THE END

ALPHA

AARON RYAN

Award-winning author of the bestselling post-apocalyptic alien invasion 6-book saga, Dissonance, the sci-fi thriller Forecast, and The Christian Kids Values, Identity & Affirmation Picture Book Series

© 2025 Aaron Ryan & CM LLC.  U.S. Copyright # forthcoming. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication or copying prohibited by law.  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the express written permission of the publisher or copyright holder is illegal and punishable by law.  Please purchase only authorized print or electronic versions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

Published in 2025, Edition 1.

Paperback ISBN # 9781965372180 ∙ Hardcover ISBN # 9781965372197 ∙ eBook ISBN # 9781965372173.

Edited by Denouement Editing.  Published independently.

Cover art by CM LLC. Man by muratkalenderoglu on Pixabay.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

CHAPTER 1: Sage

1 . 1 . 2113 ∙ Maple Park, IL

Ξ Ξ Ξ

Some people are just wolves in sheep’s clothing; we all know that now.

All that glitters is not gold, and so on and so forth.  We all learned the hard way, and now, all of us were living in raw, cold fear. 

We were running from Nero 24/7. 

When he burst onto the scene in the Senate in 2104, most of us didn’t really know who he was.  I was too young anyway.  That wasn’t his name then, of course: it was Constantine Jedidiah Goodfellow. But history has always been rewritten by those in power as they see fit; it’s happening even now, certainly.  There will be no mention of forced edicts, or worship…or even the Guardians.  But we know they exist.  I definitely do.  My whole family knew they existed just before they were shot down and deprived of life, right after dad hid me. 

We should have seen it coming. With a name like his, you might think that such a person was all good.  Constantine means steadfast.  Jedidiah means beloved of the Lord.  Goodfellow means, well, good fellow.

That’s why no one saw it coming.

I wish the stupid virus had never happened.  That unquestionably set the stage for Nero to do what he did, and we, in our foolish blindness and extreme naiveté, trusted him.  But all such wishing is futile, right?  You can’t go back.  None of us can.  You can’t go home again. Forward is the only option, even if forward is through grinding metal and scorching flames, and all of us depending on the guy next to us to toe the line and hold firm in the faith.

No one even really knew how the virus happened.  Unfortunately, there was a lot of supposition that Christians had spread it.  There was nothing empirical ever presented for that accusation, but Nero ran with it, using it as grounds for further dissent.  And then you had the wackos, the nationalists, and the crazies who whipped a lot of people up into a frenzy with scare tactics and polarizing viewpoints that galvanized people into negative action.  You had Christians committing assassination attempts, thinking Nero was the antichrist.  You had Christian preachers going crazy and stirring up dissension against him.  The simple, pure message of the gospel itself got swallowed up in message dilution.  People erroneously relinquished the gospel in favor of something far more aggressive.

That’s when the riots happened.  A bunch of hotheads cried out for justice, pleading with others to take back our capitol, take back our country, take back our world for Christ.  Their intentions were honorable; their execution sucked.  That just added more fuel to the anti-Christian fire and spawned a lot of negative sentiment toward those who called Jesus Lord.  It ended up being far too much to recover from reputationally, which gave Nero far too much license to stamp out Christianity for good.  A lot of us did it to ourselves, frankly.

And then, no one was strong enough to oppose him.  Before we knew what hit us, he and his military tech were empowered beyond measure. Beyond restraint.  And where you have empowerment without oversight, you have a god complex.

Christianity itself, once the bedrock of our country’s democratic and ethical principles, became the scourge of the world: of ill repute, undesirable, and a government-labeled ‘unholy threat.’ All because Nero was at the helm.

And then came The Cleansing.

I was lost in thought, shaking my head at the memory and the horror of all of it.

“Sage, you still alive over there, buddy?”

His question jerked me out of my reveries.  My eyes were released from the mesmerizing amber licks of the fire.  I turned to Hunter, my best friend.  His brow was furrowed as he watched me, his face framed by the fake flames coming from the artificial fireplace in front of us.

