“Who?” Amye said.
“Never mind.” A glint off of something at the far end of the room caught his eye. He walked over to get a closer look. He handed Kristin his stick and climbed up onto the small stage.
“What are you doing?” she asked as she watched him drag the piano out of the way so he could reach the crucifix hanging above it. It was sturdy looking wood, maple maybe, or oak, with a heavy, metal Christ on the front. He stuck his fingers into the slender gap behind it and tried to pry. It was screwed into the drywall and barely moved. But it moved. Digging his fingers into the slight space between it and the wall hurt his fingers, but he kept on until it started to give. When he had a decent enough gap, he took off his belt and slipped it behind the upright beam of the cross. He slid the strap down until it was closest to the bottom where he had the least resistance and the most leverage. He threaded the end through the buckle and cinched it. Looping the other end around his fist, he braced a foot against the wall and pulled. After a couple of tries, the drywall gave way with a soft cracking sound. The thing whipped at him. He ducked and swung the heavy ornament around and back toward the wall where it collided and left a big triangular dent before clattering to the stage floor. Mitch picked the thing up. It was shorter than the dowel, but much heavier, with points and sharp edges. He reckoned it could leave a dent in a man’s skull shaped just like the one it punctured in the wall. Or worse. He smiled. That was just fine with him. He was done being sucker punched.
Stepping out from behind the upright piano he’d shoved out of the way to get to his new weapon, he paused and gave it another small push. He turned and asked Kristin, “Do you think you can push this thing off the stage when I give you a thumbs up?” Her brow furrowed, and then she seemed to gather his plan. She stood, and stepped over to the instrument to take a practice pull at it. It rolled on its wheels smoothly, but was heavy. She’d be better off with help, Mitch realized. “Steve, can you give us a hand?”
Steve came over to the stage. “What’s your idea?”
“I want to get someone’s attention.” Mitch said. “When I give you the thumbs up, I was hoping you and Kristin could send that thing over the edge. Think you can make it happen?”
“Damn right we can!” Kristin said.
Mitch lightly pounded a fist on Steve’s shoulder and gave Kristin a nod. “When it goes down, you two get down. Preferably behind something that can stop bullets.”
“Where are you going to be?” Kristin asked.
“In harm’s way.” Mitch stepped off the stage and walked into the middle of the room. He glanced at the door, quietly thankful there was no window in it. In order to check up on them, the guard would have to come in. He took a couple of deep breaths to work himself up enough to address the rest of the people in the room. While violence came easy to him, leadership did not. But, if he was going to start shit, he felt like the others should at least know about it so they could choose to either get in on the action or out of the line of fire. “In a few minutes,” he began, “I’m going to get that door open. And then I’m leaving through it. The rest of you are welcome to follow me. In fact, I’d like a couple of people backing me up. Your choice.”
“They have guns. You’re going to get everyone killed.” Byron said.
“I’m starting to think that’s already on the agenda. Old time religion style: join or die. Why else would we be locked away in here?”
Alexa lifted her head off of Nick’s thighs and said, “I’ll help. We both will.” Nick looked apprehensive, but nodded in agreement.
Izzy stood and put her hand in. “Me too.”
Mitch went around the room, yanked down the rest of the tapestries and liberated the dowels inside. He handed one to each of them and took one back to Steve. Kristin held hers up proudly, as if she couldn’t wait to break it on someone’s head. Alexa swung hers awkwardly like a flag. Mitch walked over and showed her how to angle it. She was small, there wasn’t much muscle in her, but he knew heart when he saw it. “Swing it at his mouth. If you miss and hit his nose or throat instead, it’s still all a win. But the mouth is your best bet. Get him thinking about his teeth. You follow?” She nodded, eyes wide with apprehension at the idea of bashing a person in the face. But she didn’t let go of the stick or step away. She’s in, Mitch thought. Heart counted every bit as much in a fight as strength. Maybe more.
Mitch took the last dowel to Amye and held it out. She shook her head. Unlike Alexa, violence, no matter how reluctant, didn’t appear to be in her. Mitch put a hand on her arm and squeezed lightly. “It’s all right. Stay back and keep up, okay?” She nodded quickly, afraid, but still standing.
