Another reason they’d taken to the water was because they’d gotten pretty sunburned that morning and they were looking for shade. They found it under high outcroppings like The Rocks (which they quickly deemed too unsafe to hang around under for long) or overhanging sweet gum trees. Naturally, they kept an eye on the woods knowing that anybody could be right there within the trees, but they shared an unspoken belief that “whoever” the killer was would be preoccupied with Cindy and the others and wasn’t going to stoop to stalking nobodies like them.
“Oh, it’s so beautiful out here,” exclaimed Maia, momentarily slipping away from Faith and floating on her back out away from the shore for a moment.
Faith swam over, treading water and stared up at the sky as well. Striations of white, puffy clouds had etched their way through the blue like lines on sheet music, stretching from one horizon to the other which dulled the brightness of the sun. Maia reached over and held Faith’s hand as they floated along.
“If this is the Rapture and we’ve been left behind on the Earth with the others, I’d love to just find a place far away from everybody; learn to farm, learn to hunt, maybe, and just live in the middle of nowhere,” Maia said. “We knew some guys like that in Colorado. They’d saved up all through high school, bought a van and drove it to the base of the Rocky Mountains where they were trying to start a marijuana farm. It was like they were functionally homesteading.”
Faith nodded, though she wasn’t entirely clear on the concept of “homesteading,” much less farming pot, but she liked the idea of moving to Colorado, though, getting away from her family and school and, most importantly, being with Maia.
“Can you imagine?” Faith asked. “Forget all this college prep crap, getting a job, graduating at the top of the class, GPAs – just know what your life is going to be and starting it right, right now. No more waiting for it to happen.”
Maia nodded, holding Faith’s fingers a little tighter in her own. “Just you and me...”
“You and me,” Faith echoed, closing her eyes as she let the water splash up against her half-submerged face and around her body.
Suddenly, she felt Maia’s fingers tense and pull away.
“What?” she asked.
“Look,” said Maia, now upright and treading water, pointing back across the lake towards the camp.
Having thought Maia must’ve seen somebody in the woods or, worse, coming towards them in the water, Faith was surprised when she looked out to the west and saw a tremendous black cloud of smoke moving across the horizon like a thunderhead. It looked like an atomic mushroom cloud rising out of the woods, but unlike with an explosion, this pyrocumulus monstrosity was expanding without hurry, fueled by one great ongoing blaze rather than a single, over-and-done calamitous event.
“It’s a forest fire!” exclaimed Maia. “And it looks like it’s coming our way...”
Faith stared on the smoke and knew immediately that it was anything but a natural event.
It didn’t take long for panic to descend on Cindy’s group. The counselor had suggested that they move forward, try to outrun the gathering fires as they connected in front of them, but after only a few minutes of pushing on, every camper could see the same thing happening – the plumes of smoke joining to form a sort of great horseshoe of fire, with them in the center. Even worse, they began seeing orange flames licking the tops of trees in each direction, some as close as a few hundred yards away, rapidly encroaching on their position.
Though they didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger of being burned alive, the smoke had begun to flow in with the ferocity of a sandstorm. Hot and thick with embers, the wind carried it directly in the lungs of the campers who were then wracked with coughs as their body attempted to expel it. It was seconds later that the first kid collapsed, clawing at their throat as they began asphyxiating.
A more terrifying sight the campers couldn’t imagine. Though many could barely see through her tear-and-ash-filled eyes, the group quickly broke ranks and started trying to outrun the blaze back to camp.
But the more they screamed and the harder they ran, the quicker they pumped the smoke into their lungs and moved that much closer to their deaths.
Flight paths.
This was what had concerned Father Billy when he’d been considering hi methods of last resort should large groups of campers attempt to leave Camp Easley before he was finished with them. He knew that the smoke from a fire out at the lake would take hours to be substantial enough to alert people on the ground as the highway was so far away and it wouldn’t be seen in the next town, or, at least, recognized as anything other than a distant cloud for hours.
Better yet, if it happened in the afternoon, it would easily disappear into the night sky at dusk, which would only be a couple of hours away, giving him an additional dozen hours or so, which he figured would be more than enough to accomplish what he’d hoped to.
This left one problem – flight paths. At night, though the smoke would go unseen from the ground, the glowing orange of a real, multi-acre forest fire would be unmissable from the air.
So, he did a little research on flights coming in and out of DFW and Love Field in Dallas, knowing that planes not on approach or departure would be at too great an altitude to see the fires unless they continued for days. In fact, he discovered that there was only one commercial flight, a commuter route that went between Baton Rouge and DFW, that even came close and it would have to be a few miles off course and directly above it for even the most eagle-eyed passenger to spot it. He felt confident that it would be a non-issue.
So, when he’d surreptitiously watched Cindy assemble her children’s crusade to head down the road, he knew that it would be far too many people for him to fight on his own and the impetus to start the planned conflagration was upon him. He had not expected to live through the entire camp experience, truly believing that God would eventually have to strike him down, but if this did not happen, having the entire place razed by flames might give him an out that would allow him back into civilized society with no one the wiser, which might allow him to try again somewhere else.