But not just the flames.  From the back of his neck came the amber glow.  The glow from the mark.

Same as me.  Same as nearly everyone in here.

I nodded.  “Just thinking.  About time to hit the hay anyway,” I replied in a melancholy drone.

“Man, you said it.  I’m worn out.”

“Me too.  I’ve done three years’ worth of Remembrance in just one night.”

He chuckled and nodded solemnly.

Remembrance.  That’s what Swifty called it.  It was like what the Vietnamese and other cultures did.  The Kinh people believed that the incense they lit would lead those who had died to safe passage.  They believed it would guide them home as well.  They did it in remembrance, and they were very intentional about it.

I guess when over half of the world’s population has been wiped out by a virus, and a malevolent, paranoid delusional, Machiavellian psychopath now occupies the highest throne on the planet, it’s good to do a little bit of Remembrance.

Even if it’s only ever filled with pain.

On this New Year’s Day – which was now little more than just another day – there was no celebrating; there was only remembering.

Maranatha. Come, Lord.

Ξ Ξ Ξ

We’d been at Maple Park for three days now.  The flight from Dekalb had been terrifying; we lost four on the way.  The Guardians were definitely getting faster. Whether that was through software or hardware upgrades, or they may have even been new models, was anyone’s guess.  They had some kind of new scanners that could pick up if we were branded, whether they could see our necks clearly or not.  Awful.  Awful and unfair.  All we had now were our collective prayers for strength to patiently endure. 

There was a nun here – the only one left at this church – and her name was Sister Theresa.  Saint Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church had lost everyone except for Sister Theresa, who silently kept up the grounds like a ghostly warden, providing shelter and praying for souls.  She did it at great risk to herself.  Half the church had been bombed right during a service.  It was amazing that any of it was still standing, though it was now a blackened, bombed-out, husk of its former brick glory.  All of the religious institutions like this one had, of course, been mapped out, and the Guardians may have some thermal imaging available to them; we weren’t sure. Thank God someone in their right mind had the prescience to build a bomb shelter below it.  That’s where we now lived and worked out of.

I guess Nero regarded a blackened and charred half-structure like this church – like all the churches – as fait accompli because he moved on and didn’t have them check here again.  For that, we were grateful.

Swifty sent us ahead of him, and then he and six other guys held off Nero’s Guardians until they could regroup and make a break for it.  That’s when we high-tailed it home, sticking to the crops and fields.  For whatever reason, Guardians weren’t good at picking out organic against organic.  If you were stuck somewhere in the metro, they had you.  All that signal bounced off the aluminum and metal, and they would zero you like you were in a 3D grid, and then they’d lock and load.  That’s why we steered clear of the big cities.  Chicago was uncomfortably close, at only an hour and a quarter away by car.  We were safer in the country.

When the eight of us finally made it back to Maple Park, our mouths were dry and our lungs were burning.

The goal was a bit far-fetched, if you ask me: to get to DeKalb Taylor Airport and see if we might be able to catch a flight further out west.  Maybe to Seattle, and then off to Hawaii.  Many said that was pointless: Nero’s arm had grown long indeed, and his reach was greater than any of us had ever known.  Others thought we should fly north and make for Canada.  The prime minister was either dead or in hiding, but maybe there would be some stout souls that would be willing to stand up to Nero, enforce whatever remained of international extradition policies, and provide us asylum, at least for a while.  Most everyone shook their head no matter the suggestion.  The Guardians were everywhere.  It didn’t really matter where you went; the Guardians were watching, which meant that Nero was watching.  

Hunter saved me.

Hunter Preston was my best friend. I’d known him since I was eleven.  Or twelve? There’s no more clear record since we’ve been on the move so much.  I have his back, and he has mine, and that’s the way of it.  I looked over at him now, sound asleep, twitching.  I stifled a chuckle, watching him; he’s always had that nervous tick, and it even comes out when he sleeps.

