"Yes, Carl. It's me."
"Oh, thank God!" He ran forward and dropped to his knees before Joe. He began to sob. "You come back! Thank God, you come back!"
Joe pulled him to his feet.
"Come on now, Carl. Get a grip."
"You come back to save us, ain'tcha? God sent you here to punish him, didn't He?"
"Punish whom?"
"Fadda Palmeri! He's one a them! He's the worst of alia them! He—"
"I know," Joe said. "I know."
"Oh, it's so good to have ya back, Fadda Joe! We ain't knowed what to do since the suckers took over. We been prayin for someone like you and now ya here. It's a freakin miracle!"
Joe wanted to ask Carl where he and all these people who seemed to think they needed him now had been when he was being railroaded out of the parish. But that was ancient history.
"Not a miracle, Carl," Joe said, glancing at Zev. "Rabbi Wolpin brought me back." As Carl and Zev shook hands, Joe said, "And I'm just passing through."
"Passing through? No. Don't say that! Ya gotta stay!"
Joe saw the light of hope fading in the little man's eyes and something twisted within, tugging at him.
"What can I do here, Carl? I'm just one man."
"I'll help! I'll do whatever ya want! Just tell me!"
"Will you help me clean up?"
Carl looked around and seemed to see the cadavers for the first time. He cringed and turned a few shades paler.
"Yeah ... sure. Anything."
Joe looked at Zev. "Well? What do you think?"
Zev shrugged. "I should tell you what to do? My parish it's not."
"Not mine either."
Zev jutted his beard at Carl. "I think maybe he'd tell you differendy."
Joe did a slow turn. The vaulted nave was utterly silent except for the buzzing of the flies around the cadavers. A massive cleanup job. But if they worked all day they could make a decent dent in it. And then—
And then what?
Joe didn't know. He was playing this by ear. He'd wait and see what the night brought.
"Can you get us some food, Carl? I'd sell my soul for a cup of coffee."
Carl gave him a strange look.
"Just a figure of speech, Carl. We'll need some food if we're going to keep working."
The man's eyes lit again.
"That means ya staying?"
"For a while."
"I'll getcha some food," he said excitedly as he ran for the door. "And coffee. I know someone who's still got coffee. She'll part with some of it for Fadda Joe." He stopped at the door and turned. "Ay, and Fadda, I never believed any of them things was said aboutcha. Never."
Joe tried but he couldn't hold it back.
"It would have meant a lot to have heard that from you then, Carl."
The man lowered his eyes. "Yeah. I guess it woulda. But I'll make it up to ya, Fadda. I will. You can take that to the bank."
Then he was out the door and gone. Joe turned to Zev and saw the old man rolling up his sleeves.
"Nu?" Zev said. "The bodies. Before we do anything else, I think maybe we should move the bodies."
ZEV . . .
By early afternoon, Zev was exhausted. The heat and the heavy work had taken their toll. He had to stop and rest. He sat on the chancel rail and looked around. Nearly eight hours work and they'd barely scratched the surface. But the place did look and smell better.
Removing the flyblown corpses and scattered body parts had been the worst of it. A foul, gut-roiling task that had taken most of the morning. They'd carried the corpses out to the small graveyard behind the church and left them there. Those people deserved a decent burial but there was no time for it today.
Once the corpses were gone, Father Joe had torn the defilements from the statue of Mary and then they'd turned their attention to the huge crucifix. It took a while but they finally found Christ's plaster arms in the pile of ruined pews. Both still were nailed to the sawed-off crosspieces of the crucifix. While Zev and Joe worked at jury-rigging a series of braces to reattach the arms,
Carl found a mop and bucket and began the long, slow process of washing the fouled floor of the nave.
Now the crucifix was intact again—the life-size plaster Jesus had his arms reattached and was once again nailed to his refurbished cross. Joe and Carl had restored him to his former position of dominance. The poor Nazarene was upright again, hanging over the center of the sanctuary in all his tortured splendor.
A grisly sight. Zev never could understand the Catholic attachment to these gruesome statues. But if the undead loathed them, then Zev was for them all the way.
His stomach rumbled with hunger. At least they'd had a good breakfast. Carl had returned from his food run this morning with fresh-baked bread, peanut butter, and two thermoses of hot coffee. He wished now they'd saved some. Maybe there was a crust of bread left in the sack.
He headed back to the vestibule to check and found an aluminum pot and a paper bag sitting by the door. The pot was hot and full of beef stew, the sack contained three cans of Pepsi.
He poked his head out the doors but saw no one on the street outside. It had been that way all day—he'd spy a figure or two peeking in the front doors; they'd hover there for a moment as if to confirm that what they had heard was true, then they'd scurry away.
He looked down at the meal that had been left. A group of the locals must have donated from their hoard of canned stew and precious soft drinks to fix this. Zev was touched.
He was about to call out to Joe and Carl when a shadow fell across the floor. He looked up and saw a young woman in a leather jacket standing in the doorway. The first thing he did was check for her right ear for one of those cursed crescents. Easy enough to see with her close-cropped, almost boyish brown hair. She didn't. Such a relief.