Messiahs by Matt Rogers (bookstand for reading txt) 📕

chin now crushed to his chest, and the life went from his eyes.

Slater got up and walked away.

105

The spectacle demonstrated exactly where Maeve had gone wrong.

King and Violetta walked across the fields, approaching the farm house. There were no defences. No one was bunkered down or barricaded in. The disciples of Mother Libertas milled around the wraparound porch, which was home to a single occupant.

Maeve Riordan wore her farm dress. She was perched on the top step above her followers. They were armed, but not well. Perhaps there was no armoury after all, no crates of weapons, just a single M4 carbine reserved for desperate measures. The disciples had instruments they’d fashioned themselves — spiked bats, clubs, two-by-fours, even a couple of pitchforks, like they weren’t permitted to be subtle with the symbolism. They’d taken what they could from their quarters and come up with a janky homemade arsenal straight out of the nineteenth century.

Everyone saw King and Violetta coming.

King estimated there were more than thirty of them — he didn’t have time to count them individually. He was focused on Maeve, watching her every move, scrutinising her behaviour.

There wasn’t even a hint that she knew her husband was dead.

King realised she probably didn’t care either way.

He paid careful attention to Maeve’s hands.

They were empty.

That’s when the full extent of her egotism became clear.

She undoubtedly had a gun inside the house, tucked in a drawer in her office or hidden in a safe in the kitchen. There wasn’t a chance she worked here every afternoon without safety measures. But if she pulled it in full view of her cult, the gesture alone would spread discontent. She was a god, after all. Relying on man-made hardware would tarnish her image, make her seem vulnerable, make her…

…human.

King realised just as Dane was a slave to his wife, she was a slave to Mother Libertas. The unwritten rules she’d created and fed to her followers couldn’t be disobeyed, not even by herself. If she wanted her disciples to act as her personal guard, she needed them to believe. And that meant taking the risk of standing in full view of the approaching enemy. It meant projecting the image of invulnerability. If she didn’t, they wouldn’t defend her so fanatically.

He could see on her face, even from a hundred feet away.

False confidence on the surface.

Crippling doubt underneath.

He stopped at the head of the dirt driveway and put a hand against Violetta’s stomach, keeping her back, instinctively protecting her. The mob watched in cold silence. The sky behind the farmhouse was light now.

Maeve regarded them with derision.

Over the heads of her disciples, she shouted, ‘Come to beg?’

King brandished the M4 and held it up in case anyone had accidentally missed the sight of it. ‘Let’s talk inside, Maeve.’

‘You don’t make the demands here.’

Violetta muttered, ‘She’s in too deep.’

‘No shit.’

One of the disciples up front held a baseball bat above his head, mirroring King raising the carbine. He was wiry, neither skinny nor muscular. His straight brown hair fell in a bowl cut over his forehead and the tops of his ears. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. King’s stomach twisted in anger that he directed solely at Maeve, the woman who’d sold these people false hopes and dreams of a better life. The majority of them might never work their way back to the truth again.

They’d been sold lies so they could become pawns.

King looked over the heads of the crowd and shouted to Maeve, ‘Let’s be smart about this.’

‘Be quiet!’ she screamed back. Her voice was nails on a chalkboard. ‘You come here spreading pestilence and discontent. You are devils in human form. Do you honestly think you can stop the cause? We have work to do, we have the soul of this planet to free, and you come to this temple asking to talk? You’ve caused enough misery in this commune. One chance. Walk away. I suggest you fucking take it.’

Right there, he knew he had her.

A couple of the disciples twitched as Maeve’s words reached their ears, the use of “fuck” setting them on edge. Maeve had lost her cool hundreds of times in private, in the presence of Dane, but never before the disciples. Her words were empty now, devoid of the calm and confident rhetoric that had become a staple of her public speech.

She knew this confrontation had to go well for her, and that put pressure on her to perform.

She’d never dealt with stakes like this.

King tapped a finger on the trigger guard. ‘We talk, or I shoot you.’

Something flashed on her face — only King and Violetta saw it. The crowd was facing away from the house, transfixed by their brainwashed rage.

But Maeve showed true fear for the first time in public.

It disappeared — she got a grip on her emotions fast — but that didn’t hide the fact King and Violetta had seen it.

They’d worked her into a corner.

She had to pretend she was omnipotent if she wanted the protection of the masses.

‘You can shoot!’ she screeched, but her voice wavered in shrill staccato. ‘But you won’t kill. You won’t even harm. And to get to me, you’ll have to go through my children. All of them. We are all devotees to the cause, and the cause will live for the rest of time.’

King read between the lines.

What she was really saying was, ‘If you want me dead you’ll have to kill all these people between us. They’ll protect me because I live in their heads. I control their every thought. Beneath my brainwashing they are innocent, and you know it, so you’ll have to get the blood of thirty people on your hands if you want a hope of getting to me. I’m sure you can do it, but you won’t. You’re good people with morals. That won’t cut it here.’

He hated her.

He briefly looked at the faces of the crowd before him.

There would be no persuading them of anything.

They swelled with the energy