Hunter’s family was killed in a blast, just as mine was.  Except for Heather.  I heaved a sigh and thought back, shaking my head.  I didn’t want to, but I had to.  Trying to picture them in my mind was the only way to keep them alive, to keep me going.  I knew where mom and dad were; I knew where Heather was.  I knew.  They were with Jesus now.  With Jesus, basking in His warmth, while Hunter and I continued to fight it out down here in the dark and cold, Guardians always tailing us.

I closed my eyes and remembered.

Ξ Ξ Ξ

11 . 4 . 2099  ∙  Des Moines IA

“Keep up, Sage, honey, we’re almost there.”

“I’m hu-ungry,” I remember whining.

“I know, I know.  Almost there, sweet boy,” Mommy encouraged me again, and I went back to my FidgetBot, abandoning the notion of food for the moment.

My little feet trudged along next to her, holding her hand, as she carried Heather.  Daddy was feverishly filling out the form on the tablet he had been given.  For something called a ‘census,’ though I had no idea what that meant. All I knew was that so many people around us had died, and somebody called President Goodfellow had made a lot of promises that made Mommy and Daddy so very happy.

We lost Auntie Leah and Uncle Ethan to the sickness.   They died.  Daddy said they went to heaven.  A few of my classmates too, but I don’t know if they went to heaven or not.  Then they cancelled school altogether, starting with the youngest.  My preschool was one of the first to go.  They said something about little kids being ‘cesspools,’ and I didn’t know what that meant.  Mommy and Daddy didn’t talk about the virus with us much; every time the word came up, they just seemed to look at each other and take a big sigh while their eyes went wide, and they’d tell me it would be okay.

We were almost there.  It was nighttime, and a cold wind was wafting across the parking lot, with the occasional gust and chill.  There were a lot of people with us, filtering in and around us into the school auditorium, which was where I would have had my first assembly.  I barely remembered it from the few times we went to see Heather in a school musical performance.  I was too distracted to care, and it was too loud for me in there.  I remember really having to pee during one of those performances, and Daddy got kind of mad that I couldn’t hold it.  He had to take me to the potty and was telling me to hurry; he didn’t want to miss Heather singing.  That’s all I remember.

We walked right past the bathroom where Daddy had taken me to potty, and he took a big sigh and told Mommy “okay, I think I got it.”

“Yeah?” Mommy asked him back.  I looked up and watched them both talk quickly.

“Yep, basic stuff,” Daddy said, “address, DOB, social security, all that.  They asked about religion, too, which I thought was weird, but whatever.  I listed us as Christian.”  I remember he dropped his volume on the last line.

“Proud of it, baby,” Mommy said, smiling.  I glanced up at her quickly, remembering something she had said a few weeks ago about being careful who we tell that to. As I did so, my big sister raised her weary head off Mommy’s shoulder and yawned, looking around blearily and rubbing her eyes as she came to.

“Daddy, what’s religion mean?” I interrupted, not pulling my eyes away from my FidgetBot.  

“Oh, it just means who we worship, who we pray to, that kind of thing, kiddo.”

“You mean Jesus?” I asked him.

Daddy smiled and answered me almost before I said His name.  “Shhh, yes, punkin,’ that’s right,” he said, scooping me up and looking around cautiously.  “Thank you for being so patient.  We’re gonna head right home after this and get you a snack.  I know it’s late.”

“Late is right,” Mommy said.  “Why they needed this so urgently is beyond me.  Such a long drive.”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Daddy said.  “But it’s November, ya know, turn of the century.  They’ve got a lot to get back up and running, and I bet they just wanna get all the info they can as quickly as they can in order to take care of everyone as best they can.”  They looked at each other just then.  “You have to remember this is the second major calamity of this century after the alien invasions in the forties, sweetheart.”

“Aliens?” I asked in surprise, looking up, my mouth agape.

