Chapter 20

I’d definitely never run into a burning building before. Even knowing that I couldn’t be burned, there was a natural resistance to the idea ... and the reality of going straight into a blaze, the heat, the smoke, the smell of it very unpleasant. I could hear the screams of a couple of the fools who were already aflame. I could see the fiery figures running in an anguished panic, desperate to stop the pure, excruciating pain of roasted flesh.

Not the entire building was on fire, of course, and that was the reason that I didn’t just let them all burn to death. I wanted to cut them down before they perished from the flames that continued to spread. It was more merciful and yet more satisfying that way. No fire would get the satisfaction of killing all of these enemies ... at least some of them would die at my hand. I would take their heads and mount them somewhere in warning to those who would defy me. As I said before, it worked for Sulla, so it would work for me.

The bodies could burn and save me the cost and effort of cremation, but the heads were my gruesome trophies. I wanted to forever sear into the minds of the locals who was in command, so that they never forgot the lesson. At fifteen years of age, I was now effectively a warlord, and it happened almost by accident ... almost. I was no mere scrawny lad anymore. I was lord and master of all that I surveyed, a tribal chieftain, if not a king, despite it being 1992.

The spirit had as much as confirmed to me that the old order, the Western, liberal, democratic order, was doomed, anyway. Instead of letting it fall to the usual jaded oligarchs, they preferred to hand it over to me, a teenage boy (at least in body, if not in mind). I would make a much better steward or custodian of civil government, of political authority, in the future civilization, than any politician thrice or four times my age.

That was heady wine indeed, when one actually contemplated the meaning of it. It was also an indictment of the existing social order, that the closest thing to actual gods, angels, or demons viewed a mere youth as superior to the statesmen of the day. The spirit guides clearly lacked confidence in men like George Bush, John Major, Boris Yeltsin, Jiang Xemin, Helmut Kohl, and Francois Mitterand to guide the destiny of mankind. From what I had seen of those mostly technocratic hacks, they were especially justified in their disenchantment. Bush himself said that he didn’t do “the vision thing,” after all.

As it turned out, five of the twenty men who followed “Brother Caleb,” aka Aldous Price, were already dead or dying in the flame when we located them. This knocked down their numbers to a mere fifteen, though these were heavily armed and thought that their firepower could even the odds against seventy naked assailants with bladed weapons. Instead, of course, the bullets just bounced off our skin and ricocheted back into their ranks, cutting three more men down as well. There were only twelve of them now, all of them stunned as they ran between the flames that their guns had failed to make a dent in our numbers.

Our soot-covered bodies now provided great camouflage against an ever darkening, crumbling, smoky atmosphere inside the church. I cut through two men easily as if through paper, my dagger slashing them from throat to belly. Chesty severed a man’s head right next to me as if his neck had been on the block, simply with her machete. The enemy was now down to just nine men by my count, which went down further to seven when Uncle Curtis and Bryan Arrows each took out a foeman with their blades. It truly was the last stand for Christianity in our fair town. Aunt Molly was next to slay a man, gelding him quite deliberately and tossing his genitals into the fire before slitting his throat.

Then there were six ... just six out of the original “Caleb’s Twenty.” The flames claimed another doomed fellow and reduced their numbers to five. They were now in the choir box, desperately trying to fight us off. We pushed them further, killing another man in the process at the hands of Erin, who gave no quarter to the enemy. It was a steady decline of their numbers, until there were just four of them, all a mere step from being pushed into the baptistry. They were trapped, cornered, and they knew it.

One of them was Jasper McHugh, the forty-two year old church treasurer, while another was revealed to actually be a woman dressed as a man: Beulah Price, Caleb’s sister, and the church pianist, in fact. She was also the teacher of the third and fourth grade classes. The spirit was amused at this situation, as she had dressed up so much like a man as to fool him ... but she was rather flat-chested and thin, with a sharp, boyish figure. I always pegged her as a closet lesbian, but I could never prove it.