Far Cry: Absolution

II

WILL HALF SLID, HALF CLIMBED DOWN ALONG THE SLOPE, following the path of broken branches and flattened leaf matter. The truck was on its side another fifty feet down. He could only see the bottoms of the tires and the metal undercarriage where the drive shaft went straight through from the front of the truck to the back. He carried his pack and wore his hat. He also carried the rifle he used for hunting. It had sat between his legs as he’d come up the mountain, riding shotgun, listening to John tell him which way he’d thought the girl had gone and why.

“You understand we mean to help her?”

“That’s why you want to find her?” Will had asked.

“That’s why. We want to save her. We want to give her a new life, just like the one we gave to you.”

Will looked away out the side of the passenger window. He had his hands resting on the rifle, watching the trees and vegetation blurring past. A deer stood off to the side of the road and he watched it as they passed. He watched it all the way until he couldn’t see it anymore and the road had curved away behind them. Will’s eyes fell on a tarp in the bed of the truck. One corner coming loose.

“What’s back there?” Will asked.

John glanced across to see what Will had seen. “My oldest brother Jacob has been tracking wolves in the mountains nearby. It’s some of his equipment.”

Will tried to see what was there but the tarp would not stay still.

“The concept is pretty simple,” John said. “You hunt one and then tag it with the signal. Once you have one you let it go and then you use the tag to home in on it, and instead of having one, you now can find the whole pack. That’s why we need you out there tracking Mary May, Will. We need to bring her back. We need to help her see that she is part of something bigger. We need her to believe as you do, and as I do, that we can help everyone here in this county. Help them to see how strong they can truly be if they could only come together.”

“And that works?”

“You know better than I do, Will. You are a hunter. You know that the hunter always uses the best tool he has at hand.”

Will thought about what John had said. He slid the remaining fifty feet and came to a stop just before the front axle of the pickup. Above, moving down toward him with a little more caution, Lonny followed, using the thin branches of the currant thicket, that had slowed and must have somewhat cushioned the truck as it went off the road above.

From everything Will had seen thus far it didn’t seem at all like they were trying to save the girl. Though Will had seen the baptism and what they might be calling salvation these days.

Moving around the end of the truck he looked at the damage. The front windshield had been cracked and there were fresh scrapes along the metal side panel, one of the headlights had been smashed. Will braced himself against the bumper and rocked the truck a little, thinking that it was very lucky the truck had not rolled the remaining distance through the thicket of currant and crushed itself on the pines farther on. When he lifted himself up and looked down into the cab he could see the passenger side window was completely gone, branches and leaves beneath could be seen where they had been pressed under the weight of the vehicle. There was no blood to be seen and Will let himself back down onto the slope and looked it all over again as if seeing it fresh for the first time.

When Lonny met him there, Will said, “I know this truck.”

“I expected you would.”

“What are we into here?”

“Damsels in distress,” Lonny said, smiling at Will.

“In distress from what?”

“Eternal damnation,” Lonny said. “Just like all the rest.”

Will gave Lonny one last look then walked his way down along the truck until he came to the tailgate. “They said she went north?”

Lonny came up beside him, carrying his own pack and leaning slightly into the slope as he went, one hand out to brace his movements. “She went this way,” Lonny said, pointing to a small opening in the thick green underbrush that could have been an animal track, but that also showed a few small broken branches at chest height.

“They follow her?”

“They followed her as best they could. They said she turned into a goddamn mountain goat just as soon as she hit these woods.”

Will turned and looked back up the slope to where the two church trucks sat. John was watching them. “What did John say to you about all this?” Will asked.

“He said only that we should find her. He said she was saying things about the church that just weren’t true. He said she’s been stirring up the pot back in town, trying to get the sheriff to look into all of us.”

“Is there something to look into?”

Lonny shrugged. “You know her, don’t you?”

“I know her. I went to school with Mary May’s father back when there was a school to go to.”

“Then you know how she can be,” Lonny said. He looked up at John now and then glanced back at Will. “We better get to going. John didn’t bring the both of us up here so we could sit here jawing.”

MARY MAY CAME UP ALONG THE EDGE OF THE DRY AVALANCHE chute, using the slender branches of juniper to pull herself along. She had quit the forest a little while ago and she climbed now in the open. Her breath laboring with the effort, the slick feel of her own sweat down the inside of her shirt. The sun behind her in the west, the heat felt warm against her back, the metal of the .38 feeling solid and heavy beneath the waist of her pants. The gun and a hooded, zippered sweatshirt were all she’d had time to take from the truck before she’d run.

She had lost John and the rest of his men almost five hours before. She climbed now with the alpine breeze, smelling like cracked rock and melted ice, ruffling at the loose fabric of her shirt and teasing out a couple strands of hair that dangled about her face.

Stopping at the base of the ridge she set the .38 to her side then cupped water from a stream and washed it over her face, up along her hair, and then rubbed it along the back of her neck. She drank from between her hands and then stood there looking at the wavering leaves all around, waiting and watching, hoping they were not still out there somewhere trying to follow her.

Satisfied for the moment, she sat there on a large rock and peeled down the jeans she wore to view the dark bruise where her hip had hit the truck door. The bruise purple and black, three quarters up her thigh stretching under the line of her panties and up along her side. She had scrapes in other places, some from when the truck had gone off the road, others from the brush she had been bushwhacking through most of the day.

There had been a thought at one time to head down toward the road but she had given up on it, knowing John was out there, knowing he was looking for her. And that as she had run from the overturned truck, moving through the trees with the sound of the men behind as they crashed through the underbrush after her, she was certain they were not there to offer her any kind of help.

Twenty minutes later she had cut a sharp path to the east and then ducked in behind a big fir tree that lay along the ground, its wide web of roots still clutching at the rocks and dirt that had once surrounded it. She went along the trunk, keeping low, and as she came to the ball of roots and soil she looked back down the mountain to where John and several of his men were standing no more than a hundred feet away. All of them with their weapons. Bearded and tattooed, their eyes searching out the surrounding wood, trying to discern what path they would pursue.

She held the .38 in her hand and her breath when it came seemed louder than she had ever heard it. Though she knew it was only a whisper, that the fear she felt had only made her think it was all the louder.

“Mary May,” John called, his eyes roaming now around the surrounding wood. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” He was almost singing and he looked now in the direction of the big windfall fir, but his eyes only passed it by, then continued.

“No one’s going to hurt you,” John said. He had taken a few steps and she watched the big magnum revolver he held in one hand as he moved, how he ran it one way then another as if it were some form of divining rod and she the precious water. “No one wants this to go any farther than it has to.”

She waited. She watched him take a few more steps. His men had already gone ahead of him and he was still looking around. The dark shadows of the forest converged all around him and the great canopy of the trees above.

“You come out and we’ll take you to see your brother. We’ll take you right to Eden’s Gate. We can all be friends. We can all just be one big happy family. You. Your brother. Me. And everyone else, The Father, and all who hear his words.”

She watched him till he walked out of sight behind the roots. Then she moved back along the trunk, following him and peeking over to watch where he was going. He spun but she dropped just as fast, her hand still clutching the .38, her face pressed down in the damp forest floor. When she looked again he was another hundred or so feet on, moving in the direction his men had gone. She watched him till she could not see him anymore and then she ran.

A few hours later she had rested at the stream. An hour after that she was climbing the avalanche chute and had come out into the open, using the squat juniper bushes to hold to. Now she came to the top of the windswept ridge and stood there looking down. Steep rock cliffs ran much of the opposite side and stepping closer, she peered now into the dark shadow of a deep abyss. Rock and talus collected three hundred feet below.

She had climbed the ridge hoping to get her bearings, but all she saw was more forest and more hills, mountain after mountain stretching on ahead. Somewhere out there was her brother. All she truly knew about the location of Eden’s Gate was that it rested somewhere along the lake farther on. A place that had been scoured out by glaciers millennia ago, the water deep and the mountains and hills that surrounded it running right down into that blue-green water. But it was still very far from where she was. She looked in the direction she thought Eden’s Gate might be, scanning the ridge she stood upon then running her eyes down along the far side and out into a river valley far below.

Two or three miles on, on the opposite slope from where she stood, she could see the white dots of animals moving in a mountain field. What she thought at first was a herd of mountain goats, now appeared to her as sheep, and as she studied the surrounding grass she saw a man walk out from the edge of the forest and stand watching the sheep then move back beneath the trees.

She stood and took it all in for the better part of five minutes before she picked her way along the ridge and found a small, gradual chute to descend upon the river valley there below.

WILL KEPT A FEW FEET OUT FROM THE BIG TREE TRUNK AND root ball of the fir. He circled and looked each footfall over. He saw how she had pressed a knee to the ground at one point and how the edges of the depression showed the slight shift of her movements as, he could only guess, she had hidden behind the large trunk and then moved to peer over it at whoever had pursued her.

“What had she been saying?” Will asked.

Lonny turned to look at him. He was standing off a bit in the place Will had gestured for him to go.

“What was she saying to people in town? What made her come out here?”

“Ugly things,” Lonny said. “That we were murderers. That we were hiding things, that we were keeping secrets.”

“Are we?”

Lonny kept his eyes on Will. He gave a half smile and then turned to look back the way they’d come, as if John might be standing there. “We haven’t done nothing that hasn’t needed to be done. You’ve seen the baptized.”

“I’ve seen it but I’m having a hard time remembering it being done quite that way when the brothers first came up from Georgia,” Will said.

“The Father means to cull the herd. He means to separate the weak from those of us who are strong.”

“And which is Mary May?”

“You know her, don’t you? What would you say?”

“I knew her,” Will said. “But that was a long time ago. That was before I came to Eden’s Gate. I knew her family, too. And I’ve seen her brother, Drew, at Eden’s Gate, but I haven’t spoken more than a few words to him since he joined. I wasn’t there when he was baptized and I guess I don’t know his story. As a kid Drew always seemed to idolize his daddy, Gary, following him around like he was Gary’s own shadow, but Gary was always against Eden’s Gate. I guess for Drew that’s changed.”

“Well,” Lonny said. “Things have changed. Things have changed a good deal even from the time I came up here. Even from the time John invited me up here to this place and told me it would be all milk and honey.”

“But it hasn’t been, has it?”

Lonny looked around at the forest, at the fallen fir tree. “This look like milk and honey to you?” he said. “How long do you think it’ll take before we track her down?”

“I’ll track her as far as I can. But it doesn’t mean we’ll find her. She could get down into a riverbed, or she could travel over rock and not leave any trace. Just cause we’re looking doesn’t mean we’ll find her.”

