Leonard put the yellowed index card in the window. Tonight his front parlor would once again become the Church of the Holy Flame. Across the street, the blasphemous porn shop's sign was unlit, a yellow notice from the city taped to the door. That was a victory for the church. Pity they hadn't taken the posters down yet.

Soon they could move to someone else's parlor. The Hieromonk had a list of people and businesses to remove from the city by means of the laws forbidding them presence near a church.

Leonard drew the curtains. They would arrive shortly, and he still had to change.

Upstairs, Jack waited, sweating, wondering if this would be the night they took him.

~~

Canton 8090 -- in a few generations the designation would be shortened to Cannity -- was one of those places that lived between. Like Old Tijuana, between American California and Mexico, a bazaar of madness and patois, where pockets are picked and prostitutes peddled, hot and sweaty and vile and beautiful in its chaos and rhythm.

Street layouts were quite mad, and shops and drug dens lay cheek-by-jowl with schools and churches. Canals sluggishly moved fluids from one place to another, only the Digorians and their thralls poling their rafts along, singing their disconcerting tales of woe and loss and starlight.

Upright and moral citizens -- as they thought of themselves -- made a stand, buying up piss-cheap parcels of land and flattening the shacks and spires of disparate disease-ridden devotees to a thousand demons and demiurges. They set walls about the place and built homes as they thought they should be, modeled after the cantons and histories of their origin. It was to be peaceful and high and a gesture of defiance against the barbaric thrum of the city. This was the Triumph.

There was no authority to it, just the landlords and developers imposing order on those that would live and commerce there. The rulers of the Triumph did not agree on what was good, but had similar ideas of what was bad, so a truce was possible, as long as there were smut peddlers, drug dens and atheists to bully out, back down to the dregs that made up the rest of Canton 8090.

The Church of the Holy Flame was a new religion, founded since the Shattering during the great transmigrations before most people -- and others -- settled down and tried to carry on in the ruins of Old Earth, and its time-warped shards.

It was nomadic, charismatic, and very, very private. Membership was restricted to male descendents of the founding families, and no one else. In recent years, under the direction of the Hieromonk, they have taken to moving their church to places in the Triumph that were growing a bit weak in moral resolve. While there was no way to ban them outright, by traditional rule, amoral businesses and registered perversions were not allowed anywhere near schools or churches. Thus, having a  front-parlor church could force out undesirables. The leadership of the Triumph appreciated this service, and didn't look too hard into the secrets of the cult.
~~
The Hieromonk arrived first, as always. He was old, unfathomably old. Where Leonard had come from, no one lived anywhere near that old. Two hundred at least, for he had founded the church that long ago, but photos of the founders showed him just as gnarled and bent.

Leonard avoided the Hieromonk's gaze, as always. The monk-priest's eyes were white, with no line between the white iris and the white sclera, unmarked by veins or yellowness of age. The pupils were tiny pinpricks, not visible from any distance, as if he'd evolved in a place much darker.

"Thank you for hosting," said the Hieromonk. "I know moving next to that den of vice is a hardship, but please know you have the church's gratitude. The Triumph Council will be razing it next week."

"Thank you, Revered One," said Leonard. "The parlor is ready."

The Hieromonk nodded, strode through to the kitchen, opened a cabinet and pushed the secret catch. The inner face of it swung open, shelves of canned food with it, revealing a dark, narrow stairway upward. The Hieromonk would wait upstairs in a room set aside for him until the service began.

As the cabinet closed behind him, a knock came on the door. The first congregant was arriving.

~~

Upstairs, Jack heard the measured steps of the Hieromonk on the rough-hewn boards of the unfinished upper floor. He waited for the steps to stop at his door, but they continued past, and Jack heard them enter the Sanctum Sanctorum, and the door shut firmly behind the Old One.

Jack sighed, whether from relief or disappointment he could not tell. He was 14, definitely old enough, but still was not allowed into the brotherhood of the church.

It was as scary to consider joining as it was to consider never being chosen.
He wondered, as he often did, where his mother was.

~~

Jack's brother Jarl was not in the brotherhood of the church. He was a Marine in a distant, desert land, fighting a war for the leaders of a country he never knew. After the Shattering, he was suddenly a citizen of a state with a draft.

Time seemed to travel differently in the desert. The other Marines received letters from home regularly enough, but years seemed to pass between them. Years of unending sand and heat and the undead.

He adjusted his goggles and once he got a bearing on his target, waved to his squad: large herd, coming this way.

He flipped his rifle to silence and took aim.

~~

The brotherhood were assembled. Vapors of heady incense crawled across the floor, enveloping the men's feet, so they appeared to be floating in clouds.

The Hieromonk glided into the mist from the darkened kitchen doorway.

He said a word, and they echoed it back to him. He said another word, and they repeated this one, also. At the third word, a breeze stirred the smoke, and the men felt a chill. They repeated the word in unison.

The Hieromonk looked at his congregation, twelve men squeezed into a modest parlor of a modest, middle-class dwelling. One was a school teacher, he knew. One was a wealthy banker. One, secretly, was the Hegumen, the one who ruled over the Hieromonk's cultic church, as well as many others, others that were similar in root, if quite different in cosmetic flavor.

