I've been sent to do His work, divine work, and you, Mr. Davis, are going to help me.

Jefferson Davis seriously doubted that. Looking into the face of Rusty Fauntleroy that first time (four days ago? Five? A week?) he was sure that he was the devil, not a prophet of God as he claimed. Davis was not an overly religious man by any means, but he was certain that God would not choose such a hideous creature to do his work, and hideous he was. Short and hunched like an old man under the weight of years, Fauntleroy greatly resembled an Eastern European vampyre: his hair was long, thin, and white; his eyes were black and shone with moist and blasphemous unlife; his teeth were crooked, yellow, and sharp; and his ashen flesh clung tightly to his misshapen skull. His voice was dark and rasping, the sound of a rusted coffin being thrown open by some insidious thing, and cold radiated off of him in stale waves. When he offered his hand to Davis, the latter took one look at it and recoiled: the fingers were double jointed, the nails long and black, and the skin was spotted with blue and purple dots.

He had been nearly alone in the capitol building since the middle of July, when his cabinet fell ill and died all within a week. Others, mainly janitors, came and went like youthful acquaintances, but as far as the executive branch (and legislative and judicial) went, he was it, the sole remaining remnant of Confederate governance. Stonewall Jackson, whom he had called back from Fredericksburg, had been around for a while, but then he caught the plague and died, attended to in his final hours by an elderly Negro couple on loan from a planter down south.

Most days, he sat idly behind his desk like a captain on a voyage of the damned, twiddling his thumbs and pushing papers back and forth. Looking back, he was sure that he had been in shock, numb and uncomprehending. Temperatures in the city had hit 100 then, and he vaguely remembered roasting, slathered in sweat, and wondering why he was so blamed hot. When a message boy relayed to him the news of the victory in New York City, he merely smiled and nodded. A victory. How nice. Victories were good things.

The last person to flee the building had been one of the old niggers who were with Jackson when he went; he couldn't remember if it was the husband or the wife, though. He/she/it stood bashfully in the doorway, his/her/its face downcast and shiny with sweat.

"Mista Davis?"

He looked up from his hands, intertwined on the desk. "Yes?"

"Things lookin' pretty bad out there. I reckon I be goin' now."

"Okay," he said, and that was that; he/she/it slunk away, never to be seen again. Later, in the cool, ashy shadows of late evening, he realized what he had done. That was a slave! And not his to free!

But what did it matter? The world was coming to an end all around them. Who cared if a slave went free? Who cared if all of them went free? The cotton fields were closed for business, and so were all of their overseas customers. Everyone was just too damn busy dying to worry about anything else.

Well, maybe not everybody. There were the roaming survivors, shell-shocked and vacant. Occasionally one would pass by in the streets, crying their lament.

When full night fell, Davis found himself floating off to bed. He couldn't remember much before being wakened hours later. He was irrationally sure that it came at midnight, the somber pounding hooves on the cobblestone street; the shrieking of the rusted front gate (he'd meant to oil that damn thing a million times); the eerie, echoing footfalls on the stairs.

Never a superstitious man, Davis, caught in the frightful void between consciousness and sleep, was certain that the dead were coming for him, faces black and puffy, tongues lolling and trembling arms outstretched.

Shivering, lightheaded with terror, he spilled out of the bed and fumbled for the pistol he kept on the nightstand, instead knocking over the candelabra; the flame went out, and the room went black.

God help me, he thought hysterically, shaking violently, his heart hammering in his breast. The footsteps reached the hall. Creak. Creak. Creak. Closer and closer, the zombie came. Looking out the window at the silvery, moonwashed night, Davis frantically considered jumping to the street below. His rooms were only four stories up. He could manage that. Even if he couldn't, it would be better to die in the street like a mangy dog than to be ripped apart by the hungry dead.

Get ahold of yourself! Such things do not exist!

They didn't. He was being irrational, a fool jumping at shadows. If anything, the footfalls belonged to a thief seeking state gold and bank notes.

Creak. Creak. Creak. Right outside the door now. They paused.

Then, lightly, there came a rapping, like in that morbid poem by Poe, tentative and polite, almost effeminate.

Davis's blood ran cold. He stood frozen. The temperature dipped at least ten degrees..

Knock. Knock. Knock. Louder, the noise echoing throughout the abandoned building.

