Behind and around Saint John there were other sounds. The distant roar of the quads as his reapers scoured the woods to hunt down the last of Carter’s heretics. And, closer to hand, the artless footfalls of the following dead, coaxed in this direction by occasional blasts of his dog whistle.

Twice Saint John encountered reapers and twice he sent them away, declining their offer of help, ordering them to continue with the hunt for the heretics. By nightfall the last of that party should be accounted for, their bodies opened by sanctified blades so the darkness could enter. It had been a long chase from Treetops, the clever tree-house town in Wyoming. A thousand wooden houses built amid the boughs of the sturdy pines of the Bighorn National Forest.

He smiled at the thought. Wooden houses in wooden trees. Lovely to the eye, but so foolish, and ultimately no protection from torches and blades. No protection from the will of God.

The memories of that conflagration enchanted his mind as he ran. The graceful pines reaching like the arms of green titans into the endless star field of the night sky. The mingling of a hundred shades of yellow and orange and red as the trees caught fire. The screams of the blasphemers, crying out to a god who could not answer, for he did not exist. Saint John wished that he could be inside their minds at the moment when the darkness took them. How wonderful it must be to suddenly see and know the infinite truths.

It made him want to weep, as he had wept then. In the morning he had moved through the ashes, and his tears fell onto blackened bodies that now knew the glory of the eternal darkness.

Saint John had fallen to his knees, his arms red to the elbow with blood, his mouth smeared with it, his cheeks streaked with tears. There he had led the faithful in a prayer. Mercy for those who were too blind to see the truth. Grace for those who had embraced the darkness as the flames and the blades sanctified them. And patience to the reapers who each longed to step into that darkness, but whose sacred duty kept them here. In ugly, mortal flesh, attached to this world of hurt and misery until the work of their god was accomplished.

His wonderful memories were shattered by a gruff voice yelling from the woods. “There’s one of them!”

Saint John slowed from a run to a walk and then stood still as three men emerged from the darkness of the forest. They were tough-looking. Big and muscular, each of them armed with a vicious farm tool. One man had a pitchfork, another had a sledgehammer that he held as if it were a tack hammer, and the third carried a pair of sickles.