Blood of Cain

95

They led Courtney back in time. It was a small community of long-standing log cabins with river-rock chimneys, rough-hewn one-story buildings, split rail fences, a small clapboard store and a grist mill by a running stream. The big wooden wheel turned slowly as water from a trough was channeled and diverted to fall onto the blades of the timeworn wheel.

Courtney looked at the people as she was led, arms tied behind her back, like a captured prisoner into their world. The smell of wood smoke drifted over the settlement. Women looked up curiously from the creek where they washed clothes. One man, pushing a wooden wheel-barrow piled high with corn, set it down and stared. Barefoot children wearing bib overalls played by the stream.

The men and woman were dressed in Amish-style clothes — long dresses for the women, overalls for the men. None of the men wore hats. They all watched her with suspicion as Dillon Flanagan and three of his men walked into the camp. Courtney noticed that many of the women were pregnant.

Dillon turned to her and said, “You’re blood related to some of those children, Courtney. They’re your little cousins. All of the women swollen with child are swollen with my children.” He grinned and whispered, “My seed will never be removed from the garden.”

Dillon stepped up on the sawed-off stump of a tree. He shouted, “Gather about brothers and sisters. More than two dozen people formed a semi-circle around him and Courtney. He said, “This poor woman is unclean. She fornicates … prostitutes her body for the pleasure of men. She is not without redemption, but she must be isolated, taken to her knees in the dark to understand the depth of her sins. God requires it of us.”

“Amen, Prophet,” said one of the men.

Dillon nodded, his penetrating eyes scanning the rapt faces of his followers. “She is a descendent of Caesar, an emissary.”

Courtney felt like she’d awakened in a nightmare. She screamed, “No! I’m not a descendent of Caesar and I’m not a prostitute. My grandmother was Dillon’s mother. He’s my uncle. Yes! It’s true. And he raped me. The first time when I was eleven. He stopped when I turned fourteen. And he’ll rape your children, too.”

“Blasphemy!” shouted Dillon. “You’re wicked. If she’s released, she will tell them about us, and they’ll come here. They will hang us from the cross.”

Courtney shook her head. “Can’t you see he’s insane? What did he do? Did he hypnotize everyone here? Can’t you see him for what he really is … a sick fake?”

I followed Dave’s directions, driving up a steep, unpaved road that was carved around the perimeter of a mountain. He said, “It looks like there’s an overlook — a cliff, maybe, about a half mile to the north of where I see Courtney’s location. The satellite images are pretty good. But they appear to have been shot in the fall when leaves are off most of the trees. So I don’t know exactly what you’ll be able to see, if anything.”

“How close am I to this place?”

“Maybe a quarter mile. Whatever Dillon is doing with Courtney, there is very little movement. They’ve stopped … looks like it’s in a clearing near a large expanse of woods. Unless Dillon tossed her phone, somehow she’s managed to keep it and to keep it turned on. I could lose the connection any second.”

“I’ll be at the overlook in less than a minute.”

“You can’t get there fast enough, Sean.”

When I came around a bend in the road, it looked like a door had opened to hell.

“Courtney!” I yelled.

Dave was saying something as I dropped my phone in the passenger seat.

A Toyota pickup truck was burning in a ditch on the side of the road. Flames roared from the open windows, tires belching black smoke, the sounds of metal popping, glass shattering.

The hungry and ugly sound of a ravenous fire devouring prey.

Was Courtney inside the truck? Could someone have stolen her phone?

I ran to the truck, the heat like a furnace from fifty feet away. I held my arm up to shield my face from the fire, trying to see if Courtney’s body was behind the melting steering wheel. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so helpless.

No one in the crowd said anything. They simply stared at Courtney, collective eyes shifting over to Dillon who shouted, “Dig a hole — a grave, back up in the field of clover, beyond the grove.” He turned to a tall, lanky, scarecrow of a man. “Brother William, my carpenter!”

“Yes, Prophet.”

“Make me a casket. Bore a one-inch hole near the head of the box.”

“Yes, Prophet.”

“Brother John, my blacksmith.”

“I’m here, Prophet,” said a man with the shoulders of an ox.

“Make me a pipe. Five feet in length. Fit it to the hole that William bores in the box.”

“Yes, Prophet.”

Dillon turned to the men at his side. “Bring her, and bring me the infiltrator you caught yesterday.”

