He looked like he had a million questions, but he didn’t ask any of them. Almost as if he understood that she’d already told him more than she intended.
“Tahiti, then,” he said lightly. “You can’t argue with Tahiti.”
“Tahiti?”
“Tahiti.”
“Sold.”
“So it’s a deal,” he said. “When this is all over, we take off for paradise.”
“It’s a deal.”
She reached out her hand. He took it.
They shook.
She didn’t know if she could sleep. Daniel stayed with her, and she listened to his steady breathing in the dark, and thought about white sand beaches and storybook skies, and as dawn crept in, her hands stopped shaking and the sweat dried on her brow, and she could, in the gray light, almost imagine what it would be like to get away from all of it. To leave herself behind.
The deacon made good on his promise, and the response exceeded his expectations.
Ellie’s mother nurtured a bit of a girlish crush on the good deacon herself, so was less than pleased at the reports of her slim, youthful daughter parading before him in her underwear. She told her daughter that she would be in her prayers but not, until she cast Satan from her heart, in her house. Ellie’s father held little truck with all the Bible talk but believed the deacon to be a good, strong man who was steering the town in the right direction – and he’d always been uncomfortable with his daughter’s newfound womanhood and the fact that when she emerged from the shower wet and glistening, he couldn’t help noticing the swell of her breasts beneath the towel. He, too, thought that it would be best if she took some time away. “Your friend Moses wandered in the desert for forty years,” he told her. “Seemed to do him some good.”
“The deacon’s lying,” Ellie told them.
And, when that didn’t work, “It’s wrong, what he’s doing to the town.”
And, in desperation, “He’s wrong.”
But whatever he’d whispered in their ears had taken.
“You’re the liar, Ellie,” her mother said. “Leading us all to believe you’re some kind of holy visionary.”
“I never said —”
“I’m your mother, so I’m sure I can find it in my heart to forgive you, but the rest of the town? There’s going to be anger out there.”
“Be careful, sweetie,” her father said before closing his door in her face.
She received similar treatment, if harsher, from Clair and Morgan, both of whom informed her, with little regret, that she was not welcome, and would not be until she repented her behavior and stopped spreading her lies. These were the days of God’s wrath – she’d said that herself, hadn’t she, more than once? The time of mercy had passed; this, Morgan said, was the time of justice, and there was something eager in her face, something hungry, that made Ellie leave hastily, and not try her luck with any more of her supposed friends.
She went to the jail. She’d lost her sway with the town; the deacon had seen to that. But he couldn’t quiet her voice. And after all: Whatever you did not do for the least among you, you did not do for Me.
She went to the jail, and refused to answer any questions. She repeated only a simple request: “I want to see Cassandra.” She could see it in their eyes: they were spooked. She’d never been very good at making people like her, but when it came to creeping people out, she was a pro, and there was a certain power in that, too.
When she arrived at the cell, Cass was asleep, or pretending to be. Ellie sat on the linoleum across from the locked door, ignoring the grime and the insects, and leaned her head against the wall. She would stand guard here tonight. In the morning, when they came to take Cass for judgment, Ellie would be with her, step by step, to avert her fate, or to share in it.
On the night before Jesus was to be arrested, he had called on his apostles in this time of darkest need. Stay the night with me in Gethsemane, he had begged. Watch me safely through the dawn. But in the end, even the most loyal among them had betrayed him, and fallen asleep.
Ellie did not.
West had a key to the locker room, so that was where he went. That was where he slept, or tried to, stretched out on one of the narrow wooden benches, resolved to ignore the fact that everything stank of pit sweat and feet. The walk through the dark had taken him more than an hour, and there had been nothing good or leisurely about it. Every step was pain.
West folded his hands on his stomach and listened to his breathing. His heart seemed to pound in time with the throbbing of his leg, and his thoughts beat with the same insistent rhythm.
They knew.
They hated him.
They hurt him.
They didn’t want him.
They’d changed. Into something wrong, something diseased. Or maybe it was easier to think so.
Now you know why I limp, Nick said, reaching out of the dark to stroke West’s bruised face, to kiss his wounded leg. Now you understand.
It wasn’t real. He knew that. Nick was gone.
Probably he was going crazy.
I can taste someone else on your lips, Nick said, and West felt the ghost of a tongue tracing the line of his lips, the beads of sweat and the dried blood that smeared his jaw. You’ve been bad.
You’ve been punished.
Was he better than me?
“It wasn’t like that.” West stopped, aware he was talking to himself – or, worse, a voice in his head.
Another kiss on his leg.
