RISE UP NO MORE by otter (otter@fadedpress.com)

Jeremiah Dooley didn't think he was sick so much as infested. He clenched his teeth against the twisting in his guts, paid no mind to the tears that streamed from the corners of his eyes, and tried to remember how to breathe.

Everything in his brain went fuzzy and black for awhile, a falling-asleep that he wasn't sure would come hand in hand with a waking-up. For a moment he thought that he was back in his bed in Harristown, and then he thought maybe he was floating in that wide, warm river next to Chapel Hill, where he'd washed the Alliance blood off his boots before jumping in for a swim. His guts twisted and rolled again, pulled him back to where he was, but he didn't stay for long. He remembered riding fences as a boy, stopping to mend a broken stretch of barbed wire and finding that little calf huddled up under a bush. He'd thought it was dead, and then he'd seen it moving, and then he'd realized that the rippling under its hide was something beneath the skin, some unnamable horror eating the carcass from the inside out.

When he woke up again he was screaming, and he couldn't seem to stop. Somebody leaned over the bed and said, "That's enough, Private Dooley," and then they injected something into his neck that gave the agony soft edges; the stabbing pain became a gentle, loving rub, like his mother's barn cats twisting between his legs.

Jeremiah Dooley stayed in the barn with the cats, while the Alliance doctors loaded him onto a gurney. When they rolled him in among a crowded mass of the ill and injured in the shuttle, he was in the loft, easing aside a bale of sweet-smelling hay to uncover a mewling clutch of kittens whose black and white coats were still tinted by the fresh pink of their skin. When his body was arranged on a filthy infirmary cot, and somebody stole the boots off his feet, Jeremiah had his nose buried in the sun-warmed fur at the back of a cat's neck, and the deep-throated thrum of its purr was lulling him to sleep.

While Jeremiah was in the barn with the cats, he killed five thousand men, and laid waste to New Gilead.

+++

Book went back to his bunk after supper. He knelt beside his modest little cot, closed his eyes and clasped his hands together. He recited the Twelve Admonitions Against Sin, and the Five Prayers For Forgiveness, and then he reached for the Bible that he kept on his bedside table, and found it missing.

Book lowered his head, heaved out a sigh, and added a prayer for patience to his repertoire.

The lights in River's room were out, and through the semi-opaque door, Book could see a darker lump in the bed, which was probably River. He sighed again, and turned toward her brother's room, where a lamp still burned. He knocked and poked his head inside, and found Simon bent over a notepad, pen in hand, fast asleep.

He shook the boy by the shoulder, and didn't bother to hide his own smile. "Simon," he whispered, and then a little louder, "Wake up, son."

Simon did wake up, mostly, just long enough to drop the pen and roll over, assuming a position less likely to result in permanent spinal damage.

"Simon," Book said, "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I think your sister may have 'borrowed' my Bible again."

Simon muttered something unintelligible, and then said, "I saw the Captain reading it." He snuffled once and fell deeply back into sleep.

Book frowned and straightened. "Surely I heard that wrong," he muttered to himself, but when he stepped back out into the corridor, he set out to look for the Captain, anyway.

The bridge was empty, and the door to the Captain's bunk was closed, but that didn't necessarily mean anything; Mal never left it open. No one was in the kitchen.

He finally found the man he was looking for in the cargo bay. The big bay door was open to let in the cool breeze from outside, and Mal had set up a chair at the top of the ramp, where he was lounging with his shirt half unbuttoned and his suspenders hanging from his hips. He was flipping slowly through a thick book in his hands, which looked suspiciously like the Bible.

Book sidled up beside the chair, his footsteps ringing softly against the grate floor, and said, "Nice night, isn't it?"

Mal nodded distractedly, turning another page, his finger drifting down the lines as he skimmed the passages. "Nice enough down here," he said. "Bunks are fairly sweltering, though. Kaylee says she'll have the temp controls fixed in the morning."

Book nodded and rocked back on his heels, clasping his hands behind his back. "I didn't find my room too uncomfortable," he said, "but I did find myself missing a Bible. I suppose the last place I expected to find it was in your hands, Captain."

Mal didn't look up, but Book could see the very edge of his little smile. "River gave it to me after supper. I gotta say, Preacher, it ain't terribly manly of you to enlist a little girl to do your shepherding for you."

Book smiled, too. "Well, I wouldn't generally recommend theft as a way to spread the faith, but since it's apparently persuaded you to crack open the Good Book, in this case I believe the ends probably justify the means."

Mal snorted. Far overhead, a mottled gray moth beat itself over and over again against the glow of a lightbulb, and its little body made a faint thunk-thunk-thunk noise with each impact, like it was providing a bass accompaniment to the cricket chorus outside. The air smelled like fresh grass and far-off water.

