“I don’t,” the man says slowly and deliberately. “I don’t believe in a goddamned thing.”
The priest blushes. His soft, embarrassed laughter is like the patter of children’s feet up a long staircase. He touches his collar nervously.
“When the power died, I believed it would come back on,” the man with the rifle says. “Everybody did. The power goes out—the power comes back on. That’s faith, right?” He gnawed the gum, left side, right side, pushing the green knob back and forth with his tongue. “Then the news trickles in from the coasts that there are no coasts anymore. Now Reno is prime oceanfront property. Big deal; so what? There’ve been earthquakes before. There’ve been tsunamis. Who needs New York? What’s so special about California? We’ll bounce back. We always bounce back. I believed that.”
The watchman is nodding, staring at the night sky, at the cold, blazing stars. Eyes high, voice low. “Then people got sick. Antibiotics. Quarantines. Disinfectants. We put on masks and washed our hands until our skin peeled off. Most of us died anyway.”
And the man with the rifle watches the stars as if waiting for them to shake loose from the black and tumble to the Earth. Why shouldn’t they?
“My neighbors. My friends. My wife and kids. I knew that all of them wouldn’t die. How could all of them die? Some people will get sick, but most people won’t, and the rest will get better, right? That’s faith. That’s what we believed.”
The man pulls a large hunting knife from his boot and begins to clean the dirt from beneath his nails with its tip.
“This is faith: You grow up; you go to school. Find a job. Get married. Start a family.” Finishing the job on one hand, a nail for each rite of passage, then beginning on the other. “Your kids grow up. They go to school. They find a job. They get married. They start a family.” Scrape, scrape. Scrape, scrape, scrape. He pushes his hat back with the heel of the hand that wields the knife. “I was never what you’d call a religious person. Haven’t seen the inside of a church in twenty years. But I know what faith is, Father. I know what it is to believe in something. The lights go out, they come back on. The floodwaters roll in, they roll out again. Folks get sick, they get better. Life goes on. That’s true faith, isn’t it? Your mumbo-jumbo about heaven and hell, sin and salvation, throw it all out and you’re still left with that. Even your biggest church-bashing atheist has faith in that. Life will go on.”
“Yes,” the priest says. “Life will go on.”
The watchman bares his teeth. He jabs the knife toward the priest’s chest and snarls, “You haven’t heard a damn word I’ve said. See, this is why I can’t stand your kind. You light your candles and mumble your Latin spells and pray to a god who isn’t there, doesn’t care, or is just plain crazy or cruel or both. The world burns and you praise the asshole who either set it or let it.”
The little priest has raised his hands, the same hands that consecrated the bread and wine, as if to show the man that they are empty, that he means no harm.
“I don’t pretend to know the mind of God,” the priest begins, lowering his hands. Eyeing the knife, he quotes from the book of Job: “‘Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.’”
The man stares at him for a very long, very uncomfortable moment, absolutely still except for his jaw working the already tasteless knob of gum.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Father,” he says matter-of-factly. “I feel like killing you right now.”
The priest nods somberly. “I’m afraid that may happen. When the truth hits home.”
He eases the knife from the man’s shaking hand. The priest touches the man’s shoulder.
The man flinches but doesn’t pull away. “What is the truth?” the man whispers.
“This,” the little priest answers, and drives the knife deep into the man’s chest.
The blade is very sharp—it slides through the man’s shirt easily, gliding between the ribs before sinking three inches into the heart.
The priest pulls the man to his chest and kisses the top of his head. May God give you pardon and peace.
It is over quickly. The gum drops from the man’s slackened lips, and the priest picks it up and tosses it through the cave’s mouth. He eases the man onto the cold stone floor and stands up. The wet knife glimmers in his hand. The blood of the new and everlasting covenant . . .
The priest studies the dead man’s face, and his heart burns with rage and revulsion. The human face is hideous, unendurably grotesque. No need to hide his disgust anymore.
The little priest returns to the Big Room, following a well-worn path into the main chamber, where the others twitch and turn in restless sleep. All except Agatha, who leans against the back wall of the chamber, a small woman lost in the fur-lined jacket the little priest had lent her, her frizz of unwashed hair a cyclone of gray and black. Grime nestles in the deep crevices of her withered face, around a mouth bereft of dentures long since lost and eyes buried in folds of sagging skin.
This is humanity, the priest thinks. This is its face.
“Father, is that you?” Her voice is barely audible, a mouse’s squeak, a rat’s high-pitched cry.
And this, humanity’s voice.
“Yes, Agatha. It’s me.”
She squints into the human mask he has worn since infancy, obscured in shadow. “I can’t sleep, Father. Will you sit with me awhile?”