Against his better judgment, Mitch offered the last stick to Byron. “You want in?”
“I’m not getting shot for you,” he said, ignoring the fact that Mitch wasn’t asking anyone to take a risk for him alone. Everyone was welcome to walk out of the Parents’ Ministry if they wanted.
“Fine. Stay in the corner. If you get in my fuckin’ way, I’ll burn you down.”
He set down his dowel and cross by Izzy, asking her to keep an eye on them, and dragged a chair over to the door. Climbing up, he inspected the hydraulic return arm at the top. “Anyone got a dime?” Nick dug in his pockets and handed him one. After a few minutes of work at the arm, he dropped a small bolt in his pocket and handed the dime back to Nick. “Thanks.”
Climbing down, he picked up the crucifix, feeling its heft and balance. It felt good and deadly. This was as premeditated as the DA had claimed Junior’s beating was. If only that lawyer knew what it felt like to stand in this place. That elected asshole calling that assault cold and calculated was like a priest giving a sermon on having a healthy sex life.
Mitch kicked the last stick into the far corner of the cafeteria and took his place behind the door. He took a deep breath and found his center of calmness. The place where he would go right before the bell rang—right before diving into someone’s cell to take back what they stole out of his.
The place where violence lived in him was quiet.
35
Asphalt gave way first to gravel and then a rutted dirt road that pulled at the wheels as if trying to dissuade Mike and Liana from continuing forward. Mike slowed as they approached the next turnoff. Painted in large white letters on a bold, blue sign above a pair of hands clasped in prayer it read:
NEW LIFE CHURCH
A RELIGIOUS RETREAT AND COMMUNITY
Below that, in smaller text, contradicting the typical church sign message of “All are welcome,” was the warning
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO TRESPASSING
“Are you sure this is it?” Mike asked.
Liana squirmed in her seat, drawing in a deep breath with a hand on her chest, and nodded. “She’s that way.” Pointing past the sign, she said, “I can feel her.”
“So what now? It doesn’t look like they like visitors.”
“It’s just a sign. Keep going.”
Mike let out the clutch and drove on. As they rounded the next curve in the road, they came upon an electric lifting gate beside a small security building that looked like it should’ve been at the end of a Hollywood star’s mansion driveway, and not a church in the middle of rural New England. Mike stepped hard on the brakes as a pair of black-clad men wearing rifles stepped out of the gatehouse. He turned to Liana with a fearful look and quietly implored her to let him turn back.
“She’s in there.”
He gritted his teeth and pulled forward slowly until one of the guards raised a hand for him to stop. Liana stared out the window at the two men approaching the car. They carried their guns in a ready position the way soldiers in the movies did, up high with an elbow out, barrel pointed toward the ground. One bent over and leaned into Mike’s window to ask where they thought they were going. Mike’s mouth gaped open for an insufferably long second while he seemed to search for the lie that would open wide the gates.
“Um, hi,” he said, forcing
a smile. The man did not smile back. “We’re not sure where we are. A friend of ours invited us up for a couples’ getaway, but we’re pretty lost.” He held up his cell phone and the gunman took a step back raising his rifle slightly. Mike tried not to flinch. “I can’t get a signal, and I have no idea what else to do. Do you have a phone we could borrow?”
“You two are a couple?”
“Don’t we look like it?” Mike said. He tried to mask his fear with a nervous laugh. Liana gasped, taking another deliberate deep breath she didn’t actually need.
“What’s wrong with her?”
