The Wicked (The Righteous)

by Michael Wallace

  “Don’t throw up!” Eliza cried.

  She wasn’t just worried about the added smell, but her own stomach roiled and she thought she might lose it herself. And then Madeleine retched, three times, and it was all Eliza could do to keep her own reflexes from following. Somehow, she managed.

  “I’m sorry,” Madeleine said. “Please don’t be mad.”

  Eliza waited one more long moment to make sure she had the gag reflex under control, then said, “Don’t worry about it, you couldn’t help it.”

  “There wasn’t much there, anyway. Mostly water.”

  “Come on, let’s get this cleaned up.”

  It was only one gallon overturned, thank goodness. The other two gallons of waste still had their caps on. It could have been worse. Eliza screwed on the lid with half of it still inside, then rinsed her hands with some of the drinking water. She threw the thinner mattress over the top of the mess. The smell was still overpowering.

  “That didn’t exactly work out,” Madeline said. “Unless you can think of some other way to use the mattresses.”

  “I’m tempted to make a joke about illegally removing mattress tags,” Eliza said.

  “Please don’t, aren’t we suffering enough already?”

  Eliza laughed, and felt a spark of encouragement that the other woman seemed to be waking from her stupor. “Okay, let’s get this other one down, we’ll keep thinking.”

  Her resolve stiffened. She had to get out of this cesspool.

  They were dragging the mattress with the springs back into place when someone started pushing the fridge from above. Both women froze.

  A shaft of light stabbed into the darkness. Eliza had to look away it was so bright. She caught a glimpse of Madeline cringing. Her hair was a matted, dirty tangle, and dirt and tears stained her face. The bones on her face were sharp over her pale skin, her eyes brilliant blue. Her breasts tiny, her hips angular. She looked like a filthy mannequin, stripped of clothes, impossibly slender. Only the ribs and the heaving chest spoiled the effect.

  Eliza looked back up at the light. Someone looked back at her, but the light was so glaring behind the person’s head that it left the face dark and washed out. With the light came a flood of fresh air. It was the sweetest thing she’d ever tasted.

  “Let us go, please,” she said.

  Something dropped from above and she ducked as it flew past her head. And then whoever it was pulled back and started to push the fridge back over the hole.

  “What kind of person are you?” she shouted. “This is inhuman, it’s monstrous.”

  The hole closed. They returned to darkness. To her side, Madeline sank to the ground, sobbing.

  “Stop it,” Eliza said. “You’re wasting energy, now pull yourself together.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You were with me a second ago, and I need you back.”

  “It’s no use.”

  Eliza wanted to grab Madeline, shake her, work out her own anger and frustration. She couldn’t get back at the monsters who’d thrown her down here, but the urge to punish Madeline was overwhelming. What kind of idiot came down willingly into this hell? What kind of weak, pathetic fool was she, that she thought she deserved this, sat back and passively let them starve and rape her in turns. No wonder that other girl had thrown herself off the Hoover Dam bridge. If you’re going to give up, you may as well get it over with.

  Stop it, Eliza told herself. You’re just as bad as she is. Stay calm, stop feeling sorry for yourself and figure this out.

  Eliza made her way over to Madeline. The rage had passed and she meant to grab the other woman and hold her for a few minutes, maybe share some of her own strength so they could make another attempt. But then she bumped into a plastic bag. It took her a moment to figure out that it was the object that had fallen from above. She felt the bag, then opened it to discover several pieces of bread and a jar. She opened the jar and lifted it to her nose. Peanut butter, maybe a quarter jar full.

  “What are you doing?” Madeline asked. “What’s that rustling?”

  “It’s food. That person just dropped it. Bread and a jar with a little peanut butter.”

  “It’s a trick, don’t eat it.”

  “What do you mean, poisoned?”

  “No, like a test. Whoever it was dropped me some bananas, to see if I was strong enough to resist. I almost ate them, stopped myself just in time.”

  “You mean you didn’t? Where are they?” And then Eliza remembered the smell of rotting bananas that had come out of the spilled gallon of human waste. “Wait, you didn’t. Are you out of your mind?”

