After the Fire

by Will Hill

  When she’s close enough that I could reach out and touch her, she stops. Tears are streaming down her face and one of her hands is still over her mouth and she’s looking at me like I’m not real, like she doesn’t believe I’m actually standing in front of her.

  “Little Moon,” she whispers, and the sound of her voice cuts though me like the sharpest knife, splaying me open and exposing my insides to the entire world.

  My face twists up and I start to cry, because I never thought I’d hear her voice again. I had come to terms with that awful reality, had done all my grieving and sobbing and cursing and weeping, and the relief that I was wrong is almost too much for me to bear.

  “Don’t cry,” she says. “Please don’t cry, Moonbeam. It’s all right.”

  I shake my head, because it’s not all right, nothing is all right. It’s not all right that so many people died, that so many of my Brothers and Sisters were orphaned and left with wounds that will never fully heal, and it’s not all right that my mom can come back to me while their parents are rotting in the ground.

  It’s not fair.

  But I can’t tell her that. I don’t want to tell her that. Because all I want to do is hug her and hold onto her and never let go.

  “Say something,” she says, her voice shaking. “Please say something.”

  I open my mouth but nothing comes out, and she sweeps forward and pulls me against her and whispers two words in my ear, over and over again.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  I don’t know how long we stay like that, standing in the middle of the room with our arms wrapped around each other.

  It feels like for ever.

  When we finally untangle ourselves, I go to the door and ask Doctor Hernandez to come into the room. My mom looks confused, almost nervous, as though she’s worried I’m going to ask him to make her leave. But that’s not why I want him. I want him to stand beside me while I ask her the only question that really matters any more.

  Where have you been?

  He gives me a tight smile as he walks through the door, an expression that’s very clearly asking: Are you okay?

  I nod, and then I stand next to him and we look at my mom and I ask my question.

  She tells me that when I was sent out of the Big House after the decision was made to Banish her, Father John told her two things.

  The first was that he had people in the Outside who were loyal to the Legion, people who would be watching her every day for the rest of her life, making sure she never went to the authorities.

  The second was that if the police or any other Government ever arrived at The Base, he would assume it was because of her. He would assume it was her doing, and he would have Jacob Reynolds take me out into the desert and gut me and leave me for the coyotes.

  She never knew whether to believe his first claim, but she never doubted the second, not for a single second.

  “He meant it,” she whispers, her voice cracking. “Oh God, he meant it.”

  Doctor Hernandez takes a step closer to me as she talks, his face pale. I think he’s getting ready to catch me if I faint. I don’t think I’m going to, but I appreciate the gesture.

  My mom tells me she called a woman she had been friends with in Santa Cruz and asked them for help, a friend who had tried to persuade her not to go to Texas in the first place. She tells me that her friend sent her enough money for her to rent an apartment in Odessa, from where she started planning how to get me out of the Legion. But the apartment was broken into three times in three months, and she felt like people were watching her, people she saw in her building or at the store. She started to believe her phone was bugged, and she started to leave her apartment less and less. And she started drinking. Started drinking a lot.

  She stops and tells me she’s not sure I want to hear this, not now. Doctor Hernandez says he thinks that’s a decision I can make for myself and I feel a surge of affection for him and I tell her I want to know everything, no matter how bad it is.

  Be brave, whispers the voice in the back of my head.

  She starts to cry as she tells me the rest of it. How she gave up the apartment in Odessa and fled to Dallas, how she saw Father John’s people on every corner, in every diner and bar, in the strangers who smiled at her as they passed her on the street. She drank more and more, until she didn’t really do anything else.

  And for a long while after that, she was lost.

  It took an ambulance ride to the emergency room, more than two years later, to wake her up. She had ended up living in Seattle, for reasons she tells me she can’t remember, and she collapsed outside a drugstore on the south side of the city. Her heart stopped twice on the way to the hospital – my stomach churns as she tells me she was technically dead for six minutes – and when they released her, almost a month later, with the address of a shelter where she could stay, she finally started the journey back to the person she used to be.

  She was halfway through a six-month residential addiction programme in Oregon when the fire at The Base happened. Access to the news was carefully filtered, so as not to upset the process – I glance at Doctor Hernandez as she uses the word – and nobody at the centre knew she had any connection to The Lord’s Legion. As a result, she didn’t find out what had happened until two days ago, when the programme ended and she was released.

  She immediately started making calls, trying to find out what had happened to me, and within three hours she was on a flight to Texas. She arrived in Odessa last night, and this morning – my birthday, of all days – Doctor Hernandez gave her the news she had stopped believing she would ever hear.

  I was out. And I was safe.

  She finishes talking, and looks at me. My heart is aching for her, for the things she has been through, and I wonder if the damage that Father John caused will ever truly end, if his shadow will always be out there, creating pain and misery wherever it touches.

