Messiahs by Matt Rogers (bookstand for reading txt) 📕

But soon that would all change, and they would unify under the Riordans and simply overwhelm the imposters, whether they were armed or not.

King knew it.

He hoped Slater did too.

He said, ‘We need to move. Now. And we stick together or we’re fucked. Force our way out of this hall, find a ride, and get out.’

‘Then come back for the Riordans?’ Slater said.

‘That’s not important right now.’

‘Yes it is.’

King could see the burning desire in his eyes.

He said, ‘Let’s go.’

King led from the front, hustling past the incapacitated disciples within the mess hall. He reached the exterior doors and swept the outside corridor with the Beretta up, clearing every corner.

The building was deserted.

And the alarm had stopped.

For the first time he recognised the eerie quiet. He didn’t like it. He made sure Slater, Alexis and Violetta were close behind him, effectively glued to his back, before he continued. He ignored the main entrance/exit and ran down the sparsely furnished hallway until he came to a side door marked: EMERGENCY EXIT.

He kicked it open and waited.

Dawn light flooded in, then the horrid blast of a gunshot ruptured the silence. The bullet thwacked into the door frame, half a foot from King’s centre mass.

He realised it was the first shot fired on the commune since they arrived.

Distant screams rose like banshee wails. King ignored the terror now rippling through the commune’s population, waited for another shot to impact the door frame, then leant out and sized up his target in milliseconds.

The disciple was holding a pistol with shaky hands. He was older, maybe forty, but there was no humanity left in him. He had given himself so completely to the cause that he was determined to murder these newcomers for the cult.

That was enough for King.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but in the end it was simple.

Him or me.

King shot him in the forehead before the guy could get a third round off.

He didn’t watch the body fall to the dirt. He hated the choice, hated what the Riordans had forced him to do, but there was simply no way he could talk reason and common sense into a man firing on them. And behind King was Violetta, carrying their child. That stifled his remorse.

He surveyed the landscape.

There were three isolated clusters of disciples in sight. No one was armed. Half the followers were women, and the men were terrified. They were all fleeing in separate directions, startled into panic mode by the gunshots close by.

King let them go.

When push came to shove, Mother Libertas was timid. A few more months, maybe these people would have been stripped of their souls, completely brainwashed to ignore danger.

Now, however, they were still human.

Maeve hadn’t stripped them of everything yet.

King looked across this side of the commune and spotted Dane. The tall man was empty-handed, hovering in the doorway of a low rectangular building with wooden walls.

His face was stoically set, but there was terror behind it. King could see it even from this distance.

King swept his aim over to centre on Dane’s chest.

Dane sucked in the cool morning air through gritted teeth and retreated into the building at a sprint to avoid getting shot.

King said, ‘Stay on me. Ready?’

Three grunts of affirmation came from behind.

If they were all armed, the smart move would be to split into teams of two to prevent them all getting bottlenecked in a trap. But three of them were unarmed, so staying in a tight unit was paramount.

As they raced out of the mess hall, Alexis stopped over the body of the forty-year-old disciple and bent down. King refused to look. He didn’t want to see what he’d done.

Besides, his entire concentration was focused on the building Dane had fled into.

Alexis caught up and the four of them swept through the doorway, King still leading the charge. They stepped into a lavishly furnished entranceway, done up with the same decor as the Riordans’ farmhouse. There were rattan chairs on bearskin rugs and mounted deer heads on the wooden walls.

Dane stood next to a doorway up the back of the big lobby, hands in the air, his face pale.

Surrendering.

100

King said, ‘Don’t fucking move.’

Dane’s lower lip quivered.

King ignored it.

Slater said, ‘He’s faking it.’

King said, ‘What?’

‘He’s not scared. He’s never scared.’

With inhuman athleticism, Dane leapt out of sight, sprinting through the open doorway into the next room like an Olympian coming off the starting blocks.

It’s unbelievable what fear can do.

King roared, ‘Stay with me!’ as he ran across the room, his footsteps muffled by the artfully placed rugs.

It would be suicide to charge into the unknown on his own, leaving Slater, Violetta, and Alexis stranded with no weapons. On the off chance he lost a battle of reflexes or ran into a trap, it was better for Slater to be right behind him, ready to scoop the Beretta off his corpse and finish the job.

They barrelled into the room.

It was pitch dark.

Lights flared to life overhead. Harsh white bulbs, leaving no room for shadow, exposing an entirely bare room. Every surface was concrete — the walls, the floor, the ceiling. There were brown stains on the floor. King knew immediately it was blood.

There was no sign of Dane.

He ground to a halt and twisted and caught Slater as the man sprinted in behind him. He spun Slater around like a top and shouted, ‘Out!’

Slater understood in milliseconds.

Violetta got it a second later.

It took Alexis a moment longer. She still had subconscious civilian tendencies, and reacting on the fly in a life-or-death situation takes longer than a few months to become ingrained in your DNA. You have to override your human instincts.

She was slow to catch up, and King and Slater hung back for a beat to make sure she got out with them.

Rapid footsteps sounded in the lobby, and the door swung shut on them.

Not Dane. The man couldn’t teleport.

One of the disciples, waiting in the wings, ready to pounce.

The back of the door was cold steel.

A bolt slid across the