“Well which way did she go?”

Will looked up, ran his eyes away from the trunk and out among the trees. “She went this way and it looks like she was running.”

“You can tell all that?”

“It’s the spacing of the footfalls,” Will said, rising now and pointing several out. “Catching up to her is going to be no easy task.”

“That right?”

Will walked and kept his eyes down along the ground. He followed Mary May’s path up through the forest. The dun of needles displaced here and there where she’d brought a heel down or pushed off with the toe of her shoe.

The last time he’d seen her she had been a teenager, just old enough to work the bar. But that was a long time ago. A very long time since he’d come to the church and gave his soul over to The Father and divorced himself from all he’d known.

MARY MAY CAME ON THEM JUST AS THEY WERE FINISHING THEIR dinner, and one of them rose now to meet her. He walked out to her from under the tree where they had their fire and their cookpot. She said hello and watched him where he stood. The sun was already in the trees to the west and soon it would be gone all together. Only saying a few words to her in Spanish, he motioned for her to come over and to sit and eat with them.

There were two of them, a father and his teenage son and it had been the father who had invited her to share their dinner. They were eating corn tortillas heated in a pan set by the fire and in the pot simmered a kind of thick stew of meat and beans and spices that smelled of some other world she had not known existed here, but that caused her mouth to water. A bowl was fixed and tortillas given. She sat and ate as they watched her. When she had eaten one tortilla and started on the other, running it around the sides of the bowl and using it to clean the edges, the man asked his son something, then the son spoke to her in English, asking what had brought her here.

“I’m looking for my brother,” she said.

The son told his father then turned and looked at her again. “Is he lost?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” she said. The sheep were grazing the high meadow and she looked out on them and ran her eyes across the country. She was trying to see it all before the light was gone and she marked a notch to the north where she thought she might pass through. When she brought her eyes back to the fire and the herders who sat around it, she asked how far away the Church of Eden’s Gate was from where they were now sitting.

“Está buscando por la iglesia?” the father asked. His face had turned and he was watching her. “Es una mala iglesia.”

Mary May looked from the father to the son and waited for the boy to translate.

“He says it is a bad place,” the son said. “They have tried several times to talk with our employer. They have tried to push him, to get him to give over the sheep and to bring him around to their way of thinking.”

“They have done the same to many,” she said. “They are trying to do the same to me.” She wiped the last of the stew up with the remaining tortilla then folded it and put it to her mouth.

“They come sometimes at night and they take a sheep. They are like wolves. They are thieves and soon, if our employer keeps losing his livestock and the money they produce, he will have no choice but to give them over for the pennies they are offering.”

“The same has been done to me,” she said. “They have turned away alcohol I need for my bar in town, in Fall’s End. They have cut me off from many of my distributors and scared half of them away.”

“They want too much,” the boy said. “They think it all belongs to them. But this land belongs to no one. It is for the people, for the sheep, it is for you to walk across and to go whichever way you please.”

She looked from one to the next then thanked them for the dinner. She stood and handed back the bowl they had given her.

“A dónde vas?” the father asked.

“To get my brother,” she said.

“Él está con ellos?”

“Yes,” she said. She could see him thinking all this through. He stood and asked her if she would stay. He told her there was an extra blanket, that she was welcome to it. He said that it would be dark soon and he did not want her to lose her way.

He left and went back in beneath the trees again. A minute later he came out riding a big roan horse, kicking it with his heels to set it into a trot. A rifle sat beside him in an aged leather scabbard and she could see the worn wood of the buttstock. She looked after him as he went then turned to the son with the question in her eyes.

“The rifle is for the wolves, whatever form they take.”

“Has it become that bad?”

“It is hard to say. It is hard to say until you are in it and you must decide. I am not sure how bad it is, but I truly cannot say. Time will tell.”

“And your father?” she asked. She looked after the rider on the horse, his dark shape moving through the gray light above, the sheep moving all around him, turned away as if the horse itself were a boat breaking through the waves. “He would shoot them?”

“He will go out and give the sheep one last look before it is full dark,” the son said. He had begun to clean the big pot out and to wash it with a bit of water and a cloth. “He is a herder. He has always been a herder. To take away his herd is to end his life. You understand?” He went on washing. When he looked up at Mary May again, he asked, “Your brother is a believer?”

“I don’t know if he is or if he isn’t,” she said. “I don’t know him anymore. I guess I haven’t known him for a while.”

“We hear things sometimes,” the boy said. “We hear their chanting, or their singing. We hear voices in the woods and sometimes we see their fires. Some are believers,” he said. “Others are less so. And it’s these that always have it the hardest for what they think they are entering is a world defined by the mercy of God, but the place they have come is not a place of God, but a place of sinners and the word of The Father has little bearing on God, and instead The Father’s words are used to enslave them.”

She stood watching him and then she turned to look to where his own father was rounding the sheep in the high pasture lands above. When she turned back to the boy, she said, “You’re a knowledgeable kid.”

He finished with the pot then set it aside and started in on the bowls and the big ladle they had used for serving. “Just because we live out here does not mean we are blind to what is going on in town, and in all the corners of this county. Sometimes it is the distance itself, either physical or emotional, that lets you see with the most clarity.”

THEY HAD STOPPED AT THE FOOT OF THE RIDGE WHEN THE DARK had come and they had eaten from the supplies Will had packed. They made a small fire and Will watched the twigs and small bits of wood fall away within the dancing heat while Lonny rolled a cigarette and told Will that he hoped tomorrow they would find her.

Will said he hoped so, too. But that he was unsure what good it would do her or do the church to bring her in. “She is not a believer,” Will said. “Her family has always hated the church and I don’t see how bringing her in would change that.”

“It is better to have her under control than to have her loose out there,” Lonny said. He lit the cigarette and sat smoking. “She was talking to the sheriff before all this.”

“What was she saying to him?”

“Nothing of any truth,” Lonny said. “But she is casting doubt upon The Father and upon the church and I think that alone is something John cannot stand about her.”

“I knew her as a kid,” Will said. “She was strong-willed even then. I don’t expect she’s changed much since.”

“We will see,” Lonny said. He smoked the cigarette and looked in on the flames, then when he was done he flicked the cigarette away into the fire. Five minutes later he was asleep.

Will watched the fire until it was only an incandescent flicker of coal there at the bottom of the pit he had constructed from loose stones he’d found nearby. He thought of the bear cub and how he had wanted to save it, but that in the end he had not been able to.

That night for the first time in a long time he dreamt of his daughter. She had always liked him to sit up by her bed and she would not go to sleep unless he was there next to her. When she had been young she would wake up screaming if she found the chair empty and him not there. Will dreamt of her there in bed with her eyes closed but her mind still wide awake.

“You won’t leave me?” she said.

“No. I’m going to sit right here.”

“Even when I fall asleep you’ll be right there?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m going to be right here. I’m going to be looking over you and I’ll never leave you.”

“What about Mamma?” she asked.

“What about her?”

“Who is looking over her?”

“I am. I am watching over both of you.”

“Even while you’re watching over me?”

“Yes,” he said. He observed her for a while. He listened to her breathing. He heard the way her breath changed as she went to sleep. He was sitting in the old room that had been hers, sitting in the house that had been his and his wife’s and that had sat up above on the bluff. And in the dream, he could see out on the landscape through the bedroom window and there was a golden and full character to the land that seemed to him like the dry wheat of a field seen just before the harvest.

He got up from the chair and went out of the room and closed the door. He stopped for a moment, knowing his daughter was in there and that she was safe and that she was alive. Now he went and looked for his wife, but he could not find her. He stood in the kitchen and looked out on the same field. It was dark now, nothing to see but his own reflection in the glass and it seemed to him that the house had changed and that much was missing in the reflected glass of the world behind him.

When he turned from the window he heard his daughter’s piercing scream, calling for him, calling for him to come and get her like he had done when she was a little girl and she would wake up startled to find herself alone.

He was at her door as if he had simply found it waiting there but each time he turned the knob it would not unlock and he could hear her screaming for him, asking where he was, asking for him to come and find her. He kept turning the knob in his hand and it was doing nothing and he knew without a doubt that something horrible was happening that he could not stop, that even in his home there was nothing he could do to help her.

He woke with a start, and he could not stop coughing. It was still an hour before the dawn would come, but he could see the light building in the east. He held a hand to his mouth and racked his lungs and felt something stir within him and come loose. He spit it from his mouth and sat staring at it. Mucus, dark and evil looking there on the ground like some Precambrian life form brought forth from within the mud.

After an hour he was still awake, just lying there watching above as the sun chased the last remaining stars from out of the sky. On the ground beside him, dark as a pool of tar was the blackened and drying blood of an ulcer or some other wickedness he had brought up from somewhere deep inside.

THE BOY WOKE HER IN THE MORNING WITH A HAND HELD OUT across her shoulder and as she opened her eyes he backed away toward the fire and he sat again and stirred whatever it was he had been making there in the pot. His father sat beside him, both of them there like they had never left, still wearing the same clothes and sitting in the same place.

“Estabas hablando,” the father said.

She shook her head to show she did not understand then looked toward the boy and waited.

“You were talking in your sleep,” the boy said. Using the ladle, he scooped dark liquid from within the pot then put it in a bowl and handed it to her. He was back at the fire again when she looked up. She sniffed the bowl, blew on it then put the liquid to her lips and tasted it. “Coffee?” she said. “Gracias.”

“De nada,” the father said. The boy nodded, dipping the ladle again and serving his father before he served himself.

When she was finished with the bowl she could see the loose grinds at the bottom and she thought about the cowboy stories the old ones who came into the bar used to tell about reading the grinds to tell the future. And though she stared down for a minute or more she could not tell a thing from what she saw. She rose, tipping the bowl over and using her fingers to clean out the grinds.

The bruise was still there on her thigh when she squatted down within the trees. She ran her hand across it, pressing against it to feel the tenderness of the skin. It was purple, going blue to yellow at the edges, and when she was done she lifted her pants and came out from under the trees buttoning up her jeans.

The boy had saddled up the horse and he was waiting for her. “You’ll go to find your brother now?”

“I’m going to try.”

The boy offered her his hand. “I can give you a ride as far as the high ridge,” he said. “The church is beyond another few miles and you may be able to see the smoke but I still think it is a bad idea.”

She looked at him then took his hand and pulled herself up behind him. The father came forward now. He held the chrome .38 in the flat palm of his hand like some offering.

“It was in your bedding,” the boy said, looking down at the gun in his father’s hand.

