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  With a burst of speed, he knees the cleaver man in the nuts, hears a popping noise past all the screaming, watches blood spread through the crotch of the man’s pants. Samson throws his arms wide, snapping the chains from his wrists. He wraps the guy in a bear hug, squeezing hard until he hears his back snap, then spins, throwing the body into one of the guys coming up behind.

  Cleaver’s not getting up again, but the other guy will soon, so he needs to take out the only one standing fast. This one’s got a shiv made out of a sharpened chunk of sheet metal, and he’s big—almost as big as Samson. This might very well come down to a contest of brute strength, and the way he’s feeling right now, Samson isn’t sure he’ll win it.

  And then the floor drops out from under him.

  Samson falls through a trapdoor, one of the few on stage designed to open down instead of up. He drops a good five feet, rough hands grabbing at him to slow his fall. He swings a fist, connecting with somebody’s face, hears a voice telling him over and over that it’s all right, he’s all right. Someone slaps something onto his face, straps and buckles cinched tight over the back of his head.

  Through the smeared plastic of the gas mask, he sees James King standing before him, beatific smile on his face. “It’s time, Samson,” King says. “Time to deliver them to God.”

  Above him, Samson hears a series of muffled explosions, five in rapid succession, then ten more over as many seconds. Surprised yelling as the crowd realizes that something’s wrong but doesn’t know what it is.

  Then the screams start.

  Cyrus had explained that the chemical he’d wanted from Tess, the stuff labeled 35884–77–6, was something called xylyl bromide that was used as a tear gas in some war over a hundred years ago. How Tess got her hands on that shit he had no idea, but now that he had it, he was damn well going to use it.

  In small doses exposure leads to burning eyes, throat damage. Higher concentrations and the eyeballs swell and scar, airways close, lungs burn. And in the concentration they just dumped into the Arena, no one’s getting out alive.

  Samson follows the group that pulled him off the stage through a tunnel that leads to the outside. They get through a basement door and then seal it with a couple of pieces of rusty rebar through the door handles.

  Samson pulls off the mask, takes a deep breath of cool, clean air, then starts to cough. Barely a whiff of the stuff got through the mask, but his skin is already beginning to itch, and his eyes burn. A woman who helped pull him out of the building pushes him to his knees and pours water from a bottle into his eyes.

  “This will help,” she says. “And we’ll want to get your skin scrubbed clean, too. But that can wait. Can you breathe okay?”

  “Yeah,” Samson says, though his swelling tongue makes him wonder how long that will last. “Just my eyes sting is all.”

  She hands him another bottle. “Keep flushing your eyes, sir. I need to get back to the doors, make sure nobody gets through.”

  “Okay, Novice…”

  “Initiate, sir. Initiate Katarina Volkov. Glory be to God and his Prophet James King.”

  “Glory be to God,” Samson says, watching her retreat through blurred eyes.

  “A few more minutes and our people will go in and finish up the survivors,” King says. “Every one of those godless sinners delivered unto the Lord. A glorious victory for God’s Militia, don’t you think, Samson?”

  “Of course, Reverend,” Samson says. He wonders how many were in there. The Locos had a good hundred, hundred fifty members, and with so many wanting to see Samson’s head on a platter, there had to be a lot more than that in there. Two hundred, maybe? Three? He’s never seen that many dead. He has a hard time wrapping his brain around it.

  “Something wrong, Samson?” King says.

  “Just that we never gave them the choice. Even at the Market, even at the camps, we gave them a choice.”

  “We gave them a choice here, too, son. You walked into their heathen’s den, let them subject you to beatings and torture. They could have stopped. They could have never started. The ones who went to watch your assassination in there, they could have stayed home.”

  King shakes his head, puts a hand on Samson’s shoulder. “They didn’t have to participate in that barbarism, but they chose to, anyway. Never think they didn’t have a choice.”

  Samson pours more water in his stinging eyes and trusts in James King that they did the right thing.

