Henry moved, with faltering steps, into the confines of the church. He heard the doors close behind him and looked to see Annie waiting for him to head further along inside. The pitchfork still dripped with the liquid that could once have been blood, but stank of something rotten and fetid. He didn't want to go any further. Her reaction had told him everything he needed to know. He had no need to see it.

"Are they all dead?" His fingers flexed against the handle of the scythe, awaiting the inevitable hissing and moaning that came once people passed on, now. "Are we about to be assaulted by a horde of folk that once made this town thrive?"

"Reckon they're as dead as can be." She had waited long enough for him to move and took the initiative herself, stepping toward the first in the rows of pews. "If'n what's happened is what I figure's happened, we ain't gonna have no more trouble from these folk. If'n they were Drifters, we'd have found out by now."

Henry followed her lead, his eyes tracing everywhere. None of the townsfolk moved. Not an inch. Some sat slumped in their seats, others with their heads lolling in unnatural angles, still others looked as though they looked upward toward the glory of The Lord, but they would never see the rapture. Not now. They had become lost to God and Heaven.

There was no blood. He had expected his stomach to turn, yet again, at the sight of congealed life fluids coating the rough wooden floorboards. Great pools of blood, congregating and mixing into an ocean of death that would threaten to drown him, should he step too close, but he saw nothing. His journalistic mind turned away from the horror of the situation and began to formulate assumptions and hypotheses.

As he moved around to examine the first body, he saw a great gash in the man's throat. Torn, ripped open by what Henry could not imagine. As though some beast of the wild had attacked the man where he sat. At first, Henry considered it the work of a Skinchanger, but he saw only one wound. Once a Skinchanger began to attack, a body would suffer far more wounds than one, single gaping slash across the throat.

"Murcies." His whisper carried throughout the church, feeling like an affront to the slaughter that had occurred in this tainted place of worship. "They all just sat here while a Murcie drank their blood. What could cause a man to pass into death in such docile fashion?"

And it was only men. No! Here and there, he spotted the odd woman, though they were all older. Ladies passing into the lavender years of their lives. Of other women, the young, or of children, Henry could see no sign. Not one woman older than thirty, Henry surmised, rested upon these pews, praising a God that had abandoned them in His house.

"They have a ways about 'em. Can't explain it. Makes you kinda sleepy. Dreamy." Annie talked as though she spoke from experience. She squatted before another dead man, turning his head to the side. "I ain't no hunter, nor tracker, nor educated woman, but I'd say there were more'n one that done this. The bite marks are different. Some big, some smaller. Maybe two'r three of 'em."

She acted as though these were not living people not so long ago, moving from one dead man to another, moving their heads to look at the damage wrought by the Murcies. At one point she even pressed her fingers within the wound of one of the dead, testing the depth of the gash and wiping her barely bloodied fingers upon the man's clothing.

Henry left her to her examinations, moving further along the aisle until he reached the altar. There, attached to the wall behind the candle strewn surface, sat the cross. A simple decoration, it didn't depict the figure of Christ, giving his life so that mankind could live through His suffering. Only a wooden cross, made from some dark wood that Henry could not identify.

He stared up at the cross, hoping for revelation. For something that could give meaning to the slaughter that had occurred here, but he found no answer here. It was a cross. It was wood and glue. It held no answers, gave no pity or sympathy for the dead. It sat there as cold as the bodies that littered the seats. Uncaring. Aloof and remote. God did not reside here and had not for some time, if God had ever cared for these folks at all.

To the side, Henry saw the pulpit, a small construction designed to allow the preacher to stand above the congregation, giving sermons that filled hearts with hope and pious fervour. He wondered what reading the preacher had given as the Murcies had hammered upon the doors, if that is what they had done. Perhaps they simply walked in, taking the blood of those within with nary a breath to disturb the day?

The preacher, a grey-haired man, with stern features and the lines of weary age decorating now pallid skin, lay at the foot of the pulpit, pressed back against the surface of the boards of the wall. In one hand, he held a cross, gripped tight as though his last thoughts were that Jesus would save him from the horror, but it had not. His sightless eyes had risen to the larger cross upon the wall in his dying moments, a single drop of blood marring the small square of white at his throat.