She looked at the father then looked to the boy. She thanked him and took the revolver. “It was my father’s,” she said, then, realizing she knew the word in Spanish, she said to him, “De mi padre.”

“Dónde está tu padre?”

“Dead. A car accident.”

The father clucked his tongue and shook his head. He offered his condolences. The boy started the horse up across the field, Mary May with her hands about the waist of the boy as they went, and the sheep parting around them like whitecaps seen in an ocean storm.

When she looked back toward the small campground she could only see the rise of smoke, dying now as somewhere down there the boy’s father prepared for another day.

The boy climbed the ridge, moving the horse one way and then another on a path that Mary May could see had been used before. When they came to the top the boy slid down and helped her from the horse. He pointed out the valley below and showed her where the church was, down across the valley over a few hills and farther on to where the lake lay.

“Your brother is all you have, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said.

WILL LOST THE TRAIL COMING UP THE AVALANCHE CHUTE. Several times he had to backtrack and find it before he could go on only to lose it again. When they came out on top of the ridge he could see it would be no help. The windswept rock barren of any sign.

He walked the edge of the ridge and looked down over the precipice at the rocks below, broad fans of talus and broken rock spread across the slope into the river valley farther on. It disappeared among the sedge, and then farther on he saw the thick darkness again of trees and brush.

When he came back, walking along the ridge the opposite way, he could see the white backs of the sheep moving in the mountain field opposite from where he stood. They were high on the mountain and he watched a rider move through them, seeing how the sheep began to part to let the rider through.

“That’s where I’d go,” Will said. “Cold and lost. I’d go to where the people are.” He looked to where Lonny was standing. He pointed out the rider and the sheep. He took up his rifle and passed the scope across the field then handed the rifle over to Lonny. “I count two men,” Will said. “I don’t see Mary May.”

Lonny took a long look through the scope then handed it back to Will. “That’s where you’d go?”

“That’s where I’d go,” Will said.

By midmorning they had crossed the river and climbed up the mountain into the field. The sheep moved about them as they walked and the two herders now stood to watch them come.

“Buenos días,” the older of the two said. He had come forward a bit from the dead firepit and watched them as they walked closer.

Will raised a hand and returned the greeting, afterward turning to look back over his shoulder at Lonny. “You speak any Spanish?”

Lonny shook his head. He was watching the two herders and he looked to Will now. “The only Mexicans I ever knew were in prison and they might as well have been in another country the way the place was divided up.”

Will looked back toward the man. “You speak any English?”

The man looked backwards at the boy, who Will could now see must have been the man’s son. The son just stood there looking at the two of them and he shook his head.

“Estamos buscando…” Will said. He was trying to think up what to say, but he didn’t know the words. He had worked a few summers in the fields to the east when he had come back from the war, but it was a long time ago and even then he had not spoken much Spanish. “Estamos buscando for someone,” he said, making a wide and somewhat futile gesture of the surrounding world.

Again, the father looked toward the boy. The boy shrugged.

“These guys don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Lonny said. He went to stand at the fire and looked down upon the blackened rocks. “Ask them if they have any fucking food? Or liquor?” he said, looking over at Will, not even bothering to ask the father or the son. “I’d kill one of these sheep if it meant we had something to bring back out of here for John and the rest at the church.”

“Iglesia?” the father asked. He raised a hand to his chin and pantomimed stroking the long beards both Will and Lonny wore, along with all the rest of the men of Eden’s Gate.

“Yes,” Will said. “Iglesia. Both of us.” He pointed to Lonny then brought his hand back and put it to his chest. “Iglesia.”

“Ask them about the food,” Lonny said again. He had begun to walk around the small camp and he was toeing at the supplies there and the various camp ware. The boy was watching him. “Hell, ask them if they have any liquor? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Will raised a hand to his mouth. “Comida?” he asked. He was speaking to the father, but he brought his eyes around on the son.

“No,” the father said.

“No?” Lonny said. “Tell them they’re being rude.” He spoke to Will but he looked now to the boy who was standing a few feet off. “You’re being fucking rude,” Lonny said. “You understand you motherfucking mute?” Lonny leaned down, looked in under the trees then started to walk away toward where a horse was tethered. “I’m going to take their horse and take their sheep and ride the fuck out of here. I’m done with whatever this is we’re doing.”

The boy came around and stood between Lonny and the horse. In his hand was a small knife that he was holding about waist-high in front of him.

Lonny raised his hands then turned and looked toward Will and to the father. A small half smile began to spread across his face. Will didn’t even see what happened next, it seemed that fast. The boy was on the ground with blood streaming from his nostrils, Lonny standing over him, one of his boots already across the wrist that held the knife.

The father turned but Will was close and he broadsided the man and sent him to the ground. Will took the rifle from his shoulder and held it on the man just as he tried to get back to his feet. The sound of Will moving the bolt forward froze the man in place.

The boy tried to bring his other hand across and take the knife but Lonny bent and punched him hard in the ribs then reached and twisted the knife away. He stood and tossed the knife and backed away a little as the boy wheezed and tried to gather his breath.

“Stop,” Will said, watching all of this, watching Lonny where he stood and watching the boy. “He was only trying to protect what’s his.”

“What’s his?” Lonny asked, his voice elevated in a tone of disbelief. “What’s his?” He took a step away from the boy then he turned and pivoted and brought his boot up fast and kicked the boy so hard he left the ground. The boy was wheezing and rolling on the ground, trying to get his hands and knees beneath him.

“Stop it,” Will said again. He could see the same wild smile come across Lonny’s face.

Lonny kicked the boy twice in the side as the boy tried to get to his feet and he was rolling now away from Lonny and Lonny was going after him, kicking him time after time. Huffing with the effort. “When are they going to learn? When are they all going to fucking learn their lesson?” he was saying. “What’s theirs is mine. They think they know better than me or John. They think they can just close their eyes and look away.” He kicked the boy again. He bent and grabbed the boy at his shirt collar and brought him up and he started punching him now, raising the boy toward him with one hand on his collar and punching him with the other.

Will was on Lonny almost as soon as he’d made up his mind he had to stop it. He dragged Lonny backwards, the rifle underneath Lonny’s chin and Will backing, one hand on the stock and the other on the barrel, choking Lonny and dragging him from the campground. “You were going to kill him,” Will said. “Calm down. Calm the fuck down.”

The father had risen and he had bent over his son and Will could see the son’s slow movements and see that he had been beaten badly but that he was still alive and still conscious. Will dragged Lonny farther and he could feel Lonny start to slacken. He eased the rifle off his throat and asked him if he would calm the fuck down.

When Will let him go, Lonny stood there rubbing at his throat. He looked toward the camp where the father still knelt, trying to help his son. “There’s no one here,” Lonny said.

“That doesn’t mean you can kill them.”

“You saw how they reacted when I talked about the church.”

“I saw how they reacted when you threatened to steal from them. You need to calm down, Lonny. You need to think.”

He was still rubbing at his throat, and he looked to Will. “It’s time they knew. It’s time they all knew what is coming for them.”

“What’s that?” Will said.

“The end is coming and they can help us and be saved or they can go against us and burn with all the rest.”

Will watched Lonny. He didn’t know what to say. “You’re a fucking lunatic,” Will finally got out.

“No,” Lonny said. “I’m a survivor. And all of us are riding in the ark and some of us just don’t know it yet.”

Will looked to Lonny and then he looked to where the father knelt trying to comfort his son. When Will approached, the father turned and held an upraised palm toward Will and said, “Ella fue a la iglesia. Allá.” He moved his hand, pointing past Will to the ridge above.

Will turned and looked. He thought about saying something more, but there was nothing more to say that would make it any better. Something was going on here that he did not understand and he looked to Lonny and then looked up at the ridge.

THE HAWK PASSED AGAIN, THE SHADOW NOW SHOWING IN THE grass as the bird turned, rising on the thermals. Mary May was halfway across the broad field that ran the bottom of the valley and she turned now to look upward on the sky, trying to see where the hawk had gone.

Though she had known in some way that what she was attempting was beyond any real sense or hope, she had gone ahead anyway. Now she was walking in the direction the boy had shown her, working over and over in her mind the question he had asked.

“Your brother is all you have?”

Drew was three years younger than her and he had been the last, along with the rest of his class, to graduate from the high school before they shut it down. There was a time afterwards where she had just worked. She had worked the bar and she had done her thing as she had always done and she had not thought about him but to share a meal from time to time, or see him in passing at their parents’ place. She had kept her head down and she had saved and tried to help her parents with the bar.

When he came in and told her that he had joined the army and would soon be leaving, she had not known what to say. She realized for a long time, ever since they had been kids together, she had never talked to him, she had never truly thought to ask him anything of any real depth.

She walked on. She thought about what the herder boy had asked her next. She thought about what he’d said to her, he had wondered what she would do when she found him. He had wondered what would happen if she found her brother to be someone other than who she thought he was.

“I hope you mean the same to him as he means to you,” the boy had said. He had turned the horse around right there and with a little nod to her he was gone down the ridge the way he’d come.

WILL CAME UP THE RIDGE WITH LONNY FOLLOWING. THEY USED the switchback path that showed the horse tracks in the dirt. But that was mostly covered with sedge and the droppings of many sheep.

When Will looked back down the sheep were still there in the field but he could see nothing of the camp that was beneath the trees. He had said little to Lonny since they’d left, but he could hear Lonny grumbling over it from time to time and complaining that they should have at least taken the horse if they meant to catch up to Mary May.

“Is that how it is?” Will asked. “Us versus them?”

“That’s how it’s always been,” Lonny said.

“When they came to me and offered me a place with them I was grateful for it. They did not force my hand.”

“Simpler times,” Lonny said. “The time is coming when it won’t be that simple anymore and the more we have among us—the more we have that are willing to hear The Father’s words—the better all of us will be.”

“You act like the end of the world will come tomorrow.”

“It might not come tomorrow, or the next day, but that doesn’t mean it is not coming. People like you and me will survive.”

“What kind of people are we?” Will asked.

“We’re people who do what they need to do.”

“Not if it means pushing other people under,” Will said.

“You and me,” Lonny said. “We see the world in different ways, but we are no different.”

“We all have our purpose,” Will said, playing off what Lonny had told him at the empty Kershaw farm.

“That’s right,” Lonny said. “That’s what John says all the time. We all have our purpose. We all must do our duty for the church.”

They came to the top of the ridge and Will could see it was much like the other they had moved over earlier that morning. One side a gradual slope, while the other, the side that they now came to, fell away almost as if it had been scooped from the rock by the hand of some celestial being. Steep and perilous and littered below with rock and talus that had fallen from the very spot they now were standing.

