Savannah kept driving until the fire behind them was only an orange glow between the trees. The sedan rattled over the county road with its rear window gone. Louis still tasted blood from the cut inside his cheek. Broken glass slid across the floorboards with every bump.
Savannah held the wheel with both hands. Blood from her wrist ran into her palm and darkened the steering wheel under her fingers. Nicholas sat up slowly in the back seat. He had lost his hat. A cut had opened along one cheek from flying glass. He did not touch it. The M14 lay across his knees.
“We need to get back to the farm,” Louis said.
“No.” Nicholas’s voice was rough. “We go to the church.”
Louis stared at him. “The church? What the hell for?”
“My church.” Nicholas looked at the road ahead. “There’s a gathering tonight.”
“A gathering of what? More snake handlers?”
“Yes.” Nicholas looked at him.
“Why?”
“We just started a war.” Nicholas leaned forward between the seats and pointed past Savannah’s shoulder. “Next fork, left. Toward the hills.”
Savannah glanced at him, then at Louis.
Louis nodded once. “Go.”
Savannah said nothing. The sedan ran over another stretch of broken road and slowed at a fork. A dirt lane bent uphill between the trees. There was no sign, and grass covered the edges. She cut the wheel. Branches scraped both sides of the car.
Nicholas spoke again.
“They have my name. They have Pike’s hand on the paper. By morning, they will find out what happened at the fuel stop. They will come to the farm, then the whole church.”
Louis looked at him. “They’ll come for all of us.”
“Yes. The viper must strike before it is seen.” Nicholas looked toward the side window and said nothing more.
The lane climbed, narrowed, then dipped into a hollow. A low barn stood where the trees broke. One covered lamp burned near the side door. From the road, it looked like a storage barn. The white boards had gone gray at the edges. A tin roof sagged above the walls. The small windows were shuttered from inside.
Savannah turned off the headlights before she stopped. She turned the key off. Sound came from the barn: feet on wood, hands clapping, a woman’s voice rising above the others, and a man praying fast beneath it.
She looked at the building.
“These folks ain’t gonna like me,” she said.
Nicholas opened the rear door and stepped out with the M14 in one hand. “Tonight they will listen.”
She gave him a flat look through the broken window. “You sure about that?”
“Yes.” He did not wait.
Louis got out. He tore the armband off and tossed it to the ground. His legs were unsteady for the first step. Savannah stepped down carefully, eyes moving over the door and windows.
Nicholas went first. He opened the side door. Heat and voices came out.
There were perhaps twenty people inside the barn. Two rows of mismatched benches had been pushed back from the center. Oil lamps hung from nails along the beams and lit the open floor. Men lined the walls in work shirts. Jackets hung from pegs behind them. Rifles and shotguns leaned below the jackets. Women stood with hands raised.
At the front, before a rough platform made of planks, the preacher held a copperhead in both hands. The snake moved slowly through his fingers. Louis made himself keep looking. The old bite below the heel of his hand had mostly closed, but the skin tightened when he looked at the snake. He kept his arm still at his side and looked at the preacher’s face instead of the snake’s head.
The preacher was thin, with a lined face and tired eyes. His white shirt had been washed thin at the collar. His sleeves were rolled to the forearms. Old scars marked one hand in pale ridges. He looked past the snake toward Nicholas.
Then the people nearest the door saw them. The clapping stopped. People turned toward the door. A child was pulled behind his mother’s skirt. One man near the wall shifted his hand toward a rifle stock. Nicholas raised the M14 slightly.
The preacher kept holding the snake.
“Brother Nowak,” he said. His voice was hoarse but steady. “Service is not over.”
Nicholas stood just inside the door, smoke on his shirt and dried blood on his cheek. “It is now.”
The copperhead’s head lifted slightly. The preacher looked at Louis, then at Savannah’s wrists.
“What have you brought into this house?”
Nicholas did not move farther in. “What the Lord has given us.”
Men along the wall began talking under their breath.
