CHAPTER 54

Later that week, on a cold, gray October morning, Aaron Roberts walked with his wife, Kate, and his son, Thomas, across the narrow stretch of ground that separated his cottage from Jasper’s, marveling to himself how quickly the seasons changed here in North Dakota.

A fine powdery layer of snow lay upon the compound, and the dark wood of the cottages around Jasper’s private quarters stood out in stark relief from the whiteness of the snow and the depthless gray of the sky. The cold had been upon them for nearly a month, but not the biting cold that now stung his cheeks and turned his hands to claws. That had come upon them almost overnight. As a boy, he’d read stories of Indian fighters who passed this way during the 1870s and 1880s, men whose pants had frozen to their saddles and whose spit had turned to ice with an explosive crackle before it hit the ground. He’d known that the coming winter was going to be a hard one, but until this very morning, he hadn’t quite realized just how hard it was going to be.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught Kate looking at him. There were creases around her mouth and a sadness in her eyes that suggested the years were catching up with her. How much of that, he wondered, had happened in just the last few months?

Behind them, Thomas followed along with his head down, eyes on his shoes.

Aaron and Kate both slowed so their son could catch up. Aaron watched Thomas trudge through the snow, and a wave of grief washed over him. The boy—hadn’t he been calling him a man just a couple of weeks ago?—had grown increasingly despondent since his first visit to Jasper, and seeing it stirred up familiar feelings of anger and pity and self-loathing for the way it had happened.

The feelings were unexpected, too. Aaron himself had shared Jasper’s bed numerous times over the years. As had Kate. For them, sexual congress with Jasper had been an act of faith, a form of communion with the man whose brilliance and spiritual guidance had made it so that their world made sense. Watching Thomas grow, he’d looked forward to the day when Thomas, too, could find the same sense of oneness that he’d found. But now, as he watched the transformation that had come over his son, he felt hollow inside, and he was aware that what had started out as an act of fatherly kindness had been transmuted through some horrible alchemy into sin and betrayal.

Thomas would not look him in the eye any longer—hadn’t since that first visit to Jasper’s bed. He complained of fatigue and nausea in the mornings. He seemed to have lost his appetite completely. And, worst of all, when Aaron put his hand on his son’s shoulder, he felt Thomas’s back constrict and a shudder move through the boy’s body. During those moments, he could picture once again the morning Jasper had asked Aaron to send Thomas to him. He could hear Thomas pleading with him, the tears streaming down his cheeks as he begged not to go.

They’d fought. For the first time in years, they’d fought. Screaming had filled their small cabin. And Aaron had responded with renewed anger, his self-doubt turning into a rigid demand for obedience. Aaron had not cried since he was a teenager, but he had cried that morning.

But what could he do? Really, honestly, what could he do? His whole world was here, in this place. He had devoted everything to Jasper. More than half his life had been steered by that man. The structure of his family, his worldview, his relationship with God, all of that had been shaped by Jasper, guided by his wisdom. Could he really divorce himself from that now, with the rest of the world in ashes?

“Aaron,” Kate said. “Baby, you okay?”

He looked at her. Between them, his eyes cast down at his shoes, Thomas seemed like a shell of the person he had once been.

“I don’t know, Kate. I just don’t know.”

They entered Jasper’s quarters and found Barnes and several of Jasper’s lieutenants seated around the coffee table, waiting for them. Jasper stood next to the small dining room table in the back right corner of the house. A tray of paper Dixie cups was next to him on the table, each one containing what looked like wine.

“Thomas,” Jasper said to Aaron’s son. “Come here and take this for me.”

He gestured toward the tray. With barely concealed reluctance, Thomas crossed the room and took the tray to the coffee table without a word, while Aaron and Kate took their places on the couch.

“I want each of you to pick up a cup,” Jasper said.

Everyone leaned forward and picked up a cup. A few of the younger lieutenants traded looks around. Aaron didn’t bother to meet anyone else’s gaze.

“The wine is mixed with potassium cyanide. Drink this and you will die within two minutes.” Jasper’s southern twang gave the words a chilly resonance. “Now raise your cups. Go on, each of you. Let’s see ’em.”

The group each raised their cups. Aaron could feel the nervous tension in the room, and yet he also felt strangely dead to it.

“Now drink,” Jasper commanded them.

Nobody moved.

A few cups wavered in the air as people traded anxious looks. The man across the table from Aaron swallowed, his Adam’s apple pumping in his throat like a piston.

One of the younger lieutenants, a black man named Lucius Johnson, said, “Jasper, I don’t wanna drink it.”

Aaron glanced up. He expected Jasper to fly into a rage and start screaming at the man. This was the kind of thing that set him off, direct disobedience to a command. But Jasper surprised him. He spoke quietly, softly, to the man. “Lucius, you drink that up, you hear? I got my reasons. If you love me, if you believe in me, you’ll drink.”

Barnes drank his down in one gulp. Then he leaned forward and dropped his empty cup on the tray.

Kate and Thomas and a few other lieutenants drank theirs as well. Without raising his head, Aaron raised his cup and slowly sipped it down. The wine was overly fruity, with a cheap boozy aftertaste. He hadn’t had a drink since he was seventeen, not out of a sense of decorum or religious conviction, but because he didn’t like the taste, and he found age hadn’t changed him in that direction. It was still a foul substance.