Will stopped and looked down at the valley below. He waited for Lonny to take the last few steps and then when the man came up and stood beside him, Will took the rifle from his shoulder, flipped the lens cover up on the scope, and put the lens to his eye. There was a wide valley below with a broad field of sedge and Junegrass and he ran his vision upon it. When he brought his eye away he almost could not believe that he had found Mary May.

She was walking down the middle of the field and he could see that she would be into the far wood in the next quarter mile. He placed the scope to his eye again and marked her. When he brought the scope away again, he looked down into the field. She was a tiny thing there in the depths and he knew that with the naked eye he would have missed her.

Without taking his eyes away, he handed the rifle over to Lonny. “Take a look,” Will said. He was watching the tiny figure out there below them. A hawk was circling high above and it was a speck itself, riding on the thermals. “You see the hawk out there? Put the scope on it and then run the lens down all the way to the meadow.”

He watched Lonny now. He watched Lonny find the hawk and then he watched Lonny move the scope down and find Mary May.

“John will be very happy,” Lonny said. He brought his eye away from the scope and looked to Will and in that same moment a rifle fired that was not the one Lonny held in his two hands.

Will turned and moved toward the sound. It was down in the mountain field out of which they had just climbed. The rifle fired again and he heard the echo of the shot and the reverberation as the sound spread from one side of the valley to the other. Then Will started to hear more shots, automatic gunfire, and the big booming of a shotgun.

At first he had thought maybe the herder and his son had followed them. Or had taken up some position to better take revenge. But now as Will peered back over a loose conglomeration of rocks on the sheep and the meadow below, he could see the herder had started shooting at five men now moving up across the meadow—moving exactly toward where Will and Lonny now had come.

Out front and leading the men, amid the surging sheep that swirled and stampeded in a sort of whirling sweep of white, was John Seed. He held in front of him a large metal antenna shaped almost like a wire grid. Will knew it immediately and he knew that John was not hunting wolves, but that he was hunting them and hunting Mary May and Will should have known it from the start.

The herder fired again and John’s men ducked and then rose, shooting over the backs of the sheep as they came up through the field. Will watched one man, holding an AK-47, strafe the campsite, the bullets raking across the dirt.

Several more single rifle shots were fired from the sheep camp but Will could not see the herders. They were somewhere beneath the trees and they were firing on the men as they moved in among the sheep. A moment later he heard the clop of the hooves and he saw the two herders doubled on the horse, riding fast along the bottom of the meadow and away. Several of John’s men were shooting at them, taking shots as they rose and fired again over the backs of sheep.

Will might not have heard the click of his rifle had they kept on shooting. But as close to him, and as familiar to him as it was, he turned almost in the same instant Lonny pushed the safety forward on the rifle. Lonny’s eye was to the scope and the barrel faced down toward the valley in which Mary May was walking, and Lonny did not need to push the .308 cartridge forward with the bolt, because Will now realized with horror that he had already done it for him.

MARY MAY WAS THREE QUARTERS OF THE WAY ACROSS THE meadow when she heard the thunder. She stopped and looked toward the sky. Blue as a robin’s egg. She turned and looked toward the ridge she had descended from and she took a few steps back the way she’d come.

She heard the pulse of thunder again, but she knew it was not thunder. The booming sound was diffuse and more of a rumble, just as distant thunder might sometimes be. But around it, and at the edge of this new sound, was the snap of gunfire that she knew well enough and that she had heard all through her life out here in the country.

She was looking up toward the ridge and she was wondering whether whatever had happened could be helped and she moved now, walking with purpose back the way she’d come. Soon she was running and she had taken out the .38. She held it tight in her hand to make sure she would not lose it. She came nearly halfway across the field when the firing stopped and there was a strange moment when the world returned to normal. Just a breeze working across the meadow, and the sun above, and the far branches of trees wavering a little in the wind.

The rifle shot that passed her was no more than a foot from her, traveling in the air then thudding into the ground another ten feet on. She felt the air move, she turned and saw where the dust had bloomed up from off the ground and then as she stood there, beginning to realize what was happening, she heard the distant shot of the rifle sound from right there atop the ridge.

WILL MADE IT TO LONNY JUST AS HE PULLED THE TRIGGER. WILL bowled him over and sent him to his back. The rifle came loose from his hands and Will watched it skitter atop rock for a moment then fall over the edge of the ridge and disappear.

Lonny came up off the ground with his hands out on either side of him like a wrestler taking up his stance.

“You were going to shoot her,” Will said. They stood no more than five feet apart and Will watched Lonny circle downslope, his hands still out, his eyes never leaving Will.

“Better to do it here than to do it somewhere else. Better if it seems like she went into the woods and never came back out.”

“Christ, Lonny. We were told to find her. We were told to find her and help her out.”

Lonny struck out fast with a single fist and Will only had time to fall away and catch himself with one hand. He scrambled back to his feet, feeling too old and too slow to be any match for the quickness Lonny brought with each movement. Lonny was smiling at him and he whipped out a fist again that brushed past Will’s right cheek. Both still wore their packs and it made their movements awkward and a little counterweighted as Will circled the edge of the ridge then came down, trying to stay just out of Lonny’s reach.

“Pretty limber for an old guy,” Lonny said. He came inside and popped one fist up hard, catching Will in the ribs. “But still an old guy.” Will bent double, dry heaving. Lonny brought the opposite fist down hard against his cheekbone.

Will fell facedown against the smooth windswept rock of the ridge. His face was on fire from where Lonny had knocked him and his belly muscles were cramping and pulling on each other like some tug of war within his stomach. He tried to roll but Lonny kicked him and Will—using the force of the kick to move downslope—fell off a ledge of rock and landed another four feet down.

He felt like someone had thrown dynamite at his feet and he had been launched upward only to land, barely whole, forty feet away. He wasn’t sure if anything was broken and pieces of him ached and hurt like they had not hurt for years, but he knew he needed to get up. He knew he needed to help himself, and he knew he needed to stop Lonny from whatever it was he was doing.

Will stood fast, just as Lonny came to the edge of the small ledge. He took one of Lonny’s feet and pulled back hard. Will heard bone hitting the rock as Lonny landed first on his backpack, then the residual force whipped his head down and his skull bounced then resettled against the top of the ledge. Now Will moved around, wheezing with one hand held atop his belly. He came around the ledge while Lonny was still gathering himself together, now turning on his side. There was blood in his hair and on the rock where his skull had hit.

Before Will could get to him Lonny had risen to one knee. He pushed himself fully upright and Will circled, looking for anything that he might use to defend himself with. Lonny brought his fists up again and came at him. There were loose rocks nearby that Will thought to reach for, but grabbing for them would put him again within Lonny’s reach.

Will backed as far as he could. He was moving toward the edge now and Lonny moved after him. Blood was wet against the side of Lonny’s neck where it had fallen from his hairline. Will looked again behind him but he could see nothing to stop himself from going over. The rifle was down there somewhere. Ten feet? Fifty? A hundred feet below? He turned again, inches from the edge. He could see the rifle now. It had landed on a small outcropping, three feet down. Will began to move but in that instant, just as he decided this might be his only chance, Lonny swung, his right hand striking out as Will tried to duck and move for the rifle just below.

The fist would have struck him if he hadn’t decided just a half second before to go for the rifle. But as it happened, with Lonny already off balance, already woozy and bleeding from the back of his head, he went over. Will turned just as the fist passed by him, followed by Lonny’s twisting body, arm outstretched as his forward momentum carried him across the edge of the ridge and out into the broad space beyond.

Will saw him falling. It seemed like a minute before Lonny hit, but it must have been merely a second or two. The body landed in the loose rock and talus a hundred feet below then bounced awkwardly as it somersaulted and careened, legs and arms stretched outward down the slope, sliding to a stop amid the larger boulders toward the bottom of the cliff debris.

Will stood there staring down. One of Lonny’s arms lay behind him in strange backwards rapture, while his face looked upward and his head appeared like it had been popped and then stretched away from off his body. The skin of the neck the only thing to keep it now attached.

Will bent and lay against the edge of the ridge. He reached a hand for the rifle and came up holding it by the stock. Quickly he worked the bolt and checked the rifle over, moving it to one side then the other in a quick study of wood and metal. It seemed okay but there was a crack in the lens when he raised his eye to it and looked again down into the empty meadow he had seen Mary May passing across only minutes before.

AS HER LUNGS BEAT, PULLING AT THE AIR LIKE THE AIR ITSELF was not enough and the capillaries in her heart burst like distant stars, far away but looming ever closer—she ran. Flat out, full speed ahead, no looking back, no pause, no fucking way she was letting anyone catch her. In the checkered light of shadow and sun that came streaming down through the pines, the world bounced across her vision with the frenetic pull of some devil’s hacksaw, raking away at the earth from down below.

It was only the sheer terror and realization that each footfall and beat of her sole could be heard against rock and pine needle that caused her to pull up short. She veered to her right and stood stock-still, with her back to the thin trunk of a tall pine, trying as best she could to catch her breath. She was immediately aware of how alone she was, how very lost she was from any comfort or salvation. Out there in the wider brightness of the field from which she ran, she could see no one and she had heard nothing since the bullet flew past her and struck the ground no more than ten feet off.

She needed to get away and she needed to get away now. She looked around at the half-lit forest. She knew now why so many of the original pioneers were lost in places like this. The lodgepole pines everywhere she looked, straight as arrows, thick as telephone poles, each the same, like the makings of some carnival funhouse there was no escaping from.

WILL CAME DOWN OFF THE RIDGE, HALF SLIDING AND HALF walking through the loose gravel that lined the bottom of the cliff. When he came to Lonny, the man’s eyes were still and open and a savage gash could be seen across the side of his head that ran all the way along one cheek and up across the skin just above his ear. His neck was clearly broken and the skin had bruised and even as Will took hold of an arm, meaning to turn him over, Will could feel the lifelessness of his body and the looseness of the muscle.

Will rolled and pushed Lonny over. He was lighter than Will but he was by no means easy to move, and as Will pushed he could smell already the turning of the body and the release of all its liquids. He pushed Lonny all the way over and now he could get his hands on Lonny’s pack.

Undoing the drawstring at the top he began to pull item after item from the backpack and lay them out. Much of it Will had seen already when they’d made their camp the night before. But when he came to the wolf collar with the transmitter he was not at all surprised. He pulled it up and stood looking at it. He turned it over in his hand. It weighed little more than a few pounds and he could see where there was a little switch that could be turned on and then turned off.