“That’s right, kiddo.  Scary.  Tell ya another time.”

“You’re right, I know,” Mom said, almost cheerily. “God forbid we need a third.  Everybody thought that was Armageddon.  Next it’ll be locusts or something,” Mommy snorted.

“With women’s hair!” Daddy teased back.

“Stop it,” she protested with a smile.  “This isn’t Revelation come to life, you know.”

“Mommy, what’s relevation?” I asked her while still playing on my FidgetBot.

“Re-ve-la-tion,” she corrected, glancing down at me.  “It’s the last book in the Bible, punkin.  It’s about the end times.”

“That’s right,” Daddy replied.  “Anyway, they’re just trying to keep people safe.”

“From the sickness?” I asked him, still not taking my eyes off my toy.

He kissed the side of my head, and I wiped it off. 

 “Yep, kiddo, from the sickness.”

I looked at him to say something, but then Daddy acknowledged someone who was talking to him and directing us over to a line.  Daddy nodded back and pointed at ourselves questioningly.  The man who was looking at him had a dark outfit on and a cap.  He blew a whistle and nodded, apparently instructing us to move over into the line.  It was getting colder.

Daddy carried me over into the line and lightly bobbed with me in his arms.  “Almost done, punkin.’ Almost done.  You’re doin’ great.”

“I want macaroni,” Heather breathed through a yawn.

“Me too,” I said coolly, back to my toy.

Before too long we went all the way through the line, following a bunch of other people.  It took way too long.  Daddy stopped with me in his arms before a woman who was seated at a table surrounded by other seated workers all around her assisting other families in line.  Beside each of them lay a long black device with a handle at the bottom and a translucent reddish cap on the end.  I remember I couldn’t help but think it was some kind of space gun.

“Hi folks.  Name?”

“Uh, Maddox?  Mark and Tracy Maddox.”

I watched the woman scan through her list.  “Here it is.  From Cedar Rapids?” she asked warmly, smiling.

Daddy nodded.  “Yes.”

“Hey, Cedar Rapids is where you grew up, Daddy!” I exclaimed joyfully.  “What does hail mean?”

The woman looked up at me with twinkling eyes and smiled. “That’s right, little one, good for you.  Is it just the four of you then?” she asked, dismissing my question. Daddy nodded again and Mommy said yes.  “And these are Sage and Heather; they’re your children?” she asked.

“Correct,” Daddy replied, and then squeezed me tighter to him, whispering, “It just means where you come from.”

“Daddy, I’m hungry again. Can we pleeease go back to the car? I want a snack!  And what’s that?” I asked, pointing.

“Shhh, just a second, punkin,” he said.

I growled at him, and I won’t forget that, because he looked at me angrily.  “Not now, kiddo.  Just wait, please.”

“Hmm, oh, this?” asked the woman with a rasp in her voice.  “This helps us to check if you’re all clear.”  She didn’t look at me; she just kept tapping on the tablet Daddy had been using, and then turned and grabbed some kind of packet of information and handed it to him and Mommy.

“Okay, got it.  Thanks for your patience, folks,” she said with a sidelong glance, “I know it’s cold, and it sounds like these cuties want some food.  It’ll be just one more second.  Let’s start with Daddy, okay?”

She stood up, creaking at the knees, and with a slight grunt, she lifted up the device that was sitting next to her on the table.  “It’ll feel hot for just a quick second, but I promise you no lasting damage will be done.  It’s just to check for the virus.”

I gasped.  “You mean the sickness?”

“Uh-huh, that’s right, sweetheart,” the elderly woman nodded and assured me.  “The virus gets into our brain stem and stays there, and it’s a bad one.  This little gizmo helps us see if it’s in there or not.  To see if Daddy’s a carrier.  Here, hon, turn around please,” she said to Daddy.

Daddy did so and showed her his neck.  She aimed the device at the base of his skull as I watched, curiously.  I glanced over at Mommy and Heather; they were watching too.  “Okay, Daddy’s clear, say yay, kids!”

