Before He Harms

by Blake Pierce

  “You watch now! You! You have caused this.” He then turned to the men with the belts and gave them a nod. “Now. Skip the formalities and do it now!”

  Two of the men raised their belts over their shoulders.

  Mackenzie acted on pure adrenaline and instinct. In that moment, she did not care what became of her. She could not stand by and allow this to happen. She moved so quickly that the man holding her had no chance of stopping her.

  She dashed forward. Some poor soul beside her stepped out to stop her but she threw out her right elbow as if it were on a mechanical release and downed the man easily. She barreled forward and, unsurprisingly, Cole moved out of the way. She dove for the two men who had raised their belts, knowing she could not take them both out. Still, she did her best.

  Just before her shoulders collided with the knees of the man on the right, there was a loud crack as the belt came down. It slapped her right across the back and though her shirt softened the blow, the pain was immense. She did not cry out, though. Instead, she funneled that pain towards her anger and got to her feet right away.

  She saw that several people were coming for her and that Ellington was engaged in a fight of his own. She barely caught sight of another of the men with a belt. He raised it up, aiming it for her face. When it came down, Mackenzie braced herself for the pain as she brought her arm up to block it. Not only was she able to block it, she managed to wrap her hand around the belt. She gave a tug, and though the belt did not come free of the man’s hands, it did bring him forward. He tumbled toward her and she met him with a punch to the face. As he staggered back, she pulled the belt free.

  She wasted no time, wheeling around and slapping the person closest to her. She caught the man on the arm. Someone caught her from behind, placing an arm around her neck. She arched her back, grabbed the arm, and tossed them over her shoulder. They went sailing into three other people and it was in seeing that that made Mackenzie realize how much trouble they were really in.

  But that’s when the first gunshot rang out. A man screamed and for a moment, she was sure it was Ellington. But when she looked for the source of the shot, she saw an older man staggering backward with blood coming out of his shoulder. Below him, on the ground, Ellington was getting to his feet with one of their guns. The other, she saw, was on the ground at his feet. One of Cole’s men dove for it, but Ellington kicked him in the face for his efforts.

  Another man came running for Ellington, screaming in terror. Mackenzie was helpless but to watch as Ellington shot the man. The round went into the man’s stomach. He took one more step forward before he collapsed.

  In front of her, Cole was screaming for people to attack, to get the agents, to kill them.

  But his voice was soon overtaken by the sounds of sirens. Several people heard it all at once, looking back toward the direction of the ruined gate. Mackenzie took advantage of the momentary distraction to angle herself back over toward Ellington.

  Cole did his best to regain composure. He still stood by Ruth, regarding the panicking crowd. “Everyone, as you were! Calm down! We’ve done nothing wrong here!”

  Mackenzie couldn’t help herself. As Cole went on with his little diatribe, she gripped the belt and flicked it forward like a bullwhip. The crack it made in the air was buried under the commotion of the crowd, but she saw the effects. It caught Cole right in the mouth. He stumbled backward, his hand flying to his face. She wanted to do it again and again, but ran to Ellington’s side.

  As he handed her the other gun, a brave soul ran up to both of them and spit in Ellington’s face. Mackenzie delivered a stiff right hand that caught the man in the throat. Two more men were coming at them, one of whom Mackenzie took out with a shot to the lower leg. This made the other one back up and with that, most everyone within the Community decided the time for the attack was over.

  The sirens had reached them now as two police cars pulled in through the crashed front gate. And as Mackenzie looked in that direction, watching Sheriff Burke get out of his car, she saw a third and a fourth pulling behind them as well.

  Then, as she and Ellington stood back to back, keeping an eye out for any remaining brave and foolish would-be attackers, she heard the unmistakable stuttering noise of an approaching helicopter. She looked up and to the left, where a small speck approaching form the north got gradually closer.

  Then, realizing that no one else was going to come for them—most of them were running in a panic, some into their homes and others toward the gate as they tried to escape the Community—Mackenzie dashed down to where Ruth was still on the ground. The girl tensed up a bit when Mackenzie gently took her shoulders.

  “Ruth, it’s okay. It’s me…you’re okay now.”

  Mackenzie started undoing the ropes around Ruth’s wrists as the girl began to cry uncontrollably. A few people eyed them as they went rushing past, but Mackenzie ignored them. She sat there, holding Ruth against her, as Burke and his men stormed the grounds and the helicopter started to slowly land just outside the Community’s fence.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  Following the ordeal on the Community grounds, Burke insisted that Mackenzie and Ellington get some sleep. He even volunteered to put them up in Fellsburg’s only motel. And while the prospect of sleep seemed glorious (she’d had only a twenty-minute nap in the last forty-two hours), Mackenzie refused.

  The police presence within the Community grounds remained there for nearly twenty-four hours after the helicopter touched down. During the day or so that followed, Mackenzie and Ellington did indeed catch some sleep, but only in little sporadic power naps here and there.