For ten seconds, he stood there looking at it, then he slid the collar back inside the bag with all the rest of Lonny’s things and pulled the man over and let him rest. Up above Will could see the place he had once stood and he looked now into the field another hundred or so feet down slope. He set off in the direction he had seen Mary May heading, knowing that Eden’s Gate was not far off.

When he had made it all the way across the field he could see figures moving on the ridge. He watched them where they formed just at the lip of the cliff. Will moved under the trees now, not wanting to be seen. Once he was in the shade he raised the scope and put his eye on them, watching as they looked down on the place Will knew Lonny to be.

Will watched them long enough to see them break apart from their small group and move out along the ridge in single file. He watched them come to the place that Will himself had found to thread his way down from atop the cliff. And then Will watched them move across the loose rock and talus just as he had done. John walked out front, leading with the antenna, no doubt moving toward the transponder and the wolf collar within Lonny’s bag.

MARY MAY HAD WAITED JUST LONG ENOUGH TO SEE HOW MANY had been following her. She watched the distant shape of a single man move down and away from the far ridge as he cut through the grass almost in the same path that she had surely followed. She could see the rifle on his back and she watched him stop midway through, studying something he saw there in the grass.

Without giving any more time for the man to catch her, she removed her boots and stuffed her socks down within. Then, with boots in hand and the .38 stuck back down the waist of her pants she set out, moving fast and making her way up a small rise to the north she knew might give her a vantage of the land. She was careful with her movements as she went, knowing the man had tracked her this far and could likely track her farther.

She moved barefoot over the forest bed of pine needles and she stopped often to look back at her trail. She was leaving less of one but she could still see in places the scuff of one foot followed by the other. She had grown up in these woods. She had been trained by her father and his friends to track and hunt and she knew an experienced hunter could track just about anything over almost anything, except the smoothest rock or water.

With hands outstretched she moved onward up the slope as she made her way to the slight rise above. The slope now growing ever steeper in a way she had not calculated for, much of it hidden behind the dense trunks and underbrush of the forest. Halfway up she fell and slid four feet down and getting to her feet she saw the dark scrape she had made there in the pine needles. She could do nothing for it and she moved now, quicker even than she had gone before.

Soon she gained the rise and with a single scanning look down the way she’d come, she drew herself up and over a large outcropping of rock there. Laying herself out flat so that she could present the smallest profile. The rock on which she lay was like some backbone across the topmost portion of the rise, but unlike the ridges and ranges she had crossed through earlier it did not offer the view she had been hoping for. The rise only high enough above the forest floor to offer up the briefest view of the land beyond.

In the silence that followed, as she listened to her heart beating in her chest, she thought she heard the sound of breathing. She held her own breath, steadying herself where she hid. In the far distance, she heard the call of a shrike dusted up from somewhere on the other side of the rise. The bird’s anxious call settling in across the forest as it flapped up along the rise then came out above, moving past and then away, threading its way down into the trees beyond.

For only a second did she keep her eyes on the path of this bird. She knew maybe it had simply startled up out of some tree, called from the branches by some prey or thing it hunted. But she also knew this was only hopeful thinking, that somewhere down below there was a man tracking her with a rifle.

For a beat, she looked down into the gray muted light of the forest. Afternoon was settling in and the sun had begun to move away beneath the trees. She pulled herself back, moving on her stomach until she could stand safely out of view. Somewhere down below she knew she would come to a road and farther on the church, and hopefully if she could find him, her brother.

She had grown up in the county and she knew these roads, she knew the forests and the mountains. And though she had never gone this far into the woods, or off the paths that lined and connected many of the lakes and mountains in the area, she knew where the county road ran the edge of the Eden’s Gate property and she charted a course in her head to get there. Pines and aspen on the slope then paper birch below that ran out and moved across boggy lowlands a mile on. She’d have cover all the way down the slope into the lowlands before she started coming across sedge and grassland right before the road.

She took one last look over the edge of the rock outcropping before she turned and moved downslope. A couple hundred feet on she came to a dead stop and looked back up toward where she’d been. In the exact spot she had picked to lay upon her belly, was a man seen standing at the top of the rise there looking down on her.

WILL DID NOT PUT THE RIFLE ON HER OR EVEN MAKE A SINGLE movement. He stood atop the small rise and looked down toward her. She had grown up considerably since he’d seen her last. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and a dirty, zippered sweatshirt. She carried her boots in her hands. She stood there looking back at him and if she recognized him at all she did not show it.

She was off and running before he could say a thing and for only a second he let her go. He knew where she was going and though she had removed her boots and changed her track, he could see now that he would have little trouble following her. What did concern him was the ache and sickness he had started to feel at his core. He was moving now slightly bent over with a hand across his belly where Lonny had connected with a fist and then delivered kick after kick. Will knew whatever damage had been done, a bruised organ or a cracked rib, the adrenaline of his fight with Lonny had hidden it. And now as he went on that feeling was wearing off and each step seemed to pain him further.

He watched the place she had been standing, then he set off down the rise and came into the wood. For a moment, he could see her running, the light coming through the pines above flashing on her as she moved. He took several steps forward, the ache and pain in his stomach now showing on his face. He stopped and looked to where he had seen her last, but she was not there. He wondered how much time he had. He wondered about Lonny and what Lonny had said to him before Will had moved and watched the man go over.

Then, standing there, he bent double and the insides of his stomach came up and splattered across the ground. He went down on a knee and the relief he felt was almost immediate. He could breathe again and the muscles of his stomach had come free from the knot that had bound them up so tight. Will could see blood in the vomit and he wondered again what evil thing might reside within him, whether it was an ulcer, or whether it was simply Lonny beating the shit out of him only a half hour before. But there was no time to dwell on it as he rose to his feet again then looked back the way he’d come.

John and four of his men were still out there and if any of them were trackers they would come upon him soon. Will looked back upon the rise and the path he’d taken down from it. He was unsure what to do. He was unsure what would happen, or what had been meant to happen all this time.

John had said he wanted to help Mary May, as John and The Father had once helped Will so long ago.

Will turned and looked again to where he had last seen her. He’d lost too much time and he knew it. She was scared and now she knew she was being followed. He called her name low at first and then stepping forward he cupped his two hands to his mouth and yelled her name. He had said he would protect her. He had said he would keep her safe and he would help her, but he could not do that if she ran. He could do nothing for her if he could not catch her. He called her name again. “Mary May,” he called. He let the name linger in the air and then he yelled again.

MARY MAY TURNED AND LOOKED BACK THE WAY SHE’D COME AS soon as she heard her name. She hesitated and for a second she thought about stopping. But there had been no denying the fact that she had been shot at, that the man who had likely shot at her was out there following her still, and that like a hunter using an elk call, this man was hunting her, calling out her name, hoping that it would stop her and draw her near.

Twenty minutes later Mary May saw the road. She had backtracked and crosscut the forest behind her in such a fashion that future archeologists looking over the casts of her movements in the mud would wonder if she were not already wounded in some way, delirious, and headed straight for whatever tar pit might be close at hand.

She came out of the trees into patches of dogwood and mountain ash, dotted here and there with clearings of sedge. Her legs burned slightly and her hands and forearms, though tough from years of working the bar, were scratched and dappled with minor cuts and bruises.

She had no idea where the man who hunted her had gone, and she had seen no more of him. She stopped and just listened to the forest, then satisfied he was gone she put her boots back on one at a time. A mile or so up and over the ridge was the sound of a big truck running down through its gears as it came out of the northern mountains. She tried to listen for more but all she fathomed from it was that perhaps it was a logging truck, though that seemed false to her, the church already having bought and closed the mill years before.

When she reached the road, she did not go directly out. The light was fading and she was beginning to feel the cold. She had no way of knowing exactly where Eden’s Gate was, whether it was right or left, but she was certain it was on this road. She was shivering slightly, the dusk was settling in and the thought of spending another night out here was beginning to weigh heavily on her mind. She stepped now onto the road and she began to run, feeling her lungs beat inside her chest and the air move across her skin.

When the headlights broke from around a bend in the road far off and spread their light toward her she was quick to drop off the road and hide herself within the underbrush. But the vehicle did not pass her by. It stopped fifty feet away, its headlights reaching out across the pavement, and the dusky light of the setting sun giving everything a tinge of auburn red.

She heard a door open, then she heard the sound of boots on cement and she watched the shape of a man walk out and through the light of the headlights as he came toward her. She backed now, increasing her distance, almost certain she would run. Almost certain she would need to dive headlong through the brush, that whoever had seen her would go after her and finish whatever had been started days before.

But when she heard her name it was not the same voice she had heard calling to her in the mountains. It was not John’s voice or any she had heard in a very long time. She stood now and she came forward. She heard her name called again. She walked up onto the road, almost disbelieving she had found him, or that it was him that had actually found her.

“Drew?” she said.

He stood looking down on her from there atop the road. He was thinner than she remembered, but bigger in the chest and in the shoulders and though he was bearded, his skin and eyes were much the same and she knew he was the same brother she had so often thought about and that her father had gone to find.

“Drew,” she said again, just to say it, just to speak his name as if she feared she might not get another chance.

“It’s me,” he said. He walked forward and put a hand out and he pulled her up from out of the roadside ditch. He was a few inches taller than her and he pulled her into him and hugged her, holding her for a long time.

“You heard about Daddy?” she asked. “And Mamma?”

He let her go. He stood close to her, his arms still holding her shoulders. “I heard,” he said. “I heard what happened.”

“He tried to come and get you.” The tears were coming now and she could not stop them. She looked away and he pulled her close again and she could feel the way he held her. She could feel the way his lungs moved and she let her head down onto his chest and she cried for what seemed a very long while.

When she was done, when she had pulled away and had wiped a hand across her eyes, he said, “Let’s get you home. Let’s get you somewhere warm. Let’s get you some food and water. Let’s get you somewhere safe.”

She looked at him for a time and she stood there waiting and thinking of what to say next. She could hardly believe he was here, that he had found her and that he would take her away from this and everything could be the way it had always been meant to be.

“Come on,” he said.

He started to lead her back to the truck, but she stopped and then he stopped. She was looking at the insignia on the side of the truck and then she was looking up at him. “The truck? You’re driving one of their trucks. One of their church trucks.”

He looked at her like she might be crazy. He ran his eyes from her to the truck then back again. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “You’re going to be just fine. I’m going to take you home. You’ll see. I’m your brother. You’re going to be fine with me.”

She looked at him. She let what he had said sit between them. “You’ll take me home?” she asked. “And you’ll come with me?”

“Yes,” he said. “Now get in the truck and let me help you.”