  –7–

  “And the seeds of your downfall will be sowed in the soil of your successes.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, Season 4, Episode 7

  Four hundred and twelve dead. Samson sits on muddy grass, damp from the wet, fetid wind blowing through the city, and says it to himself again.

  Four hundred and twelve dead. They declared the building free of corpses last night as they dumped the final one into the pyre burning in the emptied Echo Park Lake. The fires dance in Samson’s eyes, the breezes fanning them higher, as if God himself were stoking the flames with his hot breath.

  The sky above is an overcast orange, low clouds underlit by the pyre, as the haze and smoke blow toward the coast.

  “Smells like barbecue,” Cyrus says, sitting down next to Samson to watch the blaze. It’s been three days and Cyrus has been too busy to check on Samson. That’s fine. Plenty of other people have been checking on him.

  Samson nods. It does smell like that, actually. His mouth is watering a little bit, and he could really go for some grilled possum. He hasn’t eaten much since he gave himself up to the Locos.

  “How’d you know that plan would work?” Samson says.

  “God told me.” Cyrus laughs at the look on Samson’s face. “Nah, you’re the one with the radio to the big guy. It’s just that I know the Locos, I know these people. They didn’t care why you were there, they just wanted your head. And the Locos wouldn’t just chop it off, either. They’d want a spectacle. So we gave ‘em one.”

  “We killed them all.”

  Not everyone died from the gas, at least not right away. The ones hit first went fastest as their throats closed and their lungs shriveled up in their chests. They suffocated within minutes. Others took longer, but they died the same way. For Samson the worst were the ones the gas didn’t kill, just left them in shivering agony, blind, blood running from their burnt–out eyes. Most of those couldn’t even scream, just lay there, waiting to be put out of their misery by the Church’s soldiers going through the Arena with clubs and knives.

  “That we did, my friend,” Cyrus says. “Every last stinking one of those sinners. And got ourselves a fancy new pad. Clean it up some, air it out. Gonna be a few days before we can go in without masks, but then, voila.”

  “They’ll hate us even more now,” Samson says.

  “Good. Easier to separate the saints from the sinners. We’re doin’ God’s work,” Cyrus says. “Somebody’s against us, they’re against God.”

  There’s a hole in that logic somewhere, but Samson can’t find it, so he leaves it alone. Instead he says, “What now?”

  “Now it’s time to regroup, get our act together, get ready to really expand. Did you know they have a radio in there? Stupid bastards didn’t even know enough to use it right. It’s just a big jumble in an office. Thinkin’ it’s time we powered it up and started spreading the good word to some heathens a little farther afield. Going to start transmitting the Sermon According to James King. Spread it all over the place.”

  “Like how King had his television show?”

  “Better. He had competition. People had lots of things to watch. But you turn on a radio today and you’re hearing some yokel going off about acid rain or a flare–up of radiation sickness somewhere. We get this thing going, and we are going to clean the fuck up. Spread the word farther and wider than it’s ever been spread. We can get all of Reverend King’s sermons onto the airwaves and out to everyone. The church is gonna be huge.”

  “It’s not about the church, Cyrus
. It’s about God. It’s about Reverend King.”

  “Of course,” Cyrus says. “Sure. That’s what I meant.”

  “Excuse me.” A shadow falls across them. Samson looks up to see a tall woman with long black hair and a red smock holding a bottle of water out to him. “Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you might want some water. The medic said you should flush your eyes out several times a day for the next week.”

  “Novice Volkov,” Samson says, taking the water. “Thank you.” There’s something familiar about her that he can’t quite place. “Have we met?”

  “You’re welcome, sir. Yes. I helped get you out of the Arena. And I got you water for your eyes. It was the least I could do. You sacrificed a lot for us, sir. It must have been awful in there. And it’s Initiate.”

  “It’s Novice now,” Samson says. “I knew that God was watching over me. I had nothing to worry about.”