Davis shuddered. There was no thief on the other side of that door. It was Death personified, come to claim him at last. Hahaha. Jeff Davis thought he was immune to the plague, did he? Hahahahahaha!

Or perhaps it was the devil, here to steal his soul. It could have been any number of things, but it almost certainly was not human.

The gun. Get the gun.

Numb and sluggish like a man in a nightmare, Davis dropped to his knees and felt for the gun.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Where was it? Where was it?

There was a chu-chunk as, crazily, the door was unlatched from the inside. Davis stiffened. The door swung slowly open, moaning like something risen from the grave.

An animal backed into a corner, so to speak, Davis staggered to his feet and balled his fists, ready to fight whatever approached him. He didn't know what he had been expecting (not a monster, not seriously), but what stood in the threshold was beyond his wildest nightmares.

Bathed in the cold, dusty light of the moon, a slouching Nasfuautu in a ragged black cloak, was a thing. Its long pointed face was half darkened, but its glowing red eyes shone brightly.

"Jeffersssssson," it hissed, and Davis went faint with horror. "Jefferssssson."

The thing moved closer, but Davis could not flee, could not move a muscle, in fact; he found it hard to even breathe. He was caught in the monster's shimmering eyes, like a deer blinded by onrushing headlights. It's hypnotizing me! he realized, but he could do nothing about it.

"Jeffersssson." It was coming to him, seeming to float like a Victorian specter in a bad penny dreadful.

Davis screamed.

When his hysterics subsided sometime later, the beast lighted a candle and stood almost gloatingly as Davis sat on the edge of the bed.

"I'm sorry to have frightened you, Mr. Davis," it said, and from the amused tone in its voice, Davis knew that it was not sorry at all, "I was almost certain that you were expecting my arrival."

Davis slowly shook his head. He'd heard no word on a Satanic visitor from hell. He didn't dare say as much, though. Something told him that this thing would rip out his eyes and slurp up his soul if he offended it.

Then he thought back to the strange dreams he'd been having, the ones where he was standing in a high place (on a building or a mountain) and overlooking a vast army of skeletons advancing antlike over a red, Martian landscape. Though he felt that he had some measure of authority in this strange Lovecraftian world, he was afraid, deathly afraid. And his fear was unlike anything he had ever felt before in his life. It was a religious terror, the kind a wicked man no doubt felt as he stood on the banks of the River Styx looking deep into the heart of hell.

Shuddering, he pushed it aside. "No," he said weakly.

The thing smiled, a wide, cannibal grin. "Well, no matter. I've come a great distance and have much work to do. I've been sent, you see, by God, to do His work, divine work, and you, Mr. Davis, are going to help me."

Davis looked at him. No. He didn't doubt the creature's claim, he thought, he knew it was a lie. "I am?"

The thing nodded.

"W-who are you?" Davis stammered, almost substituting who with what.

The thing smiled, and Davis shuddered. "My name's Rusty Fauntleroy, and my business here is to prepare His way."


On the morning of July 28, John Wilks Booth sat on a bench on the corner of A and K streets, dividing his attention between a dead man and a dying horse. To the north and south of him, smoke billowed into the low, hazy sky, and silent traffic jams stood like frozen rivers.

Slightly to the right of him, the horse made a low, pitiable noise in the back of its throat, and again moved its thin legs. To his left, the dead man...well, he was dead, so he didn't move; he merely went on lying there on his side.

Booth had seen a lot of death in the past couple days. It started on the twenty-fifth, when Philips called him and told him that he had canceled Our American Cousin. "I'm not feelin' too hot. I think I'm gonna take a few days off. Might even leave the city all together. Shit's starting to get bad."

That call had left him distraught, and he was too wrapped up in his own self-pity to realize that things were getting worse. All of the shops were closing down, and people were pouring out of the city by the hundreds. That evening, he was roused by his landlady and informed that Mr. Sape had died. She asked for his help in dragging the body to the street for collection, but he refused. The next day, he awoke to find the world gone mad, literally overnight. While the rest of the city may have been greatly affected by the plague, the upper-class district hadn't. On the morning of the twenty-sixth, however, chaos and death had consumed it. Bodies littered the streets, and hooligans rushed to and fro, smashing windows and stealing valuables. Someone set fire to an antique store down the block, and no one came to put it out.