WILL CAME TO THE ROAD JUST AS THE BRAKE LIGHTS FLARED ON and the truck moved away. He watched the taillights until they were gone from sight. He had seen the road from higher up and he had seen the truck stop, then Mary May come up out of the ditch with the man standing over her, offering her his hand.

Almost in the same instant Will had gone crashing down through the dogwood and ash that had started to populate the land. He came out into the clearing before the road, knelt and swung the rifle around and looked through the scope to where the truck had parked there in the middle of the lane. Mary May was holding onto the man and Will put the crosshairs on him and waited for the man to release her. When he had—when he had stepped back from her and turned toward the truck—Will could see him now clear as he had seen Mary May standing there on the mountain looking back at him. It was her brother, Drew. Will let the rifle down and, with one knee still down in the dirt of the field just before the road, he watched both siblings climb into the truck and drive away.

Now, he walked the road for fifty feet and then stood looking out down the empty pavement. The light was all but gone, the blue of night settling in, and he could hear the chirping of frogs in the ditch off the side of the road. When he turned and looked opposite he found a lone maple tree standing in the middle of a clearing. And though it was not yet late summer, the leaves had turned and many had begun to fall and litter the ground below.

Will came down off the road, took a wide step across the ditch, and walked out into the field. The ground was boggy and in places he could see a foul mud that held atop it a greasy oil. He walked almost to the tree, but stopped just before it and stood looking up into the branches, knowing for its height and width that it had lived a long time in this place and might have lived even longer had the earth itself not changed.

As he stood there he could see several leaves come loose then drift down. The tree was not barren but it likely would be soon.

When John’s voice called to him from behind, Will did not turn. He kept looking up at the tree and wondering just how long it would go on.

“You did good,” John said. “Mary May is with us now. You helped to save her.”

Will turned. John stood there looking at him. Farther on, back by the road his men were standing, all of them with their weapons held crossways in their arms. Tired looking but at rest. “And Lonny?” Will asked. “He said he meant to kill her.”

“Yes,” John said. “I saw how he was going. I should have seen it sooner.”

“Sooner?”

“His drinking. The loosening of his faith. He was not a true believer,” John said. “He was breaking away from us, breaking away and falling in among his own past sins.”

“That’s why you tracked us? That’s why you followed us up the mountain?”

“Yes,” John said. “I could not trust him. I did not know if I could trust you. Lonny used to say you were an enigma.”

A leaf fell again, and it fluttered and flipped, end over end, then came to rest between them. “Enigma?”

“It was not the word he used,” John said. “But I see now that he was the one that could not be trusted. I should have seen it earlier. I should have known all of it, all he said and all he did, was all leading up to this.”

“I did not mean to kill him.”

“You didn’t kill him,” John said. “You would have never done a thing like that. He simply fell. He toppled over a cliff and he fell and broke his neck. It was an accident and all of us could see that clearly. His blood is not on your hands.”

Will locked eyes with John as he put a hand to Will’s shoulder.

“You are still with us. You are part of who we are. You have provided us with a service and we are thankful for you and all you do. There is no shame in this. Once you had owed us everything, but that time has long passed and it is us who now owe you. We will take you back to Eden’s Gate and there you will receive your blessing and we will give you a place to rest and help you just as you have helped us. You are still with us, aren’t you, Will?”

“Of course,” Will said, not knowing what else he could say.

“We have given you salvation. But you too have given us your soul.”

“Yes,” Will said. “I know that. I never stopped knowing that.”

“Good,” John said. “The Father will be glad to hear it. He waits for you. He waits to give you his blessing once again. You will stay at Eden’s Gate tonight and you will be my guest and The Father’s.” John took his arm away, he turned to go.

Will stopped him. “What about Mary May?”

“You don’t need to worry about her,” John said. “You may well see her soon enough. She is with us now. She is with us just as she is with her brother. Both of them are now a part of us.”

SHE LOOKED AT DREW AND WAITED ON HIM TO SAY SOMETHING to her, but he never did. He just kept driving. They were headed down the mountain. All she could see when she looked out at the blur of forest as they passed it by was her own reflection staring darkly back at her.

“Where have you been?” she said.

He turned for a moment to look at her. He was now more man than he was boy and she wondered briefly when and how that had come to be. “I’ve been here and there,” he said. “Working, I guess is what you might call it.”

She sat and stared at him, she was scared to ask. “Working?” she said.

“They’ve been good to me up here.”

“That right?”

“That’s right.” He glanced her way again then put his eyes back on the road. “You don’t trust them, do you?”

“We were raised not to. And some would say for good reason, too.”

“You’re talking about Daddy and Mamma, aren’t you?”

“Who else,” she said. “John and them have been scaring off our distributors. They’ve been trying to shut us down.”

“You still selling alcohol?”

“Not much of a bar without it.”

“There’s reasons for what they do. There’s good reasons.”

She shook her head. “You sound just like them.”

“There’s good reasons for that, too,” he said.

They had come down the mountain about five miles and he turned the wheel. The truck tires came off the pavement and she could hear the gravel beneath the tires and small rocks hitting in the wheel wells.

“What’s this?” she said. “You said you’d take us home.”

He looked over at her but did not say anything. She leaned forward now and peered ahead, trying to decipher their route from the darkness.

“I said I’d take you home,” he said. “I didn’t mean your home, or Mamma’s and Daddy’s home.”

Up ahead she could see cement blocks to either side of the road and the gate there. The gate now opening to take them in. Church members waited on either side and she could see the guns they carried and the eyes they laid upon her as they passed.

She sat there watching them as they went. And as Drew brought the truck forward, she turned and saw that same gate close behind her. “Drew?” she said.

“Don’t you worry.”

She reached behind her and brought up the .38, holding it at her side just out of sight.

She could see buildings now and lights and the spire of a church. Outside the night seemed to grow darker as they drove, the lake there only distinguished from the night by the reflection of their headlights. She could tell beyond the buildings and the church the land was a mix of trees and grass that came up from the lakeshore and rose toward the mountains.

Drew pulled the truck around and brought it to a stop. He leaned forward and brought the transmission into park, then he took the keys. The engine stopped working and for a moment she felt very alone there in the truck, as if her brother were not there, and she had been left now completely on her own.

“Is that Daddy’s .38?” Drew asked. He turned now and looked to where she held the gun, then he looked to see what she would say.

“It’s his.”

“I wondered if he still had it.”

“You wondered?”

“I just thought about it sometimes. I’ve thought about a lot of things while I’ve been up here.”

“I wish Daddy would have found you,” she said. “I wish he’d had a chance to talk to you.”

“You think it would have changed some things?”

“I think it would have. I wish you two could have worked it out.”

“He never really gave me much of any kind of chance,” Drew said. “You know that just as well as me.”

She studied his face in profile. “He was stubborn but it didn’t mean he didn’t care.”

“I get it,” Drew said. “Look, they put this place aside for you.” He nodded toward the little house that sat before them. “You’ll be able to shower. You’ll be able to rest. I’m sure you’re tired. I’m sure you could use a little time.”

“Time for what? I never asked to come here. I don’t want to be here. I want you to take me home. Not here but home. Our home.”

“There’s people who want to meet you, Mary May. You understand you are a guest. They only want to talk to you.”

“They can come into the bar if that’s what they want,” she said. “We’re open every day from noon to two.”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “I don’t want you being rude.”

She gave her brother a hard stare. “You know they shot at me? You know they shot at me just this afternoon?”

“I think that was just a misunderstanding,” Drew said. “They’re good folk up here. You’ll see.”

She didn’t take her eyes off him.

“Look,” he said. “Don’t shoot no one. They want to talk to you. That’s not going to hurt you none. And when it’s all done you’ll go back down to Fall’s End and your bar.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“You should come back to town with me, Drew. That’s what Daddy and Mamma would have wanted.”

“That’s kind of you to say, but you and I both know there’s not much truth in that.”

WILL RODE IN THE BACK OF THE PICKUP WITH THE FOUR OTHER men. All of them were thirty to forty years younger than him and tattooed and pierced in ways that Will had never even thought of. None of them said anything to him, but he could see their eyes rest on him and on his rifle from time to time before they moved on again, back out to the forest beyond and the night that now came on toward them forty miles per hour at a time. No one talked. The wind was rushing with a fierceness as they came down the highway road then turned down the gravel lane and came to Eden’s Gate.

John rode shotgun and Will watched him lean and talk with one of the guards. The guard bent down to talk with John and then pointed out ahead of him to where the buildings sat.

It had been three weeks since he’d been here and he could see the metal fence posts were beginning to go in at the perimeter of the property. A new house was going up as well. One of many smaller houses that made up this community, some still unpainted, half salvaged and half built of roughly sawn wood and plank that had been erected down the gravel drives that composed this place. There were fires burning in many places and he watched the people who stood around them, men and women, some he knew by name but many he didn’t.

The driver took them down through the houses and small outbuildings and Will looked toward the pickup he thought he’d seen Drew driving. It sat in front of a small house with white clapboard siding and a single light on within. He could see nothing of the inside through the curtains save the light.

“Is she in there?” he asked, turning to the man who sat closest to him.

The man only nodded, the pickup coming to a stop now just before the church.

John was up out of the truck, and he came around thumping his hands along the top of the bed. He gave Will a pat on the back and told him to follow him.

They moved back through the compound until they found the square tractor barn that had sat there always. John led him inside the aluminum-sided barn that sat atop a wood frame and that served as the mess hall for all of the compound.

“You’ll see some things have changed,” John said.

It was dark in many places and their feet rang out in the emptiness of the place as they walked. Above, lights hung from the rafters, a chord suspending a single bulb within the green cone of a shade. All of it gave the place a washed-out tone. In one corner, leading down and then out of sight were the collected pipes and wirings that provided water and electricity to the houses and church.

Will kept walking. He followed John a little farther and he was led among a collection of long wooden picnic benches. John told Will to sit.

Like much of the place seen at night, this place was poorly lit and he sat and set his bag down then put his rifle atop the table. John had disappeared through another door about three quarters of the way down one wall of the converted tractor barn and Will put his eyes upon it.

He did not wait long before the door opened and a woman came out carrying a tray of food and a glass of water. He knew her almost as soon as he saw her and he stood and watched her come toward him across the floor.

He took off his hat and she leaned in and looked at him then set the tray on the table right between them. “That’s some of that buck you shot last week. Thought you might appreciate it.”

He thanked her and waited for her to sit before taking his own seat across from her. “You eat already?”

