Messiahs by Matt Rogers (bookstand for reading txt) 📕

of devotion. This commune was their lives, and they’d sacrificed all chance of an ordinary existence to come out here, so even if some of them were questioning the motives of the Riordans’, none of them would act on it. And the anonymity of the group gave them confidence. Here they were free to sin with impunity. They could beat King’s brains in, and then Violetta’s, and they could go the rest of their lives shirking their guilt because they were anonymous in the masses. When the blame is able to be spread between dozens of people, humans can commit shocking acts of depravity.

But King had a lifeline.

And no choice but to use it.

This house of cards was built on Maeve’s performance as a god.

If that came crashing down…

King shrugged, looked dead in Maeve’s eyes. ‘If that’s the way it has to go…’

A long moment of silence.

The disciples were practically foaming at the mouths.

Maeve spread her arms wide at the top of the stairs, letting her dress billow out. She opened her palms and spread her fingers, searching for power she was sure existed, channeling the energy of Mother Earth into her bones and brain.

Her eyes went wide and she screamed, ‘Get them!’

The disciples moved forward in a wave.

Slowly.

Methodically.

Maeve’s eyes went wide, like they were all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, and she lifted her arms to the sky and—

King raised the M4 over the heads of the disciples and shot her in the chest.

106

Two bullets smashed through her vital organs, but she didn’t go down.

She rocked back on her heels, almost toppling, but she managed to right herself and stayed just lucid enough to look down at her chest and see the blood billowing from the entry wounds, spreading across the front of the farm dress, darkening the peach colour. Her mouth went agape. King knew she was deep in shock, feeling no pain, and she probably thought it was due to her invincibility.

She looked up at King and smiled. Her mouth twisted as she tried to speak, to lend power to her followers. She was about to let them know she couldn’t be stopped.

Bullets are worthless against the power of—

Her body gave out and she crumbled, collapsing first at the waist.

She pitched forward, falling head-first.

Her shoulder hit the top step and her frame splayed as she tumbled down the short flight.

She came to rest in the dirt.

The front of her dress was soaked now, and her skin was white as a sheet. Her mouth flapped uselessly. She couldn’t get the words out.

She rolled to her side and lay still.

The air seemed to thicken. The wave of disciples slowed. A couple of them looked over their shoulders, which started a chain reaction. The rest followed, their focus torn from the enemy. Some of them screamed. Most of them fell silent. One man at the very front turned back to King, his eyes bloodshot, his face ghoulish. He was red-haired and broad-chested, with a ruddy complexion and a squashed nose. He carried a bat spiked with barbed wire, and he still had every intention of using it.

King realised everything would come down to a spark.

If one of the disciples became a kamikaze, the rest would follow. It turned his stomach end over end. There was nothing he wanted more than to leave these people alone. They had their own crises to grapple with now, the horrific disillusionment of realising everything they’d been fed was a lie. They didn’t have to pay with their lives.

Unless…

The red-haired, red-faced man screamed, ‘She lives!’

He charged at King.

King willed himself to raise the carbine again, but he couldn’t. Something was different. This man was aiming all his dark rage at King, but King was frozen by the fact that he knew the anger was misplaced. In the past, he’d willingly taken the life of anyone who tried to take his own. Simple self-defence. But here it was so obvious the guy was brainwashed, so clear he wasn’t in control of his own actions, that King couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Even though one hit from that spiked bat would permanently maim or cripple him, and the follow-up shots would kill him.

Violetta said, ‘I’ll do it if you won’t.’

By then it was too late.

The guy was on them.

He swung the bat, looking to take King’s head off with the first swing.

King went from a statue to a berserker in a split second.

The bat swung through empty air that he no longer stood in, and then he was right beside the man. The guy only had time to tense up for the punch he knew was coming, but it didn’t help him. King had already dropped the gun to free his hands, and he threw an elbow so fast it was barely visible to the human eye. It separated the guy from consciousness with a rare brutality. His head snapped sideways and ricocheted off his shoulder and he went down like he was dead.

He wasn’t, but he might as well have been.

Cognitively, he might never be the same.

The price you pay.

King retrieved the M4, planted a foot on top of the guy’s motionless form, and stared hard at the rest of the procession.

‘You’re human,’ he said, filling the silence. ‘You’ll get what he got. Walk away.’

They didn’t disperse.

But no one charged.

A couple of the followers sat down hard in the dirt, their morale crushed, their worlds turned upside-down. It seemed to kickstart the next chain reaction, in which the entire procession let their deepest emotions come to the surface. Most turned back to face Maeve’s crumpled form, her dress now more crimson than peach. A couple whispered incantations under their breath, but the large majority stared in silence. A few outliers walked away into the twilight. They dropped their bats and clubs and didn’t look back. They were either headed to other outbuildings, or they were simply walking with no destination, rendered useless by sensory overload. They might keep walking until they dropped of exhaustion or stumbled upon a