  Again, she had to fight down her anger. The woman had been in the pit for days, starved, sexually abused, convinced that only strict obedience would get her out of this hell.

  She made her way to Madeline’s side, holding the bag of food. She groped until she touched the other woman’s face. “I need you to listen to me. Maybe someone dropped this to test us and maybe it’s someone trying to help. Either way, it doesn’t matter. You can eat this food, then we’ll rest a little and try again.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “You need to stop this. There’s no way to think clearly when you’re starving in a dark, filthy hole. We need to get out of here and away from these people, and then there will be time to figure things out.”

  “But—”

  Eliza needed a new tactic. “Did you know that my family has known Caleb’s family for many years?”

  “Caleb?” Madeline asked.

  “The Disciple. That was his name before he started recruiting people to his sect. I didn’t know Caleb, but I knew his family.” She thought about Gideon, lying face down and dead in the sinkhole, about Taylor Junior trying to sexually assault her before her brother Jacob came in and rescued her, and shuddered. “I knew them too well. My father once got a young golden Lab that had been house trained by Caleb’s family. I think it belonged to his older brother, Taylor Junior. They said it was defective, a biter, and were going to shoot it. My father heard and brought it home. He said, ’Whoever heard of a Lab that’s a biter? Liz, see what you can do with him.’”

  “And was it a biter?” Madeline asked, sounding interested, with the black mood lifting from her voice. “Or was your dad right?”

  “It bit my hand the first time I tried to feed it.”

  “So you had to kill it in the end, anyway.”

  “Not at all. My brother Jacob found me with the dog in the mud room. It was growling with its tail between its legs and I was frozen about five feet away, holding my hand where the dog had bit me. It hadn’t broken the skin, but I was too afraid to move. My brother looked at my hand and when he saw it wasn’t serious said, ’He’s scared, look at the poor guy.’ And then I saw that the dog was trembling, that he’d dribbled pee on the floor. His tail was between his legs. I felt sorry for him. ’Be kind and patient,’ Jacob told me, ’and that dog will be your best friend in the world.’

  “It took a week until I could come close to Lubby without him snarling and snapping his teeth. The Kimballs had given him the kind of training that means a beating for getting in the way, or shoving a dog’s nose in its poop when it makes a mess in the house. Poor thing had scars from all the bite marks of the other Kimball dogs. They’d been treated the same way and of course Lubby turned mean like all the rest. The only difference was that Lubby was dumb enough to snap at humans, too, so Elder Kimball was going to shoot him.

  Jacob was right, there was nothing wrong with him. Too much energy, of course, like a typical Lab. Eventually he got fat and lazy, also like a Lab. But he wasn’t mean or defective. Lubby turned into the biggest sweetheart you can imagine.”

  Eliza reached into the bag and pulled out a piece of bread. It was dry and stale. She pressed the bread into Madeline’s hand. “The problem is, Elder Kimball treated his sons like he treated his dogs. And just like the dogs, they turned on each other and anyone else who got too close. You take one of those bullied kid
s, someone like Caleb who suffers from mental illness, he becomes a neurotic, dangerous lunatic. They were a religious family, so his insanity comes out through rants about God.”

  Madeline ate the bread. Eliza gave her a minute, then said, “See, all you need is a little food and you’ll be fine, too.”

  “Oh, so now I’m one of the dogs in your story?”

  “You’ve got a lot of eating until you’re as fat and lazy as Lubby. Here, have some peanut butter.”

  Eliza ate a piece of bread herself, but didn’t want to stick a finger into the peanut butter, not after she’d been messing around with the spilled gallon of waste. Madeline ate until Eliza took the jar away. Eat too much and she’d make herself sick.

  After about twenty minutes, when Eliza felt a little stronger and the smell in the pit had either diminished or she’d simply grown used to it, her mind started working again. She ran through the possibilities until she came up with something that might actually work. She roused Madeleine, who had fallen asleep.

  “Wake up, we have work to do.”

  “Work?”

