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“I’m always the last to hear about these things” is a phrase that should be stricken out of my mouth. It was bad enough to watch Sister Mary Agatha’s head disintegrate right in front of my face as I was coming around the corner from the kitchen headed to the chapel for Vespers.

Her head did not disappear like one of those movies where it just poofs away as smoke. It was more a cross between one of Sister Margaret Mary’s tomatoes squishing under a dull knife and a watermelon exploding because of an enthusiastic blow from Sister Angelina Ruth’s mallet. I probably would not have been so upset if what was left of her head had not splattered all over my scapular. (Sister Mary Agatha, no matter what Mother Superior said about her, was just a bitch.) Sister Aquinata Clare — who I now remember lying in a bloody heap over by the ovens — had just brought it to me, freshly washed not an hour before I heard the bells for prayer.

Now I was in the back of a car watching the bakery burn to the ground. Sister Margaret Mary was driving as fast as she could muttering about weapons and God and needing a new habit. I could not help but stare and watch as the bullets rushed to meet the night. The car sliced through the fog in an attempt to hide from the blaze of horror we were leaving behind.

“Did Mother Superior get out alive?” Sister Frances Magdalen was damn near screaming. “Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It has been nine hours since my last confession. I just thought the word ‘damn.’”

“I didn’t see her! I didn’t see her!” Sister Margaret Mary was hyperventilating. How she was keeping the car on the road, I am sure, is a mystery of the Church.

“Is that the best you can think right now? Who fuckin’ cares?” I was beside myself watching yet another bullet fly through the back window and pierce Sister Frances Magdalen’s left temple and exit out to the headrest in front of her.

“Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It has been thirty seconds since my last confession. I just said the word ‘fucking.’ But at the moment I’m pretty fucking sure that’s the least of my problems.”

“Just keep driving,” I yelled at Sister Margaret Mary, “and stop huffing like that. You’re going to wreck and kill us faster than they will.”

Sister Margaret Mary drove like a bat out of our belfry as her breathing subsided to something approximating a rhythm about four hours later. The night swallowed us in a haze of smoke and fog only to spit us out into dawn on the other side of the mountain range in a small farming town that seemed a bit too quiet.

She parked the car next to the barbershop and turned off the engine. The three of us, two alive and one dead, just sat there. Sister Frances Magdalen’s brains dripped in an awkward beat until the sound was just irritating enough that I opened the door and shoved her out onto the sidewalk. Her body seemed to twitch a little and I almost thought I saw her mouth open to say something. Nothing but blood ran from between her lips and her eyes remained a bit bulging from the bullet wound behind them. There was nothing I could do for her so I closed the door and turned back to Sister Margaret Mary who was still sitting in the driver’s seat, hands welded to the steering wheel, and staring off into the distance.

“You couldn’t just marry him?” she asked.

“What?”

“You couldn’t just marry the man? You had to come and join our convent?” Her tone was flat. Even the attempt at frustrated exasperation was monotonous.

I was suddenly furious. “You expect me to actually marry the man that did that?” I smashed my finger into the back window as I was jabbing it toward the burning bakery and convent we had left behind.

“Jethro Midas only did that because you wouldn’t marry him!” Sister Mary Margaret finally let go of the steering wheel and turned to face me. “Look around you. This doesn’t look like too bad of a town to settle down.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “It definitely has the look of that Midas touch.”

“What does that mean?”

“Never mind,” I said quietly. “Let’s get out of here.”

Sister Mary Margaret opened her door.

“Where are you going?”

“I want to get out and walk a moment,” she replied.

I got out and met her at the back of the car. We started to walk down the main street of town, stopping at various shops along the way. We both noticed it was deserted, eerily calm. 

“Strange,” she said. “This feels like a ghost town.”

I nodded.“If the Midas brothers came through here first, who’s to say they didn’t leave things a mess here like they did the convent.”

“Except there’s no mess. There’s no bodies. Where are the bodies? If they were here, there should be bodies!” 

Sister Mary Margaret was right. We saw no bodies, no blood, no carnage to suggest anything like the convent massacre. The stillness of the town was unsettling. We stopped at Booboo’s Bountiful Boutique and pilfered clothes to replace our bloodstained habits. We found a deserted market around the corner. I grabbed a wilted salad while Sister Mary Margaret claimed she was not hungry at all and waved me off when I offered her a cookie. In the time we’d left the car, her mood was becoming dull and slow, and her pallor was somewhat greying. 

“Do you even know what Jethro Midas does for a living?” Sister Mary Margaret asked, as we walked back down toward the car.

“No,” I admitted. I had never thought about it. I just knew that I did not want to be married off to someone that I barely knew because of some bargain my father made when he was a child.

“Jethro Midas created the ability to live forever,” she said.

I stopped and turned to face her, hesitant as to what to say to something like that. It was preposterous. That’s when I saw it. Her eyes glazed over like cobwebs in the rectory and her lips parted as she rushed at me. I felt her mouth close on my neck. The sharpness of those fangs … Those fangs. I’m lucky to be alive.