The attendant fired up another cigarette. “Sure, buddy. You got problems, come back and I’ll give you a full refund.”

Leo was still snoring when Rakkim got back to the car.

The car bucked and backfired for the first few miles, finally smoothed out a bit from the volatile fuel mix. A half hour later, Rakkim drove past a large sign offering vacation condos along the Carolina coast, happy black and white children playing in the surf, elaborate sand castles on the shore.

The sign tilted heavily to one side, covered in graffiti and chickweed. The condos and everything else along the coast had been scoured away by hurricanes twenty years ago, the offshore islands inundated by rising sea levels, the former state of Florida eaten away until it was almost an island. The entrepreneurial Cubans who ruled Nuevo Florida had been building a dike against the inevitable for the last twenty years, a wall over four hundred miles long, stretching from the Atlantic around to the Gulf. Millions of tons of concrete were poured every year, raising the wall higher and higher to protect their orange groves, hotels, and casinos. The Belt didn’t have the money or the will to try to reclaim their coastline. God’s will was the prevailing excuse for giving up. Same excuse they used in the Islamic Republic.

Rakkim raced past crudely painted billboards daubed with BEWARE 666 and JUDGMENT AWAITS and GOD IS LOVE with the word love shot out. The crosses pounded into the sides of the road came more frequently now, homemade crosses of all sizes and materials-crosses made of stone and concrete, crosses made from twists of barbwire, crosses made of white picket fencing nailed together, a road of crosses rising into the hills, leading him straight toward the dark cloud on the horizon, a boiling mass blacker than a thunderhead.

Leo jerked awake, blinking. “I…I was dreaming of Leanne,” he said, still a little dopey from sleep. He rubbed his eyes. “You think there’s such a thing as love at first sight?”

“We’re not going to have another sex talk, are we? Because I’d rather teach you how to use a knife. I’m better qualified.”

“I’m serious. Did you fall in love with your wife when you first met her?”

“Sarah was four and I was nine-the only thing I was in love with at that moment was a hot meal and a warm bed.” Rakkim checked the rearview, gave the pyramid a spin, the eye going round and round. “With Sarah and me, love came later.”

“The moment I looked at Leanne…the very first moment, I knew. She’s so…amazing.”

A brown rabbit darted across the road. Rakkim barely had time to avoid it.

“I called her last night…don’t worry, I made sure it was safe. I told her how I felt. I was scared at first, you know, because I didn’t know how she would react…” Leo smiled to himself. “She said she felt exactly the same way.”

“I wish you hadn’t done that. I need you focused-”

“You don’t think about your wife and son,” said Leo. “Does it distract you?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, I’m not like you.” Leo pointed at the eye in the pyramid spinning lazily from the rearview. “Where did you get that?”

“You like it?”

“I think you should get rid of it.”

The dark cloud ahead of them thickened, rolling above the trees, black and oily. Rakkim could smell it now.

Leo finally noticed what they were heading toward. “What is that?”

Rakkim felt his jaws clench. “Addington.”

Chapter 29

Clyde Winthrop ran a small grocery store and souvenir stand. It didn’t take long to find him. The population of Addington, North Carolina, currently stood at twenty-three people, most of them living along a ridge that caught the easterly wind off the mountains, which tended to minimize the smoke from the coal fire outside the town that had been burning continuously, just under the surface, for thirty-one years. Even with the air filter humming, it was still smoky in the store, a dark, irritating haze that made your throat raw. Outside was much worse.

Winthrop, a pudgy black man with short hair and a thin mustache, his eyes rimmed with red, didn’t look up from his book as Rakkim walked in. “Howdy.”

Rakkim nodded. He could hear the steady thumping of the generator outside.

Leo closed the door after him, coughing, holding a handkerchief over his mouth.

“Got particle masks for twenty-five dollars,” said Winthrop, perched behind the register, still reading. “Filters are five dollars each. Last about a half hour.” He wrote a note in the margin of the book. “Won’t do you much good in the coal fields, but it will make walking around town more tolerable.”

Leo stayed bent over, gasping.

“Mr. Winthrop, we’re friends of your cousin Bill Tigard,” said Rakkim. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

Winthrop put the dog-eared paperback down. A Short History of Space and Time.

“Bill and Florence…the boys, they’re all dead,” said Rakkim. “I’m really sorry. Sorrier than I can express.”

Winthrop showed no emotion, his face a mask holding itself together by sheer force of will. “Raiders?”

“The Colonel’s men burned them out. Murdered them as they tried to escape.”

Winthrop cocked his head. “That doesn’t sound right. What business did the Colonel have with Bill?”

“They were looking for us,” Rakkim said softly. “Me and Leo here.”

Winthrop stared at him. “You said you were his friend. Well…Bill was always a poor judge of character.” He turned away, looked out the soot-grimed windows, and watched the smoke whirl down the street. “I haven’t seen or talked to Bill in over ten years. Hardly know what we argued about now…except it seemed important at the time.” He cleared his throat, spit a black wad into a tissue. “You come all this distance just to tell me the news. That’s a long way, even for a guilty man.”

“I’m here because I need a favor,” said Rakkim.

“Of course you do,” said Winthrop.

“I’m looking for the Church of the Mists. I thought you could help me.”

“Mister, only reason anybody comes to Addington is to be able to tell their friends that they looked for the Church of the Mists. Everybody searching for that miracle. We get all kinds of college kids and Bible study groups, sometimes soldiers trying to prove to each other how brave they are. Even got a few politicians. Desperate ones, mostly, fearful of the next election and with good cause. They all come to Addington, and they all rent breathing masks and safety gear, go out for twenty minutes or so, and then run back hacking up filth and filled with ghost stories about how close they got. Just another few feet, that’s what they say. I was so close…yap yap yap. Of course, that’s the ones that do make it back. Plenty of them don’t. Least a dozen this year alone. That’s why there’s a five-hundred-dollar deposit on the gear. Take it from me, mister, hardly nobody ever reached the Church of the Mists and lived to tell about it.”

“Malcolm Crews did,” said Rakkim.

Winthrop looked surprised. Nodded. “He was the only one. Couple years ago, and the fire’s gotten even worse since then. Credit where credit is due, though. He did it. Showed me the proof and everything. People look for the church because they think it will change them. Heal them or something. Well, Malcolm Crews found the church, but it didn’t do him much good. Turned him clear inside out.”

“He’s a warlord now up in Tennessee,” said Rakkim. “Leader of a bunch called the End-Times Army.”

“Yup,” said Winthrop. “Crazier than a shithouse rat, just like I said.”

“Is the church really surrounded by fire?” said Leo. “A wall of fire, yet it doesn’t burn?”

“That’s right,” said Winthrop. “I attended services there when I was a boy. Nice little church. Nothing fancy, but filled with the Holy Spirit. Addington was a good town, full of God-fearing people making honest wages in the mines. Then the coal fields caught fire and that was that. Tried for years to put it out, but nothing worked. Air just got worse and worse, until everybody up and left.”