Sin Chaser: Terror from the Heavens (AFTER: A POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVOR SERIES) Read online

  “Let me taste you,” the Reaper breathed. “Let me devour you.”

  “Hard pass,” Ness grunted, sliding the hunting knife off the creature’s belt and stabbing it through the underside of its jaw.

  The blade pinned its mouth shut, and surprised it enough that Ness could flip it onto its back. She drew her leg back and toe-kicked the hilt of the knife. The point burst out the top of the Reaper’s head and she stopped moving.

  Ness pushed herself up, staggering from the tumble, and snatched the pistol from the dead man’s hand. She ran to the woman the Reapers had violated, cold sweat chilling her back. She aimed the gun at her forward, just as she sat up with a scream and her teeth elongated and her eyes turned bloody red.

  “No!” Faith yelled, and then the gun barked and the dead woman was dead again.

  Silence reigned in Sanctuary. Ness tucked the gun into her waistband, grabbed the corpse by the ankles and started dragging it towards the church. It left a trail of black in the dirt behind it.

  “What did you do?” Faith whispered, when she reached the door. “Wasn’t she alive?”

  Ness shook her head. “Not the way it works, kid. The Reapers take your soul, you’re just another empty vessel for them to set up shop. She’d have preferred it this way. Trust me.”

  “They took her soul?”

  “They can’t take it into the ether with them. Every soul these three ever took, they’re in the wind now. Hopefully they end up where they want to be.”

  Faith stared at the mess Ness had made outside the church. She gulped, then squared her shoulders.

  “You said I needed to carry?”

  “Yeah. I’d appreciate it. Then we can get moving.”

  “Moving?”

  Ness nodded. “There’ll be more Reapers coming. That’s why we need to move quick.”

  “You want me to…come with you?”

  “I need to get you to Archangel, let someone in charge know about you. Kid, you survived one of the Big Seven. Far as I know, that’s never happened before.”

  She stared at Faith, at the wide-eyed alarm in her eyes, the vulnerable tremble in her lips. Odds were, she had no idea just how important she was.

  “You could change everything.”

  Chapter Three

  As You Go

  “Isn’t that what we’re all looking for, Faithful? A place to call home? A place to call our own? I know, sometimes, things seem hopeless. Why, it seems like this maelstrom we’re caught in is never going to end. But we’re all part of the Struggle now, and what we build up will surely be laid low again. We must weather that destruction, together, and keep the Faith. Heaven above is our only place beyond the storm.”

  “Yeesh,” Ness grunted. “That lady is laying it on thick today.”

  Even on low volume, she could still hear the Shepherd preaching, but she needed the station on to know if the route was clear all the way to Archangel. Hell, she needed the station to know where Archangel was these days.

  She’d taken a truck from Sanctuary with a full tank of gas. After dealing with the bodies, she hadn’t been able to risk looking for food, water, weapons, so all she’d taken was the Reapers’ pistol and knife.

  Sanctuary probably didn’t have weapons. Pacifists. Didn’t even shoot varmints. They’d embraced the Struggle, big time. God only knew how they’d survived so long.

  Before they mounted up, Ness took Chip’s Circle from her pocket and pressed it into Faith’s hand.

  “This belonged to a friend of mine, but it don’t feel right to me. Figure he’d want you to have it, since you’re special.”

  “I’m not that special,” Faith whispered, staring into the bonfire where her church used to be.

  They’d ridden in silence since then, until Ness turned down the radio.

  “I like her,” Faith said.

  “Who, the Shepherd?”

  “She’s nice. Lot of the folks back home said she helped them get through the day sometimes. Reminded them of what was important.”

  “The Struggle?”

  The girl shook her head. “The Struggle’s about getting to Heaven. That’s not important. It’s about being kind, no matter what else the world wants you to be.”

  “Not a good attitude for survival.”

  “Survival’s not important either. Not really.”

  Ness scoffed. “We’ll agree to disagree.”

  They fell back into silence, but Ness turned the volume dial up a couple notches, and smiled when Faith started humming along to old Christian rock ballads.

  “Need to find some place to stop,” Ness said eventually.

  “Really? I thought you said we had enough gas for a day or two.”

  “We do, but I’m a little beat up and a little hungry.”

  “Oh,” Faith said, glancing at the wound on Ness’s arm like she didn’t understand it. “Okay then.”

  There was a farmhouse ahead, lights on. Ness veered off the road and powered through the rough patch of dust that might have been a field once, until the topsoil stripped away. She came up on the house’s dark side and parked. Problem with a place this quiet, Reapers and road crews could hear an engine a mile off.

  She popped the door and stepped down, pistol at the ready. Faith saw it and shook her head.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please?”

  Ness stared at her a moment, then nodded and slid the gun away under her jacket. Made more sense anyway. Less chance of being shot on sight if someone spotted her first.

  She walked across the field, straddling the line between sneaking and remaining unthreateningly visible. Halfway to the house, a floodlight burst into life. She lifted her hands.

  “Kiss the dirt,” a man’s voice ordered.