  Within the first hour, the Salt Lake City FBI had also arrived on the scene. State police reinforcement had also showed up. Hundreds of Community residents did their best to escape but most were stopped by law enforcement. This resulted in quite a few brawls, some of which nearly got so out of hand that there was a conversation about calling in reinforcements from the National Guard.

  In the end, such measures weren’t needed. By seven o’clock that evening, there were more than one hundred and twenty law enforcement personnel on the grounds. The Community members were filed into different sectors, quickly interrogated, and, in most cases arrested or charged. Those that were not charged but had nowhere to go were housed in temporary tents that the State Police set up several yards outside of the Community grounds. When it was quite clear that many of the women were traumatized and had been abused, counselors and other mental health professionals were called to the site.

  As ten o’clock rolled around, Mackenzie found herself sitting in the passenger’s seat of the car she had wrecked through the gate. In the busyness of the day, it had been pulled away from the gate and set to the side. Mackenzie sat in the seat and watched the lines of Community residents as they were led through makeshift kiosks the State Police had set up in the field in front of the fences. There were so many people and so much going on that Mackenzie still wasn’t sure how it was working. She supposed, aside from the idiots who had tried to escape, a great deal of the Community residents may even be glad this had happened. Perhaps the level of violence and chaos wasn’t so bad because many of them wanted a different life.

  She spotted a figure walking over toward her. The shape was mostly shadow, cast and stretched by the multiple floodlights that had been set up around the grounds. As the figure drew closer to the car, Mackenzie saw that it was Amy. The young woman came over to the driver’s side and knocked on the door.

  “Come on in,” Mackenzie said.

  Amy opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. “I understand you used this as a battering ram earlier today.”

  “Yeah. It’s just hard for me to think of it as today. Seems like forever ago.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m exhausted, though.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “He’s out there somewhere. He thrives under this sort of stuff. He hasn’t had any sleep either but
he’s on cloud nine right now.”

  “Agent White, I wanted to thank you. You tried so hard to get me to reveal things and I was stubborn. I could have made this a lot easier…”

  “It’s okay. You were scared. I get it. I especially get it after seeing what they were about to do to Ruth today. I had no idea it was that bad. Honestly, I respect the hell out of you for trying to help those girls.”

  “They were going to punish her, weren’t they? In front of the entire community?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I sometimes wonder what they would have done to me if they’d captured me back when I escaped. It would have been embarrassing for them, you know? To have to admit someone escaped. I think that’s why Lilith killed those girls. To make sure no one ever knew. And you know what? I apologize for that, too.”

  “For what?”

  “Being so blinded by it all and assuming Lilith was truly on my side. You saw through it in just a few days and I…I would have never seen it.”

  “Amy, stop that. Your life has been a mess because of these people and you’re just going to allow them to have more power over you. Besides, I think it’s safe to say you were the one who gave those girls hope. You were the one who proved that it was possible to leave.”

  “And look what it got them,” Amy said, starting to cry. “I just wish…I wish she’d come for me. I wish she’d killed me and that would have been the end of it.”

  “You know why she didn’t, right?”

  Amy shook her head.

  “She didn’t kill you because you’d been gone for so long. If anyone at the Community ever happened to find out what was going on, they’d know you had escaped and stayed in hiding for so long. They were more interested in showing their power and control immediately—for girls that had just escaped. To kill you would mean having to face their failures.”

  Another thing she had thought of, but did not say in front of Amy, was that Lilith had likely planned the entire thing. In the same way Marshall Cole had so many loopholes and scenarios to make himself look stronger, Lilith had also devised a way to make sure she was able to keep the women in line: help them escape and then kill them right away.

  “You have somewhere to go after all of this?” Mackenzie asked.

  “I met with a counselor a few hours ago. She said she thinks it’s a bad idea to go back to the house I was living in. She’s working out how me and a few of the women can find some sort of state-funded housing to live together until we can get back on our feet.”

  “That’s good,” Mackenzie said. She wanted to say something else but, really, what else was there to say? I’m sorry didn’t seem to cover the gamut of betrayal and pain Amy was currently experiencing.

  “Anyway,” Amy said. “I just wanted to apologize. You were trying to catch a nap, weren’t you?”

  “It’s okay. I’ll get some sleep soon enough.”

  Amy nodded and slowly got out of the car. Mackenzie watched the girl walk back over toward the tents. She looked in the direction of the Community, separated from her by only the chain-link fence. She stared in that direction for a while, as if trying to make sense of something. It broke Mackenzie’s heart to see her standing like that, frozen between her horrific past and her future. Mackenzie kept her eyes on Amy until she stepped into one of the tents.

  Then, with a faint smile on her face, Mackenzie drifted off to sleep.

  ***

  She woke up some time later with Ellington lightly shaking her. She sat up with a gasp. She hadn’t even realized she’d fallen asleep. She glanced to the digital clock in the dashboard and saw that somehow, it had gotten to be 2:15 in the morning.

  “I hated to wake you up,” Ellington said. “But I think you and I are done here for now. And I’d really like to take Burke up on that offer of a hotel room.”

  “You can drive,” she said, already trying to recapture her sleep.

  “Not this car,” he said. “You sort of broke it.”