With that in mind, he had left the campers to their weapons-building and moved out the trees one last time.
“You love the faith-inspiring coincidence, correct?” Father Billy murmured as he moved through the woods, occasionally glancing skyward. “This way, you don’t even have to take a human life. Send a thunderstorm, send a light shower and you’ll save all these lives, Father. Anything like that could be seen as an everyday meteorological occurrence, but these children wouldn’t have to die. I’d know, but I’d be the only one. Please, God. This burden delivered unto me is too heavy. I beg you. Let these killings end.”
Father Billy stopped in his track and actually waited for an answer this time. He looked up to the late afternoon sun and wondered if it would be the last sunset he’d ever see and, if it was, was he at peace with that?
The fires were to be started by sixteen propane tanks suspended around the woods at hundred yard intervals on ropes. The plan was to go around, light fires underneath them and wait for the flames to superheat the tanks, which would then explode. He’d cut rough trenches from each blaze to the road which he’d filled with accelerant, a mix of kerosene and gasoline, which he hoped would direct the blaze. Combining that with the dry underbrush of the drought-stricken thicket, the truth was, the fire might even burn out of control through potentially dozens of square miles, maybe even hundreds if it went unnoticed and picked up steam. In fact, it might cost more lives than just the campers.
But as he mapped it out, he knew that if it got to this point, he would no longer care.
He’d wanted to be stopped. He’d begged God to turn the poison in Constance and the others’ canteens to sugar. Demanded He grant him heart attack the second before driving a spike into the neck of the whimpering Pamela as she stood over her dead boyfriend’s body a night that felt like it was almost a lifetime ago. His fondest heart’s desir
e was to have but one camper fight back against him with the strength of a lion and slay him first or even that the PCP-afflicted athletes simply wake up with headaches instead of being driven into a kill-crazy rampage.
But this didn’t happen and it was taking apart Father Billy’s soul. He had never felt so far from himself in his life.
As he began joylessly lighting the fires under the propane tanks, he imagined lying down next to them, allowing himself to be immolated as well and letting the cards fall from there. He wondered if the rains might come then, once his life was extinguished, but then everything he’d have worked for would prove meaningless and that was one option he ultimately wouldn’t allow himself to consider.
Cindy ran and ran and ran, her lungs aching, her eyes burning with every step, but she continued on regardless. All around her, she saw flames creeping through the trees, sending burning trunks down into her path. She has started out with a group of campers, but they had all fallen away. She knew they were dead and knew she would soon be as well, so grossly had she underestimated the inferno.
She looked up as a tree consumed by fire cracked in half and came barreling down straight for her and replayed the events of the last twenty-four hours quickly in her head.
How could she have been so wrong?
Back at the camp, Douglas Perry and the prayer circle campers smelled the coming smoke as it wafted into the camp, but they continued praying.
“The flames won’t reach us,” claimed Douglas, who stared out the windows towards the woods, watching the smoke waft closer. “They will stop before they reach the camp and go no further.”
His followers, weakened now from over twenty-four hours of fasting, could only nod and continue their prayers.
Out on the lake, Maia and Faith circumnavigated the shoreline until they were on the opposite side from the camp, about a half mile of water between them and the swift-moving blaze. Though the initial retreat had been frantic and harried as they started smelling smoke almost immediately after seeing the cloud, once they were far enough away, they actually felt safe enough to climb out onto the shore and try to dry off.
“We can always jump right back in,” Faith said. “But I’m pretty sure the Devil’s occupied.”
As they looked back towards the great black cloud another word rising over the distant woods, they were in awe, the setting sun casting it all in an orangish-red, Apocalyptic glow. Unlike a more typical atmospheric formation, this one appeared to be boiling up out of the earth itself as if a volcano had suddenly made its presence known in the East Texas woods.
“I wish I had a camera,” said Maia, watching the smoke rise ever-higher. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Faith nodded, but said nothing. She was staring at the tiny pinpoints of light that occasionally showed themselves, fire rising off the tree tops. Every so often, a tree would bow then fall, soundlessly, out of frame. She knew that off in those distant woods, this great, crashing torch was likely destroying anything unlucky enough to be in its path, Cindy and the other campers likely in the midst of the maelstrom, but from where she stood, it might as well be happening on the moon for all the effect it had on her enjoyment of the sight.
That’s when Maia glanced down to her shoulder, a strange look on her face.
“What is it?” asked Faith.
“Rain,” said Maia with surprise. “I felt rain.”
“Our Channel 7 exclusive Doppler Radar Report brings us news of a thunder shower developing east of here, currently in the Patterson/Lake Carlisle area,” said a nattily-dressed man in a bowtie on the television. “There’s no telling if it will reach us here in Dallas, but we could certainly use it, couldn’t we, Dave?”
The anchorman to whom the TV weatherman was making his joking aside to duly nodded, and then suggested “in all seriousness,” that indeed, Dallas could use the rain.
“Wow – that’s gotta suck for whoever’s still out there,” said Mark, who was munching on his second microwave pizza. “Wonder what God, in His infinite wisdom, is trying to pull with that.”