The Hieromonk said a name. The congregation did not repeat this name, for it was forbidden for them to utter it.

Upstairs, there was a crash as Jack fell to the floor, gripped in a seizure, thrashing and severely biting his tongue. He pissed himself.

Leonard was the only one to look up, away from the Hieromonk. Was tonight the night his son would be taken?

~~

Private First Class Jarl, Jack's brother, Leonard's older son, was sleeping through the heat of the day, when suddenly he sat up, eyes wide and staring. His comrades slept soundly near him, though some turned and frowned in their slumber.

~~

When Jack awoke, he was unsure what had happened. The last thing he remembered was the sound of the Hieromonk passing by his door. Now he was on the floor, in a puddle of piss and drool, and his tongue felt raw and scraped.

It was silent downstairs: the service was over. Soon, his father would unlock his door and lead him down to the kitchen, to eat supper.

But hours passed, and Leonard never came.

When Jack finally got the courage up to try his door, he found it unlocked, for the first time. He listened. All he heard was the silences of an empty house, and the river flowing in the distance, white and wild with spring rains.

"Hello? Father?" he called out, but he knew there would be no reply.

He opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. Drying urine on his gown made his legs chill, and he could smell himself against the pinewood and dust of the corridor. "Hello?" he tried again.

Jack's eyes did not roam the corridor; he did not look left or right, or peer into the darkness, trying to make out any detail at all: he was blind.

~~

"PFC Logan! Up and at 'em!" It was the voice of the Sergeant-at-Arms. Jarl opened one eye. Still dark. This did not bode well.

Training got him up, training got him into his boots and his Battle Dress Uniform, Training kept hold of him until his untrained bladder told him he'd have to take a leak before doing anything important. And what was that dream?

Minutes later, Jarl, along with the other Marines in his barracks, fell out onto the pavement in the center of camp. The sergeant strode up and down in front of them until they were all in tidy lines. "At ease!" and training put each Marine into an identical posture that was not exactly easeful, but not attention, and not a civilian's relaxed slouch.

"Chopper one spotted a herd coming over the ruins. Baghdad is overrun. This is the biggest we've seen. Once again, they seem to be coming to us. Science geeks are trying to figure out why, but in the meantime we need to be ready. Get weapons and ammo and don't forget water! We lost three of you dipshits to heat stroke yesterday."

At his command, the Marines broke ranks and ran, double-time, for the armory. A smaller squad headed to the motor pool, Two headed to the Comm tower, and a team went for the tank. This was going to be messy, thought Jarl.

~~

Baghdad was once a capitol city of Old Iraq, but it has lain in ruins since the silvered walls of shattered time came down, overrun with sand and wind. The desert reclaims land fast once the population stops fighting it. The Shattering had cut Baghdad off from water and supply lines, and they must have died off in a matter of weeks.

Now the dead arose from their mummifying pits and holes and dragged along in search of meat and blood. Living meat and blood. And the only living food in this desert was Marine. Behind the Marine's lines of defense, though, was a rich, pastoral land populated by harmless people a million years or more evolved from pre-Shatter humanity. And since there had been no predators locked in with them, and there was plenty to eat and drink, they had grown fat and soft and merry as Hobbits. They could not defend themselves from the voracious, desiccated hordes that seemed to be able to smell their rich, green life from miles away, across dunes the color of death.

~~

The next door down from Jack's was the Sanctum. Jack listened, heard nothing. He tried the door, found it locked, as expected. Even if it had been unlocked, he would not have gone in -- but it was good to know something was as it should be.

He walked down the corridor toward the stairs, slowly, feeling ahead with hands and sinuses. While he could pace his room unerringly, he had never walked this corridor alone.

Halfway to the stairs he stopped. Something was blocking his way.

He knelt, fingers looking, identifying, and he stopped with a gasp. It was a body.

~~

One of the lookouts from the comm tower was the first to notice, and passed word along the chain of command, who, understandably, refused to believe it until one bird climbed the tower to see for himself: there were troops behind the undead horde, somehow driving them forward, toward the protected perimeter.

There were living enemies behind these attacks. The undead were not a natural occurrence let loose by the un-Shattering, but some sort of biological weapon.

But who were they? The Shard on the other side of the desert was empty, a bare stone promontory without cave or crevasse. The other two sides were bound by a boiling ocean and even more desert, black volcanic sand mixing against the glaring white of the Arabian dunes.

~~

Jack sat there, refusing to put his hands on the body's face, refusing to identify who it was, knowing, just knowing it was his father. Fear, regret and relief passed through him, and repeated. But he had to be sure.

The body was on its side, turned away from him. Gently, he rolled it over onto its back. Jack touched the body's chest, let them move upward, to the throat, the chin, and stopped.

His hands met a sticky wetness, blood, obviously, and it took more strength to continue his perusal of that dead one's face than he'd known he had.

But he would be frustrated for all his efforts. The body had no face. It took Jack a moment to realize he was touching bare, bloody bone, but when he did he stood and backpedaled so fast he slammed hard into a wall. He did not remember moving. He stood there, afraid to breathe, afraid to move, holding his hands in front of him like a gesture of peace, thinking, I will not put my hands on my face, even if I cry.

And cry he did.

~~

Time passed.