Far Cry: Absolution

III

WHEN WILL WOKE HOLLY WAS SITTING THERE ON THE single bed opposite his own. “You ready?” Holly asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “What time is it?”

“Morning time.” She had no watch to check and no phone, for there was no service even if she had one.

He pushed back the blankets then brought his feet over the edge and placed them bare upon the floor.

“Jesus, Will. You make your own underwear or something?”

He looked down to the briefs he wore. They were old and had once been black but years of washing them in the river then hanging them in the sun had turned them a sun-bleached brown. He looked up at her and smiled. “They’re just a reflection of my life.”

“Underwear are the windows to the soul.” She sat up and told him to shower and then meet her in the barn cafeteria.

He showered then dressed in his old clothes. They still smelled of the mountains, of pine and dirt and cracked rock, and of his own sweat and salt. He carried with him his rifle and backpack as he came into the cafeteria and found her waiting for him.

She gathered up a basket and put it out on the table before him and told him to go through the clothes within. “I tried to find things that I thought would fit.”

He looked in the basket and removed the first layer of clothes and set it to the side. “Where did this stuff come from?”

“Donations,” she said. “You know how it works, Will. You come to us and you donate what you have and we give to you as well. We are a communion, though I never would have called it by some hippy shit name like that.”

He picked through the clothes and found the ones he thought would work, and then he rolled them and put them down within his bag. “There’s more of this?”

“Sure,” she said.

She brought him into the long room that took up half of one of the houses and flipped on the lights. He saw the piles of clothes that stretched from one end of the room all the way to the other. There were piles of shoes as high as he was. There were gloves and hats in another pile. There were coats, pants, shirts, underwear. He walked along down the middle of them all. There was little order to it other than by article—children’s clothes thrown in among the adults. He stopped and picked up a children’s size eight set of shoes by the shoelaces that connected them. The laces white and stained with dirt, while the shoes were pink and purple.

He looked back at Holly where she stood. “The Kershaws? Lonny said they had brought them somewhere. They had a daughter and a son. But I’ve seen no children. In fact, I haven’t seen the Kershaws, either.” He stood with the shoes dangling in his hand and he ran his eyes out across the piles of clothes then back again. He was beginning to see items he recognized. Shirts that advertised the local little league team, or one that showed the emblem of the lumberyard. “What is happening here? Where is everyone?”

“I see where your mind is going, Will. But you don’t need to worry. They are with us. But they are not with us here.”

He held the shoes still. They were like something he’d once had in his own long forgotten life. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“There are other places being set up,” Holly said. “There’s a woman out east who runs our farms. She grows our food, she gives us the produce we need. The eggs. The meat from different livestock. Surely you didn’t think it was just you. The church is everywhere and there are many to feed,” she said.

“And that is where the children are?”

“Yes,” Holly said. “Everyone is safe. Everyone has their purpose. You’ll see one day.”

He dropped the shoes now and he looked around at the piles once again. “There’s so much,” he said.

“Jacob, their oldest brother, has also begun to train women and men in the mountains.”

“The mountains to the north?”

“Yes,” Holly said. “Not far off. There’s much that has changed. And I can see now that Lonny did not keep you up to speed as he should have. We are growing, Will. You and I are some of the first. But many have started to come and ask for our protection.”

“Protection?”

“Yes,” Holly said. “From their own lives, just like you. Just like when you came to Eden’s Gate and gave up the bottle and gave up sin. Others come because they need financial help. Others come because they have lost the faith. But, regardless of how they come to us, they all need our help. Souls do not save themselves,” Holly said.

Will watched her. He looked once more across the piles of clothes, then he turned to her again. “I think I’m ready,” he said. But he could see in her face that she had unsettled something within him, and that she knew it.

“We’re building toward something here,” Holly said.

“I know. I get it. I can see that now.” He grabbed his bag then took the rifle and put the strap over his shoulder.

She led him out of the room and they came out of the small, wooden clapboard house into the morning light. “Throw your bag back there,” she said as they came to the pickup she must have pulled around earlier.

He put the bag into the bed then walked to the door and pulled it open. No one was about and only far down the drive, past the small wooden houses and outbuildings, did he see another soul. Two guards stood at the gate and he watched them for a time and watched the weapons on their shoulders.

When he opened the truck door and climbed inside, she was waiting for him and she turned and cranked the engine. “It’s been good to see you, Will.”

He looked over at her. He still held the rifle and he settled it now between his legs. “It’s been good to see you, too, Holly.”

She pushed down on the pedal and they went on down the gravel road. “You really shouldn’t be a stranger anymore, Will. Even when you’re here once a month you are a stranger. I can see that now. I’m going to make sure I come and see you. John asked me to. He asked me to be the one to keep track of you now that Lonny’s gone. I’ll be coming by.”

“I’d like that,” Will said. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was looking at the houses. Many were painted crudely white, like the church behind them. Others were simply rough wood, stained to keep the weather out. They kept driving and his eyes landed on one and he could not take his eyes away. In big painted letters that had run and dripped down the white siding was the single word, SINNER, written across the front, just beside the door.

His head moved to take the house in even as they passed and he turned in the seat and watched as the house receded behind them. He could not remember the same word being there the day before. He turned back now and looked out the front windshield, but in the side mirror he could still see the house and he watched it and then when he turned to say something to Holly, she instead began to speak.

“It’s been weeks since you’ve been here last,” Holly said. “You should come once a week at least. If you’re with us you should come to the Sunday services, Will. You should hear The Father’s sermons. The way he speaks. The power of his thoughts and the message he gives to us from deep within his soul.”

“I will,” he said. “I have missed too many.”

HOLLY LET HIM OUT IN FRONT OF THE GENERAL STORE IN TOWN and he thanked her and climbed from inside the cab and grabbed his bag. When he came back down along the truck she called out to him through the open window of the cab. “You sure you don’t want me to bring you all the way up to your place?”

“No,” he said. “I need new snares and new traps and I need some more cartridges for the rifle. Most of my snares are probably gone by now, torn up or dragged clear across the fields.”

“Okay,” she said. “And you’ll get a ride with someone going up that way?”

He nodded. “It’s no trouble. Thank you, Holly.”

She looked at him for a time and then leaned to the open window. “I’m trying to help you out here,” she said.

“I get it. I’ll be okay on my own.”

“That’s what I’m getting at,” Holly said. “I’ve been trying to tell you how things are changing. Eden’s Gate, The Father, John, all of it. I see you and I worry about you, Will. You’re going to get left behind or pushed aside if you don’t start making the effort.”

Her talk had riled him up a bit. He didn’t like being told what to do, or to have his actions questioned. “Like you?” Will said.

“Yes, like me, Will. I might not like everything that’s going on up there but I know who butters my bread. I can see you still making your mind up about that.”

Will cracked a smile. “Well I’m not going to start sleeping with John if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Fuck you,” Holly said. She wasn’t smiling about it and she put her hands up on the wheel for a second and looked on down the road. When she turned and met his eyes again, she said, “I might not agree with everything they do but I owe them my life. And you owe them yours. You understand? I might criticize them but I’m on their side always. It’s your choice, Will. I already made mine.”

She opened her mouth to say something more, but instead she simply turned the key and started the engine again.

He stood there for a while, feeling a little dumbfounded, as he watched her pull around in the street then head back the way she’d come. He felt bad about what he’d said to Holly, but there was nothing he could do for it now.

He went inside the general store and bought his cartridges and a couple hundred feet of twenty-four-gauge snare wire. He bought needle-nose pliers and wire cutters because his had started to rust from the use he gave them, working in the open with the rain and snow that saturated the fields every spring and winter. He put everything on the tab that Lonny had set up for him a while back, and he thought now whether Holly would know to pay it for him. He was standing at the counter when he thought about the bear cub and asked the clerk about the beaver traps and the small floats that went along with them. He bought five and he came out of the store with most of it stuffed down inside his bag, and the traps that he could not fit strapped along the side.

He walked to the end of the block then stopped and stared into an empty window. He placed his hands to the glass and peered inside: dust and empty booths and barren tables. There had been a café here only a year before and he wondered now when it had closed and where the people who had owned it had gone. He walked a little more, then crossed the street. The bar sat there in front of him, just the same as it had always looked.

He walked up and saw the beer lights were off, a “Closed” sign sitting in the window. He set his bag down to the side of the door then walked along the outside. He could see only shadow and outlines of things through the dark windows. He stood there and thought it through. He was no fool and he’d never been one.

Holly had told him that Mary May and her brother had come down that very morning and he had sat and thought about that and he had thought about the fresh paint he’d seen there on the side of the small house. Wondering the whole while if it was the same house he had asked about the day before—the house in which Mary May had been.

Will also thought about how the bullshit alone could only be piled so high before one thing or another broke beneath its weight. He turned and looked back across the town. He saw that many of the buildings were boarded up now and he remembered a time when every one of them had been open and behind every door and every window was a business or a neighbor. He did not know when that had changed, and he did not know when he had stopped noticing, though he certainly noticed it now.

He put his hands to the window again and tried to see inside. There was nothing to see except his own mirrored face looking back at him. He moved back to where his bag sat. He put a hand out and tried the door. It was locked. He stepped back a little, turned again and walked the length of the bar and then, at the corner, he went down the side of the bar and came around the back.

There were trashcans there and a storage shed and halfway down he saw the wooden service door. He walked past the trashcans and tried the door. He was surprised at first when he found it was unlocked. He still carried his rifle with him and he took it off his shoulder now and held it in his hand. In no way did he think that he would use it, but he also was aware that he was going into someone else’s bar, that there might be some consequences for his actions.

He cracked the door and looked in on the kitchen that sat just behind the bar. Close by, just at the point where the white linoleum ended, he could see the wooden barroom floor. He could see chairs atop tables and the shadowed light that was let in through the darkened windows.

He could hear voices now and he stopped with his hand still on the doorknob. Inside and very close there was a man’s voice and then, softer now, a woman’s voice responding. Will leaned and pushed the door open then went inside.

Sitting at a stainless-steel prep table was a man, stocky, wearing a white chef’s coat, stained in many places. Just beside him, around the adjoining corner of the table was a young girl, who Will guessed could be no more than twenty-one. Both turned and stared at him, their conversation cut short.

The chef stood and Will shifted and moved the rifle, but then thought better of it, knowing now who stood before him, “Hello, Casey,” Will said. “You cook here now?”

The cook, who had been a few years behind Will at high school, took a step then stopped just at the head of the table. It was obvious he was still trying to determine what this was. A half second passed while the girl looked to Will then back at Casey. Finally, Casey said, “Will?”

THE ARTICLE WAS ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE LOCAL NEWSpaper. A paper that held little content usually, and that most in town stockpiled and simply used as fuel for their wood-burning stoves. The back section of The Chronicle was for selling tractors or fly-casting lessons, and the front section was mostly just pieces regarding the local weather, or the annual log jamboree, or what was going on that week at the VFW. Casey handed him the paper. He stood behind the bar and Janet, the waitress, sat a couple stools down and looked Will’s way.

“Saloon owner found dead,” Will said, reading the headline of the article aloud. He looked up at Casey. “Gary died?”

“Irene died two weeks before him.”

Will’s mind raced. He was thinking about them both. Gary and Irene. They were parents to Mary May and Drew. They were the owners of this bar. They were friends, or they had been until Will had gone and disappeared twelve years before.

“Last week we had the funeral for Gary,” Casey said. “A week before we had one for Irene. They’re out there in the cemetery, side by side. The grass hasn’t even had a chance to root.”

Will read the article. He looked back up at Casey then looked down the bar to Janet. “Where’s Mary May?” he asked. “Or Drew?”

“Drew?” Casey said. “We haven’t seen Drew in months, maybe even longer.”

“And Mary May?”

Janet spoke up, she was watching Casey as if maybe she should get permission, but then she ran her eyes to Will and said, “We haven’t seen her in a couple days. She closed the bar. She said for us to come back in and see her today and that’s what we were doing when you came in. We were waiting. We thought maybe it was time to get back to work.”

