The Reverend’s Return: A Suicide Mission to Save the West

The Mary-Mae cut through the fog of the Great Maze like a promise of salvation, her engines thrumming a steady prayer of escape. Below deck, in a cramped supply closet that smelled of oil and desperation, Reverend Fleming was conducting three kinds of surgery.

The first was on Sheriff Aemon’s shoulder—cleaning the ragged pincer wound with whiskey that was probably more valuable than gold in these waters, packing it with gauze, ignoring the man’s winces because both of them had been through worse. The wound was stabilized. Aemon would live to see another questionable decision.

The second surgery was on Fleming’s own back. Using a small mirror and a pair of forceps, he performed the kind of self-extraction that would make a field medic wince. The .44 slug came out with a wet plop into a tin cup, and Fleming stitched himself up by candlelight like he was mending a torn coat. Which, spiritually speaking, he supposed he was.

The third surgery was on his soul.

With the physical work done, Fleming sat on a crate of machine parts and simply… breathed. No grand pronouncements. No desperate bargaining. Just a quiet opening of the heart to whatever was listening. The Mary-Mae chugged deeper into the fog, and slowly—like dawn creeping over the canyon walls—he felt that divine connection begin to hum again. Not full strength. Not even close. But enough.

Five power points out of fifteen. Enough for a couple of miracles if he chose wisely.

Enough to get himself killed trying to do the right thing, which was pretty much par for the course.

The Books of the Dead

Fleming spread the two ledgers on the floor like he was laying out a corpse for examination. Ledger I—the one Albright had tried to save from the Deliverance. Ledger IV—the one he’d pulled from Thorne’s twitching chest. Cross-referencing dates from the first with formulas in the second was like watching a nightmare develop in a darkroom.

The picture that emerged would haunt him for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be.

Ledger IV detailed something called “Biomechanical Distillation.” The Church wasn’t just feeding people. They were refining human biological matter using ghost rock vapors, creating a substance that made consumers stronger, faster, more resilient. And more importantly—more dependent. Those who ate “Grimme’s Meat” didn’t just get a meal. They got a leash.

Like Thorne, with his unhinged jaw and blackened talons. An “innovation.”

Ledger I revealed Pip and Lily’s true value in this horror show. They weren’t just batteries for Albright’s machine. They were “High-Resonance Samples”—children with a specific bloodline that allowed them to stabilize the vats. Without them, the “meat” turned into toxic sludge within hours.

The final entry in Ledger IV was dated three days ago. It mentioned a “Grand Feast”—Grimme’s plan to distribute this innovated meat to every settlement in the Great Maze under the guise of famine relief. Once people ate, they wouldn’t just be citizens of the Church anymore.

They’d be parts of it. Literally.

Aemon watched Fleming’s face go pale, then hard as canyon stone. “Preacher… if those books say what I think they say, we aren’t just carrying evidence. We’re carrying the only thing that can stop Grimme from turning the entire West into a graveyard of ghouls.”

Fleming closed the ledgers carefully, like he was handling something that might explode. Which, in a sense, he was.

“We need to talk to Albright.”

A Devil’s Bargain

The brig smelled like grease, salt, and the particular desperation that comes from knowing you’ve built a monster and lost control of it. Dr. Albright slumped against the bulkhead in his ruined silk suit, looking less like a war criminal and more like a very expensive piece of soggy garbage.

He looked up as Fleming entered, trying for arrogance and achieving something closer to hypothermic terror.

“Back for more sermons, Preacher? Or have you come to finish what the Maze started?”

Fleming didn’t answer with words. He dropped Ledger IV onto the small wooden table. The effect was immediate and gratifying—Albright lunged forward as far as his chains allowed, fingers twitching toward the book like a drowning man reaching for driftwood.

“Where… where did you get this?” His voice cracked. “If you took this from the Cathedral, then Grimme won’t just kill you. He’ll make sure you never die. He’ll put you in a vat and keep you screaming for a century.”

Fleming pointed to the final entries. The Grand Feast. He explained what he knew, watching Albright’s face cycle through about seventeen different emotions before landing on a dry, hacking laugh that sounded like it hurt.

“It was supposed to be a solution, Fleming! A way to end the hunger! But Grimme… he didn’t want a fed population. He wanted a tame one. The ghost rock resonance creates a psychic anchor. He isn’t just a Reverend anymore; he’s a hive-mind in a miter.”

Fleming leaned forward, and his voice dropped to something that made Albright press back against the bulkhead.

“Can you stop it?”

Albright’s eyes went bright with desperate cunning. “I can stop it. The distillation requires a stabilizer derived from the children. But if you introduce a concentrated solution of ghost rock salt and nitric acid into the main boilers at the refinery, the whole supply doesn’t just spoil. It becomes an anesthetic. Every ghoul and innovated soldier in Lost Angels would drop into a coma.”