“Yay!” Heather and I cheered.  “No sickness for Daddy!”

“That’s right!  Okay, and now Mommy’s next,” the woman said, directing her smile to my mother.

It took my mom the same amount of time.  She set Heather down, whirled around and pulled the back of her coat down, raising her snow hat at the same time, while the old woman raised her device.

“Guess what, looks like Mommy’s clear too!” said the woman, happily.  “Congratulations, folks.”

“Yay, Mommy!” I said, as my stomach growled.  I remember feeling a sigh of relief for both my parents as they were cleared.  I felt it again when both Heather and I were found to be clear as well.  The old lady said it would be ‘just a little zap.  Come to think of it, I don’t remember anyone in there being ‘found’ with the virus.  Everyone, seemingly, was clear.  I guess that was good news for all of us, although my neck itched and felt hot following my little ‘zap.’

By now I was famished and was about to throw my FidgetBot.  I needed a snack and was about to scream.

The lady put down her device and smiled at me, and I didn’t return the smile.  “These are your clearance papers; you’re in what’s now known as ‘Sector 8.’ Food vouchers, government stimulus claim form, and medical referral paperwork are all included. New job onboarding materials are in there as well.”  The mention of food made me scowl at her, but she didn’t notice.  “You’ll receive a call in two weeks from a case worker for both vaccine intake and ramp-up to the new health system.  Any questions?”

“Uh, no, that’s great, thanks,” Daddy said.  “Okay, punkin,’ guess what?”

“What?  And my name’s not punkin,” I growled.

“We’re going back to the car and going home! You want a snack now?”

I felt the heat in my face dissipate as a smile took over.  “Yay!  Yes, please, yes, please, yes, please, yes, please,” I replied in a sing-song, while teeter-tottering my head in excitement.

“Alright, folks, you’re all set,” the lady said with cheeks knotted into a warm smile.  “Nice to meet you and have a good night.  Next?”  She turned to the people just behind us in line.

“Bye, lady.  By the way, this is my FidgetBot,” I said, waving its arm toward her in goodbye.

“Bye, FidgetBot!” she said with a huge smile, leaning toward me as we walked through and then arced back toward the van.

Bye, FidgetBot.

Bye, lady.

We ended up saying goodbye to so many others. 

Ξ Ξ Ξ

1 . 1 . 2113  ∙  Maple Park IL

My eyes flashed open, and I sat up, scrutinizing the clock.

1:13 am.

I felt haggard and rubbed my eyes, sighing in discontent and lying back down with a yawn.

But the yawn wasn’t from fatigue; it was from nerves, just like a dog licks its lips and yawns when it’s nervous.

Nerves afire from treacherous memories.

Hunter yawned across from me in his bunk.

“Hey, you still up too?”

“Yep,” I confirmed.  “Memories.  You know how it is.”

He nodded silently through the dark, thinking to himself.  “Well, like Swifty says, it’s better if we remember together, right?  ‘Wherever two or more are gathered in His name, there He is in the midst of them,’ right?”

I sighed.  “Right.  Okay, let’s do it.”  I stuck a knuckle in my eye and sat up, yawning.  The concrete floor was icy cold for my bare feet.  I moved back toward the wall so my feet could elevate beyond the ledge of the bed. Hunter came over and sat next to me.

“That whole census had been one big setup,” I began.  “No one ever told me until a few years later, after the sentries came, after the churches had been blown up or smashed into, after everyone had been scattered, and I had been in more hideouts than you could shake a stick at.”

Hunter nodded.  His story was much of the same.

“The perfect setup,” he agreed.  “They told me later that President Goodfellow had held a press conference about the church bombings.  He denounced these ‘dastardly acts’ and said that they would not go unpunished. They told me that he even wept, if you can believe it.