  Doctor Hernandez asks me if I’m okay, and I tell him I want to go back to my room. My mom looks like she’s going to start crying again, and tells me she doesn’t blame me if I hate her, that she failed me, that she let me down.

  I shake my head, and I tell her I love her.

  She does cry then, and she tells me she loves me too, that she never stopped loving me.

  I’m going to try to believe her.

  I’ve been eighteen for just over a month.

  I’m an adult now. I could go anywhere in the world I choose, but right now – for the time being, at least – where I want to be is here.

  I’m sitting in the garden of my mom’s little house on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. She’s gone into town to meet her sponsor and then she’s going to the store on her way home to get food for dinner. It always takes her about ten minutes to get into the car, to convince herself that I’m telling the truth when I say I’ll be okay on my own for a couple of hours.

  A mug of coffee is steaming on the table next to my chair. I’d never had coffee until I got here. I’m still not sure if I like it or not, but drinking it seems to be a thing that people in the real world do, and I don’t want to be different. I want to be exactly the same as everyone else, at least for a while.

  I take a sip and look around at the place my mom keeps telling me is my home. There’s no cliff at the bottom of the garden, no water stretching to the horizon. The house doesn’t have a chimney, and its wall aren’t blue.

  But it’s okay.

  It’s a start.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  After The Fire is a work of fiction.

  The Holy Church of The Lord’s Legion, the George W. Bush Municipal Center, the town of Layfield, and the characters that populate them are all products of my imagination. And as I hope will be clear from the text, the novel is not intended as an attack on anyone’s religious beliefs. The belief structure of The Lord’s Legion is far removed from the Christianity practised by two and a half billion people around the world – deliberately so. This is a story
about power and corruption, and how charismatic figures can twist faith to serve their own ends. And ultimately, it’s a story about survival; more specifically, one girl’s way back after her world falls apart.

  Like most writers I know, I don’t go looking for ideas. The good ones, the ones that might be worth pursuing, that might eventually turn into a story, usually appear out of nowhere. Sometimes (although rarely, for me at least) they’re fully-formed, with a beginning and a middle and an end already in place. Sometimes they’re infuriatingly vague: a piece of action, a small moment, or the first outline of a character. And sometimes they are a direct response to something I read, or hear, or see.

  This novel was inspired by a real event: one that I remember vividly, but that I suspect many reading this book will be unaware of. Things have a tendency to fade into history, even things that shocked the world when they happened.

  On the 19th of April 1993, eighty-two members of the Branch Davidian religious sect and four US government agents died after a stand-off, which had lasted almost two months, ended in a blazing inferno. It became known as the Waco siege (after the nearby town in Texas). At the time, I was too young to absorb the detail of what had led to such a terrible loss of life, and definitely too young to comprehend the existence of men like the group’s Messianic leader David Koresh, the latest (at the time) in a long line of men (they’re almost always men) who manipulated people’s fears and beliefs to satisfy their own desire for power.

  But I do remember my shock at watching footage from the fiery conclusion of the siege on the television news. I remember watching the buildings burn, thinking how terrifying it must have been to be there, to find yourself in the middle of all that chaos. It seemed so entirely alien to me.

  Years later, my girlfriend and I went to Washington DC on holiday. We visited the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian, the Washington Monument, and then on the last day before we left we visited a place called the Newseum. It’s a museum of American journalism, from its beginnings to the present day, and it’s fantastic. One of the exhibits was all about the FBI and the press. It showed the coverage of Bonnie and Clyde, of the agency’s battle with the Italian mafia in New York, and the hunt for the 9/11 attackers. And in one corner, filling the entire wall, it had coverage of the Waco siege.

  I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. I’d remained fascinated by cults, and those organizations like Scientology that furiously reject the label, but Waco and the Branch Davidians and David Koresh hadn’t crossed my mind in years.

  I looked at the photos, and I watched the footage again – the armoured vehicles, the black-clad agents with their automatic rifles, the burning buildings, the empty desert that surrounded it all – and I listened to recordings of Koresh negotiating with the authorities. His voice – so flat and ordinary as he discussed the end of the world – sent chills up my spine. I thought about Waco from the perspective of an adult, one who had twenty years’ more experience of seeing people do awful things to others, and I asked myself the most obvious question: how did such a thing happen? How did David Koresh persuade people to lay down their lives at his command? How did he twist their faiths and beliefs until a violent end became inevitable? What led people to the point where they believed in such an obviously self-serving charlatan? How desperate must they have been, or vulnerable, or both? What was it like to live inside that compound, believing you were in mortal danger from the outside world? And what would such constant fear do to a person? Lastly, for the people who survived, what would it mean to discover that your whole life had been a lie?

  On the way back to our hotel I bought a notebook, and in our room I scribbled the outline of a character. A teenage girl, who has survived the end of her world but is still far from safe. A girl whose own faith had failed, but had been surrounded by the truest of true believers. A girl who had seen the truth, but not until it was far too late. A girl with secrets she has no intention of telling anyone.