  “We’ve got to get busy. Here, have some more peanut butter. Lettuce, too, if you can stomach it.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking of ways to escape, of course.”

  “You still think that’s possible?” There was an edge of determination in her voice. Good.

  “Of course I do. I know this sounds incredible, but I’m not discouraged.”

  “We’re naked and starving at the bottom of a pit,” Madeline said. “You’ve got to be at least a little discouraged.”

  “I’m sure that’s what your so-called Disciple is counting on. He thinks he’ll be rid of me, that by the time I’m done, I’d be either dead or starved into submission. Sorry, that’s not going to work. I’ve been through worse.”

  “Worse? You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s true,” Eliza said. “And I learned something about myself. They can only destroy me if I submit. And I’ll never submit. You need to ask yourself the same question. Are you going to submit? Or are you going to fight?”

  Madeline was quiet for a long moment, but when she spoke, there was strength in her voice. “I’m going to fight.”

  “Good, now here’s what we do. First thing, we’re going to tear open this mattress. We need to get at the springs. Those will be our tools.”

  Chapter Nineteen:

  The Disciple and the boy entered Blister Creek through Witch’s Warts. Arriving in late afternoon, he stashed the truck in a dry irrigation ditch near the McCormick ranch. He didn’t know if McCormick had been caught up in the fraud investigation or if he’d simply taken his wives and children and fled the Church of the Anointing, but the ranch house was abandoned, the yard and fields returning to sagebrush. Tumbleweed had blown into the porch and filled it, then stacked in front and halfway down the sidewalk to the road.

  “All the better,” he said to the boy. Diego looked up at him with round eyes, impossibly large in his pinched, hungry face.

  The Disciple pulled the boy out of the truck and they crossed the dirt road and entered Witch’s Warts on foot. He carried few possessions. No food, no water, no map. Children had become lost for days inside Witch’s Warts, turned around, disoriented. Once, in the 1940s, a woman tried to flee Blister Creek by escaping through the maze of sandstone hoodoos, fins, and spires. Nobody saw her go, though it had been no secret that she wanted to escape her abusive husband. They found her coyote-gnawed body several months later, just thirty feet from the road, inside the last row of sandstone fins.

  A racer lizard sprinted away from them, leaving a set of parallel prints, bisected by a tail track like a pencil lead dragged across the sand. A moment later, a jackrabbit tore across their path. Diego flinched, and the Disciple put a quick hand on his shoulder to steady him.

  The Disciple fished out his compass, oriented himself, then figured out his bearing.

  Voices whispered in his head. Put the compass away, you won’t need it. Let us guide you, trust us.

  “I need to be sure.”

  You’ll be sure. We’ll tell you where to go.

  His brother Gideon had died in here. This was just a few months after the man had tracked him down at the trailer park in Barstow, California, west of the Mojave. Caleb—he hadn’t yet thought of himself as the Disciple—had been working at a truck stop diner, flipping pancakes and burgers for ten bucks an hour. One day, he’d come home to find Gideon sitting on the porch. An unpleasant smile crossed his face when he saw Caleb.

  “There he is, the prodigal son.”

  Caleb hadn’t been happy to see his brother. He stopped about ten feet away. “No more prodigal than you. Anyway, what are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to welcome you back to the fold.”

  “What fold? You’re not part of any fold.”

  “Of course I am. Father and I have reconciled. I’ve even come to terms with Taylor Junior.”

  “What are you talking about?” Caleb asked. Lost Boys did not reconcile with church elders. Once Elder Kimball drove his sons to St. George, that was it. You didn’t come back.

  “And now it is your turn. Father said he would forget the kitchen fire, or how you diddled your little sister.”

  “I never touched her.”

  The accusation outraged him, as it had when Father had suggested, not that he’d “diddled” anyone, but that he’d been thinking about diddling his half sisters. When Caleb had protested, vigorously, Father had given a grave nod and said, “See, this is how I know you’re unrepentant. You didn’t come with the idea of atoning for your sins, only to deny and justify.”