He put his cup on the table next to the others.

Lucius was crying. He said, “Jasper…”

“Don’t be afraid,” Jasper said. “There’s no pain. You’ll just fall asleep.”

The man had tears in his eyes as he raised the cup to his lips and swallowed it down in a hurry. He sat there for a moment longer with the cup to his lips, his eyes closed, his fingers trembling. After a while, he put the cup down and waited, the dark skin of his cheeks looking flushed.

“Excellent,” Jasper said. “Excellent. Each and every one of you.” He pulled out a chair from the dining room table and sat down with them in the circle. “I believe in each of you, just as you believe in me. This is our covenant, and it will not be broken. Now listen. None of you will die today.” He looked at Michael Barnes. “Some of you, perhaps, have already figured that out. What you did just now was prove yourself to me. And that proof will be important in the days ahead.”

He leaned forward and laced his fingers together, pointing at the family members with his doubled index fingers.

“Something terrible happened this morning, and I need to tell you about it.”

Aaron glanced up. He expected to hear about the zombies they’d been seeing more and more of. Aaron had heard Barnes’s reports from the field, and they were not encouraging. The hard, cold weather hadn’t done a thing to slow the zombie advance. If anything, their numbers were increasing, and each morning, Michael Barnes had to lead teams out through the gate to clear the roads.

But then Jasper surprised him. He took off his sunglasses and broke into the deep, resonant voice he reserved for the pulpit.

“For months now, I have been telling you that the American government has betrayed us. They have set their sights upon us because we dared to speak up against their injustices. While they sought to preserve the privilege of the rich, we preached to the poor. While they sought to contain the nonwhite races, we held out our hands to all the races. They created a pressure cooker in the form of the Gulf Coast Quarantine, and when it exploded, we dared to survive. We set up this outpost of progress here on the prairie in open defiance to their ways, and it has driven them to distraction.

“I listen to them on the radio, talking about us. Spreading lies about us. Ah, if you only heard the filth they talked about us. Well, it seems they have finally decided to test us directly.”

Aaron took Kate’s hand.

“Yesterday morning I was contacted by the United States Air Force Base in Minot. They want to send a delegation here. They told me they’ve heard of the wonderful things we are doing, and they’re looking to see why we’re doing so well.”

Lucius Johnson said, “It’s a trick. They want to take our homes away.”

The others murmured in assent.

“A moment,” said Jasper. “Brother Lucius, you’re absolutely correct. I know it’s a trick.” He turned to Barnes. “Go ahead, Brother Michael.”

Barnes looked around the room, making sure the others were all looking at him.

“I went to Minot last night,” he said. “It’s a large base, well supplied, but they are surrounded by the infected.”

“Surrounded?” Lucius said.

“Far worse than we’ve seen here. Our worst days have brought us four or five hundred at a time. Last night, I saw tens of thousands of the infected around the base. Another three to five thousand were dead, piled up against the fence. They’re under siege. From what I saw, it’s only a matter of time before their defenses collapse under the weight.”

“But how could they be surrounded?” Lucius said.

“I killed a few of the infected along the road leading into Minot,” Barnes said. “I checked the IDs in their pockets. Most are from Minneapolis. What they’re doing there I couldn’t say. But almost all of them have come from Minneapolis.”

“Perhaps they’re looking to the government for help,” Jasper said. “But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The one thing that does matter is that all those government troops will surely be looking for a place to relocate, and you know what that means. They will try to come here. They will try to destroy the way of life we’ve created. They will parachute in here and kill us if they have to. Imagine a whole battalion of soldiers, coming in here, guns blazing. They haven’t seen a woman in months. They will rape our women. They will spear our babies on their bayonets. Do you see it, people? Please, listen to what I am telling you. The end of this good thing is near. There will come a day very soon when we will have to make a decision. Do we let them take our lives away, or do we end our lives with dignity and purpose? My soul is prepared for that day, and you’ve just proven to me that yours are as well.”

He stopped there, looking at each of them in turn, a barrel-chested, gimlet-eyed man with lips pulled back over rows of large white teeth.

He said, “Go now. But be prepared. The day will come very soon when we must exercise the one option left to us. I know you’ll be ready.”

The group filed out into the gray, cold day in solemn silence. Aaron held the door open for his wife as she stepped out. He glanced back and saw that Michael Barnes had not moved. He still sat on the couch, Jasper standing next to him with his hand on his shoulder.

Aaron nodded to them both and closed the door. Then he stood there, lost in thought, watching the limitless vista of white waves that stretched out before him.

From behind him, he heard Jasper say, “Tonight, Michael, I have something I need you to do.”

Aaron had a pretty good idea what that was, just as he was also pretty sure that he had just been bumped as Jasper’s personal confidant.

As Aaron closed the door, Michael Barnes let his gaze turn on Jasper.

“You’re gonna have a busy night ahead of you, Michael. I’m sorry. I hope you’re up for it.”

“Whatever you need, Jasper.”

“Those troops are coming here because their base is overrun with the infected. When they get here, I want them to see that things aren’t any better here.”

“A few hundred zombies won’t deter them, Jasper.”

“No. But a couple thousand would.”

Barnes looked at him for a long time.

“Our fences wouldn’t be able to hold against that many.”

“They won’t have to, Michael. Because there’s something else I need you to do, too.”