Will looked from Janet to Casey, then he turned and looked around the bar. He hadn’t been in here in twelve years, but nothing that he could see had changed. The same dark paint, wood paneling, and beer signs, the same dust in the corners of the room.

He brought his eyes back around on Casey. “Gary and Irene are buried over at the cemetery? The one here in town?”

WILL LOOKED DOWN AT THE GRAVESTONES. HE HELD HIS HAT IN one hand and his rifle in the other. The earth had barely even sunk in, mounded and fresh there atop the graves. He scanned his eyes out across the rest. Names he’d known. Names he recognized. He stared off toward the two he knew, his wife and daughter. It seemed to him that this place was dying. It seemed to him that every soul he’d known was here.

“They asked for help but no one listened.”

Will turned now and saw the pastor standing there. He was dressed the same as Will had always remembered him, in his black suit and white collar. And though there was white in the black curl of his hair, he was younger than Will by at least twenty years. And, as far as Will remembered, he’d been a gunnery sergeant in the first Gulf War before he’d found God and then brought his faith here.

“I did not listen,” the pastor said, as if he wanted to offer clarification for his sin.

Will ran his eyes across the man. The cemetery sat before the church and behind, seen across the graves, a single door was open and Will could faintly see the pews and window glass beyond.

“I thought maybe you had come to burn me down, to harass me, and to hurt the church. But I think now that you are here to see for yourself what your church has done. And I wonder now, seeing you here again, whether the things you see before you have left the same mark on you that they have left on me.”

“Jerome,” Will said. “How are you?”

“Tired. Mostly tired all the time now. Mostly sick and tired of the shit that goes on.”

Will had taken his backpack up as he’d come out of the saloon and he’d walked the length of the town with the rifle held in his hands. He held it still and he looked Jerome over and said, “I didn’t come to shoot you, or harass you, or to burn you down. I came for answers.”

Jerome laughed. He was not prone to it and he looked at Will and said, “Eden’s Gate has many answers. The Father has many answers for those who seek his shelter. But I do not have the answers. I am not the prophet The Father wants us to believe he is. I am a follower of God. I am a reader of the Bible. I do not change the words to suit my own delusion.”

“Christ,” Will said. “Can you cut the shit, Jerome. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war on someone else.”

“People love to quote Shakespeare right before they go to war,” Jerome said. “It probably makes them feel pretty smart just before they get their ass blown off and start to feel real stupid. What the fuck can I do for you, Will? You want to confess a sin?”

“Maybe several,” Will said. “For now, I just want you to tell me what happened here.”

“Irene died a few weeks back. It’s going to sound sappy as hell, but I truly think she died of a broken heart.”

“How’s that?”

“About a year ago your buddies started to come down pretty hard on Irene and Gary. They made it clear they didn’t want them selling alcohol. They even stopped a few trucks that had come out this way on delivery. No booze meant no money. And no money meant they had to make a choice between giving up their house or giving up the bar.”

“They chose to keep the bar?”

“You know it,” Jerome said. “But guess who swoops in and buys the house for pennies?”

“Eden’s Gate.”

“You’re quick,” Jerome said. “It was like there was no one else who was even willing to buy the place. They could offer whatever they wanted for it and they knew Gary and Irene would have to take it.”

“And Irene?”

“She’s dead a month later. It was an aneurysm or something. A pressure in her head.”

“And Gary?”

“We tried a few times to get the word to Drew, but you know how Eden’s Gate can be. You know they don’t listen to a thing we say. Gary just decides he’s going to go up there. He’s going to get Drew and bring him down here so we can do the funeral for Irene.”

“That’s not how it worked out though, is it?”

Jerome stared back at him. He looked down at the two graves then back up at Will. “What are you playing at here, Will? You still with them? You said you came here looking for answers but it seems like maybe you already know each and every one. Let’s cut the shit. One vet to another, you want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“I’m starting to realize I had half the story,” Will said. “It seems like you had the other side.”

“You and I both know that’s how it’s always been with war.”

Will looked at him. “Irene and Gary used to mean something to me,” Will said. “Their family meant something to me. I was a mess but I knew that.”

“Things change, Will,” Jerome said. He raised a hand and gestured to the graves that sat everywhere about them. “This place is testament to that.”

“Yes, but they had family—all of them. You forget that sometimes in war. You forget about home. You forget about the people there. You and I both know what that’s like,” Will said. “You’re out there. You’re so far away from all you know that it starts feeling like your life out there is your real life, and the life you knew back home, the normal one, the place you were born, the place you grew up, that’s the fake life, the false life, and mostly all you want is to be back at war.”

“Is that what you want?” Jerome asked. “Because I’m older now. I’m smarter. I can tell the difference. I’m not blind the way I used to be. I’m not fool enough to think it’s one reality or the other. They are the same. This life and that life, they’re all just one big fucking mess. Most everyone here knew that in the end.” He stepped past Will now and looked out on the cemetery.

Will thought about what to say. He thought about Mary May and he thought about how she’d gone up there and found her brother. “You’re a man of God,” Will said. “You ever seen the word ‘sinner’ painted on a house?”

Jerome’s eyes came around fast. “Where did you see that?” he asked.

“It was painted on a house up at Eden’s Gate. I’m trying to remember if it was painted there the day before.”

“I’ve seen it,” Jerome said. “I’ve seen it written on a couple houses close by Eden’s Gate. The owners came to church right here in town and they both were trying to sell their houses, but they could never get anyone to buy. No one wants to live next to a place like Eden’s Gate. No one wants to be neighbor to a cult. Both families just went and left one day. They just left and they never said a thing. They didn’t even sell their places. I guess they figured they were worthless. I heard later that Eden’s Gate bought them from the bank.”

“And you went there?”

“I went there after they didn’t show up to church a couple Sun-days in a row. The places were empty, not a piece of furniture, or a strip of clothing. Just empty. Someone had tagged up the houses and written ‘sinner’ on the side for anyone to see.”

Will turned and looked upward on the sun. He wondered when it was that he’d last seen Mary May. He wondered how much time had passed and he hoped he was not too late. When he looked back over at Jerome, he asked, “You got a car or something I can use? I need to get back up to Eden’s Gate.”

“Then you are still with them?” Jerome asked.

“Never farther from them, actually. You can call me stupid for saying this but it’s probably time we cued the Shakespeare.”

MARY MAY CAME AWAKE GASPING, AS IF SHE HAD GONE TO BED beneath the waves. They had done something to her. They had given her some drug.

She was in a dark room and though she was awake, her vision swam and then refocused, colors seen at the periphery of her vision like that of some negative universe. Black was white and red was green. They had left her in a corner and from where she sat with her back to one wall and her head leaning against the other, she could see the sliver of light that came in from under the door and reached across the floor toward her. She tried to move, but her hands had been bound behind her and as she tried to wriggle free, she realized her fingers had gone numb.

They had bound her legs at her ankles and as soon as she tried to stand she fell and hit her forehead against the floor. She could smell dust, and something metallic, something that seemed now to remind her of the metallic taste of blood.

With her feet she pushed away at the wall then inched across the floor, her eyes moving out ahead of her, searching out the light. Her hands and fingers had started to come to life again and there was the prick of needles across her skin and the warm fuzz of blood now coursing in the veins. She pushed again, inching closer.

They had taken her in the truck and left the compound. All the while sitting around her where she lay. She had tried to get up many times and been knocked down over and over again. The feel of the road beneath the tires, the bounce of springs, and the smell always of the pine that had surrounded them and moved above, branches blotting out the stars and moon. When they stopped she knew they had come to a river rolling down out of the mountains. The air had changed and had become cooler. The smell was of water and silt and rock. And farther out the sound of the rapids running and the water flowing, ever faster.

She did not know yet why they’d come for her. She did not know yet where her brother was. She had looked around as they brought her up and dragged her by an arm from the truck. They threw her down in the sand right there at the edge of the water.

“Do you confess?”

She tried to find the voice that now addressed her. John stood knee deep in the water, and he walked forward now and held a hand out and cupped her chin within his palm.

“Do you confess?” he asked again.

“Confess what?”

“Do you confess your sin?”

She looked up at him in wonder. There was a sense, though fleeting, that none of this could be possible. There was a feeling inside of her that this could not be real.

“Confess and all will be forgiven,” he said.

She looked wildly around her for her brother but she could not see him and she felt John’s hand tighten against her chin. He held her there like that, his hand to her face and his fingers gripped upward across her cheek. “Where’s Drew?” she managed now to ask.

“Drew?” John said, as if he had never heard the name. “Drew is all of us and all of us are Drew. You know little of your brother. And you always have, but you will see now what he is and what we are and in this you will find your own salvation.”

He released her. He stepped back and raised his arms, as if he might be raising them to some rain now falling from above. “Those who walk in heaven are those who have unburdened their heart of sin,” he said, his arms still upraised and his voice now thrown forth among them all, Mary May and everyone who had taken her and held her down in the truck bed. “Those who are unburdened may walk and hold the hand of the prophet. Those that have been unburdened can enter into heaven. But those who choose to go against his mercy, those who do not reveal to us their sin, those that would turn their back on Eden’s Gate and all its providence, those few who have not the foresight to understand, they will be cast into the hell of their own making. The fire that will come and scour the world to ash and flame.”

Slowly, he brought his arms down then moved his eyes again to where she knelt. “Now, brothers and sisters we must help her—help her to find the way.”

She could feel around her the movements of the people. She could feel them tightening around her. She was having a hard time breathing, as if in their movements they had also sucked up the air. She started now to hyperventilate and to fight with every breath for oxygen. They closed in on her and two lifted her beneath the arms and carried her toward the water. She was fighting now, moving arms and legs and she could feel her toes dragging in the sand, cold and wet and heavy.

They went into the water with her and to her side she saw a man begin to pour some dark liquid in among the current. The liquid riding on the surface like an oil and the smell of flowers coming to her but no flowers seen anywhere in the dark flow of the river.

“Now, brothers and sisters, you all know the process and the reasons why. We come here to complete this process and I hold you all responsible to witness and to support the wishes of salvation given to us here tonight. Mary May is a sinner and we will be the hand that cleans her of her sin.”

She felt John’s grip wrap around her neck and she was pushed forward and her head went down within the oily water and then was left there. She struggled, fighting in the inky black. She kicked and fought, but they held her on both sides and she could feel John’s nails digging and holding to her skin.

She came up sputtering. She spit away the water, and she had almost no time to scream. She felt his hands still there behind her and then his voice again. “This one fights against salvation. This one fights to keep her sin. And you see, brothers and sisters, that there is a demon in her. An evil that tries now to evade the good will we give to her, bestowed upon us by The Father. Well, she will learn there is no fighting. She will learn to accept her sin and then in that way lose it. She will learn that my hand and your hands are the tools of the prophet and the prophet’s own extended power.”

He dunked her again, and then held her. She could feel the liquid drift beneath her, she could feel the cold. She did not fight this time, fearing he would not let her back up again. But now, as the seconds ticked by, her body began to convulse and she could not control her own urge to breathe and to free her mouth and nostrils from beneath the liquid. She fought and he held her down below.

She woke in a dark room, gasping for air as if they had drowned her. Which she knew now they had almost done. Her clothes were still damp and she inched forward now, moving across the floor with hands and feet bound, inching toward the light.

JEROME TURNED HIS ANCIENT OLDSMOBILE OFF THE COUNTY road and down the double track that ran atop the bluff. Will had told the pastor all he could think to say, but he knew there were details and minutiae that he simply did not know, and he was realizing even after he’d told his story to Jerome that he had let both Eden’s Gate and The Father blind him. And as they came out along the bluff and saw the lake and the buildings of Eden’s Gate below across scattered stands of forest, Will knew that though he’d found the light to see Eden’s Gate for who they truly were, he was still blind to so much more.

“You tell me where,” Jerome said. “I still think this is craziness and I still think you might be crazy.”