Nicholas raised his voice enough to carry over them. “Listen. The war has come to us. The militia took me from my home today. They took the girl beside me from the road.” He did not gesture. “They will come for all of you by tomorrow. If you wait here, you will be taken. If you hide, you will be found.”
The preacher closed his hands gently around the snake.
“And what would you have us do, brother?”
“It is time to draw the serpent from its hole,” Nicholas said. “The night is upon us. Let us strike before the dawn.”
Someone objected from the back. “Brother Amos—”
The preacher raised one hand, and the snake moved with it. The man stopped.
The preacher stared at Nicholas, then lowered his head and whispered to the snake. He stepped back, opened the wooden box behind him, and let the copperhead slide halfway into it. Then he stopped. His fingers closed around the moving body and drew it back out. He shut the box with his free hand and turned back to the room.
“For two decades we have hidden.” His voice carried now, clear and edged. “For two decades we have prayed under floors and behind barns. For two decades we have taught our children to lower their voices when they speak of the Spirit, because the county hears what it is told to hear and kills what it is paid to call unclean. Now the Lord says, enough. Now He calls us to act. Now the church must become what it was born to be.”
Louis felt the people around him change. He had seen it in Atlanta, when the preacher turned fear into a target.
“They called us mad because we took up serpents,” Brother Amos said. “But it was never the serpent they feared.”
The copperhead lifted its head again. Louis looked down before he could stop himself. The old chapel came back: phone light, Donya screaming, blood in his palm, scales moving under the crates. He breathed once through his nose and kept his hand still.
“It was a people who would not let the state tell them where the Spirit ended.”
A woman near the back began to weep.
“They built their licensed churches and called it Christ. They put badges on Cain and called him righteous. They painted crosses on brick walls and filled the rooms behind them with names of the faithful.” His voice hardened. “They came with county paper. They came with sheriff’s men. They came with pastors appointed by offices and committees and purity boards, men who cannot bear the sign, men who will not touch the serpent, men who bow to their fear and call it law. But when the state sent its men to our doors, we were not afraid.”
“Amen,” someone said.
“Today the county has struck at us.” His free hand made a fist. “They took Brother Nowak from his family. They took a stranger from the road. Now they will come for each of us. So tonight we answer. Tonight we remind the county that the Spirit does not need Montgomery to give it breath.”
The guitar player began again. People began to stand and lift their hands.
The preacher’s voice dropped. “Patience is holy. But patience is not surrender. Meekness is not cowardice. Forgiveness is not endless. The Lord sends the storm when He is ready. Are we ready?”
People answered in shouts.
“Are we ready?” Brother Amos shouted.
The answer came louder.
“The hour is here. The serpent is risen. The enemy is on the road. Will we meet him?”
“Yes!” they answered.
“Then let us prepare to meet him together.” The preacher stepped down from the platform. The copperhead moved across the back of his hand and made a dark loop around his wrist. No one moved while Amos carried the snake down from the platform.
Brother Amos looked toward the crowd. “Wake the houses.”
A young man moved first, crossing to the back wall and taking down a coat that covered two rifles. A woman gathered three children and pushed them toward the side room. Nicholas stepped aside as two more men came in from the rear passage and reached for weapons hidden above the door frame.
Brother Amos said, “Mercy Ridge.”
A teenage girl dropped to her knees behind the platform and lifted a plank from the floor. Under it lay a radio unit, battery leads, a small book tied with twine, and a coil of wire. Static cracked from the radio.
A young man took the set. “Narrow Gate to Mercy Ridge.”
Brother Amos stood above him with the copperhead in his hands.
“Say it,” the preacher said.
The young man swallowed. “The boxes are open.”
Static answered first. Then a thin voice came back through the static.
“Mercy Ridge hears.”
He changed frequency and called again.
“Dry Creek hears.”
Again.
“Beech Tree hears.”
Six calls went out. Six houses answered.
Brother Amos spoke over them.
“Hide the children. Burn the ledgers. Move the women off the roads. No man opens a door unarmed. No child remains where they can be taken. Tonight we remind the county who holds the true power. Tonight we begin.”
The young man repeated it into the radio. His voice steadied.