“But then I learned the real truth,” he continued, “when they told me a few years later.  Goodfellow had been unmasked; it was all at his direction: all of it.  But by then he had quashed all opposition, and it was too late. 

“Nero called it Directive 666, and they scoffed at the number and what it implied.  They questioned his motive.  The census had been nothing more than to locate all Christians.  Identify them and their families.  Find out where they lived.  And then hunt them down,” he finished sadly.

“And then hunt them down,” I echoed grimly. “The Cleansing.”

“Yep.  The Cleansing,” he repeated.  “What a joke.”

“It had been launched to exterminate those whose religious views were unfavorable and non-conducive to world peace,” -here I employed my best tone of sardonic mockery- “so the leaflets said.  And my mom and dad, like so many, they walked blindly into it, and boom, I was an orphan a few months later.”

“Me too.”

“Dad had the good sense to hide me in the crawlspace of our home.  Heather wasn’t so lucky, as they looked in our attic and shot her onsite.  The branding on her neck told the Guardians everything they needed to know.”

“I barely remember my parents now,” Hunter said sadly, staring off into space.  I turned to him.  He had a thousand-yard stare.  It caused me to put on the same.  My brow furrowed, and I frowned.

“Me neither,” I said with a difficult lung-clearing.

We spoke no words for several minutes.

Hunter finally broke the silence.  “That branding,” he said, shaking his head and scoffing.  “It only took a few weeks for that indelible glowing mark to show up.  Dad noticed it on mom first, fresh out of the shower.  And then she checked him and saw the same thing.  They ran to me and checked me, and there was a lot of sobbing.  To their horror, it was then that they realized that they had been duped.  We all had.”

“Yep,” I agreed.  “A total con.  We hadn’t been scanned for VZV2 at all,” I said, rattling off the new variant of the Varicella-Zoster Virus.  “We were being branded like cattle without even knowing it.”  I looked around.  All the sleeping figures around us glowed amber at the backs of their necks.  The marks burnt into them had a latent nascency: eventually, they all revealed their hosts’ religion with a dim amber light, and the grim truth was simultaneously revealed.

I could practically hear him shaking his head in the dark.  “All I remember seeing was the glint of titanium and tungsten in the night, and those cold, amber eyes.  I remember hearing that whirr of the air through their rotors and the fast-moving treads crunching gravel and soot underneath as they wormed their way into our neighborhood – into every neighborhood, dude – and hunted down every man, woman, or child who professed the name of Jesus.”

“I remember running,” I told him.  “After they killed Heather.  I eventually found my way out of there and ran all the way across Indianola Avenue onto East Creston.  I knew I had to keep quiet, but I was only four, and the tears erupted into bursting sobs of incredulity as my little heart quaked.  I rounded a corner onto East Creston, and that’s when I saw that teenage girl standing there, face to face with a Guardian.  Cassie, I think they said her name was.  It was the first time I heard one of those machines ask the question.”

He scoffed again.  We mockingly said the foreboding words together.

Citizen, this is your final warning. Do you recant?

“Recant,” I breathed scornfully, shaking my head.  “I didn’t even know what the word meant then.  But I knew what a bullet-riddled human looked and sounded like, and I witnessed it with my own eyes, as that girl shook her head and the machine fired away in a hammer-smash of bullets straight into her chest.  A thudding cacophony, man. Blood sprayed everywhere, and she fell to her knees as the Guardian finished her off.  She was a pile of meat.  Others watching took off.”

“Yeah, the Guardians were landlocked then, right?  They weren’t in the air, and that had been some saving grace.  But it was really only a matter of time before Nero began to think three-dimensionally. I think it was 2105 when we saw them for the first time over The Windy City,” he said.

“That’s why some of us were reluctant to try the airport; the risk of interception was too great in the air.”

He nodded, numbly scratching at an itch on his leg.

“Nero started deploying the AirGuard, and we found they could hover with some kind of advanced propulsion. That’s when he started calling himself that stupid nickname.”