Through the trees, with the Oldsmobile moving, Will saw fleeting glimpses of the buildings. He scanned ahead to plan some course for himself that would bring him down off the bluff and hide him as he went on foot to find Mary May and bring her back. “Go up here a ways and when you find cover stop the car.”

Jerome turned and raised himself up to better see the land below. “That’s a lot of ground to cover.”

“I have the rifle,” Will said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll keep them at a distance.”

Jerome pulled over then brought the car around. There was a grouping of short pine that sprouted from atop a nurse log. Jerome sat there for a little bit, then he cut the engine and looked across at Will. Jerome’s face was completely serious. “You know they have guns, too?”

Will just looked at him and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I heard it’s kind of their thing.”

“That worry you at all?”

“It only worries me if they start using them.”

“I can go with you,” Jerome said. “I certainly could help.”

“You are helping,” Will said. “If she’s down there, if they have her, if we can make it back here, we’re both going to need you ready to get us out of here.”

“Okay,” Jerome said. “Try not to get shot at.”

Will cracked the door then moved to get up and out of the seat. “It’s not like I haven’t been shot at before,” Will said.

“Getting shot at is fine and dandy,” Jerome said. “Getting shot is not. You remember that one and try to make it back here.”

Will closed the door. He carried his rifle and settled his hat down across his head. He had taken his hunting knife from within his bag, and he had loaded up his pockets with the .308 cartridges he’d purchased that same morning. He went down through the trees now and when he came to an opening that looked out toward the lake and Eden’s Gate beyond, he settled in and put the lens on them and watched to see who might be watching back.

SHE THOUGHT THE LIGHT AHEAD WAS DAYLIGHT, BUT THE CLOSER Mary May came to the sliver beneath the door the more she started to doubt that. She lay on the floor and with her hands behind her and her ankles bound she could only see the slightest movement of air there before the door. Bits of dust floated like protozoa in some languid current within the sea.

There was the sound now of echoed footsteps. They kept coming closer as if they were moving down a long and very empty hall. The steps came closer and her eyes bore down on the splinter of light that sat before her and soon she saw the shadow move across the opening then come to a stop in front of her door.

When the door came open the light was blinding and she clenched her eyelids together and tried to turn away. There was little escape to find and she rolled as far as her hands would let her and she lay there and watched the room come into focus. It was a room of standard size and on every wall she saw the writing of the sins. The seven of them repeated hundreds of times, each on a different set of faded, almost wax-looking paper pieces that had been pinned to the wall somehow.

Gluttony.

Lust.

Greed.

Pride.

Envy.

Wrath.

Sloth.

Mary May rolled and stared at them from where she lay, looking every scrawled word over. The papers jagged and misshapen where they were not pinned. She kept looking at them and then, startled and in a rush, she realized what the smell of this room had been. The metallic, almost vinegary tang of skins stretched one end to the other and pinned by the hundreds across the wall. Dark to light like every color of the human body.

“You shouldn’t worry,” Drew said. He stood at the door looking in. He waited as her eyes adjusted and her vision cleared.

She rolled now and looked to where he stood and she saw his eyes running over the walls then dropping to where she lay.

“In the wilderness after you fled into the forest John had wanted to kill you. He had wanted you to go away, to disappear. I asked him not to kill you. I asked him to spare you as we have been taught to spare all that see the truth.” Drew came forward into the room. He studied one of the skins a little way down the wall, then he turned to her. “This one,” he said, gesturing to the skin. “This one is my own.”

She looked to the wall and read the sin written there, Envy.

“The Father and John helped me to see that I was envious. That I had always been envious and that it would continue unless I accepted myself for who I was. They helped to strengthen me, and in the process they showed me how lost I had truly been.”

“That’s yours?” she asked. She did not understand. She looked at him and then around the room. “What is this?” she asked. “What are those?”

He bent and knelt in front of her. He reached a hand out and touched her neck then ran his fingers down across the sternum of her chest. “They tattoo you right here,” he said. “They look into your soul and they see the sin that you are carrying and they bring it to the surface when they tattoo it across your chest.” He stood again, taking his hand from where it had pressed down on her. “Once you accept your sin, you can then release it.” He hooked a finger up and pulled down the collar of his shirt.

She could see the scar tissue there. Almost as if it were a burn, but she knew it was more than that—that the skin itself had been removed. She looked to the wall again. She looked to the sin that had sat atop her brother’s chest. When she looked back at him, she said, “What have they done to you, Drew? What have you let them do to you? You’re not this man. You’re not the man they think you are.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not that man anymore. You’re right about that.” He took the .38 from behind now and he brought it up and stared down at it like the gun itself were some treasure rescued from the bottom of the sea. “They never treated me like an equal. They never thought I could ever be anything like you, or like him. They always thought I was lesser. They never wanted me. I know that now. I know it was their sin that gave me life and I accepted that. I accepted them for that and for what they did when they gave this life to me. But they, in turn, never accepted me.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Mamma and Daddy loved you. He came up here to get you. He came to get you and bring you back, just as I did. You have to see that there is love there. You have to understand that.”

“No,” Drew said. He brought the gun around. He held it out toward her now, and he reached and pulled her to her knees. “You are the one that doesn’t understand. You are the one who has been marked with sin. Who needed to be cleansed. I am the one who has saved you. I am the one who saves you still.”

She listened to him, but what she heard most distinctly, and what terrified her all the more, was the sound of another set of footsteps now approaching down the long hallway.

WILL HAD COME DOWN THE BLUFF, WORKING ALONG THE SLOPE at an angle. By the time he reached the flatlands near the lake he could see the buildings through the trees and he pictured himself there among them. The trees were patchy in many places and his view looked toward the lake and among the trunks of the trees and though Will was one of them he knew he must be cautious in his approach. He threw himself down among a growth of thick underbrush and glassed the compound.

He had a straight shot to the house where the word SINNER had been written, but in its place now was white paint. He ran his eye across it several times before he was even sure of what he saw. The word was gone. Erased as if it had never been there to see at all.

Using the scope, he viewed the gravel drive then moved the scope along each building. He had little idea where to start or even to guess where he might find Mary May or in what state.

When Will had come to the church twelve years ago, he had come to confess his sins. He had come to speak to The Father and to ask him for his forgiveness. And while Will had always been a believer in the church in town, he had prayed to them and his prayers for peace and for acceptance of the things he’d done, had, in his mind, gone unanswered.

The Father had told him to have faith. He had laid his hands upon Will in a way so different than Will had seen, or felt in town. The Father hugged him and brought him toward him like a brother. Gesturing in that moment to his own brother John, and the eldest among them, Jacob, he had said to Will, “You will be to us a brother, and that bond you share with us will be even stronger than the one we three share even in our blood. You will be family to us and we will care for you as family and you will care for us as family and in this we will take comfort and provide for one another for the rest of time.”

Will had been released and he had stood there with The Father, and with the ten or so followers that soon would grow to become many hundreds. And Will had looked back at him and The Father had said for him to bathe in the water of the river and to immerse himself and wash his sin.

John, himself, had been the one to baptize Will. And afterwards he had said to Will, “Now you must confess. You must confess your sin.”

“But I do not know it,” Will had said.

“You know it. You know it just as you know your own reflection seen—but then forgotten—in the passing of a mirror.”

“I cannot see it,” Will said. “I am lost. I am lost without them, without my wife and without my daughter.”

John had pulled him close just as The Father had, and he had led him to the edge of the river, bringing him to a tranquil eddy where the water sat calm and still. “Now you see the sin inside you,” John had said. “You are a hunter. You are a killer. You are a man of Wrath and not of good. You are here for this very reason. You are here to appease your sin and erase the Wrath that lives within you.”

Will dropped the scope from his eyes. He knew now where they had taken her. He knew now what had been done to her and he feared now he might be too late.

JOHN CRADLED MARY MAY BY THE BACK OF THE HEAD. HE BLEW the powder upon her, and then he knelt and looked inward on her. It seemed to her that he was looking through her, in through the eyes then out the back. The powder roiled within her like a smoke, pouring past her eyelids and down her throat.

“You only had a taste of the true power of the Bliss in which we bathe the sinners,” John said. “You did not have the chance to see the world in its truest form, stripped naked, and revealed.” He stepped back now and watched her. She was having trouble keeping focus. A cloud was moving across her vision and all she saw had morphed and begun to pull. Still, she was aware that Drew was standing with her, their father’s .38 still held in his hands, the gun barrel pressed upon her skull.

“There’s no need for that anymore,” John said. He told Drew to lower the weapon. He told Drew to cut the rope that bound her hands and feet then to step back and stand behind him.

She tried to move her arms and to get her feet beneath her, but she felt weighted in place as if she were made of stone. Her arms dangled now like the air itself had become a gel and she had dove headfirst into a world composed not of any solid conglomeration of atom or particle, but instead into a world made loose by the breaking of many different bonds.

She moved but also did not move, and afterwards, when her mind had time to catch up to the instinctual manifestations of her body, she wondered even if she had ever moved, or if, as she felt now, with John looking down upon her, whether she were even still within her body.

“I’m sure Drew told you what I’d wanted to do to you,” John said. “I’m sure he told you that I thought you might be better dead. But I think it’s better this way. I think it’s better that you know that he still loves you, even if you do not give to him the very same. That is why we marked you. That is why we brought you to be washed. And now we ask you to confess so that we can send you back as one who is marked with sin but not forgiven.”

Her head swam, and she tried to still it on her shoulders. Everything was out of focus and even as she looked up to John and Drew, she could see they had begun to almost melt from off their bones.

She turned her gaze upon the wall. The skin hung all around her. Stretched and pinned with staples like long dead butterflies beneath their case. With the drug now streaming full through her she thought there was a kind of beauty to it. A kind of beauty to the sin and the skin that hung there, that had been taken from off the sinner’s chest.

John turned and spoke to Drew. He said the next part would not be easy for a loved one. He told Drew to go back to the house, to wait. He said this all would be over as soon as he could get her to confess.

There was hesitation seen, but then acceptance, and soon Mary May was aware she was alone with John and that as the door closed behind Drew and John stepped forward into the overhead light, he became a figure of some form that was only shadow. In her eyes it was the figure of her own father she saw looking down on her.

It was her father. She was sure of it now. And when he pulled back into the light she was certain of it. His face. His eyes. The touch of his hand across her cheek. Mary May could not understand it. She watched him move away from her and walk the full length of the room, and for a long time he didn’t look away from her. It is him, she thought. It is him. Her mind was trying to make sense of it. She now felt the drug in every vein.

Her father rounded back to her. He took her hands into his, and he leaned and turned each palm upward. His eyes searching out the whorls across her skin like he meant to create a map of the maze that was her fingerprint. Now he began, his voice stopping and starting. And the voice she heard was not John’s but that of her dead father, addressing her as if to give her comfort from the afterlife. His words carefully chosen, as he spoke and paused, drawing some words long while cutting others short.

“Your hands,” her father said. “Look what you have done to them—look what you have done to them just to be here. They are bruised and cut. They have been wounded, misspent, and misused. You came to us and though you might not see it now, you came to us in order to receive your purpose. And that purpose starts with these hands. The things they might build. The creation they might make. There is so much potential in just one of these fingers. In ten there is an infinity.”

There was a showmanship to this. A resonance that was somewhere between tent revival and southern Baptist snake handling, and Mary May was trying to understand it all. She was trying to make sense of this being she saw before her, John or her father, and she could not distinguish between the two. She listened to the rise and fall of his voice, and she wondered about a thing like the afterlife and whether a soul could cross back in time of need, and what that soul in all its infinite knowledge of life after death would see in her—whether she would be declared saint or demon, burned or saved.

He looked her over. He looked up and away from her to where the skins hung pinned against the wall. And in her mind the skins were moving and there was the sound of them rustling on the wall like snakeskin, spent already from the body, artifacts that showed the secession from one state of being to the next.

She didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe it was her father. There was no coming back from death. He was gone. He was gone from here and this could not be him.