“Yeah,” she said. “They have it all set up like clockwork around here. That there in front of you is almost the last of it. It doesn’t take long for us to get through just about anything these days. All these new faces around here and all of them young and hungry.” She watched him dip his fork into the meat. It had been cooked slow and he could see they’d put some fat to it.

When he looked up at her she was watching him. “How are you doing, Holly?”

“Better than I was outside this place.”

“Uh huh,” he said. He ate some more of the meat. She’d put a slab of cornbread on the side and it dripped with butter. He picked that up and ate it too.

“I like to watch a man eat,” she said.

“Well, I like to watch a woman from time to time too,” he said.

She smiled at him. “You’re still a charmer, Will. But old as you are I doubt you got much left in the tank for me.”

He smiled back at her then picked up his glass and drank it halfway empty. She was nearly thirty years younger than him and for a time she’d been his closest neighbor. But her husband had beat on her and Will had gone over there almost weekly just to check on her and see that she was okay. After Will’s wife and daughter died he had not seen much of Holly for four or five years, then one day she just showed up at the gates of the church saying her husband had disappeared, but Will had always thought Holly had been the one to make him disappear.

“John said maybe we’d be seeing more of you now that Lonny’s gone,” Holly said.

Will coughed and put a hand to his mouth, almost choking on the meat. “Word travels fast,” Will said.

“John just told me. He said Lonny had himself an accident. I can’t say I mind that he is gone. He was an asshole to begin with. Always trying to fuck every single one of us.”

“That right?” Will asked.

“That’s right,” she said. “So you think you’ll start to come around more often? I’ve got to tell you it’s starting to get a little weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah,” she said, lowering her voice a little. She leaned in now and looked him in the eye. “I fuck John from time to time and he tells me shit. He tells me shit I shouldn’t hear. I don’t have a fucking clue about half of it, but the other half is fucking out there. The Father and his scripture and all this shit about the prophet and the coming fire of Hell. Sinners and saints. Salvation and damnation.”

“That’s nothing new,” Will said. He finished off his plate of food then pushed the tray a little way across the table. “That’s just what passes for conversation around these parts.”

“You’re a hardened old cowboy,” Holly said. “I always liked that about you. But just be careful you don’t become an old fool like so many other fool men I’ve known.”

He looked at her and she didn’t say a thing. After a while, he said, “Tell it to me then.”

Holly looked behind at the door she had come out of. Then she turned and sat a bit straighter in her seat. “Where to start,” she said. “Guns, weapons, most of these kids my age and even younger on this shit they’re calling Bliss. They suck it up their noses. It helps them do the things they have to do I guess.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Most of them would kill their mothers if it meant they could get another hit. But the shit they’re pulling on these farmers out here, on people we used to know, it’s shameful,” she said. “It’s not the kind of scripture either of us remember from back in town. They’ll find your weakness and then they’ll start to push. They push and push and they keep adding on the weight. Eventually one thing has got to give.”

He looked at her and waited on her to tell him more. “You still a believer?” he asked.

She laughed. “You are asking me? You? The one who would rather spend three weeks out of every month alone in the woods trapping rabbits and hunting bucks than sit here and have a conversation with another human being.”

“We all serve our purpose.”

“Yes, we do,” she said, smiling at him. “Yes, we do at that. I believe in The Father. I believe in what he sees. In his words and what is coming. But sometimes—” She stopped. Behind, heard through the kitchen door were footsteps. She stood and took the tray up and as she turned Will saw John step through, then pass her by.

“You want anything else, Will?”

Will raised up his hand. “I’m done,” he said.

“Good,” John said. “You’re going to need your strength, The Father asked to see you alone in his church. He wants to put his hands upon you and thank you personally for all you’ve done.”

MARY MAY SHOWERED. WHEN SHE WAS DONE SHE DRESSED herself in the clothes her brother had left for her and she came out into the small living room where Drew was waiting.

He stood when she came in.

“I’m glad you found me,” she said.

“I’m glad I found you, too.”

She looked around. It was a small place, the living room and kitchen all one room.

“You ready?” he asked.

“I don’t want to,” she said. “I think we should just get out of here. Go home.”

“You’re a guest here, Mary May. Our parents always taught us not to be rude.” He looked her over like he was waiting for her to say more. Then he said, “Don’t be rude.”

“MERCY HAS BEEN GIVEN TO MANY ONLY AFTER THEY WERE MADE to suffer. It was their lot to suffer. It was a choice. A conscious decision. Into this chasm they walked and the darkness closed in about them and only through their faith did they find salvation, walking forth from that chasm unharmed.”

Will opened his eyes as soon as he felt The Father’s hands leave his shoulders. He had been led into the church by John and then told to kneel. Alone he had waited there, looking about the place. The symbol of the church seen in every window and a large American flag hanging down the front of the church with the cross and rays of Eden’s Gate there at its center amid the stars.

The Father had come in shortly after, his steps sounding on the wooden floor before he came and stood in front of Will. He wore jeans and a shirt buttoned all the way to the collar. Like all the rest of his congregation he was bearded, and though he looked much like his brother, John, he was a little taller and a little wider through the chest and shoulders. His hair was pulled back behind his head and his eyes met Will’s and held him while he talked.

“Life has tested you, Will. You must believe that now. You must believe that you’re here for a reason. Chosen for the good of our kind. There are dark times ahead. Dark times to come and we shall be like a light in those dark times.”

“Yes,” Will said.

“When your wife and child were taken, you were tested. You were tested once more today.” The Father dropped down in front of Will, elbows on knees and his face so close that Will could feel the spit on his skin and smell the man’s breath when he spoke. “The time is coming—the end of days. The air itself will be afire. And I will call my people closer. I will call them all to me and I will ask them to make ready. For we, like the pioneers who came to this country before us, will have a journey. And now I ask you, will you be ready for this journey?”

“Yes,” Will said.

He rose and looked down at Will. “You have helped us, but we will need you even more. We will need the eye that looks down upon the people through the scope. We will need the hand that holds and swings the knife. We will need the finger that pulls the trigger. Do you understand, Will? Do you understand all that I am asking you to do?”

Will hesitated. He looked up at The Father.

“Many times in humankind’s long history have we not trusted in our faith. And many times that faith has been tested. And so it was for all who have made the choice to undertake this journey. A journey of salvation, but a journey also of necessity—for if you are unwilling to take this journey you will perish. And now, Will, that time has come and I am asking you again, as I asked you in that long-ago time when you first came to us, are you ready to do what it takes to find salvation?”

The Father stopped. He walked a few paces away from Will before turning back. He waited for some response. But Will would not look to The Father.

“After your wife and child left this earth we feared for your life,” The Father said. “We feared that you had let the weakness overtake you. But you did not. You became the hunter not the hunted. You gave up sin. You gave up vice and all the evil that had overrun your life. We put our hands upon you and together we took away your sin. We cut it from your chest, just as every member here has also given up their sin.”

Will nodded. He thought about it now. The tattoo. The razor. The giving of the sin. When he looked toward The Father again, he said, “I remember.”

HE WAS RISING FROM HIS PLACE JUST BELOW THE ALTAR WHEN Mary May entered. She stood at the back of the empty pews. A feeling of doubt began to slowly work inside her like a sickness spreading through every vein. She watched him rise and she watched The Father gather him up like the man was part and parcel of his family.

She recognized him almost in the same instant. She knew him as the man who had stood upon the rise. The tracker. The man who had shot at her and nearly hit her. The feeling that had begun to spread its roots within her body now suddenly bloomed upward through her head. She had made a mistake in coming here. She had made a mistake in letting down her guard. And maybe she had even made a mistake in trusting her brother.

When the man turned and walked their way, Mary May was standing next to her brother, Drew, and she watched the tracker come toward her. He was bearded and his face was worn and weathered from years of sun. Crow’s-feet like cracked clay sat to either side of his eyes and the hair atop his head was patchy and going gray. She stared at him as he moved and his eyes flashed on her and for a second he stopped and nodded to her and said, “I’m glad to see you, Mary May.” He said the same thing to Drew, then he took his hat that he’d been holding in one hand and squared it atop his head.

He was gone, out through the front door a second later and she took a step to take him in again, but Drew stopped her, holding a hand to her elbow where she stood. “Will Boyd,” Drew said, speaking to her in a whisper.

She remembered the man. She had gone with her own family to the funeral of his daughter and his wife. A car accident if she remembered right. Will standing there alone as people filed past. Her own father and mother leaning in, reaching to hold him, and Mary May thinking now about how even then he had smelled of booze and of something sweet like salt and sweat and the turning of a body into something other than what it once had been.

She’d thought him dead, but it was obvious to her now that he was not.

When she turned now to the front of the church, The Father was waiting on them. He raised his hands toward them, and he called to them, saying, “Come, my children. Come forward.”

Drew moved and then waited for her in the aisle. She walked with hesitation as she came to the aisle, taking her time to turn and then go on toward The Father. She could remember him, too. He had changed little but to grow older, and she remembered how he’d come up from Georgia years before, attending church in town with them and speaking to the congregation as a friend. He had offered the word of God when asked to, and he had sat in silence and quiet study as the pastor had spoken and it was not until months later that there had been the split between them. The Father, or at that time Joseph, had gone his own way, telling all that wished to follow that he alone could be their savior.

Now he stepped forward to look upon her. “Come,” he said again, his hands outstretched, his eyes unwavering as they, too, reached toward her.

She came forward and soon his hands held her by her shoulders. He brought her close and she could smell his sweat, feel the strength of his arms and the way he gripped and held her to him like they had both endured these past few days only to finally find salvation together.

“I welcome you,” he said. “I welcome you here to us, even as I have only begun to understand what has happened to your father, and to your mother.”

She nodded. Her eyes now on the floor.

“Drew has said much to me about them. He has spoken to me and to us all and in his stories, and in his remembrance of them they will live eternal.”

She nodded again. She did not know what to think of this. The way he spoke now seeming so different than that of his younger brother, John.

“Kneel now,” he said. “Kneel and I will give you the blessing of my hands and together we will prepare to wash the sin from inside you, scour it from every bone, from every piece of gristle. You will see that all will soon be right in this world. All shall be good, and your place here shall be in a place of wakefulness, and my eyes shall look after you as one of the blessed children of Eden’s Gate.” He released her and stepped back.

It felt to her as if he had been holding her for years. She looked now to her brother where he stood not far off. The Father beckoned Drew to come closer. Then he told them both to kneel. Drew knelt first, and though her nerves were jumping within her skin she knelt as well.