  Ness nodded and obeyed. Reapers tended to shoot first and suck souls later—first degree ids, never satisfied unless something was blowing up. Could have been a road crew, but…

  Set up in a farmhouse like this? Didn’t seem likely.

  She scanned the house as she lay down. Lights were on in the upper windows, but flickering. Candles. Dark shapes stood at the curtains. Watchmen? Or dress shop dummies, so’s it seemed like a full house?

  “Don’t mean you no harm,” Ness said, as the stranger approached. “But I’m kind of banged up and I’ve got a girl with me. Need some place to spend the night.”

  “And you were fixing to use my place?”

  “If that’s cool. I’ve got…a pistol I can trade.”

  Suddenly, she was regretting taking nothing from Sanctuary. Still, a trade was only important if this guy was a peaceable sort. Otherwise, he’d be more interested in the knife in her sleeve than the pistol.

  “You Faithful?” he asked.

  “The girl is.”

  “And she’s travelling with you?”

  “I’m her…guardian.”

  He stood over her, rifle aimed at her back. He studied her, then glanced over at the truck. Hopefully, Faith was staying out of sight for the moment.

  Before Ness could slide the knife out of her jacket and find a place for it, he said, “Okay, on your feet. Bring the little lady inside.”

  …

  “So it’s just the two of you here?” Ness asked.

  Harlon, her friend with the rifle, nodded. He stirred a cooking pot full of beans over a gas stove, the flicker of the hissing flame lighting in his greying beard. His wife, Marie—a fading blonde with sunken cheeks and a bright smile and work boots on under her dress—sat opposite Ness at the table, stitching the circular split in her forearm, while Faith watched. Ness had hung her jacket in the hall, like a real house guest.

  “For a few years now, ever since our baby girl left for Archangel. Said she wanted to be closer to the Struggle.”

  “We’re going to Archangel,” Faith said, with a smile.<
br />
  “Kid!” Ness snapped. Faith flinched.

  “Don’t be hard on her, Ness,” Marie said, pushing the needle through a little more forcefully than before. “She’s just a girl.”

  “No offence, but you don’t know the shit I was doing when I was her age.”

  “And I’m sorry for that, but she’s obviously come from a good home. Can’t blame her for not being as suspicious as you.”

  “Maybe not, but I still need to keep her safe, and part of that is not telling complete strangers where we’re headed. You seem nice enough, but plenty of people seem nice.”

  “Very true,” Marie said. “Are you listening, Faith? Ness is giving good advice.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Might have a proposition for you, if you’re interested,” Harlon said, setting a bowl of beans down in front of Ness, who started shoveling one-handed.

  “Depends on the proposition,” she said, full-mouthed. “We can’t stay long.”

  He nodded. “You’ve got your reasons and I won’t pry. But if you’re heading to Archangel anyway, maybe you could deliver a letter for us. To our daughter. I can’t offer you much in the way of payment, but I can point you some place you could find supplies.”

  Ness tried not to smirk. Folks like Harlon and Marie, she was pretty sure they’d give her the location anyway. Anything to help Faith, who they’d been smitten with from the start, reach her destination.

  But she tried, wherever possible, not to be an asshole.

  “Sure. I can’t make any promises, but…”

  “You should find her pretty easily when you get there,” Marie said. “Most folk in Archangel know her.”

  “We’d love to help,” Faith said, face all lit up.

  Ness scooped beans into her mouth to hide a smile. “We sure would.”

  …

  Ness slept on the floor in front of the bedroom door, while Faith took their daughter’s old bed. They woke at dawn and ate coarse oatmeal with purified water. Marie had washed and mended Ness’s jacket during the night.

  Harlon gave them a map with the location of a good prospect marked on it. An old shopping mall, if Ness read it right. It had the potential to be a big haul, or a terrible dud. She’d approach it the same way she approached everything. Like a fucking landmine.

  They departed with a wave and a tear from Faith. Marie remarked that it was like having their daughter back, just for a night, and she and her husband agreed that their baby girl could have grown up to be Ness quite easily.

  Marie went inside to fix lunch. Harlon took his rifle and strolled around the farmhouse, thinking on the stranger and her ward, and their mission to get to Archangel, and how things happened all the time that he didn’t understand, but which God still expected him to play a part in, so all he could do was try his best to do right.

  He didn’t see the car—the second parked on his land in two days—until it was too late. Then the knife was under his chin and the whisper was in his ear.

  “Where did you send them?” it demanded.

  “I’m not telling you a thing,” Harlon said, breathing the scent of ash, “Reaper.”

  “Should I incentivize you? Perhaps your wife will be more inclined to tell me.”

  Harlon spat in the dirt. The knife shaved a quarter-inch of his beard.

  “You don’t know my wife,” he growled. “She’ll tell you, same as I will. Go back to the pit.”

  “That is unfortunate. But not altogether unexpected.”

  He felt the Reaper’s muscles tense and twisted, bringing the rifle up. The shot rang out across the fields, scattering a hundred crows.

  In the silence that followed, only one of them started the long walk back towards the farmhouse.

  Chapter Four

  Shadows

  “What do you expect to find in the derelict places of this world? Food? Water? Or a sign from God that you were meant to survive another day? Salvage has become our way in this world, but beware the easy path, Faithful. Beware the harvest that was sown in the world before, because that harvest has already been Reaped. Why, you’re just as likely to find death in those old haunts as anything to give life.”