Mike said, “Asthma. She’s got bad asthma and we forgot her inhaler. I’m running low on gas and like I said, my reception way out here is non-existent. Could you just let us in to use the phone? We won’t be long, I promise.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “We got no phone in the guard house. Just these.” He nodded his chin toward a black and yellow two-way radio clipped to one of the MOLLE straps on his vest. “You two head back that way,” he said pointing away from their car. “Follow the road about twenty miles and you’ll end up in Keene. They got cell towers and gas there. We got neither.” He stepped back from the car, hands still on the rifle. Although he kept his finger outside the trigger guard, Liana felt certain he was itching to slip it in. She’d seen that look before. If she couldn’t exactly read his mind, it wasn’t hard to discern his thoughts. They were hot and unpleasant. On top of that, the feeling of breathlessness and confinement was growing steadily worse. She wanted to spring out of the car and run into the open to get a deep breath, but, the way they looked, she was pretty certain these two were already itching for a reason to switch their safeties off. She stayed put. The gate guards backed away and the one who’d told them to turn around jerked his chin at them, encouraging the couple to take his suggestion and head to Keene.
Mike looked at her, gesturing with his hands on the wheel to say “What now?” She nodded behind them. He put the car in reverse and started to back up the road, breathing a deep sigh of relief. When they moved away, however, her breathing seemed more labored and desperate. “Thanks anyway, fellas,” he called out the window. He regretted it immediately.
She saw the gateman whispering at each other as Mike backed the car down the road, and the one who’d given them directions spoke into his radio. Liana couldn’t hear what he said, but he wasn’t taking his eyes off the car. It felt like being in some classic spy film, getting stopped at the border checkpoint between the U.S.S.R. and Poland while the lonely outpost soldiers checked to see if their papers were legitimate. But she wasn’t a Bond girl; she was a supermarket checker who sometimes liked to get in the pit at concerts. She wasn’t afraid of a fair fight, but her elite combat training was limited to listening to people bitch about the price of quinoa and not tripping over her own boots in the circle pit. And she sure as hell was afraid of men with guns. She felt for the reassurance of the never-used baseball bat she kept in the backseat foot well. A purchase inspired by her ax handle beating. Right next to it was a catcher’s mitt, in case anyone ever had reason to ask why she had a bat in the car. As if anyone would ever think she was sporty.
“What now?” Mike asked. He stopped at the end of the drive, waiting for Liana to tell him which way to go before backing out onto the highway.
She pointed the opposite direction the man with the gun had directed them. “That way. Go maybe a half-mile and find a place to pull over. We have to walk the rest of the way.”
“Walk? Where?”
She widened her eyes, looking at the sign ahead of them for the New Life Church.
“Did you see the guys with the guns?”
She sighed. “Uh huh. I did.” She turned in her seat to face him. “You don’t have to come with me. You can wait with the car; I’ll go by myself. That way, when I come out with Sophie and Mitch, you and Octavia can be ready to get us out of here, tout suite.”
“You named your car ‘Octavia’?”
Huffing a wheezing laugh, she patted the dashboard affectionately. She loved her car, and whenever she had extra money, she made sure to take it to a mechanic friend to be tuned up and serviced. Still, it was old, and she hadn’t had extra cash in a while. Octavia was past due for his attention, and while it was reliable for city driving, she had no idea how hard or for how long they could push the engine before something broke. That she could rely on Mike was an immutable certainty; relying on Octavia was another matter.
“Let’s go,” she said. Mike pulled out onto the highway and did as she suggested. He drove until he found a space on the shoulder big enough to park the car completely off the road. He made a U-turn and nestled Octavia into a patch of wild grass next to the tree line.
“How are you going to keep from getting lost in there?”
Liana stared out the window into the woods. She was as outdoorsy as she was sporty. That a pair of Dr. Martens might be suitable for hiking was only accidental fitness for the occasion. At home, she oriented herself to tall buildings and main roads, and her friends joked that she could get lost in Public Garden. But, looking into the thick trees and underbrush, she knew the way. “I guess the same thing that got us this far will get me through there.”
“And once you’re through?”
She shook her head. “I have no fuckin’ idea.” She opened the door and pulled the black “Brooklyn Crusher” bat from behind her seat. It didn’t resemble anything anyone would actually take to a game, but it suited her aesthetic better than a Louisville Slugger, and was more deniably a weapon than the telescoping police baton she used to carry. She left the glove on the floor and dropped the seat back into place. Mike shut off the engine and climbed out of the car behind her. “You sure you don’t want to wait here,” she said. “You’ve already done way more than—”
He held up a hand to stop her. “You’re not the boss of me,” he said. The tremor in his voice belied the joke, but he didn’t back down. Mike was stand up all the way.
