, putting Gideon Stroud in charge of the keeping, and Stroud hadn’t doubted that for a single hour of the twenty-two days.

The window over the sink had gone black with the night, and it gave him back his own face, with the dark shape of the church out past it.

He wet his palm and smoothed his hair back, straightened the white tab of his collar with two fingers, and let the smile go out of his face until all that was left was the solemn look he kept for the altar.

She’d hung under that helicopter in the cold for four hours, doing everything that was asked of her, and she’d be starving by now.

He wasn’t going to make her wait one minute longer than he had to.

Stroud lifted the tray off the counter with both hands, level, held out from his chest, and carried it out into the snow like a man carrying the host.

He took the path to the vestry door without hurrying, keeping the tray level over the icy patches while the cold got into his bare hands.

Bert Coyle was waiting inside the door with his cap in his hands, the oldest of the four men, a deacon at St. Jude’s for twenty years who still took his cap off the second he came indoors.

Behind him, the cage stood empty in the middle of the vestry, the little back room where the robes were kept, with its door hanging open and the tarp folded on top, and the smell she’d left in it filled the room, sweet as strawberries, clinging to the bars.

"She’s down, Pastor..." Bert kept his eyes on the tray while he spoke, turning the cap around and around in his fingers. "Ronnie’s on the door. We got the hood off her, and the chain’s on the ring."

"Thank you, Bert. Go to bed." Stroud smiled at the old man until he looked up from the tray, and Bert went out into the snow with the cap still in his hand.

Stroud went through into the church, dark except for four candles burning at the foot of the altar steps, where old Arnie Voss lay on two trestles under a white sheet with his good brown Sunday shoes sticking out from the bottom of it.

Arnie had run the hardware store in Coldwater for forty-four years, and two nights ago he’d died in his sleep in the third row of tents curled into a ball.

Stroud stopped beside him, balanced the tray on his left forearm, and laid his right hand flat on the sheet over the old man’s chest.

"The coats came in tonight, Arnie..." Stroud told him, easy and warm, as if they were chatting across the counter of the store. "Sixty-two of them... Little Huff can finally give his mother her sweater back."

He patted the sheet twice, took the tray in both hands again, and went on behind the altar.

Beside the carved oak screen against the east wall, a low arched doorway opened onto a stone stair going down under the altar, nineteen steps worn into dips in the middle from a hundred and eighty years of men walking them.

A single bare bulb burned at the bottom on a cable stapled down the wall, and the cold coming up the stairwell carried the smell of the angle God had sent for their salvation, stronger down here, mixed with old stone and candle wax and the iron of the chain.

Stroud went down one step at a time, humming, and with every step the solemn face he’d put on in the kitchen came off him by degrees.

By the tenth step the lines between his brows had smoothed out flat, and he was smiling, and by the fifteenth the hymn had come up out of his chest with the words in it, loud enough to fill the stairwell. "...I once was lost, but now am found..."

He was happy, going down those stairs. This was the best part of his day, every day, and by the second week he’d stopped pretending otherwise to himself.

Ronnie got up off his folding chair at the bottom when Stroud’s boots came into the light, a big soft young man of twenty-five with a patchy blond beard and a DUNMORE MALL SECURITY fleece zipped up to his throat, a lever-action .30-30 held across his chest in both hands.

Ronnie looked at the tray first, then at Stroud’s collar, his shoes, the wall beside his shoulder, everywhere except his eyes, as he had every night since the first week.

He was frightened of the force on the other side of the door behind him, and he was ashamed of being frightened, and Stroud held neither one against him.

A man who could look his pastor in the eye at the bottom of these stairs would have worried him a great deal more.

The door at Ronnie’s back was older than anything else in St. Jude’s, black oak ten centimeters thick and bound with three straps of hand-forged iron, with a new steel bolt the men had put on in the first week that was thicker than Stroud’s thumb.

-Shhhhk... clink... shhhhk...

From the other side of it came the chain, dragged slow and heavy across the flagstones to the end of its length and back, over and over, until a link struck the iron straps hard enough that Ronnie took a step sideways away from the door.

