At night, while Lena sleeps, the ghosts call to me. They scream my name in anger, they call out to me in pain. They beg me to relent, fawning upon me with their supplications as I struggle to ignore them. Some nights their voices ring so heavily in the wind, or drip so loudly in the humid air, that I cannot sleep. Other nights I focus on the dying embers of our campfire, begging the spirit of Fire to entrance my mind and shut out the voices, and he grants me that boon, and sleep finds me.

I say nothing of the voices to Lena. She would be frightened, and She would not understand my explanations. And in my love for Her, I would tell Her everything, and thereby lose Her, as I have lost everything else in my life. I cannot allow that; She is all I have left, the only tenuous string holding me together, the sole barrier staving off despair.

We have little time, She and I. Little time to enjoy the warmth of each other's bodies, little time to enjoy the beautiful emptiness of the world. Every sunrise, every breath of wind in our hair, every warm afternoon basking in sunlight must be savored. I cling to these moments like a child grasping a giant lollipop -- the beauty of the world, the feeling of it pressing in against my skin, are like a drug to me.

I fear what is coming. That fear gnaws at me, filling me with doubt and leeching from me what hope remained after God abandoned me. I wake each morning wondering if today will be the day I am taken from Her. Every moment we spend in idleness, I wonder if that moment will be the one I regret at the end; how many minutes of tomorrow are we losing to this minute of today?

Lena does not share my fear and my urgency, and at times they make Her cross. Why shouldn't they? If She wants to swim in a creek for an afternoon, or spend a week exploring the ruins of a great library, She should have those luxuries, and I would be a churl to deny them. But I can find no rest; when the world is silent I fear that all creatures have been scared off by those who hunt me, and when the world is not silent I am certain that all the noise represents the chattering of spies, telling them where to find me.

Still, She can bring a smile to my lips, and a flutter of joy to my heart, and so I do not push the issue, though I fear we will both rue it when the time comes; and our lonely peripatetic wandering is punctuated with long sojourns in the places which excite Her. I draw the line at one thing only: I will not set foot in a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue. I hold nothing but revulsion for those monuments to the twisted God who cruelly used me and then discarded me.

We argued about it, at first. Lena had never been overly religious as a child; Her parents taught Her that God was a myth and Man the measure of all things. But, like many raised secular, the onset of tragedy had changed Her mind; there are no atheists in foxholes, it used to be said, and there were precious few during the days of the death of man. "Shouldn't we give thanks to God that we are still alive?" She would ask, when we passed by a church. My angry denials that any thanks were owed to the bringer of the Plague wore Her down more than they convinced Her.

Nor could they have, for I did not believe them myself, and lack of conviction is easily communicated even through the noise of overwhelming anger. But I cannot tell Her the real reasons I hate God.

God chose me. He came to me when I was a teenager. I saw Him in dreams, at first, but after a while I began to see Him when I was awake. He would talk to me, father to child. He told me He loved me. He praised me when I did well in school, and castigated me when I jacked off to my father's Playboy. He told me He had a great destiny in store for me, if I would only do as He told me, and that my name and my service to Him would be remembered by mankind for all eternity.

How can I explain what a wonderful experience that was? I was intoxicated, overjoyed. God himself was speaking to me, laying out a future in which I was crucial; a future in which I would be remembered as much as Jesus himself. I bristled with pride, though I was careful not to show it to others --- the talent for deception which allows me to live with Lena was well developed, even then. I worked hard at school, and even harder to purge myself of the sin of lust, because I could not bear the thought that if God were disappointed in me, He might withdraw His love and withdraw my destiny. I lived for nothing else.

God told me to go into biology, and so I did. He gave me a wife, and we had children together, and we were happy. He directed my career, putting me always in places where I was successful, so that by age thirty-five I was one of the most famous genetic engineers in the world. We started a company together, my wife and God and I, and it was successful; by age forty, the blogs and the press had dubbed me 'the Bill Gates of genetic engineering'.

Then, one day, He came to me, and told me to quit. Quit my job as the head of the largest genetic engineering company in the world, walk out of management, and go back to being a code monkey. I was horrified; how could I give up my life? I told Him He was insane. He told me that this had been His plan all along, and that I must do as He said. I begged Him not to make me do it; He said He would no more take this cup from me than He had taken Jesus' cup from Him. I swore in anger, I swore in pain; I uttered every blasphemy I could have imagined, but in the end I gave in.

It was the worst mistake I ever made. God could not have done worse to me in anger at my rejection than He did in reward of my acceptance. He brought me to the lab, and showed me, piece by piece, how to assemble the genetic code of the creature He wanted me to create. He did not explain what He was doing, and I was too blind to see it. He played me well.

I released the bacteria culture into a banana tree, as He asked. He thanked me profusely, told me I had done a good job and was well worthy of His love. Then He grew quiet, and the sky grew dark around Him, and I became frightened. After a while, He asked me if I thought He should have let Abraham kill Ishmael, and when I stood there, uncomprehending and uncertain how to answer, He grew angry.

He asked me if I knew what I had done, and I said that I had obeyed my God. Then He laughed, bitterly, and explained to me what He had used me to do. The horror must have shown in my eyes, for He snarled at me, telling me that I had no right to question Him, and disappeared. I have not seen Him since.

Eight days later the deaths began. My family were among the first to go; the plague took them less than thirty-six hours from their first coughing fits. Within two weeks, everybody was gone. Everyone but me; God had spared me from the ravages of His plague, choosing instead to torture me with guilt at the memory of what He had caused me to do.

For months I suffered, wandering aimlessly from town to town. I was well and truly alone. God did not visit me -- not that I would have wanted Him to -- and there were no other people that I could see; the plague had done its work well. Every town I passed, every rusting car or abandoned house, called out to me, telling me the stories of the people I had killed. I wept until I could weep no more. I screamed until my voice fell silent. There was nothing I could do.

The ghosts were louder then, more insistent than they are today, and they haunted me in the day as well as the night. It was one of the ghosts who reminded me of God's promise: I would be famous, I would be remembered. Remembered by whom?, the ghost taunted me; and I realized then the fear which has driven me ever since. Somebody must have survived. The plague could not have been universally fatal; no plague ever is. The survivors will regroup, and God will keep His promise to me by telling them my name, and they will come for me. They will come to enact vengeance, to repay the deaths of their parents, their children, and their friends.

Was it a kindness of that ghost to remind me of things I should never have forgotten? Or is the certainty of impending doom itself a torture, inflicted upon me by ghosts as the only revenge within their grasp? I wonder this sometimes, at night, when trying to drown out their voices, just as I wonder if the joy I've found in Lena is also an insidious torture. I have no answers. Outside of Lena, I have nothing but guilt, and anger, and pain. I wish that God had never found me. I wish that I were dead.

In the morning, Lena will wake me with a smile, and we will be happy for a while. The wind will blow on my skin, and I will be happy to be alive, and be uplifted by the beauty of the world. I will savor every moment of Her company as a guilty pleasure, snatched away while the executioner is looking elsewhere.

Because I know they are looking for me. One day the executioner will find me, and I will deserve what he brings. I will go willingly, on that day. I only hope they spare Lena when they take me.