“Prince of the Power of the Air,” we both mocked.

“Yeah,” Hunter agreed.  “I guess that’s what you get when you elect a delusional, psychopathic, techno-trillionaire into office who creates military-grade machinery and holds all the codes. To think he’d been building all of that to sell to the government.  They were too afraid of him to not sign the contract with NeroTech.”

“But back then?” I jumped back to my own story.  “That little boy just crouched there, concealed in the bushes in a cloud of fear, staring out past the foliage at the dead girl.  My little corduroys were steaming with pee.  I trembled for my life, man, questioning every cracked twig around me.  It was hours before I moved again, and I could only stumble over to the next house as they took me in.  I passed that girl’s corpse.  She was turned on her side, and I could see the back of her neck.  Her mark was fading, cooling, because her body was losing heat as she lay dying.  She had professed the name of Christ, though.  Probably the victim of an informant.”

“Informants,” he hissed venomously.

“Hey,” I said.  “Forgiveness.”

He rolled his eyes and sighed.  “I know.”

“Anyway, I was too young to understand any of it back then.  I understand all of it now.”

We didn’t say anything for a while.  I shook my head as I remembered that sweet elderly woman at the school during the census and ‘virus scan.’ That kind old woman had no idea she was part of it.  None of them did.  Nero used them like he had so many others.  It was all part of his master plan.  The woman wasn’t scanning us for the virus in the elementary school.  She was branding us with infrared, a mark that would eventually appear for all to see, and, in due course, be used to target us for elimination.

I took a deep breath.  “Isn’t it sick?  That virus was the perfect cover for a branding operation.  Those devices weren’t scanning for viruses already present; they were implanting a virus in us via infrared laser.  They were directly linked to the tablets that everyone filled out, my dad included.  He had told them we were Christians.  So, the device burnt an infrared mark into all four of us.”  I shook my head at the memory.  “All because my dad selected ‘Christian.’  The scanner was linked to the tablet; the tablet was linked to our religion.  My dad says we’re not Christian?  No mark for us. The family one aisle over at the census that said they were atheist?  No mark for them, either, and they’re most likely alive out there, presumably, subservient to Nero.”

Good for them, I thought blandly.

Hunter was quiet for a while.  At last he turned to me. “What would you say to him if you ever met him face to face?”

I smiled at my friend, but it felt fiendish. I thought of someday infiltrating his ranks, sneaking up to him, closer and closer. Like a jackal, gaining his trust and working my way in for the kill.

“You know what I’d say?”

“What?” Hunter asked me.

“I’d look him in the eye and say two things.  ‘There is a God, and you’re not him.’”

Hunter laughed abruptly, but his laughter faded as he regarded my stoic expression.  “But Hunt,” I said, “the sad truth is that I might do a lot more than that before I could even calm down to speak to him.”

My friend stared at me quizzically, but I knew that he knew what I meant. He’d expressed the same thing once or twice.  We would never sit down to a nice coffee with Nero; we would kill him.

He was the man who was solely responsible for the annihilation of Christians and the eradication of Christianity.

The man hunting all of us down as we speak.

The man whose crusade had always been to blame the virus, and all the world’s misfortunes since the dawn of time, on us.

The man who we now knew believed he truly was the Antichrist, and truly sought to usher in Armageddon.  ‘To call God out,’ he had said.  ‘Where is your God now?’ he challenged in his first address as Nero.

But Nero had no idea who God was, and he failed to recognize that God doesn’t work on man’s timeline.  God works on God’s timeline.

I slowly ripped off my choker and could see the wall splash in faint orange behind me in the dim light of the bunker.  My mark was glowing, like all ours did.  It helped the enemy to target us better, and I’d had it since I was four.  I’d learned to live with it.  And to cover it up.

I wondered if one day we would be equally as sinister in The Defiance.  I wondered if we could be that cold and heartless as we struck back.

I wondered if I could be a sheep in a wolf’s clothing.