John brought his eyes back to her. The gaze he cast upon her was almost predatory, like a cougar looking out of the darkness at its prey. The realization of where she was and who she was with and the danger she was in suddenly came rushing back to her. She tried to pull away, but his hand held hers firm in his. And when she looked down it was not John’s hands she saw but her father’s once again. Aged and callused. Loved. Hands she could not hate. Hands she wanted to hold to, as if holding to them would prevent him from ever leaving her again.

And when she looked again he was caressing that hand of hers like a father might the broken hand of one of his children. “Together,” he said, his voice now tender. “Your hands in mine, in the greater fold of this family there is only warmth, only understanding, only the true gift of potential we see for you. But without that gift you are alone.”

He held her fingers for only a beat longer before he dropped them. What he said to her was true, she felt the cold of the room. She felt the decay in the air, not just skin, but dust, and loss, and solitude.

“Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you understand your sin, and the way it stands before you, blocking you from the gates of heaven?” He stood now in the light, his skin illuminated from above, her father. His hair seemed almost gossamer. She looked around now, as if coming out of some dream into the waking world, knowing the feel of danger, but not seeing it. She could see only her father and she wanted very much to go to him and to hold him and to never let him go, but she felt weighted to the floor, as if she were in the water still and he was looking down on her from the breathing world above.

He began to speak again. “This sin will govern you from waking moment to your final half-remembered dreams. But I can stop it for you. I can bring it toward the surface and then someday cut it from your skin. Will you do this willingly?” he asked, waiting now on her reply.

She looked around the room. She looked from skin to skin then back again to him. Her father had faded away but no one had taken his place, not John or Drew, or anyone. What she saw there was no longer human. He was a voice above her like that of some god speaking from atop the mountaintops many thousands of feet above. “Yes,” she said.

He seemed to reset and his voice began to roam about the room, and she was having trouble tracking it as he went. “What beautiful things are the gifts of hands. They are gifts given to all of us. They are like the tongue, or the mind, or the muscle beneath your skin. They are a tool and they have been misused. Chipped and bent, marred, even broken a time or two, but they can heal. They have this power and it is a power not to be forgotten. For all the bad those hands have done, for all the paths those hands have wrongly led you down, for all the days those hands spent in toil only to find you were building an effigy to a false prophet—those hands can still be healed. They can be tools again in the way they were first intended.”

He came back to her now, the drug fading a bit and she saw it was John there before her and not her father. He held her hands again. She was scared not because of where she was or who she was with. She was scared of the words he used and the way they had begun to seep inside her and bend and harden like scaffolding meant to support and soon overtake her very being.

“I am glad,” John said. “I am glad Bliss has released in you this path to a truer understanding.” He guided her hands now to where her collar was and he began to pull with her hands in his, ripping the material of the collar until she felt the bare skin of her flesh come exposed in the dead air. “Your sin will go here above your breasts, and it will be a mark for you to remember us by. You will have many days and nights to think on it, and in the end you will find there is only one conclusion, and that conclusion will be that you will join us here, giving up your sin, and your life beyond. But first we must prepare you. We must wash you clean, for your sin is envy, and it will be placed upon you for all to see.”

WILL LET HIMSELF IN THROUGH THE FAR DOOR THEN STOOD looking down the long hallway with the overhead lights in cages every ten feet or so, six of them in total and the doors of the rooms beneath each. He had not been here in years, but he had not forgotten this place. He knew where the room was, and where his own tattoo had long ago been stapled to the wall. He knew this was where they would take Mary May. He knew it because he had once been taken there himself.

He had gone only a couple of steps down the hall when he heard the opening of a door. He came to a dead stop and then, thinking fast, he ducked into the nearest room. With the blackness of the room behind he stood there with the door just cracked and a slivered view of the hallway before him. He wondered what would happen if he was caught here, whether they would be able to see he had lost the faith. He wondered whether it was that obvious, and whether they would have come to his own house to write the word SINNER upon his walls.

In what little light there was Will slid the rifle bolt down and checked the chamber, then carefully pushed it back into place. He listened to the soles of heavy booted feet pass by then fade again.

Will cracked the door a little then eased out. Going down the hall was Drew. Will watched him walk, his movements almost robotic. Each step labored and deliberate, one in front of the other all the way to the end, where he let himself back out into the light of day.

When Will heard the door close, he went again into the hallway. Will had not liked what he had seen and he wondered now why Drew was not with Mary May. Will started to doubt himself, but he also feared for Mary May all the more.

He held the rifle out before him and began to walk in the direction Drew had come from, heel then toe, the rubber beneath his boots softly echoing. If she was here she was down this hallway. He looked ahead and continued, his eyes fixed now on where he thought she’d be.

There was a creak of door hinges then the sound of footsteps up ahead. A voice was heard suddenly. A voice Will knew was John’s.

Will moved fast. He took three steps, trying to keep the sound of his own boot soles hidden. The inlaid shadow of a door sat before him, and he ducked in just as he saw John come into sight fifty feet ahead. He was talking to someone, but Will’s own pulse had begun to beat so fast and loud in the channels of his head that he could hear nothing. He had felt this way before. With the big boar grizzly, with his own wife and child, and before all that he had felt this in the war. Now he tried to push this feeling down away from him and loosen its grip from around his skin.

When he bent and looked again around the inlay of the door, John had turned and moved away in the opposite direction. Will saw him open a new door and then disappear within. Will was out and moving down the hallway. His heart still beat inside of him with a thump that shook the skin, but he kept going. He moved because he had to, because he thought there might not be another time. If he was going to save Mary May this was the only time. He only hoped now that he would find her and that whatever had happened to her, wherever she was in the process, was not now at its end.

He came down the hallway with the same fast and silent steps. He reached the door that held the sins within, and he turned the knob now and pulled it open. Mary May was there before him, kneeling on the floor five feet in. Her eyes were glassy and almost nonresponsive as he moved to her and tried to bring her to her feet. The collar of her shirt had been ripped and pulled aside and he could see the beginning of her bra and the naked upper skin of her breastbone. He tried now to gather the material up, to somehow help her.

“Mary May,” he said, whispering to her then turning to look behind him. He had left the door open and he felt the cool air of the hall flowing in like a ghost unseen. He turned back to her, he tried to bring her up and to get her on her feet but she was unmoving. He snapped his fingers in front of her. “Mary May, you need to help me. We need to go. We need to get you out of here. We need to get away from here. You don’t know the things they do.”

She turned her head slightly, and then she met his eyes. “Are you up there?” she asked.

He was watching her. Mary May’s eyes swam beneath her lids like something come loose from all that anchored them, but her voice had stunned him for a moment with how clear and deliberate she had made it sound. He turned again and looked behind him and when he came back to her, he said, “I can lift you. I can lift you out of here and carry you over my shoulder. But if you can walk and help me it would be better. We may need to fight to get out of here. We may need to run and I don’t know if we will get away if it comes down to that.”

Her eyes washed past him now. He tried to meet them as they went. He watched her head roll to the side then turn upward on the wall. “Are you up there, Will? Are you there on that wall with all the rest?”

“Jesus,” Will said. “What did they give you?”

“Are you up there?” she asked again.

“Yes,” he said. He looked around wildly, desperate to escape and knowing if he was found here that it could get no worse. “Can you help me? Can you help me get you out of here?” He did not wait for a response, he bent and lifted, getting her over his shoulder like some backwoods kill. He turned around and began to move for the door but she stopped him.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t take me.”

“What?”

“Don’t take me. Put me down.”

He paused at the doorway, cautious, not wanting to be seen. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“John is only going to tattoo me,” she said. “I came to get my brother. I came for Drew.”

He didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say, but he knew even with whatever drug they’d given her, he knew what she was asking him to do.

“Put me back,” she said again. “Put me back exactly as you found me.” Her voice was so deliberate. Each syllable defined and clear. “If my family ever meant anything to you, put me down.”

He turned and set her down.

She looked up at him. She watched his face as he stood watching hers. “Drew is at the house where they put me last night. He is waiting there. Do you know it?”

She was drugged and he could see it in every movement she made. But there was clarity there, too, like someone surfacing from a coma for a single moment before they were lost again. “Yes,” Will said. “I can find it.”

“I think they killed my father,” she said. She said it almost as if it was an afterthought, but he knew it was not. He knew she had been thinking about it all along. “You need to be careful,” she said. “I came to get my brother and I came to get him out of here. It’s what my daddy wanted. Can you do that for me, Will? You were always one of Daddy’s favorites. You were always missed even though we knew you were not gone. Not really.”

Will turned and looked to the open door. He was losing time. He might lose his life if he stayed here. He knew now what the members of Eden’s Gate were capable of. He knew it was not Lonny alone who had wanted Mary May to die out there. “What about you?”

“John wants to tattoo me. He wants me to be marked so that he can in some way feel he controls me.”

Her words were clear, but he could still see the drug working away at her. She had felt lifeless as a sack of grain when he had lifted her. Will turned again. He had to go. He kept his eyes on the doorway a half second longer, and then he brought the hunting knife up from where he’d put it on his belt. He turned back and lowered the knife down and hid it between the floor and her calf.

“You can’t trust John,” Will said. “You can’t trust anything he says. You might need to get out of here on your own. You might need to use the knife. I’ll get your brother, and then I’ll figure something out. I’ll try and come back for you if I can. The pastor from town, Jerome, is waiting with his car on a road to the northwest, up above the Eden’s Gate property. I’m telling this to you because you might need to get out of here on your own. You understand me?”

She nodded.

He gave her one last look, then he turned and ran. Halfway down the hallway he heard the doorway behind open, and he dashed forward and hid again in the place he had before. When he peered back out, down the hallway, John was moving upward with his eyes on the doorway and the room within where Mary May waited. He held in one hand a medical kit and in the other he carried the metal surgical tray Will knew held the tattoo gun and ink.

SHE HAD MOVED NOT A MUSCLE FROM THE TIME THAT WILL left to the time John came through the door. The only thing, she realized now, was that when John had left he had closed the door, and now as he came back in, it stood open.

She watched him move into the room then set his medical bag on the floor and put the tray down next to it. On the tray, she saw the tattoo gun and needle. Not far off, rolling slightly back and forth on the metal tray was the bottle of black ink. John turned now and looked toward the open door. He seemed to consider it for a time. And then he looked back at her. “You wouldn’t move, would you? You’d stay still? It will make it easier if you just accept it. If you just accept the sin and let it happen.”

“I accept it,” she said. She had not moved at all and he looked her over then looked back at the open door.

“That’s good,” John said. “I don’t want to ask anyone to hold you down, or to tie you up. It always goes easier if the sinner is willing. It helps me. It helps the ink and the writing of the sin.”

He walked now to the door and stood there with his back to her. When he turned again and looked to where she knelt, he said, “Still. I don’t trust you.” He walked out through the door and returned in a few seconds. He held in his hand a metal stool with a swivel at its base that raised or lowered the stool up and down. He brought this toward her and set it on the floor.

Next, he brought the tray over and began to bring up swabs and alcohol from within the medical kit. When he had laid it all out he simply sat there on the stool. “I know you said you wouldn’t move, but the needle always makes them move. It makes them move and I wouldn’t want you to ruin the work I do.” He stood and took from his pocket a vial of the same powder he had blown across her face. He uncorked it and blew it over her again.

The feeling washed over her as a wave might break upon an ocean shore. She was immersed in this feeling once again, dragged outward and away as the wave receded.

WILL WENT THROUGH THE DOOR AND INTO THE BRIGHT SUNLIT afternoon. He could not shake the feeling he should have stayed. He should not have listened to Mary May. They should be out here in the daylight, moving toward the bluff where Jerome waited for them both.

There was a real dread that Mary May would never leave this place. There was fear that John might be killing her even now, suffocating her, or otherwise hurting her in some way and Will almost turned and went back inside, hoping again that he was not too late. But he did not do it. She had been drugged, but she had seemed in control. She had seemed certain that what she was doing—getting a tattoo—was only a small sacrifice to make in order to free her brother from this place.