But Phil couldn’t be flippant. Staring straight at the radar image on screen, his panic was rising.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed.
“What?” asked Mark.
“What do you mean, ‘what?’” Phil replied, disgusted. “Faith and Maia! They’re out on that diving platform. If it starts pouring down, they’ll have to come on land. And if they do that, they’re screwed. How the hell can God do this?! It’s like he’s helping Father Billy! What the fuck?! Rain?!”
Mark reached over and tapped on the phone. “We could call the police. Right now. All this ends.”
“No!” Phil cried, shaking his head. “We made a promise to God. What if this is tied to that? What if by making that promise, we effectively traded Faith and Maia’s lives for ours?”
Mark stared at Phil.
“You can’t be serious,” he said. “When did you start believing in that shit?”
“When somehow, some way, we escaped a homicidal maniac today!” Phil roared, clambering off the sofa. “I’ve been praying ever since. I don’t know why we were spared, but we were. God has a plan for us and I don’t know what it is, but we made one stupid little promise to Him and then – suddenly – we were allowed to live when everyone else has to die. What the hell is that?”
“You think God had anything to do with that?” Mark cried, setting down his pizza. “No, my friend, that was me, your one friend crazy enough to be able to bullshit his way past a psychopath. Don’t mistake dumb luck and a roll of the dice for the work of the Almighty. We survived because we didn’t fall for all this God-shit like all those other now-dead idiots who thought it was the Devil. You want to go back on that now?”
Phil thought about this for a moment, but then turned around and walked to the garage.
“Where are you going?” yelled Mark.
“Back,” said Phil. “I’m going back for Faith. Fuck this and fuck you.”
The rain was a miracle. Within moments, it had saved the woods around Camp Easley, dousing the flames and preventing the immolation of probably hundreds of acres of old-growth forest, the northwestern tributaries of the Big Thicket. It had begun suddenly, emerging out of a weather system that had moved up from the Mississippi River Delta, crossed over into Texas around the Sabine National Forest and finally reached its saturation point just past Lake Carlisle, sending its liquefying payload back to the earth as rain. The storm was brief and well-timed. Besides putting out the fire, the lesser plant life around the lake sorely needed a drink and the area’s water table, while not empty, would need replenishing sooner or later before the fall heat set in and this served that purpose.
On top of that, it began the rotting process for the trees and plant life that fell in the fire that would eventually provide shelter and food to several generations of insects that would, in turn, become a food source to generations of birds and small mammals. The culling of the tallest trees would also allow saplings, long in the shadows, to realize their growth potential as their highest leaves could now stretch to the sun. The rotting foliage would also become fertilizer as it sank into the ground, making the rich soil even richer with nutrients, strengthening the woods as a whole.
The rain, however, did not save Cindy’s campers.
Eighteen died in the first few minutes after they’d left the Jeep, three more died soon thereafter on the road and, half an hour after the fires began, the remaining nine were scattered along the lonely stretch of road, all having taken off in the direction of the camp, only to be overtaken by the smoke.
The last to die had been an unusually strong runner named Jenny Forrestal who actually lived long enough to feel the first drops of rain, but her lungs were too far gone and she breathed her last mere seconds before her clothes were soaked through.
Her body would eventually be found only three hundred yards from the Camp Easley parking lot.
The campers were all dead, but the person who ha
d led them out onto the road in the first place, Cindy, had survived. She had done the impossible, outrun the smoke. And though there was plenty of it still in her lungs, when the rain came she’d gotten the reprieve she needed and made it long enough to reach the camp alive; coughing and choking, but able to breathe.
With the rain puddling around her, her clothes and hands covered in mud, she walked until finally collapsing in a heap in front of the counselor’s cabin, which she’d only left four hours earlier. With wild eyes, she stared up into the dark, wet skies above.
“WHY?!? WHY?!?!” she demanded angrily in a strangled rasp. “WHY?!?!?”
Why was she alive and every last person whose safety and well-being had been her responsibility was dead? It was as if, by allowing her to live, God was making some kind of sick point about the pronounced and absolute nature of her failure and now Cindy wanted answers.
Why a miracle, but too late to do any good?
“WHY!?!?!” she roared again, squeezing her fists in anguish, her eyes streaming with tears. “You bastard!!! WHY?!?!?”
But the rain continued to pour, as if taunting her from high above, mocking her tears as she envisioned the faces of her dying campers. She had never known anger or anguish quite like this before and felt as if it was driving her just a little mad. That’s when she looked over and saw a light on in the administrator’s cabin, peering through the darkness.
Slowly, she lifted herself up out of the mud and walked over to it. Her shoes and socks were drenched and slowed her down, so she kicked them off and walked barefoot. Her muscles ached and she was still choking out ash, but she kept going. When she reached the porch steps, she tentatively climbed up, barely noticing that the rain was finally beginning to slacken. She reached the door and looked in, seeing Father Billy lying on the sofa completely passed out and oblivious to the world.
Sunday Billy Sunday Page 17