Does that hurt?
The lips moved up his thigh.
Or that?
West closed his eyes.
It never stops hurting. But at least we’re the same now.
“You were in an accident. It’s not the same.”
There was no accident.
It was only an accident that he left a mark. That time.
It was only an accident that the damage was permanent.
You thought it was so easy for me.
“No.”
You didn’t understand pain.
“No.”
There are ways to make it better. Ways to make them hurt.
You still have the gun.
There’s a lot you can do, with a gun.
“You’re not Nick,” West said aloud, if only to convince himself. “You’re a voice in my head that’s not even very good. Nick wasn’t like this.”
You didn’t know me.
Don’t you get that by now?
“Please stop,” he said, for the second time that night, just as uselessly. The difference: this time, he didn’t mean it.
He didn’t want the voice silenced.
He didn’t want the weight that settled atop him to fade away.
He didn’t want to be alone, not tonight.
It hurts?
“It hurts.”
Let’s make it better.
In the dark, a body was a body, imaginary… or not. Comfort was comfort.
Joy was joy.
And sleep, when it finally came, was oblivion.
11
LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT SIN
Daniel stayed awake till morning. He watched her, imagining that somehow, by marking each intake of breath, each flicker of her lids, he was protecting not just her, but Cass and Milo and even, in the most gruesome of ways, the Preacher – that standing vigil and ensuring nothing bad happened here, in this room, on his watch, would mean that for at least a few hours nothing bad happened anywhere. It was flawed logic, he knew that. Still, he did not sleep. And coincidence or not, the sun rose without incident, and they all survived the night.
Milo bounded out of bed shortly after dawn, eager to get started on that day’s drill, a willing recruit determined to earn his stripes. Daniel had to lie. Daniel had to let him believe that their father had flaked on them yet again, had disregarded whatever promise he’d made to Milo and disappeared.
Daniel had to.
Milo accepted the news without much surprise, tromped back to his bedro
om, and slammed the door. Like he’d expected as much. Daniel was tempted to follow him, if not to tell the truth, then to make up some elaborate lie about where their father had gone, something that would make the disappearance about a noble cause rather than an unlovable son. No eight-year-old should be that prepared for disappointment.
But maybe better prepared than blindsided, he thought, and let Milo sulk. If the only person Milo trusted to come through for him was his big brother, then that’s what Daniel would have to do.
“So what’s the plan?” Jule asked, slurping down a mug of watery instant coffee.
“What plan?”
“For this great rescue operation of yours. I assume you have a plan?”
The trial was scheduled for noon, with sentencing and punishment to presumably follow swiftly after. It was a few minutes after ten, which gave him two hours to come up with something brilliant and the nerve to carry it out.
His father could wait.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Jule said.
She was significantly steadier than she’d been the night before, though Daniel thought he could detect a certain watchfulness about her. There was a tightness at the corners of her eyes and lips, a drawing back of her shoulders, a wary alertness to shadows and sudden movements that hadn’t been there before. He didn’t know her, he reminded himself. Not really. He couldn’t begin to guess what had brought her to his door, and he knew better than to ask.
Five feet tall, nothing to her but a shock of purple hair and a sharp voice, and still, he was afraid of her… What was he going to do when he had to go up against the cops? What hope did Cass have, if her only hope was him?
“I’ll figure something out,” he said. “I’m not letting them kill her in the street.”
“Can I ask you something? Honestly?”
He waited for her to ask why he cared so much. It wasn’t a question he liked looking at head-on. Did some dark part of him nurture the hope that, murderer or not, Cass would ride off with him into a happily ever after, that she would be so filled with gratitude she’d drag him to the shed on the spot and, as his father would have put it, make a man of him? It wasn’t about that; it never had been, even when things were simple and Cass was nothing but a beautiful girl he used to know. He knew it was stupid, the way he clung to a childhood friendship that hadn’t meant much at the time and meant less with every passing year. But it was all he had left of some other life, the life before everything had gone wrong. Jule had her fairy tale of white beaches and satin sheets; Daniel had Cass and the life he might have had if his mother had lived. That’s what he’d clung to, these years, though he didn’t like to admit it to himself, the idea that if he got Cass Porter to see him, the way she used to see him – the way he used to be – that he could resuscitate the past.
For him, Cass had always stood for what was good, and what could be good again. If he lost her, he’d lose that, too.
It seemed unbearably selfish, wanting to help someone only because it would help yourself.
“What if it were someone else?” Jule asked. “Would you still care? Would you still try to stop it?”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
Save someone, even a stranger, just for the sake of saving them? Risk himself only because it was right? He wondered what it said about him that the answer didn’t come easily. “I don’t know.”