Will knew the tattoo was only the first thing though. He had looked at her and looked up at the wall on which all the skins had been placed and he, for a moment, had been terrified of just how many he had seen there. Hundreds more than he had thought existed. Hundreds more Eden’s Gate members than he had previously known about. And though this meant he did not know them, it also meant they did not know him, and if anyone suspected anything of him, it would be his end.

He set off along the passageways that moved in and out of the buildings that made up Eden’s Gate. He came down then circled out and around the backs of the houses that lined the gravel drive. He kept low, one hand on his hat as he moved and the other hand carrying the rifle right there beside him.

He moved house to house, hiding at the back of each before sprinting across the open space that divided one from the next to come. When Will found the house he thought Drew was within he still could not be sure. Many of the houses were much the same and he walked cautiously along the side and came to the front. Down the gravel drive he could see the guards and up by the church he saw more men and women of Eden’s Gate. On the road were several more and he stood with his back flattened to the siding then reached a hand out and felt the paint. It was drying in the place that SINNER had once been written, and his fingers came back white at each tip. The whorls of his fingerprints now cloudy with the paint.

He moved back along the siding of the house and as he went he wiped his hand down along his clothes. The paint was almost dry, but it came away in places and marked his clothes where he had put each finger.

When he got to the rear of the house again, he moved toward the back door. He stood in front of it for a time, and then he reached a hand and turned the knob. The door opened and fell inward with his hand still on the knob. He was careful now not to let it fall against the wall. He took a step inside and saw that the door led into a hallway. The bathroom sat on one side and a bedroom sat on the other. Out ahead of him he could see the kitchen and a part of the living room, and he was cautious as he went, for the light of day went before him into the darkness of the place and as he went himself, he cast his own shadow out before him and he could see there was nothing he could do for it but to continue.

Drew was standing with his back to Will, looking out through the blinds toward the larger building in which the tattooed skins were collected, and where he’d left his sister.

“Hello, Drew,” Will said. He stood at the end of the hallway where it came into the living room.

Drew turned and his face was startled but not overly suspicious that Will was there.

“When you first joined Eden’s Gate I should have talked to you. I should have tried to be around a bit more,” Will said to him. “Even though I left town your parents always meant something to me, and so did you and Mary May.” He walked a little farther into the room. He still held the rifle, but Will was no different than any other member of Eden’s Gate who carried a rifle one place or another on this land. “I’m learning I should have been around. I might have been able to stop what happened to your father. I guess a lot has changed.”

Drew’s eyes darted to the small coffee table in the corner of the room and Will saw there a chrome-plated .38. When Will brought his eyes back he could see Drew was watching him again. “You come to kill me, Will?”

“No,” Will said. “What would make you even say that?”

“For what I’ve done.”

“You haven’t done anything yet,” Will said. “I can help you.”

“You were friends with Mamma and with Daddy.”

“I know that,” Will said. “But that makes me only want to help you all the more. I loved them, you know. Your daddy and mamma were like family to me. I wouldn’t want to hurt you or Mary May.” He took a few more steps, and he watched Drew’s eyes move again toward the .38.

“You don’t know what I’ve done,” Drew said. He moved now, going for the weapon there on the table in between them.

Will met him with a crash, lowering his shoulder and using the whole weight of his body to throw Drew against the wall. And though Drew was a half foot shorter than Will and probably fifty pounds lighter, the shock of hitting the younger man was felt all through Will’s shoulder and down along his side. He watched Drew hit the wall then slide almost to the floor, but Drew was up again in the same instant and he dove and fell into Will, driving both to the floor.

They rolled and knocked into the table. Will heard the gun go over and the heavy thud of it as it hit the floor. Will’s own rifle had been lost when Drew had hit him and Will now turned and tried to locate it and to find the .38, but he saw neither as he called out suddenly in pain.

Drew had struck him hard in the ribs with the knuckles of his fist. He hit him twice more in quick succession as Will rolled and tried to get away. Drew moved after him, both men scrambling and trying to get the better of the other. Will put a hand out on the couch and tried to lift himself, but Drew lunged and belted him across the back again and Will fell away, losing his grip on the couch and any chance he’d had for standing.

The effort had brought Drew to the floor again and while Will rolled and tried to keep outside Drew’s reach, Drew came up onto his knees. As he was getting one foot under to stand again, Will got hold of the coffee table and flipped it over his body to where Drew knelt. The table hit Drew just as he raised an arm to fend it off and though Will knew it had not hurt Drew much, Will saw in the same moment that Drew had been thrown off balance.

Will got to his feet and charged. He came down on Drew with the same force he’d leveled on him the first time, throwing all his weight toward the man. They went to the floor in a thrash of fists and legs, rolling and hitting out at each other. But it was Drew again who managed to land a sudden hit to Will’s head.

Will lay stunned, flat on his back. Drew got up and went for the gun. Will sent a foot up and across Drew’s shin, tripping him and bringing him back to the floor. Now Will came to his hands and knees and grabbed out after Drew and gripped a piece of his clothing then tugged back.

The .38 lay just ahead of Drew and he reached for it with his hand. His fingers gripping into the carpet as Will grabbed and pulled again. Drew kicked back but Will managed to avoid the brunt, and now he got his forearm beneath Drew’s chin. Will pulled up hard, bending Drew’s spine upwards and cutting off his air supply. Drew’s hands and fingers remained outstretched, searching for the gun while Will kept pulling back ever harder.

Drew, most likely seeing he was trapped, began to aim elbows backwards into Will’s sides and lower chest, the majority landed poorly. Now, as Drew fought and Will maintained his hold, the smaller man started to dig and rip at Will with his fingers, scraping the flesh of Will’s forearm and raking his fingers across Will’s face.

Will just kept holding him and after a minute he could feel Drew begin to slacken. He held Drew for ten seconds more before he let him drop to the floor again. Will stepped over him then reached and pulled up the .38. He stepped back over Drew and stuck the gun down the front of his pants. Next Will dropped down on all fours and lowered his head to look beneath the couch, and then he put a hand out. His hand came back from underneath the couch gripping the rifle.

For ten seconds he stood there with the rifle strap over his shoulder trying to get his breath. Drew hadn’t been able to hurt Will in the stomach, but the movements had brought the sourness of bile to his lips and when Will ran his tongue out he could taste the tang of blood. Something was coming apart inside him that he did not have the time for, and he looked around the room and knew this was not the time to dwell on it.

When he felt his nerves begin to still and his breath to even, he went to the window Drew had been standing at. He looked in the same direction he had seen Drew look. There were still a few church members up toward the church, but no one seemed to have noticed the sound of the struggle there inside the house.

Will crossed the room again and looked down on Drew. The man’s chest was moving almost imperceptibly beneath his shirt, and his head lay to the side. Will bent now and lifted his hat from where it had fallen on the floor and squared it atop his head. He wished there had been time to reason with the man. He wished there had been more to say. He watched the movements of the chest. Drew had given him no other option and though Will had hoped they might just walk out of here, Will knew now that the only way he was going to get Drew up the hill and off the Eden’s Gate property was to carry the smaller man across his shoulder.

Taking a knife from the kitchen, Will went from room to room cutting the cords from any electrical appliance or lamp he could find. He came back into the living room and trussed Drew’s ankles together then his wrists behind his back. When he was done he rolled Drew on his side and, using the same kitchen knife, cut material from the couch then folded it and stuffed it down into the man’s mouth.

Drew was beginning to come awake so he brought up the last bit of electrical cord and wrapped it tight around the back of Drew’s head and mouth, and then tied the gag in place. When he stood again, he could see Drew’s eyes had begun to flutter and as Will watched, he came awake and tried to free himself from the wrappings of the cords.

Will stepped away again. He could hear the man fighting it and he could hear his voice as he tried to speak and the muted call of his scream as he tried to free himself. Will didn’t pay him any mind. Will could feel the fresh marks Drew had left on him, the nails that had gouged his skin, both across his forearm and across his face. Will also knew that one side of his face had begun to swell, most likely beginning to discolor from the punches that had landed on his cheek and neck.

When he looked out the window he saw the same things he’d seen before, but this time he looked toward the building in which Mary May was being kept. He watched the far trees and he thought about the mile or so between Eden’s Gate and where Jerome was waiting. Will wondered now about Mary May and if he had done the right thing listening to her.

He came away from the window and without even pausing to speak to Drew, Will bent and lifted the man up and over his shoulder. Will guessed he weighed around a hundred and forty pounds and the weight of that first step nearly stopped Will in his tracks, but the next step felt a little better, and the step after was a little easier. He had carried full-grown bucks that weighed the same as Drew, but they had not been alive and they had not been fighting and Will now purposefully knocked Drew’s head twice against the jam of the back door as they both went through.

“Don’t fuck around,” Will said, keeping his voice low. “I told Mary May I was getting you out of here and I’m going to do it. But we’re going to get your sister first because you’re heavy as fuck and I could use a hand.”

He hadn’t gone more than fifty feet when he turned and looked out between the houses to the road. Holly was standing there and it was as if her feet had been nailed right there in place. Her mouth was open like she was about to scream and her eyes were on him where he stood, Drew up over his shoulder, the rifle over the other, the .38 down the front of Will’s pants, and the blood and bruises showing on his face and arms.

For a second he thought to tell her it wasn’t what it looked like. But he knew it was exactly what it looked like. And just as she was about to take a step toward him, or to run screaming up the road to the church or to the guards with their automatic rifles, Will turned and ran, still carrying Drew atop his shoulder.

MARY MAY WAS COMING BACK INTO HERSELF. SHE HAD BEEN washed far out to sea and her head swam, then dived, and for a very long time it was like she was not within herself at all but floating somewhere in the deep below.

Now she began to feel the pressure on her chest. She smelled the alcohol John had used to wash her. The sting, almost like an electric current vibrating across her breastplate. John took the needle back, and now he leaned and wiped a rag across her chest then stood looking down upon her.

He sat again on the stool. She blinked then blinked again and tried to wash the haze from the surface of her eyeballs but whatever it was it seemed not to wash at all and she saw him lean again and place the needle to her skin. When she looked down she could see the tattoo was halfway done, the black ink showing on her skin and the raised lettering swollen and red around the edges.

“I’m glad we have this time alone together,” John said. “I like to have time alone with all I mark.”

She watched him shift atop the stool then run the rag across her chest again. There was blood seen there amid the ink and her head swooned a moment then recovered.

He began to work again, and she felt him move the needle down then bring it up again as he formed the letter V.

“Sometimes Bliss works to hold you inside your head,” he said. “I’ve seen it do strange things to people. I’ve seen them hallucinate, and to disappear within the high. There is a common experience that they all tell me about afterwards, and that is of them looking up from down below. They are looking down a long path, or they are looking up as if from out of a well and if they can make it to the top they can make it back. But many have said to me they feared they might never make it.” He ran the needle down the V again then brought it back up again. “You will make it, Mary May. I can see that in you. I can see you will be fine. And once you realize your sin. Once you see how it has been brought forth onto your skin, you will understand it better and you will come and ask for it to be severed from the body.”

He bent and pressed the needle into her once again. He had started on the Y. The pain she felt was more acute and she looked around the room now and began to remember the reason she was even kneeling here. Her brother Drew had set this up. She thought of him now. She thought of Will. She wondered where they were. She wondered whether Will was coming for her.

There was pain now like she had not felt before. A dull, almost everlasting pain that seemed to hover across the top of her breast and to slip down and wrap itself around her bones. She turned and looked down on the needle, and she saw the word had taken shape. ENVY. Red and swollen was the word and her own blood rose red from among the black.

“Almost done,” John said. He moved back again and wiped the cloth across her chest. He leaned outward and whistled in self-congratulation at his work. She looked again. The letters were two inches high and they spanned the center of her upper chest.