Booth, wisely, locked the door and hid for most of the day, peering out only occasionally to see if the madness had ceased, and every time he did he found that, if anything, it had grown worse. Screams, gunshots, cries of "Rape!" and "Murder!"

All hell had literally broken loose; the constraints of law and order had been lifted, and now people were indulging in their sickest fantasies.

By nightfall, things had settled down. Booth slept with his back against the door, lest someone try to force their way in. It was a thin, fitful slumber plagued by nightmares. In the morning, he crawled to the window and raised his head cautiously above the sash. There were about a dozen dead bodies scattered about (mainly before smashed and burnt-out storefronts), but there was no sign of life.

To be sure, he waited all of the morning and most of the afternoon before going out. Infrequent gunshots and screams rose in the distance, but he needen't fear; those were other streets and neighborhoods.

So, at four in the afternoon, he left his building and toured the neighborhood. What he found was far worse than he had expected. Most of the buildings to the south were burnt to their foundations; piles of plague victims lie heaped on street corners, gathering flies; and a small plane had crashed into the E Street Bridge, causing a great fire that swept over the bumper-to-bumper traffic there stalled.

At dusk (night in the city struck Booth as being dangerous), he returned home, shaken.

Presently, the horse left out a whine, shivered all over, and then died. Booth watched it numbly, and only several minutes later realized how alone he felt. The horse, an animal, had been company to a degree; now, there was no one.

There were others in this part of the city, but they were little more than rambling wraiths who flitted hither and yon, dazed and confused, mad and hysterical. One man he met earlier said that he was going to go to the Federal District, find the Declaration of Independence, and wipe his ass with it. Booth had sniggered. Surely the government was intact, and this cretin would be shot if he attempted as much.

"Nope," the man said with a crooked smile, "you should see the White House. General Grant got out, but a bunch of people came along after him and set it on fire. The Capitol Building's empty as a grave on Resurrection Day. I was there yesterday."

Booth simply could not process this information at the time, so he smiled and walked away. Then, he'd come across a sick woman in Freedom Park who offered to do unspeakable things to him if he could make everything "Right again."

Before collapsing onto the bench and weeping, Booth, seeming to come out of a haze, went over to Lafayette Park to see if the man had been telling the truth. Surely enough, the White House had burned. Not all the way to the ground, however; the roof fell into the interior and smothered most of the flames. The stone around the broken windows was blackened. The lawn was littered with trash and bodies. It looked as if a mass crush of people had broken down the iron gate and stormed the premises, only to be gunned down by troops.

The world had gone mad, he lamented as he fell onto the bench, and now it was just gone.

He had to get out of the city. This was no place for a human being; if he stayed, he would go mad himself, and then catch something from the millions of rotting bodies around him and die. Either that or he would be captured by some roving gang and shot, or beaten, or hung from an overpass.

It was noon. He could be in Virginia by two. No. Later than that; he would need to stop somewhere. He needed a gun, something to protect himself. And maybe other things. He had no idea what. He was an actor, for God's sake, not Indiana Jones.

The closest place to find a gun was ten blocks north, in a little store called Green River, which also sold camping gear, outdoor supplies, and assorted other things.

Booth warily walked the distance, sure that some gangster would lean out of every doorway he passed. At one point he had to cross a short bridge jammed with traffic, and came across a sickened man with no shirt on. This man was more afraid of Booth than Booth was of him, though; for when he saw Booth, he squealed and dove into the river.

Green River sat in a parking lot between a Burger King and the offices of The Washington Post. The door was locked, and after searching for a back entrance, he was forced to break in. An alarm sounded shrilly out, echoing up and down the dead streets, and he was sure that someone would hear and come, if not a policeman then someone who suddenly decided that they wanted a tent too, but only after killing someone.

Inside, it was cool and dim. The guns were kept in the back of the store, and there he found a vast selection. Booth had never fired a gun in his life, and thus chose the simplest piece he could find; a Colt revolver. As far as he could tell, you merely loaded the rounds into the chamber, aimed, and fired. Seemed easy enough.

But would he be able to shoot someone if and when the time came?

He didn't know. The thought of shooting someone sickened him.