“Okay. Good enough.”
“For what?”
“For me. I’m in.”
“I don’t think that’s a good —”
“You want to give me some noble sexist bullshit about how this is a man’s job and you don’t want to put me in danger, or you want to hear my plan?”
“You have a plan?”
“You said the Preacher’s preparing for war, right?” she said.
He nodded, suddenly nervous. It was one thing to resolve to do the impossible – it was another to team up with someone who seemed nuts enough to actually try it.
She smiled. “I assume that means he has an armory.”
Daniel had, of course, held a gun before. His father had trained him to shoot nearly as soon as he’d learned to walk. But it had been a long time, and he’d never actually shot at anything other than soda cans. The first time his father had taken him out hunting, he’d gotten off one shot, about ten feet wide of a scrawny buck, and burst into tears. That had been the end of that hunting trip, and shortly after, his mother’s death and father’s drinking had put an end to the idea of taking any more.
The Preacher kept his arsenal in the dining room. In Kansas it was, as it turned out, surprisingly easy for even a drunken maniac to secure any kind of gun he liked. The Preacher had assembled quite the collection.
Daniel chose a shotgun, as it was the one that felt most comfortable in his hand, though that wasn’t saying much. Jule took a 9 mm that would have fit in her purse had she carried one, but instead got tucked away in Milo’s Spider-Man messenger bag. Daniel slung the shotgun over his shoulder, intending to tell anyone, if asked, that he was headed on a hunting trip, but he didn’t expect anyone to ask – carrying a gun in plain sight in Oleander hadn’t exactly been particularly noteworthy even before the storm.
“You don’t have to do this,” he told Jule as they approached the police station, thinking I don’t have to do this.
Thinking: This is crazy.
But there was a pyre in front of the town hall, and Coach Hart was probably at that very moment stoning his wife, and the mayor had declared some kind of military theocracy, and his father was trussed up like a butchered pig. The whole town had gone crazy. There was no reason for Daniel to be an exception.
“I’ve got nothing better to do today,” Jule said. “But are you sure? My uncle Scott always says never point a gun at someone unless you’re a hundred and ten percent sure you can pull the trigger.”
Daniel swallowed. The shotgun strap was digging uncomfortably into his shoulder. “He doesn’t sound very good at math.”
“Bad at math, good at shooting people. So… are you sure?”
The plan wasn’t too complicated. They would storm the police station, Daniel grabbing the nearest body as a hostage while Jule covered him with the 9 mm. Ideally, this hostage would be weak and unarmed. If not, Jule would disarm him and Daniel would poke the gun into the small of his back and inform the room at large that either they release Cass or he would shoot.
He was pretty sure he would not shoot. So hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
Jule, after acquiring a hostage of her own, would accompany said hostage downstairs to release Cass from the cell while Daniel waited upstairs with the shotgun and a roomful of cops who no longer felt bound by any rules of legal conduct. Then, on the off chance all that went smoothly, they would flee on foot, around the corner to where Daniel had parked the Preacher’s car. It still had enough gas to get them to the edge of town, where they would throw themselves on the mercy of the soldiers. Failing mercy, they would still have the guns. They would, somehow, get themselves across the border. Where Cass would, presumably, be taken into legal custody once again, at least this time by people who weren’t intending to slaughter her in the street. Daniel and Jule would… well, there the plan went vague. But it was a good bet they wouldn’t end up in Tahiti.
He’d kissed Milo’s forehead before they left, a gesture of affection he rarely made. Milo had wiped it off with exaggerated disgust, and given him a punch on the arm for his trouble. “Tomorrow you’re building me a fort,” he reminded Daniel, who agreed: tomorrow. Then he’d distracted Milo with a dirty joke (one Milo would understand just enough to spend the entire day puzzling over the punch line) before they could shake on it.
He’d left Milo alone. It seemed criminal, but it was the only option. The day-care program had disbanded, half the town’s children had disappeared with Laura Tanner, and word had it more went missing every day – something that seemed to alarm no one but Daniel, who no longer let Milo leave the ho
use. There were no trustworthy neighbors; there was no one but his father, tied up in the shed. So Milo was alone, with a stack of comics and strict instructions to answer the door to no one but Daniel. Years before, their father had installed a small panic room beneath the kitchen – more of a cramped crawl space than a room, but complete with a steel door, a jug of water, and a week’s supply of canned tuna. Milo rolled his eyes, but promised to lock himself inside at the first sign of trouble.
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