He wiped her again. Then, after appraising her a moment, he bent and pushed the needle once more across the wording, tracing each letter as he went. Tears were forming in her eyes and now she began to think of her hands and of her feet and there was a desire in her to get away, far, far away from here. Will had told her not to trust John. He had told her she might need to run and to get away. But he had also said he would come for her and she looked now to the door behind which John had placed his stool. The door was open and though she wanted Will and her brother to appear there they did not. She was still watching the hallway beyond when she began to hear the siren. Now, pausing in his work, John’s head turned to better hear the siren, too. He stood and looked about, running his eyes out on the hallway and the place where the siren seemed to grow only louder.

He took a step out, and he was standing there in the hallway now. Mary May looked down at her chest. The letters were bleeding and as she tried to stand she faltered and had to reach a hand out and support herself with the stool. She remembered now about the knife tucked away beneath her calf and she bent and put a hand to the floor and, almost in disbelief, pulled up the knife and held it in her hand.

She could barely get her feet beneath her, but she knew she had to. She had to run. She had to find her brother and she knew now almost without a doubt that whatever Will had tried to do, escape or find her brother, he had failed at one or maybe even both. She put a hand out, tried for balance. John had disappeared, and she looked now to the open door. She tried to get one foot in front of the other, but both her feet seemed to be made of gelatin and her legs felt as wobbly as rubber bands.

It was as she tried to get her feet together that she kicked the vial of powder and saw it roll and then come to a stop at the edge of the room where the wall came down and met the floor. She stumbled toward it. Each movement pulling at her freshly tattooed skin. Her chest from her breasts to her neck felt like it was afire but she kept moving, keeping her eye ahead and on the little vial that now might offer her the only chance she had.

She came to the wall as if she had not expected to come to it so soon. She hit hard and slid, her one open hand bracing for the floor. In her other hand, she held the knife and now as she came to a rest, she moved her fingers outward and found the vial and brought it to her teeth. It was stoppered with a rubber cork and she bit at it then spit the cork away.

The siren was still blaring overhead, but she could hear between its howling roll that there were footsteps coming closer. She pushed herself up, and using the wall to steady herself she came to the door just as John returned.

“Where are you going?” he said. He was smiling, as if this were all some game she’d made for them, the siren blaring and the grin across his face.

The smile ended as soon as he saw the knife she was holding in her hand and, caught off guard, he took a step away. She jumped and landed on him, bringing him to the floor. She held the knife in one unsteady hand. For a moment only she thought to use it. But that moment passed almost as fast as it had come. Instead she bent and with her other hand she dumped the powder out, shaking it over him and across his mouth and nostrils. She watched the capillaries in his eyes bloom and expand, as if a star had burst suddenly into stardust and thrown itself across the sky.

She pushed away and rose now, running on legs that felt like rubber for the doorway far ahead.

WILL HAD TIME ONLY TO REACH THE HOUSE THEN THROW DREW inside before he heard the siren. The whoop of it like some air raid signal Will had only heard long ago as a kid.

He left Drew to sit there with his bound legs across the back hallway floor, his spine against the wall. The house was the same as he had left it, and he crossed now and went again to the window and parted the shades. Out on the road he could see church members moving but they had, at least not yet, figured out which way the threat was coming from. Will turned and looked toward the guards far down at the gate. He saw that two remained and the other two were advancing up the road now, moving toward him.

When Will turned back again, he could see Holly there in the middle of the road. She had likely been the one to sound the alarm and he had to give it to her in some way, she had seen what was going on with him, maybe before Will had seen it himself. Now, as he watched her, he saw her point back to the place she had seen him and Drew last, then she pointed roughly in his direction, signaling which way he’d gone.

“Fuck,” Will said. He let the shades fall and went back through the house and stared down at Drew, and it seemed like Drew was laughing at him. “I’m not dead yet,” Will said.

He took the .38 from his waist, then spun the cylinder and looked in on the bullets. Then he put the gun back in his pants and crossed back through the house. He had seen propane tanks in one place or another on the property. He went to the stove and turned the dial on the range then watched the flame bloom red before turning blue.

He looked around with a wildness and he had to tell himself to calm his nerves and rein himself in a bit. He had to tell himself he was going to get out of here, that it wasn’t over yet. He left the flame going on the range, and he turned and started to go through the cupboards and all the drawers. He knew these people, and he knew their minds, their basic values.

When he came to the emergency candles he brought one up and looked it over, then he bent again and looked some more. When he found the cans of Sterno he set them on the counter. He took one from inside the packaging and pried off the top and looked at the flammable pink gelatin within. Not pausing any more he took a candle and dipped the wick through the flame then brought it to the open sterno. The flame bloomed almost purple. He looked around then brought the Sterno to the bathroom and closed the door.

He came back out of the bathroom and glancing down now he could see Drew’s mood had changed. He was watching Will now with caution. Will took the .38 out again. He flipped the safety off, and he looked from Drew to where the flame still danced atop the range. He was adding time and distance up in his head wondering how they might even make it out of the house, or even up the hill without being shot somewhere along the way.

Will went back toward the front windows then parted the shades again. He saw the guards talking to Holly. He saw her point again in the same direction. The guards stalked off, their weapons raised as they went out of sight between the houses. Will looked down at the knob of the front door and the dead bolt. He reached and flicked the bolt over and made sure it was locked.

He crossed back toward the kitchen, then he turned the flame off and looked it over. He looked back toward the bathroom door and Drew, Drew tracking Will’s every movement. Will turned the knob again on the range. He heard the gas then the click as it caught fire. He tried to blow it out, but it only made the flames dance and move. After a couple seconds of experimenting one way or another with the gas he had still not been able to turn off the flame.

He looked back toward the rear door, and he now saw the shape of one of the guards pass across the curtained window. Will turned and saw out front the other guard approaching, his shape seen across the diffuse curtains Will had parted earlier. Likely they were going house to house and now they had come to this one.

Will turned and looked on the flame again. It was pale and small no matter what he did to it. Turned it up or turned it all the way down, he still did not have what he was looking for. Knowing this, and knowing he was likely dead one way or another, he turned the range all the way down and put a hand on either side of the oven and pulled it out. The sound was loud and each inch he gained seemed to him like a shot fired or a flare launched high into the air that said, here I am.

When he got the oven far enough away from the wall he mounted the counter as quickly as he could and, getting his back to the wall above and his feet braced against the rear paneling of the oven, he pushed. The sound now was unavoidable. Loud as could be. He pushed as hard as he could possibly push and the oven went over and crashed across the floor. He could smell gas. And looking down he saw where the hose had come loose from the wall, and he could hear the hiss of it there in the room with him.

He came down off the counter and crossed to the back door. He saw the shape of the guard in the window and without pausing opened up the door and saw the guard swinging the barrel of his AR-15 machine gun up. Will grabbed it just as the man pulled the trigger, a series of bullets going into the wall just to the right of Will’s hip and leg. Will felt the warm barrel in his hand, and he pulled the man forward into the house where he now fell across Drew’s outstretched legs. Before the guard could turn or get the machine gun around, Will had already taken the .38 from his belt and he struck the man hard across the back of his head and watched his body flatten and go limp.

At the front door, the other guard was now trying the knob. Will could see the mechanism turning then the door rattling as he tried to get the door to open. Will fired one shot into the door at about head level. He heard the guard swear and dive into the gravel beyond, but Will did not think he’d hit him.

Will looked the first guard over, but decided there was no time to try and wrestle the strap of the AR-15 off his shoulder and from underneath his now-unconscious body. Instead, Will lifted Drew up and went out through the rear door of the house and into the open beyond. He had only begun to smell the gas, and now as he came into the open land outside the house he felt almost as if he wore it like a cape around his neck, dragging it forth upon the world.

He had replaced the .38 in the waist of his pants, and he ran with his two hands holding tight to Drew’s legs, just behind the knees, while Drew bounced and moaned, riding on his belly across Will’s shoulder. On his other shoulder Will still carried his rifle, and he ran with a labored gait from the back of one house to the next much the same way he had threaded his way among them earlier.

He could hear the siren now louder than it had sounded in the house. He made it nearly halfway to the church, when a spray of automatic gunfire tore up the earth beside his feet then thudded in a line across the wood of the nearest house. He did not even turn to look for who had fired on him before he cut and went through the passageway between two houses then came to a stop at the far edge.

Drew was heavier than Will had thought and he could not move as he had wanted to. He paused and looked around the gravel roadway at the members of Eden’s Gate that had converged farther down, and he knew he could not run fast enough to get away. He was waiting on that house to blow and it felt like an eternity had passed. He wondered if somehow they had managed to stop the gas, or if they had found the Sterno behind the closed bathroom door. Behind him, he saw now the shadows of three gunmen approaching the place where he’d cut and disappeared between the houses. The sun was behind them. He could see their shapes and he could see the long barrels they carried that were either machine guns or those of shotguns.

He watched their figures only long enough to understand that he could not be there when they arrived, and now, taking a quick look out on the gravel drive again, he sprinted as fast as possible out and up the road toward the church ahead. It was high ground and he knew if he could reach it and get his rifle from his shoulder he might have some advantage over those below who had been summoned by the siren and the sound of gunfire.

He reached the church just as he saw the three gunmen come around the corner and move after him up the road. Without even thinking about it he threw Drew to the ground as soon as they had cover. He came back around to the corner of the church and flicked the safety forward then leveled the rifle and took his shot. He shot the first man just above his chest. Will watched the bullet hit him in the right collarbone, and then he watched the blood mist and carry on the breeze as the bullet moved through him and exited somewhere past his shoulder blade. He was down in the gravel as soon as Will shucked the casing then pushed the bolt forward again, his eye looking down the scope.

He could hear the man’s cry and he could hear the other men calling to him, but no one dared move to get him from where they’d dove themselves as soon as Will had fired. Down the gravel road Will could see many had hidden in among the houses. He watched the shadows of their movements and, as he ran the scope across the road, he watched a group of five break cover from one house, dashing for another. He shot at them, but he put the bullet low and watched it dig in among the dirt. The church members diving to the ground then scrambling up on hands and knees as they either went back the way they’d come or reached the protection of the next nearest house.

He shucked the bullet casing and loaded the chamber anew. Down in the road the man was crying for someone to come get him. He managed now to roll and get one arm beneath him, dragging himself across the road. The dirt and gravel beneath appeared slick and dark from the blood pouring from his back and front. Will shot at him again and watched him startle. The bullet had gone wide, but Will had placed it a foot in front of him, in the direction he had been going. The man was now too scared to move as he resigned himself to simply lying there, moaning and calling for his friends.

Will shucked the shell casing then, and as he loaded in another bullet, he saw first the shadow of the big man coming around the corner of the church, then the man himself. Will swung the Remington, but it was too late and the big man caught it in his hands and forced it back down upon Will. The rifle held crossways in his hands and the big man pressing the forestock now across Will’s windpipe as both big man and Will went to the ground in a tumble.

Will tried to kick out, but his legs and knees landed in awkward places. The man was at least a half foot taller than Will and probably had fifty pounds on him. And as Will fought to free himself he could feel the man was muscle and sinew and not much else. With his hands Will tried to push the rifle up off his throat, but it was like trying to bench press several hundred pounds and the most he could get was a half inch before the man forced the rifle down again.

Will started to lose consciousness. He could see the black beginning to spot his vision. His mind swooned and then for a moment Will’s sight went totally out, but he managed to overcome it. He pushed up on the rifle and felt the man rise a little. Will was left for a second to gasp at the air before the big man put his full weight down atop Will’s throat again. The smell of the big man’s breath in Will’s face and the teeth of the man seen bared with the effort of keeping Will down against the ground.

Will could still hear the man in the road calling for his friends, but it was growing fainter now, and Will was not sure if that was because the man was bleeding out, or if it was that Will himself was about to die, suffocated with his own rifle.

When the big man arched his back up, calling out in pain, his face suddenly seen as a web of vein and muscle tissue, Will could only roll and cough, gasping now to get more oxygen within his lungs. The rifle was turned loose now from the man’s hands and as Will rolled and tried to master himself, he watched the big man turn and saw his own hunting knife there in the man’s lower back. Will turned his head and saw Mary May now stepping backwards as the big man swiveled, clawing for the knife.

