“Are you a Jew?” asked the twin on the left.
“No. I’m… Episcopalian.”
“She’s lying. Mother Patricia?”
The older woman scrutinized the frightened tourist. “It’s so hard to decide. Still, I suppose it’s best to err on the side of caution. Toss the heretic into the flames.”
Shep’s eyes widened in horror as two orange-vested guards dragged the screaming California woman toward the amphitheater. Before he could react, a third guard doused her with gasoline and she was coldly heaved into the mouth of the conflagration, her flailing body igniting in an ethereal white flame.
Shep swooned, the black smoke rising from the pyre — not over the amphitheater but over a brick enclave surrounded by wood barracks and barbed wire herding living skeletons wearing striped uniforms and despair.
Auschwitz…
“Who’s next? You… one-armed man. Tell us your name.”
Shep shook the vision of the Nazi death camp from his mind, only to find himself staring at the voluptuous twins. Wind swirled around the jagged rock, whipping up the conflagration—
— loosening Jamie Megaera’s and Terry Alecto’s outer garments. The twins smile seductively at him, exposing their ample breasts as they stand to perform, gyrating in place.
“Come closer, Patrick Shepherd.”
“Yes, Patrick. Come closer so that we might taste you.”
He takes a step closer—
— his face battered by a blinding gust of sleet that whipped through the park, dousing torches and swirling bonfires, sending the Furies crawling down from their perch to seek cover.
Thunder rolled in the heavens, followed by a blast of trumpets that cut through the night like a scalpel. Having been officially summoned, the swell of forty thousand followers pushed forward as one, crowding the base of Belvedere Castle.
Virgil yelled at Paolo, shouting above the wind to be heard. “Find us a car, anything that’s mobile! Patrick and I will watch over your wife!”
“No! It’s the Second Coming! I need to be here!”
“Remain here, and your son shall never see the dawn. Tell him, Francesca!”
She looked at the certainty in Virgil’s eyes. “Paolo, do as he says!”
“Francesca?”
“Go! We’ll meet you at the 79th Street Transverse.”
Unsure, Paolo looked around, got his bearings, then pushed through the crowd, heading for the stretch of tarmac known as West Drive.
A slice of spotlight cut across the Great Lawn’s periphery. For a moment, Patrick feared it was an Army helicopter, but the beam was coming from atop the Delacorte Theater. It settled on a lone figure standing on the third-story balcony of Belvedere Castle — a pale woman, dressed in a hooded white robe.
Loudspeakers crackled to life, powered by two backup generators. Cheers rose across the Great Lawn as the white-clad figure took the microphone from its stand to address her flock.
“Then the seven angels with the seven trumpets blew their mighty blasts. And one-third of the people on Earth were killed by this mighty plague. But the people who did not die still refused to turn from their evil deeds… refusing to repent their murders or their witchcraft or their thefts.”
The woman in white retracted the garment’s hood, revealing herself to her followers. Her frightening appearance elicited gasps from those standing closest to the castle’s foundation. A moment later, her image materialized on the theater’s big screen for all to see.
Beneath a shock of greasy candy-apple red hair was a face plagued hideously pale. The tip of her nose was blotched grayish purple, matching the circles beneath her olive green eyes. Scythe had rotted her teeth and gums black, and her psychotic expression was more demon than deliverer.
Virgil pulled Shep closer. “Patrick, I’ve seen this woman. She was in the VA hospital. They were moving her into an isolation ward.”
“Isolation?” Shep stared at the figure, recalling his last conversation with Leigh Nelson as she dragged him up the stairwell to the VA hospital’s roof. “One of my patients, a redheaded woman we had in isolation, she released a man-made plague…”
Mary Louise Klipot moved to the edge of the Victorian balcony, the crowd silencing itself to listen to the woman’s words. “Babylon has fallen. Our once-great city has fallen because she was seduced by the nations of the world. Babylon the great… now mother of all prostitutes and obscenities in the world, hideout of demons and evils spirits, a nest for filthy buzzards, a den for filthy beasts. And the rulers of the world who took part in her immoral acts and enjoyed her great luxury will suffer as the smoke rises again from her charred remains… the heretics who sought to destroy her… who sought to destroy America shall suffer God’s wrath.”
Yellow-tinted lights illuminated the second tier of the castle directly below Mary’s perch, revealing three hastily constructed gallows. Lined up in rows, held at gunpoint, were several hundred people, their wrists bound behind their backs, their mouths duct-taped shut. Gays and lesbians, Muslims and Hindus. Old and young, men, women, and children… all predestined to be sacrificed… at least in Mary Klipot’s jumbled thoughts.
“Bring forth the first group of heretics!”
The first three people in line — a Hindu family — were segregated from the condemned.
Manisha Patel convulsed in the grasp of hooded men adorned in the robes of the archdioceses. She screamed through her gag. Her knees buckled, her bridled angst sending her body writhing in contortions as she witnessed men grab her daughter, Dawn, and forcibly shove the girl’s head through the noose on her right.
The rope on her left was occupied by her husband, Pankaj, who was being wrestled into submission by four men dressed in religious robes.
The crystal dangling around Manisha’s neck sparked with static electricity as her own head was forcibly thrust through an awaiting noose. The rope was tightened around her jaw, forcing her up on her toes in order to breathe. “God, please spare my child. Spare my child. Spare my child!”
As Manisha moved, her hearing dulled, muffling the voice of the redheaded witch as she drove the crowd into a feverish frenzy. Barely conscious, the necromancer grunted each painful breath — an arctic inhalation that burned her throat while causing her nose to run. Her entire body trembled as she danced on the rope, waiting… waiting—
“Stop!”
Manisha opened her eyes, her dilated pupils too blurred with tears to focus.
She found him on the big screen. He was standing atop the third tier directly above their gallows, his face partially concealed within the dark hood, his right fist holding the witch upright by her hair, his bloodstained scythe poised at her neck.
Patrick Shepherd dragged Mary Klipot past the two skinhead “elders,” who lay bleeding on the stone deck, and leaned over the microphone to speak, the blinding spotlight glistening on his steel prosthetic arm. “And then another angel appeared… the Angel of Death. And the Grim Reaper said, Release those innocent people now, or I’ll cut off this ugly bitch’s head and send her and the rest of you straight to Hell.”
The moon slipped behind storm clouds, once more casting him from West Drive’s snow-covered tarmac into darkness. Unseen branches tore at his clothing and face, unseen roots caused him to stumble and fall. He was hopelessly lost, separated from his wife, exiled from deliverance. Regaining his feet, he groped his way forward another eight paces—
— only to run into fencing along the edge of a partially frozen wetland. The impasse unleashed a wave of panic. His bearings gone, his faith diminishing rapidly, he knelt in the snow and prayed, more an act of desperation than of salvation.