  “Where you from, honey?” Cyrus says.

  Volkov startles, as though just now noticing Cyrus. “Hollywood, sir. I’ve been with the church for about a month now.”

  “I hear they’ve been expanding.”

  “They were when I was there,” she says. “Refugees, mostly. People afraid to give themselves over to the church.”

  Cyrus nods at the news. “You can go now.”

  She bows her head and hurries away before Samson can even say goodbye. “What was that about?” he says. “You never ask where people are from.”

  “Hollywood’s getting too—” Cyrus pauses. “Full of sin,” he says. “Whores and faggots and druggies and Communists. You asked what was next. That’s next.”

  Samson had been wondering when they were going to have this conversation. He and Cyrus had been to Hollywood plenty of times to visit the whores before they found James King and everything changed. When he’d first been there years ago, it was little more than a camp, but it had grown since then into a decent–sized town. Last he’d seen it had almost a thousand people, and if what Volkov said was true, then it was even bigger now from all of the sinners the church had been driving into its arms.

  “If you say so,” Samson says.

  Cyrus laughs. “We ain’t goin’ for a while yet. Not until we get this place up and running. Not until we consolidate. We have people, sure, and they’re good in a fight, but we want to take down Hollywood, we’re gonna need a real army. And we don’t have one yet.”

  Samson scratches his chin. “Okay. What’s it gonna take to get it?”

  “You let me worry about that,” Cyrus says. “You just keep preachin’ and swingin’ that hammer.”

  Samson frowns. “I ain’t a kid, Cyrus. I’m not stupid. I can help with the plans.”

  “Of course you can,” says Cyrus. “I just don’t want to distract you with the boring stuff. I know you’re not stupid.”

  But Samson knows it’s a lie.

  ***

  Samson is a lot of things, Cyrus thinks. Insane, idealistic, gullible. But goddamn can he hold a crowd.

  “You might think you’ve come to us for different reasons,” Samson says, looking out at the assembled flock lined up in rows in front of him outside the Angelus Temple, his voice bellowing through the loudspeakers.

  “But it’s all the same reason. You’re lookin’ for answers. Lookin’ for hope. You came because you saw the Truth and the Light. You came because you know that the way of God through his Prophet James King is the one true way.”

  Cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” erupt from the crowd. Cyrus stands to one side, scans the crowd, sees rapt attention on everyone’s faces. They’re in the presence of greatness, and they know it. Stupid greatness, sure, but most of these rubes can’t find their asses with both hands. Samson goes with his gut, goes with what feels right to him. Leads with his heart. And that’s just what these people want. Samson throws enough passionate bullshit at them, they’ll follow him anywhere.

  And that scares the shit out of Cyrus.

  Because he knows, knows as surely as he knows that these people will lay down their lives for Samson, for the gospels of James King, for God and Truth and Light and all that other horseshit, that they will never do the same for Cyrus.

  Samson’s always had that certain something, though the man can’t see it himself, that makes women fall for him, makes men want to be his friend or stay well the fuck away from him. Always has. That’s why Cyrus stuck with him, because if you can’t be great then you damn well better stick to greatness like flies on shit.

  “Some folks are gonna listen,” Samson says. “They’re gonna let you in with open arms. They’ll come to us easily, willingly. And there are those who won’t. And do you know what you have to do when that happens?”

  “Amen” and “Hallelujah” are replaced with “Kill ‘em,” “Burn ‘em,” and “Eat their fuckin’ babies!” Samson nods to all of these, though there’s a sadness in his eyes when he hears each one.

  “They will be cleansed in the fires of God’s love, their souls sent to Heaven with machete and hammer and gun. You will be the instrument of their salvation.”

  The crowd roars. They reach their hands out to Samson. Some of them have tears in their eyes. Cyrus cringes. There it is. Love. And not for the church. Not for the message.

  For Samson.

