He said, “Fuck you.”
Then he grabbed the steering wheel in both hands, shoved it to the left with all his strength, and sent the Escalade careening into the headlights of a monstrous eighteen-wheel Freightliner pulling a full load of steel I-beams. Right into eighty thousand pounds driving at eighty-two miles an hour.
Although the impact opened a thousand red mouths in the flesh of Homer Gibbon, they whispered no secrets; and the Black Eye went forever blind.
PART FOUR
FIRST NIGHT
“… So, when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.”
—John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
No one at the bar knew his last name. When asked he said that his name was John. It wasn’t exactly true, but true enough.
John sat at the end of the bar, drinking red wine, making it last, paying for it with money he’d taken from the biker he’d killed. He would have more money when he sold the motorcycle. John was not a biker type. He disliked machines and especially loud ones. Noise irritated him. It was hard enough to listen to all of the voices in his head without those kinds of distractions.
The bar was quiet, especially this early in the day. The bartender, two other early-bird customers, and John. He’d come in as soon as it opened, found his favorite stool, and sat down to watch the news. So many wonderful things were happening in the world.
Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio had all clearly been touched by the hand of God.
He wondered if that meant that it was starting.
The Fall.
The collapse of the false world of idolatry and sin.
It was something for which he’d prayed every day of his adult life.
It was something he always believed would happen one day.
The Fall.
Then the news station interrupted its own broadcast to play another video clip from a reporter named Gregory Weinman. The reporter, who was somewhere in the affected area, had been sending videos all night, and at first the press had dismissed them as elaborate fakes and the worst kind of practical jokes.
As the night burned away and the morning dawned with fear and promise, the reaction to those reports changed. Now they were being trotted out as hard news. News that terrified everyone at the bar.
Except John, who found them so incredibly comforting.
The TV reporter warned that the footage they were about to show was disturbing and contained images not suitable for children. John saw the predatory gleam in the reporter’s eyes. Then the footage began, showing a man that John immediately recognized as the supposedly executed serial killer Homer Gibbon as he went into a 7-Eleven and began attacking people.
It was all very messy and crude. John did not like biting. He always preferred knives.
Knives held within them a purity of purpose. They were instruments of God’s will. John had several of them in special pockets he’d sewn inside his clothes. He was never without his knives.
The video played out and then it cut to the interior of a car as Homer Gibbon spoke about why he was doing what he did.