Two men nodded and left. The third grabbed Courtney by her forearm and led her away, Dillon following. He paused, stopping next to pregnant young woman. He placed his wide, open hand on her dress over her belly, looked at her, his eyes piercing, and said, “I feel the blood and spirit of a Celt warrior. You are a chosen woman, Sister April.”

She lowered her eyes, a demure smile working in the corners of her small mouth. The residents drifted back to their routine tasks as Dillon caught up with Courtney and her sentry walking down the hard-packed dirt road, past a cornfield, and then coming to a small clearing bordered by a large strand of oaks. Two men brought a third, younger man, his feet and hands shackled in chains.

He was in his late twenties, wearing a University of Virginia T-shirt, red baseball cap, jeans and hiking boots. Courtney could see he was terrified, his breathing quick, eyes darting around, vein pounding in his neck.

Dillon said, “Remove the iron from the limbs of this dissident. And two of you hold his arms until I say to release them.”

The man said, “Let me go. I didn’t do anything. I was just up here scouting the area for a student film we’re shooting. I heard about these old buildings. I didn’t know anybody actually lived in this place. Please, just let me go, okay. I won’t say anything about you people living here.”

“You people?” Dillon cocked his head, his eyes like laser beams. “You, sir, have no idea who these people are and why they’re here. This is the valley of the gods, a place of rebirth. To find a renaissance, to seek a better path to the future, death is often the key because the transference — the spirit leaving the body uses the limbs, even the blood of the body to point the way to the future.” He looked at one man without moving his head. “Brother Arthur, it is your turn.”

After the flames subsided somewhat, and I could see there wasn’t a body in the Toyota truck, I moved on quickly. The last two hundred yards were not accessible by car. I carried my rifle, put Dave on speaker-phone and ran, ran hard in the direction he pointed out. He said, “Another hundred feet and you should reach it. Be careful. The drop-off is damn steep, more than eleven hundred feet straight down. There’s a fast-moving river at the bottom.”

“Got it.” I arrived in a small clearing of ancient rock and cedar trees on the edge of a mountain. Ground water seeped between the boulders making their surface slick. I looked toward a small valley to my left, maybe a quarter mile away. There were a few ramshackle buildings, wood smoke curling from a chimney attached to a rickety cabin. A few people milling around the property.

“What do you see, Sean?”

“Hold on Dave.” I slipped my phone into my shirt pocket and then used an outcropping of rock to set up the bipod for my rifle, looking into the scope. I panned slowly to the right across the cleared property, spotting men, woman, and a few children. It was an agrarian, eighteenth century Appalachian farming community. I kept panning to the right, past a grist mill, past a whitewashed church.

And then I found Courtney.

And Dillon Flanagan.

It had to be him. Tall, thick black hair, cheekbones. A resemblance to the actor Daniel Day Lewis. He stood next to Courtney, her hands shackled behind her back. Standing there, next to five men, her head cutting from right to left as if she was looking for a place to run. But there was no escape, nowhere to run. One man, wearing a red baseball cap, was being held by two others. Even through the scope, I could see the man was pleading for his life.

I chambered a round, moving the cross-hair sight to the back of my brother’s head.

The man called Brother Arthur waddled like a grizzly bear walking on its hind legs. Courtney watched him, saw the vacancy in his eyes. She knew what was about to happen. He towered more than six-four, near three hundred pounds, ruddy face with a salt and pepper Van Dyke beard. He slid an ice pick from his overall pocket and slowly approached the frightened man who was held by two other men, each one gripping one of the man’s forearms, stretching his arms outward.

Courtney shouted, “Leave him alone! Uncle Dillon, please, don’t hurt him. Dear God, please.”

“God?” Dillon turned to her, his head cocking like a cat watching a goldfish in a glass bowl. “God can’t help you. Never could. Never will.”

“Please, let him go. Kill me instead.”

“Is that what you would desire, Courtney? Be careful what you wish for. This man before us was sent here on a mission. And now his mission is altered, he will help show us the future because the honesty of a real death cannot be false. The flailing of the limbs and blood flow speaks the truth and the future. It is the way of the Celts.” He looked at the large man and said, “Proceed.”

The large man gripped the ice pick, slowly raising it in the air. Courtney bit her bottom lip and closed her eyes just as the bulky man’s head exploded.

He was dead before he hit the ground.