He was going after Mary May now and he grasped for the knife and missed then grasped for it again. Finally, on his third try, he got his fingers on the hilt and pulled it from his own back, while at the same time making a sound Will had only heard a few times and never from a man. It was animal and tortured and in it Will heard the anger and the hatred building now into certain violence. Mary May backed up even more and the big man advanced upon her, Will’s knife still within his hand.

When Will brought the rifle up and fired, the shot went straight, digging up through the man’s back ribs and exiting through the heart. He fell over almost immediately, turning slightly as he went. And when he landed there was a stillness seen in the body suggesting he would never move again.

Mary May bent down and got the knife and came forward toward Will. He could see the blood spatter on her face and on her clothes. Her collar was open almost all the way down her chest and Will saw how the blood ran from the fresh tattoo then disappeared in the cleavage formed by her bra. Will coughed and still he could not get the oxygen he needed. They were in rough shape, both of them.

Down on the road the man had stopped calling for his friends, but there was the sound now of footsteps making their way up toward them. Will bent and drew the .38 from his waist, then going to the corner of the church again, he fired twice, aiming the gun barrel down the small hill. He snuck his head out for a second and saw how his pursuers had scattered once again and soon were all back in hiding. Will simply looked on the place the man had been, and he saw that they had come and gotten him, and that he might be somewhere now getting the medical assistance he would need.

When Will looked back at Mary May she was waiting for him, kneeling over her brother and looking back at Will. Will stumbled over. He felt weak, but every breath he took seemed to give him new strength. As he moved toward her, he bent and picked up the rifle from the ground then loaded new cartridges from his pockets.

“Where’s John?” Will asked. It was the first thing he said to her and he felt badly that it was not to ask how she was, but he knew they simply did not have the time. She was alive and keeping her that way was what now mattered most.

“Drugged,” she said. “But I heard others back there and I know they’re coming. The siren is even louder out on the road than it is back here.”

Will looked past her to the stand of trees that surrounded the compound. He thought of the hundreds of tattoos he’d seen in that room. He had seen many people, but he had not seen hundreds. He spun and went to the corner of the church again and fired on the first thing he saw; a window in a house halfway down the road shattered then fell inward from its frame.

When he came back to Mary May he reached down and took the knife from off the ground where she had left it. He wiped the blood on his shirt then stuck it back down within his sheath. Next, he brought up the .38 and handed it over to her. “Three shots left,” he said, watching her stand and then take one wobbly step toward him.

“Jerome is still waiting for us?” she asked. She turned slightly and looked in the direction of the far bluff.

“You can barely walk,” Will said. “Can you make it?”

“I have to.”

He looked her over. Her eyes were not tracking right and she was covered in her own blood and the blood of the man Will had shot. “You’ll make it,” Will said. He bent low to pick Drew up off the ground. Will used his legs and hefted Drew upward, feeling the man try and fight against the electrical cords that bound him, and which held the gag about his mouth. Paying little notice to Drew and still high on the adrenaline that had flooded his system, Will told Mary May to go as straight as she could and look for the big nurse log by the roadside. “Jerome will be there.”

“Why tell me that?”

“Because you’re going to need to find him and you’re going to need to tell him how to find us.” Will went to the corner of the church now and with Drew still over his shoulder he peaked out around the edge and several guns opened up on him immediately.

Will came cautiously back to where Mary May had flattened herself to the side of the church. “Go,” Will said. “They’ve seen me and they’ve seen your brother. They don’t know you’re up here and they don’t know which way you’re going. Tell Jerome we’ll be a mile down on the road as he heads toward the state highway.”

She looked at him like she didn’t think any of this was a good idea and Will knew she was right. It wasn’t a good idea. But he knew, too, it was better than anything else they had.

“Go,” he said.

MARY MAY WAS ALONE. SHE HAD COME AROUND THE BACK OF the church then gone into the trees, running in the direction Will had pointed her. But only about a hundred yards in, with the compound still clearly seen behind her through the tall pines, she began to hear shooting and the yelling of men and women. When she turned, locating first the edge of the compound, then running her eyes across the landscape, she saw the houses farther on. The front of the church was visible as well, with the steeple rising above, and it was there that she saw most of the Eden’s Gate people gathered. And seeing them she dropped and lay in the grass that grew everywhere between the trees.

They were a hundred yards away and though Mary May did not know where they had come from, she could see a great many of them. A few trucks were there, when before there had been none. And many of the people who had arrived carried rifles and guns and were dressed in flak jackets, outfitted as if they meant to go to war.

She watched and saw several turn and move away from her in the direction Will had gone. Soon after she heard gunfire, then farther out the dissonant return of Will’s rifle, quickly firing over and over again. For the fifth or sixth time, she thought to turn and go back toward him, but she knew there was little she might do.

She carried with her the .38 revolver, three shots left within the cylinder. She looked down at her father’s gun. She knew if Will and Drew were to make it out of there and to the road that ran farther up along the bluff, she was going to need to make it first to Jerome. If Will came out on that road and Jerome was not there, or Will even had to wait a minute, it would not take long for Eden’s Gate to surround and quickly overpower him. Like her, Will’s advantage only lasted as long as he kept moving. And if she didn’t move—if she didn’t run, and run now—Mary May, Will, Jerome, and possibly even her brother, Drew, were all as good as dead.

She started running, moving away from the lake in the way Will had told her to go. Any effect of the drug was gone now, either sweated from her system or expunged by her own adrenaline. She was nearly at the dense trees that climbed the bluff when the first bullet round hit the nearest trunk. She turned only briefly and saw the ten or so members of Eden’s Gate advancing toward her, and who had no doubt seen her running straight on toward the bluff and the road above that she hoped to use for her escape.

By the time she came to the incline of the hill and started to climb, the bullets from six or seven guns were digging up the earth all around her and the trees were coming apart in a hail of wood chips and falling branches. But then in an instant all the gunfire and the sound of the bullets digging up the woods completely stopped, and for a half second, she thought the world had been sucked up and away into the vortex of some tornado that had rendered the world mute.

The light of the explosion hit her first, followed closely by the sound and Mary May turned to see the mushroom cloud expanding, and moving ever higher there above the Eden’s Gate compound. She’d been scrambling up the hillside with her hands outstretched on the incline and her feet digging beneath her as she climbed. She looked back down the way she’d come and saw between the thin pines below a new column of smoke rising to the sky. She moved over until she could see what was left of a house. Just a dark black patch in the otherwise brown and green expanse below. Will had told her nothing of a house exploding and for longer than she should have, she stared at the place the house had been and wondered now whether Will and Drew in some way had been within.

She had little time to dwell on any of this. She could not explain what had happened and though she was worried, she had to believe Will and Drew had not doubled back somehow and made a final stand within the house. Looking now, she saw several of the church members had followed her into the forest and while they had turned, taking in this new disaster, Mary May cut across the slope, moving with the swiftness of some mountain animal. And now as she moved up she could see she’d increased her lead as the slope began to round.

The sun was still out, but it had begun to lower toward the horizon and the chill of the place could be felt now against her skin. The shirt John had ripped down the middle hung open and the exposed skin of her chest was covered in a collection of sweat, blood, ink, and the dirt of her own escape. Sometimes she moved fully upright, but mostly she had climbed with her hands outstretched, the gun wedged down the back of her pants as she went.

She chanced one more look back the way she’d come, letting her vision pan across the slope. Nothing could be seen but the wavering flow of wind as it moved through the branches above. No sound of rocks cut loose by those that followed her. No gunshots. No shouts or voices. The place seemed eerily normal to her, and it was this sense of normality among the more current chaos that frightened her most. She took one last look back across the path she’d made, then moved, hands outward on the slope again. All the while she thought that if she’d heard just one shot fired far out there in this landscape of forest and lakeshore, she might have felt some relief for Will or for her brother, but that she had not heard anything at all now scared her more than all that had come before.

SHE CAME OVER THE TOP OF THE HILLSIDE WITH A CHILL SWEAT across her brow and down along her exposed clavicle. Through the trees she saw the road ahead. She pushed herself up and went into a full run. She was midway to the road when she saw Jerome. He was just south of where she’d thought he’d be, closer even than she’d hoped.

Jerome met her halfway and she fell against him and he held her for only a moment before turning her toward the ancient Oldsmobile. “Where’s Will?” he asked. He looked now to the trees and forest she had herself run from. “He isn’t with you?”

They reached the car and she let him help her with the door then help her to sit within. She was breathing hard and the sweat felt cool on her skin now in a way it hadn’t before.

“What about Will? I heard the explosion. I came out to the edge of the hill but I couldn’t see anything but smoke rising up above the trees. Is he okay?”

This was a hard question for her. She hadn’t had time to process it, she hadn’t had much more of a thought in her head than to simply escape. Run. Climb. Get the fuck out of there. But now, with Jerome waiting on her she did not know what to say. She looked back toward the forest. She almost wanted to see Will and her brother there. Will making his own escape, running, trying to find them where they sat. But no one was there. Just the wind through the trees—just the emptiness of the forest as it stared back at her. “I’m not sure Will made it,” Mary May said, her eyes still on the forest.

“He’s dead?”

“I don’t know.” She turned away from the forest. She looked to Jerome. She looked on the road ahead. “We need to go,” she said. “We need to get out of here before we can’t get out of here at all.”

He looked at her, and then he closed the door. He came around the front of the car then pulled his own door open and sat in the driver’s seat. He leaned forward and cranked the engine.

“I told Will to get my brother,” Mary May said. “But we couldn’t all get out together. Will and Drew went one way and I went the other. Will said they’d meet us down the road. But I’m just not sure if they made it.” She could feel her voice beginning to break a little at the edges. This—being in Jerome’s car—was the first time in nearly a day she had had a chance simply to sit and to reflect on her own existence. To realize how very, very dangerous Eden’s Gate had become.

Jerome hit the gas and they started down the double track. She looked out on the road ahead then turned and looked back at the place where she’d come up over the hill. She wondered about her brother and she wondered about Will and whether either of them were still alive.

WILL HAD TOLD HER “GO” AND HE’D WATCHED MARY MAY TURN and run toward the stand of trees and that was the last he saw of her.

He held Drew up over his shoulder and the man’s weight alone was almost enough to buckle Will at the knees. But he thought now, you got yourself into this, said you’d go get the brother like a fool. Now what?

He set out in a heavy trot, his boots scuffing across the dirt as he cut down toward the rolling lands just beyond the lake. He came off the small hill where the church sat and ran on into the lowlands, scraped by glacial flows a few thousand years before, but now populated by ferns and trees. Ahead, through the sparse growth of forest he saw where the hillside began, moving unevenly up toward the high bluff and the road that ran atop it, the feel of the rifle swinging on the strap over his shoulder, the weight of Drew upon his other side. No one shot at him or followed him and, still moving, he turned slightly to the side and looked back at the church and Eden’s Gate and he wondered why.

The sound of the trucks froze him right there in place. He turned fully now and looked back toward the compound. Five trucks were rolling in past the gate, the dust moving off them as they went. And as Will watched he knew without a doubt that everything he’d gone through already that day had nothing on what was now approaching.

The trucks came up the drive, winding their way past the houses. Will was a couple hundred yards from the church, standing in the forested flatlands that came up from the lake, his view of the place seen through stands of pine, but the pine trunks were not dense enough to stop the trucks if they decided to turn and go for him.

Ahead, in the direction he needed to go, there was another quarter mile or so before he would reach the protection of the bluff. He was exposed and though he had felt isolated and alone when he had come down from the church and moved past the preliminary makings of the perimeter fence, a feeling of desperate solitude now seemed to emanate up from within his marrow.

Working quickly, Will dropped Drew to the ground then raised the rifle and put the lens to his eye. He could see the trucks still coming, they had almost reached the church. Many Eden’s Gate members were waiting there and as Will moved the rifle scope to the people, Holly and a few others he recognized, he saw all of them were pointing out across the compound and into the trees to the place he now stood looking back.