  And I already knew her name:

  Moonbeam.

  But there was an immediate problem. I didn’t want to tell a straight fictionalized version of the Waco siege, for a pretty obvious reason: that it would be disrespectful to the Branch Davidian survivors to retell the worst thing that ever happened to them as entertainment.

  So I started researching in earnest and, as I read, Moonbeam’s life became clearer and clearer. I read the Danforth Report, the US government’s investigation into the actions of the Federal agencies during the Waco siege, I read Malcom Gladwell’s remarkable account of the negotiations between the authorities and Koresh (Sacred and Profane, published in the New Yorker), and I discovered the work of Dr Bruce Perry.

  In the early days of the siege, Koresh released twenty-one of the Branch Davidian children, in an apparent show of good faith to the authorities negotiating with him. I don’t want to give him more than a minimum of credit for doing so, given that a further twenty or so children, most of them fathered by him with various female members of the group, were not allowed to leave, and most of them died with their father.

  But twenty-one children survived. Broken, battered, abused, but alive. Although what chance did any of them have of really, truly surviving what they had been through?

  Perry was the Chief of Psychiatry at the Texas Children’s Hospital in 1993, and had formed a “rapid response” Trauma Assessment Team, intended to assist children who had been the victims of car crashes, shootings and natural disasters. He offered his services after the Branch Davidian children (ranging from five months to twelve years old) were released, and immediately travelled to Waco.

  What he found were children whose hearts were beating at almost twice normal speed, a symptom of the profound, intense stress they had lived under and were still experiencing – because they were now in the hands of the “Babylonians”, the outsiders that Koresh had warned them about, and they saw themselves as hostages rather than patients. He found boys and girls unwilling to sit together, because it broke the rules. He found children who had been forced to fight each other as “training” for the apocalypse, who had been taught numerous ways to kill themselves if they were ever caught by “their enemies”. Children who had lived in a state of almost constant terror.

  Perry and his team worked with the children, trying to help them towards a place where they would be able to move on from what had passed for their childhoods, even as the siege ended in fire and shooting and the awful end of the world that the children had been repeatedly warned about became real for their friends and parents and siblings.

  I felt like I owed it to them and to all abuse survivors to treat this story with honesty and sensitivity, to not diminish the horrors that Moonbeam had been through but not to sensationalize them either. All I can say is that any mistakes in the novel, in terms of process and psychiatry, are the result of my own failures of understanding, rather than a lack of diligence in research.

  With all of these elements in mind, by the time I sat down to write the first draft in the summer of 2015, Moonbeam had grown into the strong, vulnerable, complicated, sarcastic, brilliant survivor that I hope I’ve done justice to in the pages you’ve just read. I hated having to describe some of the things that had happened to her, but I never stopped wanting to tell her story.

  I genuinely didn’t know that I was going to give her a (reasonably) happy ending until I was almost finished writing – in the end, I was glad the story’s final twists and turns went the way they did. I like to imagine her and her mother in their little garden, as they try to put themselves back together and move on.

  To keep surviving, no matter what.

  Will Hill

  London, January 2017

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR

  AFTER THE FIRE

  Father John is able to exert control over the members of The Lord’s Legion through both psychological and physical methods. Pick out some of the methods he uses and discuss why or how you think they were effective.

  The novel jumps betw
een Before and After the fire. How did this non-chronological narrative affect your reading? Do you think the story could have been told chronologically, or in a different way? Why do you think the author decided to do this?

  Is it possible to feel empathy towards Luke, or understand his actions? Why, or why not?

  Consider the portrayals of Doctor Hernandez and Agent Carlyle. Through Moonbeam’s eyes, we meet them in their professional roles, though over the course of the story, elements of their outside lives seem to drip into the sessions. What did you think of both men? Discuss the differences and similarities in their approaches to Moonbeam.

  As Will states in his author note, this novel is not meant as an attack on Christianity, but instead an exploration of power, and how power can corrupt. Would you consider the doctrine that Father John uses as a type of “religion”? Do you think Father John ever believes his own creed?

  Discuss your thoughts on Moonbeam’s mom; can you understand why she left her daughter? Did she have any other options? What did you think of her decision to support Father John’s choice of Moonbeam as a future wife?

  Moonbeam’s life has been spent inside the Base, “protected” by the Fence. But when she’s taken to the George W. Bush Memorial Center, the nurses lock her in her room except for when she attends her sessions. Consider the idea of “imprisonment”. Is Moonbeam a prisoner at the centre? Was she a prisoner at the Base? Is there a difference?

  Did you know anything about the Waco siege before you read the book? What do you think of novels which take a real-life event as their starting point? Do you believe that fiction can be a helpful tool in addressing or redressing horrific real-life events such as the Waco siege?