"She’s been at that since they brought her down, Pastor..." Ronnie kept his eyes on the tray while he talked, and his voice came out higher than a man his size ought to have. "Back and forth, back and forth, the whole time... I don’t think she liked the cold up there much tonight."

"She was waiting for me, son." Stroud smiled at the door, warm and pleased. "She always knows when it’s me."

The chain went quiet on the other side of the door the moment he spoke, and stayed quiet.

"Yes, sir..." Ronnie’s eyes went to the door and straight back to the tray. "That’s... that’s real nice, sir."

"Open it for me, please."

-Click-!-Clack-!

Ronnie thumbed the .30-30’s hammer back to full cock, shifted the rifle to one hand, drew the bolt with the other, then hauled the door open toward himself and stood behind it, muzzle pointed at the ceiling, the oak between him and whatever was inside.

And the door swung open on darkness.

The bulb behind Stroud lit the first meter of floor past the threshold, flagstones swept clean and wet with melted frost, and beyond that it lit nothing at all.

And from the pitch-black darkness, two burning red eyes glared at him from about a meter off the floor, three or four meters back in the black, where she crouched by the ring her chain ran to.

They were red from rim to rim, with no white in them anywhere, and they didn’t blink.

The smell rolled out of the crypt around them, sweet and strong enough to sting, while the cold off the stone came up through the soles of Stroud’s boots.

Stroud looked into those eyes and loved what was looking back at him more than anything he had left in the world.

And his face showed every bit of it, the smile going wide and wet-eyed, his chin trembling once before he got it back under control.

He knelt down on the flagstones at the threshold, both knees cracking, and set the tray across his lap so his eyes were level with hers.

"There you are..." Stroud’s voice came out low and warm, a voice nobody upstairs ever got to hear from him. "I know... I know, it was a long night... Cold up there, wasn’t it? You did so well. You did so well tonight."

The chain dragged as she came forward, and the red eyes came with it until the chain ran out and held them at the edge of the light, a meter short of the threshold, close enough that he could hear her breathing, a dry, quick rasp as though nails dragged over stone.

Stroud bowed his head over the tray and folded his hands on top of the steel lid.

"For what we are about to receive... may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen."

"Amen," Ronnie mumbled behind the door, out of twenty-five years of habit, and looked sick the second it was out of his mouth.

Stroud took the ring on top of the lid between his finger and thumb, and lifted it.

And on that tray lay a human hand.

It was Arnie’s left hand, sawn off a few centimeters above the shoulder, dried meat where the blade had gone through.

The skin had gone a waxy yellow-grey, freckled brown across the back with age spots, and the fingers had stiffened, curled in toward the palm, the nails cut short and square, with hardware-store grime still packed under the thumbnail.

And the second the pastor held it out, a hand slowly came out of the dark and took it.

It was a long, grey, bony hand, its skin shrunk tight over every knuckle and its nails grown thick and yellow, split at the ends.

It closed on the hand, cold fingers sliding between cold fingers, and drew back into the black with it.

-Crack-!

Came the dry snapping of bones from that darkness, along with wet tearing of cold meat filling the stairwell.

All the while, those red eyes never once left Stroud’s face.

Ronnie stared at the wall above the door with his lips moving and the rifle trembling in his hands, not daring to look down even once.

Stroud laughed under his breath, fond and helpless with it.

"Slow down... slow down, you’ll make yourself sick... Nobody’s going to take it off you."

Then he reached into the dark with his bare right hand while she ate.

"Pastor-" Ronnie’s whisper cracked down the middle.

But Stroud paid him no mind at all.

His palm found the top of her head in the darkness, a cold skull under hair so matted and stiff that it crackled under his fingers, and she let his hand stay there.

She didn’t stop eating, and she didn’t pull away from him.

He stroked her hair back from the crown of her head down to the nape of her neck, slow and steady, over and over, while the bones cracked in the dark under his hand.

"Good girl."