“Good shall be the salvation of your body. Good shall be the giving up of sin.” The Father gave his attention to her once again, putting his hands on either side of her temple. The warmth of his skin pressed to hers. “You are a sinner,” he said. “You are a sinner and in your eyes, I see wrath and envy, I see guilt and shame. I see every deadly sin there is and I offer you salvation. I offer to help you put the trouble of your soul to rest.” He fell now to his knees and without releasing her from his grip, he put his forehead to her own. “I ask that you hear me now,” he said. “Hear me. Hear the call of Eden’s Gate. I call upon you to listen. You are not alone, Mary May. You have sinned, but you are not alone. You have not yet been forgotten.”

He began to pray, his voice lower, a shift of octaves that seemed to resonate now from down below. His voice rising as he rose, bringing his hands up, bringing her up within his grip. He called for her forgiveness. He spoke of alcohol. He spoke of sin. He said that she did not know the things she did, and that she, like many in this county and in this world, only asked for pardon. But that it was their souls that cried up from the darkness, not their waking voices. He said that she was like many more, that she had come to him and come to this church as only the first sign of a greater need. “Thank you, Mary May,” he said. “Thank you for coming forward. I thank you, and your brother thanks you, and in this we offer you salvation.”

She looked up at him. He waited now, looking on her with the same eyes that never seemed to blink. Sweat stood out on his forehead. The feel of his hands still pressed on either side of her.

“Do you accept us, Mary May? Do you give up sin as your brother has before you? Do you recognize the weeping of your soul and the call of its release from the body that has thus far punished it?” He released her and pushed her backwards.

She almost tipped over, but he was faster and he held her again, righting her and asking, “Do you give up sin? Say it, Mary May. Say it and all will be forgiven. Do you ask for the washing of your body, for the purifying of your soul?” He pushed her away again and she faltered but did not fall.

Now he walked away from her. He turned his back to her and looked upon the flag that hung there. She had for some reason not fully taken it in until he brought her attention to it. It was an American flag, but altered now, amid the blue and amid the stars she could see the woven thread of the Eden’s Gate symbol. Almost a star itself, a cross fitted with many rays.

He had begun to talk, but this time softer, his voice slower than it had been, more deliberate, as if maybe he were channeling some other person, someone long deceased who had come now to take possession of the living. “Fire will be the ending,” The Father said. “Fire and the destruction of all who have not yet washed themselves of sin. Fire and the hand of wickedness.” He turned and waited. He let the silence linger there between them, and then as if coming awake from out of some dream, he asked, “Do you give up sin? Do you ask salvation of the redeemer? Do you ask to be washed? To be purified? To be forgiven and reborn?”

Do you…

Do you…

Do you…

She watched him. She watched those unblinking eyes. And she understood there could only be one answer.

OF COURSE WILL HAD BEEN DRUNK WHEN IT HAPPENED TWELVE years before. He had been drunk most of his adult life and losing them had made it no better. He tried not to think about them anymore. He tried to think of them like they were ancestors from another time, family long forgotten, kin in some way that had given him influence in some unknowing but completely necessary way.

It was The Father’s words that had released this from inside of him. And as he lay there in bed, he tried to summon the spirits of those long dead that he had loved, he knew that without a doubt they were the reason he was apart from church and town, alone still even after he had given up his sin.

He rose and put his feet to the floor and looked in the dark to the sliver of light beneath the door. They had given him a room in one of the houses with two single beds and he could smell the lake through the windows that were open. The night air at Eden’s Gate always seeming to move and drift like ocean currents in the liquid depths.

By the time he had pulled up his pants and laced his boots, he had thought too much about his wife and daughter. He could feel the tears welling in the dark and how they brimmed and then fell across his cheeks and stung his skin.

He was the messenger of his own demise. Twelve years had passed since he’d lost his wife and daughter. And he’d never been more certain of the part he’d played and the pain he’d caused himself and the ones he loved. He had bought that drink. He had sent that bullet flying, just as deadly and accurate as any shot Will had ever taken. But he knew it now for what it was, and he recognized it as a self-inflicted wound.

He pushed out through the door and stood in the empty hallway beyond and looked one way then the other. He did not know what time it was and he did not care. He needed air. He needed to see the stars and moon and to stand in the grass and see the night as he had grown accustomed to it in all his time out there hunting for the church.

And though he always wished he could go back in time and do it better, he knew that change would never be. He had bought that drink for the man who killed his family. He had sent that man out into the world as accurate and straight as Will could have made it, at that time, on that road; on that exact night when his wife, Sarah, had finally said enough, not trusting Will to come home on his own, she had put their ten-year-old daughter, Cali, in the passenger seat and drove to get Will from the bar.

Will had tortured himself thinking about the part he’d played. Even now he could feel this emotion he had come to know as guilt as it welled within him and rose into his throat. He swallowed it down like he’d swallowed it down so many times before, then he stumbled down the hallway, like the old drunk he’d been, and now knew he might well be still. He stumbled on, trying to overcome his own guilt and sadness. He went out past a small living area and into the open night air, and he tried to somehow gather the pieces of his life together.

He walked away from the compound and passed several guards who looked his direction but gave no greeting but a nod. When he had seen the stars and looked across the lake toward where the hills began on the opposite shore and the mountains stood darkly sitting, he turned and came back again.

A small campfire had been made close by the lakeshore and he came to stand just beyond the light, looking at the woman who had no doubt lit it. When he stepped out of the darkness and into the pool of light created by the flame, Holly only glanced at him before looking back down within the fire.

“You have trouble sleeping, too?” Holly asked.

“Something like that.”

“There is truth in what The Father says. Though it is easy in the dark waking hours of night to question.” She nodded toward a section of log that sat a few feet off. “You should sit. I’ll be the one to bring you back tomorrow, now that Lonny’s gone.”

He thanked her. He watched the flame dance, then he said to her, “How does The Father know the things he knows?”

Holly laughed. “You mean, is he clairvoyant? Psychic? God’s own prophet?”

Will just stared at her. “I mean how does he know? How does he know beyond a doubt?”

“No one knows beyond a doubt,” she said. “God gave Adam and Eve paradise and even God could not keep them from using their own free will.”

“You sound like him,” Will said.

“Like who?”

“The Father. John. Every one of us. Man or woman.”

“Adam and Eve?”

“I guess so,” he said. “Is this paradise?”

“It is whatever you make it to be,” she said. She looked at him now and laughed. He was starting to get the feeling she was in on some joke that he had no idea about. “Be careful, Will. They might not see what’s going on with you, but I do.”

“Is that what’s keeping you up?” Will asked, offering her a weak smile, trying to defuse anything he had set in motion inside her head.

“I’m waiting up for John.”

“How serious is this thing you have with him?”

“Serious enough to have me out here waiting,” she said.

He looked at her. He looked out into the night. He wondered about the woman he saw before him, and he wondered about the woman he’d known before. He thought that they had been the same, but he did not know now if they were. “You get lonely up here sometimes?”

“It helps to have someone,” she said. “It helps to keep the mind from wandering too far afield.”

He looked at her. Holly pushed at a log with a stick and they both watched as sparks kicked up in a flurry then rose in the thermals. He wondered who she had been talking about, her or him.

MARY MAY WOKE IN THE DARK. HER BROTHER HAD NOT TAKEN her back down to Fall’s End like he’d said. She had been given the little room in the little house and she had stood there and watched him, this man that was her brother but now somehow was not. She did not know him. She had thought she did. But she knew she did not know him anymore.

“You’ll drive me back to town, won’t you?”

“Yes,” he’d said.

“You’ll come with me.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t leave me,” she said. “Stay here. Stay right here in this house till morning. You can stay on the couch and you can drive us into town in the morning.”

“Yes,” he’d said.

She stood looking at him. In that moment, he reminded her of the little brother she had once had. She thought of their mother nagging on him. She thought of the answers he would give. Yes. Yes. It was always yes.

When she woke in the dark she knew she was not alone.

“Drew?”

Across the room she heard a rustling. A shift of fabric then the creak of a wooden chair beneath human weight.

“Drew?” she called again.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I’m here.”

She put an elbow down then turned and tried to see him in the darkness. He was a shape only, a shadow among the darker shadows of the room. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” he said.

She could hear him shift. She heard him stand from the little wooden chair she remembered had sat beside the door. “Is something wrong?” she asked again, listening still and watching the dark shadow where he stood.

“You need to wash,” he said.

“Wash?”

“Yes. You need to wash yourself in the water. You need to cleanse yourself. You said you would.”

“Drew,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

“There’s no reason to be scared,” he said. He took a step now, and he came toward the bed then moved up and along the side of it.

Out of instinct she pulled back. She sat up and put her hands out in front of her like she might fend off whatever this might be.

“Don’t be scared,” he said again. “You need to wash. You need to cleanse and prepare to face your sin.”

He had come closer now and she looked wildly around. She looked for anything she might use to stop him but there was nothing there and before she could move another inch, or throw up a hand, he had grabbed one of her ankles and turned sharply, pulling her from the bed with a savage tug.

She came off the bed with her arms flailing, reaching for anything that might stop her fall. Nothing could be found except for the bare sheets, and she fell two feet from the bed and landed on one elbow then hit her head.

The pain was instant and reverberated down through her skin all the way through her body. She had hit hard and fast, and she could barely think except to know she was being dragged across the carpet. She turned and bent away from him, reaching out with her hands. Her fingernails dug for purchase but came away with only dirt and sand and lint and whatever other thing that could be taken underneath her nails.

He swung open the door and the light flooded inward. She could see that he would drag her past the frame and out the door. She called his name, but he did not stop and she reached and grabbed the leg of the chair then the doorjamb as she went. For a second she held on, but he kicked her then brought her up again, lifting her by the ankle so that she spun and twisted with her head dragged backwards across the floor and out of the little room.

“Drew!” she said. “Drew!”

But it was as if he didn’t hear her. He kept moving and soon they had crossed the living room. The door came open in his hand and she was yanked out after him and then let go.

She laid in the dirt and gravel of the drive. Small bits of sand against her face and in her hair. She coughed. The taste of blood from some cut she must have had inside her mouth and she coughed again then tried to look around.

John sat there waiting for her. He was sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck and as she looked around, she could see the faces of many more. Men and women she had seen that day, church members.

“Hello,” John said.

She turned and got a hand behind her and tried to sit. “What is this?”

“This is the end,” John said. “This is what I’ve always wanted for you. You have been alone. You have lived without the word of The Father and now you will be alone no more.”

She tried to push herself up. She tried to fight them when they came for her. She tried to rip her arms away from their grip. But there were too many to defend from. Soon she was in the air, carried up out of the dirt and thrown down across the truck bed.

She called her brother’s name. She repeated it again and again, but she never heard any response.