"This book itself seems to justify a lot of things," Mal said, after awhile. "Did you know that God hates shrimp? No, really, it's right here. 'These ye shall eat of all that are in the waters: all that have fins and scales shall ye eat: And whatsoever hath not fins and scales ye may not eat; it is unclean unto you.' Deuteronomy 14:9." He frowned at the book and said, "I wonder it how it'd classify those weird scaly lobster things they breed on Titan moon." Then he flipped forward a few more pages and took to scanning again.

Book made a little "hmm" sound at the back of his throat. "Yes, well, some of the guidance that the Bible provides is perhaps not as applicable in today's modern world. Most likely many of the laws against eating certain foods were rooted in the safe health practices of the day."

Mal grunted back, and then said, "Ah, here we are. I've found my favorite part." He cleared his throat theatrically, and read, "'When thou comest neigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all of the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.'"

Behind his back, Book clutched one hand with the other, squeezing so tightly that he could almost hear his bones grinding.

"'And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it unto thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword.'"

The moth threw itself into the breach again and its wings went thump-thump-thump against the light. Mal stood and hit the door controls in the same movement; as the ramp trundled upwards to shut the ship away from the night, Mal snapped the book shut, too, and thrust it against Book's chest. He said, "Well. I suppose if God says it's okay, that makes it just, then."

The bay doors closed with a heavy sound that Book imagined was not unlike the gates of Heaven swinging shut. Mal gave the Bible a last little shove against Book's chest, so he could feel the useless weight of it and the faint stab of the corners as they dug at his flesh. Then the Captain turned and retreated, and from the stairs he said, "You might want to start locking that book up someplace, Shepherd. It ends up in my hands again and I might pitch the gorram thing out into the black." Mal disappeared into the shadows of the upper catwalk first, and then the sound of his footfalls faded away, as well.

Book clutched the Bible to his chest, traced over the little inlaid cross on the front with his fingertip, and squeezed shut his eyes. He said, "'If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word I do hope.'"

The only creature around to hear him was the mottled gray moth, and it had already beaten itself to death against the light.

+++

Thaddeus Bender never saw the carnage on New Gilead with his own eyes. He received daily reports, of course, but they typically described the epidemic in clean terms: "Continued outbreak of Woden's Disease. Request immediate shipment of vaccinations, medical supplies. Estimate sixty-four percent of prisoner population already lost."

He sent back responses that were equally terse. They said things like, "Requested supplies unavailable" and "Casualties considered acceptable."

The bulk of Bender's days above New Gideon were filled with other paperwork: allocation of supplies, which were just enough for the troops garrisoned on his cruiser, and which spared little for the prison camp on the planet below. He signed off on commendations for a few of the men, reprimands for others, medical discharges and troop transportation.

Later in the week, he wrote a report to Alliance central command, stating that a prisoner transported to the New Gideon camp had been carrying Woden's, and that the entire camp was expected to succumb to the disease. He did not mention the password-protected docket on his workstation, which contained the ship surgeon's diagnosis of the case of Woden's. It also recorded the doctor's advice that the patient be terminated and the body incinerated before the illness could spread to the unvaccinated population of Independent prisoners. He did not mention his own orders, issued later in that same day, which sent Jeremiah Dooley down to New Gideon among the general population.

He mentioned none of it, because no one would have cared. Much later, when the last backwater revolts had been put down and everyone in the 'Verse understood that the Alliance had prevailed, Bender's superiors gave him five shiny new medals to hang from his chest, in recognition of the tactical prowess and the relentless determination which had made him a reliable commander in the Alliance fleet.

No one ever mentioned New Gideon, but Bender suspected that they would've given him a medal for that, too, if they could've found a reason.

Long after the war was over, Bender was sent back to New Gideon to supervise the installation of a mining camp; on the fourth day of construction, when they were just scratching the surface to start the mine shaft, the workers hit the mass grave where a prison camp had once stood.

No longer floating miles above the planet, Thaddeus Bender stood and watched as the men pulled body after body from the earth and trucked the remains away to be buried elsewhere, far from valuable mineral deposits. The next morning, he resigned his commission and vanished as if he'd never existed.

+++

Five years after leaving Serenity – under somewhat mysterious circumstances, following the abrupt departure of Simon and River Tam – Shepherd Book sent an old-fashioned paper letter to Captain Malcolm Reynolds. After he sent it, he could hardly recall what he'd written. He remembered a part that said, "This is my last confession," and "If I never earned your forgiveness, then I don't deserve God's." He also remembered a part toward the end – when the pain medication was kicking in, and the squeezing around his heart became a gentle rubbing, like the cat Kaylee had brought aboard from Greenleaf – where he wrote, "I was Amherst, Bouquet, and Ecuyer. I was the conquerer, sending my beaten enemy a gift of blankets wrapped up with disease."

He'd signed the letter, "General F. Thaddeus Bender," but that had looked all wrong, and it had made him want to cry, so he'd scratched it out and just written "Book" instead.

The end