  The grey highway swallowed them up. Six lanes of open road and theirs was the only car. The only one driving at least. Plenty of jack-knifed trucks and burnt-out wrecks to swerve around. Urban obstacle course. The truck from Sanctuary had been well-maintained. It handled the jigsaw asphalt with aplomb.

  The desolation could get heavy, which was why Ness was grateful for the literal break, when the road gave way to a field of sunflowers that’d transgressed its borders and overtaken the highway. They clipped through the overgrowth at speed, scattering yellow petals, and for a moment the truck cab was full of laughter. Not for the first time, Ness was reminded that Faith was new to all of this.

  “Do you think we’ll find everything we need at this place?” Faith asked, studying the map Ness had given her to navigate by.

  “We should. These places used to have everything. Food, water, clothes. Speaking of which, we need to get you something to wear.”

  “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

  “You look too much like a girl.”

  “I am a girl.”

  “Yeah, and that’s the problem.” Ness bit her tongue. She could feel her temper rising. She needed to tamp that shit down. It wasn’t Faith’s fault she didn’t know better. “Some people do terrible things to girls.”

  “But that’s not my fault, just because I’m a girl.”

  “No, kid. You’re right. It ain’t your fault. It’s not any girl’s fault when it happens, and in the best possible world, maybe it doesn’t. But this ain’t that world, and we need to be careful. I don’t want you getting hurt, okay?”

  Faith nodded, hesitant, and Ness wondered what the people in Sanctuary had told her about the world she lived in. Did she know about the Reaping? The Big Seven? She didn’t have a clue about Reapers, and that alone was baffling.

  How did someone go fourteen years in this world without ever seeing a single Reaper?

  They drove on a little longer, and the only words that passed between them were directions. They rolled off the cracked asphalt tongue into the bowels of a ravaged suburb. A corroded sign dangling over the road welcomed them to Junction City. They circled north, heading for Harlon’s cache, and avoiding the inner city. Faith stared at the crumbling buildings, threaded green with the promise of nature’s second coming. Ness wondered if she was thinking about her own home, now a ruin.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “About your folks.”

  “My birth momma died when I was born. She lived just long enough to name me. I was raised by the town. They…called me a miracle, on account of how I didn’t have a daddy.”

  Ness nodded, but said nothing. She’d heard of a few miracle babies in her time. Usually, daddy was a Reaper, or someone well on their way to becoming one.

  “You always live in Sanctuary?”

  “Yeah, but… We moved around a lot at first. I remember…a lot of roads and things, when I was little. They said the place they settled down was better than where they started.”

  Ness chose not to point out they shouldn’t have settled down at all. Not if they wanted to keep breathing.

  “They always told me my momma was a good person. Close to an angel, they said. I…I kept asking why someone so good had to die so I could live.”

  “Some questions don’t have an answer,” Ness said. “Not a nice one anyway.”

  She chewed her tongue as she steered them through the demolished town. She thought over how much to share, how much of the story to tell. She decided, as she often did, to give unsolicited advice instead.

  “Some people die and some people live, and it feels like it’s all wrong. Way I figure it, all you can do is try to make the
world as good a place as they’d have made it.”

  “Sounds like something the Shepherd would say.”

  Ness scowled. Faith laughed. Then her good humor tapered off and her eyes turned again to the tombstones of the old world all around.

  “How does it get like this?”

  “Neglect. All these places need maintenance, kid. Leaks, cracks, broken windows, fires. Not enough people to fill up all the houses and stop it so it…spirals. No one’s lived here since the Reaping, I’ll bet.”

  Such a waste. Water gone stagnant, food rotten, shelter crumbled and people dead. So much the new world could have used but…

  Too static to survive the Big Seven. Too much that couldn’t be moved quickly. Humanity had become a nomadic species, chased from one camp to another by the worst of supernatural disasters, carrying their lives in duffel bags and car trunks.

  And then there were the Reapers, picking off the stragglers, the lost and lonely and vulnerable.

  “I’m sorry,” Faith said. “I don’t know enough about this world.”

  Ness sniggered. “What, you think I do? Your guess is as good as mine, kid. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, sure, but… The way you talk about survival, like it doesn’t matter? I’d kill for an ounce of that grace.”

  “It’s mostly tough talk. I don’t want to die.”

  “No one does. No one who loves something anyway.”

  “What do you love?”

  Ness pursed her lips. She cranked the dial on the radio. Faith didn’t ask any more questions.

  On the road ahead, the mall came into view, a shattered cathedral to the fallen religion of consumerism, glass smashed and steel rusted. Somewhere, in those moss-speckled caves and silent tunnels marked by ancient obelisks proclaiming ‘You Are Here’, was the possibility of an easy ride the rest of the way to Archangel.

  How many other people had taken that bait?

  …

  She parked the truck out of sight of the road, behind a decrepit billboard for consumer electronics bearing the logo of a company everyone now called ‘The Apple of Forbidden Knowledge’. No one phoned anymore.