Authored by Robin Kaspar

I love Father Mark. He's a good man, and he truly walks the walk with that little cane of his. He's an orthodox monk, which means he's got a grey beard down to his waist, a black get-up and a little round black hat he always wears. He certainly knows more bible than I do, and he's even read the gnostic gospels. He keeps telling me to read the gospel of Thomas, but that's not my Christianity, that's his affair. I'm watching him right now, where he is, down on the street. He's leafleting the working girls, offering salvation, medical exams, addictions counseling. He means every word, and the tracts he hands out aren't that damnation porn that bastard Jack Chick churns out.

Authored by Robin Kaspar

Elijah sat in the chair, struggling to not mind that it was uncomfortable. It was the strange sort of chair hospitals presumably had specially made - it had padding yet it was terribly uncomfortable. The proportions were all wrong, it was an ergonomic nightmare. His legs were too high. The seatback cut across his massive trapezius at an exactly wrong spot unless he slouched in a spine doubling position Clippit himself would avoid. The fabric was undoubtedly easy to clean, but aside from that it had the feel and yielding comfort of burlap stretched over a few reams of paper.

When he finally woke, he wasn’t sure just how long he’d been asleep. Three or four hours. Maybe longer. The infant, Magdalene, was stirring, rooting for another feeding. They lay under a footbridge somewhere on the edge of Hudson City Park, but it could have been an apocalyptic version of Eden. Dawn was still hours away.

9:00pm

South, Sebastian said, so south JACE went. But south where? He crossed over the Stewart, but felt like he was flying blind. The proverbial needle in the haystack and JACE was wasting his time.

JACE sighed. Although he enjoyed flying, he would much rather be in his lab, modifying the ebola virus to make it less infectious and more deadly. He was convinced it would make the perfect addition to his arsenal, if he could just get it to respond properly to gene re-sequencing.

Then, as if in response, his HUD flashed a subtle alert. Monitoring the police band was a simple subroutine and these alerts were commonplace (one of the newer, more annoying additions to the suit). He went to ignore it, but something caught his attention. Instead, he tuned in.

“In local news, an unidentified meta-human wreaks havoc this evening on a small, local church. We have Donna Grey live on the scene. Donna?”

A young blonde with artful makeup and a maroon pant-suit materialized on screen. Behind her was chaos as news crews crowded around spectators who crowded around police barriers which encompassed the wreckage of a very old and once elegant-looking church. Now the building had a gaping hole in one wall, the size of a Volvo. Emergency lights sliced through the evening in alternating red and blue. She spoke loud over the noise around her.

The Apostate walked the streets of Midian, hounded by Despair and Exhaustion. All that kept them at bay were the words of Psalm 88, repeated endlessly in a whisper in his lips. He listened to the cries of the damned that flamed up through the grates in the gutter, wailing red up to him accompanied by the sounds of breaking fingernails. Despair drank the red in laciviously, hunching ferally over the crack in the earth. To the Apostate, Despair looked grotesquely sexual in this moment, roistering in the desperate cries for unknowable relief.