Louis stood near the door. He looked at Savannah. She had taken a strip of cloth from someone and was wrapping her wrist with her teeth and one good hand. No one helped her. No one insulted her. He looked away from the snake only when Nicholas came beside him.
“You are not George Harris,” Nicholas said.
Louis looked at him. “No. I am not.” He paused. “My name is Louis Collins.”
Nicholas nodded. He did not look surprised. “I thought so.”
Louis looked toward the preacher and kept his eyes above the snake. “I need a phone.”
The radio hissed behind the platform. People turned toward him. Brother Amos turned. The copperhead moved through his hands.
“To whom?”
“My father.”
“And who is your father?”
Men along the wall looked at him.
“Constantine Collins,” Louis said. “Supreme President of the Dominion of the Pacific.”
A woman lowered her arms. The man by the wall stopped adjusting his rifle strap. Brother Amos looked at Louis.
“The Dominion’s prince walks into my church with smoke on his shirt and asks for my phone,” he said.
“Yes.” Louis held his gaze.
“Why should I let the son of the man who made a kingdom of sin speak to his father from my house?”
“Because by morning your county will be burning. My father needs to know where. And I think you want him to know it too.”
The preacher looked from Louis to the radio.
Brother Amos said, “Can he reach the sky?”
Louis understood him at once.
“Yes.”
The preacher looked away from him.
“Bring the black book.”
A man crossed behind the platform, knelt beside the open plank, and reached deeper beneath the floor. What he drew out was a notebook wrapped in oilcloth and tied with butcher’s string. He placed it on the platform and opened it. The pages were crowded with road names, survey marks, call signs, dates, and names written in different hands. It was a target list built over years.
Brother Amos looked at him.
“If your father has ears in heaven,” he said, “tell him where the wolves sleep.”
Someone handed Louis a small phone wrapped in foil and oilcloth. It was old, cheap, and light. He dialed his father’s emergency number from memory. The call connected after a single ring.
“Speak,” his father said.
Louis spoke into the phone, low and fast.
“This is Louis. I have updates. The snake-handling church is starting a war against the Holy States tonight. They have a list of targets. I’m sending you their book. Give the targets to the Collective. Tell them to strike before dawn.”
Constantine’s voice changed.
“Copy. How organized are they?”
“Decentralized but coordinated. They have weapons. They have a plan. And they are willing to die.”
“Understood.” His father’s voice hardened. “Give me the coordinates.”
Brother Amos nodded to the woman holding the black book. She looked down at the first marked page.
“Wolfe County office,” she said.
Brother Amos gave the first string of numbers. Louis repeated them into the phone. The woman turned the page.
“Campton Airfield.” She read the numbers.
Louis relayed them.
“Hazel Green fuel depot.” She gave another string of numbers.
The woman read each target. Louis repeated each name and number into the phone. Brother Amos watched without moving. The copperhead moved across his wrists. Louis did not look at it now.
“Last one,” the woman said. “Carter’s Fork.”
She gave the numbers.
Louis repeated them and waited.
His father said, “Targets confirmed. I’m routing them to Collective command now. Stay on the line.”
The woman closed the book and tied the string again.
Brother Amos looked at Louis. “Is it done?”
Louis put his hand over the mouthpiece. “He’s sending the orders.”
Amos nodded. The copperhead moved between his fingers.
His father came back on the line. “The Collective has missiles on standby. They will strike before dawn.”
Louis looked at Brother Amos. “He said the strike comes before dawn.”
The preacher lowered his head. “We are ready.”
Louis relayed the message.
“Good,” his father said. “Louis, get out of there before it starts.”
“I will.”
“Stay alive.” The line went dead.
Louis gave the phone back to the woman. She took it from him, pried off the back with a small knife, pulled the battery and SIM card, snapped the SIM, and dropped the phone shell into the stove. Plastic curled in the heat. A sharp chemical smell came from it.
Brother Amos lifted the copperhead higher. Its head rose with his hand, and its tongue flicked once.
“God has sent the storm,” he said to Louis. “Go with it.”
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