"We can't stay here." Annie had finished her tour of the church, searching for what, Henry did not know. Now she stood back near the door, fingers resting upon the handle. "These folks'll start to stink afore long. We need to find a place to hole up for the night."

"Can ... can we do anything for them? For these people?" He walked, without thinking, back to Annie. He tried to impress the faces of everyone here into his memory as he passed. "We could burn the place, as you burned the farmstead. Give these folks some kind of dignity in death that they had taken from them in life."

"No." With not a note of maliciousness about her, Annie made a cold statement of fact. "It'd take a whole mess'a oil to catch this place on fire. Would you like to search the town for it? No, didn't think so. I reckon these folks are lucky. Don't no-one become Drifters if'n they're killed by Skinchangers or Murcies. Could be worse for 'em, that's for sure. 'Sides, a fire this big'd call attention of those things that did this, and we don't want their attention. Not yet."

"You think you know who, what, did this, don't you?" Henry took one last glance back toward the bodies. He had never heard of such a massacre by Murcies since the Starfall. "Could it be ...?"

"Shipton? Maybe. Maybe not." She opened the door a slight, looking back out onto the street. "Jus' seems a mite coincidental. Him havin' a place not far from here. I seen his work, in the past. Of a kind to this, though with more blood. Son-of-a-bitch has become a Murcie, I figure, an' he was as dangerous a man as you'd care to meet afore. Now ..."

The door opened wide enough for them to leave the church, one-by-one. As soon as she stepped out, Annie stuck her pitchfork into the head of a Drifter, yanking it free to allow the creature to fall upon the steps of the church. Once again, Henry wondered how many of these Drifters were townsfolk. For certain, though there were many in the church, there were not nearly enough to fill the houses within Simmons.

This settlement, like most settlements across the continent, had found a new, burgeoning population after the Starfall, all seeking safety from the monsters that had appeared, taking lives, feasting upon flesh, or blood, or both. Turning folks into grotesque caricatures of their former selves. The walls of settlements proved a welcoming respite by those folks who had tried to make a living from the land. Now only the foolishly confident, or the confidently foolish, wandered beyond without a wall to protect them. Not that the wall had protected the people of Simmons.

Annie made her way back toward the wall at the edge of the town, the open gates and the livery stables. The horses would have survived with nothing more than a scare if Drifters moved too close, and Henry had spotted a second floor to the large barn of the livery. No doubt a place where the owner, or their employees slept, never choosing to leave expensive horses unguarded.

Indeed, as they neared the edge of the town, avoiding the few Drifters along the way, Annie made a change of direction toward that barn and, after a quick check upon their horses, set to climbing the stairs, that hugged the outside of the building, up to the second floor above. After a few seconds, something came flying out of the open door, after Annie had entered. A Drifter, its face destroyed by the tines of Annie's pitchfork, dropped to the packed ground, its innards almost exploding outward from its distended, gas-filled gut. Another soon followed that one, a younger man, when he had once lived.

Drifters couldn't climb onto things, but some remnant in what passed for their minds still allowed them to navigate stairs. Henry, his mind still numb from seeing the horror within the church, almost found it comical. Put a set of steps before a Drifter and they would lift their legs high enough to ascend. Put a stone, or something else, of a similar height to a stair step, and the Drifter would tumble over it, or find their forward movement stymied. None of it made any sense and Henry doubted he would ever understand everything about the creatures that lived after death.

"Get in here!" Annie's head reappeared at the door. She jerked it to the side, urging him to follow. "We caught us a fine place for the night here. We got a stove, wood, beds and more food'n you'll ever eat of a night. The Lord above has blessed us this night!"

It didn't feel much of a blessing to Henry. Not for the people of this town, at least. From here he could see the bell tower of the church, back in the centre of town, and it seemed to taunt him. He wished he could do something, anything for those that had died within, but he knew Annie was right. They would need a lot of oil to start an inferno large enough to devour the entire church and he could not abide leaving anyone half-burned. God had already turned his face from these people and now Henry had to, too.