  She sighed and got out of the car with him. As she expected, she came more and more awake as she walked with him.

  “Sorry I conked out on you.”

  “It’s okay. You deserve it.”

  “So do you. But you weren’t sleeping.”

  “That’s because I have far more endurance than you,” he joked.

  He wrapped his arm around her and drew her close as they walked across the field. She saw that all of the tents were still standing. The lines looked shorter but the people manning those tents weren’t going to be done anytime soon. The spotlights were also still up, shining down on the field and a currently empty Community.

  “I don’t think McGrath is going to like us staying in Utah one more day just so we can sleep.”

  “I already talked to him,” Ellington said. “He approved it. The amount of information that is coming in about what’s going on here has him a little flummoxed. He has complaints regarding us but stories of multiple arrests and saved women. It should be a very interesting meeting when we get back.”

  “Can you imagine writing up a report about this?”

  “Not right now. And I don’t even want to think about it until I get at least ten hours of sleep.”

  Mackenzie agreed. Ellington led her over to a Fellsburg patrol car. An officer Mackenzie had not yet met nodded to them and opened the back door for them. As Mackenzie got inside, she took one last look to the Community grounds. She was glad she was so tired and unable to fully comprehend the years and years of suffering and abuse that had taken place there. While she was glad to have helped bring it to an end, it did little to heal her heart toward women like Amy and Ruth. She couldn’t imagine the things they had endured.

  Softly, she cried into Ellington’s shoulder. She closed her eyes and felt the bumps of the dirt road as the policeman took them away from the Community. Even through her closed eyes she could detect the glare of the spotlights but as soon as that glare faded, there was only the dark. And Mackenzie slipped into sleep again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  One thing Director McGrath hated more than anything was for his agents to be involved in news coverage. Mackenzie supposed that was why he was in such a pissy mood when she and Ellington sat down in front of his desk. They’d left Utah, slept the sleep of the dead during the four-and-a-half-hour flight, and had come straight to his office. It had all occurred in a whirlwind and as she sat across from him, Mackenzie felt well-worn and exhausted. Four and a half hours on a plane was nothing, even after the day they had spent sleeping and working on their case report in the motel in Fellsburg.

  McGrath looked across the desk at them, as he had many times before. He wasn’t mad or upset exactly, but it was clear that something was troubling him. She saw a thin stack of papers on his desk and assumed it was the report she and Ellington had worked on yesterday in the motel.

  Footage of the Community grounds was all over the news. She and Ellington had left the scene long before the media arrived, but their names were being mentioned in news reports. From what Mackenzie could gather, some of the women gave the reporters their names—probably Amy or Ruth, unaware of how difficult it might make things for them.

  McGrath was likely aware of the reports. And that was probably the result of his odd and nearly bipolar mood. When he looked at both of them, though, she thought she saw something like amusement in his eyes. She couldn’t be sure; it wasn’t the sort of thing she was used to seeing out of him.

  “You two,” McGrath said, “are an absolute pain in my ass.”

  He let the comment linger for a moment. He looked down to the report and then back to them. He reclined back in his seat and shook his head.

  “I got a call twenty minutes ago,” he said. “It was from the director of the Salt Lake City branch. The numbers aren’t finalized yet, but here’s what we have so far. Four hundred and eleven arrests. Four hundred. And. Eleven. And the two of you opened the door for that. Four hundred and eleven arrests, all of men who were abusing the women in t
he Community. Marshall Cole is, of course, among that number. His trial should be interesting…but I digress. Out of that entire scene at the Community two days ago, there were zero deaths. Not a single one. There were several injuries, however. And that’s where this conversation is going to turn a little bleak.”

  Mackenzie thought of the crowd falling in on her, of knowing full well they would have to fire their guns to fend the Community members off. She also recalled the mad dash as many of those same members had attempted to escape.

  “Any idea how many members are unaccounted for?” Mackenzie asked.

  “It’s harder for them to tell that sort of thing for sure, but they’re estimating somewhere around one hundred.”

  “And the women?” Ellington asked.

  “It’s still being sorted out. Most of them were over eighteen so Child Protective Services isn’t being absolutely flooded. It does create a nightmare for the state as they try to find medical and mental help. And housing…but you can get that information later. For now, we need to go over the formalities of it all.”

  “Formalities?” Ellington asked.

  “Yeah. Amid all of these amazing numbers for arrests and lives saved that are coming, there are complaints, too. Most are from the Community members that are being placed under arrest. I’ve got reports that indicate the following.” He stopped here to pick up a piece of paper sitting off to the side of their case report. “Driving a car through a gate and trespassing on private property. Shooting a security guard. Shooting at least three other Community members. Physical assault, including Marshall Cole being whipped across the face with a belt. There are more here, but they are minor.”

  “That sounds bad,” Mackenzie said, “but you saw the report. If we didn’t get in there, God only knows what they would have done to Ruth Cole.”

  “Oh, I’m aware. Her testimony is one of the darkest, most gruesome things I’ve ever heard. Still, despite the heroism the two of your displayed, there are certain measures and rules we have to follow.”