He flinched under Fleming’s stare before the preacher even spoke.

“I’m not lying! Page 112! I designed the kill-switch because I knew Grimme would eventually decide I was redundant. I wanted a way out!”

That’s when the ship exploded.

Well, not exploded exactly. But the violent THUMP of a collision and the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of a Gatling gun opening fire was close enough. Captain Silas’s voice echoed down from the deck: “Angels! They’ve got an interceptor!”

Fleming looked at Albright. At the ledgers. At the door to the deck where bullets were currently perforating perfectly good wood.

“Time to go.”

Into the Fire

Captain Silas looked at Fleming like the preacher had just announced he was going to solve their problem by turning into a fish.

“You want to take the lifeboat? Back to the city that just tried to kill you?”

“They’ll stop chasing you once we’re off the ship,” Fleming said, already hauling Albright across the deck while Gatling fire chewed through the railing. “Besides, we have unfinished business with their refinery.”

“You’re a madman, Fleming.”

“I’ve been called worse by better people. Lower the boat.”

The deck was a storm of splinters and lead. The Church patrol boat—the Vengeance, because of course it was—looked like someone had taken a regular boat and given it anger issues. Its forward-mounted Gatling gun was making the Mary-Mae’s railing into a violent suggestion of its former self.

Fleming tumbled into the lifeboat with Albright, Aemon, and the children. “Cut the lines!”

Silas pulled the lever just as he vented the boilers. A massive cloud of white steam swallowed everything—the ship, the lifeboat, the Vengeance’s very expensive Gatling gun. Fleming hit the water with a splash, grabbed the oars, and started rowing like his life depended on it.

Mainly because it did.

The Gatling fire continued for a few moments, bullets hissing into the water nearby, but they were blind. Fleming rowed away from the Mary-Mae and back toward the black spires of the City of Lost Angels, which loomed out of the fog like the world’s worst homecoming.

The Madman’s Plan

The fog was thick and cold, carrying the smell of salt and the sulfur of the refineries. Fleming rowed while Albright sat in the bow, staring at the distant lights of the ghost-rock processing plants.

“You realize what you’re asking,” Albright whispered. “The refinery is the most heavily guarded structure in the city. We’ll be walking into the mouth of the furnace.”

Aemon checked his revolver. “We’ve got the ledgers, the doctor, and a Preacher who can call down fire. I’ve liked worse odds.”

“You have?” Albright looked genuinely curious.

“No. But it seemed like the right thing to say.”

As they rowed, Albright worked with the lifeboat’s emergency medical kit, synthesizing what he called the “Sustenance Nullifier” using ghost-rock residue scraped from Fleming’s duster. The result was a small amber vial filled with swirling, iridescent liquid that looked entirely too pretty for something designed to collapse a theocratic nightmare.

“This is it,” Albright said, holding it up to the dim light. “Drop this into the intake valves, and the entire meat supply becomes useless. It won’t kill anyone, but it severs the connection to Grimme.”

The refinery emerged from the fog like something a drunk architect had nightmares about—a massive, soot-stained fortress built into the canyon wall, with pipes three feet thick pumping black sludge and steam into the city’s distribution center.

Fleming studied their options: the submerged intake grate (terrifying), the loading docks (suicidal), or the canyon vents (impossible).

“How much time do we have?” he asked.

Albright consulted a pocket watch he’d somehow kept dry. “Four hours until sunset. That’s when the Grand Feast begins. Once those wagons leave the refinery, we’re done.”

Fleming looked at his ragged crew: a wounded sheriff, two terrified children, a war criminal turned reluctant hero, and himself—a preacher with five power points and no backup plan.

The sun was dropping toward the canyon rim, painting everything the color of old blood.

“Alright,” Fleming said, still studying the fortress. “Before we do something spectacularly stupid, let’s make sure we understand exactly how stupid it needs to be.”

He looked at the three entry points again. The intake grate would drown the children. The loading docks were crawling with Angels and probably more things like Thorne. The canyon vents required climbing skills that his wounded shoulder wasn’t thrilled about.

But somewhere in that fortress was a pressure manifold that could save the entire Great Maze from becoming Grimme’s puppet show.

“The clock’s ticking, Reverend,” Aemon said quietly.

Fleming nodded, still thinking. Four hours. One vial. One chance.

Sometimes salvation looked like a preacher in a lifeboat, rowing back toward the thing that wanted him dead, carrying the one weapon that could save everyone.

The refinery’s massive pistons thumped their steady rhythm, counting down to sunset.

“Alright,” Fleming said finally, his voice steady. “Here’s what we’re going to do…“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​