Gun in hand, Booth made a slow round of the store, looking for anything and everything that might be useful. He took a knife, some waterproof matches, and a small, handheld hatchet. He didn't know where he was going (just out of Washington for now), and hoped that he wouldn't be forced to live like some transient tramp, but it was a possibility.

When he was done, Booth left the shop. The alarm had died by then, and the street stood quiet. He checked his watch. Almost one. He was ready.

Well...not entirely. He needed to pick up a map.

From K Street, Booth followed 21st Street NW, which was jammed with dead traffic, past sprawling George Washington University. He met a few people along the way, one of them an old black woman who looked as though she were mad. She smiled at him, and he politely tipped his hat.

"Lovely day!" the woman said. And Booth said that it was.

At the intersection of 21st and E NW, Booth paused for a moment, shocked by what he saw across the way, in Triangle Park: several large heaps of bodies ten or more feet high. For his money, the men on the body recovery crews had grown lazy and begun sloping bodies anywhere they could before fleeing or dying themselves.

He shuddered.

E NW eventually brought him alongside the E Street Expressway, which, as he had expected, was packed with vehicles.

For a long moment, Booth debated his next move. He could get onto the expressway and follow it across the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge, or he could go south on 23rd Street, connect to Lincoln Memorial Circle, and then cross over the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Or, if he wanted to make mileage before even leaving the city proper, he could take Ohio Drive along the waterfront and then go across the 14th Street Bridge.

It honestly didn't matter at this point. He would still be in the suburbs of Washington by dusk, and most likely at this same time tomorrow. The Roosevelt Bridge appealed to him because it would take him on a westerly course, and he'd been thinking a lot of West Virginia. Out there, a man could hide from the horrors of the plague forever. Of course he wouldn't have it easy, but it would be better than staying in the city.

Finally, he decided to take the Roosevelt Bridge.

After a quick check of the map, he discovered that it would be easier to continue down 21st, past the State Department Building, and then head west on Constitution Avenue, which formed the northern boundary of Gorla Plain Park. After crossing the bridge, he would keep northwest on the Custis Memorial Parkway.

Booth stuffed the map into his pocket and then walked down 21st. Nearly a half hour later, he stood in the middle of congested Constitution. Up ahead, the road rose out of the tee spackled park and merged with US66. Traffic was so tight in places that he would most likely have to scramble over roofs. Dirtying his suit would be a regrettable tragedy, but at this point he wanted out of this dead city so badly that he would swim if he had to.

A hard road awaits you, an inner voice seemed to say. Yes, he understood that, but what was the alternative? Booth knew that he was a pampered man, but if he remained in the city, subsisting on canned foods and staying in his rooms, he would die. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did. He would die, just like everyone else.

With a deep breath, Booth set out, up the onramp and across the bridge. Yes, he was forced to scurry over the roofs and hoods of cars like some sort of small woodland creature, and yes, his knees and elbows were brown by the time he stepped onto Virginia soil (an olive drab tank sat across the southbound lanes; the C.S.A., it would appear, had tried in vain to stem the tide of Northern refugees), but he was happy. He stood in the middle of the deserted parkway (maybe their efforts hadn't been in vain after all) and looked back over the river. Washington was huddled against the humid day, smoke of all colors (white, black, and gray) rising into the sky. He realized then that he had come almost the entire way without hearing one gunshot. Maybe there weren't as many survivors as it had seemed. Perhaps the hooligans were the sick and dying, striking out at the world one last time before the Reaper came for them.

Booth followed the parkway. After several miles of running parallel to the city, it bent west. Booth checked his map again, and saw that the urban congestion didn't thin out for what seemed a hundred miles. If he stuck with the parkway, he would eventually pass through Langley, Falls Church, and Idlewood, all built up bedroom communities. He wouldn't hit open country until he passed north of Fairfax and crossed into Fauquier County.

After doing some quick mental math, Booth groaned. It was forty-one miles, and would take him at least twenty hours to get there on foot, and that was walking at a brisk pace non-stop. But of course that wasn't his destination. If he stayed with the parkway, he would only get halfway there before turning west toward Haymarket and Front Royal. He didn't even want to calculate that distance.

Perhaps Warrenton and environs was rural enough. Warrenton, as far as he could remember, was a farming community on a hill, and all around it was open space and woodland.

He figured he would see how he felt once he got further along.

Now, he had to contend with Arlington.