Liana stepped away from the car to take a couple of practice swings, almost throwing the bat away on the first one. She tightened her grip and tried again. However devastating the polypropylene bat was advertised to be, it felt ridiculous to contemplate bringing such a thing to what was most likely going to be a gun fight if it was any kind of fight at all. Then again, having a club, knife, or even just a big rock seemed better than showing up empty-handed—which Mike still was. She leaned back in the car and opened her purse, feeling around until her hand closed on a “tactical” pen. Constructed from non-reflective hardened aircraft aluminum, it included a sharpened, scalloped edge euphemistically described on the original packaging as a “DNA catcher.” That feature was designed to dig out a chunk of flesh and make a person bleed as you jammed it into their throat or face. The pen was a ridiculous thing she bought as a joke. “Weaponize your life!” she told friends when using it to sign a bar tab. But then, so far, she’d never been denied entry to a club with it in her purse. As often as she ran into guys at shows who asked the question “What are you doing here?” with more than a little racial animus in their voices, she felt better with it in her purse. Though she’d never actually used it—she was better at avoiding shit than finishing it—it was better than nothing. She held it out for him to take; he looked at the pen like she was trying to hand him a snake.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s mightier than the sword, as they say.” She showed him the scalloped edge. “You can jam this end into a dude’s eye or temple or something. The writing side will hurt real bad too.” He took it and timidly practiced thrusting it into someone’s face. “Yeah. Just like that.” She winked and started off into the woods.
Everything she stepped on in the overgrown forest floor seemed to crackle or crunch no matter how much care she took to be quiet. Behind her, she heard Mike stumble and curse under his breath. The two of them were very possibly the worst trackers in the history of the woods. More than once, she imagined the sound of a h
idden twig snapping was that of the rifle shot that was going to end her or Mike before they even caught sight of the New Life Church. But the shot never came, and the farther they hiked through the woods, the more strongly she felt the pull, almost like Sophie knew she was near and was drawing her on harder. Breathing still wasn’t getting any easier.
They slowed as they crested a steep incline. It gave way on the other side to a clearing and, beyond that, a complex of buildings arranged in a diamond. As they scuttered down the hillock, the glass and steel dome of the central building rose up like a blue halo around a statue looming over them. It was a caped, crowned, and faceless figure holding a massive sword aloft that looked more like a wraith from a fantasy novel than the gentle savior she remembered her Gran praying to. Though eyeless, it seemed to glare at them with hot malevolence as if about to come to life and strike them down. She remembered some of the parishioners in her Gran’s church talking about the avenging savior who’d someday return to cleanse the Earth of the wicked. Is that us? Are we the wicked? Her blood ran cold.
Despite the desire to turn back and flee up the hill, she stood her ground, feeling for the pull in her heart to tell her where to go. As badly as she wanted to follow her instincts, she followed Sophie’s call.
36
Kristin and Steve wheeled the piano up to the apron edge of the small stage and waited for Mitch to give them a thumbs up. He positioned himself by the door, and raised his eyebrows to ask if they were ready. They nodded, and he raised his hand, thumb extended. Rearing back, they gave the instrument a violent shove toward the edge. It banged loudly as the front wheels cleared the apron and the piano pedals jammed into the lip of the stage. Then it toppled forward, seeming to hang in the air for a quantum eternity before crashing to the floor below. The sound was a musical explosion. An echoing wooden crash accompanied by a couple hundred strings all vibrating with sour notes at once. The piano lid swung open and clapped closed and small fragments of the thing went scattering across the floor with their own random percussion. The disharmony filled the tile-floored room, bouncing off the shutters at the opposite end, surrounding them in a medley of tatters, broken strings ringing, snapping wood and faux ivory clattering on the floor. It all echoed in the room like the Devil’s concerto.
Come to Dust Page 17