  Cyrus looks behind him at the Angelus Temple, then back to Samson. He’s more the Church than the Church is him, and that means that if Samson dies, the church dies. And if the church dies, what the hell happens to poor old Cyrus?

  Fortunately, Cyrus has some ideas about how to refocus that love, how to make the Church more than Samson, and the best part is, Samson’s gonna be the one saying the words that’ll make it happen.

  “So we get our shit together,” Samson says, just like Cyrus told him. “You’re all gonna learn the gospels so you can welcome your brethren with open arms, and you’ll train, all fierce and shit, so that you may meet the Unbelievers with furious vengeance. And so starting tomorrow you’ll all be assigned into ranks, placed into squads and battalions. Some of you will be captains, knights, administrators. We’ll match our faith with discipline. We’ll become the army that God needs. We will be his red right hand.” Samson hammers the podium with his fist, makes the whole stage shake.

  The crowd screams amens and hallelujahs. Demands the blood of the Unbelievers. Cyrus smiles. Samson just pounded the first nail into his own coffin. It’s still way too early to move Samson aside. He’s larger than life, more real than reality itself. Right now, the whole thing will fall apart without him.

  But soon, Cyrus thinks, once all those captains, knights, and administrators get comfortable in their jobs, once they start realizing their future’s secure as long as the church remains strong, then Cyrus can start thinking about doing something about Samson.

  –8–

  “The Lord will set you on the path of adversity. Your failures will be many. But they are a test of your resolve and your commitment to His truth.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, Season 4, Episode 19

  To train his troops, Samson finds inspiration in movies with ridiculous titles from almost a hundred years ago found in the King’s studio. Commando, three different Rocky movies, something about a kid who learns karate, and a dozen others. They’re so badly degraded that Samson can’t begin to follow the plots, but they all show men and women fighting against evil and corruption with quick–cut training scenes, the end result of which is always the same—they have become unstoppable killing machines.

  And so the Church’s training is fierce and rapid. Every soldier in God’s Militia drills, practices, marches, spars. They are schooled in flashy hand–to–hand, acrobatic sword work, double–fisted gun combat, and a form of battle meditation that focuses on ramming magazines into guns, slamming knives into sheathes.

  It is a brutal training regimen, and those who survive know that they are the best of the best, God’s appointed soldiers. Those who can make the cut survive. Those who can’t, don’t. There is
no room for the weak. For weakness, as Cyrus’s ever–expanding good book says, is a lack of faith.

  With that, the Church’s soldiers go forth to grow their ranks and salt the Earth, certain that they can do no wrong because God, James King, and Luke Samson guide their hands.

  They convert scores. They kill hundreds.

  ***

  They catch the spy in one of the buildings half buried in mud and swamp–grass along Franklin.

  Samson looks down at the man on the floor in front of him, torchlight throwing flickering shadows across his face, hands tied behind him. He says he’s just a squatter, one more scavenger in a world filled with them. But he’s too well fed, too clean. Doesn’t have the haunted look of a man who lives by the hour.

  Samson’s army has set up camp at the corner of Western and Los Feliz in preparation for their final push into that den of sin, Hollywood. It’s been a long year of fighting and training since they took the Angelus Temple, and Samson feels every day of that year in his bones. The Church slowly expanded its territory north into Los Feliz and Glendale, building and strengthening. Cyrus hasn’t seemed to be in any hurry to make a move on what he had said was their “next” target all those months ago, but all that time James King has been screaming in Samson’s ear about putting the whoremongers and homosexuals in Hollywood to the sword, making his blood boil and his head throb. It was tearing Samson apart, but thankfully Cyrus finally—finally—gave him the go–ahead, and now he’s on the march.

  There has been surprisingly little fighting as they’ve moved down from Los Feliz. Guerilla tactics, mostly. Overgrowth of mutant oak, sage, and manzanita has crept down to Los Feliz from Griffith Park, making the whole area perfect for ambushes, but the fact that there have been so few tells Samson that Hollywood is waiting for something. He’s just not sure what.