  “And if I’d admitted it, that would have helped somehow?”

  “So you do? You do admit that you’ve thought about incestual fornication with your sisters?”

  “No!”

  “Like I said, your attitude is poor. It’s a sign that you don’t belong in Zion.”

  The problem wasn’t the alleged lustful feelings. He could deny those. It was harder to deny that Charity Kimball, Father’s senior wife, had caught him pouring lighter fluid on the stove burners.

  He looked at Gideon with a glare. “You don’t believe me, do you? You think I actually did that stuff to my sisters?”

  “Oh, who cares?” Gideon asked. “None of that matters anymore. Don’t you see, this is your chance to get back in.”

  Inside, over a pair of Sprites reluctantly taken from the fridge and offered, Gideon explained the bones of his plan. Father had decided that the Church of the Anointing was weak and corrupt and needed to be cleansed if they were to have any hope of filling the earth with their righteous seed. The details of the plan were hazy, but apparently Gideon was gathering Lost Boys to take over Blister Creek.

  But Caleb had succumbed to the voices by then, and couldn’t be fooled.

  That is not God’s way. Listen to us. We are Legion, and we have wisdom beyond that of your pitiful brother. In due time, God will show you the path, but do not follow The Wicked.

  Gideon had left shortly after, sputtering and condemning him, and shaking the dust from his shoes to damn Caleb’s soul. The younger brother had watched this rant with growing certainty that he was doing the right thing.

  Well done. You shall be the chosen of the Lord. You shall be his disciple.

  And what had happened to Gideon? He’d died right here in Witch’s Warts. The Disciple didn’t know the exact details, but apparently he’d tried to kidnap a wife while fleeing from the police, then the girl had bashed in his brains with a hunk of sandstone.

  “No woman can be tamed before she has been purified and sanctified,” he said out loud.

  Diego stopped and looked up at him.

  “Keep going. We have two, maybe three miles to go.”

  So why was he going through Witch’s Warts? Why not just drive into town after dark and park on a side street, then walk a few blocks to the Kimball house? He wasn’t Gideon,
fleeing into the wilderness in a desperate attempt to escape his enemies. Nobody was expecting Caleb Kimball to return, if they even knew that he’d become God’s chosen one. He could complete his holy vengeance and go back to Nevada to be with the others when Wormwood fell. But the voices had told him to come this way and there must have been a good reason.

  Tonight you will send your enemies to hell.

  And rid himself of every injustice, every cruelty, every sin against his body and person. The ridicule, the abuse, the ejection from his family and home.

  They continued in silence for about twenty minutes before Diego wobbled and fell. He looked like he was going to get up, then lay down in the sand, as if he were going to take a nap.

  “Get up.” The boy tried to rise, but failed. The Disciple hauled him to his feet. “I said get up!”

  “Please.” The boy’s voice came out in a whisper.

  The Disciple stopped, surprised. How long since he’d heard Diego speak? “Please? What do you mean, please?”

  But Diego simply shook his head.

  “You are ready, child. I have anointed your head with oil and prepared a table before you in the presence of your enemies. Tonight you will atone for the blood and sins of this generation.”

  Still, he couldn’t have the child fainting. He searched the stretch of sand between two fins of red rock and discovered a prickly pear cactus sprouting in a stretch of hard pan. He carefully plucked off several fruits, then found a place to roll them in gravel to remove the small, hairy prickles. He peeled them and fed them to the boy, one by one, as they continued.

  “It’s only a few more minutes, you’ve got the strength,” the Disciple said. “And then we’ll do what we came to do, and you can rest.”

  His rest will be eternal.

  It grew dark among the rocks, long shadows stretching like hands as the sun dropped. Wind blew down from the Ghost Cliffs, kicking up a sand so fine it was almost dust. It coated nostrils and eyelashes. They squinted and pressed on. The last of the lizards had fled to their holes and even the insects fell silent. There was something in the air that made him think of a storm, but it was too dry and the clouds overhead didn’t look dense enough to hold rain. Minutes later, he heard a low rumble from the west. A dry thunderstorm.