He swung the rifle up then bent and grasped Drew and put him back up over his shoulder. The man struggled for a moment but Will simply set off across the lowlands as fast as he could go, jostling Drew across his shoulder as he went. The first shot was heard as it buzzed past a few feet above his head. The next went wide and he saw it dig into a pine trunk to his left. Will cut and moved, veering across the land, trying to get as much forest between him and those who were shooting at him.

When he looked back he could see all five trucks had stopped right there next to the church and men had begun to move out and drop from the truck beds. He watched a distant rifle flare and he heard the shot. The bullet cut across the air a foot in front of him. They had a man like him up there, with a scope and hunting rifle, and Will knew now it was only a matter of time before a shot went true.

Will ran on. He dropped into a small depression between two rolling hills that held a dry creek at the bottom, and when he came back up the opposite rise and turned to look toward the church only two trucks were now parked there. Dust hung in the air and he knew almost without a doubt that the other three trucks were coming for him.

He gained the rise just as another bullet tore up the earth beside his foot, the dirt spraying high across his arm and side. He knew he was going to lose this one. He knew the bullets were getting closer. He came to the top of the rise and he went down the opposite side but he stopped and looked behind him. A bullet cut the air and Will dropped to the ground and with a shout from beneath the gag, Drew went rolling away from him and lay sideways down the hill, still struggling against the cording that wrapped his wrists and ankles.

Will could hear the trucks closing in on him, the sound of gravel and dirt echoing across the nearby lake and in among the trees. He kept his eyes forward. He had good cover here, but he knew it would not last if they caught him and surrounded him where he lay. Looking ahead he heard the engines working up the rise that stretched away from the compound. Then suddenly he saw them. They came into view moving as fast as possible, slowed only by the trees they had to weave among.

For a second all three of the trucks broke into the open, crossing a barren patch of meadow within the forest. Will watched them come. He was slightly above them and from time to time he lost them behind the trunks of pine and underbrush. The drivers navigated across the uneven ground and the engines raced as they came into the open and gunned their motors across the open meadow. From back atop the small hill where the church sat another rifle flare was seen. The bullet hit just before him, spraying dirt and bits of rock upward in the air.

He had no time. He had nothing but a sick feeling in his stomach that heralded the coming of his own destruction. Another bullet hit and sprayed him again with dirt. He looked to where the man was standing in the bed of one of the two remaining trucks by the church. He stood there with the rifle braced up over the roof of the cab and Will could see the glint of the scope there in the light of the lowering sun.

Will brought his own rifle around. He estimated there was now almost a quarter mile between this man and him. He looked at the way the nearby grass was moving, he looked at the trunks between him and the church. He measured the space between and the crosswind. He allowed for drop and even offered up a prayer. He put the scope to his eyes now and he thought if there is one thing you do right today, let this be it.

The rifle jumped and Will had time only to settle the scope back on his eye as he watched the man atop the truck buckle back and fall away.

Now the trucks had come across the little meadow and Will watched them through the scope, the sound of the engines racing and the men in the passenger seats pointing on ahead and one now moving up and out of the open window, assault rifle in hand as the truck bore down on Will. Less than a thousand feet of space now to close.

Will worked the bolt. Then he took aim through the trunks of pines that made up the forest between him and them. He fired. He worked the bolt again. He kept firing from the prone position there atop the little rise and he watched the bullets spark and skip across the metal of hoods and siding. He watched the windshield crack and spider web on the nearest truck. He worked the bolt till there were no cartridges left to fire and the casings lay about him in the grass, hot from within the chamber.

The trucks were eating up the land, navigating both forest floor and the tree trunks that grew everywhere about. Will dug in his pockets and brought the last of his .308 cartridges up. Some fell and were lost there among the low vegetation, mixing in among the spent casings and blades of grass. He loaded and slammed the bolt forward, and he was firing again, rapidly, working through the cartridges as fast as they would fire.

He took the mirror from one truck, flattened out one tire and watched the driver fight to keep control, the truck soon sliding and going over, rolling down an incline and then out of sight. Will shot and fired again, the bullet digging through the engine block of another truck, and the truck now puttering to a stop. Will was firing even as the men dove and moved for cover. He was near out of bullets by the time the third truck had come within a hundred yards. Will stood now and ran, knowing if he did not move they would soon be on him.

He reached Drew and, with the adrenaline still coursing, Will brought Drew up over his shoulder and he pumped up the rise beyond with his thighs feeling like they had caught on fire. It was then, almost as the truck was on them, that the little house blew, the light seen in the forest boughs, and the sound following soon after.

Will turned. He had thought that the house would not go. He had thought that if it was to go that the gas would have ignited already. And that the little house was not there and the cloud of fire and smoke now rose above it all was to him almost as much of a shock as he could now see it was to those back at Eden’s Gate and to the remaining men who followed him in the truck.

The last truck veered. He watched the driver shift and look behind as if the fireball might be heading out across the land to get them. Will paused only for a second, recognizing this was the time he needed to make the bluff and the dense trees and forest that clung to the rocks there.

He took off running again. His feet feeling like two pieces of stone pulled along behind his body. His heart felt inside his chest like it was pumping something that was half acid through his bloodstream. And though he had been cutting a fairly straight path before, he moved down from atop the nearest rise and went running in the depression, keeping hidden from the truck behind, following the curve between the two rises that he could see now would lead him directly to the bluff.

He reached the bluff in the same moment the truck came blaring over the edge of the rise, the engine heard slipping down through the gears as the driver pulled the wheel around. Tires and engine ate up the same tracks Will had left only moments before as he had cut his own path across the sparse forest floor. Drew grunted with each step as Will labored toward the steep incline of the bluff, the truck coming on fast, running over the thin underbrush that grew everywhere beneath the trees.

The gunman in the passenger seat now leaned out and began firing a submachine gun from the window. The bullets raking through the trees. Will slipped then righted himself, one hand holding tight to Drew’s legs and the other held out against the hillside. He was trying now to move upwards on the slope, and he fell beneath his weight and that of Drew’s. He slipped nearly five feet before he could get his toes dug in somewhere and then reach and try to stop Drew who had come rolling after him.

Now Will turned and brought the rifle around. He saw the truck pull sideways down below, the gunman in the passenger seat still. Will put the scope on him and fired. The shot caught the man in the right bicep. He spun a bit with the force then fell out of the door, scrambling now to get around the back of the bed and find some cover.

Both driver and passenger wore flak jackets and Will sighted what he could, seeing how each had taken up a place behind the body of the truck. He had only one cartridge left and he levered it down within the chamber. He was exposed there on the hillside. He had wedged his heels into the loose soil and dried pine needles that lay everywhere beneath the trees, and he braced his back against Drew.

When the submachine gun came up over the body of the truck and fired wildly into the trees and shrubs about them, Will watched through the scope, waiting as the man came into view. Will fired just as the man turned to run for the trees and the slope on which he sat. The bullet entered the side of the man’s ribs, just between the two plates within the vest. The man went down immediately and the gun lay a foot ahead of him in the grass, but he did not move to get it and as Will put the scope across him, he could see the man’s unmoving eyes.

There were no bullets left and Will gave the truck and the driver who hid behind it one last look before he moved and brought Drew to his feet. Drew stood awkwardly on the slope. Now, weak as he was from carrying Drew this far, Will used that same slope to get a little below Drew and placed his shoulder into Drew’s stomach and bent and lifted. He felt his muscles fighting to keep their hold as he went up the hill again, hoping for both their sakes that Mary May had made it to Jerome.

He was almost at the top of the bluff when he looked behind and saw the driver now climbing upward through the trees. The driver, like all the rest, wore a protective vest and Will could see the butt of a shotgun where it emerged above his shoulder. The gun bobbing along behind him as he climbed.

Will had nothing left. He looked ahead of him through the trees. A low spine of rock ran atop the bluff and beyond. Looking past the smooth surface of rock—seen between shrubs and trees—there were patches of dirt and gravel Will thought might be the road. He moved on, his own heart and the scuff of his boots across the ground the only thing to hear. He was running on empty and he knew it. No sweat now felt across his skin and a desperate need felt in the bowels of his stomach and on his tongue for liquid. Each footfall he took feeling like it would be his last.

He came to the top of the rock. He could see now the double track of the road about fifty feet on, down a little gully and across an opening in the trees. Will looked behind him. The driver could not be seen and the idea now of even trying to bring Drew down the gully to where the road sat below was like trying to convince him to climb Everest without rope or oxygen of any kind.

Will slumped and brought his knees down upon the earth. He levered Drew off onto the ground and now he straightened. The effort of carrying Drew through the forest and up the bluff felt as if it had compounded and fused each of Will’s vertebrae into a rigid growth of bone. Not wanting to ever lift the man again, Will met Drew’s waiting eyes then put a foot out and sent the man rolling down the incline toward the road and the bottom of the gully where Will could see in wetter months a stream would flow.

Will was up again just as he saw the driver come through the trees a couple hundred feet behind. Without another thought, Will went over the side and down, sending bits of rock and pebble out ahead of him as he went. At the bottom, he wrestled the gun from his shoulder then scrambled upward toward a gnarled growth of tree roots that had come exposed at one point from the soil. Climbing up, he wedged himself as far under the grip of these roots as possible. With the rifle off his shoulder and no bullets to load it with, Will now took the hunting knife from his belt. He held it in his hand and looked down toward the bottom of the gully where Drew lay watching him.

There was a sound now of the driver coming through the trees. Will heard how his steps changed as he moved from the forest floor onto the smoothness of the rock. Will leaned out a little. He could see the man move cautiously to the edge of rock, the shotgun now held before him as his eyes caught sight of Drew there at the bottom of the incline. The driver came over the edge and down the incline, moving toward Drew.

Will waited as long as he could. The man was no more than ten feet from him now. With knife in one hand and bits of gravel and dirt held within the other palm, Will stood from his hiding place. Drew’s eyes were open wide, looking past the driver to Will, and by the time the driver caught wind of what was happening and turned Will had already thrown the dirt, blinding the driver then shoving the knife upward through his neck.

They went to the ground together. The driver making the small dying sounds that Will had come to know so well when he’d been twenty years of age and in another country far across the world. Blood welled from the windpipe of the man and the gurgle of breath could be heard as the driver struggled to fill his lungs. Will had heard this sound both from men he’d killed, and from friends who had lain dying in his arms, and he had liked it then no more than he did now.

All he’d done that day could not be changed and he felt helpless. People had died because of him, and at his hand, and though he knew it had been them or him, he could in some way still not accept it. He had thought all of this long behind him.

It came rushing at him now. Who he’d been in war and after, when he’d come home. Who he was now—who time and regret had made him. The deaths of his wife and daughter felt to him like a wound that would never close. The man he’d become because of them. The part he’d played in all of this. He couldn’t look away anymore. He couldn’t just hide and hope it all went away. He knew he was doing something now. He hoped it was enough for absolution. He hoped somehow that this was what he needed to do to earn his forgiveness from God, or from whatever being out there decided his fate one way or another. He had caused so much pain and done so little to redeem himself. He hoped this was enough.

He looked over at Drew, who was watching him in all this. In all of Will’s raw anguish. The thoughts going around in Will’s head that seemed to have exploded from out of the depths of his mind and then seeped like oil through every crevice. He wondered if he was losing it. He was so tired. So very tired and once more he felt something move inside of him and come loose and he coughed it up and stood looking at it on the ground, a clot of blood that was the size and shape of a golf ball. An ulcer surely grown in his stomach—a physical manifestation of his own fears and doubts concerning Eden’s Gate.

He looked at Drew again. The man’s eyes fixed on him, a look of disgust across his face. Will’s head swam and he nearly fainted except he knew he couldn’t. It was only the sound of car tires now that kept him from passing out. Then, from somewhere down the road, he heard the racing of an engine. He took the shotgun from the man who now was dead and Will lay there with the stock braced across the man’s chest and the barrel pointed down the road. He had little will to move and he waited now to see who would come, knowing he would fight if it came down to it, that he would use each and every shell.